The Morning Rant: Coal Deserves A Second Look

[click to enlarge]

Well, it has always been an amazingly efficient source of energy, and one with fewer technological issues that complicate extraction. It can be transported on existing infrastructure (rail lines), and is much safer during transport than any other fossil fuel. Modern coal-fired power plants are also amazingly clean... no killing smog like in London in the 1950s!

Oh...we also have enough of it to power America for hundreds of years!

So what's the problem?

Two generations of rabid environmentalists/communists have conspired to destroy the image of coal. People now think of strip-mined hillsides and monstrous plumes of black smoke belching from smokestacks, rather than cheap, clean, and abundant energy that is entirely produced in America.

Add in the idiocy of Anthropogenic Global Warming/Climate Change^TM, and we have demonized coal so much that we are closing perfectly good power plants just because coal is icky, and its use creates carbon dioxide. You know...the stuff that plants eat to feed us and make oxygen so we can breathe!

You Pay Each Month for Closing Coal Power

Coal kept the cost of electricity at an affordable level for over a century but idealistic policy decisions to close to 300 coal plants in the last 15 years have opened the door for higher and more volatile electricity prices. In 2010, the price of electricity in the U.S. was about 11 cents per kilowatt hour. By 2026 the price of electricity has increased 75% to 19 cents. And, according to the Department of Energy, rates could increase another 40% in the next four years. Meanwhile coal generation has dropped from 45% of America's power to barely 16% today and is projected to decline another 50% by 2030. In statistics this is called an inverse correlation. Simply put, the more we reduce coal generation the more we will pay for electricity. It is a sad irony that the very people who were instrumental in prematurely closing efficient coal plants, now whine about increases in the cost of electricity.

Energy is life, and inexpensive and abundant energy drives economic growth unlike any other input. We created the greatest economic engine in human history by providing that energy, and much of it was coal! The increased use of petroleum correlates with the rise of the automobile, which makes engineering sense because gasoline and diesel are so energy dense. But the steel used to build those cars was made with coal energy, and using coal for industrial power and electrical generation is a perfect pairing with petroleum for transportation.

Another reason for the decline of coal and its vilification is its history as the fuel for the rise of the West, and America in particular. It is linked with post-modern evils such as industrialization, colonialism, etc. It powered the great industries of the 19th century West, and is linked with the dominance of White Europeans over the rest of the world.

So the crypto-communist environmental lobby has pushed to destroy our greatest source of energy, and the intended consequence is that electricity costs have skyrocketed! Because they want us to regress to the mean, and that mean is European summers during which tens of thousands of people die from the heat, because they are too poor to afford air conditioning. And look forward to wearing coats inside during the winter, because fuel will become so expensive that Jimmy Carter's cardigan will become a quaint glimpse of a better time!

[Crossposted at CutJibNewsletter and X/Twitter]. And if you folks who are on X/Twitter would follow me it would be much appreciated!

posted by CBD at 11:00 AM

| Access Comments