It's Time To Let Coal Die | Climate Town

now I've never actually seen the movie Weekend at Bernie's

but statistically neither have you it's

just one of those things everybody knows

about which is convenient because puppeting

a corpse around for personal gain is

a really good metaphor for the coal industry in America now

don't get me wrong for

150 years the handful of rich people who owned coal mines and coal-fired

power plants in the United States were at the top of a thriving industry

fully capable of supporting itself not unlike Weekend at Bernie's

I I assume I've never seen the movie

unfortunately for coal however the

last 15 years have

been a real kick in the stones Cole

went from being the Undisputed

king of electrical production in the mid-2000s

to being passed by both natural gas and renewable energy like solar and wind

Coal Power is now so expensive that some utilities are buying working coal

plants just to shut them down to get out of their contracts

it's like owning a million pay phone booths right when cell phones came out

and just like big Payphone big

coal is hemorrhaging money almost

every major U.S coal operator has already declared

bankruptcy at least once and some have done it over and over again as

a way to weasel out of paying Pension funds to the coal miners they

claim to care about

and then up up

out of the up

out of the bench

I'm dead I can't help

there we go okay all

right you know what they get it we're doing a Weekend at Bernie's bed

you guys are good thanks so much I really appreciate it thank you yeah

I don't want to make you do that Coal

Power is a dirty expensive

1800s era technology that

cannot compete with modern forms of electricity generation

and in the vast majority of cases

it's cheaper to build all

new solar and wind farms from

scratch than it is to just keep

using existing coal plants

but what if I told you we

could save we can't it's

dead but what if I told you we could huh

sounds pretty intriguing right sounds

like the kind of thing you might be able to get the U.S government

to spend billions of taxpayer

dollars on to prop up a dying industry

so you could squeeze the last dollars

out of your existing coal

mines huh because let me tell you about

Clean Coal Clean Coal Clean Coal beautiful Clean

Coal Clean Coal really

clean cold the only problem with Clean Coal

is that it doesn't exist

yeah I mean you can certainly say it loudly plain

cold but you can't actually make clean electricity

out of coal now

some people will try to tell you about carbon

capture or CO2 utilization

but no matter how you move the numbers around Clean

Coal is the pair of sunglasses

on a dead guy being picked up and carried around a dance floor

or yacht and wherever Bernie lives I don't know I haven't seen the movie

hi I'm Raleigh Williams a guy with a climate science and policy degree and

two very nice friends and

it's time to let Cole

die welcome to climate town

all right so there was a time when coal powered electricity was like iPhone

14 level technology back

in the 1800s when electricity

was first getting developed and a blossoming

electrical grid created a big demand for something they could burn to make street

lights work Thomas Edison was there to Electrify

America and also like

Electrify a ton of stray cats and dogs

like to death as

in like Thomas Edison

electrocuted and murdered a bunch of innocent animals which is some classic sociopaths

that kind of gets swept under the old historical

rug well Tommy red flags

decided to start the Edison illuminating

company and he built the first ever coal-fired

power plant in the United States

and then we'll cut to me standing that's right the Pearl Street Station

commissioned in 1882 and run on pure 100 American

coal baby and now it's

a parking lot demand

for electrified buildings and illuminated sidewalks

meant an abundant supply of American coal

and before long the streets were full of kids taking their pet Hoops for

a nighttime stroll by the glow of coal-powered

Illumination coal quickly became the dominant source of electricity and by 1924

American demand for coal meant employing 860

000 coal miners I mean my God one

in every hundred Americans

was a coal miner and coal companies treated their employees like

sorry like uh human

beings making sure they had safe work and good pay oh

sorry I have this paper upside down one sec let me just

oh no no no no no no

yeah yeah it's one of those will work mining

was dangerous work and the miners that powered America would routinely be killed by

