Tag: fossil fuel
What's Behind Trump's Doomed Effort To Revive The Coal Industry?

What's Behind Trump's Doomed Effort To Revive The Coal Industry?

I’ve just gotten back from the Netherlands, which is famous for its picturesque windmills. But wind power in Holland is more than a historical curiosity. There are also modern wind turbines almost everywhere you look, both onshore and off. And the ground is covered with dead birds and whales.

OK, not really. Wind power is, in fact, far cleaner and safer than burning fossil fuels. And I personally like the sight of wind turbines. After all, I value the comforts of modern civilization and find it reassuring to see the power needed to provide those comforts generated without harmful emissions.

But Donald Trump, as everyone knows, hates wind power and loves coal. Both passions are deeply irrational. Yet they are shaping policy.

Trump is doing his best to kill wind power, going so far as to order work halted on a mostly completed wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island. (Orsted, the Danish company behind the project, has sued and gotten the stop-work order lifted.)

And the administration is trying to revive coal, opening federal land for mining, removing pollution limits and providing hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies. But why?Administration officials would have you believe that coal mining is an economically viable industry that has been sabotaged by liberals. On Monday Chris Wright, the energy secretary, declared — in a weirdly dated culture war cliché — that coal is “out of fashion with the chardonnay set in San Francisco, Boulder, Colorado, and New York City.”

The truth, however, is that coal is a dying industry for very good reasons, and anti-wokeism is unlikely to revive it.

Coal stopped being a significant source of jobs decades ago:

At this point there are only around 40,000 coal miners left. In case you’re wondering, vineyards and wineries employ around 130,000 people, three times as many as the coal industry.

Where did all the coal jobs go? The answers may surprise you.

As you can see in the chart above, there was an epic decline in coal employment between 1950 and the 2000s, from half a million miners to around 80,000. But this employment decline didn’t reflect an economy turning away from coal. In fact, use of coal to generate electricity rose steadily over the whole period, peaking in 2008:

So what happened to all the coal jobs? Basically, workers were displaced first by giant power shovels (strip mining), then by explosives used to blow the tops off mountains, exposing the coal beneath. By using these techniques, in 2008 coal companies were able to produce twice as much coal as they did in 1950, while employing 80 percent fewer workers.

Coal consumption finally did start declining after 2008. But if you look at the chart above, you can see that until recently coal was mainly replaced, not by renewable energy, but by natural gas — which became cheap and abundant thanks to the rise of fracking.

Solar and wind power have finally become important sources of energy in recent years. But the reason they have grown rapidly while coal has declined isn’t that the chardonnay set considers coal unfashionable. It’s the simple fact that coal is no longer cost-competitive, while wind and solar are.

Needless to say, Trump and company aren’t going to acknowledge these facts. They may not even be aware of them. In his speech at the U.N. General Assembly, Trump declared that the Chinese sell a lot of wind turbines to the rest of the world, “but they barely use them.” Ahem:

For the rest of us, however, the important thing to understand is that none of the ostensible justifications for promoting coal make sense. It’s not about saving jobs: Coal mining as a way of life vanished decades ago, not because chardonnay-sipping liberals sneered at it, but because corporations replaced miners with machines and explosives. It’s not about reducing energy prices: Trying to keep coal alive will make energy more expensive, not less.

What it’s really about is culture war. Trying to bring back coal is all about owning the libs. And if it damages the environment, well, from MAGA’s point of view that’s a plus.

Reprinted with permission from Substack.

Internet Slays Joe Manchin Over Dumb Comments That Fossil Fuels Can Produce Clean Energy

Internet Slays Joe Manchin Over Dumb Comments That Fossil Fuels Can Produce Clean Energy

United States Senator Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) on Wednesday claimed that oil can be used to generate clean power as the nation transitions to renewables sources of energy.

"For us to be strong, to be the superpower of the world, we should develop here in North America a North American energy alliance with Canada and basically Mexico and the United States as one continent basically that could be the energy hub," Manchin told MSNBC's Joe Scarborough on Morning Joe.

"We can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can make sure that we produce the cleanest resources basically from fossil but also be able to segue into a cleaner environment with the technology and investments that it'll take to transition," Manchin continued.

