I’m all for that vs telling companies what to do. Just make the coal worker after a certain point a protected class and support them while they transition either into retirement or other careers.
I think there's a large group of people that don't want to be retrained, fossil subsidies create a number of problems and screw with electricity market incentives in a way that could have horrendous repercussions.
Welfare for this class wouldn't help me directly but a subsidy for the industry would likely hurt us all in a diffuse fashion over the long-term.
I thought the GOP was in favor of free-market and balanced budget.
In this case, the administration already attempted the free-market approach (asking FERC to review whether the market rules properly compensated the unique attributes of coal and nuclear). That failed. So now it's big-government central-planning.
Government forcing private industry to do something for purely political reasons is always wrong. It doesn’t matter if it’s to protect the coal industry or “green power” — government involvement is almost always the wrong thing.
On one hand there's the "no government involvement. period", but then we end up with companies clearly taking advantage of citizens and the environment without any repercussions.
On the other hand, there's the "regulate all the things", which is almost always abused by those in power to take advantage of citizens and the environment without any repercussions.
Can we not have a mixture of the two, where there's just enough government involvement to keep us from destroying ourselves and each other, but not too much such that we destroy ourselves and each other?
Back on topic: this instance of government involvement is purely political, at the detriment of the environment and those in it, and should not be legal. I hope this, if it's implemented, is immediately challenged in court.
No, we can't, because "more vs less government" is an almost purely synthetic wedge issue that is purpose-built to be an ambiguous and adaptable distraction. If you so much as implicitly acknowledge its legitimacy by using it to frame your discussion, you have already lost.
There's very clearly a "more vs less government" stance being taken here. OP very clearly takes the side of "less government". Other comments on HN, reddit, on the street are very typically (when on the topic of regulation) either "regulate everything" or "regulate nothing". If you believe otherwise, then I would LOVE to know where I can mingle with folks who don't see things as one extreme vs another, because that's literally all I see here.
Good points. So what's wrong with seperation of powers? As you said, when too much power is concentrated, people will suffet.
The commerce clause was obviously never intended to allow the federal government the powers it has today. At least in the case where state A is pointing a gun to your head and sending you to jail for growing medicinal marijuana for only personal use, when your state allows medicinal marijuana anyways, at least you can move with your feet to state B. As it is now this is not possible, because SCOTUS says that this falls under regulating commerce between states, somehow[1].
The only thing which the federal government should be allowed to do here is regulate the pollution externalities and commerce which literally crosses state boundaries.
Yea, the commerce clause is ridiculously overpowered. Radio Lab/More Perfect did a great episode (1) a while back on this very topic that's worth listening to.
That's public health, not energy policy. To the extent that green power is a public health policy question (let's not heat up the earth) then it should be addressed as such. The maxim is that your freedom to swing your fist ends where your neighbor's nose begins so if coal-burners are affecting public health then going after them on those grounds is appropriate (and I support that). But the article isn't about public health but energy policy.
It's pretty clear at this point that coal isn't economically viable compared to natural gas and even some renewable sources, and it won't get any better. Artificially propping up demand might delay it by 5-10 years. But you can only fight the inevitable for so long. Then the crash off of coal will be more severe and harder to manage.
The thing is humans aren't actually going to stop eating corn - like, our taste in foodstuffs hasn't shifted that much.
Whereas the trend into the future is to basically drive coal use down to nothing - it's dirty and harder to deploy then modern alternatives, and even if you kept the mines open the advent of gas turbines means that coal-seam gas would be the fossil fuel you'd be targeting.
It's hard to take the purported national security justification seriously given that it requires actively buying from coal plants instead of just requiring a minimum # days' worth of backup energy kept on-site.
A regulation more along those lines would, indeed, seem like a smart move (if it's not already done).
If there were only one power plant responsible for the grid, I'd agree with a regulation requiring a minimum number of days of fuel on-site.
However, there are many thousands of power plants on each of the three US grids (Eastern, Western, Texas (ERCOT). And many different points of failure. [1] How much more should consumers pay for a regulation to keep fuel onsite to mitigate a risk that has, effectively, never happened? [2]
This is just headline grabbing to make the poor people who worked at defunct coal mines believe Trump has their back when, in fact, the administration knows nothing will come after the headlines because coal is on its way out due not to the environment but cost.
Ignoring any of the environmental problems, I'd rather just be taxed if we're going to be giving coal workers welfare.