Why has the world started to mine coal again?
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?
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.
Oh I just remembered, someone who worked at an arboretum who I met a while ago mentioned that trees actually diffuse carbon dioxide directly into the soil. I think he said it was about one third of the weight of the tree? That amount would still be sequestered even if the tree wasn’t buried. But I don’t know how stable that is over the long term.
For offsets to work, they’d need to be based on the actual science of how much carbon they trap over what period of time. Different methods would need to have offset values published by the government. But I agree, offsets with algie or similar look much more feasible than trees.
paid a buddy of mine to plant trees.
It’s actually worse than that they are paying people to not cut down trees. It’s the same logic when my GF says she saved $200 because the dress was half price.
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 genuinely thought coal was phased out as an option for power, and that fossil fuels were starting it’s (very long) descent to being phased out just the same.
Fossil fuels will take way longer, but why the more recent interest in coal again?? That’s the part I cannot understand, and I don’t know where it came from
I get the feeling they're talking about all the publicity around coal in the past few days.
Germany is dismantling windmills to expand a coal mine. A state in the US gave the go ahead to restart a power plant (and supposedly turn it into a hydrogen plant eventually) , and another state is expanding mines. Australia approved enough new mines to add another 150 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. Canada is expanding exports of thermal coal. Not to mention, China and India using a bunch of coal in general.
These are all headlines I've seen, in like the past week. Even though demand for coal hasn't really ceased, it seems like recently, there's a renewed push.
I was going to say, coal remains around 1/3 of our electric generation worldwide (as of 2022): https://www.statista.com/statistics/269811/world-electricity-production-by-energy-source/
Coal can't be reused, created, or otherwise obtained outside of mining. Until we remove our dependency on coal, mining will continue.
I hope this is a serious question, obviously this depends on your baseline. In 2013 Germany had a 56% share of fossil fuels, 27% share of renewables and 17% share of nuclear power generation. In the current year, the shares are: 59% renewables, 39% fossil fuels and 2% nuclear power generation. So in the last ten years there has been a switch in generation from both nuclear and fossil fuels to renewable generation. Could it have been better in the wake of the looming crisis of both climate and energy? Yes, I think it would have been better to keep some newer nuclear power plants running. But Cpt. Hindsight always has it easier.
In the long run every successful economy will generate its major share of electricity from renewables. Some countries will choose to generate a part with nuclear, others will choose to use a mix of hydrogen, batteries etc. to complement renewables. We will see what works best.
Yes, of course, hydrogen is not an energy source (neither are batteries). Sorry if I was not clear about that, I thought it was clear from the context. I was talking about hydrogen and batteries as means of balancing fluctuating output from renewables.
I tend to agree that 44% fossil fuels are still too much, the transition could have been faster and needs to faster in the future. Not a lot of countries have done the successful pivot from fossil energy to renewable energy. The only example that comes to mind is Denmark, where they have great policies (and great wind resources). So I guess everything needs to be viewed in context.
While I agree that it would have been better to phase out coal before nuclear power plants, I also think that those decisions have to be viewed in context and are more nuanced than ‘pretty stupid’.
For example, as other in this thread pointed out, nuclear power plants can be pretty safe to operate IF there is a good culture of safety and protocols in place. Which of course need to be followed and supervised by a strong regulatory body. Two of nuclear power plants in Brunsbüttel and Krümmel were missing this kind of safety culture in the opinion of the regulatory body. They were both operated by Vattenfall. If you lose trust in the operator of such critical infrastructure, then a decision to shut down nuclear power plants has to factor in all the arguments at hand.
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.
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.
Coal us decreasing in Germany because of renewables.
More renewables has come online than was lost from nuclear.
Renewables (solar and wind) are actually the cheapest forms of electricity generation (see Lazard’s Levelized Cost of Energy report). This has been true since at least the 2016 version of the report, and it is true even when the cost of generation is not subsidized with government funding.
This is why Texas is investing so much in building new wind turbines, even though they’re not politically inclined toward “green energy” - the cost per MWh is lowest.
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.
The truth is, we do have enough resources. We just care more about the economy and profit than our future climate (which will also strongly affect the economy, but that’s in the future so…).
I’d we actually valued the climate as much as we ought to, switching fully to renewables would be a bargain.
Everything has a cost of course, building solar panel requires a significant amount of precious metals, which may or may not be easily accessible or affordable depending on the political climate between countries who mine vs the countries who needs the resources.
And the production of solar panel does create some toxic leftovers which needs to make handled appropriately. Not saying they’re a bad alternative and they’re definitely before than fossil fuel or coal, just needs to consider the cost and the impact of everything.
building solar panel requires a significant amount of precious metals
Mmm, no, no they dont. Solar panels are primarily made from silicon. Sand.
They also need
and some others rare-earth elements. The current photocell chemistry we use is quite complex.
Demand for rare earth elements (REEs) – primarily for EV motors and wind turbines
solar panels do not use these metals you are worried about
Storage. Coal, natural gas, and nuclear generate power regardless of weather, day and night.
Solar generates plenty of electricity (with enough panels installed), but it slows down significantly under cloudy skies and stops entirely at night.
Wind generates plenty as well…unless the wind stops blowing.
The grid needs power all the time, not just when it’s sunny and windy. For renewables to actually compete, the excess power they generate during sunny and windy times needs to be stored for use when it’s dark and still.
As much as we applaud lithium batteries, our energy storage technologies are abysmally inefficient. We’re nowhere near being able to store and discharge grid-scale power the way we’d need to for full adoption of renewables. The very best we can do today (and I wish I were kidding) is pump water up a hill, then use hydroelectric generators as it flows back down. Our energy storage tech is literally in the Stone Age.
Don’t underestimate the battery potential of gravity!
According to …wikipedia.org/…/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity#…. The round-trip efficiency of pumped storage is 70-80%, that’s pretty darn good for cheap mass-storage. There’s not much more to gain there.
It works very well, not disputing that.
But, like geothermal power generation (which is also very good), it’s extremely dependent on location. Most populated areas don’t have the altitude differential (steep hills) and/or water supply to implement pumped hydro storage.
Where it can be used, it should be (and largely is - fossil fuel generation does better with some storage as well, since demand is not consistent), but it’s hardly something that can be deployed alongside solar and wind generators everywhere.
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