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Comment by chubbard | Hacker News Reader

As we move away from coal burning the price will fall, but coal producers within the US will simply export the cheaper fuel to countries like India and China. Unfortunately, the overall picture hasn't changed because the coal that was being burned within the US is merely being burned in other countries without the US environmental restrictions. We might be actually worse off environmentally due to the same amount of coal is being burned globally.

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The third world is going to use the cheapest, easiest, proven technology to get to first world standards of living, just like the first world did. That is just how its going to work. Look at China and India as case studies.

If people really want clean technology, then we need to develop cheaper, easier to implement and deploy technologies than gas and coal. Anything else will not get the job done.

Problem with that is technology typically can't be both cheaper and yield the same performance. It can be cheaper but yield less performance or more expensive with higher performance. The more expensive technology typically is a sustaining technology, but the problem here is that not enough people want to pay more for a clean technology so we can't start to make it cheaper without government funding. It almost doesn't matter what we do because we will be dwarfed by the CO2 output of Asia if it uses conventional fossil fuels.

I think we're better off for sure. Had we kept burning as much coal, things would be even worse than they are now. You are most certainly correct about the exports, though: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=U.S._coal_exports...

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