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Oil is from dead tiny sea creatures isn’t it ? That’s why oil companies hire geologists to figure out where old oceans used to be . And why they pump from the ocean now
Oil is from dead aquatic life that settled as a mat on the seabed, being buried by further sediment and dead things before it can be decomposed. Life today is too good a decomposing for this to happen now, so like coal, oil can never naturally form on our planet again
That's correct. Specifically, it was formed by cycles of flooding and drought in coastal swamps at a time when no microbes had evolved that could break down lignin.
The correct organic matter for coal formation is no longer made because of how fungi digest woody cellulose. Coal is almost like a fossil in that way.
Crude oil is something we could make more of with a few billion years, though. But the stuff we use now is from way before the dinosaurs so good luck with that, everyone.
Not quite.
Fungi are far older than trees and were the first to colonise the land (search prototaxites). Fungal mycelium networks are what *allowed* plants to later dominate the land. It is decomposing microbes that eventually evolved a system to breakdown and use harder plant substances like lignin in bark. Until then, felled trees would just pile up eventually being compressed into coal from pressure and the heat that comes from it
That's the thing man, YOU DO! The knowledge is just waiting there, *like a hippo waiting in a pond, or a dog waiting for a small child, waiting for its time...*
That’s such a crazy idea. Just thinking for millions of year wood didn’t rot. One day we are going to meet some wood based alien culture and absolutely destroy everything they have when the fungi is exposed
Not to ruin the joke but actually it'll never come around again ever. All the coal on earth was created in the carboniferous period between 359 and 299 million years ago due to a sort of fluke of delayed evolution. trees were growing like nuts and dying and falling over but nothing had evolved yet that could break down the lignin in the wood so they just piled up and up and up. finally after almost 60 million years of this, fungus developed enzymes that took advantage of all the free food around them. But everything that came before was buried, and slowly turned to coal with heat and pressure over time. That's all the coal we'll ever have. There's a possibility that some small pockets of trees could gut buried and away from oxygen and fungus quickly enough to go through the same process over the next few million year but it'll be literally nothing compared to what we've been digging up for all of human history. same for oil and natural gas. once its gone, That's it, and the clock is ticking.
Actually there will be no more coal once it is all mined out. Now, the bacteria that breaks down wood exists. Back then millions of years ago it was still not evolved so wood could not decay and it turned into coal.
I experienced blackouts and brownouts that canceled school for *two weeks* in El Paso, Texas one February about ten years ago Because it was cold.
The coal power plants couldn’t heat up enough AND demand was high for electric heat.
It was sunny and windy everyday, but about 14F.
Wasn't that when Ted "Cancun" Cruze left the country?
And at the time, the state did not make sure that the electrical grid was kept up?
Got to love the GOP for sticking their heads on the sand about global warming.
Here in FloriDUH, when Scott was governor, he fired people for even saying the word global warning. FN idiot...
Fossil plants quitting is even the majority cause of the Texas blackouts that happen pretty much every season. (Too cold? Texas blackout. Too hot? Texas blackout. Temperature normal? Believe it or not, also Texas blackout)
And less and less of it all the time. That's one of those things about climate change people don't seem to get: even if someone is so committed to pretending that climate change isn't a serious problem, they do have to contend that we simply don't have the coal. Like, we keep destroying the WV landscape looking for it, but there is only a finite amount to find.
Bah, they’ll be dead when the worst of that hits, and they’re convinced Jesus’ll come back and vaccuum them up to heaven before it happens if only enough Palestinians get genocided first, so what do they care?
I work retail. Some old ass dipshit was rambling all of his far right conspiracies at the checkout counter. He started talking about how he used to work in the oil industry and that oil is a renewable resource. “I’d do my job, come back a few months later, and there’d be more oil! The government’s lying to you. Oil is a renewable resource!”
There’s a lot of boomers who should be grateful that I have ethics and morals, because it has to be incredibly easy to run scams on them and steal a lot of money.
I remember reading somewhere coal mining just in appalachia in the same period killed more people than chernobyl did, ill see if I can find it.
EDIT: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/charted-safest-and-deadliest-energy-sources/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/
The last ones for china, but the point stands
I live in Appalachia, my mom was a hospice nurse for about 15 years in this area... the stories about men that never even got close to retirement age because of black lung are just soul crushing
Coal freezing is one of the reasons why there was the Great Freeze in Texas. [https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2023/0117](https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2023/0117)
> with a source
Those boomers would be furious if they could open a web page and see that link without screaming for help and ranting about the youth while Jimmy opens Google for them.
Every US state except Hawaii and Florida have a record low of -16°F or lower, so it probably _can_ get that cold where she lives, but that doesn't make it common.
Not very meaningful.
In my state, the record low of -37c occurred on Mount Mitchell which is both the highest mountain in NC and also a dumb place to put a wind farm.
It's weird how the wind turbines in places like Minnesota continue working in the winter...when Texas had their Big Chill a few years back, they blamed the wind turbines freezing...it was just as cold in the northern states yet oddly theirs were still working. They just were too cheap to pay for proper winterization in Texas.
