> Coal plants that plan to stay open beyond 2039 would have to cut or capture 90% of their carbon dioxide emissions by 2032, the EPA said. Plants that expect to retire by 2039 would face a less stringent standard but still would have to capture some emissions. Coal plants that are set to retire by 2032 would not be subject to the new rules.
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.
pfdietz 24 days ago [-]
This also applies to natural gas, which is a much bigger deal. The title here didn't say that, but the article's title did.
ZeroGravitas 24 days ago [-]
I thought they'd softened this so it didn't apply to any existing gas plant? Did they change that again?
edit:
> The EPA’s new power plant pollution rule has a big, gassy hole in it
Yes, I see that's the case. I imagine that's because of all the existing combined cycle plants. The new rule also doesn't apply to peaker plants.
The folks with the Allam cycle patents must be happy about this.
toomuchtodo 23 days ago [-]
Peaker plants are not cost competitive with utility scale battery storage, storage which is currently supply constrained.
pfdietz 23 days ago [-]
They're not cost competitive with batteries for diurnal storage, but they are competitive for low duty cycle demand on much longer time scales (like covering Dunkelflauten).
SigmundA 24 days ago [-]
Natural gas emits less than half the CO2 of coal per unit of energy due to its chemical makeup, NG is the "cleanest" fossil fuel.
If you count the leaks then the numbers are not that good.
jajko 24 days ago [-]
Apart from that tiny chinese fleet of 1000+ coal plants, havent noticed any plans for those, or rest of developing world like India.
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.
mschuster91 24 days ago [-]
> Apart from that tiny chinese fleet of 1000+ coal plants, havent noticed any plans for those, or rest of developing world like India.
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.
Do you ever consider that you personally are helping the extreme parties by passing on memes like "but what about the foreigners!" and "poor folks are paying the bills!" when this topic comes up?
24 days ago [-]
jajko 23 days ago [-]
Man, I am not living in EU anymore so not personally affected by its policies, just mentioning that world and people are more complex than you would like it to be, not 'sowing' anything. Just relaying what I heard over and over in eastern part of EU, across multiple states, on personal but also institutional/government level.
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.
peteradio 24 days ago [-]
Do you think its not true or should we mute certain truths dare it support the evil faction?
cbrozefsky 24 days ago [-]
Noone has spoken facts on this matter. They made vague and incorrect statements, and "whattabouts". The energy price volatility is not due to green policies, or extreme parties in the EU, it's due to their reliance upon natural gas and oil from a global exporter who then decided to invade their neighbor and threaten all of Europe.
That's the fact here.
adrianN 23 days ago [-]
I believe we should refrain from reducing complex topics like international carbon policy to „but the other guy“ style arguments.
tichiian 24 days ago [-]
"Whataboutism" isn't a proper counter-argument. Shutting down a few plants in the west is maybe just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, and asking about the iceberg and the cold water isn't "whataboutism" in that it doesn't distract from the issue at hand. It rather points to the really important part of the issue. More like a kind of "reverse whataboutism".
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.
bryanlarsen 24 days ago [-]
US per capita emissions are almost twice that of China, so a dollar spent on emissions reductions in the US has a bigger impact.
dredmorbius 23 days ago [-]
Total global warming is predicated on total CO2 emissions, which is the bottom line that is most significant. Yes, the US has higher per-capita emissions, and absolutely should reduce those. However US emissions have been flat or declining for decades now (since the 1970s or 1980s depending on how you look at it), whilst China's emissions, both total and per capita, have exploded in the past four decades as that country has industrialised and emerged as a mid-income nation.
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.
Agreed. My comment was a response to somebody who basically said "why should the US do anything when China is worse." Others attacked the (bad) argument, I attacked the (bad) assumption.
gadflyinyoureye 24 days ago [-]
Is your suggestion to not look at the full picture when discussing policy topics? If so, how do you propose rational policies? The impact of parties outside of direct political control can offset any good done locally. If the local policies are too restrictive it could have knock on effects that make people’s live materially and psychologically worse.
adrianN 24 days ago [-]
Luckily environmental protections are extremely far from „too restrictive“ so there are no concerns about that.
gadflyinyoureye 24 days ago [-]
If the price of energy is too high, you will suffer economically. This will lead to mental health issues. That will lead to suicide and broken homes. That will lead to cycle of poverty and pain across generations.
