It would be a real shame if you were to make Gavin Newsom wear the data/reality of what his energy/environmental policies have rendered in CA like a Scarlet Letter for the next 33 months.
My thoughts are that coal became uncompetitive against gas because of the cost burden of regulations. In a vacuum where no alternative fuel was available, the price would have simply increased. Regardless the intent of the Biden era rules were to completely eliminate combustion as a power source, simply building on the endangerment finding foundation.
Coal has been hurt, not killed by abundant natural gas.. but when the utilities bought into the "Net Zero" concept, they were the 1st to go on the chopping block.. BTW, despite the regs and RGGI, see the data below
Coal can put GWhrs on the grid at a lower cost than a natural gas or nuclear plant.
The PJM (The PA, NJ, MD Grid) day-ahead prices for coal-fired and gas-fired electricity during all of 2025 showed that coal was 23% cheaper than natural gas. (DuckDuckGoAI)
Pricing Overview
FUEL TYPE 2025 PRICE (IN $/MWH) GENERATION TRENDS
Coal-Fired $51.50 (Estimated) Increased by 11% compared to 2024
Gas-Fired $66.00 (Estimated) Decreased by 3% in generation
There is so much demand on natural gas now, it's driving it out of it's former competitive position. Back when the shale boom first hit gas was cheap, and Combined Cycle beat coal efficiency by 20%. If Coal and gas were competing head to head coal still would have still won. But then you need slurry for the scrubber, and urea for the catalyst and special ash handling, and whatever you need to control mercury, but i bet it takes feedstock of some kind. Then pile on all the permits and fees, coal drowned under the weight. But now EVERYONE wants gas including Europe, so the price is up and coal is back in the black again.
I mostly concur.. Coal has generally weathered the onslaught of regs dating back to the 70s'. The limestone, urea/NH3, and activated carbon (Hg/heavy metals) have certainly increased cost, but coal was still the cheapest until the Cap&Trade, aka RGGI tax, came to town.. Slowly, that tax has put coal at a huge disadvantage.. No Utility or private investor wanted to build, or really refurbish, coal plants because they knew the RGGI tax would grow over time.
The goal of the Ds is to have RGGI grow so big as to force the nat gas plants to shut down. In VA alone, the RGGI tax will add over $550M/yr in taxes to the 2.5 million consumers. RGGI artificially increases the cost of fossil fuel plants, making nukes, wind and solar look better.
I wish someone would sue or challenge the RGGI tax out of existence. I always thought it was a violation of the Interstate Commerce Act. Because it unduly impacted the interstate flow of electricity.
Excellent post and counterpoint to Roger Pielke Jr.'s assertions in the Podcast he just cross posted with Jim Pethokoukis as well as elsewhere. RJP basically says that the original endangerment finding has had no effect on emissions so it is a nothing burger and repealing it will be of little to no consequence. He basically ignores the impact on energy costs and availability. He is being misleading by taking this view IMHO, yet he does so repeatedly and pretty much blows off questions about his motivation for doing this.
The clean power plan and endangerment were the impossible final boss for coal plants. All the other emissions could reasonably be mitigated with technology but with carbon rules lingering, many plant owners decided there was no point, which is exactly what the Obama and Biden admins wanted.
Well done guys and Thank you for this outstanding article. Obama had a lot of support from fellow Democrats and some select NGOs. They are still a threat to America. Here is one blog post I made on some of Obama's co-conspirators, Influencers of U.S. Energy Policy, January 3, 2023. These people and NGOs are dangerous: http://dickstormprobizblog.org/2023/01/04/influencers-of-american-energy-policy/
Great article,,, I hope the following helps your efforts....
Some facts -
Coal production and power generation are down over 50% in the last 20 years, BUT COPD and Asthma cases have been flat.... That can't be!..... We've all been told that big bad coal was killing people rights and left..... That the Clean Air Act amendments and new regs on PM2.5, NOX, and mercury/heavy metals would save >50,000 lives per year..... BUT, over the last 20 years, the life expectancy in the USA has been flat, too?.....
Apparently, the facts don't match the rhetoric...... The cause-and-effect relationship is broken...... Why?.... Because coal plants have air permits that require them to meet the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS)......