mine collapses flooding or just good old-fashioned

exploded to death they would also be poisoned

by a gas known as an after Dam which was a fun term miners

had but when a bunch of carbon monoxide and other gases would poison your

lungs and you would die there was also black damp white damp steak damn

fire damn all very fun terms for ways miners got killed while making millions

of dollars for the people that owned the mines

and if you didn't get murdered by unsafe working conditions

miners got rewarded with a little thing called Black Lung or its kissing cousin

lung cancer and if that wasn't bad enough miners

were constantly being exploited

by mining companies and

cataloging their experiences in

absolutely Barn Burning songs My

Favorite of which being 16 tons

below 16 Tons what

do you get another

day older and deeper

in debt St Peter don't you call me cause I

can't go I owe my soul to the company store

and if it wasn't obvious what owing his soul to the company store meant

it refers to a fun little tradition American mine owners and operators practiced

known as debt bondage or debt slavery miners

were required to buy their own supplies but they could only do it at

the company store which

would charge insanely high prices for the pickaxes

and food and everything and

since they were paid almost nothing to begin with miners

fell deeper and deeper in debt to the mining company the

longer they worked naturally coal miners were sick of getting exploited

and enslaved and frequently killed so they formed unions

unfortunately for the miners this was the first and last straw for the mine

owners and the coal Wars began and I'm not being dramatic

these were actual wars fought between the mine owners and the miners because Coal

Mine owners were not good guys I

encourage you to check out the horrendous

treatment of minors but to get you started check out the Matawan massacre

in West Virginia where

private police hired by the coal company fought the union Miners and left 10

dead including the mayor or check out all

these other massacres or just take a peek at the paint Creek mine

War a war that was started because the miners had a list of Demands

that the mine owners found completely

ridiculous and I could go on forever

because America built itself out of coal and the men who mined that coal

were viciously exploited by coal Barons past and present it

turns out if you have enough money and you don't really give a about

your employees you can win just about any war against them and coal power

went on like that for like 80 more years with

coal mine owners getting rich and coal miners are

getting shafted it is demand for electricity grew

and grew in the United States demand

for coal grew right along with it but

as the pages of a calendar fell off time is passing old movie montage

style a funny thing happened to Cole it turned out burning

all that coal for electricity

released a lot of gases into the atmosphere you know your knocks your socks

your carbon diox coal

ash just normal stuff Mercury

you know that kind of thing that causes spikes in respiratory

disease asthma child mortality

and a little thing called climate

change and and people are starting to make the connection a

coal industry study found that by 2007

public support for coal had eroded

so badly that roughly 50 percent of the country opposed

coal use for power generation

with just 46 in

favor and presumably four percent of people who just shot themselves in the head

rather than take a survey on the phone now a big coal was probably

tempted to just tell America to go itself because they made the electricity that

the country runs on but they knew that public opinion

could come with government regulation

and they didn't want that to eat into their profits so they decided to

address the whole situation with

some nice cheap words I'm

talking about Clean Coal

I believe in the future I

believe I believe we can use American energy resources

I believe in technology we

can we will clean

coal it's a big challenge but we've made a commitment learn more about Clean

Coal at americaspower.org Clean Coal

technology means that you are using coal without putting pollutants into the atmosphere

now did the technology exist

no but was there a promising prototype

on the way also

no but could they claim to be working on a magical new Clean Coal

technology while taking millions

of dollars in free government money changing

nothing about their business practices and kicking the can down the road oh

yeah yeah yes I mean they were hoping they could make Clean Coal work

but much more important than it actually working was

saying they were working on it I mean they literally hired the pr firm

that invented the phrase what happens in Vegas stays

in Vegas to publicize

the concept of Clean Coal they spent millions

of dollars making sure everybody

heard about it and

my god did people love the sound of it Clean Coal Clean Coal Clean

Coal Clean Coal was part of our Energy Future clean cold Clean

Coal technology is something that can make America energy independent

their PR campaign worked better than they ever expected

and by the end of 2008

the coal industry found that 72

percent of Americans approved

of coal power the federal government even spent hundreds of millions of dollars to

make sure Clean Coal worked the way the coal industry said it would that's

why we support it adding

200 million dollars in

funding for studies on carbon

uh see so the department of energy hand-picked

the eight most promising Clean Coal projects

and what kind of detail-oriented

try hard YouTube channel would I be if I didn't talk about all

eight of them ah

but don't panic click on something less tedious just yet because

seven of the eight projects

failed before they even started

construction yeah it turns out really wanting clean cold work is different from it

