Is it smart to make a little cheap electricity from coal now, paying a lot later because of global warming?

Question

Proof of the high cost later.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6096084.stm

http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSL052735320070407

http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-wg2.htm

Answer 1

Yes because global warming isn't that bad. Here is a link for you.

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...

Also, any CO2 put into the atmosphere will be used up by plants and bacteria to make O2 anyways. It is called the planet and it is a great buffer system. Coal and Oil are the best fuels available, and although I believe in providing as much choice as possible to consumers for fuel sources to recuce costs, I want to use every drop of oil and coal we have because it is utterly useless just sitting there.

peace and chicken grease homie.

Answer 2

Ultimately we need the electricity so if a coal power plant is the only thing that can produce it we'll just have to pay the costs later.

Of course that only applies to existing coal power plants, not the new ones that are being built in Germany and also only applies when you can't replace a coal power plant with a nuclear power plant (with few exceptions anything else is just a distraction that will prevent us from solving the problem).

Answer 3

The most efficient form to obtain electricity is nuclear.  France is run on 90% nuclear.  Consider that all the Naval vessels (submarines and aircraft carriers) are nuclear powered, yet they never have to 're-fuel' because nuclear can last for so long, yet power so much.

If properly designed, there can be minimal environmental impact.  The only problem is that many people are afraid of something going wrong.

Answer 4

I could go for all the nuke generators we can produce, for several reasons, 1. Need power  2. The politics of global warming, kiss some international heiny in a way that's not negative in the long run, like passing around carbon credits, or sequestering co2. Pretend we're 'on board' with this ridiculous nonsense until it dissipates. 3. Save massive amounts of coal for later 4. The off hand chance that co2 does cause warming, (ha!)  5. Particulates. That's a real problem. We'd have less particulates with nuclear power plants.

Answer 5

actually, the government should subsidize all that coal generated electricity.

give it away to ----- cigarette manufacturers, and make 'em promise not to advertise to kids.

i mean, we all got those tax rebates.

and if i recall correctly, Exxon got a tax credit.

and how are those paid for?

by deficits.

by borrowing money from our children and grandchildren.

well stealing --- it's not like we asked them or anything.

if we're going to steal from our children, do you really expect that we care at all what kind of world we leave behind for them to live in?

consider what our parents and grandparents did, creating the country we live in today, compared to what we're doing to pass on to our successors.  it's a pretty miserable legacy.

our society's morals have deteriorated extraordinarily.

think about what we read.

magazines like  US,  SELF.

(i hear that  AMERICAN NARCISSIST will come out next year.  bound to be successful.)

"is it smart"

we, as a group, (A) probably don't care, and (B) even more likely aren't qualified to judge.

sad, for this once great, and now declining, nation.  :-(

it just occurred to me.  what happens to a body as it's dying?  it feeds on itself.  parts of it begin to break down, and digest other parts.  sadly, if one looks, with the way we're handling our economy, and budget, and jobs, and resources, that is what's happening to the United States of America.  (on a smaller scale, if you were a rat, it'd be time to leave -- maybe following the jobs to Asia.)

as a country, we are just unable to plan ahead any more.

consider the huge tobacco settlement.

that was 10 years ago.  and there are 10 years left.

what has the country to show for the first 10 years?  not much.

http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/na...

Answer 6

Bob-- I agree with you on ECONOMIC terms-- not on the gloom and doom of supposed global disasters--  I am concerned about the 700 billion in oil imports sent out of the country each year-- and as you know I agree with T Boone's wind power plan as a good first step.

I just do not know what energy source could replace these two in the short run???

Coal is about 25% of our electric power-- with Nuclear at about 20%--- coal is predicted to increase through 2025 both as a source of energy and for EXPORT (primarilly to Canada).

EDIT-- I also believe that "carbon credits" is simply a scheme to transfer money to developing countries-- and means more jobs for the "money changers"--- it is tragic that Russia, China, and India, some of the worst polluting countries on Earth HAVE carbon credits to sell to us.(as they are developing countries)

http://www.agmrc.org/NR/rdonlyres/A24B58...

Answer 7

global warming is a fraud.

Answer 8

The United States is running out of power. Many regions are in very real danger of experiencing brown outs or black outs in the near future. Go to slide 5 of the source listed below to see what regions will hit capacity in the upcoming years based on the 2007 NERC study.

A coal fired generation plant takes about 5 years to build with permitting. A nuclear plant takes almost 11 years to build. Renewable resources are intermittent and could not meet all of the US's power needs under the best set of circumstances with existing technologies. Those technologies will burgeon and grow, but for now we have to build coal fired plants if we want to have power when we flip the switch.

