The coal industry is one of, if not the largest industry in Wyoming. As wind and solar become the least-cost source of new generation, the economic viability of coal generation is threatened. Rather than allow the free market to select the least-cost solution, so-called Republicans who think government shouldn't pick winers, are picking winners.
Republicans are not at all in any way pro free market, that's just a propaganda ploy, a Jedi mind trick for the weak. They are, have always been, classist. They believe in retaining class distinctions. Everything they do is a preservation of differentiation of the American version of the caste system. And it's why some people seem to vote against their economic interests, like coal workers. They voted Republican to preserve their class, not actually get ahead, and to preserve the class of their company's owners, rich landed elite.
So now the calculus will be, which party will sign on to protecting the human worker vs the robot, in a variation of the H-1B program. The really dangerous jobs will go to the robots, ostensibly to protect the worker, so that there's still this differentiation of class preservation.
Naturally, anyone who disagrees with this is a traitor to their class, because everyone should want to be preserve the class caste system. Know your proper place. Some people are in fact better than others. Equality is P.C. bullcrap.
When Republicans talk about supporting innovation and removing "burdensome regulations", and this is the kind of protectionist agenda they support, it's clear they have no real interest in true innovation. They merely want to protect the antiquated business models of sluggish industries that actually refuse to innovate. Real innovation is difficult, it requires revolutionary thinking, and the coal industry certainly doesn't want to think too hard about changing their business. They just want to extract more coal cheaply and sell it at the same profit. Because they refuse to innovate, they are threatened by competitors who have invested in renewables and made progress such that their prices are now close to fossil fuels.
Why don't Republicans champion the innovation of the renewables industry? If they truly cared about innovation they would, but it's clear that they hide behind this rhetoric only to protect their powerful lobbyist friends.
It might not be because they're republicans. It might be because their constituents are the beneficiaries of the local coal industry. The politicians are just doing what their voters want. They're puppets of the people who live there and want to keep their jobs at the expense of everyone else.
As much as I considerably support the transition toward renewables - I agree: this is fundamentally the job of state and local politicians. They can actively attempt to shape the conversation on a local level - but they are "hired" as a representative of the people and the people's will. It's the people, on a local level, that must be convinced that change is necessary.
Yeah, yeah, I know that's 19th century, but I hope to show your generalizations are absurdly broad.
Hell, even 21st century, we have a populist Republican president appealing to blue-collar workers. Characterizing the Republican party as elitists oppressing the masses is woefully incomplete.
To be fair, the Republican party is widely viewed as having gone through a major shift in policy and makeup with Nixon's 'southern strategy'[1] in the 60s. Comparing the modern Republican party with anything pre-1960 requires taking things with a whole truckload of salt.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
You are the one who imputed that 'cmurf referred to all parties named the Republican Party, rather than the more logical interpretation as the current party named the Republican Party.
"The logical interpretation"? There's not much logical about using the word "always" and expecting everyone understand "currently" was actually meant, when no caveat like "modern" was included.
This gets my goat more on the grounds of using sweeping absolute statements, than any care for the reputation of Republicans, current or pre-1960.
On the other hand, the fact that a blowhard troll like Dinesh D'Souza passes for an intellectual in the modern Republican party is more evidence that they're definitely not elitists.
That would be convicted felon Dinesh D'Souza, author of such timeless classics as Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me about Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party. Didn't he get fired from King's College for cheating on his wife?
>Didn't he get fired from King's College for cheating on his wife?
Education institution that fires people based on their personal life choices that don't affect their work? And I thought we were done with this crap in the 21st century.
(1) Adultery is not your average indiscretion. Breaking a marriage contract is illegal in most jurisdictions (though it is rarely enforced).
(2) When you teach at a religious institution, "personal life choices that don't affect their work?" is less of a thing, because you've deliberately related work and religion (i.e. personal choices).
It might not be your cup of tea, but some students want to attend an institution of high moral standards, as well as high academic standards.
You can bring up D'Souza's getting fired for cheating on his wife with the Board of Trustees of King's College. Their address is:
56 Broadway, New York, NY 10004
Since King's College is an accredited, Christian liberal arts college, I can only assume that they demand the highest moral character from their professors and administration. And stuff.
Why would I? I don't care about their views on morality, and they can decide whatever they like. I wouldn't regard religious schools as a quality education though.
But I'm not sure why extramarital relations are being brought up as a way to discredit someone, when it's of zero relevance.
Um, no. An ad hominem argument would be if I were attacking 551199's character which I'm not. Instead, 551199 cited D'Souza as a reliable source and I attacked D'Souza's character. See the difference? Good.
I am however, impeaching D'Souza's credibility as a source.
..based on political views you find odious, rather than directly attacking what you think is right or wrong about the particular (unrelated) statement in question. That is an ad hominem argument.
Well, I didn't know that a felony conviction or cheating on your wife were political views. However, given the current President, perhaps you're right.
Specifically, pointing out the obviously biased nature of a source calls to question the credibility of said source, even before we get to addressing the argument itself.
Again, the arguer was+is 551199 and I'm not attacking him. However, he did trot out the odious Dinesh D'Souza and I felt it necessary to put that cretin into his proper context. So I'm not attacking the arguer; I'm attacking his alternate facts.
This whole Dinesh D'Souza tangent is a distraction to avoid talking about the issue at hand.
I think its safe to say that one the guiding principles of the modern Republican party is that less government regulation is better for everyone.
So why is the party that always advocates for less regulation and more competition REGULATING the energy market and RESTRICTING competition? Maybe because they aren't really for less regulation and more competition. Maybe they are about protecting the status quo?
Squaring the less regulation/more competition principles against this Wyoming law, or the anti-Tesla legislation in conservative states seems to indicate that these "principles" are an idealogical front to justify at least what some people want - Protecting their interests.
That's disingenuous at best, and frankly you should be ashamed to present such a weak argument.
And in the 21st century, as you mention, the "populist Republican president" is pretty blatantly playing an inside game and an outside game, cursing the industry and political establishment to the public, then going inside and shaking hands and sitting down with the same people, going so far as to put them on his cabinet and deep inside his government.
In the 1960s the Democrats and Republicans switched places on a lot of issues. It wasn't taught very well to me in school, and for a variety of reasons its not discussed much in the current media. Ovbiously, the parties themselves don't want to make a point out of it.
I suspect that the parties might flip again. The Democrats has been very pro-authoritarian lately for example loudly defending the FBI, CIA, drone programs, patriot act and erosion of civil liberties. While the Republicans have recently picked up a small anti-authoritarian streak. Both are now arguing from rather atypical positions for them.
I can see that. It would be rather disastrous. I wonder if that because more military officials seem to be Republican might give them an edge in strategic thinking? They have a majority of the electorate and yet still lose from time to time, mostly when the Republicans give them just enough rope to hang themselves with a few years prior.
The first Republicans did not focus on abolition because they wanted to change a class structure, they fought for abolition because they feared an unfair imbalance in the labor market as the nation expanded westward while the abolitionist policies of the northern states ensured that there would be a continuous set of compromises between new free and slave states such that over time the slave states would be dominant economically and politically (3/5ths clause).
While it may be true that some Republicans were motivated by economic concerns, I highly doubt all; and, I believe there were noted abolitionists that helped to form the party.
... because only Northern Republicans signed up to the Union army?
Not to mention that only the superficial accounts of the civil war say it was about slavery. Even Lincoln basically said the free slaves thing was basically just an add-on.
If you're going to be literalist in how you read others' comments, then be correct when you do so.
Take the original statement "Everything they do is a preservation of differentiation of the American version of the caste system." If that were really true in the absolute sense it was presented, Lincoln would not have freed the slaves, not even as a side-effect. It's fair to point that out as a counter-example when the original argument was so stark and black-and-white.
Or you could read it as "have always been" as in the commentor's own personal experience. Or as in the current serving representatives throughout their careers.
Taking a counterpoint from over 150 years ago and using a hard literalist interpretation... is a pretty pissweak way to counter the point that the GP was getting at. Extracting 'have always been' from everything that was said and then zeroing in on that like it's the core of the argument? It's an adolescent debating style.
That white savior narrative is bullshit. No matter what Lincoln did, you will see a pretty strong trend of people who fly Confederate flags and what party they support... It also does not excuse or somehow counteract the last half century of Republican actions
The real reason the US "freed" the slaves was because there was a cotton crisis in egypt, making the united States the primary supplier of cotton to Europe. Now, the civil war was a resources game of who could fund their armies the longest, and Lincoln was smart enough to know that Europe would most likely support the south in the war in order to ensure steady flow of suddenly more valuable cotton. So, he made the war about slavery and issued the emancipation proclamation. The language in the EP is very clearly aimed at European interests and it put a moral high ground underneath the north to stand on, to sort of guilt Europe from funding the south in the civil war. It wasn't about civil rights, it was about securing the war effort.
The emancipation proclamation was issued in 1863, same year as the Lancanshire Cotton Famine. The language of the document is clearly pointed outwards as much inwards.
Is this not true? Humans aren't equal. Some people are tall and others short, some are smart and others aren't, some are talented in certain ways and others in different ways. We can't all swim like Phelps and assuming you're a coder, Phelps probably can't code like you. There's nothing wrong with that. I think majority of human beings have something distinct that they can offer and what differentiates how successful one becomes is the graft one puts in. There's never been a greater time to showcase one's talents if sufficient effort is applied.
>They are, have always been, classist
Going back to my earlier point; we aren't equal. Some people will have the will to put in more time, money and effort. This naturally leads to class distinctions and a natural order. You want to entrust a company's leadership, for instance, on the most qualified individuals, not just anyone for the purposes of egalitarian sentiments. If this is the case, you MUST admit that people are different and that some are more qualified than others. This is not to say that one class should act in ways that would harm any other class.
As for the OPs submission, I don't agree with and sort of state or federal intervention. To me, it is wrong. Market forces should indeed determine what gets adopted as an energy source, be it coal or renewable.
Many of the west's coal power plants are powered from Wyoming coal. Lots of ways of life about to go away, lots of people desperately trying to protect the old. So strange to see this same theme repeated over and over in history, you'd think we'd learn after seeing this for so many centuries.
My way of life was just upended in October by machine learning, I didn't fight it instead I just switched careers. Not sure why others are so unwilling to do the same.