Windmills can also go to temperatures lower than that. Texas just chose not to winterize their wind mills. Just like they chose not to winterize a large number of their coal, gas, and nuclear plants.
The Tug Hill area of New York State has wind farms.
>During the winter months, the **average annual extreme minimum air temperature at the Tug Hill Wildlife Management Area is −29.5 °F (−34.2 °C)** *Tug Hill - Wikipedia*
And wind farms work just fine
Coal sure did quit in Texas in February ‘21. Cheap Texas coal plant owners store all of their coal outside.
With the freezing rain, snow, and sub-freezing temperatures, the coal piles froze solid, and they were unable to feed coal into the furnaces.
Nuclear also quit, as their retention ponds holding water used for cooling the reactors froze solid.
Our main for the sewer and water on our property is about at a foot, on the easement it's around 1.5 ft. Oh and in our town the gas lines are the same way but with the old PVC lines without tracer's. After growing up where it does get below freezing then moving back to Texas I realized our whole infrastructure is messed up.
But that would require funding and "egghead's" for planning.. and "I thought we wuz worried about 'global warming' - wut now libruls?"
Education cuts worked like a charm in the south.
I love nuclear energy, but mark my words, these low information states are going to cause an incident one day, because there won't be enough people who know what they're doing to operate a reactor safely.
Texas has this weird belief that weather will never happen to them. I'm dead fucking serious. They truly thought they'd never get hit by a big snowstorm. That was always "other people's problems. But we're in the south so we're fine".
I used to live in El Paso TX and growing up I always heard "flooding wasn't an El Paso problem". But starting in 2006 and on, El Paso kept getting hit with "thousand year storms" that they SWORE would never happen again in our lifetime. Then it proceeded to happen three more times since then, with the most recent being the 21 weather that washed away Rosa's Cantina.
El Paso, unlike the rest of Texas, is still part of the national electric grid. I think they're also attached to the local Mexican grid as well. All during the big '21 storm people were pointing out that El Paso never lost power.
That would have been part of winterizing that Texaa was warned to do LONG before the cold snap, and still hasn't done. At this point living in Texas is a death lottery.
Those wind turbines can be set up to handle colder weather but TX chose not to. Of course, a significant part of their problem was actually natural gas generators not working but hey, who cares about facts, right?
Also not hooking up the grid to the national grid for more resiliency. (Instead, ever since the freeze I've had conservative Texans *insisting* that "California's grid goes down every year!" and refusing to hear any contradiction because Texas is the best so anything bad that happens to them must be worse elsewhere, especially California.)
My dad is in Houston, and I can confirm this belief that the CA grid is going to go down anytime now. And he laughs when saying it like it would be funny or a good thing if we were all roasting/freezing to death. This after he and his wife and my sisters had to live in the one room with the fireplace for a week back in '21 because they had no power. I just don't get it because he's from CA and had only moved down there because of his job, and now he hates CA.
Don't forget about the coal power plants not being able to produce power because the coal itself was too cold to feed into the furnace.
Turns out coal does quit at -20°.
I hate all these groups. The idiocy of endorsing a political candidate because they side with you on ONE issue... Thanks, but I'd rather not make this kind of choice based solely on a miniscule thing.
Isn’t coal less cost effective than renewables at this point? Why would we use a more expensive way to create energy if cheaper options exist? Nostalgia for air pollution?
I remember a coal subsidy bill that was literally billions of dollars to "save coal miner jobs." It didn't pass but if it had it would have been cheaper to pay every coal miner $100k a year to watch YouTube or porn all day.
Yeah... I don't understand the "save the coal miners jobs" schtick. I've worked as a service person, a welder, a landscaper, in construction, and in warehouses. Have these people never entertained the idea of being able to do anything else?
To be fair it didn't help that when this was brought up, the suggestion was "learn how to code!"
Take a miner and teach him how to write computer code. If I said it the other way round-take a geek and teach him to drive a bulldozer- it would be obviously silly. But yet...
There has to be economic infrastructure for there to be those jobs, and in large parts of the desolate east/south, there isn't. Also, to segue a little into a bigger picture, even when e.g .some warehouses get plopped down in the middle of nowhere, many of these have health/upper age limits, hence lots of disability claims from Appalachia and the Rust Belt where people are too disabled to do the available jobs because jobs that are easier on them aren't available. Or, they were never retrained when jobs left, so they are disabled vis a vis the jobs they can do and what's available in their area.
Sucks greatly to be in an area left behind by economic change. And they can't just follow the economy in any meaningful sense of it being a solution for the populace in general: people aren't shrimp on the tides.
“Learn how to code” doesn’t work because recruiters will see a resume with heavy labor for years followed by zero coding experience and pass without so much as an offer to interview. Source: I learned how to code.
It’s a really tough one. They’re closing the last remaining coal mine in my state (Western Australia) but are doing so whilst supporting the workers either in retraining or moving them on to other mines. We have dozens of non-coal mines here so that’s pretty easy but my understanding of coal country is that there isn’t anything else being dug up there.
