Is the Coal Industry Dead?

The key point is to try to disprove your thesis. Seek out the negatives and the counter-arguments, then make a reasoned decision to invest, not invest, short, stand-aside and wait, or dig further.

Lots of bad news hitting the coal industry: China slow-down, EPA Rules, falling natural gas prices, falling met and steam coal prices, President Obama says he will put coal out of business (supposedly)  http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2014/10/08/the-repeated-claim-that-obama-vow

HARD TIMES for US-coal-producers/

2015 is the reckoning for coal: http://www.oilandenergydaily.com/2013/11/22/coal-2/

EPA Regulations Hit Economic Reality:  https://www.scribd.com/doc/266957890/Walker-May-2015-Letter

Will there be a coal industry over the next few decades in order to determine whether to use liquidation or going-concern value?

We seek to buy cyclical assets when there are NO REASONS to buy, the companies in the industry have depressed profits or large losses, and there seems to be no hope for the industry (Remember Airlines 9/11). However, we wish to avoid investing in Canal companies during the advent of the steam locomotive because then there is a permanent decline in asset value because long-term cash flows are driven by capacity constraints and customer demand changes.  Thus, we first try to answer this post’s question.

Let’s break down the energy producing statistics.

According to the Independent Statistics and Analysis Energy Information Administration, here’s how the nation’s electricity was generated in 2014:

• ■ Coal: 38 percent
• ■ Natural gas: 27 percent
• ■ Nuclear: 19 percent
• ■ Hydropower: 6 percent
• ■ Other renewables: 7 percent, including
•       — Biomass: 1.7 percent
•       — Geothermal: 0.4 percent
•       — Solar: 0.4 percent
•       — Wind: 4.4 percent
•       — Other gases: 1 percent

So let’s take the 38 percent of coal production out of the mix. Where’s the energy going to come from? It’s not. Therefore, we’re left with nothing but periods of darkness.

http://www.craigdailypress.com/news/2015/may/29/us-would-blackout-without-coal/

Global-coal-use-growing-faster-than-any-other-energy/

Books on the Coal Industry and Coal’s History

Long dismissed as a relic of a bygone era, coal is back — with a vengence. Coal is one of the nation’s biggest and most influential industries — Big Coal provides more than half the electricity consumed by Americans today (2006) — and its dominance is growing, driven by rising oil prices and calls for energy independence. Is coal the solution to America’s energy problems?

On close examination, the glowing promise of coal quickly turns to ash. Coal mining remains a deadly and environmentally destructive industry. Nearly forty percent of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere each year comes from coal-fired power plants. In the last two decades, air pollution from coal plants has killed more than half a million Americans. In this eye-opening call to action, Goodell explains the costs and consequences of America’s addiction to coal and discusses how we can kick the habit.

We need fossil fuels

Current policies to supplant fossil fuels with inferior energy sources need to incorporate a deeper understanding of the transformative role of energy in human society lest they jettison the wellsprings of mankind’s greatest advance.

The thesis of this paper is that fossil fuels, as a necessary condition of the Industrial Revolution, made modern living standards possible and vastly improved living conditions across the world. Humanity’s use of fossil fuels has released whole populations from abject poverty. Throughout human history, elites, of course, have enjoyed comfortable wealth. No more than 200 years ago, however, the lives of the bulk of humanity were “poor, nasty, brutish and short,” in the words memorably used by Thomas Hobbes.

This paper aims to articulate and explain some startling, but rarely acknowledged, facts about the role of energy in human history. Energy is so intimately connected to life itself that it is almost equivalent to physical life. Virtually everything needed to sustain the life of a human individual—food, heat, clothing, shelter—depends upon access to and conversion of energy. Modern, prosperous nations now access a seemingly limitless supply of energy. This cornucopia, however, is a very recent advance in mankind’s history. Fossil fuels, methodically harnessed for the first time in the English Industrial Revolution, beginning in the 18th century and taking off in the 19th century, have been a necessary condition of prosperous societies and of fundamental improvements in human well-being.

