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How to kill coal in 10 years

We know that coal is the enemy of the human race, what with carbon emissions, deadly air pollution, and unsafe and destructive mining practices. The supply of coal is becoming more problematic as well: recently, a Wall Street Journal article described a "coal-price surge," and Richard Heinberg has warned that coal may peak much sooner than most people expect. So what's to like? Not much.

But since coal-fired plants provide almost half of our electricity, we can't get rid of coal unless we find either a way to replace it or a way to reduce the use of electricity. Recently, Gar Lipow has discussed how friggin' cheap it would be to replace coal, and Bill Becker has pointed to several studies that show how renewables could replace coal.

I will argue in this post that if buildings could produce all the space and water heating, air conditioning, and ventilation that they need, we wouldn't need any coal. Heating and cooling buildings and water now consume 30 percent of our electricity and 32 percent of our natural gas.

If, for instance, geothermal exchange units (also known as geothermal heat pumps) were installed under every building, and an appropriate amount of solar photovoltaics were installed on roofs in order to power those units, we wouldn't need to burn 60 percent of our coal because we would not need 30 percent of our electricity. And because we could redirect our natural gas from warming and cooling into electricity generation, we could get rid of the remaining coal, replacing it with natural gas.

In other words, the buildings would both destroy electrical demand and free up natural gas, until renewables come online and replaced natural gas in turn. If we did this within a 10-year timeframe, we could generate millions of green-collar jobs, create new industries, and help the rest of the world kill off the rest of coal.

All of the data that I use in this post is available online in a spreadsheet I created called "EnergyUse." It has tabs for electrical use, natural gas use, my calculations concerning coal, and some notes on the data, all of which comes from the Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration (EIA).

So let's get electricity literate, and take a look at how electricity (and natural gas) are used in this country, so that we can figure out how to kill coal:

CBS to pay $31 million to clean up Indiana Superfund sites

The media giant CBS has agreed to pay $31 million to clean up six ultra-polluted Superfund sites around Bloomington, Ind. CBS is the corporate successor of Westinghouse, which ran industrial operations in the area that polluted streams and groundwater with high concentrations of PCBs. An agreement to clean up the contamination in the 1990s was […]

How do we define the green-job economy?

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British Columbia unveils carbon tax

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Obama pledges to cap carbon

In this video (the second of two) of his victory speech this evening in Houston, at about 7 min. in, Obama discusses energy policy — says we’re shipping money overseas and melting the polar icecaps. He pledges to cap carbon, invest in renewable energy, and raise fuel efficiency in cars (it’s "the only way we […]

Wisconsin goes to Obama and McCain

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Kleenex boxes infiltrated by anti-logging leaflets

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Notable quotable

“I think this is a landmark decision in North America as far as government addressing global warming. The B.C. government has decided to use one of the most powerful incentives at its disposal to reduce pollution.” — Ian Bruce of the Suzuki Foundation, on the carbon tax just implemented by the provincial government of British […]

Questions for Obama and Clinton from a Wisconsin farmer

Wisconsin is a state where agriculture is still important, and while farming may not be as glamorous as, say, politics, we still have more people engaged in agriculture-related jobs than any other occupation in the state. Still, when politicians come to Wisconsin, they may do the obligatory photo op on a farm, but they spend their time courting the voters in the big cities. So what are Clinton and Obama promising people like me -- people who spend more time worrying about cows than poll numbers?

Upton Sinclair on downer cows

Regarding the record-breaking meat recall in California, involving an industrial slaughterhouse that used torture to compel downer (i.e, too sick to walk) cows to slaughter, I caught word of a passage from Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (published exactly 102 years ago Monday). Forcing downer cows through the kill line and into the food supply has […]