6 ms·

Hopefully next we can help fix mercury in fish, the number one contributor right now is burning coal. Seems like it would be a easy decision.

vpShane 9mo ago
We live in opposite-world where the way it is, is the exact opposite of how it should be
epistasis 9mo ago
Coal is mostly sticking around in the US because of federal overreach to keep unprofitable and ancient coal generators going long after anybody wants to pay for the high maintenance. Last week, a Colorado utility was "respectfully" asking to be able to close a plant: > TTri-State Generation and partner Platte River Power Authority had a “respectful” but emphatic response late Thursday to the Trump administration ordering them to keep Craig’s Unit 1 coal-fired plant open past the New Year: > They don’t need it, they don’t want it, and their inflation-strapped consumers can’t afford the higher bills. Plus, the federal order is unconstitutional. https://coloradosun.com/2026/01/30/craig-tri-state-petition-coal-closure/ https://coloradosun.com/2026/01/30/craig-tri-state-petition-... TVA has also been begging to close a money losing coal plant for a while now, writing letters to FERC about it, but I can't find the link now. New coal is far too expensive to build anymore too. Handling big amounts of solid material is expensive, and big old unresponsive baseload is undesirable for achieving economic efficiency. Even China, which is still building new coal plants, is lessening their coal usage. Personally I think they'll keep some around to continue economic influence on Australia, which is one their primary countries for experimenting with methods to increase their soft power. There is no technical or economic reason to want coal power today.
- prodigycorp 9mo ago
  Thank you for such a thoughtful comment. There's politics that gets flagged on this site, and there's politics that makes me think about things with more clarity. Yours is obviously the latter.
  - epistasis 9mo ago
    Collective decisions are unavoidably political, and grid electricity has to be a collective decision! My hope is that we can take the partisan aspect out of the politics, however, and reduce it to a discussion of the tradeoff of values: cost, reliability, climate, and any other values that we need to include. Fortunately I think that for nearly any value set, the answer is very similar.
- gwd 9mo ago
  > There is no technical or economic reason to want coal power today. For anyone wanting a slightly ranty but also informed description of why, I enjoyed this Hank Green video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfvBx4D0Cms&pp=ygUPaGFuayBncmVlbiBjb2Fs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfvBx4D0Cms&pp=ygUPaGFuayBnc...
  - darknavi 9mo ago
    Technology Connections also released a great rant on it (and more) recently. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM
    - gwd 9mo ago
      That one was more about how "midwestern values" made him pro-solar, whereas the Hank Greek one was specifically about how bad coal is.
      - boarsofcanada 8mo ago
        Even more specifically how coal makes no economic sense even independent of environmental concerns.
- prasadjoglekar 9mo ago
  > There is no technical or economic reason to want coal power today. A quick look at the PJM interconnect data would disagree with you. About a quarter of the live power is coal. https://www.pjm.com/markets-and-operations.aspx https://www.pjm.com/markets-and-operations.aspx That serves 65+ Million people in the north east and is keeping them from dying of cold this past week, including today (Temp outside in the mid-hudson valley is 15F / -9C), and overnight will be 8F / -13C). Just for context - electricity somehow powers everything in most homes. Your oil or propane furnace needs a power hookup to ignite.
  - ipdashc 9mo ago
    PJM probably isn't a great example, it's been famously slow to approve new generation, hasn't it? And the rates aren't exactly super cheap. We shouldn't get rid of coal without having something to replace it (ideally nuclear/solar/wind, but realistically probably gas), but I think the point was just that nobody would build a new coal plant today or keep them running for longer than they need to. They're inefficient and fairly expensive.
  - tclancy 9mo ago
    As much as it is fun to imagine you believing the false dilemma you've presented, I don't think the OP was suggesting not providing another option.
  - breakyerself 9mo ago
    Coal is the most expensive form of energy. We need the energy those coal plants are producing, but we don't need the energy to come from coal and the sooner we replace those coal plants the sooner the people getting that energy can get a break on energy costs. Assuming data centers don't offset the reductions via creating excessive demand.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