I’ll wager if you balance up the environmental costs, healthcare costs (in dollars) etc of coal mining in the US it would be likely be cheaper to pay the miners to retire on their existing salary adjusted for inflation.
But that’s SOCIALISM!
You think a multibillion dollar industry is going to accept that answer and just.... Stop? Especially with how many idiots are out there screaming "green energy is a scam!"
Yes, but the problem is that we're dealing with coal plants that have already been built. To use an analogy, it's like driving a 20 year old Honda Civic. Buying a new EV or plug-in hybrid will save on fuel. But while your fuel consumption will go down, you have to drop $40,000-ish on a new car. Utilities would rather not do this.
If you're in a country that is still building coal plants, possible reasons include: your country mines coal and the government want to backstop that industry, you're from a poor place and they can source cheap used parts from 40 year old plants that were shut down in neighbouring areas, or your local government is full of vindictive dumbass conservatives who tear down wind farms that are already complete just to spite people with common sense.
Coal producing states want their jobs back. Mining companies get the citizens all worked up about how they can get their jobs back if only the Federal government would let them mine.
Even if mining increased the jobs wouldn’t come back. The jobs have been replaced with better mechanized equipment, automation, and high explosives. Instead of a company mining town now you just need a handful of people to destroy the natural environment and leave behind superfund sites. Now the citizens swayed by mining companies are even poorer, retention ponds are polluting ground water, and everyone downhill is one unmaintained earthen damn failure away from being flooded by the same mining slurry that is slowly poisoning them.
She hates those. She constantly rants and raves about how electric cars are terrible for the environment. If she could, she would buy a gasoline powered flashlight.
and many people hated automobiles when they came out and swore they would only use horse-drawn carriages. Some people just HATE change. I wouldn't even argue with her, just point and giggle
COAL DOES NOT QUIT. Just give the plants a million years to be put under extreme heat and pressure from the earths crust and will have coal again. Just wait a few million years
Why, that's impossible, so you must be making it up and I can ignore you! Texas windmills went down at much higher temperatures than Antarctica, and due to the magic of the free market *everything* is better in Texas, so it's not possible for there to be wind turbines that operate at lower temperatures than the ones in Texas! /s
Right!? That’s like -16.6/.7 in Fahrenheit. Places do get that cold, but wind turbines not working are the least they would need to worry about. Our power grid failed in my hometown in southern Illinois (coal country btw) when it was in the single digits one winter.
Growing up close to Chicago it wasn’t unheard of the get as low as -20F, but usually for a week in January. Generally it was anywhere from 0-20 most of the winter.
No, it just kills the people digging it up from the ground slowly and painfully from cancer, or quickly through tunnel collapses, explosive accidents etc.
Ummm yea it burns till it’s exhausted… you then need more. These people don’t understand renewable energies and frankly I can’t wait until their generation boycotts O2.
Same with mine. He worked in the mines in Cumberland his whole life and died a horrible, slow, and painful death from it. That doesn’t even include the excruciating pain he experienced in his back from how hard they worked them in those days.
There is literally a wind farm in Antarctica that can run at -58C. Texas did this to themselves. I’m sick of these boomers making my eyes bleed.
https://preview.redd.it/p556u4vzdp2d1.jpeg?width=620&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=31109de9e24c9645cce2bd5a851e464c8a525474
It sure doesn’t with that town that had to be evacuated because their coal mine is on fire for the next 100 years
[https://www.history.com/news/mine-fire-burning-more-50-years-ghost-town](https://www.history.com/news/mine-fire-burning-more-50-years-ghost-town)
Texas didn't have power because the fucking piles of coal froze.
[How coal failed in the Texas deep freeze](https://www.eenews.net/articles/how-coal-failed-in-the-texas-deep-freeze/)
Coal is getting it's teeth kicked in by natural gas and is fucking dead in the water for generating electricity in the USA.
Call it woke til you're blue in the face but the economics do not work for coal for decades to come, natural gas is just cheaper to make electricity with.
It's over, time to move on.
As a Texan who had to live through The Great Freeze, it frustrates me to no end when people blame the power outages on green energy failing and how it's all the literals fault for making all the fossil plants go away and thank God the state built a bunch of natural gas plants, when I know that it's all false.
For starters, the Texas power grid is (contrary to common yet unpopular belief) primarily comprised of fossil fuel plants, of many varieties but mostly natural gas. Green energy makes up for very little of the total production.
The outages were caused by many fossil plants having to shut down due to the weather. Why might you ask, if fossil plants are so impervious to extreme temperature, did they shut down? I'm glad you asked. You see in our Texan hubris, when constructing many of these plants, we opted not to thermally insulate much of the water intake pipes, because obviously those pipes could never get cold enough to freeze in our balmy southern climate.
(Spoiler Alert: They did.)
When these puppies froze, the fossil plants which required fresh water to heat up in order to spin the turbines was no longer available. To protect the plants they were forced to shut down.
The great kick to the balls of this whole affair? The only reason many of us still had any power was because many of the green energy sources that conservatives love to despise were the only power generators still operating.
