It takes some major hubris to even think about shutting down an old coal powered electric generating station, since they are grandfathered. If they are operating perfectly legally, you can't.

But wait, when President Clinton was in power they found out that just about every coal plant had been :modified." thus subjecting it to New Source Review under the Clean Air Act.  The EPA had a field day nailing those old coal plants, fining them, and making them clean up ... today we might ask for supplemental judgments such as to replace some of the dirty coal power with clean or renewable power.

We all know what happened ... Bush came into power and shut down the EPA's aggressive enforcement, whereupon a few deputies and lawyers walked off the job in disgust. They had discovered how to "retire" old coal plants using existing laws and not silly artifices such as what was proposed above (no offense my friend). Perhaps that spirit will come back - but think about it, how could a 40 or 50 year old coal electric station exist without being modified over time?  -sam

Onward through the fog

You mentioined 31,000 jobs involved in transportation of coal.  Those wouldn't necessarily be jobs lost, IMHO.
 Since rail freight is so much more efficient than trucks for long hauls, we should be using rail more than we are. The phasing out of coal will free up rail capacity, which can be used for other types of freight.  I forget the number, but coal uses a large percentage of our rail freight capacity.

...shutting down coal plants by government fiat.  How's that going to happen in the real world?  

Sam, I like your idea that NSR enforcement could return and demand alternative sources and part of settlement agreements.  That might do a little bit.

More than 30 states have renewable portfolio standards, and that's going to help too.  A federal one would be nice (as long as it doesn't override tougher state RPS's).  Federal subsidies to, and greater tax breaks for, alternative energy sources would help too.

Of course a price on carbon (tax or cap-and-trade) is essential to help level the playing field.

A ban on mountaintop removal would go a long way too.  I'm not sure if there's anything we can do directly to stop strip mining in Wyoming, though.

Anyway, the Obama administration is going to have its hands full tackling all of this -- we will all need to keep up the pressure on them and on Congress.

That's my late night preaching to the choir, for what it's worth.  I'm sure you guys know all this already, though.

Instead of presenting workers with options like "you're killing the rest of us, we're shutting down your coal plant"; how about making good on all those promises of "Green Jobs" and starting to transfer those workers to them?

For example, you cite 184,000 workers.

Well, heck, if I were to put them all on the Government payroll for say $50,000 a year (they live in Appalachia so that's like $5 million) the total cost would be:

184,000 x $50,000 = $9,200,000,000

We are still trying to bail out Wall Street AIG with a $85 billion salve -- yet, we can put the entire coal industry on retainer for a mere $9 billion for a year, or for an entire decade for the price of the AIG bailout!!

Let's put them all to work retrofiting houses and buildings for energy efficiency, putting up solar panels, and building wind farms.

A clean energy new deal!  Excellent.

Much as I would prefer to go with Generation IV Nuclear technology, the most practical way to shut the coal fired plants down is to build new Generation III+ nuclear plants.  i know that renewables advocates are going to howl at this but renewables are not good base load generators, and it will cost far more to build base load capacity with renewables than with nuclear.  

Brian Wang has pointed out a secondary CO2 savings from shifting from coal to nuclear, namely it would freed up rail capacity that is presently involved in coal hauling.  The freed up rail capacity  would permit a shift of long distance freight haling from trucks to rail.  Trains emit something like 1/8 the  CO2 that trucks do, per mile freight is moved.  Electrification of high density freight hauling rail lines would of course further reduce CO2 emissions.

Charles Barton