http://reason.com/blog/2016/10/11/natural-gas-ambush-killed-...
http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Cheap-Natural-Gas-...
For some people, it is easier to perceive that a bureaucrat is against your industry, as opposed to find out that the economic value created is exceptionally low. When a person loses a job, it will be heartbreaking for the person to realise the job performed earlier has low economical value.
Telling someone "We do not need your services anymore" is harder than telling "Well, all those bureaucrats that live elsewhere decided it...".
I do think that economic value of coal is low and it is economically swapped out for other sources.
And, FWIW, Obama did favor natural gas.
Corporate oligarchs have always tried to make the results of their deliberate decisions and the candidates they throw money at sound like the inevitable march of progress. But it isn't. And this election was a repudiation of that.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-03/from-coal...
There is no evidence for this what so ever.
Anyone is capable of moving. It's hard and it's disruptive but it's possible. And increasingly it's going to be a necessity if you want to have long term prosperity.
Easier said than done when one's entire social structure is rooted in one place, and has been since before one was born.
We forget how lucky we are that we can do our work from anywhere in the world; those of us who've moved around also tend, I think, to forget the real value of staying where one grew up.
- Having a kid? Now your whole extended family is available to give you help and advice, to babysit, to be there for you when you need them.
- Need a job? It's a lot easier to find one when you have a personal network in a place already.
- Something terrible happen in your life? You now have a built in set of folks to help you through it.
There's incredible value in having a large local support group. Yes, it's possible to compensate for the lack of it with friends, and those of us who have moved far from home tend to do that, but that's a pretty straightforward second best compared to being with family, people you've grown up with, etc.
Being able to and wise enough to move, is a survival instinct that all living things have.
What happens to all these people, their families and lives put in disarray. This is what the economic and political system of a society is supposed to address - the well being of all citizens. And we can clearly see this is where globalization and the current economic dispensation falls apart spectacularly.
Wishing it away or washing your hands off is a kind of sociopathy. Are these people to be left alone to form an underbelly of society susceptible to any demagogue willing to exploit their disenchantment for their own ends. This self serving plan of action directly leads to social unrest, breakdown and worse.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/coal-o...
http://dailycaller.com/2016/09/05/obama-kept-his-promise-830...
1. Price of natural gas is very competitive. 2. Automation. Mechanisation inside coal mines becomes more effective. 3. As old coal plants are retired, their replacements require exceptionally high capital expenditures. While running an already built coal plant can be feasible, competition for building new plants is not economically competitive.
In the end, it is the free market that took those jobs. In the end, the market always wins.
If the industry was already on it's way down the smart thing to do would have been to let it run it course instead of pushing regulations that wouldn't matter any ways and swung the state against you. Similarly if the factors killing coal really are not driven by government regulation than installing a pro-coal guy at the EPA shouldn't have any effect.
None of the costs of medical treatment or loss of life were borne by the coal industry itself prior to regulation.
It's the same thing with factory jobs. The US produces more than it ever has (at least the last time I checked), but many of those jobs were automated away.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-manufacturing-dead-outpu...
It is currently stayed by court order; a Trump administration could decline to defend it, and thereby permit it to die in court.
Low natural gas prices are in part because the Obama administration has strongly resisted any significant restriction or regulation of fracking. They have resisted it because they want gas prices to fall and displace coal.
When it comes to energy development, it's hard to think separately about technology and policy; they are both factors in every change.
I find it odd to require that they continue to operate, while more effective options for energy generation emerged in the last 50 years.
Yes, let me iterate it - so many coal plants were older than 50 years, that it is a miracle they operated for so long.
Obama's administration did not change their age; they were on their way out.
It is hard to separate technology and policy, but I find it hard to stipulate a policy to deter an upgrade of a 50-ish year old to be good policy.
What the Coal industry wants is even more federal handouts. We already give them a ton of money to keep going on the grouds that it's a transition economy and a bridge for the US economy. But the Coal Industry is really damn greedy as a whole.
Even with high profile failures like Solyndra, in general green energy runs at a fraction of the cost. This of course hurts workers, because the labor involved is less well compensated as part of that cost reduction. However, as far as I can tell we're already turning the corner to where (for _generation_, ignoring environmental costs), solar and wind already outperform coal on a cost basis.
People who want to preserve bulk coal generation do so for ideological reasons. From a more "green" perspective, there are more important things we should be doing with our coal and natural gas then burning them to heat water.
Fund the build out of solar production without worrying too much about profits. Not at a loss, just choose to fund factories that will build solar panels as an investment in the future rather than from a portfolio of competitive investments as an attempt to maximize profit.
"Killing Coal: The Obama Administration’s Intentional Assault on an Industry" http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/01/19/killing-c...
Please don't kill information simply b/c you disagree with it; otherwise there can no dialogue and ycombinator becomes little more than a billboard for the current dominant political whim.
Is news.ycombinator.com a "real news source"? Should it be renamed to "notnews.ycombinator.com" or such?
Who decides what is and isn't a "real news source"?
Perhaps the judgement:
"breitbart.com is not a real news source."
is an example why so many people were astonished at the election results. After all, if you only talk to people who agree with you then you'll certainly be unaware of those who don't. And when there's a vote, you'll really be surprised!
This attitude is destructive as it's making it so difficult for us to come to any agreement on what we accept as a trustworthy third-party. Where do we start to give people some benefit of the doubt? As it is, even "trust but verify" can appear impossible. I'm not advocating some "can't we all be friends" platitude. As a practical matter, how do we move forward from here?
Edit: minor wording changes to remove generalization and grammar improvement
Slate.com does not describe themselves as a news source, so apparently not. I've certainly never thought of them as informative.
I can't personally comment on Breitbart's content, but apparently a number of their employees quit earlier this year, believing that the site has lost its journalistic integrity since the death of Andrew Breitbart.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/10/21/le...
Time to update my news reading preferences!
edit: I suppose there might be a selection effect. The large networks are watched by everyone, and the smaller ones are sought out.
There's no way to prove objectively which sources are better but we still have to make judgments. The judgment about Breitbart is not a difficult one.
This website has a higher bias towards both people interested in running a business (and the economic climate around it) and interested in disruptive businesses. We see many articles about Tesla, alterantive energy, energy research, and updates to gas and coal based technology.
As such, the article linked really won't fall on receptive ears. We've got a lot of other sources pointing out how very subsidized the coal industry is and we're all well aware that every time an industry risks losing subsidy it immediately performs a football flop to try and stop that, as it's really quite nice to have the taxpayer help bolster your bottom line.
In general, most Americans polled believe that alternative energy is in fact a good thing to pursue and we have evidence of other first world economies making it work and turning a profit while doing so. When we then put slick and popular corporate branding on alternative energy (Tesla's latest offering, but we could name others if you please) then it gets even more popular.
The denial of coal-based power as a harmful and inefficient industrial revolution technology is a minority opinion in the US, but it gets amplified by groups either losing employment or groups hoping to leverage the fact that people are losing employment.
That's why I think you got downvoted. I am ratelimited on this site, so I couldn't spend one of my few daily posts to respond to you yesterday. I apologize for the delay. But very few people here would go, "Oh, I see!" at that article, as it conflicts a lot of other diverse and less partisan sources that pass over this website daily.
Blaming Obama for the decline of coal's commercial viability was a convenient fiction.