Answer 9

Cheap electricity and CO2 emissions have no effect upon solar activity (the true cause of this little warming trend)...give me cheap power, HOWEVER it's generated!  I don't care if you have to drive an army of hamsters around those little wheels...bring on the power!

Answer 10

Renewable energy is much better as soon as we can, because even burning the coal can contribute to global warming.  Plus it should be easy for the government to create more wind turbines, and have to spend so much less money later.  It's all a big thing where we're waiting for the government to grow up and quit spending money on things they don't need... like the war.

Answer 11

No.  We should be moving toward renewable energy as much as possible as soon as possible for many reasons, not the least of which being global warming mitigation, of course.

Answer 12

yes, because clean coal methods are being pioneered and improved.

Answer 13

July 11, 2008

Yesterday marked a first in US judicial history: The first time that a state court has applied the principles of the April 2007 decision of the US Supreme Court in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency to a proposed power plant project.

Without emissions reduction plan in place, Plant will not be approved

The court in question is the Fulton County Superior Court in Georgia and the application in question is for the planned Longleaf 1200 MW coal-fired power plant outside of Columbus. This plant was the first coal-fired plant to be proposed in Georgia for over 20 years. The project had been granted approval by an administrative court, but this was overturned by Judge Thelma Wyatt on the grounds that the plant had no plan in place to limit its CO2 emissions.

The project permit challenge was brought before the court by the Sierra Club and Friend of the Chattahoochee. Justine Thompson, executive director of the law firm representing these groups said that,

This ruling goes a long way towards protecting the rights of Georgians to breathe clean air and sends a message to [the Georgia Environmental Protection Division] that it must tighten the standards it uses to approve air pollution permits for companies seeking to build any more coal-fired plants in the state.

Bruce Nilles of the Sierra Club continued in praise of the ruling:

Coal-fired power plants emit more than 30 percent of our nation's global warming pollution. Thanks to this decision, coal plants across the country will be forced to live up to their clean coal rhetoric.

Is it smart to keep living without a future.

Answer 14

Of course, because there are no global warming consequences to pay later.  Global warming is false, unscientific and a scam.  The BBC, Reuters and especially the politically motivated IPCC are very unreliable junk-links to post.  

When the truth of this scam comes out, as it will, those who publicly support it will be shamed into oblivion.

Answer 15

Well, this question  is difficult to really answer, Bob.

Do you want my opinion, or a pragmatic (and maybe a little cynical) point of view?

In my opinion, it's the opposite of smart. Even clean coal is an atmospheric polluter, and really, coal isn't the cheapest form of power, nor is it the most renewable. And we both know that Brianna's wrong in saying that Coal and Oil are the best fuels. Plus, it's not even just the greenhouse gas portion of the emissions that causes problems.

So what makes using coal smart in the eyes of some?

For China, the large deposits of coal that they have are the perfect match for the booming need that they have developed since embracing business over communism. To them, the growth of the economy is more important than the protection of the future, and in their perspective, using coal is smart.

That doesn't mean that it is.

If we assume that using coal will not be using completely "clean" coal, then it's not only the GHG component of coal emissions that needs to be addressed, but the particulates that coal has. Even when using good scrubber technology, coal has highly toxic levels of particulate matter in its emissions. This is one of the reasons why people noticed that everything was covered in soot during the industrial revolution, why coal miners often get the "black lung", and why lung cancer is on an exponential rise in countries heavily dependent on coal like China.

Unless you have a skewed perspective, there is no really smart reason for using coal as a cheap electricity source. For many nations and people, however, coal is almost a necessity at this point.

China cannot break its dependance on coal, and it does not have the will or lack of corruption to actually enforce the environmental legislation that it has in place. To suddenly shift to another technology would require an economic undertaking that would sufficiently cripple many of the larger power hungry city centers. Then again, they could adopt rolling blackouts like South Africa has in order to accomodate the needs of their booming economy while changing over to cleaner energy sources.

What people need to stop focussing on is the silver bullet to tackle climate change. There is no one technology that is going to save us at this point, and there is also not just one major contributor to GHG emissions. The reality is that we are dealing with a buckshot of silver pellets. It will be the combination of green energies that will save us, and it will be the reduction (or destruction) of many previous practices and technologies that will save us.

And as a reply to Eric C, I'd just like to make this point:

A noble prize in economics does not give you any credentials in ethics. It is unethical for developed nations to dump their burden onto the rest of the world for economic reasons. Just as it is unethical for a richer man to dump his garbage on your lawn because he has more money than you and doesn't want to pay to have it taken to the landfill.