Just like the water coming out of your faucet, if the treatment process gets rid of the harmful contaminants down to a level you can barely record with an instrument (the levels approved by various agencies), then the product is safe...... It's that simple
I used DuckDuckGo AI to pull from the PJM day-ahead pricing database
Back when I developed/built/operated power plants, our company would subscribe to this database.. tons of info, can be very confusing... AI did a nice job of pulling it together
Barry Soetoro is such a communist asshole and we all knew it when he gave his 2004 DNC speech - it scared the shyte outta me because we saw what was coming: a gifted orator who was a communist. Fast forward to today with Spanberger in Virginia and Mamdani in the worlds financial capital: communist freaks who campaign as moderates.
A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.”
Thank you for this recap. I am curious as to the legal question as to why one interpretation of legislation by the executive branch is "better" than any other and since there continues to be a lack of hard evidence that CO2 is going to destroy humanity. after all, the initial finding was made up from whole cloth back then. on what basis do Greenpeace, etc. think that is more legally binding than tearing it up?
The legal issue, as I see it, is that the Supreme Court already found that CO2 was a pollutant; however, that was a 5-4 decision and the court, relying on the Chevron decision, deferred to the agency. Now, with a different court which no longer has to defer to the EPA can decide whether Congress intended to regulate CO2 under the clean air act (we know it did not because one of the sponsors, Dingell from Michigan, specifically said it did not).
The 2009 Endangerment Finding is legally defective. The Clean Air Act requires that an endangerment finding be followed by publication of a National Ambient Air Quality Standard. The NAAQS has not been developed and published in the 16 years since the EF.
An NAAQS for a globally well mixed trace gas, particularly one emitted primarily by other nations, would be challenging to produce and even more challenging to enforce, if even possible. However, the law requires the NAAQS and it is “missing in action and presumed dead”.
Clearly, a CAA EF was the wrong vehicle to use to control CO2 emissions.
Note that UCS & EDF have chosen not to sue EPA over this legal failing, as they did with DOE over the Climate Working Group report.
Congress considered including CO2 under the CAA both originally and in the amendment process. Congress chose not to include CO2 both times. It would seem that would represent clear "intent of Congress".
None of which is surprising. The anti-human left has no concern for consumers. Indeed, they loathe most of us and want far less of us (See Club of Rome). Thus, the increasing energy prices was a feature, not a bug. Always remember, the long term goal is less people, all of whom will live in “efficient” cities relegated to public transportation (EVs were the first step so that the government could literally shut them off when necessary), under complete control of a one world elite. Never forget how much they hate our single family homes (in CT, they just introduced a bill to abolish all local zoning and change every lot to 1/10 of an acre compared to my town, 2 acres and next town over 4 acres), freedom to travel when and wherever we want.
Even taking climate science as is, the harm interpretation is inherently political. The proposed social cost of carbon is dominated by the discount rate, determined by the question of how highly future costs should be discounted vs costs paid today. If civilization continues to get richer and more technologically capable, people in the future will be far more capable of dealing with a 3° warmer sunny day relative to the cost paid today to make it only 2.9° warmer for them
The "science" of near term extreme weather attribution shows this fact even more strongly, as it's basically the use of fun statistics to describe an 8% more extensive wildfire as being 1000x more likely to happen due to global warming. This field was explicitly developed to support lawsuits, tends to "publish" directly to news releases, and seems to be tolerated because activist scientists who think they know the political answer to discount rates think it's useful for convincing the public to agree with them
This is not remotely a field that can be handled by regulations divorced from elected legislators
Unfortunately candidate legislators can manipulate a gullible public and demagogue their way into office using this issue. One would think that education would be an antidote to such, but any number of very odd current trends would suggest that education makes some problems worse.
EBBs:"In other words, if you like your power plant, you’ll be able to keep it."
I see what you did there, guys. Well played.
My association with "climate change" and CO2 levels goes back to September of 1981 when I wrote a piece for a defunct magazine named "The Mining Claim" regarding challenges with mining coal. What has surprised me in the intervening 44 years is the staying power of the speculative hazards of atmospheric CO2 and the hysteria that seemed to grow each year. Grow each year until recently I should say.
