Common Dreams reports
FirstEnergy Solutions (FES)--together with its subsidiaries FirstEnergy Generation and FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Company--announced its bankruptcy [April 1] after years of short-sighted business decisions and executive mismanagement that resisted investing in clean, renewable energy, and its workers. The company now has a serious obligation to protect its workers and their benefits from the bankruptcy process, as well as meet its environmental responsibilities--particularly if its coal and nuclear power plants are retired or sold.
FES has power plants in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana.
In response, Mary Anne Hitt, Director of Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign, released the following statement:
"FirstEnergy Solutions' bankruptcy is a cautionary tale for utilities, investors, and public officials who think the coal and nuclear industries will somehow rebound in the coming years. They will not. America's 21st century energy market demands cheap, flexible energy resources that can rapidly shift with electricity demands and don't pollute local air and water. Coal and nuclear plants are too expensive and too dirty to compete in the modern market.
"FirstEnergy Solutions is in bankruptcy because it continually ignored America's shift to clean energy by investing in uneconomic coal and nuclear plants which have been losing money for years. Now it's time for the company to accept its mistakes and concentrate on protecting its workers and their benefits during the bankruptcy process, while also meeting its environmental obligations--particularly if its plants are decommissioned or sold. FES must do everything it can to help those being harmed by its negligent business practices and focus on transitioning them to new economic opportunities."
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 04 2018, @02:08PM (28 children)
"IF". Where's the evidence? Meanwhile I can point to groups like the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace which spend hundreds of millions a year on things like global warming propaganda.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 04 2018, @05:41PM (27 children)
Ah yes. I forgot. No company would ever lie cheat or steal.
Those are only done by the evil government and unions.
Nothing to see at all. Only the environmental guys are wrong.
You are as blind as your mouthpiece allows.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 04 2018, @07:03PM (26 children)
They wouldn't, if there was no profit in it.
And yet the environmental guys are way outspending the other side. Somethings not quite right with the narrative.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 04 2018, @09:27PM (3 children)
“They wouldn't, if there was no profit in it.”
Exactly. If there is profit in it they will lie cheat and steal.
Government isn’t for profit. It has faults. But this is where regulations keep the powerful in check. And companies need oversight. Or we get issues like Facebook is an example of currently
One of the most confusing aspects of not seeing thru fud is we get weird stuff like government is bad til our guy says it isn’t. Much like the tariffs Trump thinks he can drive thru with no worries. But I bet you think he will be fine but if it was Hillary calling for them you would be frothing at the mouth.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 05 2018, @02:39AM (2 children)
They don't similarly keep governments in check. Government accounting is a notorious example. Private businesses have to report long term liabilities. Governments don't.
How much are you betting? More would be better.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @03:09AM (1 child)
“They don't similarly keep governments in check. Government accounting is a notorious example. Private businesses have to report long term liabilities. Governments don't.”
You want to avoid short-term.
Private business reports quarterly.
Government agents report every 2-6 yrs.
You lost.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 05 2018, @03:27AM
Completely irrelevant.
So in other words, you claim that not only do governments fail to report accurate accounting figures, they report far less often? You're really selling this one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 04 2018, @09:44PM (18 children)
“And yet the environmental guys are way outspending the other side. Somethings not quite right with the narrative.”
Addressing this separately. To me this makes sense.
The companies get to hide behind “nothing is wrong” and that is cheap compared to the independent attempts to show that there is something going wrong in the environment.
Before the lead issue in Flint, the republicans hid behind nothing is wrong. And even when it got so bad they couldn’t hide they still largely said “nothing to see here”. The studies to show there was something there had to be more costly than just “nothing to see here”.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @12:36AM (2 children)
Lead pipes are a local issue, not a state issue. Flint has been run by democrats for decades. Neighboring cities replaced lead pipes at their own expense; why should Flint get this for free while those neighboring cities don't get reimbursed?
The fact that a state-level republican was forced to appoint somebody to manage Flint's finances does not erase the prior decades of failure to act. Under democrat control, Flint had gotten to the point where the problem was about to be "solved" by shutting down the water service entirely: Flint couldn't pay for the higher-quality water they were using.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @01:44AM
This is a laughable retelling of the facts.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 05 2018, @03:20AM
Actually, there are a fair number [nytimes.com] of cities in Flint's situation.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 05 2018, @02:18AM (14 children)
So why is this supposed to be a winning strategy?