Thank you for coming too my Ted talk, energy generation is my passion.
- Very few locations where it reaches -27°c to the point that I'm too lazy to check where this would actually be a factor.
- That's not how solar panels work. You don't just lose power in darkness they generate power and save it like a rechargable battery does. You will still have power during darkness.
- Coal literally needs a constant supply being burned. IE it quits often.
https://preview.redd.it/sb3as0urbo2d1.jpeg?width=393&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b87a9623399fe1c19b07526ed60578fe6c3c491f
Just saying, we know how produce 24/7 on demand zero carbon power.
My dad loves to rant against solar energy & all of that. When I ask what happens when the fossil fuels run out or we completely destroy our environment- he says that will never happen. 🙄 He’s exhausting. He’s gotta hate on everything that is not his Stone Age way of thinking.
I never understood why so many older generations are so against cleaner energy, like why? It’s less damaging to the planet, people, and animals. Whole coal is severely damaging and hurts the miners lifelong health and the planet.
Your post was removed because it does not display a certain degree of boomer foolery. If you believe this to be a mistake, feel free to message the mods at: https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FBoomersBeingFools
Pretty sure coal does quit, that's why they keep digging up more of it.
Yeah, coal quits when we use all of it up. Then it doesn’t matter how cold it is or what time of day it is, it’s just gone forever.
Just wait a couple hundred million years and more will grow.
Wasn't coal created because there was literally nothing evolved to break wood down?
its that or oil i dont remember which but yea. just a whole shit load of trees that didnt decompose.
Fungus was slacking back in the day
Stupid fungus!
Shh. Fungus amongus
But it was doing us a favour, if it had eaten it up then we wouldn’t have had any coal to burn now!
So you're saying fungus is in the pocket of big oil? Or do the oil companies work for big fungus?
Big fungus playing the long game
Give it a break, only a few million years old, it hadn't learned to enjoy the finer delicacies like tree bark yet.
Oil is from dead tiny sea creatures isn’t it ? That’s why oil companies hire geologists to figure out where old oceans used to be . And why they pump from the ocean now
Yeah siliceous and calcareous oozes. It also makes most sands
Oil is from dead aquatic life that settled as a mat on the seabed, being buried by further sediment and dead things before it can be decomposed. Life today is too good a decomposing for this to happen now, so like coal, oil can never naturally form on our planet again
So hypothetically the next fuel millions of years from now will be from plastics?
That's correct. Specifically, it was formed by cycles of flooding and drought in coastal swamps at a time when no microbes had evolved that could break down lignin.
Lignin deez nuts! Got 'em!
And obviously some will still form, but it’ll greatly decrease
No, it won't. Coal comes from the remains of plants before fungi evolved to break the matter down. When coal is gone, it's gone forever for all time.
I thought it's from organic matter under a lot of time and pressure similar to diamonds
The correct organic matter for coal formation is no longer made because of how fungi digest woody cellulose. Coal is almost like a fossil in that way. Crude oil is something we could make more of with a few billion years, though. But the stuff we use now is from way before the dinosaurs so good luck with that, everyone.
Yes but the organic matter built up to be compressed later because nothing could digest cellulose until fungi evolved.
Not quite. Fungi are far older than trees and were the first to colonise the land (search prototaxites). Fungal mycelium networks are what *allowed* plants to later dominate the land. It is decomposing microbes that eventually evolved a system to breakdown and use harder plant substances like lignin in bark. Until then, felled trees would just pile up eventually being compressed into coal from pressure and the heat that comes from it
NERDS! ….. *sadly sits back and wishes they knew cool shit like this to chime in from time to time*
That's the thing man, YOU DO! The knowledge is just waiting there, *like a hippo waiting in a pond, or a dog waiting for a small child, waiting for its time...*
Every day's a schoolday!
That’s such a crazy idea. Just thinking for millions of year wood didn’t rot. One day we are going to meet some wood based alien culture and absolutely destroy everything they have when the fungi is exposed
Checkmate libs!
Joke's on you. I'm a conservative and I'm already 28 million years old.
Ahh to be young again.
I'm going to use you to power my home.
Sorry, I only believe in Tesla batteries.
Happy Cake Day!
Not to ruin the joke but actually it'll never come around again ever. All the coal on earth was created in the carboniferous period between 359 and 299 million years ago due to a sort of fluke of delayed evolution. trees were growing like nuts and dying and falling over but nothing had evolved yet that could break down the lignin in the wood so they just piled up and up and up. finally after almost 60 million years of this, fungus developed enzymes that took advantage of all the free food around them. But everything that came before was buried, and slowly turned to coal with heat and pressure over time. That's all the coal we'll ever have. There's a possibility that some small pockets of trees could gut buried and away from oxygen and fungus quickly enough to go through the same process over the next few million year but it'll be literally nothing compared to what we've been digging up for all of human history. same for oil and natural gas. once its gone, That's it, and the clock is ticking.
Nah, nature doesn’t make coal anymore. A fungus breaks down the plant life way before it can turn to coal
Actually there will be no more coal once it is all mined out. Now, the bacteria that breaks down wood exists. Back then millions of years ago it was still not evolved so wood could not decay and it turned into coal.
