Thursday, March 4, 2010

Obama Says He Will "Bankrupt" Coal-Fired Plants



This is what happens during a campaign, January 2008, when people don't really listen to what is being said.
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3 comments:

TonyfromOz said...

Alan.
When this first came up, prior to the election, it was a surprising thing to say, because it seemed he actually had no comprehension whatsoever of how coal fired power plants operated, and how his 'voodoo' plan would actually work.
One thing he said earlier was that he wanted the CO2 credits that he introduced to be auctioned on the open market to the highest bidder.
The plants would buy the credits for whatever they emitted and then auction them if they wished. Each year as the cap was ratcheted down as he says, they would then pay the excess. The trading of the credits would 'feasibly' increase the cost.
In Europe they started out at around 48 Euro's , virtually immediately dropped to 15 Euros and have hovered there ever since. They are categorised as junk bonds and virtually worthless as no one will buy them at any price.
Obama wanted to start them at $50 per ton, and then couldn't really care if they went as high as $500, his words. Nowhere have they appreciated.

Now, what he failed to take into account was that a large coal fired plant burns 6.5 million tons of coal each year. Each ton of coal burned produces 2.86 tons of CO2, hence around 20 million tons of CO2 each year.
In the US alone, each year coal fired plants burn 950 million tons of coal.
When the CO2 from natural gas fired plants and Petroleum based plants is added to the coal, an amount totalling 3.5 Billion tons of CO2 is emitted each year, just to produce the electricity we all HAVE to use.
He can drive coal fired plants to the wall all he likes. Without them, there is NO electrical power. We all go back to the Stone Age.
See how he either has (a) no comprehension of what he says, or (b) is blinded by the huge amounts of money he hoped to make from a captive market.
Those charges will be borne by the plants themselves, and then passed down to all consumers at every one of the three levels of consumption Residential (38%) Commerce (37%) and Industrial (24%) We will pay more at the residential level, and then more again as we consume from Commerce or Industry.
Hence, it becomes nothing more than a huge new tax.
Alan, sorry to take so much space.
Tony.

March 4, 2010 at 9:50 PM
Alan Caruba said...

Tony: Take up all the space you need to make your point. It is astonishing to me that so many Americans have no clue where their electricity comes from and how.

March 5, 2010 at 4:49 AM
Guy said...

Sorry, but I've been told that you guys have it all wrong. I have it on good authority, from a liberal blogger I do battle with all the time, that Cap and Trade won't cost us anything, because the utility companies are going to have to pay almost all of the tax and the small part of it that we will have to pay will be, and I quote, a "very easy tax to pay". I tried to explain the basics of business and economics to this joker. You know, the thing about how any cost a business incurs gets passed down to the consumer, but he just couldn't seem to grasp the concept. And these are the people who want to control our auto companies, insurance companies, banks, and another sixth of our our economy when they invade our health care system. God help us ....

March 5, 2010 at 11:06 AM

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