actually working and luckily the government accountability

office wrote a whole report detailing

how the money was wasted so

let's get right into it hey

okay two of the eight projects ran the numbers and dropped out before they

even started designing their operations

that is how financially insolvent

the concept of Clean Coal

is basically when you burn coal on a large scale you produce millions of

tons of carbon dioxide in a bunch of other gases

to make Clean Coal you have to isolate

the carbon dioxide before it leaves the Smoke Stack compress

it down jam it into a little pipe and send it somewhere to be

permanently stored and it turns out that even if the government is

giving you Millions of dollars of

free money grabbing those millions of tons of carbon dioxide is so prohibitively

expensive it's not even worth attempting

Basin electric literally turned down a

hundred million dollar check from the Department of energy because

as much as they wanted Clean Coal to be a thing they

knew it wasn't an

actual thing but the idea of Clean Coal

was so intoxicating to the government that

they kept showering failing

projects with money despite

those projects not meeting required

key Milestones so you said you don't want the federal government to pick winners

and losers in the energy sector

why then spend 2 billion on Clean

well because we know Clean Coal is a winner because

we know Clean Coal is a winner when they went over budget the department

of energy allowed the projects to take money from the construction and operation phases

and use it for design and research and they even reduced the cost sharing

requirements from the private energy companies

down to one percent in

total the U.S government spent

472 million dollars of taxpayer

money to have seven separate

groups of people inform

them that Clean Coal was a losing proposition

but then again that's

the Socialist subsidized coal industry for you ah

but eagle-eared viewers out there will know that seven projects

is one fewer than eight projects

which means one of the projects worked

in Clean Coal works perfectly and

oh boy do I have a no it doesn't for

you let's talk about a little project I like to call Petra

Nova and as far as names go Petra

Nova is actually pretty cool

I mean it's way better than me having to say Uncle Ronnie's

big bad smoke sucker 40 times in the next 10 minutes

now remember it's not impossible

to separate out the CO2 and

lock it away it's

just exorbitantly expensive but the engineers at Petra Nova had a novel solution they

thought might work they

wouldn't lock it away they

would take the 1.4

million metric tons of CO2 they intended to capture every year compress

it into a pipe send it 80 miles away to

be used to extract more oil from oil wells which is then burned

to make more CO2

so not so much capturing

CO2 as using it to make more

CO2 awesome but at least they figured out how to capture the carbon right

well the company that co-owns

and operates the petronova

carbon capture machine NRG

claims they can capture 90 of

total carbon emissions which

sounds amazing but seeing as how we're already here let's just pop the old

hood on this thing and make sure there's no horseplay going oh

damn it's actually all

what a shame who could have predicted that let's get right into it so

the power plant has four coal units Each of which are generating carbon

dioxide but petrinova only captures the carbon from

one of the units so 90

of 25 and that's not exactly true because petrinova

couldn't actually handle the carbon emissions from one whole unit so

they built it a little pipe and let petrinova

deal with just about a third of the emissions which

means they spent a

billion dollars on a machine that

can handle less than 10 percent of the carbon emissions and

that's not even true because petrinova

breaks down so often it's

offline another 30 percent of the time so let me just fix that here

cool that's better a billion dollars for an eight percent reduction

but wait because Petra

Nova itself needs power to suck that carbon dioxide out of the Stream So

they built an entirely

new natural gas-fired plant which has its own emissions to the projected tune of

800 000 tons of CO2 per year which

is half of the CO2

petronova was supposed to capture in

the first place so

that eight percent is

now four percent and

if this entire thing has Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly energy which

is if you don't get that reference it's a nursery rhyme about a lady

who swallows bigger ant doesn't make any God it doesn't matter because that four

percent is now zero

percent because petronova shut down in 2020.

