Some Benevolent Green Billionaire Should Buy The Whole U.S. Coal Industry Right Now

The U.S. coal industry is in terrible shape.

Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private coal company, filed for bankruptcy on Wednesday. Fellow coal giants Alpha Natural Resources, Arch Coal, Patriot Coal and Walter Energy have each filed for bankruptcy since January 2015. More than three dozen smaller coal companies have gone under in the last four years.

And the coal companies that aren't bankrupt are worth a fraction of what they used to be. Thanks to falling demand from China, a natural gas boom in the U.S. and a string of debt-fueled mergers, the total value of the U.S. coal industry has fallen by two-thirds in the last five years, from just over $60 billion to $22 billion. Including money coal companies have pledged to restore damaged land brings the total to just under $25 billion. 

As a result, one of the most audacious environmental ideas out there is getting cheaper and cheaper to pull off.

The Huffington Post

"The idea is simple," Robinson Meyer wrote last year in the Atlantic: buy up the U.S. coal industry, retrain the workers and shut it down.

Matt Frost, a former coal company employee who is now a federal contractor who does work for the Environmental Protection Agency, has been promoting this idea in the U.S. Two green business proponents, Gil Friend and Felix Kramer, pushed the idea two years ago.

Back then, Friend and Kramer put the price tag at around $50 billion, which given the industry's current value looks like a wonderfully quaint overestimation in hindsight. In contrast, the cost of burning coal each year in the U.S. is estimated at $345 billion. Buying up the coal mining industry wouldn't stop the country from burning coal, but it would help ensure that some of those massive health costs are taken into account by making coal more expensive.

Who writes the check? A billionaire environmentalist. And it just so happens that billionaire environmentalists have a knack for having finance and deal-making backgrounds. “Savvy climate hawks like Michael Bloomberg, Richard Branson, John Doerr, Jeremy Grantham, and Tom Steyer know all about buyouts,” Friend and Kramer wrote.

Bloomberg's net worth is estimated at $37 billion, and he's already spent $60 million on a campaign to shutter coal-fired power plants. Branson is worth about $5 billion. John Doerr, a prominent venture capitalist, is worth about $4 billion. Jeremy Grantham, who founded asset manager GMO, is a longtime donor to a variety of environmental causes and has said he believes fossil fuels assets will fall in value dramatically. Tom Steyer founded the hedge fund Farallon Capital Management and is worth about $1.6 billion. He spent $76 million to make climate change a key issue in the 2014 elections.

A key part of the idea is to utilize the valuable engineering and geology skills of people in the coal industry. “If we really want to make coal less desirable”— and Paul Krugman and The Economist agree that we should indeed want that — “you have to make it more expensive,” Matt Frost told the Huffington Post last year.

Billions would have to be spent to find new jobs for the miners who showed up for generations to dangerous, dirty jobs and were forced to fight -- too often literally -- for fair pay and basic safety rules. “You could create a whole new sector of un-mining professionals, people who are really good at helping you keep carbon underground,” Frost said.

The next chapter in the U.S. coal mining industry promises to be financially bleak -- but that doesn't mean it has to inflict more harm on coal communities, people's health or the environment. 

Tesla Proclaims This The Week Electric Cars Went Mainstream

We may have reached a tipping point.

After a frenzied week watching orders for its Model 3 soar, Tesla declared Thursday that electric cars have gone mainstream.

The electric car manufacturer has received more than 325,000 pre-orders for its first affordably priced sedan. At an average cost of $42,000 apiece after various options are priced in, that comes to nearly $14 billion in sales.

Tesla claimed that eye-popping total makes this "the single biggest one-week launch of any product ever."

"Most importantly," the company added, "we are all taking a huge step towards a better future by accelerating the transition to sustainable transportation."

"We want to thank everyone who has shown their faith in Tesla and the mission of electric vehicles. We would write more, but we need to get back to increasing our Model 3 production plans!"

Tesla CEO Elon Musk had offered a similar thought on Twitter last Friday, just after the Model 3 was released, when orders stood at around 200,000.

Definitely going to need to rethink production planning...

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 1, 2016

For perspective on just how much of a production increase that may be, Autoblog notes that Tesla delivered a total of just 50,000 vehicles in 2015.

“The pent-up demand is something that surprised me," DBL Partners Managing Director Nancy Pfund, whose venture capital firm invested in Tesla a decade ago, told The Huffington Post on Monday. "I knew it was big, but I had no idea how much of a market we were tapping into with the Model 3.”

