Bloomberg Is Throwing $500M at Efforts to Shut Down All U.S. Coal Plants

But, I hear you say, what about the cost of storage? Certainly the concentrated solar can get wins by generating steam using the molten sodium for hours after the sun goes down. Over the last 10 years chemical batteries have dropped to about 1/10 of their old price and the trendline still points downwards. Battery production is seriously ramping up as EVs push demand and grid storage becomes a huge issue.

Concentrated Solar is still a day late and a dollar short.

It indicates to me that we talk about an investment with multiplication possibility:

"The financing is intended to support research, including studies and analysis to deliver accurate data to partnering organizations and officials for better decision-making. It will also fund local policy and advocacy, along with litigation brought against power companies."

Which will lead to even more and faster and better green energy through more investment and more focus and more acceptance and therefore more investment and more research and further cheaper prices for everyone.

I will buy this year a little bit of PV too for the first time.

This is for research, advocacy, and lobbying to get them shut and have the localities favor green energy. They are not building new energy sources, just pushing along and speeding up the transition.

In that light, this is a ton of money.

I have no doubt that Bloomberg is doing this, at least in part, to get credit for giving $500m away to help decarbonize the economy. And yet if that was his goal he could have accomplished this in many ways. You seem to be going further and accusing him of giving $500m away in a manner that’s explicitly designed to be ineffective. That doesn’t make a ton of sense to me.

If he actually wanted to help he would simply invest new additional power installation, and sue governments that have zoning that prevents these installations.

But he doesn't want to help, he wants to be seen as helping.

This is equivalent to the “build it and customers will come” fallacy of startups. You still have to convince humans that it’s all worth it.

The US could have had the nuclear industry of France (~70% of its electricity generation) if we had only gotten everyone to agree in the 80s. At the end of the day, you need money and marketing to convince people.

If the data this effort produces is grounded in decent research, it's a net positive for everyone.

They could. They won’t, because of loss aversion and inertia. But a smart community could tell Bloomberg they’ll close their plant if they get a subsidy for a battery plant or a very large concentrated solar power plant.

It’s a prisoner’s dilemma. And I don’t know if there’s a solution for the mines. But the tragedy is that the populations surrounded by coal aren’t selecting for long-term decision makers.

> What happened to coal jobs is even simpler. It is the same thing that happened throughout much of the country — productivity gains led to fewer workers needed to produce the same output.

Sure some people will re-train and join a new industry, but we still need heavy equipment operators for other construction sites. There is potential that a big mining site for lithium could open up [2], then we would need miners yet again. There will unfortunately be those who don't want to move or retrain that will instead resort to just doing drugs.

Personally I think we should welcome phasing out coal and, as policy, offer help to those who's jobs were displaced to prevent creation of meth towns.

[1] https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/what-ki... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/30/23849619/lithium-ev-batte...

The economy is receiving enormous benefits from increased automation and AI and will only continue to do so super-linearly (if not exponentially) for the foreseeable future. We get to decide whether those benefits should go entirely to the people who already own everything, or whether some fraction of those benefits should go to everyone. If we can finally recognize that hundred-billionaires exist not by being a million times smarter and more productive than everyone else, but by riding the waves of a heavily interconnected and increasingly automated economy, maybe we'll finally accept heavy taxes on the beneficiaries of such automation that can be distributed as basic income.

So that's the answer, or at least a huge step in the right direction: basic income. For everyone.

Meanwhile, let's still shut down coal plants, shall we?

There's a maintenance cost, of course, but as far as carbon goals it's very doable.

He doesn't need one. He's a retired billionaire, whose retirement hobby is social engineering. Brown outs aren't his concern, as I'm sure his home will have adequate back-up power.