As concerns mount over future job losses in Montana, it turns out the initial plans won’t really do anything when it comes to carbon dioxide. Translation: even more jobs could be threatened.
As The USA Today reports:
The electric power industry’s plan to retire more than 10% of its coal-fired generators within a decade will do almost nothing to reduce the nation’s emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide, a USA TODAY analysis finds.
The 140 slated retirements — mostly small, old generating units in the Midwest and South — account for only 4% of all CO2 emitted last year by U.S. power plants. In fact, not one ranks among the top 100 units for carbon emissions and only 12 are among the 475 units that comprise the top 10% of emitters, according to a review of 2013 federal data.
The (Obama Administration) rule could have a major impact on jobs. The coal industry could lose 35,000 to 38,000 “job years” — the equivalent of a full-time job for one year — by 2030, but more than 100,000 could be created in the energy-efficiency sector, according to the EPA’s impact analysis. Where in the country these jobs will be lost or added remains to be seen.
WatchdogWire.com: Coal-Rich Montana Bracing for New EPA Climate Rules
Rep. Steve Daines (R) called the EPA’s rules, which would force Montana to cut carbon emission by over 20 percent, “another step in this administration’s war on coal.”
Montana produces 43 million tons of coal each year. With the largest coal reserves in the nation, the state can supply the entire country’s coal needs for over a century.
In addition to having the nation’s largest coal reserves, Montana is home to the second largest coal-fire power plant west of the Mississippi, the Colstrip plant.
Meanwhile, from the USGS: “Glaciers Have Paused in Active Retreat“
From the AP:
Healthy snowpack and cooler summers over the past four years have slowed melting of remaining glaciers in Glacier National Park in Montana, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
“So the glaciers have paused in active retreat,” said Dan Fagre, a research ecologist with the USGS’ Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center in Bozeman who is stationed at Glacier.
Politico’s “Morning Energy”: STATE DEPT. BUMPS UP OIL-BY-RAIL DEATH ESTIMATES IN KXL ANALYSIS
The Obama administration raised its estimates for the number of deaths that would occur from rail accidents if the Keystone XL pipeline is not built after it discovered mistakes in its earlier analysis of the proposed project, the State Department said Friday. The department, in a document published Friday making technical corrections to its January environmental analysis of the pipeline, said it relied on incomplete data when estimating the number of deaths and injuries that would occur if Keystone is rejected and more oil is transported by rail. But State said the underlying conclusion in the January report remains the same: that there is a “greater potential for injuries and fatalities associated with rail transport relative to pipelines.” Andrew Restuccia has the story: http://politico.pro/1kRqU8L
Wall Street Journal op-ed: Shale Gas Is America’s Geopolitical Trump Card
When Russia and China announced a $400 billion deal last month for Russia to supply China with 38 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually for three decades, some analysts heralded it as a tectonic geopolitical shift.
Instead, Vladimir’s Putin’s haste to sign a deal that had been in the making for more than a decade confirmed his country’s political weakness. Despite being buoyed by high energy prices in the first decade of this century, Russia is in decline. Demographically it is shrinking; it has severe health problems (the average Russian male dies in his early 60s); and it is a “one-crop economy” heavily dependent on energy exports. Russia needs reforms to build a diversified, entrepreneurial economy, but its actions in Ukraine have brought on sanctions that weaken its access to Western ideas and technology. Becoming China’s gas station does nothing to reverse this trend.
The real geopolitical shift is the shale-energy revolution that took off in the past decade. While the technologies of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing are not new, their pioneering application to shale rock is largely a product of American entrepreneurship in the past decade.
Comments
Al Smith
Monday, June 09, 2014 3:07 PM
The earth has cycled through warming and cooling cycles for eons. Anyone remember the last ice age? No, because it was ending some 12,000 years ago and the earth was entering into an intraglacial warming period.
Guess what? We are lucky to have lived during this time during earth’s history, especially here in Montana where we grow wheat. Tough to grow wheat on a glacier.
In a few hundred, or few thousand years, man will be hard pressed to raise a wheat crop here in Montana as the current warm period will end and the next ice age will begin. Won’t matter much what mankind does or doesn’t do to change it or even delay it. This natural cycle will repeat.
In the meantime, those who profit from the fears induced by the “Climate Change” fanatics, such as Al Gore and his co-conspirators, will keep seeking new investments in green energy by closing coal fired electrical generation to make green energy the only game in town.
Likewise, “Climate Change Scientists” will seek large money grants to study climate change and continue to publish their reports falsely claiming mankind is at fault, thus perpetuating the biggest hoax ever birthed. If you tell a lie often enough, eventually the lie becomes truth in the minds of many.
A wise man once said, if you want to know the root cause of anything, just follow the money trail.
And that is my rant for today!