It didn't work for them and the cost of proving so was pretty cheap (basically a few thousand dollars for water testing and talking with local papers).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @02:51AM (13 children)
So why is this supposed to be a winning strategy?
Keeps shareholders at bay. Nothing like a non-voter.
“It didn't work for them and the cost of proving so was pretty cheap (basically a few thousand dollars for water testing and talking with local papers).”
Pretty cheap? We will see after the midterms.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 05 2018, @03:05AM (12 children)
Shareholders have nothing to do with with environmental regulation or climate change research, for example.
You could have just read the history [wikipedia.org] of the Flint water scandal. The people in charge had corrupt regulators hiding unfavorable test results. The whole thing broke open when an EPA regulator did independent testing on a resident's water and detected high levels of lead. It didn't take long (less than a year) and the main cost was that of the tests.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @03:13AM (11 children)
“Shareholders have nothing to do with with environmental regulation or climate change research, for example.”
So when I invest in your company I shouldn’t look at any flaws. Especially not those you can’t address via fud.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 05 2018, @03:21AM (10 children)
You are committing a non sequitur argument since the shareholder doesn't enforce the laws of the land.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @03:44AM (9 children)
Humorous since I never claimed that.
The downfall of a fascist society is failure to monitor shareholders. They MUST be the only monitors. But Eventually you get one of thereddest states in the union seeing grassroots movements for better pay. Wait. Thought all boats were lifted.
I will leave it to you to reason the downfall of a democratic society.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 05 2018, @03:54AM (8 children)
That argument doesn't hold water with regulators. Nor for that matter with the public (who doesn't hold a great deal of trust in businesses). And shareholders are likely to become non-shareholders (rather than merely disgruntled voters), if they think a company is blowing off a legitimate environmental concern that contains great risk for the company.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @04:08AM (7 children)
Oh yeah. I forgot. In your world view scams are brought out only via government employees. Not corporate shareholders (never ever). We can trust one subset of humans entirely and we can never trust the latter.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 05 2018, @05:58AM (6 children)
I guess you're just not getting it. I never said that and this thread isn't about trusting shareholders. I merely disagreed with the bullshit claim that Big Oil and such were hiding (or even, for that matter, capable of hiding) the negative effects of fossil fuels like global warming (as well the more recent claim in the thread that "nothing is wrong" propaganda actually works effectively - the poster proposing that even gave an example, the Flint water crisis, where that wasn't true and simple, cheap water testing brought down a conspiracy).
There's no evidence for that. You ignore that the green side massively outspends Big Oil on the propaganda front - despite the fact that Big Oil can afford to hold its own yet doesn't bother to, and still can't get proportional traction among the public.
It's convenient to blame Big Oil cooties, but they aren't magically more adept at propaganda than their opponents, particularly by an order of magnitude. There's simpler explanations such as the widespread dishonesty and exaggeration of the climate change side and that there's no real new information coming in to change peoples' minds. Propaganda becomes very ineffective under those circumstances.
You need more than motive for the alleged Big Oil conspiracy. Show me the money!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @03:12PM (5 children)
There was just a story about an oil company CEO confessing to exactly what you claim they don't do. Dumbass khallow so stuck in propaganda.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 05 2018, @06:39PM (4 children)
No, there wasn't. Such a thing would have been huge news. Instead, we have dishonest attack pieces like this [thinkprogress.org]
The story then concludes
and
That in turn is very far from the accusation that this CEO was deliberately covering up climate change problems. And $33 million is nothing especially over two decades. They easily could have afforded three orders of magnitude more spending on that. And that's just one oil company.
You're wasting my time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @09:03PM (3 children)
The last comment was not me.
My issue with your claim is simply that it is not unreasonable for those paying to research something as complex as climate change to spend much more than Han those who claim simply “nothing to se here”. But when I see greens attacking nuclear plants n all forms are they lose me since I find their anti nuke stance trite.
