South Africa stopped investing in energy infrastructure. This is $500m investment. That is a substantial difference.

From the article:

> "The financing is intended to support research, including studies and analysis to deliver accurate data to partnering organizations and officials for better decision-making. It will also fund local policy and advocacy, along with litigation brought against power companies."

The $500M is NOT an investment, it is a media campaign.

At the scale needed to matter, $500m might as well be $0.

So whip out that Amex and get cracking pal

source?

This money isn’t buying power stations, it’s funding efforts to influence policy.

...in shutting down plants. Investment into lowering power production

You don't need specific plants that act as perfectly reliable base load. If a bunch of auxiliary fossil fuel plants come online for 10 days per year, that's almost as good as never using them.

There's a maintenance cost, of course, but as far as carbon goals it's very doable.

The economics of that don’t even come within the same universe as working out. Those plants wouldn’t just be losing money, they’d be losing unfathomably huge amounts of money.

That's a very narrow view. Either don't make the plants independently owned, or pay the plants for keeping the capacity available, or pay them a huge markup for those 10 days. Two and a half good solutions!

I mean y'all can downvote all you like but that doesn't change the financials of shuttering a powerplant. How tf you gonna retain the skilled employees required to run the damn thing when they're furloughed 300 days out of the year?

So don't furlough people...?

Maintenance can be spread over the entire year, and you can use designs that don't need a big workforce just to run.

Peaker plants already exist, this isn't a crazy new realm in the operational sense.

I dunno, seems pretty wild to me. If the thing isn't generating electricity you're sitting there with a huge labor bill and nothing to show for it. That this sort of thing might make sense from a purely technical perspective seems reasonable to me but I don't see how you'd fund it.

If you're worried strictly about profits, and not a strong desire to avoid CO2 emissions, we can imagine a carbon tax. $100 per ton would cost a coal plant 10¢/kWh on top of operating costs. So if a carbon-free source gets even close for operating costs, then that's a lot of money to fund a backup plant and still come out ahead.

And this doesn't really require a tax. We could imagine an electrical company pricing out their aversion to carbon in cents per kWh out of their own volition or because of customer demand.

Given we live in a capitalist society that profit motive takes primacy isn't really in question.

> economics of that don’t even come within the same universe as working out

Natural gas does this fine. Perfect is the enemy of the good.

In the US it generally seems to end up being natural gas; still a pretty big emissions improvement but not zero carbon by any means.

I'm hoping nuclear power makes a comeback in the future. The new reactor opened in Georgia this year seems promising.

What about 7 years late and $17 billion dollars over budget is promising?

...as opposed the alternative, a plan to turn the US into somewhere that has perpetual and disastrous wildfires and hurricanes.

There's absolutely nothing the US can do to stop that.

You could drop US emissions to zero tomorrow and it wouldn't stop it. China's extreme emissions growth is guaranteeing this only ends one way.

And that's just one entity.

Next is India. And then after that is Africa. Those two will add 1.5 billion people (another China) over the next 50 years and they will want to emit and consume like everybody else. India will end up with emissions growth that looks a lot like China, with hundreds of millions more people than what China has today.

If you believe in the existing projections on global climate change and what it will do, the end is already settled.

The US reducing its emissions by eg 1/4 or 1/3 is entirely meaningless against the increases elsewhere. It's not like we could just go hyper green and be spared, it doesn't work that way. It's global climate change.

No, the US is responsible for 15% of global CO2 emissions. China emit around twice as much (with around 4x the population), but their emissions aren't growing over the last 10 years. Neither is their population growing. India and Africa together emit less than the US for around 6x the pop. They have a lot of population growth ahead of them, before they start to eat up a 1/4 drop in US emissions.

A bit ridiculous to claim that global warming is caused by the dirt poor and the not yet born 'wanting to consume like Americans' when it's obvious that at least half of Americans are determined to continue consuming like Americans whatever the cost.

>Your argument basically seems to boil down to "the most polluting country can't reduce use of its most polluting energy source because other countries exist and emit anything at all".

It's more like your argument forgot to account for fossil fuel demand elasticity and the reason why the developing world emits less CO2 per capita. It's not because they are enlightened minimalists who care more. It's because they are being outbid by the developed world.

