The Coal Crisis and the Future PDF Download

Author: Patrick Abercrombie
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Coal
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Author: Richard Heinberg
Publisher: New Society Publishers
ISBN: 155092429X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Coal fuels about 50 percent of US electricity production and provides a quarter of the country's total energy. China and India's ferocious economic growth is based almost entirely on coal-generated electricity. Coal currently looks like a solution to many of our fast-growing energy problems. However, while coal advocates are urging full steam ahead, increasing reliance on the dirtiest of all fossil fuels has crucial implications for the global climate, energy policy, the world economy, and geopolitics. Drawbacks to a coal-based energy strategy include: Scarcity – new studies suggest that the peak of world coal production may actually be less than two decades away. Cost – the quality of produced coal is declining, while the expense of transport is rising, leading to spiraling costs and increasing shortages. Climate impacts - our ability to deal with the historic challenge of climate change will hinge on reducing our coal consumption in future years. Blackout goes to the heart of the tough energy questions that will dominate every sphere of public policy throughout the first half of this century, and is a must-read for planners, educators, and anyone concerned about energy consumption, peak oil and climate change.

Author: Rahul Tongia, Anurag Sehgal, Puneet Kamboj
Publisher: Notion Press
ISBN: 1648288464
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 427

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Mark Twain observed, “I'm in favour of progress; it's change I don't like.” Coal dominates Indian energy because it’s available domestically and cheap (especially without a carbon tax). If the global focus is on the energy transition, how does India ensure a just transition? Managing winners and losers will be the single largest challenge for India’s energy policy. Coal is entrenched in a complex ecosystem. In some states, it’s amongst the largest contributors to state budgets. The Indian Railways, India’s largest civilian employer, is afloat because it overcharges coal to offset under-recovery from passengers. Coal India Limited, the public sector miner that produces 85% of domestic coal, is the world’s largest coal miner. But despite enormous reserves, India imports about a quarter of consumption. On the flip side, coal faces inevitable pressure from renewable energy, which is the cheapest option for new builds. However, there is significant coal-based power capacity already in place, some of which is underutilized, or even stranded. Low per-capita energy consumption means India must still grow its energy supply. Before India can phase out coal, it must first achieve a plateau of coal. How this happens cost-effectively and with least resistance isn’t just a technical or economic question, it depends on the political economy of coal and its alternatives. Some stakeholders want to kill coal. A wiser option may be to first clean it up, instead of wishing it away. Across 18 chapters, drawing from leading experts in the field, we examine all aspects of coal’s future in India. We find no easy answers, but attempt to combine the big picture with details, bringing them together to offer a range of policy options.

Author: Robert B. Laughlin
Publisher: Basic Books (AZ)
ISBN: 0465022197
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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A Nobel laureate imagines the techonolgies that will allow us to harness alternative fuel sources and power society, despite the lack of carbon-based fuels, in an intriguing look at two centuries into the future.

Author: Judah Schept
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479888923
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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How prisons became economic development strategies for rural Appalachian communities As the United States began the project of mass incarceration, rural communities turned to building prisons as a strategy for economic development. More than 350 prisons have been built in the U.S. since 1980, with certain regions of the country accounting for large shares of this dramatic growth. Central Appalachia is one such region; there are eight prisons alone in Eastern Kentucky. If Kentucky were its own country, it would have the seventh highest incarceration rate in the world. In Coal, Cages, Crisis, Judah Schept takes a closer look at this stunning phenomenon, providing insight into prison growth, jail expansion and rising incarceration rates in America’s hinterlands. Drawing on interviews, site visits, and archival research, Schept traces recent prison growth in the region to the rapid decline of its coal industry. He takes us inside this startling transformation occurring in the coalfields, where prisons are often built on top of old coalmines, including mountaintop removal sites, and built into community planning approaches to crises of unemployment, population loss, and declining revenues. By linking prison growth to other sites in this landscape—coal mines, coal waste, landfills, and incinerators—Schept shows that the prison boom has less to do with crime and punishment and much more with the overall extraction, depletion, and waste disposal processes that characterize dominant development strategies for the region. Schept argues that the future of this area now hangs in the balance, detailing recent efforts to oppose its carceral growth. Coal, Cages, Crisis offers invaluable insight into the complex dynamics of mass incarceration that continue to shape Appalachia and the broader United States.

