Bloomberg News editorializes:
The coal industry is warning that proposed federal regulations on new coal-fired power plants will effectively ban their construction. To which there are at least three rational responses: First, what new plants? Second, probably not forever. Third, that might not be a bad thing…
And what if, despite all that, the coal industry’s warnings come true? There’s a small chance those predictions are accurate, and that new caps on carbon emissions will indeed mean an effective and indefinite ban on new American coal plants. To which our answer is, ruining the atmosphere is too high a price for protecting one type of power when others are available.
We can’t keep insisting that climate change is a concern while taking no meaningful steps to stop it. For the American coal industry, there are two choices: adapt, or die.
If the same people that are trying to block new coal plants would let us build Nuclear plants instead, we might be OK. But they are blocking those instead. If they want to die cold and hungry, they are welcome to move to Europe, but I want better for my children and grandchildren.
No, it’s “knuckle under” to our Muslim-Brother-in-Chief’s “climate rules” AND die.
Surrender? When the enemy’s intention is to murder you once they’ve got you helpless?
Screw that!
The EPA has gone after coal plants for mercury, PM2.5 and CO2 emissions. None of these have any validity. The EPA has made wildy illogical and, to the most casual observer, inaccurate claims on illness, death and medical costs for Hg and PM emissions without being seriously challenged. Bloomberg is talking about only one prong of the attack.
When the EPA writes all the regulations that effectively end new and existing coal plants what do we do then? Wait for the next administration to rewrite the rules? That isn’t going to happen. The Republicans haven’t got the backbone to take environmental issues head on and say the rule is stupid and wrong. They are absolutely spineless and go all wobbly and start muttering the lib/enviro line on all of the above, clean energy, renewables, ad nauseum. Do we wait for energy rationing, high prices and “energy poverty” like the UK? I don’t see them doing much about it. Maybe when the peasants storm the palace with pitchforks and torches something will happen, but until then the current administration will break the eggs, which can’t be put back together.
I’ve been doing environmental management since 1983. I’ve watched the regulators become increasing irrational; more and more regulations covering less and less; and the ever increasing demand for more regulation and control, for our safety. None of it makes sense. One of the things I’ve learned is when I start looking for science and logic and start believing they ought to be there the best thing to do is drink bad whiskey until I get over it.
Maybe we can avoid this self-made disaster, but I doubt it.
“To which our answer is, ruining the atmosphere is too high a price for protecting one type of power when others are available.”
Soot and perhaps some gases from coal-burning can be harmful. We have enough wealth and technology to mitigate those, so coal does not ruin the atmosphere.
Burning anything except hydrogen (too expensive) produces carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is a negligible element in climate changes, so regulating carbon dioxide to get climate benefits is a waste of resources.
Coal may be displaced by less expensive and safer forms of energy. If so, let the market do this, not Bloomberg or his minions and mouthpieces or the government.
Based EPA 3 lines of evidence which are clearly false. ( trapping hotspot, catastrophic warming, models ( what a joke that is). Astounding this could happen in the United States of America. An industry that without, alot of these people trashing it wouldnt have the life they do. A sorry, sad day in a string of many for this nation of late on this issue and others
I could care less where power comes from if its cheap. The people I forecast for need to know if its warm or cold and by how much, so if you proved to me eating cheeto’s and snapping your fingers creates power, fine. But isolating, demonizing and destroying are straight from the Alinsky and Marxism, and that its based on 3 lines of evidence that are clearly false is amazing.