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.
cbrozefsky 24 days ago [-]
The politicians and policy makers are very aware of the energy price, so you are not introducing anything new to the policy makers decision making process. Read any of their materials and you will see the energy price sensitivity is a core measure for them.
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.
gadflyinyoureye 23 days ago [-]
The Canadian and Californian governments don’t seem too concerned about increasing the cost of power.
This is not about the EU or India or China. It's about the US and the EPA.
The EPA cannot regulate those other places, but it can make coal plants in the US pay for the pollutants they previously externalized.
bryanlarsen 24 days ago [-]
China is reducing their CO2/kWh at a much faster rate than the US, mostly due to massive solar deployment. They're installing solar at a rate almost 10x the rate that the US is.
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.
epgui 24 days ago [-]
Yes you're right that it's a global problem, but that should not be an objection to taking initiative.
pxmpxm 24 days ago [-]
No, that is wrong - if the outcome of this regulation is coal export with the same end use + co2 for transit + no sulfur scrubbing because emerging markets coal plants have lesser env standards, it doesn't make sense.
epgui 20 days ago [-]
That would be a great argument if it were a response to a comment other than the one I made.
9dev 24 days ago [-]
Well, it’s a hard problem to solve. The world requires a lot more immediate action than what the EU leadership ever proposed, yet we can’t even convince the fools sawing the branch we’re sitting on to at least swing the saw a little slower. And it’s not limited to Eastern Europe, the idiots are far and wide…
littlestymaar 24 days ago [-]
> but if the effort is not global while the effects always are
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.
fwungy 23 days ago [-]
Tell Putin and the Sauds. Do you think they'll give up trillions of wealth because "they aspire to be like Western elites"?
littlestymaar 23 days ago [-]
It's about the demand side, not the supply side. Putin has zero leverage on Indian's energy policy and neither does MBS.
If anything, sending money to Putin and MBS hurts Modi and Lula's own economic goals.
pxmpxm 24 days ago [-]
[flagged]
Tade0 24 days ago [-]
China's coal usage is poised to peak around 2024-2025 - earlier than analysts expected as while they're increasing generation capacity, actual coal usage is not keeping up:
Between 2000 and now their coal plant capacity factor dropped from 70% to around 50%.
Most likely they're building all those plants because that contributes to the GDP figure.
defrost 24 days ago [-]
Buried in the details there's a twist often missed.
China has shut down thousands of small, old, relatively inefficant coal plants while at the same time building fewer, larger, more efficient, less polluting coal plants and while doing more than any other country to advance solar and related technologies.
They have a massive population, which they worked hard (in questionable ways) to keep in check, as the associated energy demand has grown they've worked hard to meet it with the technology they had (coal) while also working to make that cleaner and working to replace it as rapidly as possible.
> Between 2000 and now their coal plant capacity factor dropped from 70% to around 50%.
I'm unsure of your specifics here, I agree they're working hard to use less, FWiW though, the most recent IEA figure for China coal use was 60.6% of total energy supply in 2021
The IEA also asserts that globally we've reached "peak coal use" planet wide, despite the apparent foot dragging of China and India who are still bound by large populations, large energy demands, production energy usage for goods for much of the reast of the planet, and the difficulty of fast transition.
ZeroGravitas 23 days ago [-]
Remember that 60% of primary energy supply includes the half of that energy that gets thrown away as heat when making electricity. So you'd only need to replace the actual useful final energy.
defrost 23 days ago [-]
In 2021 coal in China generated 5,417,484 GWh of electricity which was 63%
of total electricity generation.
To replace that coal generated electricity it would take 5,417,484 GWh of electricity from non coal sources.
ZeroGravitas 23 days ago [-]
The 60.6% and 63% are two different numbers for two different metrics that just happen to be coincidentally near each other at the moment.
The coal used to generate that electricity needs replaced, but it is also double-counted in the primary energy (not electricity) supply number.
ransom1538 23 days ago [-]
China is approving new coal power projects at the equivalent of two plants every week, a rate energy watchdogs say is unsustainable if the country hopes to achieve its energy targets.
ZeroGravitas 23 days ago [-]
You're suggesting that this regulation will be effective in its stated goal and lead to unexpected outcomes.
I'm suggesting it's pointless because the coal plants are already uneconomic, and this rule is only impacting things in 8 years.
Developing nations might want to import cheap coal because richer nations no longer want to poison their children and want their fish to be edible during pregnancy and reason that they don't have that luxury yet.
