#clean coal

[hope-for-the-planet]

Previous similar drops in emissions were due to periods of economic stagnation or recession--this is the first significant drop in emissions that has coincided with GDP growth.

The majority of this decline is due to changes in energy use and generation. Coal demand has dropped nearly to 1900s levels, while use of renewables grows significantly--for the first time renewables accounted for half of the energy generated in "advanced economies" included in this analysis.

[zalgoid]

some shit doodles of the worlds worst polycule

I need them to be happy 🫶

[kara-knuckles]

A little fun fact: Russian speakers call Kal'tsit "Кальцит" (calcite), because this is how this word looks like if you write it in Latin alphabet. Because of that, I headcanon that Mon3tr is at least partially comprised of calcites: not only due to the name, but also because calcite is one of the minerals that make the hard parts of living organisms (like bones and shells), so it is very fitting for a crystalline spine monster.

Here are some calcites I saw in Ilmen Nature Reserve museum:

[tavlerone]

DTIYS Submission!

Dtiys original and held by: @ampreh

I love flowers now

This was actually fun to do tbh, I really loved the color scheme going on and all. Especially when I did the flowers c: I wasn't expecting that flowers could actually be very fun to draw (and therapeutic) and this was my first time, welll...Drawing any kind of flora in an illustration. So yeah, new stuff and alot of thoughts while I was doing this dtiys.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The Environmental Protection Agency unveiled a new proposal Thursday to cut greenhouse gas emissions from thousands of power plants burning coal or natural gas, two of the top sources of electricity across the United States. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), criticizing the “radical” proposal, issued his own scorched earth ultimatum on Wednesday ahead of the announcement.

Manchin, chair of the Senate Energy Committee and the top recipient of contributions from the oil and gas industry during the 2022 election cycle, vowed Wednesday to oppose every one of President Joe Biden’s nominees for the EPA “until they halt their government overreach.”

“This Administration is determined to advance its radical climate agenda and has made it clear they are hellbent on doing everything in their power to regulate coal and gas-fueled power plants out of existence, no matter the cost to energy security and reliability,” Manchin wrote in a statement released Wednesday.

The EPA proposal would require most fossil fuel-fired power plants to slash their greenhouse emissions by 90% between 2023 and 2040. The EPA projects the emissions reduction would deliver up to $85 billion in climate and health benefits over the next two decades by heading off premature deaths, emergency room visits, asthma attacks, school absences and lost workdays.

“Alongside historic investment taking place across America in clean energy manufacturing and deployment, these proposals will help deliver tremendous benefits to the American people — cutting climate pollution and other harmful pollutants, protecting people’s health, and driving American innovation,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a statement issued Thursday.

By 2035, the Biden administration aims to shift all electricity in the U.S. to zero-emission sources including wind, solar, nuclear and hydropower, Roll Call reported. In a written statement, Manchin warned the administration’s “commitment to their extreme ideology overshadows their responsibility to ensure long-lasting energy and economic security.”

Manchin is up for reelection during the 2024 election cycle, but he has not yet announced whether he will run.

Last month, West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice (R) announced his campaign for Manchin’s seat. The Democrat-turned-Republican is among the most popular governors in the country and leads a state former President Donald Trump won by nearly 40 percentage points in 2020.

Manchin has hammered the Biden administration in recent weeks for its implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act, the president’s signature climate change bill that the Democratic senator was instrumental in shaping.

“Neither the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law nor the IRA gave new authority to regulate power plant emission standards. However, I fear that this Administration’s commitment to their extreme ideology overshadows their responsibility to ensure long-lasting energy and economic security and I will oppose all EPA nominees until they halt their government overreach,” Manchin said in his Wednesday statement.

What Manchin did not disclose in his statement, however, is that the EPA proposal would jeopardize one West Virginia coal facility that’s particularly lucrative for Manchin’s family business, Enersystems Inc., POLITICO reported. Enersystems delivers waste coal to the Grant Town power plant, which was reportedly already struggling financially, troubles that are expected to deepen with the strict new climate proposal.

Manchin personally received $537,000 from Enersystems last year, according to POLITICO’s analysis of personal financial disclosures filed with the U.S. Senate, and he has been paid more than $5 million by the company since he was first elected in 2010. His son, Joe Manchin IV, now runs Enersystems. The Senator’s campaign has also benefited from political contributions from Enersystems, OpenSecrets reported last year.

