Coal and such

The President spoke today at the climate change meeting in Paris and said that the cost of solar has come down over the past ten years. Power from fossil fuel cost about $100 per megawatt-hour and solar has come down from $500 to $200. What he didn’t say was the solar represented 0.4% of total power in 1997 and it remains at 0.4% today. One of the main reasons the cost is lower is that government subsidies helped pay for the installation of solar panels and once installed the maintenance cost is low. The President then conflated the lower carbon dioxide emissions over the past years as having something to do with solar but this is not true. The most important change has been switching power plants from coal to natural gas and this was done primarily for economic reasons. The rapid increase in domestic natural gas production in the U.S. over the past 5 years has led to a rapid transformation of how electricity is produced. Coal has lost its perch as the undisputed champion of power generation, falling from 50-plus percent of total electricity generation to around 35 percent. Natural gas has grown from only 15 percent of total generation in 2005 to 30 percent in 2012. The lower cost of operating power plants comes from the increase in the availability of natural gas due to fracking and the lower labor cost at the plant associated with switching to natural gas. A report by the American Action Forum found that under the Obama administration coal mines shed 3,702 jobs from 2008 to 2013 and power plants shed 39,684 jobs. While natural gas was replacing coal in US power plants, coal exports increased from 40 million tons in 2003 to 125 million tons in 2014. While this coal is still being used the jobs have transferred from the US to Asia. This kind of activity is what labor unions claim is the uneven playing field with which American workers must contend. Jobs are being moved to China and so is the coal. The reasoning that this is reducing carbon dioxide emissions is flawed and these union people understand that.