Earlier this week, Hillary Clinton boasted to cheering Democrats about her plans to shut down coal companies and put coal miners out of work. Unfortunately, due to the “success” of Obama Administration energy policies, that goal may be accomplished before her presidency begins.
Peabody Energy Corp BTU 9.59% , the largest U.S. coal producer, said it may have to seek Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after it delayed an interest payment due on Tuesday.
Falling demand for coal, tough environmental controls and growing competition from natural gas have pushed several big coal miners, including Arch Coal Inc, into bankruptcy protection over the past year.
Yes, an entire industry is being shut down, making hundreds of thousands of people unemployed and forcing energy costs for the rest of us to “necessarily skyrocket,” all so that global temperature might… *might* … be 0.02 degrees cooler a century from now than they might have been otherwise.
But wait, you say (if you an idiotic, Kool-Aid swilling Obama-Hillary fanboy), we’re going to replace that coal with cheap, reliable renewable energy, and that will create berzillions of jobs and save the transgendered polar bears.
A federally backed, $2.2 billion solar project in the California desert isn’t producing the electricity it is contractually required to deliver to PG&E Corp., which says the solar plant may be forced to shut down if it doesn’t receive a break Thursday from state regulators.
The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, owned by BrightSource Energy Inc., NRG Energy Inc. NRG, +0.79% and Alphabet Inc.’s GOOG, +0.02% GOOGL, +0.15% Google, uses more than 170,000 mirrors mounted to the ground to reflect sunlight to 450-foot-high towers topped by boilers that heat up to create steam, which in turn is used to generate electricity.
But the unconventional solar-thermal project, financed with $1.5 billion in federal loans, has riled environmentalists by killing thousands of birds, many of which are burned to death — and has so far failed to produce the expected power.
Environmentalists will kirk out on those exceedingly rare occasions when an oil spill results in birds getting oily. But thousands of bird fried routinely, every year, or chopped up by windmills… that’s OK because Gaia loves the transgendered polar bears moar, or something.
These putas have made areas of the California desert eyesores with miles of giant windmills and solar panels defacing the landscape.
At least the Brits have the sense to place many of their wind-turbine farms offshore out of sight of land.
I lived about 10 miles downwind from one of these new solar facilities in the SoCal desert.
It gave us about a ten degree increase in late afternoon temperatures — suspect its heat column was blocking the normal daily influx of cool ocean air, as our formerly omnipresent wind mostly disappeared too. When it did blow, now we got dust storms we’d never had before.
And I wonder just how long those mirrors will last. It only takes about three years for windborne desert sand to scour plexiglas into being totally opaque — and that’s on the sheltered side of a building.
Solar farms in the desert are not environmentally sound; they are scorched earth.
Oh, as to those polar bears “endangered” by “global warming”: When the rhetoric began, there were about 5,000 polar bears. Now there are over 30,000. Why? Because they can hunt more effectively when there’s more open water and open shoreline, thus more access to seals. They can use dry land as well as anything else; they’re not slaves to ice floes.
The polar bears survived quite-well when the Old Norse were raised dairy cattle on Greenland 1000-years ago. Gaia adapts…
The one thing that Global Warming accomplished was to make Al Gore a billionaire.The fact that a few years ago, 40,000 legitimate scientist published a letter that debunked the concept.