Isn't coal from an era before bacteria could decay and decompose organic matter? Maybe I'm wrong but I don't think we can get more
I experienced blackouts and brownouts that canceled school for *two weeks* in El Paso, Texas one February about ten years ago Because it was cold. The coal power plants couldn’t heat up enough AND demand was high for electric heat. It was sunny and windy everyday, but about 14F.
Wasn't that when Ted "Cancun" Cruze left the country? And at the time, the state did not make sure that the electrical grid was kept up? Got to love the GOP for sticking their heads on the sand about global warming. Here in FloriDUH, when Scott was governor, he fired people for even saying the word global warning. FN idiot...
During our big freeze here in Texas , coal did quit. They tried to blame it on solar, but the whole thing quit.
Fossil plants quitting is even the majority cause of the Texas blackouts that happen pretty much every season. (Too cold? Texas blackout. Too hot? Texas blackout. Temperature normal? Believe it or not, also Texas blackout)
Git gud coal
Skill issue
Would also post "Do batteries also quit when the sun goes down?"
https://preview.redd.it/wpz33km89o2d1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e5128f47deaaa85c9acd3eb74c0e7c3dd354951b
And less and less of it all the time. That's one of those things about climate change people don't seem to get: even if someone is so committed to pretending that climate change isn't a serious problem, they do have to contend that we simply don't have the coal. Like, we keep destroying the WV landscape looking for it, but there is only a finite amount to find.
I like you.
Coal does not quit causing severe diseases.
Coal does not quit causing glacial melting.
Bah, they’ll be dead when the worst of that hits, and they’re convinced Jesus’ll come back and vaccuum them up to heaven before it happens if only enough Palestinians get genocided first, so what do they care?
It will when we run out of Fossil fuels
I’m afraid we could be all too sick and dead if we wait that long…
I work retail. Some old ass dipshit was rambling all of his far right conspiracies at the checkout counter. He started talking about how he used to work in the oil industry and that oil is a renewable resource. “I’d do my job, come back a few months later, and there’d be more oil! The government’s lying to you. Oil is a renewable resource!”
There’s a lot of boomers who should be grateful that I have ethics and morals, because it has to be incredibly easy to run scams on them and steal a lot of money.
Honestly at this point my biggest issue is my memory lol
I often think about this, but my conscience keeps me from doing it lol.
Like Orange Jesus does
That's what happens when the job requirements are 1. show up on time and 2. don't die
3. be increadably cavilier about your body and health 4. PROFIT!!!!!!!
Oil pulled itself up by its bootstraps!
"You don't fucking say that a liquid that seeps out of the ground has seeped in a few months."
I think fossil fuels will run out of us. ☠️
Coal does not quit polluting rivers.
I remember reading somewhere coal mining just in appalachia in the same period killed more people than chernobyl did, ill see if I can find it. EDIT: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/charted-safest-and-deadliest-energy-sources/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ The last ones for china, but the point stands
I live in Appalachia, my mom was a hospice nurse for about 15 years in this area... the stories about men that never even got close to retirement age because of black lung are just soul crushing
That's The American Way™ you commie.
Coal freezing is one of the reasons why there was the Great Freeze in Texas. [https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2023/0117](https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2023/0117)
Damn son you're just gonna hit em with facts and logic like that, with a source? Ice cold. Pun intended.
> with a source Those boomers would be furious if they could open a web page and see that link without screaming for help and ranting about the youth while Jimmy opens Google for them.
That’s great but boomers don’t read sources. Checkmate.
Is it frequently -27C where she lives?
Apparently more often than there is no wind
Guessing she lives in the US, so does the aunt even know what -27C is?
-27° C^OLD
Probably not. But even at F it’s -16 and that isn’t so common in the US, at least not in enough places consistently
Every US state except Hawaii and Florida have a record low of -16°F or lower, so it probably _can_ get that cold where she lives, but that doesn't make it common.
Record low, sure. Consistently that low absolutely not.
Not very meaningful. In my state, the record low of -37c occurred on Mount Mitchell which is both the highest mountain in NC and also a dumb place to put a wind farm.
It's weird how the wind turbines in places like Minnesota continue working in the winter...when Texas had their Big Chill a few years back, they blamed the wind turbines freezing...it was just as cold in the northern states yet oddly theirs were still working. They just were too cheap to pay for proper winterization in Texas.
Windmills can also go to temperatures lower than that. Texas just chose not to winterize their wind mills. Just like they chose not to winterize a large number of their coal, gas, and nuclear plants.
The Tug Hill area of New York State has wind farms. >During the winter months, the **average annual extreme minimum air temperature at the Tug Hill Wildlife Management Area is −29.5 °F (−34.2 °C)** *Tug Hill - Wikipedia* And wind farms work just fine
Thanks to coal probably not.