Adequate treatment of this topic is a daunting task for anyone. The unprecedented stakes in today’s contentious energy policy debates about carbon, however, make it a morally necessary topic. As a former final decision-maker in a large environmental regulatory agency, I urge current officials and concerned citizens to reflect on energy policies within a broad but fundamental context: human history and the physics of material lives.

My research was initially inspired by a comprehensively researched monograph by Indur Goklany titled “Humanity Unbound.” His paper took me to a dozen books and twice as many academic papers. With gratitude, I acknowledge the books listed below as the most enlightening, persuasive guides on the topic. And I highly recommend them for more thorough analysis than allowed by the confines of this paper. May those policymakers entrusted with the authority to make binding decisions about energy consider these books as “a look before an unreflective leap” that could unravel mankind’s greatest achievement—
the potential enjoyment of long, comfortable, healthy lives without the gnawing hunger of subsistence poverty.

CRITICS

Yes, fossil fuels have fueled our progress through the industrial revolution into the information age. But we have over-used them and fouled our nest. We could and can shift rapidly to renewables, but big oil greed obstructs us.  (Really?) As Pope Francis says, we have made the earth into “an immense pile of filth.” Own it.

The first big flaw that tragically happens to be the binding of the entire book (and in the title) is his thesis that fossil fuels is what causes human flourishing. No. INDUSTRIALIZATION is the underlying mechanism hat has created the exponential increase in human progress. Fossil fuels was just the first way of converting potential energy to mechanical energy. And it was a good one, but we need to move on to a more advance potential energy source. Luckily exponential growth in renewables and other advanced technologies has just started to gain heavy heavy steam.

By Donald Prothero on February 8, 2015

As an actual Ph.D. geoscientist who HAS WORKED for oil companies, written textbooks in geology of oil, and also done actual published research in climate change in peer-reviewed journals, I can say this work is pure garbage. Epstein cherry-picks climate data he doesn’t understand (as the review by Kathy Moyd pointed out), denies the conclusions of an entire scientific community who are NOT paid to shill for industry, and denies the obvious evidence of climate change going on worldwide. Then he distorts the benefits of fossil fuels and neglects or underplays the problems. The biggest problem of all is that (as all of us who are in the industry know so well), we’re past the peak of Hubbert’s curve and oil isn’t going to be cheap for the uses he brags about much longer.    (CSInvesting: Whether fact-based, true or untrue, all this critic asserts is not backed up with evidence–an assertion is not an argument.)  Appeal to authority argument–I’m in the industry and brilliant, you’re an idiot, so listen up!

Once the Saudis stop flooding the market with cheap oil to drive out the competition, it will pick up again to the levels of demand that anyone in the oil futures business knows so well, and we’ll be unable to use it for cheap plastics, fertilizers, pesticides, and all the other stuff that we wasted nearly all the planet’s oil heritage on. The moral case is clearly that we need to wean ourselves OFF of using up the last remaining oil so quickly before it reaches its true levels of scarcity, and it’s irresponsible to encourage people to use it up faster.
As all of my co-workers in the oil industry (and the students I trained who are now high in the business as well) know, oil is getting scarcer and scarcer, and the last thing we need to do is use it up faster and crash the global economy. Most of my colleagues in oil also agree that climate change is a serious problem–even though the bosses at ExxonMobil and Koch are bankrolling the climate denial lobby. Before you believe garbage by an industry hack with no actual training in the field, listen to those of us INSIDE the industry and INSIDE the climate science community. Our future is at stake when we make bad decisions based on crummy books like this!   (CSInvesting: I am an expert, therefore all my assertions are correct.   What’s to argue?  What better way to move to renewable energy than to let the free market decide to price oil at $1,000 a barrel–therefore making nuclear or hydro power more economic).

