
The US Coal Industry Is Declining Irreversibly - toomuchtodo
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/The-US-Coal-Industry-Is-Declining-Irreversibly.html
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Avicebron
This seems good as long as the industry is being supplanted domestically with
renewable alternatives at the same rate it's falling.

~~~
diogenescynic
Among those renewables are “biomass” which is just burning trees. If we burned
all the trees in the country it would only be enough fuel for a year. This is
replacing one awful fuel source with another. Wind and solar rely heavily on
fossil fuel infrastructure or directly—-solar panels are made with coal and
mined quartz. And it has to be replaced ever few years. It’s looking more and
more like nuclear is the only real option but that is another terrifying
option because companies are greedy and will mismanage it and we can’t afford
nuclear disasters.

~~~
ericcumbee
biomass is a lot more than just trees. and even then its byproducts of
forestry product production like saw dust.

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dredmorbius
Biomass as an energy source is limited by net primary productivity. Humans
already appropriate a large portion of this (~20%), and total fossil fuel
consumption would roughly double this (inexact numbers, it's been a while
since I've looked at this).

Factoring in typical assumptions of population and economic growth, and the
picture darkens further.

We simply don't have available biomass to power the present economy, let alone
one with more people of net higher average wealth. There are reasons humans
switched from renewable to nonrenewable energy resources. Unfortunately the
practice is unsustainable on several fronts.

[https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2cvap7/the_int...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2cvap7/the_intractable_problem_of_biomass_for_fuels_is/)

[http://www.eoearth.org/view/article/153031/](http://www.eoearth.org/view/article/153031/)

[http://agroinnovations.com/blog/2007/04/27/the-
photosyntheti...](http://agroinnovations.com/blog/2007/04/27/the-
photosynthetic-ceiling/)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20120810132407/https://environme...](https://web.archive.org/web/20120810132407/https://environmental-
issues.wikispaces.com/Photosynthetic+ceilings)

I especially recommend Jeff Dukes, "Burning Buried Sunshine" (2003):

[https://dge.carnegiescience.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_ClimChange1....](https://dge.carnegiescience.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_ClimChange1.pdf)

