Global Warming Will Kill Us All By Releasing Viruses From The Ice Or Something
I’ve lost track of all the reasons global warming climate change is going to kill us all, but I don’t think I’ve heard this one before. Jasmin Fox-Skelly, BBC News: Climate change is melting permafrost soils that have been frozen for thousands of years, and as the soils melt they are releasing ancient viruses and […]
Source: Global Warming Will Kill Us All By Releasing Viruses From The Ice Or Something…
EPA staffer tells coal industry she’s here for them
“We’ll do a lot more. We’re going to keep going.” This Jan. 25, 2017 photo shows the Gallatin Fossil Plant in Gallatin, Tenn. Environmental groups are taking the Tennessee Valley Authority, the nation’s largest public utility, to trial over whether waste from the coal-fired power plant near Nashville polluted the Cumberland River.
Source: EPA staffer tells coal industry she’s here for them…
King Coal: ‘It takes 79 solar workers to produce same amount of electric power as one coal worker’
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Inconvenient energy fact: It takes 79 solar workers to produce same amount of electric power as one coal worker
In an April 25 New York Times article (“Today’s Energy Jobs Are in Solar, Not Coal“) reporter Nadja Popovich wrote that “Last year, the solar industry employed many more Americans [373,807] than coal [160,119], while wind power topped 100,000 jobs.” Those energy employment figures are based on a Department of Energy report (“U.S. Energy and Employment Report“) released earlier this year that provides the most complete analysis available of employment in the energy economy.
But simply reporting rather enthusiastically (see the NYT headline again) that the solar industry employs lots of Americans, more than twice as many as the number of coal miners and utility workers at electric power plants using coal, is only telling a small part of the story. Here are some important energy facts that help provide a more complete picture about how much energy is being produced in different sectors, how many workers it takes to produce a given amount of electric power, and which sectors receive the most generous taxpayer handouts.
To start, despite a huge workforce of almost 400,000 solar workers (about 20 percent of electric power payrolls in 2016), that sector produced an insignificant share, less than 1 percent, of the electric power generated in the United States last year (EIA data here). And that’s a lot of solar workers: about the same as the combined number of employees working at Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Apple, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Pfizer, Ford Motor Company and Procter & Gamble.
In contrast, it took about the same number of natural gas workers (398,235) last year to produce more than one-third of U.S. electric power, or 37 times more electricity than solar’s minuscule share of 0.90 percent. And with only 160,000 coal workers (less than half the number of workers in either solar or gas),