I think this is a very important point, in the past illiteracy used to be defined as people who couldn't read, in the future I think it's going to come to mean the people who can't or are unwilling to adapt and learn, we'll look down on them with pity like we used to all the people who couldn't read back in the 70s.
If you're on HN, it's very, very likely that you have a skill set, and knowledge base that makes career-changing fairly easy (relatively speaking, anyway).
If you've worked in a factory all your life, and suddenly all the factories around where you — and your well-established, extended family — live are closed down, or moved overseas, or whatever, you're probably going to be a bit less sanguine about the situation.
The myopia of tech people will probably never not astound me.
I couldn't agree more about the myopia. At the last place I worked I did a lot of interviewing of fresh outs for development and data science positions. Most of these kids came from elite schools with fine academic records. But hardly any of them had ever worked at a McDonalds or swung a hammer over the summer or done any job that made you sore the next day. I was in my 50s at the time and thought that strange but the HR folks said, nope, thats they way they all come these days.
I can't help but think that spending at least one summer picking oranges or unloading 18-wheelers would give tech people a little more perspective and some compassion for what most of the rest of the country has to deal with.
>Most of these kids came from elite schools with fine academic records. But hardly any of them had ever worked at a McDonalds or swung a hammer over the summer or done any job that made you sore the next day. I was in my 50s at the time and thought that strange but the HR folks said, nope, thats they way they all come these days.
That's a bit weird. I'm only 27, and I painted some basements and did some yard-work back in high school to earn spending money. I thought that was normal.
As far as I can tell it really isn't anymore. I'm 41 and worked in just about every trade involved in building a house plus a brief stint as a union ironworker before I got into tech. The overwhelming majority of tech industry coworkers I've had over the last 10 years have never performed any sort of manual labor and most are totally unfamiliar with basic tool use.
Did you deliberately skip the bit where a significant factor in my notional factory worker's situation is the "established, extended family"?
If you also can't move out of the place where there are no jobs left, that's an extra layer of fucked.
I made zero assumptions about anyone else's situation. I merely point out that the assumptions tech people make about job mobility are, on the whole, a lot less applicable if you aren't a tech person.
What tech people call "changing careers" tends to mean something like "Well, I do React now, but I used to do Rails." Trajectories like mine — I started my career writing C++, now I get paid for keeping people's PostgreSQL instances happy — are "uncommon", and mine happened gradually, over a few years.
What much of the rest of the US means by that is often more like, "Well I used to be a salesman, but now I'm a tool-and-die machinist." And those jobs are disappearing, too. (And all that leaves aside pursuing things that might require a certification or degree.)
Riding that level of cultural and social change is not something people know how to do, and might well look dauntingly impossible when you also have a family to feed. So to see people making six figures on the coasts talk down their noses about mobility and "intestinal fortitude" (from one of your comment's siblings) is, honestly, pretty galling.
I'm glad to see someone voicing this opinion. Empathy takes looking at why you're dismissing the plight of other people and seeing how hard you have to futz with the multipliers before you can't dismiss it anymore.
If us tech folk looked at it truly thoughtfully, we'd understand exactly how hard the world is for most people, and how easily it could turn that way for us.
Every industry is all about competition, consolidation, and maximizing profit. The older this one gets, the lower the wages are going to be for your run of the mill programmer. The societal message that "everyone should learn how to program!" is ultimately all about lowering wages.
As regular ol' programming tasks become cheaper and cheaper, we'll keep adapting and doing more specialized work, right? So what there's no one wanting to pay you 6 figs for making CRUD apps anymore. Just learn some machine learning and away you go! A year goes by and uh oh, Microsoft just added auto-ML to excel at the price of 20$ a month. How long can your job last? Better change specializations again!
Maybe it wont happen in our life times, but the wealth we're all capturing in this industry WILL dry up and get captured. And eventually there will be a new technological revolution that fills a new pond somewhere else. There will be a whole lot of callousness until a vast sum of us have to finally make that long horizontal migration. People who change from actionscript to rust are making tiny vertical migrations in career. It's not at all the same thing.
> If us tech folk looked at it truly thoughtfully, we'd understand exactly how hard the world is for most people, and how easily it could turn that way for us.
I'm going to avoid the whole blue-collar vs. the economy argument on HN, for once, but I do want to refresh people's memories here: this has happened, in 2000. I lived through it; purely coincidentally I decided to leave the software industry almost exactly the night before the house of cards came down, and the funny thing was that having "programmer" on my resume got me turned down for retail jobs. They assumed I was overqualified and would leave as soon as a software opportunity presented itself. More than one potential employer said as much.
It really sucked and there was a lot of noise made about it on places like Slashdot. If you were an unemployed programmer then, you pretty much gave up after a couple of months and transferred to something entirely different. (Many seemed to move to law.)
Unfortunately the folks that experienced that don't speak up in these threads and everyone else on HN is too young to remember it.
That wasn't my experience, and I graduated university in 1997. There was a period where there wasn't work to speak of, and the first job I landed after that was pretty crap (though it was also the job where I picked up the skills and exposure I needed to end up working as a Postgres DBA).
But I had some savings, collected unemployment, and had the help and support of friends (who also worked in tech, and weathered the .com bubble's popping more fortunately than I did) and family.
Not all — if even many — of those things are true for most of the rest of this country.
I mean, seriously: the fact that such a large chunk of the tech workforce couldn't find work in ~2001-3, or whenever, ended up going to law school it became A Thing people noticed doesn't seem to me a particularly valid counter-argument to the economic wreckage that is the Rust Belt.
Yes, it's a wonderful prima facie demonstration of career mobility being a thing that actually exists in the world, but it, specifically, is also largely only available to people who already have the knowledge and skills (to say nothing of connections) such that they're almost necessarily going to be better positioned for these kinds of situations.
I liked and appreciated your comments in this thread and was supporting your point, in a way, by reminding people that this happened to tech workers too but only for a relatively brief period of time and they struggled just the same.
Usually I'm the one in these threads arguing the position you're arguing, but I've decided that it's a pretty big waste of time to do so on HN.
Thanks for the reminder. I started college in 2007 and there was still an echo from the dotcom crash in the air, but I didn't have to go through it.
It's funny you mentioned that a lot of people moved to law. That industry should make it painfully clear that no one is immune to this. When I was a kid the societal message was "want to make money? Become a lawyer!". Enough kids listened to that message that the industry is in shambles today.
I am far from too young to remember it. I was a partner at an ISP when it blew up. Yes, a lot of people switched careers. I was one of them for a while. But I know far more that moved back home with mom and dad than tried to make a new career in a new field. Many lateral shifts, but very few wholesale changes.
It may take a couple more decades but it really does feel like today's Programmer will become yesteryear's factory worker.
A large chunk of what we're building is rebuilds, or maintenance, or minor upgrades. Every market is saturated. We keep ourselves busy building the same things, solving the same problems over and over, with the latest and greatest "stacks".
Post secondary education is churning out more and more programmers, and the available programming tasks continue to move towards mundane repetition.
I wonder if the new technological revolution you mention will simply be more globalization?
Manufacturing in China will eventually move to "cheaper" countries. Factory workers in today's established manufacturing centers around the world will want a better life for their children, and push them into STEM. We'll lose our jobs overseas. It happened here. It could happen there.
What's most shocking is this just happened to system administrators. Adjusted for inflation, people are now making half what people made in 2000 doing the same basic job of running a few servers at a small office.
>Riding that level of cultural and social change is not something people know how to do, and might well look dauntingly impossible when you also have a family to feed. So to see people making six figures on the coasts talk down their noses about mobility and "intestinal fortitude" (from one of your comment's siblings) is, honestly, pretty galling.
It's morally galling, yes. However, if we're talking politics, "Obey the free market or die!" is exactly what these very factory workers have been screaming at the entire rest of the country, in every single federal election year. This is what voting for unfettered capitalism means, and there's a level of moral gall in saying, "Capitalism for thee, social democracy for me".
You make reasonable and just points. However, while I agree with everything you have to say, surely the solution is not to legislate the existence of your notional worker's factory -- as the subject proposal would likely do for the coal power industry.
One would hope that the public would demand reasonable severance, assistance for relocation and retraining, et cetera, so that change becomes less dauntless. To reiterate the second point in this thread, history has shown that "digging in" is usually the exact opposite of what should be done.
> surely the solution is not to legislate the existence of your notional worker's factory
It's not the solution, but it definitely is a solution.
Imagine you're a coal miner in Wyoming. You have two choices:
1. Get your local elected officials (who have tons of other constituents in the same boat as you) to put together some anti-competitive legislation that lets you keep your job.
2. You move to a new place, possibly with gov't assistance, uprooting your nuclear family, likely leaving your extended family behind (who you've lived near all your life), to do the same job, but probably for less because the supply of such jobs is shrinking but the demand is still high.
3. You spend several years retraining for a new job, living off gov't handouts while you're unable to work. After you're done, you still have trouble because everyone else is retraining for a pool of jobs that hasn't gotten any larger. (Remember, a lot of these places are one-industry towns and counties. If one industry goes away, you don't have much else to do.)
If I were in that situation, I would love to say that I would automatically jump at the chance for #3, or at least #2, but #1 is so so so much better for me and my family.
You do the math, and you don't have a lot of savings, and #2 and #3, if they even occur to you, sound really really scary: "I might lose my house and be unable to feed my family" kind of scary. So you do the only rational thing you can in that position: #1.
> One would hope that the public would demand reasonable severance, assistance for relocation and retraining, et cetera
Unlikely. Public sentiment -- especially of the kinds of people who live in rural areas that are most hit with problems like this -- are very much against gov't assistance for retraining (or, even "worse", gov't-mandated assistance from the former employer). Remember, these are people who believe in the American Dream so much: you work hard, and you succeed. Getting a gov't handout is dirty to a lot of these people. Allowing other people to benefit from such handouts is even worse.
> To reiterate the second point in this thread, history has shown that "digging in" is usually the exact opposite of what should be done.
You seem to be under the misconception that people tend to do what is best for the community (and even themselves) over the long term, when the short term looks scary. That... just usually isn't the case.
I'm not saying any of this is right, or ideal, or efficient, or long-term sustainable... but it's how it is. Some people don't have the time or resources to see or plan long enough into the future to make the right call in situations like this.