Author: Judith Brett
Publisher: Black Inc.
ISBN: 1743821360
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 163

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Australia is a wealthy nation with the economic profile of a developing country – heavy on raw materials, and low on innovation and skilled manufacturing. Once we rode on the sheep’s back for our overseas trade; today we rely on cartloads of coal and tankers of LNG. So must we double down on fossil fuels, now that COVID-19 has halted the flow of international students and tourists? Or is there a better way forward, which supports renewable energy and local manufacturing? Judith Brett traces the unusual history of Australia’s economy and the “resource curse” that has shaped our politics. She shows how the mining industry learnt to run fear campaigns, and how the Coalition became dominated by fossil-fuel interests to the exclusion of other voices. In this insightful essay about leadership, vision and history, she looks at the costs of Australia’s coal addiction and asks, where will we be if the world stops buying it? “Faced with the crisis of a global pandemic, for the first time in more than a decade Australia has had evidence-based, bipartisan policy-making. Politicians have listened to the scientists and ... put ideology and the protection of vested interests aside and behaved like adults. Can they do the same to commit to fast and effective action to try to save our children’s and grandchildren’s future, to prevent the catastrophic fires and heatwaves the scientists predict, the species extinction and the famines?” —Judith Brett, The Coal Curse

Author: Joshua S. Goldstein
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1541724097
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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The inspiration for Nuclear Now, the new Oliver Stone film, co-written by Joshua Goldstein As climate change quickly approaches a series of turning points that guarantee disastrous outcomes, a solution is hiding in plain sight. Several countries have already replaced fossil fuels with low-carbon energy sources, and done so rapidly, in one to two decades. By following their methods, we could decarbonize the global economy by midcentury, replacing fossil fuels even while world energy use continues to rise. But so far we have lacked the courage to really try. In this clear-sighted and compelling book, Joshua Goldstein and Staffan Qvist explain how clean energy quickly replaced fossil fuels in such places as Sweden, France, South Korea, and Ontario. Their people enjoyed prosperity and growing energy use in harmony with the natural environment. They didn't do this through personal sacrifice, nor through 100 percent renewables, but by using them in combination with an energy source the Swedes call käkraft, hundreds of times safer and cleaner than coal. Clearly written and beautifully illustrated, yet footnoted with extensive technical references, Goldstein and Qvist's book will provide a new touchstone in discussions of climate change. It could spark a shift in world energy policy that, in the words of Steven Pinker's foreword, literally saves the world.

Author: Jeff Goodell
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0547526628
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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New York Times–Bestselling Author:“Should be ready by anyone who owns a microwave, or an iPod, or a table lamp, which is to say everyone.” —Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year Coal is still a significant source of power in the United States—and coal mining is still a deadly and environmentally destructive industry. Much of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere each year comes from coal-fired power plants, and in recent decades air pollution from coal plants has killed more than half a million Americans. In this eye-opening call to action, Jeff Goodell explains the costs and consequences of America’s addiction to coal and discusses how we can kick the habit. “[A] compelling indictment . . . powerful.” —The New York Times Book Review “Goodell’s description of the mining-related deaths, the widespread health consequences of burning coal and the impact on our planet’s increasingly fragile ecosystem make for compelling reading, but . . . are not what lift this book out of the ordinary. That distinction belongs to Goodell’s fieldwork, which takes him to Atlanta, West Virginia, Wyoming, China and beyond.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Goodell does a first-rate job of balancing environmental concerns with interviews from the human faces associated with ‘Big Coal’.” —Library Journal

Author: Saul Griffith
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262046237
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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An optimistic--but realistic and feasible--action plan for fighting climate change while creating new jobs and a healthier environment: electrify everything. Climate change is a planetary emergency. We have to do something now—but what? Saul Griffith has a plan. In Electrify, Griffith lays out a detailed blueprint—optimistic but feasible—for fighting climate change while creating millions of new jobs and a healthier environment. Griffith’s plan can be summed up simply: electrify everything. He explains exactly what it would take to transform our infrastructure, update our grid, and adapt our households to make this possible. Billionaires may contemplate escaping our worn-out planet on a private rocket ship to Mars, but the rest of us, Griffith says, will stay and fight for the future. Griffith, an engineer and inventor, calls for grid neutrality, ensuring that households, businesses, and utilities operate as equals; we will have to rewrite regulations that were created for a fossil-fueled world, mobilize industry as we did in World War II, and offer low-interest “climate loans.” Griffith’s plan doesn’t rely on big, not-yet-invented innovations, but on thousands of little inventions and cost reductions. We can still have our cars and our houses—but the cars will be electric and solar panels will cover our roofs. For a world trying to bounce back from a pandemic and economic crisis, there is no other project that would create as many jobs—up to twenty-five million, according to one economic analysis. Is this politically possible? We can change politics along with everything else.

Author: Christiana Figueres
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 052565836X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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A cautionary but optimistic book about the world’s changing climate and the fate of humanity, from Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac—who led negotiations for the United Nations during the historic Paris Agreement of 2015. The authors outline two possible scenarios for our planet. In one, they describe what life on Earth will be like by 2050 if we fail to meet the Paris Agreement’s climate targets. In the other, they lay out what it will be like to live in a regenerative world that has net-zero emissions. They argue for confronting the climate crisis head-on, with determination and optimism. The Future We Choose presents our options and tells us what governments, corporations, and each of us can, and must, do to fend off disaster.