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melling

“ This was due to a decrease in coal plants, which resulted in an emissions drop of 190 million metric tons”

Yep, coal is one of the biggest problems.

https://h4labs.org/ive-got-another-stupid-idea-to-deal-with-...

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Trading breathing air for one-time-use energy is absurd

I agree that it doesn't make sense at all for the US to trade breathing air for one time energy use, but in the abstract, trading breathing air for cheap energy in order to lift people out of poverty is far from absurd, it's an actual, difficult trade off that should be thought about carefully. A lot of people still live in homes constantly filled with wood smoke, for whom an electric coal-powered cooking stove would drastically improve their air quality.

Naturally coal is still terrible for the environment, but ours is a position of great privilege, to have clean air feel so much more important than the source of our energy.

To your point, even a coal-burning cooking stove is better than a wood-burning cooking stove.

To wit, some months of the year the very worst air quality in the world is in Coyhaique, Chile due to their geography & use of green wood for heating & cooking.

https://undark.org/2018/12/05/air-pollution-chile/

We can't ignore the opportunity costs. Every cent of money and effort we put towards digging fossil fuels out of the ground is money and effort we don't spend towards developing new and better sources of renewable energy. Even if the opportunity for short-term revenue is better for the former, the latter is going to secure cheap, sustainable, long-term energy independence for all of us. If we want to lift people out of energy poverty, we want to do so permanently, not in a way that leaves them back in poverty again after all our sources run out.

This is a great point, but I think it cuts both ways. If a place doesn't get electrified until it can be done so with renewables, then there are people who e.g. are dying from the pollution from their wood cook fires in the meantime. I think I've also read though that being able to deploy solar and wind on a smaller scale makes for faster electrification in some place where it would be harder to build out a giant power plant and grid, so maybe you're right in any case.

I'm a huge proponent of trying to build solar microgrids in as many places as possible; a system where every small municipality has its own local solar microgrid with battery storage, each self-sufficient but patched into a much larger grid that can help balance load and smooth over local failures in eachother's microgrids would be a way to allow the highest level of energy independence possible and avoids the pitfalls of centralization while still getting the benefits of a large-scale grid. It could be an incredibly resilient and sustainable system if well implemented. The only barrier to it as it stands is the cost to install all these solar panels and batteries.

in many parts of the world, we've already crossed a tipping point where solar and wind are cheaper than coal. We should be doing everything in our power to make that true for developing nations as well

Not really that absurd if that one-time-use energy is needed for essentials, such as heating in winter when there are no viable alternatives.

But yes, I agree with your general point.

Trading clean water for one-time-use energy is also absurd (fracking)

Clean water is a renewable resource so I don't see the absurdity.

So is breathable air tbh. If it wasn’t, we would have breathed it all up by now.

Coal is abundant and cheap and well suited to day and night base load power. The emissions are awful but there is no suitable replacement right now which fits those criteria (nuclear falls down on the cheap point). Sure, we can keep burning natural gas like it's going out of style but at some point demand is going to push up supply again.

Until grid level storage is well proven (and not geographically constrained like pumped hydro) that is the reality.

That's why you put a price on carbon emissions. The free market isn't going to solve it. There's an abundance of clean energy out there (e.g. Ontario sells the U.S. massive amounts of electricity at a loss), the problem is that coal's price doesn't reflect the damage it does to the planet.

Not having a price on the emissions amounts to an enormous subsidy paid by everyone, though not equally.

Mostly by those in the future.

Very true, I was thinking of geographical and income differences but now Vs the future is a very good point. I've recently had a kid and there's a decent chance they could live to see 2100 which puts predictions for the century in a whe new context for me. It's simple maths so it shouldn't have taken having a child for that to feel so real but still.

I am not opposed to this, but I am curious how a government would arrive at a "price" of carbon emissions. How is the tax rate decided upon? Is it a political game of just enough to make renewable energy more attractive? Or is it as high as we can make it? It just seems like it would have no basis in reality.

Start low, increase steadily to meet emissions targets.

Canada recently introduced a carbon tax at the federal level (for provinces that did not price carbon themselves), and returns 90% back to those province's taxpayers via tax credits. This makes it a progressive tax; if you lived an emissions-free lifestyle you'd just get free money, if you're around average the rebate would offset the carbon tax, if you're a high consumer you pay more.

>I am not opposed to this, but I am curious how a government would arrive at a "price" of carbon emissions

The conventional approach right now is that you have a limited number of CO2 certificates that give a company the right to pollute. The number of CO2 certificates is reduced every year to meet a defined goal like avoid warming beyond 1.5°C. Companies are handed a certain amount of certificates depending on their size (prone to corruption). If they don't have enough certificates they must buy additional certificates. If they have too many they can sell them for a profit. Supply and demand determine the price.

The problem is that too many certificates are being handed out until now the price in the EU market was in the single digits and shot up to 25€ per ton. Because people are allergic to revenue neutral carbon taxes that are offset by redistributing the tax income the latest approach is to simply set a minimum price for CO2 certificates. People think they understand taxes but they certainly don't understand CO2 certificates. The end result is that there will be very limited redistribution.

> Companies are handed a certain amount of certificates depending on their size (prone to corruption).