- throw900912 9mo ago
  > to keep unprofitable and ancient coal generators going long after anybody wants to pay for the high maintenance. In EU 90% of expenses of running coal plants are taxes, yet it can still compete with subsidized green energy! It would be in everybody best interest, to allow building modern coal plants, to replace toxic inefficient stuff from 1960ties. But with the overregulated and overtaxes industry, we have the worst from all options.
  - epistasis 9mo ago
    In the US, natural gas is extremely cheap, far cheaper than in the EU, and it will remain that way as long as we are still extracting oil via fracking. Replacing existing coal with natural gas is better, cheaper, etc. etc. and it's just downright "dumb" to build coal as explained in a parallel comment that links to youtube. But even new natural gas is likely to end up as stranded capital. Solar and wind are cheaper already, and backing that with storage, today, is nipping at the cost of most new natural gas plants. And in 3, 5, 10 years? Price trends are going to make even the cheap cost of natural gas as a fuel more expensive than using solar and storage. I'd be very surprised if 90% of the expense of coal was tax, as that would make taxes 9x higher than fuel. Not surprised because it wouldn't make scientific sense, the negative externalities of coal are massive and any hard-nosed free marketer should be advocating for putting a price on those negative externalities, but surprised because the politics of Europe allow that! Also, if taxes on coal or >9x the cost of the fuel, wouldn't that start to make natural gas much more cost effective too, even in Europe? Or does natural gas have similar taxes?
MengerSponge 9mo ago
Burning coal is a huge and easy win. Artisinal and small scale gold mining should be high on the list too, even though it's a much harder problem: https://www.unep.org/globalmercurypartnership/what-we-do/artisanal-and-small-scale-gold-mining-asgm https://www.unep.org/globalmercurypartnership/what-we-do/art...
- Paracompact 9mo ago
  You do mean banning rather than burning, right?
  - empyrrhicist 9mo ago
    I think they meant [Targeting the] burning [of] coal.
- hydrox24 9mo ago
  I'm skeptical that it's easier. On the numbers alone, artisanal and small scale gold mining (apparently) accounts for 15-20% of global gold production. But coal accounts for 35% of total electricity generation.
dyauspitr 9mo ago
Not with Captain Planet tier cartoon villains in power.
- dnautics 9mo ago
  you mean like the german environmentalists who singlehandedly kicked up german atmospheric mercury emissions?
  - ZeroGravitas 9mo ago
    Can you identify when exactly the German environmentalists did this thing you refer to? I'm assuming it's something coal related. Total and per capita coal usage for Germany and a few other peer nations: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-by-country-terawatt-hours-twh?tab=line&country=JPN~DEU~USA~GBR https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-by-count... https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-per-capita?tab=line&country=USA~GBR~DEU~JPN https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-per-capi... I can see a bump in early 1980s but I see the same in other nations, possibly a response to oil embargoes, possibly just economic growth.
    - adrianN 9mo ago
      Arguably Germany should have turned off a few lignite plants and kept their nuclear power a little bit longer.
- edm0nd 9mo ago
  Did you know that Captain Planet was straight up created to be pro environmentalist and anti-oil propaganda? >Captain Planet and the Planeteers (1990–1996) was a pioneering animated series designed by Ted Turner and producer Barbara Pyle as environmental, pro-social "edutainment" to influence children towards ecological activism. It aimed to combat pollution and encourage environmental stewardship, often using over-the-top, stereotypical villains to represent corporate greed and ecological destruction. Our parents let us get brainwashed by hippies and corporations as kids haha
UltraSane 9mo ago
We could have and should have replaced all coal with nuclear but no, we couldn't do that.
- danlitt 9mo ago
  It could have been replaced by almost anything, there is nothing particularly special about nuclear in this context (except its extremely high price).
  - UltraSane 9mo ago
    Coal and nuclear are both dispatchable electricity sources. It is much easier to replace a dispatchable source with another dispatchable source.

