Skip to main content

Pollution is Bad, Time to Move Away from Coal?

The evidence suggests the climate is changing
But maybe you just don’t agree
With all those really smart people
Or you didn’t look at the data yourself
So let’s skip all the sciency stuff and get right to the point

Pollution is bad
We should stop it as fast as we can

Blowing off mountaintops for coal
Doesn’t seem like a good idea at all.
Throwing trash into the sea.
Seems kind of dumb to me

You may think that climate change is just a hoax
Maybe it is, but I’ll tell you this folks
Pollution is bad
We should stop it as fast as we can.


Air Pollution:
 It used to be ozone. The world did a good job of reducing that. 
Now it's carbon dioxide
Smog
Acid rain (both air and water issue)

Land Pollution:


Water Pollution: 

And then there's coal: it's air,water, land pollution all in one.  Coal appears to have been a good energy source 200 years ago when that's all we had. But is it still?
"When coal mines move in, whole communities are forced off their land by expanding mines, coal fires, subsidence, and overused and contaminated water supplies. Mines are quick to dig up and destroy forests and soils. But once the coal is gone, the problems they leave behind, like acid mine drainage, can persist for decades." http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/climate-change/coal/Coal-mining-impacts/ Possibly this source is a bit biased.

Is coal worth it for the energy? 
Maybe if we can't find a better way. Today, 540 coal plants exist in the United States, which are responsible for roughly 45 percent of the electricity generated there. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2012/02/27/is-cleaning-coal-worth-it/#390114282f1d

The older, pulverized coal-fired facilities are the least efficient ones with about 35 percent of the energy input converted to electricity. If coal gasification is used, the efficiencies would reach as high as 60 percent.

To make the new coal energy plants cleaner, the carbon dioxide gets buried in the ground. Like putting my trash underneath the front seat of my car.

During the Obama administration, $3.4 billion was put toward clean coal technologies. I wish I had $3.40 to put those hamburger wrappers under my car seat.$3.4 BILLION DOLLARS TO PUT CARBON DIOXIDE INTO THE GROUND! Imagine that money put towards clean energy.

According to the Congressional Research Service, coal is responsible for about a third of all carbon dioxide emissions. It also releases double the pollutants regulated under the Clean Air Act when compared to natural gas.

The AEI (another questionable source) says "It takes 79 solar workers to produce same amount of electric power as one coal worker."Last year, the solar industry employed many more Americans [373,807] than coal [160,119], while wind power topped 100,000 jobs.” Those energy employment figures are based on a Department of Energy report (“U.S. Energy and Employment Report“)" http://www.aei.org/publication/inconvenient-energy-fact-it-takes-79-solar-workers-to-produce-same-amount-of-electric-power-as-one-coal-worker/ These numbers seem a bit strange to me.


Does coal sequestration do anything?
Yes, it hides the carbon dioxide in the ground. Does it get rid of carbon dioxide? No. It just puts it in the ground. Hide the dirty stuff under the ground where no one will see it. Err...not a good solution.

Is coal worth it because of the jobs?
Love this "The entire coal industry employs fewer people than Arby’s." The coal industry employed 76,572 people in 2014, the latest year for which data is available. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/03/31/8-surprisingly-small-industries-that-employ-more-people-than-coal/?utm_term=.67b7c8b929f1 So no.Based the AEI report, if we want to create jobs, we want solar and wind.

And nuclear?  Maybe there's a lot of power, but creating radioactive waste to get that power seems like a lousy deal. So far, the evidence suggests that humans aren't capable of using it safely.

Maybe there is climate change, maybe there isn't. Maybe 300 years ago it was just as warm. Maybe it's because the thermometers are reading incorrectly. Does  it matter?

How can anyone think that it is okay to continue to pour exhaust from our cars, businesses, homes? Just put everything we can into stopping it as fast as we can. As a species, we are smart (individually is a different story). Other solutions are out there for ALL of our Issues.

And this statistic is staggering if even half true. (is it?) Just 100 companies have been the source of more than 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1988. Almost 1 trillion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions. 100 companies!

Solar
This link is going to come out solar, but it certainly makes a good case for solar...and natural gas. Maybe I'm biased against big holes in the ground and smog in the air. https://understandsolar.com/solar-energy-vs-coal/.
  Natural gas plants are about 1/3rd the cost of a 500 MW solar plant and 1/6th the cost of a new coal plant. 

No matter how you cut it. Coal should be out.  

Wind

Wave/Water

Geothermal

Biochemical


What's this about?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Vote on How our Taxes are Spent

I want to be in control of what I spend my money on. In today's age where the government leadership has demonstrated their inability to control spending, stop the tax funds from being spent on foolish programs, I think it's time that Americans start to make the decision. Why not ask the tax payers (us!) what we want our tax dollars to be used for?  I propose a 10 year plan to The Tax Choice. Whenever we do taxes, we also fill out a form about where we want our tax dollars to go. The first 3 years is a non-binding plan to see what and where people chose to place there money and see how close it matches our current balance.  At first, we can have broad areas to chose based on the different departments, but depending on what we want, we can decide on as much detail as we want. For starters, I an chose to put 25% of my taxes towards the Department of Defense budget, 25% towards Department of Energy, 25% towards Department of Labor, and 25% towards NASA. How much deta...
Post a Comment
Read more

Setting Government-Business Incentives and Priorities To Serve the Better Good

Incentives and priorities need to be aligned. If you pay someone 5 cents to return a bottle, you get more bottles returned. If your boss pays you for making more widgets, you'll concentrate on making more widgets. This works very well until the incentives and what we want are different. Would you want someone to be paid a ten dollars for hitting you in the nose? No thank you. I see the government doing this in a couple of cases. The two that stand out to me are 1. Healthcare and 2. Prisons. Prisons are easy to fix. Get rid of private prisons. Private prisons get paid per prisoner. They don't get paid for how well they do in recovering or whether they are treated with respect or provided a way to successfully integrate back into society. Just paid per prisoner. So the government (government being you and me) pays someone to open build and run a prison that is incentivized to have more prisoners. Bad model. Some things the government should be doing themselves and not priva...
Post a Comment
Read more

Staying Focused

Check your social media, emails, voice mail (does anyone use voice mail anymore?), read a blog, check the weather, is that a text message? You could go all day and never do any real work. But you'd be really busy. That's at the individual ways you can distract yourself. What about a company? What about a country? The world has so many distractions. Add in there the companies and people who are adding distractions on purpose. Sometimes they do it to make money...like Facebook... I think they might be the worst add trying to manipulate people. But others do it too. And it's not just internet companies. Exxon-Mobile has done an amazing job of distracting us from the evils of petroleum. If we as a world organization just invested the profits from one Exxon Mobile year into solar power...oh how fantastic would that be! And what a next step! How many years would it take to reduce pollution? How many years until countries become energy independent? Politics is probably the...
Post a Comment
Read more