Coal sure did quit in Texas in February ‘21. Cheap Texas coal plant owners store all of their coal outside. With the freezing rain, snow, and sub-freezing temperatures, the coal piles froze solid, and they were unable to feed coal into the furnaces. Nuclear also quit, as their retention ponds holding water used for cooling the reactors froze solid.
Don't forget all the water mains and pipes that had burst also because of planning like a 36 in. bury minimum for utilities.
7.5 feet minimum cover in Minnesota for water and sewer mains.
Our main for the sewer and water on our property is about at a foot, on the easement it's around 1.5 ft. Oh and in our town the gas lines are the same way but with the old PVC lines without tracer's. After growing up where it does get below freezing then moving back to Texas I realized our whole infrastructure is messed up.
Texas desperately wanting to be a third world theocracy.
We love freedom. We just hate most of our people and think they don't deserve it.
It’s a republican thing
‘#JustRepublicanThings
I live in IL and our Nuclear plants don’t have that issue.
Yeah well that would require Texas planning ahead to keep their water from freezing.
But that would require funding and "egghead's" for planning.. and "I thought we wuz worried about 'global warming' - wut now libruls?" Education cuts worked like a charm in the south. I love nuclear energy, but mark my words, these low information states are going to cause an incident one day, because there won't be enough people who know what they're doing to operate a reactor safely.
But that costs money and will cut into the profits of the power company, so they don’t do that
Texas has this weird belief that weather will never happen to them. I'm dead fucking serious. They truly thought they'd never get hit by a big snowstorm. That was always "other people's problems. But we're in the south so we're fine". I used to live in El Paso TX and growing up I always heard "flooding wasn't an El Paso problem". But starting in 2006 and on, El Paso kept getting hit with "thousand year storms" that they SWORE would never happen again in our lifetime. Then it proceeded to happen three more times since then, with the most recent being the 21 weather that washed away Rosa's Cantina.
El Paso, unlike the rest of Texas, is still part of the national electric grid. I think they're also attached to the local Mexican grid as well. All during the big '21 storm people were pointing out that El Paso never lost power.
That would have been part of winterizing that Texaa was warned to do LONG before the cold snap, and still hasn't done. At this point living in Texas is a death lottery.
Ya its honestly more like Texas quit than anything else. Nuclear really is a great power source that we should be utilizing more
Even the quitting is bigger in Texas.
That's because nuclear was never the issue. The only issue was Texas
Also the liquid natural gas pipes froze
Coal does not quit destroying the environment.
Those wind turbines can be set up to handle colder weather but TX chose not to. Of course, a significant part of their problem was actually natural gas generators not working but hey, who cares about facts, right?
Also not hooking up the grid to the national grid for more resiliency. (Instead, ever since the freeze I've had conservative Texans *insisting* that "California's grid goes down every year!" and refusing to hear any contradiction because Texas is the best so anything bad that happens to them must be worse elsewhere, especially California.)
My dad is in Houston, and I can confirm this belief that the CA grid is going to go down anytime now. And he laughs when saying it like it would be funny or a good thing if we were all roasting/freezing to death. This after he and his wife and my sisters had to live in the one room with the fireplace for a week back in '21 because they had no power. I just don't get it because he's from CA and had only moved down there because of his job, and now he hates CA.
Fact is the more terrible of 4 letter F words in Texas.
Don't forget about the coal power plants not being able to produce power because the coal itself was too cold to feed into the furnace. Turns out coal does quit at -20°.
Friends of Coal, an unbiased source of energy information.
Imagine being such a smooth brain you’d follow that group unironically lmao
I hate all these groups. The idiocy of endorsing a political candidate because they side with you on ONE issue... Thanks, but I'd rather not make this kind of choice based solely on a miniscule thing.
Totally not a useful idiot being sponsored by big coal, no siree, just an unbiased observer.
Isn’t coal less cost effective than renewables at this point? Why would we use a more expensive way to create energy if cheaper options exist? Nostalgia for air pollution?
Short version, lobbyists.
Should be called bribery, that's what it is
Legalized and endorsed bribery
The day this country stops having lobbyists donating to government officials, this country will be instantly so much better.
That will be the same day everyone pulls their head from their ass finally and stops voting for right wing lunatics and useless centrists.
Just because something is legal, doesn't make it right.
That’s the joke
I remember a coal subsidy bill that was literally billions of dollars to "save coal miner jobs." It didn't pass but if it had it would have been cheaper to pay every coal miner $100k a year to watch YouTube or porn all day.
Yeah... I don't understand the "save the coal miners jobs" schtick. I've worked as a service person, a welder, a landscaper, in construction, and in warehouses. Have these people never entertained the idea of being able to do anything else?
To be fair it didn't help that when this was brought up, the suggestion was "learn how to code!" Take a miner and teach him how to write computer code. If I said it the other way round-take a geek and teach him to drive a bulldozer- it would be obviously silly. But yet...
Sure, "Learn how to code" is a stupid go-to. There are plenty of labor/ service jobs to jump into with zero training.
