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Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

> According to a press release from Bloomberg Philanthropies, this push to shut down coal-fired power plants will push officials to invest in renewable energy and clean jobs.

On one hand, it's better if we get rid of coal than if we don't, and we should do it now.

On the other hand, people who work at coal plants and lose their jobs will not turn around and become solar panel installers or wind turbine maintenance technicians. The most likely outcome is life will get worse for them. We've seen the consequences of this already from the manufacturing sector, and it's not pretty. Drugs, poverty, violence, depression.

I'm not saying we should not close down coal plants, I'm just saying there will be consequences and "they'll all work for clean tech, and live happily ever after" is not a responsible plan.

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> people who work at coal plants and lose their jobs will not turn around and become solar panel installers

They could. They won’t, because of loss aversion and inertia. But a smart community could tell Bloomberg they’ll close their plant if they get a subsidy for a battery plant or a very large concentrated solar power plant.

It’s a prisoner’s dilemma. And I don’t know if there’s a solution for the mines. But the tragedy is that the populations surrounded by coal aren’t selecting for long-term decision makers.

Moreover, this is not a huge group of people we're talking about here. The entire US coal industry employs about 55k people, from top to bottom. It's not that big.

He could directly pay each one about $9,000 for getting a new job. This probably doesn't sound like much money, but a lot of these coal jobs are in extremely poor areas of the US. It's a life-changing amount of money for many of them.

Of course the real problem is that most renewables are too efficient. They don't need that many people. Once the wind turbine, solar panels, or batteries are installed they don't need someone out there every day working on them. Not the way that coal miners have to keep digging coal. It's the kind of job that puts itself out of business over time.

This money is going to pr not building plants. Half a billion isn't enough to build one plant

> money is going to pr not building plants

There is tons of private capital ready to finance new plants. If coal communities grant permits, the panels will be laid.

Also, I’m suggesting a plan an enterprising community could launch to put themselves at the front of the line. Hell, they could probably sell carbon credits against the phase-out.

> Half a billion isn't enough to build one plant

Georgia Power builds utility-scale solar plants smaller than that[1]. 139 MW in the $200m price range (in 2017) certainly counts.

Add to that in order to build a $200m plant does not require $200m of liquid cash any more than buying a $500k house requires $500k of liquid cash.

$500m can put a significant amount of utility-scale solar online (although this effort does not appear to be geared to directly instantiate new power generation).

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/georgia-power-annou...

If the money went towards utility scale solar it would install about 666MW of production at the current average rate of $0.75/W installed. This is not much considering that currently coal plants generate about 200,000MW of power in the US. Obviously direct investment on this level will not be enough to achieve the goal of total Coal shutdown.

It's also worth noting that many coal plant "shutdowns" are actually just conversions to natural gas, which from a carbon perspective is more of a sidestep. Better for the environment, but far less so than offsetting the production with renewables.

I used to live in WV and can attest that coal mining jobs have been on the decline for some time. The reason is because the equipment is bigger, better and they can mine more effectively resulting in needing way less workers. You can skip to the conclusion in the linked article [1] which states:

> What happened to coal jobs is even simpler. It is the same thing that happened throughout much of the country — productivity gains led to fewer workers needed to produce the same output.

Sure some people will re-train and join a new industry, but we still need heavy equipment operators for other construction sites. There is potential that a big mining site for lithium could open up [2], then we would need miners yet again. There will unfortunately be those who don't want to move or retrain that will instead resort to just doing drugs.

Personally I think we should welcome phasing out coal and, as policy, offer help to those who's jobs were displaced to prevent creation of meth towns.

[1] https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/what-ki... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/30/23849619/lithium-ev-batte...

The answer to this is to stop regarding humans as worthless the instant they lose their jobs. This is the other side of the coin of venerating "hard-working Americans" -- everyone who's currently down on their luck is the opposite: worthless, lazy, stupid, entitled. Those same people "asking for government handouts" were "hard working Americans" just recently, up until forces beyond their control caused their workplace to shut down.

The economy is receiving enormous benefits from increased automation and AI and will only continue to do so super-linearly (if not exponentially) for the foreseeable future. We get to decide whether those benefits should go entirely to the people who already own everything, or whether some fraction of those benefits should go to everyone. If we can finally recognize that hundred-billionaires exist not by being a million times smarter and more productive than everyone else, but by riding the waves of a heavily interconnected and increasingly automated economy, maybe we'll finally accept heavy taxes on the beneficiaries of such automation that can be distributed as basic income.

So that's the answer, or at least a huge step in the right direction: basic income. For everyone.

Meanwhile, let's still shut down coal plants, shall we?

The fact is that they will lose their jobs, sooner or later, that is going to happen. So do you start to think about it now and figure something out, or act like all the politicians who campaign on "protecting coal mining jobs" while those mining companies go out of business themselves (because, well, market) even without these forces.

That's the sort of generic argument you can make against ever changing anything.

I think if you read my comment again, you'll find that I'm not arguing against changing anything.

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