EPA rules would force coal-fired power plants to capture emissions or shut down
abcnews.go.com
abcnews.go.com
It's too little and too late, but there's still going to be a massive political fight about it. Depressing.
Luckily, if any coal plants do last that long they'll not be running much due to economic factors.
I am all for env protection but if the effort is not global while the effects always are, poor folks that are also footing the bill get properly pissed off and then vote out do gooders for more extreme populists.
EU green deal feeds off various extreme parties in all eastern EU for decade+ and sowing deep discontent. I dont think western part or EU leadership realized how badly they underestimated this.
That's the fact here.
We’re seeing this play out in children due to Covid lockdowns. Their development was retarded. They started speaking later. They lost functionally three years. Many are pushed through school compounding the issue. At the same time violence at home rose during that time due to stressor.
We need to avoid such policy shortcomings. Administrations at various levels need to think things out. I’m not saying do nothing. I am saying tread lightly while considering many issues.
What you are doing, it bringing up a series of unrelated issue and trying to pin them on these policies, or suggest, in an ignorance, that they are not thinking about one of the core political realities of their career.
This is all the more reason to speed up the transfer of renewables which have near zero marginal cost, and aren't emitting carbon and particles which damage the people around them.
Speaking or cycle of pain and poverty, the particle pollution of coal plants and refineries is an ongoing public health crisis. This policy is an aspect of making them pay for the pollution they previously were making their neighbors pay for, in asthma, COPD, mercury poisoning, lung cancer and many other illnesses directly attributed to these plants emissions.
Relative emissions and various kinds of cost factors matter a lot. The climate isn't going to improve by stupidly and blindly spending billions, goodwill and precious time on low-yield measures, when less resources could be spent on high-yield measures elsewhere. That is why stuff like banning plastic straws or kitchen gas stoves is actively harmful. Because the "what about those foreign big emitters" argument is very valid.
These facts re-hash arguments about planetary limits which have been ongoing since the 1970s if not before, and pit past growth, consumption, and pollution amongst western nations (the US, Europe, Canada, Japan, and Australia, largely), with the hopes for economic growth, still strongly coupled to consumption and emissions, of the rest of the world, quite notably China and India, but also Africa's future billion or so in coming decades. It's notable that despite the Industrial Revolution and carbon age being roughly 250 years old, half of all emissions date from the 1970s, a time at which Western emissions were slowing heavily following the 1970s oil shocks.
It's not a case of either/or but both, the reality is complex, and simple, and most especially nationalistic simplifications, finger-pointing, or whataboutisms really don't advance the discussion.
We all saw how quickly Brexit went, and neither UK nor Europe is better afterwards, you just need few skilled populists push the right levers at right time and its done, for good. Why feed them even more without even listening to their concerns?
I am all for EU despite its dysfunctions and consider it overall a good institution in Europe, but ignoring problems and having tunnel vision only on efforts that you like ain't smartest approach, things will backfire. People and societies we form are complex in various ways, lets respect that a bit if we want some long term consensus and not constant infighting and ignored tensions which benefits just our enemies, like current one in the east.
Stop carrying water for those who use oil and gas supply as weapons and blaming the radical price volatility of energy on renewaqbles. It's oil and gas that were the cause of those spikes.
You aren't speaking for the people against extreme parties, you are parroting a propaganda line.
The effect will never be global if the West doesn't start first, because the developing countries will never accept to hurt their economic development for something the rich countries isn't doing.
But if the West starts, the rest of the world will follow, because their elite want to be like us: it is a status symbol! That's why for instance the elites in Southern countries wear western clothes despite their obvious inappropriateness to the weather. That's also why many dictators out there pretend to be “elected presidents”: because being a “president” is what makes you look like you're an western ruler.
Humans are social animals, and status is probably the strongest driver for our behaviors.
The day the West is all green, you can be sure that every country leader elsewhere world is going to flex about how green their country is too. The problem right now is that the West is all about green-washing, and so are they.
If anything, sending money to Putin and MBS hurts Modi and Lula's own economic goals.
The EPA cannot regulate those other places, but it can make coal plants in the US pay for the pollutants they previously externalized.
China in particular is building out insane amounts of solar - hundreds of gigawatts a year [1]. India plans to pause new coal power plants and increase its capacity for solar [2] - Modi's government has it a bit easier than most Western countries, both due to the increasing authoritarianism and because the people see destructive weather events and their impact themselves.
The rest of the world is already going solar thanks to cheap Chinese panels. In most of Africa, there isn't much of a working phone or electricity grid anyway for historical reasons (poverty, colonialism, theft, construction challenges, political, ...) so there's quite a lot of international aid programs going on [3] - after all, Africa has 60% of the solar energy potential of this entire rock floating in space, but only 1% of the worldwide production.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-installed-sol...
