Everyone is utterly indispensable, if we use a short enough time horizon – even old, fat useless lumps like me.
If I were hit by a bus tomorrow, the dog would be very upset that he didn’t get his evening walk, the kids would be cranky that their toast didn’t magically appear in front them on Saturday morning, faithful Club barman Gupta would be distressed at my absence, and my wife would no doubt wonder what happened to the bank balance.
But time heals all wounds. The dog will love anyone who feeds him, the kids will learn to make their own toast, Gupta has other drunken members to take care of, and my wife’s grief would no doubt be soothed by the insurance cheque.
After all, we are all just warm worm food on legs, and while our departure is never nice at the time, everything transitions in the end.
On one hand, I suppose this inexorability could be seen as a bit depressing to those of that mind set – if it is all going to end in tears, then why bother. These people are depressing. But then on the other hand, there are those who see their finite time as motivation to squeeze in as much as possible in the time they have. These people are scary.
If I can manage to fit my life somewhere in between depressing and scary and then die fast, I think I will have succeeded. As I have said before, it’s not death that I fear, its dying.
The big news last week, was of coursed Peabody Energy entering bankruptcy protection, or at least it was big news in my sad circles, largely because of some misunderstanding of what it actually meant. The number of times I had to explain that Peabody was not going bankrupt, but had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, which is a very different thing.
The confusion arises, because we don’t really have this sort of thing in the real world, as it’s only the Americans who feel, be it in sport, life or business, that they can blow a whistle and call time-out whenever things get a bit tricky.
""The trouble with coal then, is that we can’t let it die just yet as we don’t have a replacement we can afford or accept"
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In the UK, we expect companies to pay their bills as and when they fall due or the receivers are called in, but the US does seem to allow this circuit breaker and, while I can’t see it working in Rugby or War, it is I think in general a good idea in business – to be able to settle things down and think things through, if handled well almost invariably leads to a better outcome than stripping the fitting and furnishings.
The moronic press of course have latched onto this as a clear harbinger of the immediate death of coal – Peabody will be wound up and the coal age will have ended by next Tuesday week, if we are to believe the tabloids.
Blessed are the naive I suppose, but as I tell my clients, go away and have a think about what happens next. Yes, coal will die as it should in its own good time for rational economic reasons; but what will the transition look like?
The fact that coal is dirty is beyond question, but it’s also cheap and plentiful, which is why it became the dominant energy source on the planet. It still produces about 40% of global electricity and projections are that while that percentage will decrease in time, the actual tonnage will not as global electricity demand inexorably increases. Yes it pumps a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere, but balance that against all the extraordinary advances its use has produced in a few hundred years and I guess that’s the price of progress.
Human existence has a cost, but we do seem to struggle with the numbers.
Peabody produces annually in the US, something like 200 million tonnes of thermal coal, most of which is used for domestic power generation. There is no short-term replacement for this and so, without doubt, they will produce 200Mt again next year, and the year after, up until an alternative is found. But what will that be?
I read the other day that the equivalent of 4,000 homes will be powered in Cumbria by the burning of gas produced as the by-product of cheese making. Ok, I suppose that might see Wisconsin sorted, only 49 more states to go.
Nuclear has for years been seen as unspeakably evil, but that seems to have changed. A recent splendid article in, of all places, the Guardian, suggests far from condemning nuclear we should be embracing it. There have only ever been two nuclear accidents in history, at Chernobyl and Fukushima, with Three Mile Island really just being a brief moment of heightened excitement. No one died at Fukushima and as far as anyone can tell, no radioactive material of any significance was released into the environment.
Chernobyl was of course a complete cluster, but 30 years on, there were only 43 recorded deaths, but after decades of microscopic study by the UN Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, there has been no recordable increase in incidence of disease or illness that might be related to radiation. Furthermore, the 30km exclusion zone around the plant is not only now a booming tourist zone, but the removal of human activity has led to a huge recovery in environmental habitat.
So now it is popular, but the economics remain dicey and the permitting almost impossible, so don’t hold your breath.
In the meantime, there are over 100 deaths attributed to Wind Farm accidents, which I confess I struggle with a bit. Apart from falling off one, I can’t quite picture what a wind farm accident looks like, but apparently they are bloody murderous things being several thousand times more lethal per kw hour than nuclear.
Hydro is clean but environmentally catastrophic when they are built, and while they don’t pop often, they pop hard – evidenced by the 1975 Banqiao Dam collapse in China that not only killed 170,000, but displaced 10 million more.
The trouble with coal then, is that we can’t let it die just yet as we don’t have a replacement we can afford or accept. But then on the other hand, serious money is no longer prepared to fund new coal projects. But then on yet another hand, the price of coal, oil and gas is so low, that the alternatives are currently uneconomic and so they are not attracting funding either.
The problem then is this dilemma of what the new energy mix will look like, who will pay for it and how it will transition. The changeover itself is not a major problem as these sorts of major transitions are best made up on the run as technology and the markets evolve, but what is really needed is a good crisis and I can see one not far off.
Inexorable decline in coal production, coupled with a complete collapse in investment in alternative forms of energy, is the next boom in the making. Pundits suggest it will hit in 2017 and I am looking forward to it – lets pray for a cold, cold winter.
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