What a fucking joke. It’s amazing how all these countries set weak goals for themselves and then fail anyway.
We’re all going to die lol
The UK likes to go the other way by talking up a ridiculous goal and then immediately failing it, like "Our goal is to produce zero CO2 and become the global leader in renewables by 2025” and then immediately open a new coal mine.
That’s basically what Germany did. They recently shut down their nuclear plants and restarted their coal plants.
And yet coal power production is practically at the lowest level ever (except for corona months 03/20 and 04/20)
It should be 0.
Germany still has a very long way to go to be carbon neutral.
Almost 79% of its primary energy consumption is fossil fuel. 17% is renewable.
For comparison in France 46% of the primary energy consumption is fossil fuel, 14% renewable and 40% nuclear.
Look at the industry’s growth in France though. Renewables has been growing at the expense of nuclear. This is happening in Germany as well.
Germany is now using coal as base load. The main reason coal has not increased considerably is because all this new generation and loss of nuclear baseload along with limited ng generation has resulted in average energy prices doubling from 2017 to 2021 prices. Simply put the cost of energy is now so high that people and industry is using less. Done large industries shut down with loss of jobs. Solar and wind had been very expensive even with government subsidies. Subsidies that take money out of government coffers resulting in less services. This ignoring the increase in energy importation of which some may be from coal generation.
Shutting down nuclear simply denied millions of people a clean energy source unless they were willing to pay nearly double that of past years.
You know that with merit order pricing the cost of electricity only depended on the cost of the most expensive producer? So nuclear plants have close to 0 Influence on the price.
Wow… Where have I read that lie before? Oh, yeah. 20 times in this thread already, because you all get your alternative reality sppon-fed by the same lobbyists.
Actual reality:
The “massive” amount of nuclear shut down
That is just blatant misinformation. Name one single coal plant that has been restarted since nuclear power was phased out.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-reactivates-coal-fired-power-plant-to-save-gas/a-62893497
The Mehrum plant in Hohenhameln and the Heyden plant in Petershagen (whose operation has been extended).
Unless your nitpick is that these were started before the final nuclear shutdown, but I never said otherwise, only that both things happened recently.
I understood it as coal was phased in as nuclear was phased out. The thing that astounds me still though is how recent the last 3 were shut down.
I think they were planning on natural gas, but that went down the tubes because they were planning on buying from Russia. Coal plants were restarted to fill the gap.
What the plan is now, I don’t know.
The end goal was always renewables with smart net, storage and hydrogen plants to offset spikes. Gas prices are dropping again, so it will be used as a bridging solution. Energy production in Germany is actually on track of its climate goals compared to transportation.
They were extended specifically because of natural gas supply issues, caused by the war in Ukraine. Not because of nuclear shutdowns.
The actual problem was stopping to fund solar, smashing a hundred thousand jobs in renewables under the pretense of “saving workers”. ~20k jobs in coal heroically saved.
But they could easily do it (and get paid by fossil fuel lobbyists) because the discussion is completely twisted anyway. And most constructive discussion of the topic will be drowned in fairy tales about renewables not working, nuclear being our only savior and other bullshit.
Basically this whole thread is a perfect example. We discuss electricity production because that’s the direction the nuclear social media cult is pushing every discussion into…
The actual report linked in this thread is for a German report of construction and traffic sectors not meeting their emission reduction goals… and I’m pretty sure neither coal nor nuclear is used to power cars nowadays. And the electrification bottle neck for transport is the production pace of electric cars, their still too high prize, limits on loading infra-structure etc., not actually energy per se.
Thank you for debunking this nuclear fanboy bullshit that gets repeated all the time.
Yes, but the goals in germany are written into a law, and the highest council actually blaming the government for failed goals.
Still not gonna change a damn thing. The (federal) government(s) don’t care, they are busy framing harmless protesters as potential terrorists and jailing them accordingly. Or they simply change the law again so that they do not have to be held accountable for their missed goals (see the ministry for transport).
The kind of law where people go to jail or the kind of law people have long televised meetings and write op eds?
The government has more interest in pursuing the global power ambitions of the Standort Deutschland rather than accomplishing environmental goals, even in spite of one of the parties being named Die Grünen (which is basically just good PR for them and nothing of substance) - and the goals that are being pursued anyway are all to the slogan of Cem Özdemir “Zwischen Wirtschaft und Umwelt gehört kein oder”. Environmentalism as long as it remains profitable, even at costs of +2, +2,5, +3 or more °C
The next elections are sure to be won by Merz, with or without the AfD, and very likely to have the FDP in influential ministries, so nothing will change - or perhaps even for the worse.
That’s what happens when the main goal of production is not the goal of creating socially necessary goods, but to insert money into the labor process and end up with more than you had at the beginning.