Of course, the true answer is that, if you're not already in a big job market/city, you have to move and retrain. The total number of jobs, btw, does not shrink when jobs disappear. Those savings from the job that went away goes somewhere - usually more consumption - and a new job is created somewhere else. Often it's not in the same place, and neither does it require the same skills, but that's life. The government has to help people move and retrain; the alternative is dirt-poor towns full of welfare recipients. I've seen it and it's not pretty, even when the welfare is generous.
Agreed, another often overlooked part of renewable energy is the renewable part. Where coal requires people to get up and go to work every morning to dig up more because the power plants burn through it, renewables do not. Once a solar field has been established it does not need the majority of the workers any more, it has a functional life measured in decades.
While in the beginning many jobs will be available, once the fields are established go away. Then those same people who retrained to be solar panel installers are either too old or to emotionally devastated to soldier on to another replacable skill set.
How does that justify a bill that essentially subsidizes the industry by banning its competitors? I understand _why_ people support it, but I think it's wrong of them to demand that their industry alone gets to be protected.
These things have cascading effects. As your regional economy implodes, everything is impacted.
Your home that a lot of your wealth is tied up in? Worthless.
It's not just like getting laid off by a company and looking for a job. It's about having a skilled career that suddenly is worthless.
Plenty of examples in tech. Ask your average >45+ year old getting purged from tech companies about "adapting". There are still DEC alumni floating around in their 60s in shitty contract gigs who cannot retire, but haven't had a "good job" since getting nuked by HP/Compaq.
It's not just workers learning a new thing. It's entire cities built around certain industries. Vast social and economic infrastructure built around those industries. And no guarantees that anyone will bother retooling all that local infrastructure for some new industry instead of simply building it somewhere else.
I'm a lot more sympathetic toward the latter myopia.
A lot of blue collar people can't imagine what they'd do if they could no longer get a job in their current industry. Severance is meager, pensions are drying up, and retraining assistance (if they'd even accept it) is virtually nonexistent. When faced with "progress" making your way of life and standard of living untenable, that gets really really really scary. I'd challenge you to remain entirely rational if your job -- no, your entire industry -- went away, the bank decided to foreclose on your house (which is now worthless anyway, because there are no jobs where you live), you were unable to feed your family, and you didn't even have the money to move somewhere else where prospects were better.
On the other hand, we have a ton of tech people around here who, because of their privilege, are unable to put themselves into anyone else's shoes, even for a minute. It's basic empathy, and seems to be in short supply sometimes.
>A lot of blue collar people can't imagine what they'd do if they could no longer get a job in their current industry.
I work in tech. I can't imagine what I would do if I could no longer get a job in our industry. My wife left biotech and has struggled to find work.
Weirdly enough, we live in a city in Massachusetts, so the entire local, state, and federal government apparatus doesn't get mobilized to help us, because we're second-class citizens nowadays.
I was referring to Massachusetts voters and urban voters being "second-class": we can support X at essentially arbitrarily high levels of support, but the more rural states and regions of the country get more voice than us in the federal government. So when certain rural people want economic policy rewritten to "save their jobs", a whole party shifts its dominant ideology to accommodate them, even if it's not actually a good idea for everyone. However, when we (urban, coastal) want our lifestyles or preferences accommodated by policy, we're not only out of luck, we get insulted for our efforts.
Don't coastal urban voters, particularly if they're white, skew relatively wealthy compared to their rural counterparts though?
On the one hand I agree that bad policy is still bad even if it does end up saving some jobs, but it seems the economy is already so tilted in favor of white coastal urban voters that I find it somewhat hard to sympathize.
>we get insulted for our efforts.
While this is certainly disappointing, it is so prevalent on both sides I can't take it seriously unless you're willing to call out similar denigration of the rural poor by coastal urbanites.
>On the one hand I agree that bad policy is still bad even if it does end up saving some jobs, but it seems the economy is already so tilted in favor of white coastal urban voters that I find it somewhat hard to sympathize.
The economy is tilted in favor of white coastal urban voters. The government is tilted in favor of white rural landlocked voters. All voters skew more relatively wealthy than non-voters, and indeed neither of our political parties tilt in favor of non-wealthy non-white people.
>While this is certainly disappointing, it is so prevalent on both sides I can't take it seriously unless you're willing to call out similar denigration of the rural poor by coastal urbanites.
While I do call that out, I think there's a difference: one kind of denigration comes from the permanent minority party, and the other comes from the permanently dominant party. I cannot name one time in my life when the Republican Party and its base of rural white landlocked relatively wealthy people did not set the national agenda, and I'm 27 years old.
Even when they "lost" elections, in the theoretical sense of no longer holding majorities, they used various procedural tactics to maintain their chokehold over the actual mechanisms of policymaking.
So as much as the economy has inflicted horrible suffering on that base, those rural white landlocked voters still maintain the actual power. They've been supporting policies that hurt people like them, but as they tell it, those are their moral values and their notion of dignity -- if people suffer, so be it.
"Hard work" is utterly orthogonal to what your comment's parent is describing. The kind of "hard work" that many blue collar people do would leave most programmers crying in pain and frustration before the first day is out.
On the whole, people whose job perks include the fully-staffed, all-day gourmet cafeterias, paid gym memberships (if not on-site gyms and massage therapists!), and six figure salaries for sitting in meetings, thinking kinda hard, and then tapping away at a keyboard for a bit (yes, I'm being reductive; so are you) have exactly fuck-all grounds to call out anyone else about "hard work".
Of course, there's also the "drop your average blue collar worker into my job and they'd be fired within the week, if not the day"... Not to say I wouldn't be fired within the day at their job, just saying that both kinds of jobs are demanding. (Yes, yes, you could probably train them to do my job, but I could work out to build the strength to do theirs).
Exactly. It isn't. That you think your efforts are what was being described when the post up-thread mentioned "privilege" shows how poorly you understand the concept.
Not disagreeing with you in the slightest, and genuinely kinda baffled as to how you might think I was. What you seem to be missing (or ignoring), however, is that some people have a tougher climb than others, through no fault of their own. (Race, gender, disability, whatever.)
The things that you, personally, don't have to contend with on that climb are what's meant by your "privilege." Not how hard you worked. Not what you've earned, and managed to leverage that into subsequently, but the things that you have no control over, and about which other people have stories and judgements and whatever, which can — and do — materially alter the set of opportunities you'll experience your life — or, rather, they would, if you were subject to them. But you aren't, so you have that "privilege".
(Yes, I think it's a shitty name for the concept. But if you can just detach yourself from feeling like it's somehow "your fault" that you have these privileges, and look with more open eyes, you'll see that there's actually a real, demonstrable, even measurable phenomenon there, however strongly you might want to disagree with the verbiage.)
No-one's pretending these things aren't possible, so that's a nice straw-man you're building there. But apparently plenty of people are pretending that these things are exactly as hard for someone else with a different life and circumstances as it was for themselves — and that's not only demonstrably false, it's (IMO) disturbingly ignorant.
It is obviously not an easy thing to make a career change. Specially if you are asking people to go from factory workers to say, software developers (a career that requires years of formal or informal training). However, here you are not asking for that. You are asking them to go from coal miners to solar panel installation technicians. Not trivial, but doable. Of course, it would be easier to do it their state or country provided retraining programs and good unemployment benefits. You know, societal support for a societal shift, as opposed to 'mumble mumble bootstraps'. But the change itself is possible, desirable, and does not require the retraining equivalent of a full college education.
I can't find it now, but there was a recent article about how, on the short term at least, a move to renewable energy will likely create more jobs than it eliminates.
Are you saying this is not doable in the context of a formal retraining program?
What you describe is similar to the transition between being in construction to being an electrician, a transition which I know a lot of working class people have done. I particularly once knew a man who had been, professionally: a construction worker, a truck driver, a security guard, a plumber, an electrician, a factory worker, a caretaker for the elderly and a private corporate driver. Yes, it is harder than going from C# enterprise developer to JS front end developer. It is more on the scale of going from electrical engineering into software. But it is viable. "Just learn to code", for example, isn't.
We should be, as a society, providing lots of help for people to accomplish similar transitions, rather than saying "oh, sucks to be you, anyone without masters level education is useless to our modern economy" or "oh well, we will prop your failing industry, even though it is killing us all, because otherwise you won't ever be able to get a job". There are blue collar jobs that will be around for a decade or two at least. Also, I am in favor of safety nets and UBI and free college education, but that doesn't preclude offering people structured paths back into useful work they can realistically take.
How often does that -suddenly- happen? Most often it's pretty obvious that it's happening/about to happen, giving plenty of time for it's workers to prepare for a transition. It's unfortunate that many don't, but it's not because it's too hard.
It happens more often than you would expect. I live in an area of West Tennesse that made sports apparel for the most part. After the signing of the NAFTA agreement in 1993, we lost multiple factories and unemployment jumped to 20% in less than 2 years.
It took out the factory jobs, the service jobs that supported all of the people that worked there, and sent more than one county into such a downturn that it has still not recovered fully. Everywhere you look are empty buildings and homes as large sections of the community was forced to pick up and leave to find work.
Speaking of Tennessee. The VW plant in Chattanooga fired like half of its work force after a year because it turned out no one wanted an extra ten thousand Passats. No way for workers to see that coming after years of consistent growth in Passat sales. Now 'fortunately' it was only a year for anyone so no one's life got too upended but that shit happens all the time
It wasn't anywhere near half the workforce. It was 500 temp/contract workers who'd been brought on for a third shift to keep up with anticipated demand. When supply outpaced demand and dealership inventories were growing too large, they cut the third-party temp workers, and went back to two shifts. It still sucks, but your understanding of the facts is off. Temp workers are constantly in a state of gaining and losing employment. It's a pretty awful way to engage employment. VW is still a major employer around here, and never seems to cease hiring (or at least heavily marketing available jobs throughout the area).
Every one who didn't get laid off was also a temp/contract worker or at least started as because that's how everything is. You didn't/don't get hired by VW you get hired by Aerotek. They weren't temp because they were willing to live with that uncertainty they were temp because that was only way to get a job.
For production positions, yes, people start with Aerotek. But that's not the entire workforce. And the closing of one shift was still not half the workforce, nor was everyone who was left Aerotek staffers. There undoubtedly were a great many production employees left who were still Aerotek at the time, but there were many left in the total workforce who were not temp workers. Again, I'm not saying it didn't suck, because it did, and there was a noted impact in people's lives here when it happened. But the facts are still quite different from what you initially stated.
It should be the government's job to provide an ecosystem that provides jobs and opportunity to its citizens, and when it fails its the governments job to pay for the shortcomings.l directly.
