Coal Plant Retirement
Environmentalists do a great deal of hand-wringing about the terrors of the Trump administration, but we tend to forget how powerful our legal system is when it comes down to actually rolling back regulations that have been lawfully put in place over the last half century to protect the health and safety of all Americans.
Good examples of this are plentiful. Sure, Scott Pruitt and his EPA are trying their damnedest to put a spear through the CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) Standards, first enacted by the United States Congress in 1975, after the 1973–74 Arab Oil Embargo, to improve the average fuel economy of cars and light trucks. And yes, of course, they have the auto and oil industries on their side. But watch out for that push back, to everything from environmental groups to state governments.
California is saying: We can’t control what you greedy planet-ruining pigs do in Ohio, but don’t even think about selling a single moped in our state unless it meets the standards we all agreed to before Trump and his wrecking crew came to town. And guess what? At 33.9 billion vehicle miles traveled (VMT, in 2016) California accounted for more miles driven in December 2016 than the combined 33.8 billion miles of 22 states – Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, Wyoming – and Washington, D.C. Go tell your investors that you won’t be selling a single hubcap in a state with almost 100 million VMT per day, and let’s see how that works out for you.
Here’s another dandy example: coal. Trump loves coal, and his Energy Secretary, Rick Perry, went to great lengths to provide huge federal government subsidies for this dying industry (that kills 13,000 annually while causing disease in hundreds of thousands of others), before he was laughed out of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission when he presented his ideas. Yet here is a map showing the number and size of coal plants slated for retirement.
We live in a time where great evil is rampant. Fortunately, that evil has to play by certain rules, and those rules make things tough for those who think they can ruin our environment for the sake of corporate greed with the stroke of a pen.
Craig,
Your contentions are becoming more emotive, negative and desperate. Sadly, you seem to be stuck in a sort of time warp crusade citing old inaccurate myths and railing at imaginary “evils” , while ignoring, or rejecting, positive new technologies.
Although repeated inaccurately a million times by lazy journalists and green power advocates, the 2011 American Lung Association never said, or offered any evidence to substantiate the claim of 13,000 deaths annually.
That figure was based on an ‘estimated’ number of ‘premature’ deaths where coal or carbon particles ‘may’ have been a ‘contributing’ factor. Even the ‘premature’ factor is very dubious as the ability to determine how much longer elderly patients dying of respiratory complaints could have lived runs into months, weeks or even days is very questionable.
You really should read the report with a critical and open mind, not just repeat inaccuracies by fellow anti-coal crusaders.
Why always be negative ? Why pursue crusades to ” ban ” so many “evils” ? These crusades are especially futile when most of what you want to ‘ban’ are essential industries.
Why do you waste time on endless political/ ideological negative ” moral” crusades when is so much exciting new science and technology is being developed to resolve, mitigate or replace environmentally harmful practices with new clean tech technologies that ? These new technologies need your help to promote, commercialism and gain adoption, if their benefits are to be quickly implemented.
For instance UK scientists Bryon Donohoe and Nic Rorrer, have created a substance capable of “eating” plastic that could help remove one of the world’s major pollution problems.
The substance is based on an enzyme, a “biological catalyst” first discovered when Japanese researchers found a bacteria living in a Japanese recycling centre which had evolved to eat plastic.
The UK scientists realize that with a little “tweaking” the evolutionary process could be accelerated, and with the identification of more specialized microbes the problem of degrading plastics and other pollutants may be rapidly solved.
This is just one example of the many exciting new developments concentrating on effective mitigation and environmentally beneficial technology.
All around you are examples of Clean Technology solving problems while advancing human health, wealth and the environment. Why not celebrate the positive and forget grim puritanical campaigns to “ban” everything, apportion blame, and regress to a bleak minimalist existence ?
You’ve been telling me that I’ve been becoming more bizarre, emotive, erratic, unstable, unhinged, ideological, and so forth, several times a week for the last 9.5 years. Obviously, you have some powerful motivating factor; you’re on a mission. God only knows what it is. Most of my friends say it’s the Koch brothers. Whatever. I don’t care. Go for it.
If the US wants to go on exporting vehicles, it will have to continue improving fuel efficiency. Europe, China, India and others are tightening fuel efficiency standards, with all of the above looking to stop the sale of new ICE propelled vehicles between 2030 and 2040. If the US insists on being the odd one out, its car industry will rapidly become irrelevant internationally.
Excellent point, but the major OEMs have different models for different regions of the world. E.g., what GM builds in Vietnam for Southeast Asia isn’t what it’s building in Europe or the U.S. Correct?