No More Magic Buggy Whips

I call Big Coal's favorite lie of "clean coal"  the Magic Buggy Whip Myth for its combination of denial and magical thinking. But it's worse than pretending the equivalent of dry water is a potential reality. Coal is a dead industry walking, kept upright with tax subsidies and fearmongering.

 

David Atkins at Hullabaloo: 

Investing in renewables creates more jobs than exporting coal

Another piece of evidence that we don't have to choose between economic growth and responsible action on climate change:

Per dollar invested, efficiency and renewables generate many more jobs than fossil fuels.

Modern coal terminals are highly mechanized facilities, with towering, ten-story cranes pivoting massive arms above coal storage piles 60 feet high. At the ends of these arms, huge rotary shovels bigger than a house dig up the dusty coal and deposit it onto conveyor belts that snake away to bulk carriers three to four football fields long. Few workers are needed to operate these gargantuan “stacker/reclaimers.”

A currently proposed installation near Seattle provides a good example of the phenomenon:

As estimated in official project documents, the Gateway Pacific Terminal would support only 257 steady jobs, including office workers, at full build-out. That’s just one new job for every $2.6 million invested, assuming the terminal can indeed be built for its advertised price. If you include “induced jobs” that may be added in maritime and railroad industries, the total increases to 430. But extra expenditures would occur in these areas, say for necessary railroad upgrades, so figure about one new job created per $2 million spent...[I]nvesting the same $665 million in energy efficiency or renewables would create twice as many jobs at minimum. In solar manufacturing, for example, figure several hundred more jobs than at the coal terminal. For solar-installation and energy-efficiency companies, add at least another thousand...

The savings in energy costs that steadily accrue after these clean-energy projects are completed can be recycled through organizations to create even more jobs, setting up a multiplier effect that stimulates greater prosperity. Such investments also lessen dependence on fickle foreign sources of fossil fuels, whose costs can skyrocket if supply lines are threatened.

Then, too, these are jobs in construction, maintenance, building supplies and finance that will be difficult, if not impossible, to ship overseas. The wages and salaries earned will largely be spent in local communities, enhancing local economies.

The only reasons not to engage in an Apollo Program for clean energy is the corrupting influence of Big Fossil Fuel lobbying, and an ideological group of anti-spending advocates paralyzing the entire political process. Given that we are a nation desperately in need of both good jobs and immediate action on climate, the failure to take these steps is political and moral malfeasance of the highest order.

Want to beat the living economic fuck out of China? Put every coal miner to work building solar panels and windmills.