Expecting the government to patch the syptoms of the problem doesn't fix anything, myopic we are or not.
> "It should be the government's job to provide an ecosystem that provides jobs and opportunity to its citizens, and when it fails its the governments job to pay for the shortcomings.l directly."
> "Expecting the government to patch the syptoms of the problem doesn't fix anything"
So care to explain that a bit better? I think you just contradicted yourself.
The government has no business anywhere near the job market. Go read about the subsidized corn market if you want to see their brand of job creation in action. For too long we've expected the government to take care of the needs of society when we should have been doing it as citizens.
>The government has no business anywhere near the job market. Go read about the subsidized corn market if you want to see their brand of job creation in action.
Or drive through the Lincoln Tunnel or use electricity from the Hoover Dam.
Or fly from LaGuardia to LAX.
>For too long we've expected the government to take care of the needs of society
Maybe corporate welfare should be cut to the bone first.
If government bears direct financial burden (paying for the fact they cannot be employed) of failing to provide useful employment, then the feedback mechanism is in place for it to be incentivized to create jobs.
You can ALWAYS switch careers and learn new skills. If your factory closed down you could pick up a different trade that is available in your area if you're willing to start all over. You can move to a whole new area and do the same.
The question is about whether or not someone has the intestinal fortitude to make it happen and see it through. Unlike tech where a complete career change could happen in a short time, not necessarily degrade your pay too badly, and not necessarily require relocation- this could easily be just too overwhelming for people, especially with families. The key is, there is nothing preventing an able minded individual from finding a means to support themselves if they're willing to go through lean times to see it through.
No, the point is that if you let things degrade to the point where many individuals can only choose between either going through lean times and uprooting their lives or supporting a ban on renewables, it's not surprising that you'll be breathing coal fumes for a while longer.
I watched my mom take night classes and work a day job while raising three kids (with my dad) under 6.
We literally packed up and moved back to the US (we're all citizens) because where we lived was bombed by US forces. We came back to the states with 3 kids, no jobs, and a lot of what we had was actually blown up.
Don't tell me you can't retrain. It's a matter of deciding to do it and figuring out a way to make it work. It's not EASY, you don't want to do it if you don't have to. There's simply nothing keeping you from doing it other than the fear and anguish associated with upheaving your life.
I seriously commend your mother for that. But just because she could do it doesn't mean everyone else can, or is in a position to do it. You're judging the entire rest of the world on the basis of your N=1 life story. I'm sorry to tell you, dude, but not everyone is as awesome as your mom, and to dismiss anyone who isn't out of hand as being too lazy, or too afraid, or too unwilling is exactly the kind of myopia I'm talking about.
I'm not saying everyone who doesn't or thinks they can't are less than. I'm saying that short of some type of debilitation (physical or mental), there's actually nothing that is actually keeping someone from switching paths other than that person. You can go from coal miner to welder. You can go from construction worker to truck driver. You can go from factory worker to working for the city/county/state maintenance teams.
All of these will require you to seek out the opportunity, probably pick up some different skills along the way, deal with some BS trying to get a foot in the door, and likely a length of time where you've got to do something else to keep the lights on.
Back to my n=1 anecdotes, I worked more than full time at a local dairy farm and as a motorcycle tech to pay for university. My degree was in Computer Engineering, seemingly completely unrelated. I worked my ass off and admitted when I didn't know how to do something and sought help from those around me, but I also just tried. I just kept trying, that was it.
I had the luxury of not having to keep anyone but myself fed and the stamina that being 18 gives you. But all I did was drive to the farm down the road and ask if they needed help. Then I popped in to the motorcycle shop when I saw a help wanted sign.
My entire point is that people can try to change their path. They may not succeed, and it will very likely be incredibly hard and stressful- there will be obstacles and set backs, but you don't have to be special or smart or anything other than someone who's willing to try. To suggest that the vast majority of people can't do this is condescending and belittling to all of them.
I would agree that a lot won't even try, probably too afraid- which is totally different than being lazy or dumb. I would also posit that a number would come up 'short' in that they don't really get ahead of where they were, but maybe they're into a new area of work that will be more stable or safe. Then there's a lucky few who make it through the shitshow stronger, better off financially/socially, and with the self assurance that through their honest effort, all things are possible- if not always probable.
Coal miners have to change their way of life just as it happens everywhere else. If someone is not in position to alter his career, it does not mean others have to protect his obsolete and dangerous job with significant negative impact on environment. All these "myopia" talks about poor people who have families are just myopic regarding possible government policy options: there do exist approaches that can satisfy both conservatives and progressives. You have a lot of people with experience and strong motivation to work: give them money to spend 1 year of their lives to learn something else, help to relocate and provide some guidance on the job market and you'll return twice the money in future tax returns.
It is interesting that Elon Musk thinks electricity generation from utility companies is safe from his products. In fact he expects usage to go up, as people move to electric heating
If you're a coal miner and coal mining has been in your family for generations it's going to be a bit sad when that comes to an end, but you know what?
Good. The last thing we need to do is send people down deep into the earth to dig up coal so we can burn it in power plants and fuck up the air so badly that some people actually die from it. China's learning this lesson, and it's about time that America committed to the same. Shut them all down. Stop blowing up mountains to chase after chunks of coal.
Lots of ways of life are about to go away, but this is not new. Think of how many people were involved in the horse business. How many people had to deal with lepers. How many people were put out of work by steam shovels. How many were displaced by factories.
Things change. This is good, because if we don't change everyone's way of life is about to go away when the climate change gets so bad that most of the continental US is uninhabitable, under water, or both.
What lesson should they take away? How many examples are there if places like Wyoming surviving a major technological transition away from its primary economic engine?
The fact that it may be globally optimal to switch generation technologies doesn't mean it's locally optimal for Wyoming (within a political system that doesn't let Wyoming recoup local losses from national gains).
The lesson that you can't fight the tide. You can force your own utilities to use only coal, and that'll only make them less competitive. Later you'll have to force them not to buy more affordable power from utilities outside the state, which use renewables. As a result, the cost of living and the cost of doing business increases for everyone in your state, comparatively. You might as well have increased taxes. When the time comes when you're forced to face reality, you regret not having instead used all that extra imposed cost to retrain your workforce and incentivize your industry to move to more promising businesses.
An economist would say that almost any time a market leads to an unfair allocation of wealth or income, there is a reasonable solution that involves a transfer of wealth from one party to another, rather than adopting a non-market solution.
The most galling thing about this is that there is a reasonable compromise here, which is that you let the market decide things properly then you fairly pay off the people who were negatively affected, by intensive job training, relocation, early retirements + pensions, etc. For example compared to Germany, the job training in the US is a complete joke.
But American (and especially Republican) ideology of the rugged frontier individualist would never allow the blow to the psyche that would come from officially being on the 'government dole' or admitting needing help from anyone else.
Hence we have all these disguised welfare schemes (defense contractor jobs are another example) that are economically inefficient and environmentally damaging, mostly for reasons of personal and regional pride.
Speaking as someone with an economics degree, I do not believe economics defines "fair" allocations of wealth / income.
Market failures or inefficiencies, the impact of taxes and subsidies, positive/negative externalities are things. Job training may have enough positive externalities such that it would be efficient to subsidize it, but not because of a concept of fairness to someone. Economic actors should be rational enough to seek it out themselves if it maximizes their net benefit.
> I do not believe economics defines "fair" allocations of wealth / income.
Indeed, however economics does allow you to input your own definition of what 'fair' is, and it makes suggestions on how to fulfill that definition in the most efficient way.
The US actually has a special jobs program aimed at workers whose jobs are cut based on overseas competition. While a good idea, it isn't very successful.
In terms of % of GDP spent on public spending on the labor market, US ranks near the bottom. When you look at spending on job training directly, US spends 0.03% of GDP, while Germany spends seven times as much as a fraction of GDP [1].
Fraction of gdp isn't a good metric because the US has a large GDP. It's like implying that a billionaire hasn't spent much on housing because they only bought a 100 million dollar house.
A better comparison would dollars per unemployed person.
Isn't it the other way around? Looking at fraction of GDP controls for size of the country, since large countries have more unemployed people because unemployment rates don't differ by orders of magnitude.
The unemployment rate in the US and Germany are very similar (4-5%), so Germany spends 7 times as much training per unemployed person.
As a Puerto Rican, this comment resonates with me. Puerto Rico's shipping industry is closed from competition due to a 1920 law called the Jones Act. It only allows American shipping companies, with American-made ships, to ship goods to and from Puerto Rico. This significantly inflates prices of products sold in Puerto Rico. The Jones Act has created a corrupt duopoly which has been found guilty of price collusion a handful of times [1]. Republicans keep insisting on a closed market in the name of protecting the US shipping industry (which has old, inefficient ships and has little incentive to improve services and competitiveness). I can't stand the free market BS anymore - in the end, politicians will do whatever the $$$ says.
> Rather than allow the free market to select the least-cost solution
Currently it's not a 'free' market. Fossil fuels dump massive costs on everyone else via greenhouse gas emissions and climate change; it's an incredible subsidy. Nuclear, wind and solar, for example, generally have to pay to clean up their own messes.
Absolutely agree. A classical "free market" approach would be to internalize the external costs (like pollution) and then let the market figure it out. Instead of the debate in the US of whether CO2 is causing climate change, we should be arguing what the cost is (in $/ton) and then apply that as a revenue-neutral carbon tax. And then let the market do its work.
For other pollution, for coal specifically, look at the costs borne by society (not reflected in the cost of generation) to deal with coal ash containment.
For those that have not been to Wyoming, the wind there is phenomenal. Anecdotal story:
I cycled across the state from Yellowstone down to Colorado and the wind (plus awesomely paved roads, amazing scenery and friendly motorists) made the ride practically effortless. I set off at 11 in the morning on the Western side of the continental divide, went over a 10K or so pass, stopped off in a cafe for a couple of hours with some cyclists I met on the way (they had eloped from an organised tour and I had met their former partners earlier on the road). At that stage it was 5 p.m. and I had done 75 miles but it was too early to call it a day. I got going again and, by 8 p.m., I managed to put in 150 miles for the day. I was pleased with this, particularly considering that I had tent + stove + other camping gear with me. Only my heroes on the Tour de France managed such speeds for so long and they could slipstream each other plus they had a team car and 'PED's...
