With climate change looming, it seems so completely backwards to go back to using it again.
Is it coal miners pushing to keep their jobs? Fear of nuclear power? Is purely politically motivated, or are there genuinely people who believe coal is clean?
Edit, I will admit I was ignorant to the usage of coal nowadays.
Now I’m more depressed than when I posted this
I don’t think we ever stopped mining it
Yes, the correct answer is that “net zero” Is a greenwashed lie to placate the masses into inaction while the oligarchy continues business as usual until collapse.
https://medium.com/@samyoureyes/the-busy-workers-handbook-to-the-apocalypse-7790666afde7
I thought net zero meant there was no net co2 being emitted at any time? This is saying countries can claim net zero by just promising to remove co2 in the future. I’ve never seen it used that way, is that the common understanding?
The way people get to net zero is stupid accounting tricks. I burned a whole bunch of coal, but i paid a buddy of mine to plant trees. So now Im celebrating net zero with my buddy in his brand new tesla roadster. Who knew planting trees was so lucrative.
So we need good regulation to make sure the carbon is being sequestered. If planting trees and then burying them actually gets carbon permanently out of the atmosphere, I’m all for it. I would love planting trees to be lucrative, we could use more forests, they’re great!
It’s a lie because several of the dependent solutions are essentially impossible to achieve (given time, technology, resources, investment, economics, etc), as well as being the bare minimum necessary to avert disaster, with a deadline decades after it’s required to avert disaster.
Read the link to understand why.
I don’t see a link
Oil propaganda convinced millions of people that renewable energy sources like nuclear power or wind turbine were dangerous/ineffective.
Basically humans are stupid and don’t like change and rich people know and took advantage of it.
We all drank the
oilkoolaid
It never stopped. Hasn’t even really slowed down.
People need electricity. Renewables are great, but they don’t provide for the full generation need. Coal and natural gas power generation will continue unabated until a better (read: lower price for similar reliability) solution takes their place.
In my opinion, fossil fuel generation won’t take a real hit until the grid-scale energy storage problem is solved.
Coal us and fossil fuels is crashing in Europe and China might have hit peak petrol usage.
The S curve is well in its way.
There are concerns outside of the list you wrote. For example:
- people need energy and coal is a source of energy
And they’re going for coal in some places because the political situation has made other reliable energy sources unavailable:
- the Russia-Ukraine war has destroyed natural gas supply lines to Europe
- anti-nuclear activism has resulted in lack of nuclear investment
Outside of coal, nuclear, and natural gas, there aren’t many options for reliable sources of electricity.
Because the ecofanatics focused on fighting nuclear power for 50 years instead of fighting fossile fuels.
Fast forward to now, renewable are not ready at all and they need fossile fuels anyway to provide steady energy. But geopolitics is making oil too expensive, so countries are mining coal again.
In brief, ecofanatics were stupid (and still are) and war in Ukraine.
Were they stupid or deliberately misled, propagandized and manipulated by the fossil fuel industry? Sure some of them were stupid, but I don’t think that’s the whole story.
I’m an eco-fanatic and I am extremely pro-nuclear.
Yeah but that wasn’t the case in previous decades. Environmentalists have protested just about every nuclear power plant opening for the last 60 years. It might even still happen if we bothered to open more plants.
While environmental concerns, primarily regarding nuclear waste management, are probably the more public face of nuclear opposition, it is the economic burdens that have shut down nuclear plants before they even produce waste, as is the case with a number of canceled nuclear projects around the US at least.
Yes, countries like Germany are turning to coal as a direct result of nuclear-phobia.
The US, with all its green initiatives and solar/wind incentives, is pumping more oil than Saudi Arabia. The US has been the top oil producer on whole the planet for the last 5-6 years. The problem is getting worse.
Fantastic. We’re doomed
As people pointed out in another thread, nuclear energy is NOT the future and also a really bad short term solution,so countries like Germany are going back to coal short term to make the transitions to renewables in the meantime.
It’s not a great solution, but without Nordstream, there’s really not much else more sensible to do right now, just to make the transition.
what makes nuclear energy a bad option?
50+ years of fear from fossil fuel company propaganda.
“BuT thE WaSTe diSPoSaL PrObLEm”
Meanwhile coal:
“Oh that thing that’s more radioactive than nuclear waste? Yeah, just toss it in the air. Who cares”
Because of the war against nuclear plants. Our green party shut down nuclear plants in favor for renewable energy. But as predicted, renewables don’t meet our demands. So the green party started building gas plants to compensate instead of keeping nuclear running.
So why? Because of green idiocracry that demand the impossible of green energy (at this moment) and nuclear = evil
As many people pointed out, we never stopped. Nor will be stop for decades to come. Unlike what people hear online, change takes time.
It’s also something I wish people would keep in mind more when evaluating whether decisions or even whole politicians and their terms have an effect or what effect: A large portion of your own term in an office is spent on realizing the decisions made by your predecessor, and/or trying to prevent their worst effects. Conversely, anything a current politician does will have most of it’s effects after they left office.