In this respect "climate change" begins to look like it follows one of the rules of Irving Langmuir's "pathological science." According to Langmuir pathological science grows in numbers of adherents to a maximum value (which Langmuir claimed is about half of the scientific community) and then rationality returns and the number of adherents rapidly drops to zero. Best recent example? The Palmdale Bulge perhaps. Will climate change be another example? Time will tell.
I do not deny that raising the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere will warm the planet, but I do argue that it is probably not a bad thing. CO2 levels in the Paleocene/Eocene were likely three doublings above what we have today, the polar regions occasionally obtained a subtropical climate during the so-called hyperthermals -- life did well. And the persistent decline of CO2 levels throughout the Cenozoic era, under the action of the biological and bicarbonate pumps, looks to me like a slowly dying planet.
If you like your dying planet, you can certainly engineer your way there.
I wish you guys could be speakers at Democrat Conventions.... Or something. Getting this realism past the never ending drum beat of propaganda from the traditional media is important.
Deregulation is the single greatest thing Trump or any other future republican president can do for the US economy. You don't need fancy legislation or policy. You just need to deregulate. If the extinction of the endangerment finding holds up in court Trumps second term will be a success for the most part as far as I'm concerned. Next goal should be to completely abolish the EPA. Or make it purely an environmental MONITORING agency. Get rid of 99% of the employees and have them contract out environmental monitoring to private companies.
Great post, Boys.
It would be a real shame if you were to make Gavin Newsom wear the data/reality of what his energy/environmental policies have rendered in CA like a Scarlet Letter for the next 33 months.
Whatever you guys do, please don't do that....
;)
They can try, but they need a bigger audience. I doubt many California Democrats are reading this Substack, unfortunately.
My thoughts are that coal became uncompetitive against gas because of the cost burden of regulations. In a vacuum where no alternative fuel was available, the price would have simply increased. Regardless the intent of the Biden era rules were to completely eliminate combustion as a power source, simply building on the endangerment finding foundation.
Coal has been hurt, not killed by abundant natural gas.. but when the utilities bought into the "Net Zero" concept, they were the 1st to go on the chopping block.. BTW, despite the regs and RGGI, see the data below
Coal can put GWhrs on the grid at a lower cost than a natural gas or nuclear plant.
The PJM (The PA, NJ, MD Grid) day-ahead prices for coal-fired and gas-fired electricity during all of 2025 showed that coal was 23% cheaper than natural gas. (DuckDuckGoAI)
Pricing Overview
FUEL TYPE 2025 PRICE (IN $/MWH) GENERATION TRENDS
Coal-Fired $51.50 (Estimated) Increased by 11% compared to 2024
Gas-Fired $66.00 (Estimated) Decreased by 3% in generation
There is so much demand on natural gas now, it's driving it out of it's former competitive position. Back when the shale boom first hit gas was cheap, and Combined Cycle beat coal efficiency by 20%. If Coal and gas were competing head to head coal still would have still won. But then you need slurry for the scrubber, and urea for the catalyst and special ash handling, and whatever you need to control mercury, but i bet it takes feedstock of some kind. Then pile on all the permits and fees, coal drowned under the weight. But now EVERYONE wants gas including Europe, so the price is up and coal is back in the black again.
I mostly concur.. Coal has generally weathered the onslaught of regs dating back to the 70s'. The limestone, urea/NH3, and activated carbon (Hg/heavy metals) have certainly increased cost, but coal was still the cheapest until the Cap&Trade, aka RGGI tax, came to town.. Slowly, that tax has put coal at a huge disadvantage.. No Utility or private investor wanted to build, or really refurbish, coal plants because they knew the RGGI tax would grow over time.
The goal of the Ds is to have RGGI grow so big as to force the nat gas plants to shut down. In VA alone, the RGGI tax will add over $550M/yr in taxes to the 2.5 million consumers. RGGI artificially increases the cost of fossil fuel plants, making nukes, wind and solar look better.
I wish someone would sue or challenge the RGGI tax out of existence. I always thought it was a violation of the Interstate Commerce Act. Because it unduly impacted the interstate flow of electricity.
One last thought, maybe if we called RGGI a "Tariff" on fossil fuels, the D's would eliminate it?