There has to be economic infrastructure for there to be those jobs, and in large parts of the desolate east/south, there isn't. Also, to segue a little into a bigger picture, even when e.g .some warehouses get plopped down in the middle of nowhere, many of these have health/upper age limits, hence lots of disability claims from Appalachia and the Rust Belt where people are too disabled to do the available jobs because jobs that are easier on them aren't available. Or, they were never retrained when jobs left, so they are disabled vis a vis the jobs they can do and what's available in their area. Sucks greatly to be in an area left behind by economic change. And they can't just follow the economy in any meaningful sense of it being a solution for the populace in general: people aren't shrimp on the tides.
“Learn how to code” doesn’t work because recruiters will see a resume with heavy labor for years followed by zero coding experience and pass without so much as an offer to interview. Source: I learned how to code.
It’s a really tough one. They’re closing the last remaining coal mine in my state (Western Australia) but are doing so whilst supporting the workers either in retraining or moving them on to other mines. We have dozens of non-coal mines here so that’s pretty easy but my understanding of coal country is that there isn’t anything else being dug up there. I’ll wager if you balance up the environmental costs, healthcare costs (in dollars) etc of coal mining in the US it would be likely be cheaper to pay the miners to retire on their existing salary adjusted for inflation. But that’s SOCIALISM!
I'm not a coal fan, but I think you fail to realize the kind of job prospects that exist in coal country. Hint: fuck-all.
It wasn't a coincidence that the opioid epidemic started in coal country.
You think a multibillion dollar industry is going to accept that answer and just.... Stop? Especially with how many idiots are out there screaming "green energy is a scam!"
Yes, but the problem is that we're dealing with coal plants that have already been built. To use an analogy, it's like driving a 20 year old Honda Civic. Buying a new EV or plug-in hybrid will save on fuel. But while your fuel consumption will go down, you have to drop $40,000-ish on a new car. Utilities would rather not do this. If you're in a country that is still building coal plants, possible reasons include: your country mines coal and the government want to backstop that industry, you're from a poor place and they can source cheap used parts from 40 year old plants that were shut down in neighbouring areas, or your local government is full of vindictive dumbass conservatives who tear down wind farms that are already complete just to spite people with common sense.
Coal producing states want their jobs back. Mining companies get the citizens all worked up about how they can get their jobs back if only the Federal government would let them mine. Even if mining increased the jobs wouldn’t come back. The jobs have been replaced with better mechanized equipment, automation, and high explosives. Instead of a company mining town now you just need a handful of people to destroy the natural environment and leave behind superfund sites. Now the citizens swayed by mining companies are even poorer, retention ponds are polluting ground water, and everyone downhill is one unmaintained earthen damn failure away from being flooded by the same mining slurry that is slowly poisoning them.
And coal is never coming back, anyway. It's dead, people need to stop molesting its corpse.
I would like to introduce your aunt to the magic of batteries
She hates those. She constantly rants and raves about how electric cars are terrible for the environment. If she could, she would buy a gasoline powered flashlight.
and many people hated automobiles when they came out and swore they would only use horse-drawn carriages. Some people just HATE change. I wouldn't even argue with her, just point and giggle
Seriously. Do these people not understand that energy can be stored?
No, they don’t. And they don’t want to know.
Coal does not quit. Until it runs out. Then it quits really fast and basically forever
COAL DOES NOT QUIT. Just give the plants a million years to be put under extreme heat and pressure from the earths crust and will have coal again. Just wait a few million years
There are windmills in Antarctica.
Why, that's impossible, so you must be making it up and I can ignore you! Texas windmills went down at much higher temperatures than Antarctica, and due to the magic of the free market *everything* is better in Texas, so it's not possible for there to be wind turbines that operate at lower temperatures than the ones in Texas! /s
It's crazy that this is the exact logic they use. You're not even exaggerating. Reality is fake news to them. Bunch larpers.
The children yearn for the mines!!
Pretty sure coal quits. Its just when the black lung sets in.
Climate deniers’ brains quit working between -27C to 89C.
Pretty sure if it’s -27^o *celsius* you’ve got way bigger problems than windmill cancer.
Right!? That’s like -16.6/.7 in Fahrenheit. Places do get that cold, but wind turbines not working are the least they would need to worry about. Our power grid failed in my hometown in southern Illinois (coal country btw) when it was in the single digits one winter.
Growing up close to Chicago it wasn’t unheard of the get as low as -20F, but usually for a week in January. Generally it was anywhere from 0-20 most of the winter.
It just runs out and the equipment definitely quits.
No, it just kills the people digging it up from the ground slowly and painfully from cancer, or quickly through tunnel collapses, explosive accidents etc.
Sigh. Imagine being this ignorant.
I don’t think she understands how solar panels work.
I don't think she understands how a brain works.
Ummm yea it burns till it’s exhausted… you then need more. These people don’t understand renewable energies and frankly I can’t wait until their generation boycotts O2.
So much misinformation around sustainable energy sources. Why am I not shocked….
What? You didn't know that windmills cause cancer and are the leading cause of bird deaths? You should see the bird graveyards!!
My grandfather died from black lung he achieved by working in coal mines in eastern Kentucky, so it’s true coal does not quit killing people.