But when America, Australia etc. are all trying to sell them exported coal because they are running cheaper solar at home, they might see another option.
matthewdgreen 23 days ago [-]
China is building renewables and nuclear at a rate faster than the entire world, and their emissions are set to peak years earlier than expected. I wish the US was moving anywhere near as quickly.
HumblyTossed 23 days ago [-]
> to try to keep gramps in the white house...
Either way, we get gramps...
pxmpxm 23 days ago [-]
Touché, current gramps.
Kon-Peki 24 days ago [-]
My parents live in a very conservative area of the country that started a coal phaseout 5 years ago or so. Everyone was up in arms when they announced it, but the utility said "here's our data, these are the scenarios we've run, if we've made a mistake or there is a plausible scenario we've missed, let us know".
Coal just isn't competitive anymore, financially.
the_optimist 24 days ago [-]
It’s not competitive because policy has been designed to make it expensive. This is underhanded and leads to circular reasoning. Nuclear is similarly expensive. Wind and solar would be even more expensive without extraordinary policy support.
cbrozefsky 23 days ago [-]
You are myopic in a focus on subsidies, and you need to consider both current costs, and how they are externalized from coal plants to the population, and what the cost will be in the future from the pollutants (carbon and others).
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.
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-...
datadrivenangel 23 days ago [-]
Natural gas and wind turbines are cheaper now.
Would coal be competitive if there were no emission controls? Maybe, but we like relatively clean air, so we want some of those controls.
erellsworth 23 days ago [-]
Except that the US has been subsidizing fossil fuels, including coal, for decades.
bryanlarsen 23 days ago [-]
The policies that makes it expensive are emissions controls. Without those emissions controls Americans would get sick and cost us a lot more money in medical bills.
cbrozefsky 24 days ago [-]
According to the EIA, more than a quarter of the us coal fleet will be retired by 2029. This is 10 years before these regulations would be at full strength:
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.
24 days ago [-]
bilsbie 24 days ago [-]
I’m confused how they are doing stuff like this in light of West Virginia vs EPA?
aranchelk 23 days ago [-]
> The rule was among four separate measures targeting coal and natural gas plants that the EPA said would provide “regulatory certainty” to the power industry
Certainty? If Biden isn’t reelected doesn’t it all get immediately reversed?
smitty1e 24 days ago [-]
One of the ideas informing representative democracy is that those wielding power stand for election.
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.
cbrozefsky 24 days ago [-]
Perhaps you should learn more about the US Constitution, the separation of powers, and the role of the executive branch and it's ability to make ruling like this.
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.
smitty1e 23 days ago [-]
> absurd talking point
You can call the reality of the situation "absurd" all day, but you'll not be driving much improvement.
23 days ago [-]
matthewdgreen 23 days ago [-]
If Congress wants to override this rule, they can hold a vote and do it tomorrow. Don’t confuse Congress’s disinterest in doing something for their inability to do it.
smitty1e 23 days ago [-]
> If Congress wants to override this rule, they can hold a vote and do it tomorrow.
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.
matthewdgreen 23 days ago [-]
Congress has certain powers; nobody seriously disagrees about this. Congress can use those powers if it wants to: again, nobody here disagrees about this. I think everyone here would also agree that Congress is not very fast or efficient when it comes to using its powers to pass legislation. That’s unfortunate but I guess part of the basic structure of the institution.
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.
smitty1e 23 days ago [-]
You have stated things that are quite true but which ignore the gravity of the actual federal bureaucracy.
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?
kibwen 24 days ago [-]
This is nonsense. Congress hasn't abdicated anything, they've delegated it, and they retain the power to overrule the EPA, which means that voters have the power to elect representatives to do just that if the EPA made a bad ruling.
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.
ImJamal 23 days ago [-]
>Congress hasn't abdicated anything, they've delegated it, and they retain the power to overrule the EPA
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.
smitty1e 23 days ago [-]
My point is that the power has oozed into Article II over the last century, leaving facades in place for Articles I and III.
High time for an Article V re-write.
smitty1e 23 days ago [-]
> Congress hasn't abdicated anything, they've delegated it, and they retain the power to overrule the EPA
Console yourself with this theoretical point, by all means.
incomingpain 24 days ago [-]
[flagged]
cbrozefsky 24 days ago [-]
It's not politics to hold business accountable for the damage they do to their neighbors. That's called appropriately pricing previously externalized harms.