From my anecdotal experience of Wyoming (the locals told me it was always windy although the wind allegedly is 'always against you'), it would be a shame if this was not (wind) farmed. This failure to encourage wind power is kind of expected though for us observers from outside the U.S. - 'crazy Americans'!!!
And yet if Wyoming wanted to grow its economy, they could add more ski resorts, winter sports facilities, hotels, and other tourist related businesses. They are doubling down on the wrong ideas.
Do you think those blue collar coal workers are going to be amenable to switching careers so they can service wealthy ski resort visitors? All while making much less money?
On a personal note, I've always been troubled by the over-representation of unnecessary services and useless gadgets in the US economy. Luxury ski resorts and $400 cookie baking devices (with connected smartphone app) are not noble products, and they demoralize the workers who provide/build them.
I know this might not be a popular sentiment to those on HN who Uber home from their San Francisco office to pick up their Blue Apron delivery and pre-order their new iDevice, but there it is.
> Do you think those blue collar coal workers are going to be amenable to switching careers so they can service wealthy ski resort visitors? All while making much less money?
The value of their time is determined by the market, whether and how in demand their skills are. They can make themselves amenable to whatever other career options are available, or else make themselves amenable to starve waiting for the resurgence of a dying industry.
The days of lifetime employment in a single career are rapidly coming to an end - globalism and automation are constantly reducing the value of employment in many professions, or making human employment obsolete. Those industries which haven't been gutted by these trends yet will be, inevitably. Nearly everyone is going to have to learn to take what little they can get when they can get it, in time.
And instead of pandering to blue collar workers, Republicans should actually be trying to help them prepare for the future, rather than yearn for the past. But they can't, because what would help would be subsidizing education and healthcare to reduce the crippling burdens of debt on the lower and middle class and make it easier for people to find other jobs, and possibly institute some sort of basic income so that a lack of employment won't be devastating, as lack of employment becomes the norm for more and more people.
> On a personal note, I've always been troubled by the over-representation of unnecessary services and useless gadgets in the US economy. Luxury ski resorts and $400 cookie baking devices (with connected smartphone app) are not noble products, and they demoralize the workers who provide/build them.
mining coal on the other hand -- a truly noble pursuit. "A lump of coal placed in a cart embiggens the smallest man ..."
As someone that lives in the region (and used to live in Jackson), resorts can be quite lucrative. Black lung is not a great condition to acquire. My ex was a bartender pulling down $400/night. The service economy is basically a sales training job where connections can be made, and advancement is a possibility. I'm a telecommuter, but I know many people that live/work in these areas and do ok. It should be a known cost to living in such great environments with heavy tourism.
You know service workers both living and working in Jackson, and doing okay? Those lucky few! Jackson refuses to build more affordable housing (because tourists and rich locals think poor people are gross). Therefore you see many of the people who work there commute daily from Idaho, and many of the seasonal employees camp out in the national forest behind the Strategic Elk Reserve. Jackson is a terrible model (Vail is similarly bad).
That said, coal and fracking seem like a bad idea for Wyoming's future. It has plenty of wind and empty land.
I live in a ski town on the North side of Yellowstone and we're quite happy to cater to the tourists. There is nothing demeaning about providing good service that people are willing to pay for.
Unless you're prepared to make up the difference in pay with social benefits, its disingenuous to suggest industries that are going to significantly lower quality of life for people.
Disclaimer: I propose making up the difference with social benefits. "Basic income lite" if you will until society can catch up with the fact that your job and income does not define you.
they've never cared about the "free market" or "big government". it's always been about whatever argument works best in the moment to help wealthy donors and destroy the planet the fastest with global warming.
I think you're wrong there. The "old guard" conservatives actually walked the walk when it came to their free market ideals, and a big part of globalization was enabled by them.
There seems to be a new strain of conservatism being lead by Trump which seems to be a marriage of formerly liberal populism (protect workers, rebuild middle class, bring back factory jobs, socialized healthcare) and conservative economics.
Actually, George W Bush signed the spending bills for 2009. But the central point remains that conservatives (Republicans) hold no claim to fiscal conservatism.
I think we're misunderstanding each other. Yes, of course conservatives claim fiscal conservatism. But when I say they hold no claim, it's an almost archaic phrase meaning yeah, they can say it but don't actually own the claim.
Bluntly, according to their record, conservatives are not fiscal conservatives. They just dress that way.
You're not paying attention. They're talking about access to insurance. Sure, I have access to a private Gulfstream jet, but that doesn't mean I can afford it.
In other words (for me, at least), Republicans are "free market" advocates like -- well, like not. Their market advocates, more like.
As is everyone, to some extent. We're just not all so hypocritical about it.
"You can't buy this, because we say so." How much more un-free-market can you get?
P.S. This said, without even getting into all the various subsidies, externalized costs, etc. Just keeping it at the level of "free market" rhetoric that gets expounded to the public ad infinitum and ad nauseum.
Contemporary Republicans aren't small-government and fiscal conservatives. That's a complete myth. Look at Bush and how much crazy spending he did which incapacitated this country.
The Republicans and the Democrats are both basically the exact same, except they each have their own set of "winners".
The only good thing to come of Trump's election is that it shows that an independent such as Trump has the ability to win the election. He is a Republican only in name, just like Sanders was a Democrat only in name. Hopefully this gives inspiration to real leaders out there that are willing to take a chance, come next election, and then we can smash this two-party oligarchy.
Federal government should enforce antitrust laws on state governments. Given the case law available, all that states do is adversely affecting interstate commerce, even for things that happen solely intrastate.
The Federal Government's tolerance is a work of fiction to maintain compliance. States have a false sense of autonomy under the 10th amendment ever since interstate commerce became the only form of commerce.
This is dreaming of a new administration very prematurely. On day 1 it withdrew from a federal lawsuit to enforce voting rights on Texas, which enacted a blatantly racist law to engage in voter discrimination.
https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legal-work...
And as a result, the national policy is that voter discrimination is to be left up to the states. If Texas' own citizens decide to discriminate, it's their right, and not for the federal government to question it.
Systematic voter discrimination being left up to the states fairly clearly shows anti-competition will be left up to the states as well. I'd hardly call this a work of fiction, it's an emerging fact of the political landscape.
> This is dreaming of a new administration very prematurely. On day 1 it withdrew from a federal lawsuit to enforce voting rights on Texas, which enacted a blatantly racist law to engage in voter discrimination.
> https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legal-work...
Did you link to the right document? This is a motion for a continuance, not a withdrawal.
> This is dreaming of a new administration very prematurely.
Thats strange, I hadn't actually attributed this reality to any particular administration.
> On day 1 it withdrew from a federal lawsuit to enforce voting rights on Texas
This has nothing to do with enforcing federal will through the interstate commerce clause, which is what my post was about.
All expansion of the federal government's power domestically, through the interstate commerce clause, is through case law, which is largely exempt from administrations.
>Thats strange, I hadn't actually attributed this reality to any particular administration.
That's strange, considering this administration is openly hostile to the environment, and ran on the traditional Republican platform of state's rights.
Voting rights, commerce, environment - these things being relegates to the states vs being reviewable by the federal government are related by how and whether the executive branch decides to act. That they have the legal power through case law doesn't mean they'll actually use it.
You can't fathom that I don't care about the present administration?
Is it so impossible that my opinion was formed sometime else throughout my life and would be accelerated and equally constitutional if I happened to get in power some day?
Typically one law gets passed for one reason, by administration A.
Administration F has no recollection of why Administration A passed the law, and simply sees it as a convenient "thing on the books" to use when someone is technically violating it. The person challenges it in court, and the court establishes the limitations or lack thereof of that. The people in the court and appeals court were most likely appointed during administrations B, C, D, and E.
Administration Z simply reacts to these tools available.
States don't take enough autonomy from the 10th and should be taking substantially more, especially when the federal government takes blatant over-steps.
The federal government, a distinct amorphous entity for sake of discussion, has completely subjugated all of its constituent states, has the same leverage over most foreign states, and merely tolerates any autonomy as long as it is deemed beneficial to the federal government.
Even the notion of federalism is a misnomer in this country, the National government has completely subjugated all of its constituent states.
Individual united states are bankrupt entities, with toothless nominal agencies. What possible autonomy do you imagine they could muster?
I agree, but talk about kicking yourself in the ass, when the world's coal consumption rates drop and WY isn't ready. Also I would imagine they would want to export as much of this coal as possible, by consuming it themselves they're probably making less money off of it.
They may (keyword may- this may not pass) be able to manipulate their own market but doing so is going to be terrible for them in 10 years.
When wind and solar actually become cheaper than coal, the problem will take care of itself. When will this happen? People seem to think we're close, but it's still at least a decade?
Population of Wyoming: 500,000
Their decision to use coal is irrelevant. I can't believe this is a top 10 story.
Maybe, but rooftop solar without feed-in requires big local batteries to provide the majority of energy of a home, since otherwise you'll need to use utility-produced energy during the night and cloudy days.
> Those "eligible resources" are defined solely as coal, hydroelectric, natural gas, nuclear, oil, and individual net metering.
Are you referring to something other than net metering of consumer renewables when you say "feed in"? I thought that net metering was a policy that's fairly friendly to residential solar.
You could argue that solar is only becoming the least-cost solution because it's propped up by government subsidy on the basis of that evil leftist conspiracy about climate change.
(Of course, coal gets its share of subsidies too, but a supporter of this measure might prefer to forget that).
How is this not the kind of regulations/laws/red tape oft decried by conservative, free market politicians? How is this not picking a winner, another practice oft decried by conservative, free market politicians?
Is this just a case of "free market for me, but merchantilism for thee"?
To paraphrase Lenin, in politics there are no ideologies, only expedience. Free markets are useful to promulgate when you're in the process of consolidating power, as they remove the barriers to the monopolistic capture of various parts of the social and economic fabric. Once things have frayed to the point that people are on the edge of revolt, you have to march in authoritarianism to "properly" direct their political hostility.
This can be described as "cognitive dissonance". There is also a widely observed phenomenon where people are much less likely to recognize their own faults, even if they are able to observe the same fault in people around them.
I think it factors down to priorities. When a state's industry (therefore state government revenues and employment -- the leading indicator of whether voters are happy with their current representatives) is threatened, politicians will conveniently ignore the fact that their actions are the opposite of "free market".
