Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
Compared to the alternatives, coal is worse for air pollution, worse for ocean pollution, worse for global warming, uses more water, is less efficient, and costs more. Coal was a competitive source of energy before we had modern gas plants.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfvBx4D0Cms
“In the executive order, Trump directs the Department of War to enter into agreements to purchase electricity from coal plants to power military operations.”
Bad for the environment, bad for the economy, bad for the military.
Coal is not just bad for global warming, but adds to regular air pollution that kills.
We should use energy that is most efficient to use, not that the president forces people to use, with the exception of protecting the environment.
The military should use whichever energy source best serves its purpose, not the energy source that Trump likes for confused/incompetent purposes, or political purposes.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-orders-pentagon-invest-beautiful-233907955.html
As the U.S. backs away from clean energy and limiting global warming on the president’s false belief that climate change is a hoax, China is stepping in as a leader globally, leading on the issue and selling its technologies and products to countries around the world. Despite its leadership and its massive renewable production, it still uses a lot of dirty coal. China’s clean energy partnerships around the world give it influence. The Trump-led U.S. is banking on past fuels and energy, while China is advancing into the future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENJ6UmECe1Q
“the Energy Department announced that it will offer $625 million in funding to “reinvigorate and expand America’s coal industry.” The funding includes $350 million to modernize outdated coal power plants or recommission closed ones, and up to $175 million for coal power projects in rural communities. This announcement was coupled with an Interior Department directive to open 13.1 million acres of federal land for coal mining at lower royalty rates. The Environmental Protection Agency, meanwhile, announced on Monday it would roll back several Joe Biden-era regulations on coal plants
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In May, the Energy Department issued an order to prevent a Michigan coal plant from closing in order to prevent blackouts. The order failed to keep the lights on and cost the utility $29 million over five weeks, which is expected to be, at least in part, paid for by ratepayers
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These cost hikes are likely to escalate if the federal government continues to force power plants to stay open. An August report from Grid Strategies, a power sector consulting firm, estimates that ratepayers could pay more than $3 billion per year through 2028 if the Energy Department “mandates that the large fossil power plants scheduled to retire between now and the end of 2028 remain open.” This figure could soar to $6 billion per year through 2028 if additional power plants move up their retirement dates to secure government subsidies.
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the federal government has opened up millions of dollars in funding for coal projects and passed several measures to benefit coal, including subsidizing coal production overseas. The cost of those actions won’t necessarily show up in monthly utility bills—but it will force the federal government to borrow more heavily in the future, at a time when the national debt is already unsustainably large
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Ben King, director of the Rhodium Group’s energy program, told Semafor “the price of coal would need to fall by at least half,” to “change the calculus” and make coal more attractive to investors than natural gas or renewables. Brendan Pierpont, director of electricity modeling at the think tank Energy Innovation, told the outlet, “this funding is essentially cash for clunkers, but without trading in the clunkers.”
Trump’s latest coal maneuver will benefit utilities and coal companies, but it will come at the expense of taxpayers, who will be forced to finance yet another wasteful government spending account, and ratepayers who will likely see their utility bills continue to climb.”
https://reason.com/2025/09/30/trumps-625-million-coal-plan-may-raise-utility-bills-for-millions-of-americans/
Trump’s big beautiful bill takes away money from growing renewable energy that employs more jobs than coal and toward dying coal. It’s not just bad for the environment, it’s bad business. The bill makes it difficult to use components from China, even though China is one of our key suppliers. This will limit U.S. production.
The bill expands fossil fuel subsidies. Subsidies are essentially giving money to companies. This should be done when certain industries are important to emphasize above and beyond the incentive for profit-making, like environmental benefits. Considering fossil fuels cause deadly air pollution as well as contribute to global warming, subsidizing them makes no sense.
Fossil fuel industries are already built out, so subsidies pay such companies for doing stuff that they were doing anyways. Renewable industries are still developing and growing, so subsidies actually create new business. Once you consider the environmental impacts, fossil fuel subsidies net a negative return.
