Why has the world started to mine coal again?

https://lemmy.ml/post/4373489

Why has the world started to mine coal again? - Lemmy

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?

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 this.

How is nuclear renewable?

Because the amount of fuel used in a nuclear reactor is exponentially less than fossil fuels.

There’s enough nuclear material on this planet to power nuclear reactors for tens of thousands of years.

Nuclear power is clean, efficient, and lasts for essentially ever

It’s an interesting take. I guess the sun is not renewable either.

Is any practically infinite (in human scales) source of energy called renewable? I am hearing this for the first time.

I don’t understand this comment.

How is the sun not renewable?

Renewable energy means using renewable resources. Meaning things that either replenish themselves within a short enough period or things that produce massive amounts of energy over long periods of time.

Because the sun is also a depleting source of energy. I question the definition of renewable that’s all.

I would have never considered nuclear energy being renewable, but I guess a similar argument could be made.

The sun will exist for hundreds of thousands of years after humanity has gone extinct. The sun will exist for millions of years before it burns out. Humanity will thrive diminish and die before the sun dies.

It is by all intents and purposes an infinite resource for a finite species.

Technically speaking, it does not renew itself. It is being slowly depleted. So, semantically speaking, it is not renewable. You are right in saying that we can treat it as a renewable source as far as us and our technologies are concerned.
Which is similar to the reasoning for calling fissile material renewable.

The sun will exist for hundreds of thousands of years after humanity has gone extinct. The sun will exist for millions of years before it burns out.

Your timescales are off. Even if humanity lasts a very long time, which seems unlikely, the sun will last for billions of years after humanity is gone. In one billion years the sun will have become hotter so that life becomes impossible on Earth. There will be four billion years of a lifeless Earth before the sun expands into a red giant and either swallows up or cooks the Earth. One billion years after that the sun will kick off its outer layers into a nebula and become a white dwarf. At that point it’s not reacting any more so it just gradually cools down over billions more years until it’s just a cool lump.