Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is donating $500 million dollars to a new Beyond Carbon campaign. Bloomberg wants to shut down every remaining coal-fired power plant in the country, slash natural gas plant capacity in half and block any new gas plants, all by 2030.
Bloomberg’s millions will bypass Congress, which determines energy policy for the country, and instead flow to local and state governments, as well as anti-carbon organizations like Earthjustice, Sierra Club and the Hip Hop Caucus, to try to finish off the fossil fuel industry.
Carbon emissions are impacting climate, which is why the United States continues the transition to more alternative fuels. As a result, carbon emissions have been on a downward trend since 2007 in the U.S. But now Bloomberg and his acolytes want to put their anti-carbon agenda on steroids.
There are serious issues here.
First, hundreds of thousands of people who work in the coal and gas industries, and that includes the countless suppliers, will be put out of business. It will wreck West Virginia’s economy and seriously damage the many communities in this country that are dependent upon those industries.
Cecil Roberts, President of the United Mine Workers Union, said Bloomberg has now doubled down on his efforts to wipe out coal communities for good. “You’ve got a bounty being placed on workers and you’ve got bounty hunters taking the money,” Roberts said on Talkline Monday.
That is bad enough but think about this: If the Beyond Carbon effort is successful, the country’s ability to provide reliable energy will teeter on collapse. The country simply cannot construct and deploy enough renewable energy sources to replace the traditional baseloads that Bloomberg wants eliminated by 2030.
PJM Interconnection, which operates the largest power grid in the country encompassing 13 states including West Virginia, issued a report several months ago with this sobering conclusion: “The projections in this study indicate that the current pace of new entry (of alternative power producers) would be insufficient to keep up with the expected retirement (of power plants) and demand growth by 2030.”
And that was before Bloomberg said he wanted to accelerate the decommissioning of all coal-fired plants and half the gas plants over the next seven years.
Here is another gigantic problem—solar and wind power need to be dispatched from where it is generated to where it is needed. A report by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory for Sustainable Energy for the U.S. Department of Energy determined that to put the nation on a path of net zero emissions by 2050 would require “doubling or tripling the capacity of the transmission system.”
Michelle Soloman wrote in the transmission industry publication Utility Dive that meeting these aggressive goals “would require building 91,000 miles of new high-voltage interregional transmission lines by 2035. This appears unattainable when it takes 10 years on average to move a transmission line from conception to operation, and only 386 miles of high voltage transmission were built in 2021.”
And you can bet that some of the very groups that will use Bloomberg’s money to shut down coal and natural gas will also use the courts to block or delay the construction of power lines.
Meanwhile, China shows no sign of letting up on coal-fired power plant construction. The Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air reports, “Coal power plant permitting, construction starts, and new project announcements accelerated dramatically in China in 2022. The coal power capacity starting construction in China was six times as large as that in all the rest of the world combined.”
Bloomberg can do what he wants with his money, and organizations are free to pursue their specific agendas. Who really wants to argue against their mantra of saving the planet? But these efforts have consequences of their own that must be considered, and their aspirational goals must be tempered by real world practicalities.