The same kind of rent-seeking (economic term, not related to being a landlord) is visible in the telecom area (incumbents lobbying for legislation to prevent local governments from competing as broadband ISPs), the cable industry (lobbying local governments to prevent competition by higher speed internet competition), car dealerships lobbbying to defend existing state laws that prevent Tesla from selling directly to consumers, etc.
And the larger problem in the social media / echo chamber era is that political parties encourage and demand unity, so people of the same political party are not likely to call them out on their crony legislation. It is sad, because conservative voters are more likely to only hear and trust news if it comes from conservative voices (just as liberals are more likely to trust news only if it comes from liberal voices).
I see it as a personal challenge to figure out how to better distribute objective news to people of all political beliefs and I'm investigating exploiting behavior / cognitive science to do it. Message me if anyone has ideas or a similar desire.
I don't know how to change this but it seems it's more and more acceptable to loudly proclaim opinions that are totally inconsistent. Talk to a cop who gets a super nice pension that's pretty much unaffordable for his community and he will tell you that he deserves his pension but everybody else who gets money from the government is just a freeloading parasite. Or people who get lifelong health care through the VA think socialized medicine is evil and unamerican.
Why do you equate "conservatives" with being "free market politicians"? Conservatives are "pro-business" much of the time, but one would be mistaken to define pro-business as being the same as pro-free markets. This is why conservatives don't do things like reduce the size of government programs... they merely have private corporations execute those programs (conservatives love to tout these private/public partnerships) or subsidize certain industrial activities, such as ethanol production.
The interesting thing is that conservatives can be pro-business in this sense while sharing the exact same basic economics as the progressives. When push comes to shove, the "establishment" Republicans will agree with their Democrat colleagues on such ideas as government being useful in stimulating demand as also stimulating the economy. Where they disagree is who should receive the first benefits of such stimulus (business vs. some "class" based criteria). Actual advocates of free markets usually don't accept a Keynesian view of economics.
[edit for additional point] Conservatives do like to paint themselves "capitalists" without any firm definition of the word. For the same reason progressives also like to brand conservatives as both capitalists and free-marketeers (even though they aren't) as the progressives like to turn the whole matter into a package deal... meaning they want to conflate free market thinking with conservative "pro-business thinking".... many more boogeymen to point at being pro-business.
Your mistake is assuming that Republicans are libertarians. They are not, and never have been. They can do a moderately convincing impression of one when an election is close enough that they need votes from actual libertarians, but the façade is always dropped when it's time to actually sit down and govern.
Without meaning this as an endorsement but as some explanation of part of the political landscape, this perceived hypocrisy is a non-trivial part of the reason why we have Trump now. I imagine most HNers are far more familiar with the Democrat side of the drama of the last couple years, but as most of you at least know to some extent, Trump encountered significant resistance from the Republicans, as well. If you recall the #NeverTrump idea, it was mostly coming from these conservatives.
Like many organizations in the last couple of years, they decided to go all-in opposing Trump, only to discover that they didn't have anywhere near as many chips with their putative voting base as they thought, because it has been the perception (key word, please do not ignore it, arguing about whether this is "really" the case would be missing the point) among the conservative base that "their" politicians said conservative things to get elected, but promptly shed them the moment they won the election. It is probably fair to say that it is the perception of almost everybody who does not live in Washington DC that there aren't really any free-market conservative politicians whose actions are accurately described by that term; each of the two major sides may have their own reasons for believing that, but both do.
So probably just about the only people who would not describe this as hypocrisy are the actual politicians in question. There has been plenty of hypocrisy to go around lately, unfortunately.
Trump is not even close to free market ideals; he espouses heavy protectionism, for instance, which is virtually universally opposed by economists.
Trump is a nationalist, populist phenomenon. Trump's base is only in favor of free market ideals when they aren't on the losing end of competition. Because China is full of supermen or something it must be stopped.
If you read carefully, you'll see I didn't claim that Trump was a free-markets candidate.
But now I will make a claim: I wouldn't be surprised he actually ends up being a free-er market candidate than any the Right has managed to elect in a while. Yes, even considering his protectionism. This is because, in practice, nobody the Right has elected in a long time has been particularly free-market at all, not because in absolute terms Trump is "pro-free market" in some sort of libertarian ideal, because he obviously isn't.
Oh, and "universally opposed by economists" doesn't carry much weight with me anymore. The 2008 recession/depression was virtually universally not predicted by economists, and the results of the response from the government were virtually universally predicted to be much better than they actually turned out to be. Mainstream economists are all but discredited to me until they actually admit that they have a problem, but they have not.
Also, the somewhat recent emerging consensus of "Well, globalism and free trade is generally good, but maybe it does in fact bone the American poor and middle class in the process as the rich get richer" would tend to suggest that protecting the American poor and middle class would traditionally be a Democratic priority, but it doesn't seem to be. Again, by way of explanation, you may begin to see the appeal for the people getting boned of electing someone who even claims to be standing for their interests, as opposed to people who stand actively against them and often deploy mockery or tells them that they deserve it if they complain. It's not exactly a winning political strategy for votes.
> perception .. among the conservative base that "their" politicians said conservative things to get elected, but promptly shed them the moment they won the election.
That may have been why people voted for Trump, but he's probably going to make them look like amateurs. Trump policy is going to bear very little relation to his campaign speeches.
This IS exactly the kind of regulations and laws decried by conservative, free market politicians. You can therefore conclude that the person proposing the bill is not a conservative, free market politician. He is probably merely a conservative politician.
If it is a bill that is actually of any import you will sooner or later certainly see opinion columns from conservative, free-market columns decrying it, though they're a little bit in short supply relative to liberal, environmentally-conscious columnists, so you'll have to look harder.
Political parties are made of multiple people and these people are wildly inconsistent in applying what ought to ostensibly be their party's principles, especially once you get down to state-legislature local-politics matters.
There's a separate Libertarian party for a reason.
Most "conservative, free market politicians" aren't in Wyoming, so it's an error to hear one talk and assume that Wyoming politicians agree.
HN probably gets most of its news either from California or New York(most of the MSM are based there). So you're more likely to hear issues framed from the perspective of California and New York, which both have rent control and such. It would be an error to assume that Oregon or Vermont have the same values, even if some map somewhere shows them colored the same. Other states wouldn't just disagree; they'd frame the issue differently.
Every state is different. As an example, Kentucky seems to churn out free-market types like Rand Paul and Thomas Massie pretty consistently. I imagine Utah would focus on the finance industry, and using the government to enforce Mormon values. Apparently Wyoming values their coal and gas industries.
I'll also add that if you look back to 70's the Democratic Presidents have been more fiscally conservative than the Republican ones. That just supports the comment I link to above, which I think is 100% correct.
Republicans of the last 30 years care about one thing: reduce taxes on the wealthy.
The second thing they care about: reducing regulations on businesses. They want to be able to pollute and discriminate as much as they want, to increase shareholder value.
The fact that people vote against their own best interest has flabbergasted me for the last 20+ years.
I haven't seen an answer that actually addresses this beyond the political divide.
The state legislature fear regulation that would limit coal and force a quota of renewable that may be more expensive, while a "cheaper"(coal, gas, etc) resource exists. I try not to see this as a "Look at us we love coal" and more of a "We want cheap energy(and jobs) through any means necessary".
Side note: This isn't my personal view, just an argument I continuously see in this fight.
Logical fallacy. Solar panels are not the only form of renewable that are hurt by this rent-seeking legislation.
And I honestly don't even care if solar panels are created elsewhere for cheaper than market rates. That means the utility would be able to supply Wyoming energy subsidized by Chinese tax payers. Eventually China will have to deal with their own tax deficits. They have already started to cancel coal power plant projects[1].
Even if we accepted that kind of reasoning, it is not applicable to wind, because shipping is really problematic due to their ever-increasing sizes, so they're usually produced locally.
I work in renewables, and I encourage this community to not to ridicule people in Wyoming for their very clear majority choice. In their point of view, they are making the best choice for their interests, so calling them stupid only deepens their resolve.
If you want renewables in Wyoming, there are four options (in order from most effective to least):
(a) Move to Wyoming and outvote the existing population (it's not crowded, so it wouldn't take much).
(b) Donate money and time on marketing, education, and advocacy campaigns to try and convince people in Wyoming to your point of view (somewhat difficult to do as an outsider, but not impossible).
(c) Boycott fossil fuels from Wyoming (very difficult since they self consume a lot).
(d) Wait for the existing generation to die and hope the next generation makes decisions in your favor.
Currently, it sounds like HN has settled on option (d), but if your really want change, (a) and (b) are the things that work the best.
> (a) Move to Wyoming and outvote the existing population
Pollution and global warming are not a local effects. Therefore it should not be solely their decision. It should be regulated at a national or international level instead since it affects everyone. And well, obama tried but it didn't last.
So we should escalate:
(e) The international community takes action and imposes trade sanctions on wyoming or america. And if that fails resorts to an invasion.
Let me see if I understand: Industries are destroying the environment, which supports human life, and you want to stop this presumably because human life has some intrinsic value.
Your answer to this is to use the force of the state to destroy those industries, and if they resist you will literally kill the people opposing you. Do those lives have less value than others? Or is this a twisted greater good type of thing, where you think climate change is happening so quickly that we should jump to dropping bombs to stop it? (hint: it's not)
Really? You've not been paying attention then. Further the risk exists that we cross a tipping point before we even know it. There are sensible arguments for stopping polluting industry now, by any means necessary. Glib rationalization isn't a counter-argument. Science would be, if we had good enough models to know.
Nobody said anything about killing people. I merely proposed an invasion as last escalation step (escalating it to the national level already failed).
Of course if it comes to that we will have a clean war where only the worst assets are targeted without taking a human life. It is quite similar in design to clean coal.
Using derogatory terms that supposedly describe the vast majority of human makes good-faith discussion much more difficult. I know it can feel good to write, but it's not productive.
Also, a bit of a bikeshed since energy usage in Wyoming isn't all that significant.
That said, the use of the all too common dismissive comment stating that if you are not physically doing something about it then you are part of the problem is caveman thinking.
Actively fighting and protesting can do more harm than good. Freedom of speech is sometimes more about combined civil public discourse as opposed to aggressive and manipulative tactics of seizing power and pushing propaganda as you have suggested.
(e) Wait for Wyoming to lose their coal industry as renewables from nearby states undercut their export of electricity market. After a while this law acts like a tariff, and local people will simply pay higher prices to support an inefficient industry.