Notorious Coal Baron Don Blankenship Sentenced To One Year In Prison

This story was produced and originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A federal judge in West Virginia sentenced former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship to a year in prison on Wednesday for conspiring to commit mine safety violations at his company's Upper Big Branch mine during a period leading up to the explosion there that left 29 miners dead in 2010.

 

Blankenship was convicted of the misdemeanor charge in December, but the conviction was explicitly not linked to the Upper Big Branch disaster itself and Blankenship's attorney worked hard to ensure the accident was hardly mentioned during the trial. And that verdict was a disappointment to prosecutors; he was found not guilty of the more serious felony charges of making false statements to federal regulators in the aftermath of the blast in order to boost Massey's stock price. (Had he been convicted on all counts, he would have faced up to 30 years in prison.) The conspiracy conviction rested on evidence of Blankenship's domineering management style which emphasized profits over the federal mine safety laws designed to avert underground explosions:

[T]he attention to detail that made Blankenship such an effective bean counter may also be his undoing. He constantly monitored every inch of his operation and wrote memos instructing subordinates to move coal at all costs. "I could Krushchev you," he warned in a handwritten memo to one Massey official whose facilities Blankenship thought were underperforming. He called another mine manager "literally crazy" and "ridiculous" for devoting too many of his miners to safety projects. Despite repeated citations by the MSHA, Blankenship instructed Massey executives to postpone safety improvements: "We'll worry about ventilation or other issues at an appropriate time. Now is not the time." And this is only what investigators gleaned from the documents they could find: Hughie Stover, Blankenship's bodyguard and personal driver—and the head of security at Upper Big Branch—ordered a subordinate to destroy thousands of pages of documents, while the government's investigation was ongoing. (Stover was sentenced to three years in prison in 2012 for lying to federal investigators and attempting to destroy evidence.)

Before he stepped down as Massey's CEO in 2010, Blankenship had built the company into one of the largest coal producers in the United States, and become a polarizing figure in his home state, where he bankrolled the rise of Republican party, pushed climate denial, and crushed unions. For more on Blankenship, read my piece from the magazine on his rise and fall.

Even Tesla Fanatics Are Shocked By Model 3 Preorders

Elon Musk reveled this weekend in the tidal wave of preorders Tesla Motors received for the company's first affordable car, the Model 3, which debuted March 31.

By Saturday night, the electric automaker pulled in an eye-popping 276,000 orders for the $35,000 vehicle, each with a $1,000 deposit, the billionaire chief executive said on Twitter. That's more than double what the company expected. 

276k Model 3 orders by end of Sat

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 3, 2016

Even two of electric carmaker's keenest observers -- one an early investor, the other a high-ranking analyst fixated on the future of transportation -- were wowed by the numbers.

"We were all surprised to sell a quarter of a million cars in two days," DBL Partners Managing Director Nancy Pfund, whose venture firm invested in Tesla a decade ago, told The Huffington Post at the Bloomberg New Energy Finance Summit in New York on Monday. "The pent-up demand is something that surprised me. I knew it was big, but I had no idea how much of a market we were tapping into with the Model 3."

When she first invested in the electric automaker 10 years ago, the company's only offering was the super-fast, super-expensive Roadster, and electric cars in general seemed dead-on-arrival.

"People were telling us Tesla is for rich people," Pfund said. "I mean, we didn't sit around a conference table 10 years ago and say, 'Let's make a car for the wealthy.' It's like the early cellphone or iPhone, these things are expensive at first."

The reaction to the Model 3 could ripple throughout the auto industry.

"That legitimately surprised us," Colin McKerracher, the lead advanced transportation analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, told HuffPost in an interview. "I don't think you want to ignore that. I don't think you want to say that's just a flash in the pan."

Handout . / Reuters

The Tesla Model 3.

Rather, McKerracher said traditional automakers are now scrambling to develop competitors to Tesla's roster of sleek, well-designed electric vehicles. 

"I wouldn't underestimate Tesla's ability to pull other automakers along," he said.

One big difference is that the Nissan LEAF and Chevrolet's Bolt and Volt -- the Model 3's chief rivals -- simply haven't had the same hype as a Tesla.

"If you build a badass product, people will buy it on its own merits," Salim Morsy, senior analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, told HuffPost.