"I think we can do both, but we have to maintain. You can't do just one and not the other and think we're gonna be fine. And that's what we're running into – the conundrum here. We should be ramping up production," Manchin added. "We should be out there doing everything we can to maintain our independence but be able to backfill everywhere we can. And if we don't get Europe up and loaded for next winter, for the summer when they've depleted all their reserves, there's gonna be a big problem coming."

Manchin – a wealthy coal magnate who drives a Maserati and lives on a yacht while representing one of the poorest states in the country – is a lone voice among the Democratic Senate caucus when it comes to retrofitting the American energy grid to tackle climate change. He killed President Joe Biden's Build Back Better plan in part because of its provisions that called for investments in renewables. Manchin also refuses to consider amending the filibuster, which Republicans used to obstruct the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.

Twitter blasted him for touting the very industry that is padding his pockets and poisoning our biosphere.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

Rep. Lauren Boebert

Boebert Pushed Energy Bills That Could Benefit Husband’s Firm

Reprinted with permission from American Independent

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) has proposed energy legislation and attacked green energy initiatives over the past several months without disclosing that her husband has been earning hundreds of thousands for consulting on energy issues.

According to financial disclosures that were revealed on Thursday, first flagged by the Associated Press, Jayson Boebert has been working as a consultant for an energy firm listed only as "Terra Energy Productions." The disclosures revealed that in 2019, he earned $460,000 from the firm and in 2020 he earned $478,000.

The first-term congresswoman did not disclose the income during her successful 2020 congressional campaign.

The Associated Press noted that there is no company with that name registered in Colorado, but that a company named Terra Energy Partners "has a heavy presence in Boebert's district."

On its website, Terra Energy Partners describes itself as "one of the largest producers of natural gas in Colorado and one of the largest privately-held natural gas producers in the United States." A report in the Colorado-based Post Independent noted that Terra "oversees hundreds of oil and gas wells in northwest Colorado's Piceance Basin."

In a September 2020 Instagram post from the congresswoman, Jayson Boebert can be seen wearing a helmet with the same logo as Terra Energy Partners. In the caption, Boebert wrote, "Pro-Energy."

Officials from Boebert's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story. Attempts to reach Terra Energy Partners were unsuccessful.

Since taking office in January, Boebert has offered up pro-fossil fuel legislation and other similar bills while attacking energy-related initiatives from the Biden administration and congressional Democrats, without indicating that her family's income or work could be positively impacted.

Successful passage of some of that legislation would likely be a boon to the oil and gas industries.

In January, the congresswoman introduced the "Paris Agreement Constitutional Treaty Act" which would prevent the United States from reentering the Paris Climate Accords. In February, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to rejoin the accords, reversing a decision from the Trump administration.

The Paris agreement calls for a cut in greenhouse gas emissions, a byproduct of the oil and and natural gas industries.

In February, Boebert proposed the "Protecting American Energy Jobs Act" which would undo Biden's executive orders on several energy-related topics. The act would end a ban on new oil and gas leasing on federal lands, reverse the decision to cancel the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, and prevent the Interior Department from halting oil and gas drilling.

A 2018 report noted that Terra was petitioning the government for the ability to drill on federal lands.

In April, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) reintroduced the Green New Deal resolution with the goal of addressing climate change.

Boebert attacked the legislation in an April 2021 statement, describing it as an attempt to "appease environmental extremists" and claiming it would throw the country into "a literal energy dark age."

The congresswoman serves in the minority on the House Natural Resources Committee. In May she praised herself for an "energy victory" after successfully adding two amendments to pending legislation regarding energy concerns.

A month later, Boebert joined with other House Republicans, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, in signing a letter to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland criticizing a moratorium on energy leases.

Boebert claimed the moratorium was "illegal" and was "punishing energy workers to appease the Green New Deal radical leftists."

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.

pandemic, planet earth

The Pandemic Is Already Cooling The Planet — Will It Do More?

Some say the pandemic has become a permanent ally in the fight against climate catastrophe. It has jump-started a drop in the burning of fossil fuels, and that will continue. Others say this is short-term thinking: The public may abandon its concerns over global warming as it tries to climb out of the economic hole left by the COVID-19 lockdowns. Let's accentuate the positive.

First off, the government-mandated social distancing and its freezing of much industrial activity has already cut greenhouse gas emissions, certainly for the time being. The International Energy Agency predicts that global carbon emissions will have fallen about eight percent this year from 2019's level. That would be the biggest annual decline ever.

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