Now that's a plan
How did you get day ahead prices for specific forms of generation?
Actually I was questioning how does Tom Shepstone get away with publishing the Bad Boys work.
Agree.
Excellent post and counterpoint to Roger Pielke Jr.'s assertions in the Podcast he just cross posted with Jim Pethokoukis as well as elsewhere. RJP basically says that the original endangerment finding has had no effect on emissions so it is a nothing burger and repealing it will be of little to no consequence. He basically ignores the impact on energy costs and availability. He is being misleading by taking this view IMHO, yet he does so repeatedly and pretty much blows off questions about his motivation for doing this.
The clean power plan and endangerment were the impossible final boss for coal plants. All the other emissions could reasonably be mitigated with technology but with carbon rules lingering, many plant owners decided there was no point, which is exactly what the Obama and Biden admins wanted.
Energy Dependence was the goal. The repeal has had a massive impact on energy “Liberty”!!!
Well done guys and Thank you for this outstanding article. Obama had a lot of support from fellow Democrats and some select NGOs. They are still a threat to America. Here is one blog post I made on some of Obama's co-conspirators, Influencers of U.S. Energy Policy, January 3, 2023. These people and NGOs are dangerous: http://dickstormprobizblog.org/2023/01/04/influencers-of-american-energy-policy/
Great article,,, I hope the following helps your efforts....
Some facts -
Coal production and power generation are down over 50% in the last 20 years, BUT COPD and Asthma cases have been flat.... That can't be!..... We've all been told that big bad coal was killing people rights and left..... That the Clean Air Act amendments and new regs on PM2.5, NOX, and mercury/heavy metals would save >50,000 lives per year..... BUT, over the last 20 years, the life expectancy in the USA has been flat, too?.....
Apparently, the facts don't match the rhetoric...... The cause-and-effect relationship is broken...... Why?.... Because coal plants have air permits that require them to meet the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS)......
Just like the water coming out of your faucet, if the treatment process gets rid of the harmful contaminants down to a level you can barely record with an instrument (the levels approved by various agencies), then the product is safe...... It's that simple
These are intriguing stats! Do you have links for them?
I used DuckDuckGo AI to pull from the PJM day-ahead pricing database
Back when I developed/built/operated power plants, our company would subscribe to this database.. tons of info, can be very confusing... AI did a nice job of pulling it together
Barry Soetoro is such a communist asshole and we all knew it when he gave his 2004 DNC speech - it scared the shyte outta me because we saw what was coming: a gifted orator who was a communist. Fast forward to today with Spanberger in Virginia and Mamdani in the worlds financial capital: communist freaks who campaign as moderates.
Remember what Cicero said:
A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.”
Well said and very true.
Thank you for this recap. I am curious as to the legal question as to why one interpretation of legislation by the executive branch is "better" than any other and since there continues to be a lack of hard evidence that CO2 is going to destroy humanity. after all, the initial finding was made up from whole cloth back then. on what basis do Greenpeace, etc. think that is more legally binding than tearing it up?
The legal issue, as I see it, is that the Supreme Court already found that CO2 was a pollutant; however, that was a 5-4 decision and the court, relying on the Chevron decision, deferred to the agency. Now, with a different court which no longer has to defer to the EPA can decide whether Congress intended to regulate CO2 under the clean air act (we know it did not because one of the sponsors, Dingell from Michigan, specifically said it did not).
The 2009 Endangerment Finding is legally defective. The Clean Air Act requires that an endangerment finding be followed by publication of a National Ambient Air Quality Standard. The NAAQS has not been developed and published in the 16 years since the EF.
An NAAQS for a globally well mixed trace gas, particularly one emitted primarily by other nations, would be challenging to produce and even more challenging to enforce, if even possible. However, the law requires the NAAQS and it is “missing in action and presumed dead”.
Clearly, a CAA EF was the wrong vehicle to use to control CO2 emissions.
Note that UCS & EDF have chosen not to sue EPA over this legal failing, as they did with DOE over the Climate Working Group report.
And just like that, the EPA was sued on its climate finding in the sixth circuit court of appeals on Thursday.
yep, they are going to try, that's for sure
...by the same organizations which did not sue over the EPA failure to issue the required NAAQS after the Endangerment Finding.
