NewsRack: 'Coal' news in 'Energy-Independent' topic for user flenvcenter

If Trump And Modi Talk Climate	22.6.2017	Green on HuffingtonPost.com
This article first appeared as an op-ed in my column in the Indian Express. As is now well known, President Donald Trump has fulfilled his promise to pull the US out of the Paris climate agreement. This “Trexit” had all the hallmarks of a scorched earth strategy. Trump bashed not only the agreement, calling it “less about the climate and more about other countries gaining a financial advantage”, he also singled out China and India as free-riders and the main advantage-seekers. Paris gives China licence to “build hundreds of additional coal plants” while India can “double its coal production by 2020”, he said. “We can’t build the plants, but they can, according to this agreement.” Trump also took a second swing at India by pulling out of a special fund set up by developed nations as part of the Paris agreement to finance investments in renewable energy by developing nations. All this makes for an awkward prelude to Prime Minister Narendra Modi ’s visit to Washington — a pity, since the two headstrong ...
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Trump's Apprenticeship Program Should Help Train Coal Miners For Solar Jobs	21.6.2017	Politics on HuffingtonPost.com
Last week, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that boosts American apprenticeships . It will double the amount of money for apprenticeship grants and move control of the program away from the federal government to the private sector. Often with these internships, workers are paid while being trained for a new job, so it preferentially benefits the nearly half of Americans finding it hard to make ends meet. This program could be a real boon for industries like solar, which are desperate for skilled workers, as well as existing workers trapped in declining industries. Trump has repeatedly shown great interest in America’s coal industry, which has faced a steep decline in profitability. One major American coal company after another has filed for bankruptcy, and coal is declining globally. Even China is moving away from it. The industry is shedding jobs, and it has an enormous negative impact on health. Coal is responsible for killing about as many Americans every year from pollution ( ...
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Insurers Talk A Lot About Climate Change, But Most Still Do Business In Coal	20.6.2017	Green on HuffingtonPost.com
The insurance industry’s annual confab last week was supposed to be a dry, stoic affair. Instead, anti-coal protesters stormed the 44th Geneva Association conference at a ritzy hotel in San Francisco, plastered the bathrooms with slogan stickers and slipped fliers under the doors to executives’ rooms. A plane toting a banner reading “unfriend coal” circled the high-rise where the executives held their closing dinner and cocktail party. The activists’ demands were twofold: Insurance companies should divest from coal projects and stop underwriting the fossil fuel. Insurers have raised the alarm on the risk posed by climate change in recent years, forming international coalitions aimed at preparing for the increased floods, storms and heatwaves that come with a warming planet. But of the 16 companies on the board of the Geneva Association ― the insurance industry’s think tank ― just one told HuffPost it cut off both funding and insurance for coal companies. AXA Group, France’s largest insurer, in 2015 ...
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Coal Market Set To Collapse Worldwide By 2040 As Solar And Wind Dominate	17.6.2017	Green on HuffingtonPost.com
Coal-fired power is on pace to collapse in the United States and Europe over the next two decades, and will peak worldwide in nine years, according to a long-term forecast released on Thursday. Solar and wind energy, meanwhile, will dominate over the next 23 years, comprising nearly three-quarters of the expected $10.2 trillion in new electricity investments. “This year’s report suggests that the greening of the world’s electricity system is unstoppable, thanks to rapidly falling costs for solar and wind power, and a growing role for batteries, including those in electric vehicles, in balancing supply and demand,” Seb Henbest, lead author of Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s 2017 New Energy Outlook report, said in a statement. As a result, carbon pollution from the power sector will reach its apex in 2026. By 2040, emissions are forecast to be 4 percent below 2016 levels. That prediction depends on a few things: The cost of installing wind turbines needs to fall. That seems likely. With offshore wind, ...
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Global coal production sees biggest decline in history	14.6.2017	TreeHugger
Shhh, don't tell the President.
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After Coal, a Small Kentucky Town Builds a Healthier, More Creative Economy	12.6.2017	Truthout.com
A network of local organizations that helped get a catering business inside one Kentucky town's community center up and running is part of an unusual form of grassroots economic development underway in this community, staggered by the collapse of coal. It's known as the Letcher County Culture Hub, a broad and growing collaboration of arts and media groups. A Knoxville Museum of Art exhibit on Appalshop, a Kentucky-based media and arts center. (Photo: Knoxville Museum of Art ) Nearly 50 years ago, on a presidential campaign swing through eastern Kentucky, Sen. Robert Kennedy promised to help a disabled coal miner build a community center in the tiny mountain town of Hemphill to give idle youth and others a place for recreation and meetings. James Johnson used the brick-making machine and VISTA workers that Kennedy supplied to create community space and built a park and area for horseback riding. Years later Johnson developed black lung disease and couldn't keep the center going. After he died, his widow, ...
