Obama "bankrupting" coal companies

[stpioc]

From the same guy who argued CO2 isn't necessarily the cause of climate change. And to think that this guy is the Energy Secretary..

Secretary of Energy Rick Perry toured the Longview coal plant in West Virginia on Thursday with the state’s congressional delegation. During the visit, Perry’s tentative grasp of economics was on full display, as he told the crowd that demand for coal would follow supply.


Given a generous reading, Perry is referring here to Say’s law, also known as the law of markets, which has been rephrased as “supply creates its own demand.” In fact, the classical economic theory could be more accurately rephrased as “the total demand of an economy will meet the amount of supply,” although Keynes and the Depression called Say’s law into rather dramatic question. The rule does not apply to individual products, such as coal (or horses and buggies, or typewriters).


But Longview is an odd place to tout economic theory: The plant, which went online in 2011, went bankrupt in 2013. At the time, the Wall Street Journal blamed low natural gas prices for the plant’s economic woes. As a merchant plant, Longview sells electricity on the open market and is susceptible to price fluctuations as demand moves to lower-cost options.

Ironically, Perry gave his “little economics lesson” just days after West Virginia University released a report that echoed numerous recent analyses in stating coal demand will not be coming back. The report predicts that demand will remain in the 80-million-ton range through the first part of the next decade and will fall below 80 million tons by 2030 — and it’s not expected to rebound from there. The report attributed the long-term outlook for coal production to low demand overseas, declining productivity in West Virginia’s mines, and a decrease in U.S. coal-fired power plants — which, again, is tied to low-cost natural gas prices as well as increased emissions standards and more economical clean energy. (West Virginia’s biggest utility even announced this week it would invest in two more wind farms.)

Rick Perry tries to make the economic case for coal, screws up the economics part