For every amount the developed world cuts fossil fuel usage, it makes it cheaper for everyone else to buy. Price goes down, demand goes up. Usage doesn't go down, it shifts. This is a self defeating strategy. Your theory of global emissions reduction only works if no one changes their behavior in response to supply/demand changes.

Yes, I'm sure that demand for West Virginia's coal is perfectly elastic between US power plants also located in the Midwest and ones in India and Africa that haven't been built yet.

Fossil fuels are priced on a global futures markets. Did you think Canadian oil producers exist in a vacuum where Qatari production, or Indian demand, has no effect on them? Whether Canadian oil actually makes it to India doesn't matter.

You clearly know nothing about the coal trade.

Hey, could you please review the site guidelines and stick to them when posting to HN? I'm afraid your comment here broke them rather badly.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you know more than someone else, that's great, but in that case please share some of what you know—without putdowns or snark—so the rest of us can learn:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Even replacing those power plants with LNG would be a net benefit.

How about the jobs? I would like reducing coal mining to be high on the priority list but wouldn't want a lone billionaire deciding to shut down a bunch of jobs in my area.

Those jobs are going away anyway. There's less market for coal and automation means fewer miners are needed, so even in the absence of any push to transition to green energy almost all coal miners are going to lose their jobs.

And don't forget the property values!

A lone billionaire pulling the plug on regional jobs is just another Tuesday.

There's roughly 50,000 coal mining jobs in the US[1]. Saving those is not worth setting the world on fire. I would happily support giving every single one of them an immediate, life-time, full-wage pension, if it means ending coal power plants tomorrow. It would pay for itself immediately.

[1] https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-statistics/employment/coa...

Setting the world on fire, yeah right.

Please show me the total emissions of US coal, stacked up against global emissions, and then China's emissions and their emissions growth (ideally with a break-out on their coal emissions expansion, which is ongoing).

China added a hundred new coal plants in 2022 alone. That's half as many coal plants in the US, added in just a single year. And they're still going. Those are new plants, they no doubt plan to operate them for decades.

What do you think about China adding 500 new coal plants over the next ten years?

US coal is not going to make a difference whether it continues or not.

> then China's emissions and their emissions growth

sure, here you are: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions#co2-emissions-by-re....

Turns out China emits around half the CO2 per capita that the US does, and the total hasn't grown in the last decade.

The total amount of power generated from coal in China also hasn't grown in more than 10 years. And the coal they do have has become cleaner, so the carbon emissions just due to that have gone down slightly.

'But China's growth is cancelling out all our potential cuts' was a technically true, but still venal and dangerously misguided excuse 15 years (and 0.25C) ago when it was first invented. Now it isn't even technically true.

I don't have any control over China's policies. I do have a tiny bit of control over the US's policies, so that's what I concern myself with. I have no choice but to that trust there will be people like me in their respective regions who will do the same in their countries. As you say, it's a global problem, everyone knows that everyone needs to get on board to fix this. Regardless of what other countries do, the US must do its part to solve the problem, or the problem won't be solved. Losing 50k coal jobs is not sufficient reason to prevent the US from doing its part.

Edit: Oh, failed to address this:

> US coal is not going to make a difference whether it continues or not.

It absolutely will! The US is responsible for about 15% of worldwide carbon emissions[1]. Of that, about 25%[2] is from electricity generation. Of that, about 80% comes from coal and natural gas. 15 * .25 * .80 = about 1.8% of global emissions comes from US coal & natural gas power plants alone. Two percent of global emissions is quite a huge amount! It'd be one nice, big step forward on the long, long (long) road to fixing this problem. You gotta do something, or else you're doing nothing, and coal plants are a great target to aim at.

[1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...

[2] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

Your figure includes natural gas. That makes a big chunk of power generation [1], big enough that you would probably want to address an alternative source like nuclear power.

1: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...

You're being nakedly dishonest by drawing a false equivalence between this and the entirely different category of problems that SA power infrastructure is facing.

> Does Bloomberg also have a plan to replace them with something else that will serve as reliable base load? Otherwise this is just a plan to turn the US into South Africa with perpetual brown outs.

He doesn't need one. He's a retired billionaire, whose retirement hobby is social engineering. Brown outs aren't his concern, as I'm sure his home will have adequate back-up power.

People here extensively drank the kool-aid, and they don't even have the beginning of the required understanding of the economics and the physics of grid scale electricity production and distribution. Maybe they will understand when they pay the same for energy as in Germany.