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Environmentalists are evil: George Reisman-

Here’s David M. Graber, in his prominently featured Los Angeles Times book review of Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature: “McKibben is a biocentrist, and so am I (See video of debate below). We are not interested in the utility of a particular species or free-flowing river, or ecosystem, to mankind. They have intrinsic value, more value—to me—than another human body, or a billion of them.… It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil-energy consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape. Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.”

And here’s Prince Philip of England (who for sixteen years was president of the World Wildlife Fund): “In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.” (A lengthy compilation of such statements, and worse, by prominent environmentalists can be found at Frightening Quotes from Environmentalists.)

There is no negative reaction from the environmental movement because what such statements express is nothing other than the actual philosophy of the movement. This is what the movement believes in. It’s what it agrees with. It’s what it desires. Environmentalists are no more prepared to attack the advocacy of mass destruction and death than Austrian economists are prepared to attack the advocacy of laissez-faire capitalism and economic progress. Mass destruction and death is the goal of environmentalists, just as laissez-faire capitalism and economic progress is the goal of Austrian economists.

And this is why I call environmentalism evil. It’s evil to the core. In the environmental movement, contemplating the mass death of people in general is no more shocking than it was in the Communist and Nazi movements to contemplate the mass death of capitalists or Jews in particular. All three are philosophies of death. The only difference is that environmentalism aims at death on a much larger scale.

Despite still being far from possessing full power in any country, the environmentalists are already responsible for approximately 96 million deaths from malaria across the world. These deaths are the result of the environmentalist-led ban on the use of DDT, which could easily have prevented them and, before its ban, was on the verge of wiping out malaria. The environmentalists brought about the ban because they deemed the survival of a species of vultures, to whom DDT was apparently poisonous, more important than the lives of millions of human beings.

The deaths that have already been caused by environmentalism approximate the combined number of deaths caused by the Nazis and Communists.

If and when the environmentalists take full power, and begin imposing and then progressively increasing the severity of such things as carbon taxes and carbon caps, in order to reach their goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 90 percent, the number of deaths that will result will rise into the billions, which is in accord with the movement’s openly professed agenda of large-scale depopulation. (The policy will have little or no effect on global mean temperatures, the reduction of which is the rationalization for its adoption, but it will have a great effect on the size of human population.)

It is not at all accidental that environmentalism is evil and that its leading spokesmen hold or sanction ideas that are indistinguishable from those of sociopaths. Its evil springs from a fundamental philosophical doctrine that lies at the very core and deepest foundations of the movement, a doctrine that directly implies the movement’s destructiveness and hatred of the human race. This is the doctrine of the alleged intrinsic value of nature, i.e., that nature is valuable in and of itself, apart from all connection to human life and well being. This doctrine is accepted by the movement without any internal challenge, and, indeed, is the very basis of environmentalism’s existence.

As I wrote in Capitalism, “The idea of nature’s intrinsic value inexorably implies a desire to destroy man and his works because it implies a perception of man as the systematic destroyer of the good, and thus as the systematic doer of evil. Just as man perceives coyotes, wolves, and rattlesnakes as evil because they regularly destroy the cattle and sheep he values as sources of food and clothing, so on the premise of nature’s intrinsic value, the environmentalists view man as evil, because, in the pursuit of his well-being, man systematically destroys the wildlife, jungles, and rock formations that the environmentalists hold to be intrinsically valuable. Indeed, from the perspective of such alleged intrinsic values of nature, the degree of man’s alleged destructiveness and evil is directly in proportion to his loyalty to his essential nature. Man is the rational being. It is his application of his reason in the form of science, technology, and an industrial civilization that enables him to act on nature on the enormous scale on which he now does. Thus, it is his possession and use of reason—manifested in his technology and industry—for which he is hated.”

Thus these are the reasons that I think it is necessary for people never to describe themselves as environmentalists, that to do is comparable to describing oneself as a Communist or Nazi. Doing so marks one as a hater and enemy of the human race.

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Climate Change Caused by Man? List_of_scientists_opposing_the_mainstream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming

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For and Against Fossil Fuels