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Is Trump Launching a New World Order? The Petro-Powers vs. the Greens	12.6.2017	Truthout.com
(Photo: Tarabiscuite ) That Donald Trump is a grand disruptor when it comes to international affairs is now a commonplace observation in the establishment media. By snubbing NATO and withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, we've been told, President Trump is dismantling the liberal world order created by Franklin D. Roosevelt at the end of World War II. " Present at the Destruction " is the way Foreign Affairs magazine, the flagship publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, put it on its latest cover. Similar headlines can be found on the editorial pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post. But these prophecies of impending global disorder miss a crucial point: in his own quixotic way, Donald Trump is not only trying to obliterate the existing world order, but also attempting to lay the foundations for a new one, a world in which fossil-fuel powers will contend for supremacy with post-carbon, green-energy states. This grand strategic design is evident in virtually everything Trump ...
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Is Donald Trump Launching A New World Order?	12.6.2017	Politics on HuffingtonPost.com
Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com That Donald Trump is a grand disruptor when it comes to international affairs is now a commonplace observation in the establishment media. By snubbing NATO and withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, we’ve been told, President Trump is dismantling the liberal world order created by Franklin D. Roosevelt at the end of World War II. “ Present at the Destruction ” is the way Foreign Affairs magazine, the flagship publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, put it on its latest cover. Similar headlines can be found on the editorial pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post. But these prophecies of impending global disorder miss a crucial point: in his own quixotic way, Donald Trump is not only trying to obliterate the existing world order, but also attempting to lay the foundations for a new one, a world in which fossil-fuel powers will contend for supremacy with post-carbon, green-energy states. This grand strategic design is evident in virtually ...
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Climate Activists in Pacific Northwest Fight Construction of World's Largest Methanol Refinery	11.6.2017	Truthout - All Articles
Climate activists in the Pacific Northwest have rallied against a tsunami of fossil fuel export proposals involving coal, oil and petrochemicals over the last five years. Now a proposal to build the world's largest refinery on the banks of the Columbia River to produce highly flammable methanol using fracked gas for export to China is promising to be their biggest fight to date. "No Methanol Refinery" climate activists rally against the proposed Kalama Methanol Refinery outside a regional office of the Washington State Department of Ecology in Bellevue, Washington. (Photo: Neal Anderson) Climate activists have held the line against Shell's Arctic drilling plans, shut down tar sands valves at refineries and waged wave after wave of actions against new fossil fuel proposals for coal export terminals and oil-by-rail refineries in the Pacific Northwest. Late last year, Portland moved to the forefront of opposition to coal, oil and gas exports when its city council voted unanimously to prohibit new fossil ...
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The Trump administration’s false coal stats, explained	7.6.2017	High Country News Most Recent
Enviro chief Scott Pruitt’s coal job numbers aren’t even close to accurate.
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Border wall might be covered in solar panels. Why not build it out of coal?	7.6.2017	TreeHugger
It's such a win-win idea that we will be tired of winning.
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Pruitt Doubles Down On Big Coal Lie With 'Pruitt Math'	6.6.2017	Green on HuffingtonPost.com
When Pruitt gave the same lie to three separate networks (Fox, ABC and NBC) on Sunday, claiming that 50,000 new coal jobs had been created since the fourth quarter of 2016 (and 7,000 new coal industry jobs in May alone), I quickly posted a fact check on HuffPost . Pruitt earned a “Four Smokestack” rating — reserved for lies that are both deliberate and dangerous. The only question at all was on whether or not it was deliberate or a product of Pruitt not knowing what he was talking about (or a little of both). He gave the same talking point in three interviews, so the idea that it was a slip of the tongue is out the window. Now, Pruitt’s spokeswoman Amy Graham has told reporters that Pruitt was referring to all mining, not just coal mining, in making his case about why Trump pulled out of the Paris climate accord. But this statement is also false. Here is Taylor Kuykendall of S&P Global Market Intelligence Report (paywall), reporting on Graham’s June 5 statement: An EPA official told S&P Global Market ...
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Massive Coal Mine Closer To Reality As Beloved Reef Crumbles To Climate Change	6.6.2017	Green on HuffingtonPost.com
SYDNEY ― An Indian mining giant announced Tuesday the “official start” of a proposed $16 billion coal project in Australia that conservationists say threatens the Great Barrier Reef . Adani Group chairman Gautam Adani said the company had approved its “ final investment decision ” regarding the controversial project in central Queensland. The 100-square-mile Carmichael mine would produce millions of tons of the fossil fuel each year. It has faced severe backlash in the country from environmental groups who say the project would negate Australia’s pledges to limit greenhouse gas emissions and harm the environment ― particularly the imperiled reef, located off the state’s coast. “We have been challenged by activists in the courts, in inner city streets, and even outside banks that have not even been approached to finance the project,” said Adani, who founded the energy company, at a press conference. “We are still facing activists. But we are committed to this project.” In recent months, Australian ...
