A coal plant in Eastgulf, West Virginia, USA (Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
According to a report from the US Congress-funded Voice of America (VOA), a number of industry titans have voiced their concerns with investments in coal as propagated by President-elect Donald Trump.
Locals in West Virginia, a state whose economy is highly dependent on the coal industry, remain skeptical of Donald Trump’s promises during his campaign, even though he managed to win the state’s electoral votes convincingly en route to his election:
All that stuff about @realDonaldTrump bringing back coal? Everyone admits now it was a big con https://t.co/p64QqRT4eT
— Kenwardjr (@Kenwardjr) November 14, 2016
“You just can’t go with new coal [plants] at this point in time,” Appalachian Power President Charles Patton told the state’s Energy Summit last October, according to the Charleston Gazette-Mail.
“It is just not economically feasible to do so.”Furthermore, the United States has become the world’s largest producer of natural gas.
As the price of natural gas continues to fall, the United States has managed to export gas cheaply, including to its southern neighbors Mexico, where American firms are helping to build vital energy infrastructure to transport cheap American gas throughout the country.
The cheapness of gas merely renders the prospect of a massive President Trump-inspired investment in coal plants to be not only wasteful, but counterproductive and irresponsible.
(Photo: EIA)
Energy demand in the industrialized world is only expected to grow 18 percent by 2040, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. For the developing world, that figure is 71 percent.
LNG carrier in Boston Harbor. Photo Credit: Eric Kilby, Wikimedia Commons
As such, UC Berkley public policy professor Dan Kammen claims that the aforementioned developing countries want to purchase renewable energy technology from the United States.
Kammen is a U.S. State Department science envoy for the Middle East and Africa. Kammen asserts that more than 20 national delegations at the latest round of climate talks in Morocco have expressed interest in American clean energy tech.
Experts: Trump's Climate Policies Could Shift US Jobs to China https://t.co/8mzHqL0dwq @ucrevelle @UCBerkeleyNEWS
— Daniel M Kammen (@dan_kammen) November 11, 2016
“These are all countries that have clean-energy targets of 50 percent or more by 2030. And they all want to buy U.S.-made technology.”
“If these solar, wind and efficiency (products) are not available from the U.S., they will go elsewhere,” he adds.
China, India would pick up America's clean energy slack under Trump https://t.co/wfg6qMv8nx #Cop22 #Coal_Power_Plant pic.twitter.com/B77Ct7BL2v
— Taha Khalid (@Taahakhalid) November 16, 2016
Read excerpts from the original VOA article here.