Seems like it would make sense to replace the "hand them out based on size" step (I've heard "based on historical emissions" before as well) with "auction them off to the highest bidder".

This isn't revenue neutral, but you could make it so by then simply cutting some tax (personal income tax, most likely) until it is, if that's the goal.

If we want to hit zero emissions, the price should be set such that it exactly covers the cost of removing the CO2 from the atmosphere.

Of course, if it's cheaper to just not emit that CO2 in the first place (capture it or use a different process for whatever they're doing), companies can do that instead.

Increase the price steadily until the planet remains inhabitable indefinitely from a climate perspective.

Yes, room temperature superconductivity would also be a good solution to the problem. If we have the ability to transmit power around the world without huge losses from where it is being produced to where it can be consumed then a lot of the problems go away.

I don't think transmission is a huge issue; plenty of opportunity to generate in situ. e.g. going back to Ontario exporting low-carbon energy, of its sustained generation ~60% is nuclear, 15% wind (largely on-land). There's no reason you couldn't generate both of those in the midwest where coal usage is highest. All that is needed is for coal to cost what it should actually cost.

Ah, I should have checked, I assumed it was mostly hydropower like BC and AB.

However, the problem still exists, you have countries in the middle east which politically will never be allowed civilian nuclear power (only 32 countries out of 170 odd actually have civilian nuclear power) but which could potentially produce huge amounts of Solar power during the day. If only they could then buy power from solar / wind / geothermal stations through the night, or continue producing through the night from energy stored in Molten Salt, Liquid metal batteries, Liquified Air etc.

It's artificially cheap because the consequences of air pollution isn't priced into coal. It really, really ought to be. [1]

1. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/air-polluti...

Actually, that was once true, but coal is no longer economical. Renewables are approaching the marginal operating cost for coal plants. It's already silly to build a new coal plant, because it costs more than other options. But once costs of renewables drop below the operating cost of coal, then you can save money by replacing existing plants. This is already true for less efficient coal plants and in the most sunny or windy places. Which is why you see coal plants being shut down.

The situation is complicated by lack of practical grid storage, but using gas plants that can spin up and down quickly plus renewables is currently more economical than new coal. Partly because fracked gas is cheap.

Renewables are already far cheaper than coal. That's what's driving their growth. The biggest limit on renewable growth right now is available capital.

They are cheaper than new coal. They are not quite cheaper than the operating cost of existing, large coal plants, with a few exceptions, last I checked. But that may be only a couple years away now.

> Partly because fracked gas is cheap.

Indeed. It's easy to look at a 2% drop and pat everyone on the back for buying a shiny new Tesla and installing solar panels on their roof but the fact is the drop is just because per unit mass Gas has a higher concentration of Hydrogen and less Carbon. I mentioned above, the current situation with Gas prices being driven down won't last forever. Not to mention that there is plenty of controversy around fracking to start off with.

From what I've read, even considering the setup and decommissioning costs of nuclear power, it's still cheaper long term than coal power. Is this incorrect?

Yes, it's incorrect. The long-term cost of nuclear is about the same as coal. That's why we're seeing nuclear plants closing years ahead of schedule, just like coal. Gas, onshore wind, and the latest solar all cost about half as much.

This comment will undoubtedly trigger rebuttals about fusion, thorium, and other technologies that do not actually exist at production scale and will not exist for at least another decade. Solar and wind (and for better or worse, fracked gas) are here NOW.

This is not true at all. Plants are closing because of onerous NIMBY regulation. They can be made cheap if they are built at scale, see South Korea for an example of cheap plant production.

Indeed, SK produces nuclear so cheap that they are exporting plants to other countries.

Do you have any evidence for this? Can you point to any nuclear plant in the US (or anywhere else) that closed prematurely due to new regulations? I bet you can't.

As for South Korea... I'll just quote Wikipedia here.

"In 2012 South Korea had plans for significant expansion of its nuclear power industry, and to increase nuclear's share of generation to 60% by 2035.[2] Eleven more reactors were scheduled to come online in the period 2012 to 2021, adding 13.8 GWe in total.[3] However, in 2013 the government submitted a reduced draft plan to parliament for nuclear output of up to 29% of generation capacity by 2035, following several scandals related to falsification of safety documentation.[1] This new plan still involved increasing 2035 nuclear capacity by 7 GWe, to 43 GWe.[4] Responding to widespread public concerns after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan, the high earthquake risk in South Korea, and the nuclear scandals, the new government of President Moon Jae-in elected in 2017 decided to gradually phase out nuclear power. The three reactors currently under construction will be completed, but the government has decided these will be the last built, and as the existing plants close at a 40 years end-of-life they will be replaced with other modes of generation."

> Sure, we can keep burning natural gas like it's going out of style

Yes, that's pretty much the plan. Like superman it is a transitional power source.

currently natural gas is mostly a byproduct of oil extraction - as long as we're burning a lot of oil in our motor vehicles, the cost of natural gas will be very low. When we start decarbonizing transportation, natural gas supply might decrease enough that "supply and demand" will start to make sense

One needs to factor in all costs associated with a source of energy, including environmental impact and health costs, which make coal more expensive than other sources. If population lives in a highly polluted area or country that means more health issues and less productivity, more costs for health care and less money to spend on goods and services.

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