Coal plants in the US are economically dead in the water anyways, their utilization rates are plummetting between renewables and natural gas peakers. Many still operating are subsidized by policitical handouts.
If you want to talk about political decisions, perhaps look at Illinois and Ohio politicians being presecuted for bribery from the power industry for making tax payers pay for uneconomic plants. They are indeed being punished.
bryanlarsen 23 days ago [-]
This is exactly that, just phrased differently.
"Capture emissions or shut down" means "shut down" since "capture emissions" would increase costs by an order of magnitude or so.
It's just much more palatable framing -- it attacks the problem rather than dictating solutions.
Or perhaps the horse will sing and carbon capture will become reasonably priced. Highly unlikely.
EV bans should be phrased the same way. Rather than banning EV's, set strict pollution standards.
epgui 24 days ago [-]
You're throwing words around in apparent criticism, but there's no substance to it. Environmental protection policies should be about as controversial as the idea that we shouldn't shit where we eat. If you want to call that politics, then sure, I guess.
incomingpain 24 days ago [-]
>You're throwing words around in apparent criticism, but there's no substance to it.
I'm not from the USA. I kept my content brief because I knew I would be censored. I even said don't shoot the messenger!
In my personal viewpoint, shutdown all coal plants tomorrow and send black roses to their accountants.
>Environmental protection policies should be about as controversial as the idea that we shouldn't shit where we eat. If you want to call that politics, then sure, I guess.
The conversation would be interesting if people were allowed to speak. At risk of further punishment I'll elaborate.
Your political side believes this, which is totally fine and good. I even agree with you.
But it's obvious the republicans dont agree with us. This is politics, and now the EPA is going to be heavily deregulated because of this move being done in the election year.
epgui 24 days ago [-]
> I'm not from the USA.
Cool, me neither...
> I even said don't shoot the messenger!
Except you're not really carrying a message from someone else, and that's not a magic incantation shielding your ideas from criticism...
> In my personal viewpoint, shutdown all coal plants tomorrow and send black roses to their accountants.
Cheers to that!
As for the rest, I like to consider myself practically apolitical. I refuse to engage with people who unduly politicize things that should just be scienced. Just because someone wants to claim that creationism vs evolution is a political issue doesn't mean I have to sit and patiently listen to them.
incomingpain 23 days ago [-]
>As for the rest, I like to consider myself practically apolitical. I refuse to engage with people who unduly politicize things that should just be scienced. Just because someone wants to claim that creationism vs evolution is a political issue doesn't mean I have to sit and patiently listen to them.
You are upset at my original post for lacking substance. I take the risk of elaborating, expecting further censorship.
But you won't touch the substance, you call me a creationist and dismiss me.
This website is too toxic for me.
epgui 23 days ago [-]
Nobody has been censored, I did not call you a creationist, and I did not dismiss you.
If you say or write things in public, you can't reasonably get upset when people engage with you with either criticism or nuance. When someone says anything more complicated than "yes", it doesn't mean you're a victim.
I think if you re-read this thread more carefully, you'll see that we're even pretty much on the same side. /smh
donw 24 days ago [-]
The entire grid would be nuclear and carbon-free if environmentalists hadn’t spent the last 70 years fighting against it.
cbrozefsky 24 days ago [-]
No, it would not, not even people who make their living building Nuclear plants would claim that. It's incredibly expensive and risk to build the plants, they couldn't even build them to meet the needs of the grid near unlimited money. It would require more than halving the capital requirements to get close to break even with renweables, and they cannot touch fossil plants.
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.
The majority of negative economics with nuclear are from asinine policy decisions as well as tilted markets with subsidies for other sources. Lithium reactors would burn fuel that we idiotically label as waste and try to bury. China has picked up what we abandoned in the 50's; woe be to us when they scale modern reactor designs. Cheap, reliable and sustainable energy built the west - we are pissing that away over a bunch of overactive fear mongering. And if you think emerging markets are going to abandon fossil fuels and the advantages they brought us "because feelings" you are utterly delusional.
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.
MagnumOpus 23 days ago [-]
> couldn't even build them to meet the needs of the grid near unlimited money
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.
adrianN 24 days ago [-]
For economic reasons it probably wouldn’t be fully nuclear.
donw 23 days ago [-]
True! Hydro would contribute, and likely geothermal as well. Probably also some generation from the methane generated by composting garbage at scale.