Congress considered including CO2 under the CAA both originally and in the amendment process. Congress chose not to include CO2 both times. It would seem that would represent clear "intent of Congress".
Absolutely and that makes sense, right? I mean every living creature emits it so it it’s a pollutant, we violate the law by exhaling.
Emits it 🤠
🤦🏻♂️
As a funeral director, I would only add one word to your original… “I mean every non-living creature omits it….”
Ha! Was, of course supposed to be emit 😂
None of which is surprising. The anti-human left has no concern for consumers. Indeed, they loathe most of us and want far less of us (See Club of Rome). Thus, the increasing energy prices was a feature, not a bug. Always remember, the long term goal is less people, all of whom will live in “efficient” cities relegated to public transportation (EVs were the first step so that the government could literally shut them off when necessary), under complete control of a one world elite. Never forget how much they hate our single family homes (in CT, they just introduced a bill to abolish all local zoning and change every lot to 1/10 of an acre compared to my town, 2 acres and next town over 4 acres), freedom to travel when and wherever we want.
Even taking climate science as is, the harm interpretation is inherently political. The proposed social cost of carbon is dominated by the discount rate, determined by the question of how highly future costs should be discounted vs costs paid today. If civilization continues to get richer and more technologically capable, people in the future will be far more capable of dealing with a 3° warmer sunny day relative to the cost paid today to make it only 2.9° warmer for them
The "science" of near term extreme weather attribution shows this fact even more strongly, as it's basically the use of fun statistics to describe an 8% more extensive wildfire as being 1000x more likely to happen due to global warming. This field was explicitly developed to support lawsuits, tends to "publish" directly to news releases, and seems to be tolerated because activist scientists who think they know the political answer to discount rates think it's useful for convincing the public to agree with them
This is not remotely a field that can be handled by regulations divorced from elected legislators
Unfortunately candidate legislators can manipulate a gullible public and demagogue their way into office using this issue. One would think that education would be an antidote to such, but any number of very odd current trends would suggest that education makes some problems worse.
EBBs:"In other words, if you like your power plant, you’ll be able to keep it."
I see what you did there, guys. Well played.
My association with "climate change" and CO2 levels goes back to September of 1981 when I wrote a piece for a defunct magazine named "The Mining Claim" regarding challenges with mining coal. What has surprised me in the intervening 44 years is the staying power of the speculative hazards of atmospheric CO2 and the hysteria that seemed to grow each year. Grow each year until recently I should say.
In this respect "climate change" begins to look like it follows one of the rules of Irving Langmuir's "pathological science." According to Langmuir pathological science grows in numbers of adherents to a maximum value (which Langmuir claimed is about half of the scientific community) and then rationality returns and the number of adherents rapidly drops to zero. Best recent example? The Palmdale Bulge perhaps. Will climate change be another example? Time will tell.
I do not deny that raising the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere will warm the planet, but I do argue that it is probably not a bad thing. CO2 levels in the Paleocene/Eocene were likely three doublings above what we have today, the polar regions occasionally obtained a subtropical climate during the so-called hyperthermals -- life did well. And the persistent decline of CO2 levels throughout the Cenozoic era, under the action of the biological and bicarbonate pumps, looks to me like a slowly dying planet.
If you like your dying planet, you can certainly engineer your way there.
I wish you guys could be speakers at Democrat Conventions.... Or something. Getting this realism past the never ending drum beat of propaganda from the traditional media is important.
It is interesting that Republican controlled states are decarbonizing faster than Democratic controlled ones despite them being against green energy.
And keep your hopes, your wallet, your property, and all your change.
Lying pos isn't a good look.
Deregulation is the single greatest thing Trump or any other future republican president can do for the US economy. You don't need fancy legislation or policy. You just need to deregulate. If the extinction of the endangerment finding holds up in court Trumps second term will be a success for the most part as far as I'm concerned. Next goal should be to completely abolish the EPA. Or make it purely an environmental MONITORING agency. Get rid of 99% of the employees and have them contract out environmental monitoring to private companies.
How do you get away with republishing the Energy Bad Boys work?
This comment was actually directed at Tom Shepstone