It's Time to Change the Narrative About Clean Energy

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-16/solar-bea...

I also wonder whether the talk of coal being dirty and dangerous actually boosts its appeal to some voters. At the least solar and wind need to be seen as rugged. Maybe they should also play up scale, the latest offshore wind turbines, for instance, are absolutely massive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Mess_with_Texas

> In 1985 the Texas Department of Transportation asked Mike Blair and Tim McClure of GSD&M to create a slogan for an anti-littering campaign. McClure said that "bubbas in pickup trucks" who regularly littered beer cans and other items out of vehicle windows and ordinary Texans who believed that littering was a "God-given right" were targets of the advertising campaign. ... McClure recalled that "The crowd was sprinkled with 'Keep America Beautiful' and 'Keep Texas Beautiful' folks, and our audience is 18-to-24 young males." McClure added that "The 'Keep Texas Beautiful' lady said, 'Can we at least say please?' I said, 'No ma'am, you cannot use the line if you put please in front of it.'

But this article is also two years old. When it was written, coal-vs-cleantech was a big campaign issue for example.

A different rebranding angle that people are talking about now is just pure cost. Most of the new energy generation capacity added in 2018 has been renewable: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2018/05/06/renewable-so...

This isn't because of "clean jobs" or a nationwide coordinated renewable push (there isn't one, and Trump has done his best to cut whatever marginal subsidies exist). It's because renewable is now the cheapest form of new energy. The beancounters love it. Conservative Texas is the largest windfarm state in the country.

This shouldn't be surprising -- renewables are largely manufacturing-based industries where the more we build, the better we get at building it and the cheaper it becomes. Compare that to fracking where the half-life of a fracking well is 2-4 years -- after 2-4 years, the well contains half as much oil as it did, and what's left becomes harder and more expensive to extract (compare that to a saudi oil well that has half-life measured in decades and that should tell you something about the "fracking revolution" vs "fracking boom", but I digress...)

Point is, we're now at the turning point where the economics of renewable just make sense. The rebranding as An American Thing was a good talking point two years ago (and still room for it, tbh), but costs are now the more interesting story.

off-shore triple-damage elbow-grease tidal wave sooperpower

merciless monkey wrenched czochralsi silicon titty solar panels

full frontal 24/7 double penetration doctor x' geothermal energy

strike-breaking conflict mineralized all-american circumcized powerwalls

Mach-4 Modern Times side winder electrical wind mills

National Park flooding blue-collar nine-to-five hydroelectric damnation

brutal triangle trade carbon credit master race cards

storm trooper deployed stars and stripes space shades

high-maintenance super cool transmission lines

soundtrack: https://youtu.be/qvhSaIh02dA

[1] https://www.cement.org/docs/default-source/fc_concrete_techn...

The other ways to make a difference, besides pushing hard against the very negative and misery-causing emissions, are to innovate tech, to make clean energy experiences better for consumers, and to push tangentially related policies like EV credits, solar credits, and other policies which help non-toxic energy sources.

Actually, this is exactly what environmentalists have been trying to do. This is what the cap and trade system which has been pushed by various environmental organisations was all about. But of course it was blocked by conservatives paid by the energy industry.

There is one rare fact that both environmentalists and coal executives agree on -- if the coal industry is forced to pay for their emissions it will die. So I can confidently answer your question -- there would be no investors wanting to keep it alive.

Furthermore, the US government has spent literary billions of taxpayer money to make coal environmentally acceptable. All kinds of schemes have been tried -- carbon capture, coal liquification, coal gasification, etc. None of them work. It turns out it is very expensive to capture large amounts of gases for an indefinite period of time. You can liquify or gasify coal at a significant cost, but it still turns out much dirtier than gasoline or natural gas.

Even with its current preferential treatment, where it does not have to pay for damage it causes and it uses much government subsidies, the coal industry is generally losing money. Most major US coal companies went through bankruptcies in the last several years. It is highly doubtful investors would want to put good money in coal plants that actually have to pay for their environmental damage.

As "hristov" notes above, your argument is concisely self-refuting. The coal industry fights tooth and nail to prevent these things, which makes the coal industry immoral by the terms you list. "Coal" is of course a chemical compound. Burning coal at utility scale is only done in contravention of the moral framework you put forth by people who oppose that framework with everything they have.

They've been trying to do this at the international, national and state level for decades now. The Kyoto protocol (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocol) was signed in 1997. Unfortunately right wing parties in most of the anglosphere think market driven solutions are left wing conspiracy theories.

Things I'd like to see talked about? That the largest armed uprisings on American soil since the Civil War were the coal wars in West Virginia in the early 20th century. Coal unions fighting for better than what the coal mine companies, with the backing of local police and sometimes the US military, told them they were just lucky to have.

And that of the 900 clean-up workers at the 2008 Kingston fly ash spill, 30 are dead and 250 are dying because they were refused to gear and fired if they brought their own, because if they wore so much as a dust mask, the neighbors might suspect that maybe the largest environmental disaster in US history wasn't as non-toxic as the TVA tried to pretend it was. It will still be years until those people get a dime of compensation.

So many places in Appalachia with poisoned water, polluted air, no futures, and no prospects. Cheap energy tho amirite

Another media take is that renewable energy will be costly for America (a specific perspective is that it's a Chinese conspiracy); this tidbit clearly shows that this perspective is false.

If America does not commit to renewable energy it will most certainly fall behind the rest of the world where energy would be significantly cheaper, if not "free" via taxation. As a generalization: local manufacturing won't be able to compete with international competition (because international competition would have lower energy costs), so there won't be anywhere else to get work. There won't be money to import fossils (due to a lack of manufacturing exports), so there won't be fossils to generate power. To make matters worse, these two outcomes are mutually-reinforcing.

We can't compete with China right now because of cheap Chinese labor, imagine how the manufacturing landscape would look with cheap Chinese energy thrown into the mix. Renewables save more blue collar jobs in the long run (but fewer energy jobs in the short-term).

In the long run, there is no way to save all the energy jobs. We need to start looking for other ways to tackle the coming energy labor market crash and, apart from UBI as a pretty flawed solution, I have nothing.

Nonetheless, the expansion may continue for decades -- long enough for someone who needs a job now to make it all the way to retirement.

And, significantly, long enough for renewables to replace less labor-efficient and generally worse generation methods throughout the power grid. By the time the new construction jobs run out, the lobby for the legacy generation methods will be gone.