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
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.
Because it got cheaper than natural gas.
Nobody thinks it's clean, they just don't care.
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.
the Russia-Ukraine war has destroyed natural gas supply lines to Europe.
Didn't the US bomb them, tried to blame Russia at first, and are now trying to blame Ukraine? With friends like that, who needs enemies?
The big problem with nuclear is scalability and infrastructure. The power plants take long to construct and require huge investment. Even if that's solved and the whole world goes nuclear tomorrow, there's huge doubts about there even being enough easily minable Uranium. Honestly solar and wind should be the way to go, but then there's the intermittency issue. Which is an issue fossil fuels don't have. At this point degrowth is desperately needed to avert the worst effects of global warming.
now trying to blame Ukraine
Blaming Russia was either stupid b/c putting the Nord Stream out of commission hurt Russia, or cynical b/c they thought we'd be stupid enough to buy that story. Blaming Ukraine has a basis in reality. https://www.reuters.com/world/us-had-intelligence-ukrainian-plan-attack-nord-stream-pipeline-washington-post-2023-06-06/ We may well have done it, as Biden promised, in concert with Ukraine or without them. https://www.wsj.com/video/video-biden-says-no-nord-stream-2-if-russia-invades-ukraine/B5942F2D-E4E5-4BD1-8CB3-8816A2ECAF19.html
Look up the stuff Alex Hirsch has been putting out over the last decade.
It's Gravity Falls, and a background role producing The Owl House. Great shows! The LGBT representation in the latter goes hard, and I love everybody involved pushing back hard on Disney to make it happen.
Anyways, I actually meant Seymour Hersh. I just typed it wrong at first, but I felt compelled to gush about some incredible kids shows with great messages.
The US did it and Norway helped.
Again? Did we stop?
It doesn't look like anyone has mentioned metallurgical coal yet. Even if you don't burn it for energy, the carbon in steel has to come from somewhere and that's usually coke, which is coal that has been further pyrolised into a fairly pure carbon producing a byproduct of coal tar.
How much of that carbon is emitted Vs embedded in the steel matrix? 50%?
I'm not actually sure. I imagine it depends on how exactly it's mixed in.
The green alternative would be to go back to charcoal (or "biochar" if you want to sound fancy), but it might be a bit more expensive.
Metallurgical coal only makes up for rather small part of coal mining, around 7% of all coal production goes towards it, and while the process produces more GHG than just burning it for power it has a less profound impact because it's just smaller. It's also one of the places where we can't really find an alternative, to produce steel you need to use bitumen coal because they have more carbon and less volatiles than charcoal.
On top of that steel is extremely recyclable meaning that any steel produced can be reused pretty much 1:1 with only a small amount of energy needed.
You can make really pure charcoal if you use plant fiber, like waste coconut husks. I guess it's just a cost issue?
More than likely it's a cost issue, coal is artificially cheap thanks to several countries subsidizing the coal industry like Germany, USA and Australia.
There's also I guess the practical question of how much plant fiber per ton of metallurgical coal is needed, i.e. how land would be dedicated towards 'producing plant fiber' for the steel industry.
Coconut husks are free with the coconuts, which is why I mentioned them. Without explicitly breaking out my highschool chemistry, I'm guessing you get about a third the mass of carbon from cellulose.
If it's a whole 7% of the coal mined, though, that is a pretty significant amount. I assume we'll have to find less agricultural ways of fixing CO2 at some point, because it is kind of a shame to use prime agricultural land to make industrial feedstock. NASA already has a device that can turn it into CO electrically, I guess.
Because renewable energy and nuclear energy require significant capital investment, which the private sector and governments in the age of 'fiscal discipline' are not willing to make.
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.
This is also affecting nuclear power projects. The cost of wind and solar has dropped to the point where building new nuclear power plants looks financially irresponsible.
yea but the report also mentions energy storage which is necessary for solar and wind because of its intermittent nature.
also cheaper electricity means potentially less profit. why would private sector want that?
electricity market must be destroyed and energy must be exclusively public sector
Can we just... Cull all old people, start fresh? Make some new laws that aren't based on ideologies from the year 1910?
Old people aren't really the problem, capitalists are
I'm going to assume that you're being facetious when you talk about "culling" them (otherwise that's pretty concerning). many old people are annoying, many of them are downright hostile to any progress whatsoever, but they, and the viewpoints they hold, are the symptoms of a much larger problem.
It's a cheap, non intermittent, easily scalable, and highly available source of energy compatible with existing infrastructure. When the choice becomes rolling electricity blackouts/shutting down factories, or coal powered electricity due to extremely poor planning for the future, coal will win every time. I wish we just started getting renewables running decades ago. Most of the limited electricity in South Africa is produced from coal power plants or diesel generators.
I'm typing this during a rolling electricity blackout. Really not looking forward to my cold shower in the next few minutes
