Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday issued an executive order that would phase out sales of new gas-powered passenger cars by 2035, a move that he said would improve air quality and significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet.
He signed the order two weeks after he pledged to fast-track California’s environmental goals in response to what he called a “climate damn emergency” — the wildfires that have burned a record-breaking 3.6 millon acres this year.
The country's largest coal producing state is desperate to keep the struggling industry going. Wyoming is investing big to try to clean up coal's carbon emissions, even as many say it's too late.
The immediate problem with coal isn't the emissions or the waste produced, as much as its the fixed output of the plants that is of low value for much of the day - the plants cost more to run than they can make in electricity sales.
Coal is dying just like nuclear power - if it was the emissions that were killing the plants, then nuclear power would be winning. If you don't have a marketable product that you shouldn't be forcing consumers to buy it. The future is very low cost renewables, along with mid market natural gas turbines and especially peaking natural gas plants.
If coal can adapt to provide more mid market power than it has a brighter future - even without carbon sequestration. But getting coal to burn cleanly and reliability under mid market conditions is challenging - existing coal plant designs don't ramp well - and they pollute a lot more and suffer much higher breakdowns when they are forced to regularly change output. But if scientists can figure out how to make next generation plants ramp better than coal has a future at least in coal country, especially sited on existing facilities.
While touring fire-ravaged California, Donald Trump downplayed the role a warming planet could have in the devastation, suggesting temperatures will "start getting cooler" and that the recent conflagrations was a lack of proper forest management.
"I don't think science knows actually," he said when told that science didn't agree with his conclusions
Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Joe Biden went on the attack, accusing Trump of ignoring a "central crisis" facing the nation.
"If you give a climate arsonist four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised if we have more of America ablaze?" he asked. "If you give a climate denier four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised when more of America is underwater?"
If the nuclear one-tenth of global electricity generation displaced an average mix of fossil-fueled generation and nothing else, it would offset 4% of fossil-fuel CO2 emissions. So in an era of urgent climate concern, should nuclear power continue, shrink, or expand?
In May 2020, a report by the International Energy Agency claimed that not sustaining and even expanding nuclear power would make climate solutions “drastically harder and more costly.”
To check that claim, we must compare nuclear power with other potential climate solutions. Here I’ll use only two criteria—cost and speed—because if nuclear power has no business case or takes too long, we need not address its other merits or drawbacks.