This might take longer than it should, as there is no carbon tax, but it will happen. It's already cheaper to build renewable plants now, and with a marginal cost, once built, of $0, the renewables will win in the coming price war.
It's a fight between Wyoming counties that get revenue/jobs more from coal mining and/or combustion and those that are less coal-dependent. Wind is newer and smaller so coal has the more powerful voice at the whole-state level.
House Bill 0127, sponsored by Reps. Scott Clem, R-Gillette, and Michael Madden, R-Buffalo, as well as Sen. Cale Case, R-Lander, states that in addition to the current $1 tax per megawatt hour on wind energy, there will be a tax of $4 on each megawatt hour.
The revenue collected from that $4 hike would go directly into the state general fund, while the original and current single dollar rate would remain in its current 60/40 split with the state. Wyoming is the only state in the nation that taxes wind.
“Changing the rules this late in the planning and permitting process seems like retribution,” Carbon County Commissioner Lindy Glode said at a meeting of the Carbon County Council of Governments, where discussion of the bill was on the agenda.
Note that this is a separate but similar-in-spirit bill to the proposed $10/MWh tax on wind and solar. The county commissioner from a wind-friendly county is naturally angry that the state is trying to quadruple the wind tax and ensure that none of the increase goes to counties where the wind projects are located. The game is pretty transparent: coal's defenders are trying to ensure that counties with less coal-centered business don't "defect" to hosting renewable projects that could decrease the market demand for coal-fired electricity. Heaping on taxes and not permitting host-counties to get any of that extra tax revenue is how they're trying to do it.
I wouldn't be surprised if it were the majority voice. If my career was coal and my entire life was coal, I would care a lot more about my life than the environment in 100 years. I think the rational thing to do in fact would be what they just did. Fight renewable and encourage coal.
This is not to say that very locally rational choices can not be horrible on the global scale.
Which is why I think a strong federal /global team effort is needed to make smart choices for the planet. The federal level could likely shut down this kind of law. I suspect Obama would have, but that Trump would not (hence the timing of the bill).
>>I work in renewables, and I encourage this community to not to ridicule people in Wyoming for their very clear majority choice. In their point of view, they are making the best choice for their interests, so calling them stupid only deepens their resolve.<<
Your comment explains why they are making the current choice and I guess it makes sense. They are giving themselves a lifeline. What they should do now is have a plan to decrease their dependence on coal in case the price of coal collapses, which currently seems to be heading in that direction.
Otherwise it looks like they are setting themselves up for something similar to what happened in [1]. The whole thing will collapse and they will not be prepared for it.
WTF, I used to be closer to a lot of the republican ideology, but their move over the last 10 years to be so anti-science, anti-fact, anti-thinking it is repulsive. They used to stand for letting people live and not be bothered by the government, now they try to control women's vaginas and so much other shit that bugs me.
If you go back far enough, it was the democrats who opposed abolition of slavery, and it was a Republican who went to war to keep the south from seceding over it.
Oh downvote me into oblivion. But whatever the hell you're doing US, it's not good. It's not good for you, it's not good for the planet. It's not good for your citizens, it's not good for humans all around the planet. With all your overseas missions to "protect freedom" or some other utterly irrelevant excuse to satiate your military-industrial complex, you fail to do the one thing that might actually help. Progress. Progress beyond your dependence on fossil fuels, progress beyond the need to entice war, slavery, destruction for those who hold those mineral resources you value so dearly. Just think for a second: however much is left, however destructive it might be to the planet to extract and burn it(losses beyond imagination included), there is still a finite amount of it. You could be the front-runners in a revolution never seen before. The front-runners in an economy liberated from the need to see energy as "scarce". You're stuck in a mindset. "Energy is scarce". It's not, it's abundant. It's /everywhere/. Solar, Geothermal, Wind and Hydro-electric are not some hippy post-fact climate change conspiracy: they can and will provide you with unlimited and free energy. Just /think/ for just a second what that would do to your infrastructure. Grow food in deserts? Done. Free transport across the world? Done. Virtually free drinking water through ocean desalination? Done. Massive reductions in prices for food and other necessities? Done.
But no, you want to live in a world where energy is scarce and you're the sole "protector" of its use and freedom. Cite "jobs lost" or whatever you can think of to protect your bubble; but this path you're on is not sustainable.
Who are you talking to? All of the citizens of the US?
The federal government?
This is a state of Wyoming bill. Here's an analogy: You're basically directing criticism towards the European Union for something a member nation has done; the whole is not any individual part.
You seem to have some legitimate criticisms of the US government or the country as a whole but this comment section is not the place for it.
That's fair. But I do, and can, direct criticism towards the EU for one of its member states as well (however shaky the EU might be at this moment). It might not particularly effective, given, but in my book it's still valid criticism. Maybe it's my upbringing, I don't know, but I'd like to think about 'citizens of the world'. Pollution, innovations, technology and energy know, and should not, know boundries. While this particular bit was about Wyoming there have been similar stances in other states about taxing or otherwise limiting renewable energy. At some point it's necessary to abstract. To find the "general" in the particulars. It's a touchy subject, but maybe it's time to abstract this to the federal level or even higher?
Remember when the state legislatures in "Conservative" "Republican" states like Texas voted to ban Tesla sales in their state?
Lots of people in Wyoming and Texas vote "conservative" and conservatives are supposed to advocate for the free market.
And those people claim to be "conservative" want capitalism and the free market UNTIL the free market threatens to put their jobs at risk. Maybe they were never really conservative in first place?
It's not forbidden, it just has a ~10% tariff (fine). $10 per MWh compared to the current price of $120 per MWh. If solar or wind ends up actually cheaper than coal, it'll probably be by more than that 10% so it'll still be economical to use them.
Furthermore, the fine doesn't apply to exported electricity, which is most of it:
"Wyoming sends two-thirds of the electricity it generates to nearby states" [1]
The wholesale price a new American wind farm gets for its output in a region with good resources is maybe $30-$40/MWh. (Or $40-$50 if the wind farm lasts 25 years and collects the federal Production Tax Credit for its first 10 years.) The extra $10 in taxes makes a bigger difference at the wholesale level.
“Wyoming is a great wind state and we produce a lot of wind energy. We also produce a lot of conventional energy, many times our needs. The electricity generated by coal is amongst the least expensive in the country. We want Wyoming residences to benefit from this inexpensive electrical generation. We do not want to be averaged into the other states that require a certain [percentage] of more expensive renewable energy.”
Are there any Wyoming people here who can comment on the feasibility of this passing? This is crony capitalism, government choosing "winners and losers", at its finest.
Not from Wyoming, but this seems like a classic disagreement between the average state resident (or rather, the industry that has purchased her legislator) and some exceptional municipality. Since it's Wyoming I'm guessing Jackson Hole. Probably they wanted to have something nice to brag about to coastal rich people conflicted about vacationing in a red state, so they were going to require local ratepayers to purchase some percentage of "clean" energy. Outlawing this sort of local arrangement is just the sort of thing that state governments do. We've seen a lot of state laws outlawing public internet service, for example.
They might also have assumed that I approve of states interfering with municipalities this way. No way: I'm for complete decentralization. Of course that means I'm also against municipalities decreeing that one type of power will be available rather than another, but I figure people can work at a local level or vote with their feet rather than enlisting state or federal interference.
If that was actually the rationale, the law would mandate utilities to use the cheapest available source, whatever that happens to be at any given point; not provide a fixed list of sources.
I'm always astounded about what people will do for profit. To destroy the planet, or even to keep doing it, for the purpose of keeping people employed. The 'free market' doesn't fix this behavior. Thanks capitalism.
Much of the state's budget is derived from the coal and gas industry. Hence, all our other taxes are low. For the past few years we have been in a budget crisis due to the drop in energy prices. The university and public schools in particular are having a real hard time as their budgets continue to be cut.
I'm not sure whether or not if this will pass. Given the current political climate and how broke we are, I've got a bad feeling.
It's not like this is free money, though; any increase in tax revenue will just be paid by the electricity consumers, in the form of higher rates, so if the motivation was just to cover the state revenue shortfall, a direct tax on renewable energy would be more sensible. But then again, indirect taxes are politically easier, while a "helping hand" to the local industry looks good on TV.
> Lobbyists for utility companies looking to preserve the status quo paid the lawmakers to do it. Isn't that obvious?
That's an unlikely theory. If it is the Wyoming utilities that want to favor coal over renewables they don't need legislation to do that. They can simply decline to buy from renewable sources, which would accomplish their goal without any bad publicity or political controversy.
That would be true if 100% of Wyoming utilities acted in unison. But if one of them shifts to renewables, and that shift results in lower cost energy or an increase in productivity that results in a reduction of employees, it will force the others to do the same to stay competitive. This legislation is meant to prevent that from happening so jobs and profits are preserved in the short term.
Wyoming is not an electric choice state. Customers are stuck with the electric utility that owns the wires going to their house, so that utility does not need to stay competitive with utilities that serve other areas.
Utilities don't necessarily support this because it keeps the status quo. Utilities make money buy building new plants and charging ratepayers the cost of the plant plus a rate of return on capital. That's why utilities supported Pres. Obama's Clean Power Plan.
Not utility companies. This law would be a pure negative for them -- it establishes penalties for generating/using the "wrong kinds" of power, without any benefits.
If you want to point a finger at lobbyists, point it at the coal industry.
The fact that many in this thread are touting 'the free market' as a solution is unnerving. You still have profit motive under capitalism, and that doesn't stop you from exploiting people and destroying the environment.
The government works for the bourgeoisie. It's not their impediment.
> Wyoming is the nation's largest coal producer, fourth-largest natural-gas producer, and eighth-largest crude-oil producer, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
While I don't know for sure, it feels like it can be inferred from `As a large state with a small population and lots of coal` to be job protection and corporate lobbying.
This is not as bad as it sounds. In fact the answer is in the article:
> Wyoming already generates more electricity than it consumes.
> The state already has wind farms, and a 3,000-megawatt installation is under construction in Carbon County.
People will still build wind farms, they'll just export the electricity. This is no different from Germany going "nuclear free" (they still import energy from nuclear plants in France and the Czech Republic). California is a leader in green energy, of which quite a bit comes from hydro of which CA has almost none...but Washington does. Etc etc.
Still, grandstanding does send a message and this one is a stupid one.