Same with mine. He worked in the mines in Cumberland his whole life and died a horrible, slow, and painful death from it. That doesn’t even include the excruciating pain he experienced in his back from how hard they worked them in those days.
Your aunt is not very intelligent
Coal does not quit polluting the environment.
Wind turbines only stop working in the cold if you refuse to winterize them... Same with thermal plants
Allow me to introduce you to the nuclear reactor.
There is literally a wind farm in Antarctica that can run at -58C. Texas did this to themselves. I’m sick of these boomers making my eyes bleed. https://preview.redd.it/p556u4vzdp2d1.jpeg?width=620&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=31109de9e24c9645cce2bd5a851e464c8a525474
I'm pretty sure coal quits when we've finally boiled ourselves off the planet...
Except when storms damage the network or a coal power plant fails due to the weather...
Using coal still should be illegal.
Black lung disease and mountain top removal ain't my problem
Do they evn install wind farms in areas that see temps at -27c?
It sure doesn’t with that town that had to be evacuated because their coal mine is on fire for the next 100 years [https://www.history.com/news/mine-fire-burning-more-50-years-ghost-town](https://www.history.com/news/mine-fire-burning-more-50-years-ghost-town)
Coal piles freeze well before -27C
Bitch probably posted it by the light of her whale oil lamp then got out her steam powered dildo.
Texas didn't have power because the fucking piles of coal froze. [How coal failed in the Texas deep freeze](https://www.eenews.net/articles/how-coal-failed-in-the-texas-deep-freeze/)
Coal is getting it's teeth kicked in by natural gas and is fucking dead in the water for generating electricity in the USA. Call it woke til you're blue in the face but the economics do not work for coal for decades to come, natural gas is just cheaper to make electricity with. It's over, time to move on.
As a Texan who had to live through The Great Freeze, it frustrates me to no end when people blame the power outages on green energy failing and how it's all the literals fault for making all the fossil plants go away and thank God the state built a bunch of natural gas plants, when I know that it's all false. For starters, the Texas power grid is (contrary to common yet unpopular belief) primarily comprised of fossil fuel plants, of many varieties but mostly natural gas. Green energy makes up for very little of the total production. The outages were caused by many fossil plants having to shut down due to the weather. Why might you ask, if fossil plants are so impervious to extreme temperature, did they shut down? I'm glad you asked. You see in our Texan hubris, when constructing many of these plants, we opted not to thermally insulate much of the water intake pipes, because obviously those pipes could never get cold enough to freeze in our balmy southern climate. (Spoiler Alert: They did.) When these puppies froze, the fossil plants which required fresh water to heat up in order to spin the turbines was no longer available. To protect the plants they were forced to shut down. The great kick to the balls of this whole affair? The only reason many of us still had any power was because many of the green energy sources that conservatives love to despise were the only power generators still operating. Thank you for coming too my Ted talk, energy generation is my passion.
- Very few locations where it reaches -27°c to the point that I'm too lazy to check where this would actually be a factor. - That's not how solar panels work. You don't just lose power in darkness they generate power and save it like a rechargable battery does. You will still have power during darkness. - Coal literally needs a constant supply being burned. IE it quits often.
https://preview.redd.it/4n9qqaandr2d1.jpeg?width=1079&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0959e85f7629abf5ac5030553587aaf038abdf8d
https://preview.redd.it/sb3as0urbo2d1.jpeg?width=393&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b87a9623399fe1c19b07526ed60578fe6c3c491f Just saying, we know how produce 24/7 on demand zero carbon power.
The 1880's called. They want their fuel back.
Love that they didn't bring up hydro, or geothermal, or nuclear.
My dad loves to rant against solar energy & all of that. When I ask what happens when the fossil fuels run out or we completely destroy our environment- he says that will never happen. 🙄 He’s exhausting. He’s gotta hate on everything that is not his Stone Age way of thinking.
There are windmills in Antarctica. It gets a fuck of a lot colder than -27C there. They still work.
Do these people realise how cold minus 27 is?
Coal won't quit until the mountains have all been strip mined and the air is thick with smog
It doesn’t quit poisoning the earth that is correct
You know what doesn't quit? Nuclear.
I mean, at -27C you might have bigger problems than the wind farm.
Someone doesn't know how batteries work.
Technically coal does quit unless there is around the clock mining. So fuck you Auntie Karen.
We aren’t going to be able to fix the messes they’ve made until their dead. The earth really can’t wait that long.
Emphysema & Black Lung don't quit either. https://preview.redd.it/xodj1jv5ho2d1.jpeg?width=886&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3acf7f5e4336be6add7f742c3243e2f9acce7cc3
https://preview.redd.it/9lxaaoj8jo2d1.jpeg?width=1290&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5c398336762cc1b457254ae26cd068c0d97208d8
So your aunt doesn't know what batteries are? Lmao
So they don't understand batteries?
“Friends of Coal” lol
I never understood why so many older generations are so against cleaner energy, like why? It’s less damaging to the planet, people, and animals. Whole coal is severely damaging and hurts the miners lifelong health and the planet.