24 days ago [-]
Rendered at 01:18:11 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
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.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=48296
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.
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...
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.
That's the fact here.
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.
<https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions>
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.
The EPA cannot regulate those other places, but it can make coal plants in the US pay for the pollutants they previously externalized.
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.
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-coal-plants
Between 2000 and now their coal plant capacity factor dropped from 70% to around 50%.
Most likely they're building all those plants because that contributes to the GDP figure.
China has shut down thousands of small, old, relatively inefficant coal plants while at the same time building fewer, larger, more efficient, less polluting coal plants and while doing more than any other country to advance solar and related technologies.
They have a massive population, which they worked hard (in questionable ways) to keep in check, as the associated energy demand has grown they've worked hard to meet it with the technology they had (coal) while also working to make that cleaner and working to replace it as rapidly as possible.
> Between 2000 and now their coal plant capacity factor dropped from 70% to around 50%.
I'm unsure of your specifics here, I agree they're working hard to use less, FWiW though, the most recent IEA figure for China coal use was 60.6% of total energy supply in 2021
https://www.iea.org/countries/China/coal
The IEA also asserts that globally we've reached "peak coal use" planet wide, despite the apparent foot dragging of China and India who are still bound by large populations, large energy demands, production energy usage for goods for much of the reast of the planet, and the difficulty of fast transition.
To replace that coal generated electricity it would take 5,417,484 GWh of electricity from non coal sources.
The coal used to generate that electricity needs replaced, but it is also double-counted in the primary energy (not electricity) supply number.
I'm suggesting it's pointless because the coal plants are already uneconomic, and this rule is only impacting things in 8 years.
Developing nations might want to import cheap coal because richer nations no longer want to poison their children and want their fish to be edible during pregnancy and reason that they don't have that luxury yet.
But when America, Australia etc. are all trying to sell them exported coal because they are running cheaper solar at home, they might see another option.
Either way, we get gramps...
Coal just isn't competitive anymore, financially.
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-...
Would coal be competitive if there were no emission controls? Maybe, but we like relatively clean air, so we want some of those controls.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Console yourself with this theoretical point, by all means.
Coal plants in the US are economically dead in the water anyways, their utilization rates are plummetting between renewables and natural gas peakers. Many still operating are subsidized by policitical handouts.
If you want to talk about political decisions, perhaps look at Illinois and Ohio politicians being presecuted for bribery from the power industry for making tax payers pay for uneconomic plants. They are indeed being punished.
"Capture emissions or shut down" means "shut down" since "capture emissions" would increase costs by an order of magnitude or so.
It's just much more palatable framing -- it attacks the problem rather than dictating solutions.
Or perhaps the horse will sing and carbon capture will become reasonably priced. Highly unlikely.
EV bans should be phrased the same way. Rather than banning EV's, set strict pollution standards.
I'm not from the USA. I kept my content brief because I knew I would be censored. I even said don't shoot the messenger!
In my personal viewpoint, shutdown all coal plants tomorrow and send black roses to their accountants.
>Environmental protection policies should be about as controversial as the idea that we shouldn't shit where we eat. If you want to call that politics, then sure, I guess.
The conversation would be interesting if people were allowed to speak. At risk of further punishment I'll elaborate.
Your political side believes this, which is totally fine and good. I even agree with you.
But it's obvious the republicans dont agree with us. This is politics, and now the EPA is going to be heavily deregulated because of this move being done in the election year.
Cool, me neither...
> I even said don't shoot the messenger!
Except you're not really carrying a message from someone else, and that's not a magic incantation shielding your ideas from criticism...
> In my personal viewpoint, shutdown all coal plants tomorrow and send black roses to their accountants.
Cheers to that!
As for the rest, I like to consider myself practically apolitical. I refuse to engage with people who unduly politicize things that should just be scienced. Just because someone wants to claim that creationism vs evolution is a political issue doesn't mean I have to sit and patiently listen to them.
You are upset at my original post for lacking substance. I take the risk of elaborating, expecting further censorship.
But you won't touch the substance, you call me a creationist and dismiss me.
This website is too toxic for me.
If you say or write things in public, you can't reasonably get upset when people engage with you with either criticism or nuance. When someone says anything more complicated than "yes", it doesn't mean you're a victim.
I think if you re-read this thread more carefully, you'll see that we're even pretty much on the same side. /smh
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.