yeah you remember how petrinova

is completely dependent on Government funding

plus selling CO2 to get more oil well

when oil prices dropped

in 2020 petrinova was deactivated

and just to be clear Petra

Nova is shut down but the power plant it was attached to is

still alive and well and blasting out 14 million

tons of CO2 per year so just to recap the

most successful Clean Coal

project in American history

the one that ended up being constructed

for a total cost of one

billion dollars after private

financing required a whole new gas-fired

power plant to work captured

less than eight percent of the total carbon emissions and

use that captured carbon dioxide to extract more oil which released more carbon

dioxide and the entire thing collapsed

in 2020 when the price of oil dipped

skin awesome and to round out this consummate train wreck that is the best

case scenario for carbon capture the company that co-owned

the one billion dollar petronova

project sold their half of the assets to their Japanese partner

for just 3.6 million

dollars all those millions of taxpayer

dollars all the research all the engineering

scrapped for a few million and attacks right off and

that is the state of clean call in America

you know what no no blop okay because petrinova

was the good one okay there's tons of other projects

that were more expensive failed

more spectacularly that the government also

funded in a desperate effort to get Clean Coal to work because

we know clean color is a winner some projects were at least 10 times

more exploded with a hundred times more Drone footage of them exploding

and even though we're setting it to music just remember each of these represents

millions of public dollars

not getting spent on something useful

and that basically brings us to present day and if you're old enough to

remember the beginning of this video you

might recall that coal in America is in an absolute free fall and not

like a fun free fall like a bunch of surfer burglar

friends linking hands more like the free fall from the beginning of that rock

climbing or that other rock climbing movie

you know what a lot of rock climbing movies seem to start with somebody

just getting absolutely turfed

Cole's main assassin was fracking which basically unlocked

a ton of methane gas from Shale and flooded the electrical generation Market with

a cheap abundant alternative to Coal but the big surprise has been the insane

cost drop of renewable energy like wind and solar power from the time petrinova

was designed to the time it was up and running the

cost of solar power had

dropped by 86 percent which

means it would have literally been cheaper to just install solar

panels rather than try to wish Clean Coal into existence

making and this is not a guess in an astoundingly

comparable Stroke of Luck there's a utility scale solar project under construction right

now in the same county as the former petronova

project that is 240

megawatts of power which

is exactly the same equivalent output as petronova

and if you're forcing me to do a comparison Petra

Nova costs a billion dollars and the solar farm is projected to cost just

258 million and because its fuel source is the Sun and not the blood

and bones of dinosaurs

it'll be reducing emissions by you

know a hundred percent and

for anyone out there screaming

that the sun doesn't always shine or the wind doesn't always blow and that

we need coal because it's reliable

let me just tell you I

knew you would say that I wrote it into the script right

here because solar and wind farms are more and more commonly being built with

battery storage they take in excess energy and store it so they can deploy

it whenever just like a coal plant modern

technology advances and it's just a real bummer to see these long dead anti-renewable

energy talking points getting dusted

off and paraded around like

their Bernie at Weekend at Bernie's

when they wanted to go to Bernie's

party but then if Bernie was dead they knew they wouldn't be able to

go and they were going to be

babes at the party

and no because then it would be called party at Bernie so the weekend

is obviously a critical piece of the machine what

is this movie about I

could have watched it I had so much time but if Renewables

and natural gas are so Star-Spangled

great and coal is so dead why

am I even talking about this surely

that free market will come through and sort everything out libertarian

style well that's where you'd be wrong because years of being the dominant source

of energy in the United States has left the coal industry with

some pretty amazing political

connections and connection isn't

quite strong enough of a word because the chairman of the U.S Senate committee

on energy and natural resources

is a literal coal

Baron yeah Senator Joe manchin

is part owner of multiple coal companies has millions tied up in stock options

that depend on coal maintaining its relevance and of course has been a major

deciding vote on U.S energy policy

for years Joe manchin

personally tanked the buildback better bill that would have had negative implications for coal

I cannot vote to continue with

this piece of legislation

I just can't and

at his Direction the 2021

infrastructure bill and the 2022

inflation reduction Act contained

billions of dollars marked for carbon capture including

more Clean Coal Clean Coal Clean Coal clean Cold clean Cold clean cold and

if you're thinking maybe he just didn't know about the government accountability

offices scathing report on the technological

dead end that is carbon capture for coal or maybe nobody told him it

was literally addressed directly

to him he's the first name on the report this

is insane there's an obvious conflict of interest in having a man who personally

makes money if coal plants stay open writing

legislation that determines whether coal plants stay

open in a letter Senator manchin wrote to the West Virginia coal

Association after knowing full well how ineffective

Clean Coal is he brags about the billions he's continuing

to deliver for more Clean Coal Tech that hasn't worked any of the other

times they've tried it and the final in dignity

to this whole car accident is

that despite the socialism

of government handouts to the people at the top of the coal industry the

coal miners are being forced to absorb the financial losses

oh yeah we're pro coal miner here at climate Town coal

miners are people who are trying to do their jobs because they want to

do that thing where they feed their families but as mining jobs continue

to drop off transitioning

America's miners to good paying careers like

in renewable energy is

crucial to actually supporting

them and this is not just my Johnny Brooklyn opinion

the biggest coal miner Union in America supports

a just transition to Renewables

coal owners and operators will say they're supporting minors but that's a pretty hard

position to defend when they're also strategically

declaring bankruptcy to get out of paying those same miners

pensions coal companies are even refusing

to pay the miners their last paychecks

and back pay forcing

those miners to blockade train loads of coal and of course it's

even worse than that because there there's money available to jumpstart renewable energy projects