vpShane 9mo ago

We live in opposite-world where the way it is, is the exact opposite of how it should be

epistasis 9mo ago

Coal is mostly sticking around in the US because of federal overreach to keep unprofitable and ancient coal generators going long after anybody wants to pay for the high maintenance. Last week, a Colorado utility was "respectfully" asking to be able to close a plant: > TTri-State Generation and partner Platte River Power Authority had a “respectful” but emphatic response late Thursday to the Trump administration ordering them to keep Craig’s Unit 1 coal-fired plant open past the New Year: > They don’t need it, they don’t want it, and their inflation-strapped consumers can’t afford the higher bills. Plus, the federal order is unconstitutional. https://coloradosun.com/2026/01/30/craig-tri-state-petition-coal-closure/ https://coloradosun.com/2026/01/30/craig-tri-state-petition-... TVA has also been begging to close a money losing coal plant for a while now, writing letters to FERC about it, but I can't find the link now. New coal is far too expensive to build anymore too. Handling big amounts of solid material is expensive, and big old unresponsive baseload is undesirable for achieving economic efficiency. Even China, which is still building new coal plants, is lessening their coal usage. Personally I think they'll keep some around to continue economic influence on Australia, which is one their primary countries for experimenting with methods to increase their soft power. There is no technical or economic reason to want coal power today.

prodigycorp 9mo ago
Thank you for such a thoughtful comment. There's politics that gets flagged on this site, and there's politics that makes me think about things with more clarity. Yours is obviously the latter.
- epistasis 9mo ago
  Collective decisions are unavoidably political, and grid electricity has to be a collective decision! My hope is that we can take the partisan aspect out of the politics, however, and reduce it to a discussion of the tradeoff of values: cost, reliability, climate, and any other values that we need to include. Fortunately I think that for nearly any value set, the answer is very similar.
gwd 9mo ago
> There is no technical or economic reason to want coal power today. For anyone wanting a slightly ranty but also informed description of why, I enjoyed this Hank Green video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfvBx4D0Cms&pp=ygUPaGFuayBncmVlbiBjb2Fs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfvBx4D0Cms&pp=ygUPaGFuayBnc...
- darknavi 9mo ago
  Technology Connections also released a great rant on it (and more) recently. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM
  - gwd 9mo ago
    That one was more about how "midwestern values" made him pro-solar, whereas the Hank Greek one was specifically about how bad coal is.
    - boarsofcanada 8mo ago
      Even more specifically how coal makes no economic sense even independent of environmental concerns.
prasadjoglekar 9mo ago
> There is no technical or economic reason to want coal power today. A quick look at the PJM interconnect data would disagree with you. About a quarter of the live power is coal. https://www.pjm.com/markets-and-operations.aspx https://www.pjm.com/markets-and-operations.aspx That serves 65+ Million people in the north east and is keeping them from dying of cold this past week, including today (Temp outside in the mid-hudson valley is 15F / -9C), and overnight will be 8F / -13C). Just for context - electricity somehow powers everything in most homes. Your oil or propane furnace needs a power hookup to ignite.
- ipdashc 9mo ago
  PJM probably isn't a great example, it's been famously slow to approve new generation, hasn't it? And the rates aren't exactly super cheap. We shouldn't get rid of coal without having something to replace it (ideally nuclear/solar/wind, but realistically probably gas), but I think the point was just that nobody would build a new coal plant today or keep them running for longer than they need to. They're inefficient and fairly expensive.
- tclancy 9mo ago
  As much as it is fun to imagine you believing the false dilemma you've presented, I don't think the OP was suggesting not providing another option.
- breakyerself 9mo ago
  Coal is the most expensive form of energy. We need the energy those coal plants are producing, but we don't need the energy to come from coal and the sooner we replace those coal plants the sooner the people getting that energy can get a break on energy costs. Assuming data centers don't offset the reductions via creating excessive demand.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
throw900912 9mo ago
> to keep unprofitable and ancient coal generators going long after anybody wants to pay for the high maintenance. In EU 90% of expenses of running coal plants are taxes, yet it can still compete with subsidized green energy! It would be in everybody best interest, to allow building modern coal plants, to replace toxic inefficient stuff from 1960ties. But with the overregulated and overtaxes industry, we have the worst from all options.
- epistasis 9mo ago
  In the US, natural gas is extremely cheap, far cheaper than in the EU, and it will remain that way as long as we are still extracting oil via fracking. Replacing existing coal with natural gas is better, cheaper, etc. etc. and it's just downright "dumb" to build coal as explained in a parallel comment that links to youtube. But even new natural gas is likely to end up as stranded capital. Solar and wind are cheaper already, and backing that with storage, today, is nipping at the cost of most new natural gas plants. And in 3, 5, 10 years? Price trends are going to make even the cheap cost of natural gas as a fuel more expensive than using solar and storage. I'd be very surprised if 90% of the expense of coal was tax, as that would make taxes 9x higher than fuel. Not surprised because it wouldn't make scientific sense, the negative externalities of coal are massive and any hard-nosed free marketer should be advocating for putting a price on those negative externalities, but surprised because the politics of Europe allow that! Also, if taxes on coal or >9x the cost of the fuel, wouldn't that start to make natural gas much more cost effective too, even in Europe? Or does natural gas have similar taxes?