“This is going to make it harder for them to stay around. You won’t find written anywhere in the rule that this is supposed to be putting coal plants out of business, but just do the math,” Brian Murray, director of the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability at Duke University, told POLITICO.

In 2020, Manchin’s home state of West Virginia generated about 90% of its power from coal, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. By contrast, less than 20% of the energy generated nationally comes from coal. Many states, including neighboring Virginia, are phasing out coal by replacing it with natural gas.

While the U.S. may show signs of moving away from coal, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission told the Senate Energy Committee earlier this month that the country was not prepared to abandon coal and maintain a reliable energy system.

“Coal is more dependable than gas and yes, we need to keep coal generation available for the foreseeable future,” said Commissioner Mark Christie.

Manchin took another swipe at the EPA on Thursday during an energy committee hearing on permitting reform, when he accused the agency of preventing the development of carbon capture technology by denying companies the permits they need to trap captured carbon underground.

“Don’t tell me that you’re going to invest in carbon capture sequestration when we can’t get a permit to basically sequester the carbon captured,” Manchin said. “This is the game that’s being played. I know it, they know I know it, and we’re not gonna let them get away with it.”

[rabbits-of-negative-euphoria]

anyways Annie represents everything unknown beyond the ocean, and thus her act of mercy toward Armin represents the ocean/unknown/humanity acting with mercy toward Armin and that’s why he goes to her, seashell in hand, to comprehend aloud why his dreams of the great blue yonder have not only fallen apart but turned against him. and I’ll take a large fries with ketchup

[rainbow-femme]

Scientists have made a breakthrough in nuclear fusion which could lead to a clean energy source, which means everyone in the fossil fuel industry is on the phone with their favorite senator and minister right now lobbying to make sure that doesn’t happen

[reasonsforhope]

“With a childhood steeped in coal dust and a budding career powered by wind, few embody West Virginia’s transformation more than Logan Reel.

The grandson of a coal miner, Reel keeps with him his grandfather’s long, painful death from pneumoconiosis — black lung disease — in 2012. Reel was 15 years old. “It really took a toll on him,” he says. An Air Force veteran, Reel might have followed in his grandfather’s footsteps if not for an economic sea change that has taken hold around his birthplace, in the coal mecca of Northeast West Virginia.

With support from the G.I. Bill, Reel recently graduated from Eastern West Virginia Technical College where his career as a wind turbine worker took off. After a year and a half in East Tech’s wind program, in July 2021 Reel started working for Clearway, a $5.8 billion energy company headquartered in San Francisco. Now he maintains the wind turbines at Clearway’s new, 23-turbine Black Rock Wind Farm, those that generate clean energy atop the same picturesque West Virginia mountains that once provided this region its seemingly endless supply of coal...

Reel is part of a massive paradigm shift stretching from the hilltops of Allegheny-area Pennsylvania to the pits of Southern Tennessee, the latter of which has seen a whopping 79 percent drop in coal production. Historic coal towns and counties, majority right-leaning and Trump-favoring, are now reluctantly accepting Big Wind with relatively open arms.

And Big Wind is returning the embrace with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, in tax incentives, and lucrative careers to offer would-be miners and their kin. For West Virginia wind technicians like Reel, who make $77,000 a year on average, the shift to wind has opened up a world of possibilities.

“I’m doing well,” he said. “I’ve got big plans...”

Driven by the Fortune 500 preference for cleaner energy, West Virginia’s coal economy has been vacating as power plants suck in more wind and solar. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Annual Coal Report of 2022, production plummeted 28 percent from 2019 to 2020, the equivalent of shuttering 17 mines. Today, there’s only one coal plant left in Mineral and two in nearby Grant County, as utility companies like Appalachian Power phase out fossil fuels — at a rate, in Appalachian’s case, of about 10 to 12 percent a year...

These politics appear to be slowly morphing, where local executives are finding economic incentives to wave green energy behemoths into town.

“I will say we’re kind of unique, because we have coal and we have wind,” says Callie Taylor Dayton, executive director of Grant County Development Authority, who helps steer wind-interested high schoolers into a wind tech program in Petersburg. “We’re ready and kind of willing to step in and get kids on the track of, ‘You can stay here! There’s other job opportunities, more in the wind and energy development area...’”

