Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

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> At just $15/tonne of Carbon Tax, we halve CO2 output, mainly by destroying the economics of coal

Here is page 122 of NextEra’s investor deck. They are closing all coal plants by 2028 as they are no longer profitable to run. Even without a carbon adder per MWh, coal is dead (“near firm” solar and wind are renewables with battery backing to make them dispatchable when called on by the grid operator). Even existing combined cycle natural gas is under pressure! And their note: “We expect further technology improvements and cost declines will extend the competitiveness of onshore renewables and storage.”

https://cleantechnica.com/files/2022/06/lcoe-small.jpg?mrf-s...

Japan is opting out of financing coal plants further in Indonesia and Bangladesh, cancelling ~3GW worth of coal plant projects.

https://news.mongabay.com/2022/06/planned-coal-plants-fizzle...

So we’re seeing some progress in avoiding electrical thermal emissions, which is the cheapest emissions offset.

(Oahu, Hawaii’s last coal fired plant turns down in September after the Tesla Megapacks replacing their frequency response capability are installed, another 200MW of coal taken offline)

> They are closing all coal plants by 2028

Also, despite the coal subsidies from congress, even families in coal country don’t want their kids becoming miners. They just want some other way to make a living.

They should probably do what everyone else did. Move away and find something else to do. Coal mines employ a fraction of the miners they employed 100 years ago and produce more coal. Maybe have them look up what they did.

We could’ve just put federal gov satellite offices there. Train these folks for white collar jobs the federal gov will always need (IRS, SSA, VA, etc). It’s not that many people, there are more people who work at Arbys than in the coal industry.

You say that but the big coal areas of america giddily voted for the guy promising to bring coal and coal mining back

Did we really expect "big coal areas" to vote for the other candidate?

As the parent said: >even families in coal country don’t want their kids becoming miners.

But that doesn't seem to be the case, as those same families voted heavily for the politicians who claimed they could bring back coal jobs and the industry. So they obviously want someone to be digging coal, and who else but the next generation?

That's not obvious at all. People in coal-producing areas voted for Trump for the same reasons that people in wheat-producing areas did: they're rural Republicans who watch a lot of TV and the Democrat candidate never even visited their congressional district. Most of the people in those areas don't actually mine coal, and they knew they would get poorer on average under Trump just as they had gotten poorer on average under Obama, Bush, and Clinton before him. They just appreciated a moment of lip service. We can't vote in USA without pretending at some level that voting matters, so why wouldn't they also pretend that one of the candidates cared about their interests?

$More/ton could produce direct capital to pay for building out renewables. The more renewables that are built out, the less competitive the various fossils get.

We also need laws to require plugging abandoned, venting wells, and stiff fines for venting to help pay for that.

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