MengerSponge 9mo ago

Burning coal is a huge and easy win. Artisinal and small scale gold mining should be high on the list too, even though it's a much harder problem: https://www.unep.org/globalmercurypartnership/what-we-do/artisanal-and-small-scale-gold-mining-asgm https://www.unep.org/globalmercurypartnership/what-we-do/art...

Paracompact 9mo ago
You do mean banning rather than burning, right?
- empyrrhicist 9mo ago
  I think they meant [Targeting the] burning [of] coal.
hydrox24 9mo ago
I'm skeptical that it's easier. On the numbers alone, artisanal and small scale gold mining (apparently) accounts for 15-20% of global gold production. But coal accounts for 35% of total electricity generation.

dyauspitr 9mo ago

Not with Captain Planet tier cartoon villains in power.

dnautics 9mo ago
you mean like the german environmentalists who singlehandedly kicked up german atmospheric mercury emissions?
- ZeroGravitas 9mo ago
  Can you identify when exactly the German environmentalists did this thing you refer to? I'm assuming it's something coal related. Total and per capita coal usage for Germany and a few other peer nations: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-by-country-terawatt-hours-twh?tab=line&country=JPN~DEU~USA~GBR https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-by-count... https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-per-capita?tab=line&country=USA~GBR~DEU~JPN https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-per-capi... I can see a bump in early 1980s but I see the same in other nations, possibly a response to oil embargoes, possibly just economic growth.
  - adrianN 9mo ago
    Arguably Germany should have turned off a few lignite plants and kept their nuclear power a little bit longer.
edm0nd 9mo ago
Did you know that Captain Planet was straight up created to be pro environmentalist and anti-oil propaganda? >Captain Planet and the Planeteers (1990–1996) was a pioneering animated series designed by Ted Turner and producer Barbara Pyle as environmental, pro-social "edutainment" to influence children towards ecological activism. It aimed to combat pollution and encourage environmental stewardship, often using over-the-top, stereotypical villains to represent corporate greed and ecological destruction. Our parents let us get brainwashed by hippies and corporations as kids haha

UltraSane 9mo ago

We could have and should have replaced all coal with nuclear but no, we couldn't do that.

danlitt 9mo ago
It could have been replaced by almost anything, there is nothing particularly special about nuclear in this context (except its extremely high price).
- UltraSane 9mo ago
  Coal and nuclear are both dispatchable electricity sources. It is much easier to replace a dispatchable source with another dispatchable source.