in Coal towns but coal companies are actively blocking

those jobs from entering their communities this

is not a supportive

relationship this is the same story told by coal miners for hundreds of years

they work themselves into the ground for coal and at the end they're stuck

holding the check Coal

Mine owners and operators are using their miners as human Shields

kind of like in Weekend at Bernie's

and wow what a dark premise that

actually is that's a dead body they're puppeting

around that's pretty messed up never

thought about it like that

gotta really rethink what I think the plot is okay

let's bring this thing into the station no

matter how many times Ken

Bone asks us to bring back coal plants they're on the way out since

2009 over half of all coal plants in the United States have

closed and not just the old ones a Texas unit closed down in 2018

less than 10 years after it was built a lot of people talked a

big game about bringing

cold jobs back but the number of coal miners has continued its downward Decline

and is now around 38

000 people which means the United States coal industry has already lost 95

percent of its mining jobs all

the data is screaming at America to

phase out coal and get our former miners jobs and Alternative forms of energy

but we keep sinking

billions of taxpayer dollars into a fake technology

because the people in charge get paid when coal gets funding coal

is dying and no amount of sunglasses

or puppeteering can change that fact and

the sooner we admit this inescapable

truth the sooner we can put those billions of taxpayer

dollars to work on an equitable transition for

our miners our plant workers and Working Class People All Over America because

if we let the coal industry keep trying to pull this Weekend at Bernie's

the next thing you know they'll want to do a Weekend at Bernie's

too and Lord knows

this country can't survive

that wow that was a long one thank you so much for watching climate

town we got some more good stuff at the end of this video but

first uh ad break oh

yeah every once in a while a

company we actually like asks

us to advertise for a product that we actually like and

frankly I'm not above that so

here's an ad some

people are desperate to learn like me I was so desperate for information that

I took out fifty

thousand dollars in student loans from Colombia to learn information that was freely available

on books or in the internet will

I pay it back I

don't know maybe I wouldn't have gone back to school if I had known

about brilliant that's right brilliant that's our sponsor for this video it's a brilliant

commercial brilliant lets you learn interactively

and they have a disgusting amount of different lessons

and subjects and I don't even want to get into it thousands

it's too many pisses

me off but if you want to learn brilliant

is a great tool because you could suddenly have access to a ridiculous

amount of knowledge at any time anywhere

and at any Pace you want I'm talking five minutes a day one minute

a day that doesn't sound like a lot but a minute can be really

long too long or you can just pop off download

information to your brain like neon from The Matrix

or make it your full-time job I'm not even allowed

to tell you how to use brilliant

that's how high tier this stuff is it's college level content

look at all this good stuff so go learn something or

don't you're the boss of your own body thanks

brilliant brilliant and then we'll do a little diamond on my tooth and that's

the end of the ad which means you

did it you made it all the way to the end of the video

thank you so much if you thought I was lying about having never seen

Weekend at Bernie's I promise I wasn't I actually made it a point to

not learn anything about the movie so that I could watch the whole thing

at the end when I was done editing

this so if you'd like to watch it with me I'm going to live

stream it on January 22nd

at 2PM as a Sunday at 2 p.m Eastern if you're into

time zones so uh come check it out with me I'll have a link

in the bottom of this video and

if you want to hear a full summary of what I think the movie

might be about I've

already recorded it and it's available right

now at patreon.com climate

town what's that you

ask well it's our patreon

page and if you really want to support the show you

can throw us like five bucks a month and get access to some deleted

scenes in a goofball

videos and that kind kind of thing also my friend Tony Dominic

who sang the 16 tons song recorded

the whole thing and that's also available up

on patreon if you feel like listening to that we also have a very

active Discord server with a bunch of climate Town people on there right now

hanging out chatting and just basically talking about ways they can get involved with

the climate crisis on

the on the prevented

side of things probably

anyway do it not yet

do it now Jackson

very common phrase everybody knows the you can just call people Jackson and it's

fine and if you're really just spoiling

for something to do right now our friends at climate change makers have put

together a whole Playbook on exactly what to do to tell your representatives

that you think your tax dollar is going to the fossil fuel industry

is a real bummer

okay thanks so much for watching I look forward to watching a Weekend at

Bernie's with you see

you next time really

I have not tried marijuana

I have never used it at any time