Trump’s bill has led to a lot of fired scientists. Foreign countries are offering bonuses to hire these scientists. These nonsense policies are producing American brain drain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tNp2vsxEzk
“The energy provisions of the 900-plus page bill have come under particular scrutiny after last-minute changes phased out clean energy tax credits faster than expected and added new taxes on wind and solar projects.
At the same time, new last-minute inducements were unveiled for fossil fuels, including one classifying coal as a critical mineral when it comes to a government manufacturing credit.
“We’re doing coal,” Trump said in an interview released over the weekend on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures,” where he also called solar energy projects “ugly as hell.””
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/last-minute-changes-to-trumps-big-beautiful-bill-stun-clean-energy-industry-and-elon-musk-124435832.html
“Coal’s decline was not caused by a federal plot to transition away from coal, like Trump thinks, but rather by markets and innovation. Advancements in renewable energy technologies—which were, and continue to be, supported by subsidies—made the energy source more attractive to investors. Breakthroughs in horizontal drilling in the early 2000s brought a flood of cheap and abundant natural gas to the market. These technologies priced coal out, which lowered energy bills for consumers and significantly reduced greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.
The energy source is also not as cost-effective as the executive order claims. Coal plants are expensive to build and operate, and transportation costs can exceed the price of coal at the mine. These economic factors have informed investors and utilities not to build coal-fired power plants—the most recent large plant was built in 2013—which has made the current fleet of these power plants less efficient than other energy sources.
To be sure, some regulatory barriers, including federal air quality standards and state-level bans, have made coal less competitive. However, “it is the market that explains coal’s decline better than regulations,” Philip Rossetti, an energy policy analyst at the R Street Institute, tells Reason.”
https://reason.com/2025/04/10/markets-dont-want-more-coal-trump-is-propping-up-the-industry-anyway/
“Everywhere coal is mined — however it’s mined — something is left behind. At surface mines, where huge machinery strips away the top layers of the earth, the coal is separated from the surrounding rock and what remains are piles of refuse. Known as tailings or slag (or, more colloquially, culm or gob), the loose rubble is saturated with toxins and heavy metals. With each rain, more and more of the contaminants leach into the soil and nearby waterways.
In underground mines, removing the coal leaves other minerals exposed. This is especially problematic in places like southeastern Ohio, where there’s a lot of what Natalie Kruse Daniels, professor and director of the environmental studies program at Ohio University, calls “sulfur coal.”
“Primarily what we find is pyrite — something that most people recognize as ‘fool’s gold,’” she says. “As it’s exposed to oxygen and water, that sulfide weathers and it produces acid and a lot of iron.”
That’s what is happening below the ground at the Truetown Discharge. The mine was abandoned and sealed in 1964 with the coal gone and sulfide minerals like pyrite left behind. It filled up, either with rainwater, groundwater, captured surface water, or a combination. In 1984, mounting pressure forced open the seal and the acid brew burst forth, carrying 6,000 pounds of iron oxide — basically, rust — out into Sunday Creek every day.
“The best estimate we have on this is that it will continue discharging for at least 600 to 800 years,” says Michelle Shively MacIver. She began working with Rural Action as the Sunday Creek Watershed Coordinator more than a decade ago. Today, she’s the director of project development at True Pigments.
The iron oxide is heavy, MacIver explains, and at Sunday Creek it precipitates out of the water fairly quickly, building up in thick, rough-looking scales along the creek bed and the shore. “The biggest problem the iron poses is it covers the entire bottom, and it just suffocates a healthy aquatic system,” she says.”
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“The iron build-up is only half the problem. The other byproduct inside the mine is sulfuric acid, which lowers the water’s pH too much for almost anything beyond some algae to thrive.”
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“Acid mine drainage can also worsen flooding, as build-up narrows streams and creeks and reduces their capacity for floodwater.”
https://www.vox.com/climate/2023/12/11/23992695/cop28-climate-refuge-how-to-detox-coal-country-appalachia-mining
“Somehow, Germany, a country where the government is firmly committed to “green” energy, is preparing to fire up coal-burning power plants. The move is even more remarkable given that officials stubbornly refuse to restart mothballed nuclear facilities, or even reconsider the timeline for retiring those that remain online. It’s an astonishing situation for a country that very recently boasted that it would soon satisfy all its energy needs with sunshine and cool summer breezes.”
