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Politics : The Trump Presidency -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (20365)	6/3/2017 10:44:01 AM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 358014

Sure it works that way. Electricity is a commodity and as such, is cost driven. Maintenance of the generating equipment is a major factor, especially for higher sulfur fuels like coal. So when coal becomes number 4 on the list for cost per BTU and it is number 1 on the list for maintenance, the pressure to retire older plants early is very strong. They have already been amortized by that point and if the operational costs exceed the cost of replacement with the attending tax credits and all, they get shut down. If they are shut down, they don't use coal. This equation applies to China and India, too. China has greatly decreased their build rate of new coal plants because of costs, for example. They aren't quite to the point of decreasing the overall number of coal plants, but that will be soon. Again, the biggest decrease of coal use has been by China and India, they just don't import as much as they used to. But that's beside the point. If you ask coal miners who destroyed their lives they know. Not really. They know what they are told. And Fox News, and now Trump, blame Obama. Big surprise. Both are known for peddling fake news for personal gain. If the miners think their jobs have been declining since the 1950s because of Obama, well they have been snookered. Unless Obama has a personal time machine and went back before his birth to damage the coal industry, the facts just don't work that way. What has destroyed coal mining jobs has been the shift to strip mining in Montana and the attendant automation. The decline in demand from China, India and the US has just accelerated things. It has little to do with climate change and everything to do with economics. Unless Trump is going to subsidize coal, or require its use by legislation, it is a moribund and dying industry. I do realize you have little or no idea of the realities of the energy industry. Staying at a Holiday Inn just isn't sufficient. Neither is watching Fox News or reading Trump's tweets.