Bloomberg Clean Energy

Speaker 1:       With these three new power plant announcements of closure, you’re going to have a total of 285 out of the 530 power plants in the country that are in the process or have already been closed. That’s like 60% of the qualified power plants closed and incidentally, these will give us 48 power plants that we’ve closed, i think it is, since donald trump came into power and it’s good for the environment, it’s good for the climate change folks, it’s good for reducing our electric bill. The only fly in the ointment is we’ve got to find ways to train coal miners and people that work in the coal industry and give them other jobs.
Speaker 2:       Is that sort of the biggest area of opposition there is to close the plants like these?
Speaker 1:       Well, there’s always opposition to anything new, any change. I think more and more people see on their television screen, forest fires in california like they’ve never had before and floods on the east coast from storms that are much greater and dump a lot more rain than ever before and they look at insurance companies and the damage that they have to pay out; the funds that they have to pay out to repair damage. If we can close most of the coal fired power plants, we will slow down climate change. We’ve got to get the rest of the world to come along, which is a whole big other problem. It also, it helps us short term with the air we breathe and the water we drink and the safety we have so that our houses don’t get burnt down or have their roofs blown off when bigger storms.
Speaker 2:       What impact does that have on the regions power grid?
Speaker 1:       Power grid’s fine. All power is pretty much the same. It come sin one end and they distribute it in other ways.
Speaker 2:       Tell us what resources are available to learn more about the future of coal and alternative energy sources.
Speaker 1:       Go to sierraclub.org and you’ll get an answer to most of your questions. It’s a good organization. We’ve been happy to support it. In the end it is the local people who said i don’t want to breathe dirty air and you, coal fired power plant, stop polluting the world, i want my kids to not be taken to the hospital with an asthma attack and i want to have a future for my kids so we don’t find rising oceans and all those other problems.