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“Germany’s problems predate the war in Ukraine and are closely linked to the goals the country’s political class made about their energy future in the absence of a realistic plan for getting there. In 2011, after an earthquake and tsunami triggered a disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, the German government recommitted itself to closing all of its nuclear plants and getting its electricity from solar and wind. The decision was motivated by public fears of nuclear power, but also by loud insistence that the energy source had no place in a sustainable future.”
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“But “nuclear power is very close to the same shade of green as that of most renewables” when you compare mining and manufacturing inputs to each approach, energy expert Gail H. Marcus wrote for Physics World in 2017. And nuclear is reliable—the sun doesn’t always shine, and the wind doesn’t always blow, which means electricity produced by those sources ebbs and flows. That’s a big problem for electrical grids that require steady supplies of energy.
“Large amounts of intermittent electricity create huge swings in supply which the grid has to be able to cope with,” Bloomberg reported in January 2021.”
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“Germany’s plight is disturbing testimony of where you can end up if you commit yourself to a vision of a “green” future that has no place in it for the most reliable source of clean-ish electricity. By contrast, neighboring France plans to build as many as 14 new nuclear reactors because of, not despite, its environmental goals. That attitude reflects energy analyst Marcus’s assessment and is shared by the inter-governmental International Energy Agency (IEA). “Long-term operation of the existing nuclear fleet and a near-doubling of the annual rate of capacity additions are required” to meet clean-energy goals by 2050, the organization specifies.
Visons of a cleaner future based on technologies that are more efficient and less polluting are praiseworthy and shared by just about everybody. But to get from here to there requires planning and realistic decisions. Unfortunately for the German people, most of their political leaders relied on strongly held wishes and pixie dust to bring a green utopia and are instead delivering literal lumps of coal.”
“The world is now 1.1 degrees Celsius — 2 degrees Fahrenheit — warmer on average than it was at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. But baked into that seemingly small change in the average is a big increase in dangerous extreme temperatures. That’s made cooling, particularly air conditioning, vital for the survival of billions of people.”
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“These searing temperatures are just the latest in a pattern of increasingly hot weather. A heat wave that would have been a once-in-a-decade event in the 1800s is now hotter and happens nearly three times as often. Heat waves that used to occur once every 50 years are now nearly five times as frequent and reach higher temperatures. Heat records are broken so often they barely register as news. In its latest review of climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said it is “virtually certain” that heat waves have become more frequent and intense across most land areas since the 1950s.
Extreme heat events are also occurring over a wider region of the globe, from the depths of the ocean to the icy reaches of the Arctic. Heat waves are now such devastating events with long-lasting wounds that some countries say they should be named like hurricanes.
But the most severe risks from high temperatures are in places like India and Pakistan, regions closer to the equator that are already hot and have dense, growing populations. They also have less wealth, so fewer can afford cooling when thermometers reach triple digits.”
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“The tactics for cooling can end up worsening the very problem they’re trying to solve if they draw on fossil fuels, or leak refrigerants that are potent heat-trapping gases. And the people who stand to experience the most extreme heat are often those least able to cool off.”
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“There are many ways to curb the climate impacts of ACs. “The answer lies first and foremost in improving the efficiency of air conditioners, which can quickly slow down the growth in cooling-related electricity demand,” wrote Fatih Birol, executive director of the IEA, in a 2018 report. With greater energy efficiency, air conditioners do more with less. Also, homes and businesses need better insulation and sealing to prevent waste.
Another method is to manufacture more air conditioners that don’t use HFCs or other heat-trapping gases. Many countries, including the US, are phasing out HFCs. The US Senate will soon vote to ratify the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, an international treaty that commits to cutting HFCs 85 percent by 2050.
At the same time, there is going to be a massive market for sustainable cooling technologies. “There are billions of people that aspire to be wealthy, and as your income starts going up, you’re going to want to have access to cooling,” Kyte said.
The electricity that powers air conditioners needs to come from sources that don’t emit greenhouse gases, so dialing down coal, oil, and natural gas power on the grid and ramping up wind, solar, and nuclear energy is crucial.”