Obama risks a quarter million US jobs and higher electricity prices for his climate change fantasy

I like it.

 

Obama is a one man wrecking ball of executive action, ruling as if Congress does not exist.

 

For the practical purposes of everyday governance, they don't. Real life requires decisions and can't function on pure political obstruction.
You've got a DOJ, impeachment power, the Supreme Court, the FAUX/Koch propaganda machine, work the law yourself.

 

You need to move to china or at least maybe visit outside the US. What is more important jobs or the ability to breath?

 

We should vote our most vulnerable, the poors, a livable minimum wage since we all care so much.

 

China uses 4 times as much coal in a much smaller area than the US. Small factories use it. They use it to forge steel. They use it to heat their homes.

This isn't about air particulates (something we all support) it is about climate change.

 

I came in like a wrecking ball!

 

Well a functioning congress doesn't exist. They've all got their hands full with a giant circlejerk.

 

The fact that you believe this lunacy says everything that needs to be said about you.

 

I know the amount of dollars I pay for electricity, and it's not changing.

Since you seem to know so much about my electricity prices, why don't you tell me how much more I should expect to pay. Unless, of course, you don't know anything about electricity prices.

 

everyone knows that the electricity in the wires is from a variety of sources, the poster's billed amount is attributable to renewables and he pays a higher rate to do that. He's probably contracted at a rate for a period but of course when the supply produced by dirty cheap coal is phased out and contracts are renewed rates will likely edge higher....
unless we have innovations and economies of scale that end up reducing rates.

What's it going to cost to keep a 3' rise in sea level out of Texas City?

 

a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, brah

 

I think it's great.

I do think it will put upward pressure on prices because generators will need to build a lot of new gas-fired generation to replace the lost load, and they won't do that until the price of electricity goes up enough to justify the investment. But, it won't be ruinous.

I think extreme weather events will more often lead to extreme pricing events like we had in the polar vortex. I advise people to get fixed rate contracts and let energy companies bear the risks. We're currently not forecasting new generation to come on as fast as coal retires, so our reserve margins are declining, making brownouts more likely in the future. And gas-fired plants aren't as reliable as coal plants in extreme weather (because they rely on the gas pipeline infrastructure), so we're likelier to see spikes in wholesale prices in a world with less coal generation.

And the industry still has a lot to figure out. It's hasn't been worthwhile to be a power generator for at least the last 10 years. Returns on capital are terrible. The market rules don't allow investors in generation to earn enough return, and that's with these coal plants in operation. With or without coal, electricity prices have to go up to keep generators in business.

But, eliminating coal from the supply stack needed to be done and this was the best time to do it. It needs doing because coal generation is really dirty. Even if you don't believe in global warming, it's still dirty. Gas is much cleaner, and cost-competitive too, and more nimble a plant. Renewables are cleaner still, with almost no variable costs (though lacking in nimbleness). We can go it without coal now, and we should.

These coal plants are almost all old now. These are plants built 60 years ago. The technology they use is old, not just for scrubbing, but everything. The only reason than can compete at all is because coal is cheap. And coal is cheap because the externalities of burning it aren't paid for by the generator.

These coal plants would be retiring soon anyway. They're old. Gas-fired generation is cheap enough to have a place in baseload generation alongside coal. Coal and nuclear plants don't have a strong price advantage anymore and the economics of maintaining such an old asset will force it out anyway. It's just a bit quicker this way.

The EPA isn't even holding coal plants to the same standards as other kinds of generation. The cleanest coal plant is still much dirtier than would be tolerated in a gas plant. I think this is a good idea, because fuel diversity is valuable to keep. Diversity will help protect the market from idiosyncratic shocks. Right now, no one can see a fair return for building a clean coal plant. But, I hope and expect they'll find a way to make it viable, because we don't want to drop coal out of the generation mix entirely.

And, finally, this is nowhere close to over. They'll be fighting over this for years. One, coal has powerful actors in Washington. Two, no one wants to have a blackout because of an overzealous EPA. I expect there will be exceptions made all over the place for the sake of the reliability of the grid. So, in the long-run it will force remaining coal plants to burn cleaner, but we won't really have any calamitous energy crisis because it'll be a slow change-over.

By the time it's done, we'll probably have autonomous distibuted solar generation on all our rooftops anyway with Tesla batteries for storage, backed by bloomboxes.

 

Energy and food consume the largest portion of a poor person's budget, and this prick who has never run a lemonade stand and has his every need provided for doesn't care. He wants to make energy prices skyrocket.

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Aint got time for the little people. He's got delusions of grandeur that he's lowering the oceans and saving the planet.

The idea that this will improve anyone's quality of life is insane. It will just make it more expensive to power our homes and acquire wealth.

 

Ok, we include electricity in Social Security brah and welfare, we create an infrastructure job corps to provide 250,000 jobs building renewable energy projects and we tax the 1% to pay for it.

glad you've come around with your new found empathy
Utopia Bound!

 

When you resort to insults yada yada yada