But people need to know about it, he added. 

"For the Bolt, Volt and Leaf, the marketing was abysmal," Morsy said. 

Musk is nothing if not a good hype man. 

The 2 Near-Death Experiences That Changed Mark Bertolini Forever

Before Mark Bertolini became the chief executive of the country's biggest health insurer, before he was celebrated by business publications for being an "unconventional boss" who is "mindful of morality," before he overhauled his company to prioritize the wellness of his workers, he was a father watching his teenage son die.

It was 2001, and Bertolini's son Eric, who was then 16, was diagnosed with a rare type of cancer. Bertolini, now the chief executive of Aetna, quit his job at insurance rival Cigna and moved into his son's hospital room in Boston to help manage his care.

Eric made a full recovery two years later, but was struck by complications and needed a kidney transplant.

Once again, Bertolini stepped in, donating one of his kidneys to his son.

Those experiences, coupled with a severe skiing accident he suffered in 2004, completely changed the way that Bertolini saw health and, by extension, health care. 

"What I found very quickly in both his circumstance and mine was getting our lives back, becoming engaged and productive members of society, was something that the health care system cared very little about," Bertolini says in the sixth episode of "Pioneers," a new video series by The Huffington Post that profiles leaders in various industries who have redefined success by making it their mission to live more meaningful and less stressful lives.

Facing long-term disability and chronic pain after colliding with a tree, Bertolini turned to yoga and meditation. A recent study by Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center found that participants who practiced mindfulness meditation experienced greater pain relief than those who received a placebo. Regular meditation and healthy amounts of sleep essentially work to drain out toxins -- such as molecules associated with the degeneration of brain cells -- that build up during waking hours. 

"I still have my pain, but as we say in the meditative arena, in the mindfulness arena: 'I have pain, I'm aware of my pain, I am not my pain,'" Bertolini says. "I had to learn how to be more 'Zen' in the way I approached my daily life, and meditation was a way to learn how to do that."

That approach bled over into his work life, too. Under Bertolini's leadership, Aetna helped spearhead the movement in corporate culture to focus more on employee health -- as both a means of improving people's lives and a way of reducing health care costs. And perhaps most importantly, he addressed one of the biggest sources of stress for his workers: money. 

Last year, Bertolini raised the minimum hourly base pay for all U.S. workers at Aetna to $16 after reading Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a best-selling 700-page book on income inequality by the French economist Thomas Piketty.

"If people are too busy looking for food, if they're too busy stressing about whether or not they have enough money to pay for their health care, how can they possibly sleep?" Bertolini says. 

Still, for wealthy executives, money shouldn't be everything in business, he says. 

"We view stock price and compensation as ways of measuring the success of an organization, and I think, because of that, we have a very short-term view of how capitalism works," he says. "At Aetna, we actually say: 'You know what, we're here for the long run. Here are the fundamentals we're investing in, like we did with our employees.'" 

To watch previous episodes of Pioneers, head here.

FDA Sued Over Approval Of Genetically Engineered Salmon

• Plaintiffs argue the federal agency overstepped its authority in approving the genetically modified fish.
• Produced by AquaBounty Technologies, the salmon are engineered to grow twice as fast as wild species.
• Critics worry engineered salmon could prove disastrous for wild salmon populations.

Nearly a dozen fishing and environmental groups have filed suit against the Food and Drug Administration in an effort to block its recent approval of genetically modified salmon.

The plaintiffs, represented by the Center for Food Safety and Earthjustice, argue that by green-lighting the first-ever genetically altered animal slated for human consumption, the FDA violated the law and ignored potential risks to wild salmon populations, the environment and fishing communities.

"That's one of the major risks here, is the escape of these fish into the wild," George Kimbrell, senior attorney for Center for Food Safety, told The Huffington Post. "It could be a final blow to our already imperiled salmon stocks."

Produced by Massachusetts-based company AquaBounty Technologies, the AquAdvantage Salmon is an Atlantic salmon engineered with genes from a Pacific Chinook salmon and a deep water ocean eelpout to grow twice as fast as its conventional counterpart.

Handout / Reuters

An AquAdvantage Salmon is pictured in this undated photo provided by AquaBounty Technologies.

The 64-page lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, challenges whether the FDA has authority to regulate genetically modified animals as "animal drugs" under the 1938 Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act. It also argues the agency failed to protect the environment and consult wildlife agencies in its review process, as required by federal law, CFS said in a release. 