I don’t get why you accept the anti climate peeps face value. Just a simple nothing to see here and you are good.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 05 2018, @10:28PM (2 children)
There are two obvious rebuttals here. First, extraordinary claims (particularly complex claims like that of catastrophic climate change and the subsequent calls for urgent, dramatic action) require extraordinary evidence. Second, even if we were to grant the alleged fairness of your proposal above, the climate change mitigation advocates vastly outspend their rivals anyway. They should be trouncing the opposition handily. It's time to think about why that's not happening.
I don't. I certainly don't take the "But it's snowing outside" crowd any more serious than I take the "blame everything on global warming" crowd. I'm a member of the "lukewarmists", namely, the idea that there is human-caused global warming and related problems, but these aren't bad enough that we need to address them right now. My view is that the lukewarmists have the only scientific (and economic!) argument in the batch.
First, we don't have the false certainty. In the hard sell for catastrophic climate change, do you ever hear them admitting that due to uncertainty in their observations that they could be off on climate change predictions by many decades or even centuries? The most important parameter in climatology, the long term temperature sensitivity of a doubling of CO2 is currently estimated [wikipedia.org] to be 1.5 C to 4.5 C per doubling. Since when have they discussed the implications of that? 4.5 C means that we're already looking at a huge increase in future temperature. At 1.5 C, it's centuries to get to significant levels of warming. There are similar huge bars in paleoclimate data, solar output before recent decades, the climate effects of weather, and climate change predictions (particularly those of economic harm from climate change).
Researchers hid adverse data. For example, the whole Climategate [wikipedia.org] thing happened in large part because numerous scientists would argue privately about various problems of their research while presenting a different public face because said problems would somehow aid critics. Saying one thing in private and another in public is a common sign of dishonesty. Another was attempts, also during that time frame to hide data from critics, a bit of which was illegal. Another hidden bit of data is related to the false certainty of the temperature sensitivity parameter above. They fail to mention that the simple 1-dimensional radiative model of climate change (which is relatively certain), only predicts roughly 1.5 C per doubling. The rest comes from net feedback of the whole system which hasn't been observed yet. So when they're claiming 1.5 C to 4.5 C per doubling as the range, what they aren't telling you is that this long term positive feedback, beyond that of the basic radiative model ranges from non-existent to 3 C per doubling on its own.
Every mistake is in favor of the catastrophic climate change model. The best known is the "Hockey Stick" graph [wikipedia.org] of 1999 which purported to show a flat global temperature graph over the past 1000 years until one gets to modern times. A few years later, a criticism of the paper showed that the statistical methods employed in the original paper would have resulted in a hockey stick shape due to the data massaging involved even if one started with random data.
The widespread employment of fallacies. Typical ones which weed out most mitigation arguments are confirmation bias, observation bias, argument from authority, Pascal's wager, and straw man arguments. We see X, therefore it must be due to "climate change" (even though it may have been happening for the past billion years!).
Prioritizing propaganda over science - "climate change" over "anthropogenic global warming" even though the latter is the accurate term, scientifically. Prioritizing climate change in turn over every other problem of mankind (such as announcing that we must not let the climate rise more than 1.5 C over preindustrial levels, even though we're doing a lot with the activity that generates the greenhouse gases).
Finally, the catastrophic climate change argument has all the hallmarks of a scam. We are being panicked into mitigation because supposedly a small rise in global temperature (currently at 1.5 C conveniently enough) is supposed to be the threshold of no return. There's hundreds of billions of dollars of public spending at stake, in energy, transportation, finance, etc and the only justification for it is FUD.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 06 2018, @05:52AM (1 child)
And does the latest?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/shell-grappled-with-climate-change-20-years-ago-documents-show/ [scientificamerican.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 06 2018, @06:47AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 04 2018, @09:56PM (2 children)
Citation needed, and even if you are correct that just means the Oil Barons have no need to advertise since they are ridiculously entrenched and it would likely backfire with how many people know the truth.
I guess your brain is still soft enough to absorb that crap though, not like they need to bleach your brain any more in their favor.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 05 2018, @02:14AM
Why? What would be the point of the exercise?
In other words, you're already weaseling out of a losing argument.
What crap?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 05 2018, @02:42AM
Also, if you had actually read this thread you would have noticed that I gave such a citation earlier in this thread.