[2] https://apnews.com/article/india-coal-pause-plan-climate-ren...
[3] https://www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/january-2024/start...
edit:
> The EPA’s new power plant pollution rule has a big, gassy hole in it
https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/25/24139494/power-plant-poll...
The folks with the Allam cycle patents must be happy about this.
Coal just isn't competitive anymore, financially.
Would coal be competitive if there were no emission controls? Maybe, but we like relatively clean air, so we want some of those controls.
Policy has only started to make them pay for the cost of their pollution, and as they are being made too, it's become increasingly more expensive to run a coal fired power plant. Last one more than 100mw was built in 2013, and no more big ones are being built. The REAL market price of energy must include the cost of eliminating or mitigating these pollutants.
This is also why policy in the US since 2016 has increased the subsidies to renewables: https://www.eia.gov/analysis/requests/subsidy/pdf/subsidy.pd...
When the real price is considered, not just for global warming, but for public health impacts due to particulate and heavy metal and water pollution, coal is dead. It's only hope is to try and continue to externalize those costs on to all of us by crying about regulation and subsidies.
Those subsidies are an investment to avoid paying a radically higher cost in the coming years for public health and climate change disruption. The science and economic are very clear on this. https://www.lancetcountdownus.org/2023-lancet-countdown-u-s-...
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=54559
The last large plant came online in 2013 and noone has plans to build more. This is the economic reality of coal power in the US. It cannot compete with renewables (even when coal gets more subsidies) or natural gas, and it certainly cannot once it has to price in the cost of the pollution (particle, heavy metals, and carbon) that it previously made all of us pay for.
The hand wringing about politics in policy, or this EPA decision impacting energy prices are misguided and ignorant repetition of memes that the coal and other fossil fuel industries promote to perform a rear guard action and slow for their competitors who are beating them on most fronts with cheap, clean, zero marginal cost energy with very stable pricing.
Certainty? If Biden isn’t reelected doesn’t it all get immediately reversed?
This means that if those making public decisions pursue folly, they pay a price at election time.
Irrespective of whether this specific idea is a wise one, the notion of un-elected bureaucrats making policy with broad effect should terrify us.
Also worrisome is the abdication of proper legislative power by Congress.
And in this particular case, this isn't even remotely a bad ruling. The inability for markets to properly price in their negative externalities is the reason for our current looming crisis, and making up for the failures of markets by properly imposing those externalities is one of the most important roles of government.
Console yourself with this theoretical point, by all means.
Maybe the congress should do this with everything. The president can just make any rule he wants. Or maybe congress should just do their job instead of just delegating away all of their responsibility.
High time for an Article V re-write.
Doing so before you bring up an absurd talking point that is always trotted out when someone is held to account by a regulatory agency to pay for the damages they doing to their neighbors.
You can call the reality of the situation "absurd" all day, but you'll not be driving much improvement.
As elsewhere in the thread, I find this point mostly theoretical.
You could say with an equally straight face that Congress could balance the budget any old time it wants to.
You could also point to some quantum mechanical statistical possibility of a fored bullet passing through its target.
There will be no improvement in the collapsed political situation before us until we get past discussing hypotheticals and set about reform.
The only weird thing going on here is that one person in the conversation has pointed all these facts out, but then for some reason thinks it would be awesome to force Congress to micromanage the entire government through legislation rather than explicitly delegating the detailed enforcement to other branches. That’s the part I don’t get. If you’re going to push for Congress to run every element of our vast Federal government, stop providing devastating arguments that undermine your case.
The debt, for one example, is so large that it is just a Really Big Number.
Do you think that the U.S. Government accidentally created perpetual motion with the Constitution, and that none of the real-world effects outside of those ~4k words matter?
The shifting of blame to environmentalists is ludicrous. It's economic reality, that a much lower capital requirements, and zero marginal cost energy that has radically less complex engineering requirements and doesn't leave radioactive waste behind or blech it out when something goes wrong.
If the oceans are really in threat of rising, why did the Obamas buy multi-million dollar compound at sea level? Actions speak louder than words.
France did, with very limited money.
> It would require more than halving the capital requirements to get close to break even with renweables
France - the cost of their nuclear build-out 50 years ago made nuclear about the same cost as solar/wind (7c/kWh)
> they cannot touch fossil plants
Of course fossil plants get shut down if there is political will. (Yes France has barely any anymore, and the same goes for a number of other countries)
> much lower capital requirements
If you don't count the grid enhancement and the batteries needed for Dunkelflaute.