"I think it's important to note that FDA has gone ahead with this approval over the objections of over 2 million Americans in the comment period," Kimbrell told HuffPost.

In its approval announcement in November, the FDA said it determined "food from AquAdvantage Salmon is as safe to eat and as nutritious as food from other non-GE Atlantic salmon and that there are no biologically relevant differences in the nutritional profile of AquAdvantage Salmon compared to that of other farm-raised Atlantic salmon."

FDA spokeswoman Juli Putnamn told HuffPost in an email that as a matter of policy, the federal agency does not comment on pending litigation.

SAUL LOEB via Getty Images

Fresh Atlantic salmon steaks and fillets at Eastern Market in Washington, D.C. in 2013.

The lawsuit is the latest development in an ongoing and heated debate over genetically modified organisms, their safety and whether genetically engineered foods should be labeled. While proponents say the technology allows agricultural farmers to be more efficient, opponents argue they result in heavy pesticide use and transgenic contamination.

In the case of its GE salmon, AquaBounty says the fish grows to market size using 25 percent less feed than any Atlantic salmon on the market today.

But if the engineered fish were to be released into the wild -- a risk AquaBounty says is eliminated by raising them on land and away from the ocean -- critics worry they might outcompete endangered wild salmon for food and introduce new diseases.

“Once they escape, you can’t put these transgenic fish back in the bag," Dune Lankard, a salmon fisherman and the Center for Biological Diversity’s Alaska representative, said in a release. "They’re manufactured to outgrow wild salmon, and if they cross-breed, it could have irreversible impacts on the natural world. This kind of dangerous tinkering could easily morph into a disaster for wild salmon that will be impossible to undo."

Plaintiffs in the case include Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, Institute for Fisheries Resources, Golden Gate Salmon Association, Friends of Merrymeeting Bay and others.

Tesla Unveils Model 3, Its Most Important Electric Car Yet

HAWTHORNE, Calif. -- Electric car manufacturer Tesla unveiled its latest electric car Thursday night -- the hotly anticipated, lower-cost Model 3 sedan.

The much-hyped public presentation of the mid-sized sedan at Tesla's design studio was a historic moment for both the electric car industry and for Elon Musk’s Tesla.

The Model 3, Tesla's fourth production car, is the first one that's aimed at the masses, with a starting price of $35,000. For Tesla, considered the Apple of the automotive industry, the Model 3 has the potential to be its iPhone -- a sexy, mass-market, consumer-priced machine that changes the game.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

This undated photo provided by Tesla Motors shows a silver Model 3 car. The promise of an affordable electric car from Tesla Motors had hundreds of people lining up to reserve one. At a starting price of $35,000 — before federal and state government incentives — the Model 3 is less than half the cost of Tesla's previous models.

If the car becomes as popular and successful as Musk hopes, Tesla stands to become a major consumer brand that helps shepherd the all-electric car era into the mainstream. Musk said at Thursday night's event that 115,000 Model 3s had been ordered in the previous 24 hours.

#TeslaModel3 ! pic.twitter.com/kXnLwO2Rnc

— Matt Ferner (@matthewferner) April 1, 2016

But it may be a bumpy road. The Koch brothers are planning a multimillion-dollar assault on electric vehicles, Tesla’s direct-to-consumer sales model is prohibited in several states, automotive technology and trends are evolving rapidly and there is a possibility that tax incentives -- a key to electric car sales -- will drop by the time the first Model 3s ship in late 2017. The Model 3 isn't the first affordable all-electric vehicle on the market, and the competition is likely to intensify.

Musk said the Model 3 can go from 0 to 60 mph in less than six seconds and will have a range of at least 215 miles on a charge. The car will seat five adults comfortably and will have front and rear trunks, he said.

"Can you fit a seven-foot surfboard in a Model 3? Yes," said Musk.

A quick spin in a Model 3 with a Tesla driver showed the car to be blazingly fast with sporty handling. When the driver pressed the accelerator, the three passengers -- all journalists -- gasped and giggled. 

The back seat was indeed comfortable for two, and had ample room for a third person.

Less than two hours after Musk took the wraps off the car, the number of orders topped 133,000.

133K reservations and counting #TeslaModel3 pic.twitter.com/bmfFedDsIi

— Matt Ferner (@matthewferner) April 1, 2016