Additionally, if you actually read the CC08 Challenge Paper on Climate Change that you've cited, you'll note two things:

Firstly, the CC08 accept that anthropogenic climate change is occurring. Second, they actually think that R&D combined with mitigation and adaptation are viable methods. Let me just rip out some of their concluding remarks for you:

"All options other than the "mitigation only (annual)" approach have favorable benefit/cost ratios for discount rates in the 5% to 4% range. (and thus far higher than the factors used by Stern and Cline) However, a synergistic complementarity can be exploited by combining the options of R&D, mitigation and adaptation into a single policy portfolio. When combined with mitigation, R&D expenditures essentially pay for themselves; and small additional expenditures on health-related adaptation increase the net benefits even more."

"While recognizing that climate change policy is for the very long term, we have nevertheless kept within the Copenhagen Consensus budget constraint. This constraint implies a rather modest price of around $20 per ton for CO2, in the first year of the policy in contrast to the hundreds of dollars per ton proposed by Cline for the 2004 exercise. However, we also have to admit that our proposals do not "solve the climate problem."

"Our portfolio approach lowers the average global temperature rise in 2100 from about

3.5°C to a little below 3.0°. If such changes are likely to be "dangerous" in the sense used by the UNFCCC, then the Copenhagen Consensus budget constraint has been overly restrictive. In this case, our preferred policy portfolio of mitigation, R&D and adaptation must be seen essentially as a cost-effective start from which an ongoing discussion of longer-term options must continue to evolve – and giving decision-makers 4 years to talk in the meantime might be a very good idea."

What they are saying is that the budgetary constraints are the main problem... not that they disagree with acting on climate change. Just the opposite in fact...

I fully understand them, Eric, but I fear you don't. Then again, maybe I misunderstood you. It seems that you are claiming that the CC08 is in favour of using coal and that they believe that the economic implications of acting on climate change are reason to claim that the money would be better spent somewhere else. As I've shown by their conclusions above, this simply isn't the case. I must have misunderstood you, because you're right that they believe in fighting anthropogenic climate change here and now.

Also, I'd like to see some evidence of their wanting to use the money intended for climate change action to try and treat the symptoms of climate change in the developing world. That's like only taking sore throat medicine when you have strep throat because you don't like the taste of penicillin. I read the entire CC08 document on "Global Warming" and didn't read anything that said that.

My comment was geared from my understanding that you thought economists should be deciding global policy and that money should govern all of our decisions.

Answer 16

Bob, your assumption of cheap electricity from coal now is incorrect.  The price of coal has risen substantially this year and the effects of the price rise have not been fully reflected in consumer electricity markets yet.  

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/coal/page/n...

Consumers will soon learn that electricity from coal is expensive now and the costs to their children from coal emissions will be higher still.  I should point out that the future costs include environmental poisoning from heavy metals, as well as the global warming effects from soot and CO2.

I am a principal in a renewable biomass energy project designed to displace the remaining coal used in my province.  When the project was first concieved the project was profitable with coal at $30 per tonne. Now the coal price is over $100 per tonne and the difference is mostly profit (transport costs are higher).  Is continued reliance on coal smart? No. Is continued reliance on coal profitable?  :->  :->  :->

Boatman, Canada is a net exporter of coal and we are in the process of decomissioning coal power plants and decreasing our dependence on coal.  About 97% of the electricity in my province comes from renewable hydro.  China might become a larger market for US coal, but Canada won't.

Answer 17

The worlds top economists, and many noble prize winners disagree.  They were asked assuming global warming is real, is the cost benefit analysis worth it.  They said no.  There is better ways to spend the money.  These are the worlds top experts in economics.

http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/Defau...

Edit:  Steve C clearly does not understand the Copenhagen Consensus.  He wrote "A noble prize in economics does not give you any credentials in ethics. It is unethical for developed nations to dump their burden onto the rest of the world for economic reasons. Just as it is unethical for a richer man to dump his garbage on your lawn because he has more money than you and doesn't want to pay to have it taken to the landfill."  

What these economists are saying is that more good will come, if we use our resources to help out developing countries now, than to use our resources to fight global warming in order to "help them out" 100 years form now.

Answer 18

It's a lot better to start with renewable energy cause in the later, coal is going to become scarce and its price is going to skyrocket.  But having renewable energy, their prices will go down when they become more accessible.

As an example, though solar energy is somewhat expensive now, by the time you finish paying for it, it will still convert solar energy into electricity LONG AFTER you finish paying for it.