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Trump’s 'Laughing Stock' Climate Change Argument Shifts From Science To Economics	4.6.2017	Green on HuffingtonPost.com
The semantics of climate change have evolved from global warming to climate change over the last 25 years, but have focused on the science. This week, Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the historic Paris Climate Agreement, in which 194 countries pledged to step up their commitment to cutting carbon emissions. In his announcement , Trump reframed the discussion away from the science of fossil fuel’s effect on the environment toward economics: “The Paris climate accord disadvantages the United States, to the exclusive benefit of other countries, leaving American workers, who I love, and taxpayers to absorb the cost in terms of lost jobs, lower wages, shuttered factories and vastly diminished economic production.” Trump’s always planned on pulling out of the Paris accord because he’s a self-proclaimed America Firster; he’s cozy with the petroleum industry; and he thinks whatever Obama did is inherently bad. He chose an economic argument because he thought his background as a businessman would bestow ...
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9 Times Trump Twisted Facts In His Speech Quitting Paris Accord	2.6.2017	Green on HuffingtonPost.com
President Donald Trump announced plans to withdraw from the Paris climate accord on Thursday with a White House speech that made the historic agreement sound like a trade deal, which it isn’t. But that was just one of the thorns in his Rose Garden statement. The nonbinding pact to reduce planet-warming emissions, approved by every country but Syria and Nicaragua, commits its signatories to slashing greenhouse gas outputs and coming back to the negotiating table every five years to seek more ambitious goals with the hope of staving off the most catastrophic effects of global warming. Trump did not discuss climate science nor the dire consensus among nearly all peer-reviewed climatologists that emissions from burning fossil fuels, industrial farming and deforestation have put the planet on course to warm beyond the point where the climate will be irreversibly changed by the end of the century. By that sheer omission alone, the speech was misleading. Here are nine more things that Trump got wrong: 1. “The ...
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Top Trump Economic Adviser: Coal Doesn't Make Sense Anymore	27.5.2017	Politics on HuffingtonPost.com
Somebody should have been straight with the coal miners Donald Trump wooed during the presidential election. After months of Trump promising that they’d be working again mining coal, one of his top economic aides now says that coal “doesn’t make sense anymore.” Gary Cohn, director of the White House National Economic Council, talked up other energy sources and seemed to throw in the towel on coal as he spoke with reporters aboard Air Force One Thursday night. “Coal doesn’t even make that much sense anymore as a feedstock,” he said, CNN Money reported. Feedstock refers to what’s used to produce energy. Cohn called natural gas a “such a cleaner fuel,” and pointed out that America has become an “abundant producer” of natural gas. He also praised renewable energy. “If you think about how solar and how much wind power we’ve created in the United States, we can be a manufacturing powerhouse and still be environmentally friendly,” Cohn said. Cohn was a million miles away from Trump’s campaign chorus about ...
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Despite what the Trump administration says, coal is out	24.5.2017	Writers on the Range
The energy transition is happening now and will only continue.
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Latest: Coal giant emerges from bankruptcy	23.5.2017	Current Issue
Peabody is benefiting from the natural gas price hike.
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Can Trump’s Koch-Funded Appointees Stall Clean Energy Momentum?	19.5.2017	Politics on HuffingtonPost.com
When The Washington Post reported earlier this month that President Trump appointed Daniel Simmons to run the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the paper called him a “conservative scholar.” Conservative scholar? “Fossil fuel industry propagandist” would have been more accurate. A veteran of Charles and David Koch’s climate science denier network, Simmons’ has spent much of his career disparaging clean energy. His most recent job was at the Institute for Energy Research (IER), where he served as the think tank’s vice president for policy. Prior to joining IER, he was the Natural Resources Task Force director for the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporation-funded lobby group that, like IER, has been trying to repeal state standards that require electric utilities to use more renewable energy. And before that, he was a research fellow at the libertarian Mercatus Center at George Mason University. All three organizations have received ...
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Protecting The Environment And Growing The Economy Go Hand-In-Hand	17.5.2017	Green on HuffingtonPost.com
San Francisco has reduced its carbon emissions by 28 percent since 1990, while growing its GDP by 79 percent. And it’s far from alone. Across the country, cities have been proving that protecting the environment and growing the economy go hand-in-hand. A big part of this story is that cities – large and small, in red and blue states – have been transitioning away from coal and toward cleaner sources of energy. Clean energy sources are at their cheapest prices in history, and since burning coal leads to asthma, lung disease, cancer, heart disease, birth defects, and countless other illnesses, consumers are increasingly demanding cleaner energy. As a result, coal production is no longer economically competitive. In fact, since 2010, nearly half of all U.S. coal plants have closed or switched to cleaner energy sources. As a result, the number of Americans dying each year from pollution from coal-fired power plants has been cut from 13,000 to about 7,500. That is great news for our health and environment – ...
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