Oh absolutely. The first year of any new president will mostly be governed by what policies were signed under the previous president.
And many of times, certain agreements are multi year ones which yiu have little control over.
Either way, we have time. Yes, we shouldn’t lose momentum to keep the changes coming, but holy crap we have some people in here who never step away from the internet and are fed an endless stream of over hyped doom and gloom.
This is why the whole Stop Oil crew need to take a deep breath.
What do they think is going to happen if we suddenly stop using oil? It is phased approach but, no, bank’s are bad for funding them.
Reliance on oil and coal is an immediate human need but it will diminish.
Maybe if we had decided to “stop oil” like 60years ago, it wouldn’t be an issue anymore? But since we didn’t 60 years ago, perhaps we should have plan to replace fossil fuels with something that burn and can provide power day or night, rain or shine and maybe we should start building these things NOW.
They’re all triggered into thinking the world is going to collapse tomorrow, and it is infuriating.
In 50 years, we’re still going to have cars that run on gas. We’ll still have plastic bags and straws. The world will not have ended.
The worst part of all this doom and gloom is that it is going to make some people think nothing can be done, so why bother. Then there are going to be some 9ther people who want change, but after a few years they will start to wonder why hasn’t the environmental apocalypse happened yet and start thinking it was all a sham. You already hear that from people who grew up in the 70s when the last time this kind of thought was spreading. Back then everything was about global warming this and global warming that. We were going to boil over all our oceans and everyone was going to die. That never happened, obviously. In more recent years scientists have changed their views to the current climate change model where they state that some parts of the globe will actually get colder while other parts will get hotter. We will have more severe storms. That seems to reflect more of what is happening these days, but even the most doom and gloom scientists aren’t claiming we will all die in a few short months. Yet that’s kind of the hysteria of far too many folks online.
Yes, we have to do something, but relax, it’s not going to all collapse by next week.
Time of something we don’t have the luxury of.
Relax. Get off the internet for a few days. We got time.
It’s never really stopped.
But from the actions of those in power it seems they’re just plowing through climate change and making money whilst they can. Imagine the decision is we’re fucked anyway so let’s get mine whilst I can and see if it helps me survive.
Actually I thought it’s maybe because our crazy “friend”, who recently decided to show how it never actually left from behind the red curtain, had no problem shelling multiple nuclear power plant sites. Just saying.
I blame the release of both Factorio and Victoria 3.
I know Germany is shutting down its reactors and without Russian gas they need to get a reliable baseload power generation from somewhere… :/
Coal is decreasing in Germany because of renewables.
More renewables has come online than was lost from nuclear.
$$$
It’s still needed until the transition to full renewables is viable in most places. People still need to afford electricity so it’s a means to an end
Same reasons we won’t solve the climate crisis, democracy and capitalism are not great at dealing with long term, side spread problems.
If you re-open a coal mine in a depressed community, you’ve earned a lot of votes while the people who were on the green side of things are diffused throughout the world.
Socialism into communism has been disapproval far worse from an environmental point of view. Well from nearly every metric.
Even with the best form of political and economic systems, people still will use every resource possible if it makes their life that much more comfortable.
I’m not saying democracy is a bad thing. But, it is important to understand flaws that are inherent to it. Long term problems are a particular weakness for democratic governments as there is almost no incentive to deal with them instead of short term “sugar high” projects.
I disagree with much of China’s strategy but the sort of moves being an autocracy allows enables it to simultaneously pursue a policy of economic growth while planning for the future. (You also get stuff lile the belt and road initiative, which was an incredibly ambitious program.)
Again, I am not saying China is better or democracy is bad. There are a BUNCH of huge flaws to autocratic governments like China’s. But, democracy is going to particularly struggle with these sorts of long term threats.
Countries like China can certainly enact unpopular opinion with little opposition. That can get policy thru that may be beneficia at times. You can see this with their recent energy policy. They are bringing online coal power production at a rapid rate. I can understand how that will help them from an economic standpoint. It is certainly something democratic countries would have a tough time implementing where as they can do this with little opposition.
Yup. That same ability to do things without public input also allows China to better multi task. So, while China is building more coal power capacity (much like America is doing with oil) China is also backing it up with an insane amount of renewable projects; China approved 106 GW of coal capacity in 2022 but for comparison has some 379 GW in solar currently under construction and 371 GW of wind power on track to be built by 2025 (which would double the world’s wind capacity.)
That ability to multi task is why they’ve been able to reduce air toxicity by a dramatic 40% in under ten years. While the coal is regrettable, parts of the infrastructure simply aren’t constructed for intermittent energy yet (same is true in America, transitioning the grid to be entirely renewable is going to be a Herculean task and there are almost no plans to do so there) so to keep the lights/factories on, coal is a cheap, quick stopgap to meet those needs while they build more renewable capacity than the rest of the world. The ability to over ride popular demands is also why you could easily see those plants being shut down before their natural life cycle.