I know that Utah coal is exported to China since it gets shipped by rail to Port of Stockton. A local developer was trying to build a coal terminal in Oakland (Oakland Army Base which is basically attached to the Port of Oakland) but the city (mayor+sups) wisely shut that down. It is insanely stupid to have a coal terminal upwind of a populated area.
As terrible as this is, at least they can continue selling their renewables out of state. The winds in Wyoming are incredible (google image search: "Wyoming wind sock"; it's less an exaggeration than you'd think).
The Fine Article also points out that ~90% of WY's electricity already comes from non-renewables (though, for whatever reason, they count hydro amongst those).
Net, this isn't exactly changing the status quo for WY.
The bill was (according to it's creators) designed to make the utilities reserve the cheapest power for Wyoming residents rather than exporting it all to states where they could get higher retail prices and bigger profits, leaving Wyomings the less reliable and more expensive renewables.
In case you missed it the bill only affects energy sold to Wyoming residents, that's only 584,153 people (!). The utilities can sell renewable energy outside the state with no penalty.
'When asked about the motivation for the bill and concerns about it driving away future wind generation, bill sponsor Republican Rep. David Miller from Fremont County said, "Wyoming is a great wind state and we produce a lot of wind energy. We also produce a lot of conventional energy, many times our needs. The electricity generated by coal is amongst the least expensive in the country. We want Wyoming residences to benefit from this inexpensive electrical generation."'
Many states and utility companies are making it difficult for consumers to sell locally generated power to the grid.
There is pain in the short term, but in the long term it'll just cause the renewable manufacturing industry to throw more resources at improving power storage as much as the power generation has improved over the last few decades.
Tesla's Powerwall is a good step, but there are many other opportunities for companies to live in this field. Once storage technology improves, then more and more users can generate locally and store their own power and just use the grid as a backup power source.
Interestingly enough, some jurisdictions don't allow people to go "off grid" entirely because of laws passed to ensure that all citizens have a source of power and potable water. Many of those laws don't take self-generation into account.
This particular bill explicitly allows for "net metering systems", which I believe is a reference to selling locally generated power to the grid. So it seems to be specifically targeting large-scale renewables.
The goal of the bill is to protect Wyoming's fossil fuel industries. But even if passed, it would largely fail to do that. That's because the great majority of the state's fossil fuel production is sold to other states and countries that are charging ahead with renewable energy.
Instead of trying to stop the unstopable, the state government should be working on how to adapt to the new world where no one wants to buy their fossil fuel exports.
Given that the US grid is highly interconnected, would this legislation require Wyoming utilities to avoid using renewable-generated electricity from sources outside Wyoming?
This would seem to require that Wyoming's utilities isolate the state's grid to prevent using "eligible resources", according to the bill.
Solar and wind both need land. Wyoming is a land of farmers, people who extract thier livings from thier land. Where is the farm lobby? They should be defending against any law attacking a potential "crop". Are they all putting ideology ahead of profits? Are we that far down the rabbit hole?
So... Wyoming exports most of the electricity it generates, this doesn't apply to exported electricity, and electricity is fungible: in other words, this is just meaningless culture-war posturing, then?
It might make sense. If coal demand plunges they will have a glut. As long as they don't have to pay the costs of the pollution it makes sense for Wyoming taxpayers.
My comment is the only actual solution to the problem. This is pure corruption & treason. The actions of these people will cause death & hardship globally for generations to come. How do you punish if someone kills someone else?
Secession is illegal. We fought a pretty awful war to make sure of it. Also, don't assume for a minute that this sort of stuff is not also going on in California and NY.
We've got the same Republican section in NY state but it's the northern part. Their biggest complaint is that they're taxed too high and their level of services is too low. Of course, they're spread out up there compared to us in NYC, so their services cost a LOT more to deliver per service per capita. It basically puts us in a mirror situation with red vs blue states... mostly Democratic NYC population's taxes go to pay for the services of the mostly Republican upstate and the mostly Republican upstaters still complain that they pay too much for the services they get.
In this case it's the people with less money doing the complaining, if I read that correctly. The rural conservatives who are subsidized by taxes on urban areas complain that they are the ones who are getting screwed. That's red states vs. blue states in a nutshell, so it wouldn't be surprising to see the same pattern on a smaller scale between NYC and upstate NY.
The way the Republicans have been playing, they are begging for a war. Probably don't want that with all these nukes around, but why not just let a couple red states leave? They seem to really want it & know how to do a better job.
Heck, I'm sure Wyoming would love to leave. They've got such a great economy with all that gas & coal. They can keep it! Or Texas. We'll miss the BBQ, but that's OK.
So nice of the republicans that they suddenly discovered their love for coal workers.
I'm curious if they would keep that love if coal companies invested in automation and laid off workers, or if then, they'd suddenly rediscover the faith in a free market.
The US coal industry has been investing in automation and shedding workers for ages. The American coal industry's all time record year for output tonnage was 2008, and accomplished it with about half of the workers employed in 1980. The American coal industry shed a larger number of workers (though admittedly not a larger percentage of workers) during the Reagan administration than during the Obama administration. It didn't start with Reagan either. It's been going on pretty much continuously for as long as we have records. American coal employment was lower and tonnage output was higher in the 1950s than the 1920s also.
Starting in 1900, with 448,581 miners producing 268,684,000 short tons, the output's more or less risen steadily to almost four times that total amount, but the number employed in 2013 was 80,209, reflecting about 20x the productivity of 1900.
As far as the point of employment goes, Wyoming claimed a relatively modest total of 6,673 mining (surface and underground) jobs in 2013.
This is dumb. If you look at the bill itself [1], it explicitly states
11 (a) In compliance year 2018, each electric utility
12 shall procure a minimum of ninety-five percent (95%) of its
13 sales of electricity in Wyoming from eligible generating
14 resources.
15
16 (b) In compliance year 2019, each electric utility
17 shall procure a minimum of one hundred percent (100%) of
18 its sales of electricity in Wyoming from eligible
19 generating resources.
The key part here is that by 2019, each electric utility shall procure all of its sales of electricity in Wyoming from "eligible generating resources."
Now, let's see how "eligible generating resources" is defined:
6 (v) "Eligible generating resource" means an
7 electricity generating resource either located within
8 Wyoming or delivering electricity into Wyoming from another
9 state that produces electricity from one (1) or more of the
10 following sources or system:
11
12 (A) Coal;
13
14 (B) Hydroelectric;
15
16 (C) Natural gas;
17
18 (D) Net metering system, as defined by W.S.
19 37-16-101(a)(viii);
20
21 (E) Nuclear;
22
23 (F) Oil.
Oh no! It looks like "solar" and "wind" aren't on the list of eligible energy resources! Aye, take a closer look: both solar and wind energy fall under "net metering system," so in reality, climate activists are bashing their heads against the wall. They have the right sentiment, but they're only fighting against the bill because they didn't read it. :-(
Those "eligible resources" are defined solely as coal, hydroelectric, natural gas, nuclear, oil, and individual net metering.
The latter includes home solar or wind installations in which the owner feeds excess electricity back into the grid, and is paid a predetermined, fixed fee for the power.
But these small-scale sources of renewable energy are meant for private use. They just happen to produce extra power that can be utilized by the grid.
Utility-scale wind and solar farms are not included in the bill's list of "eligible resources," making it illegal for Wyoming utilities to use them in any way if the legislation passes.
And if you go back to the primary source[1], that is, W.S. 37-16-101(a)(viii), you can corroborate this, as "Net metering system" has restrictions such as:
7 (B) Has a generating capacity of not more
8 than:
9
10 (I) Twenty-five (25) kilowatts for a
11 residential facility;
12
13 (II) One (1) megawatt for a
14 nonresidential facility, if allowed by the electric
15 utility, but an electric utility may not disallow
16 nonresidential use equal to or less than twenty-five (25)
17 kilowatts.
And:
2 (E) Is intended primarily to offset part or
3 all of the customer-generator's requirements for
4 electricity
So the activists are right: this is effectively making it illegal to set up any large-scale wind or solar farm.
If any of you reading this live in Wyoming, please bring this up with your representatives. It's deliberately interfering with the free market in order to artificially inflate the value of coal by making it illegal to sell large-scale alternative energy sources, sponsored by representatives of coal-producing counties.
Fair enough. Though it makes it pretty unappealing to set up a renewable energy source in Wyoming, or even in the general vicinity of the state, if you can't actually sell to people or utilities nearby. At that point, the only good reason to set up a renewable energy plant within Wyoming is if you have some extremely good geographical/climate/geological reason to do so.
Note also that this bill also blocks geothermal energy, which I would expect should be pretty attractive as a source of energy for the home state of Yellowstone and Old Faithful.
Natural gas, hydro, and coal may fall under "net metering system" too.
The law plainly says that beginning in 2020, electric utilities in WY may not procure any power from solar and wind (unless they're located behind their customer's retail meter).
Why name technologies at all unless you're trying to pick winners (or select losers)?
I found dumb that a $10 fine is made look as if it's on top of the $0.12 per kWh, but it's actually per MWh. It's $10 on top of $120 - while still silly, is not as bad.
It must be hard to be a politician on either side of the aisle. There's a group of people who are looking for ways to attack you, regardless of whether it's for a good reason.
If you don't think that this bill imposes taxes on wind or solar generation (or coal, hydroelectric, natural gas, nuclear or oil) what do you think it is intended to tax? Geothermal power?
The net metering system is only for small distributed generating sources, like rooftop solar, kilowatt-scale generation. This bill is aimed at preventing large scale renewable projects, megawatt-scale generation.
Drop the sensationalist BS headline please. "Individual net metering" is explicitly mentioned. Net metering = individual solar panels owned by property owners. AKA The utility can't build solar but they can use the solar from any household that connects their own solar to the grid with net-metering tie-ins.
This means that renewables of some sort are in fact allowed. All it took was reading to the 9th tiny paragraph.
Well sure, it would be much harder, and even more anti-free market to ban private individuals from setting up their own renewable energy sources on their own property. That would be telling people what they can or can't do on private property, which is a whole other legal ball of wax than telling regulated utilities what they can or can't do.
But utilities would be forbidden from maintaining solar and wind farms to provide energy to their customers. Your interpretation is correct, but it doesn't change any of the things that are bad or anti-free-market about this. I can see how someone might misinterpret the headline, but that requires an almost intentional misreading, regarding a fine point that doesn't impact anything that people are concerned about here.