Clearway’s turbines... would start infusing the county with cash even before they were built. The deal gave Mineral between $200,000 and $300,000 in tax revenue, plus $133,000 to 21 grantees in community benefit funds (combined with Pinnacle’s). If the little league needed a new backstop or the fire department needed new hoses, they could ask Clearway to foot the bill...

Thirty-three miles south of the Grant-Mineral border — and 29 miles south of the lakeside Mt. Storm Power Station, which still generates 1,600 megawatts from 15,000 tons of bituminous coal — is Eastern West Virginia Technical College, where Logan Reel built his career in green energy.

Half auto mechanic school, half turbine college — literally divided down the middle — Eastern Tech is ground zero of Big Wind’s future in the West Virginia panhandle. Graduating a half-dozen wind technicians each year, most bound for Clearway’s farms, the school, lodged in the middle of a nondescript industrial park, is a quiet symbol of the New Miner...

Almost entirely subsidized by the state, Eastern Tech could be a budding energy worker’s best friend. Its four-year program can be completed in just two; and most low-income attendees — the majority of Eastern’s student body — ride by on Pell Grants. “But if they don’t,” Hakala said, walking past a switchboard, “then West Virginia Invest kicks in and covers the rest of their tuition.” (As long as, of course, they pass a drug test and keep a 2.0 GPA.)” -via Reasons to Be Cheerful, 10/24/22

[schantsan]

why new cosmetic look so comfy for pyro like holy sht also the hat makin me want to make a chimney sweeper type beat loadout for him

[bibleofficial]

so the majority of my building seems to be chinese so i’m just going to learn mandarin via cultural osmosis

[bluebison2]

The Uk’s building a new coal mine

[kjell-e]

A lot of the kids on this app have never heard of Tschernobyl or Fukushima and it shows

[oakskull]

hngnghh been thinking about wallflowers by @cubic-tree and how injuries manifest on the soulmates,,, I've been brainrotting over this specific place for and injury for no reason

okay there is a reason, I thought it would look really cool. anyway I was reading and it Seems like jimmy and tango have the same flowers so I did that. also. the addition of golden rods,,, other than the symbolic meaning matching the progression of their relationship look at this

so close to solidango, which would have been really funny.

also also, dark brown is actually ink with glitter in it. I spent like 20 minutes carefully layering browns in the top part of the eye b4 realizing I had glitter ink and making the (correct) decision to leave all of that behind so his eyes sparkle. anyway the flowers are supposed to be white carnations marigold and golden rod

[bumblebeeappletree]

One year after Russia invaded Ukraine, analysts think Putin's aggression may have sped up Europe's energy transition. How's that?

Credits:

Reporter: Ajit Niranjan

Video Editor: Nils Reinecke

Supervising editor: Michael Trobridge, Malte Rohwer-Kahlmann

We're destroying our environment at an alarming rate. But it doesn't need to be this way. Our new channel Planet A explores the shift towards an eco-friendly world — and challenges our ideas about what dealing with climate change means. We look at the big and the small: What we can do and how the system needs to change. Every Friday we'll take a truly global look at how to get us out of this mess.

#PlanetA #UkraineWar #EnergyCrisis

Read more:

European Commission data on imports of Russian fuel:

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statist...

The International Energy Agency's 10-point plan to cut demand for Russian gas: https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/ass...

The IEA's guide to avoid gas shortages in 2023:

https://www.iea.org/reports/how-to-av...

EMBER's review of European electricity:

https://ember-climate.org/insights/re...

The IEEFA's analysis of European LNG:

https://ieefa.org/articles/over-half-...

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:50 Eggs & baskets

02:20 Back to coal?

04:27 Renewables push

05:38 Humble heat pumps

07:23 Use less?

09:15 Future

10:47 Conclusion

[doctormage]

sorry to compliment a corporation but my god the joy it lights in me to hear higher ups at my company call non-clean energy / non-renewable resource industries our “opposition.” which sounds dumb now that I type it out bc from a market standpoint yeah non-renewable energy is in opposition to clean energy. and yes it’s deeply unfortunate that the bar is so low but being from coal country it is such a FUCKING relief to hear that the people making the decisions at my job like openly and unapologetically condemn non-renewable energy. what a concept