Sure… the once-again-below-5%-party will get influential ministries. And the Greens totally did not manage to meet their climate goals in agricultur and industry, both huge causes for emmisions. Oh, wait. They by far surpassed them. Soemthing you cannot say about traffic (FDP) or construction (SPD).
But yeah, I know. Brain-damage doesn’t allow you to not parrot the popular fairy tales of the German right wing media, we get dwoned in on adaily basis for nearly two years now, just once.
Let me guess… you also totally believe the popular fantasy of the Greens losing voters in droves (actual ~0-0,1% since the election) because that’s the narratives spoon-fed to you with weeks of rediculous talk about the Green’s reaching a new low constantly… while their coalition partners actually lost 33-40% of their respective voters since the election.
The goal is complete decarbonization until 2045 and a lot of sectors in Germany are already on track with that goal, energy being one of them. That with a minister of finance, that does not want to spend money and a minister of transportation, that is more a puppet of the automobile industry and does not care about decarbonization. Imagine the US without the huge subsidies into clean energy. That’s what Germany is trying to do under their current minister of finance.
Energy or electricity? Those are two very different things.
Sorry, that was imprecise. The correct German term would be Energiewirtschaft, that can be translated to energy industry. That’s not only electricity, but also production of biogas, district heating, refining of fossil fuels and so on. The struggling departments from worst to slightly struggling are: -transportation: widespread use of fossil fuels -building: heating with fossil fuels and emissions from concrete -industry: high use of energy and no alternative to fossil fuels in some cases
Great that the plan is for the entire economy. Cheap and reliable clean electricity is possibly the most important and straightforward(ish) issue to solve with steel and concrete sitting at the opposite end of the spectrum.
It’s amazing how all these countries set weak goal
It’s can kicking. Make a promise for something 25 years in the future. Who cares if the country can’t meet it? You’ll likely be out of office or retired by that point. That’s the next person’s problem.
That’s the next person’s problem.
it is until people start getting organized and seeking justice on those responsible
I’m much more optimistic, though I do think it will get worse before it gets better. I think we’ll end up with a few mass killer enviromental events before humans start to save themselves properly. It’ll never be too late as Earth is always going to better than anywhere else for us.
Quick list of things hopeful in my feeds of the top of my head.
- Renewable energy is the cheapest energy.
- Agrivoltaics can increase yeilds while also providing power.
- Home Solar & battery pay back time is coming down all the time.
- Electric cars are the cheapest over their life time and the upfront costs are tumbling.
- Electrification of more and more transport types is happening to save costs.
- EVs are going V2H/V2G/V2X which means you get a large home (and office?) battery to take part in energy markets.
- Second life EV batteries will eventury be a source of larger, cheaper, home batteries.
- Just the other day another methane solution : https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/22/bacteria-that-eats-methane-could-slow-global-heating-study-finds
- Fusion looks closer than 50 years out now.
- RightToRepair + OpenSource is slowly spreading and will reduce life time costs and reduce e-waste. Regulators are waking up too.
- Vertical farming is developing and will end up cheaper.
- Lab meat or precision fermentation is a path to animal free animal protein at lower costs.
- 5 minute cities as an idea is spreading.
- Covid has normalized WFH
- Green spaces in cities to cool them and improve mental health is increasingly being talked about and pushed in some forward thinking cities.
- Peak population is constantly revised down and sooner. Once population starts to fall, it’s not set to stop for a long time.
There is a lot of movement. It’s all about aligning economics with fighting climate change. Which is natural as using less to do the same thing is better for both.
One thing that is a very good sign is oil companies are scared. They are spending a lot of money pumping out FUD. Doom peddling to slow climate action, but economics is against them. Even without climate damage being costed in. Which governments will do when oil is less powerful.
Fight the doom!
Some of the things you listed are indeed good, but we’re not going to avert climate catastrophe unless we reject the idea that we can only do good things if they’re less expensive than the bad thing alternative.
I think it’s the way to ease the masses in. You also missing that the other end is to make the bad stuff expensive. Bring environmental cost on to the balance sheet. Criminalize and enforce those laws, environmental crimes. Carrot and stick.
There’s also a lot of propaganda paid by fossil fuel lobbyists (and some nuclear lobbyists still going for the perceived easy target of renewables, as rediculous as it is…) with the goal to disrupt the energy transition.
And the majority here actually believes they are anti-fossil fuels while they actually parrot their propaganda (for example the “Germany stopped nuclear power to burn more coal”-fairy tale you can read a hundred times by now here - only invented for the talking point of coal being needed, when Germany is actually at a historic low in use) and thus constantly running (objectively wrong) talking points against renewable power.
On one hand I love the obvious panic of fossil fuel lobbyists getting more desperate and rediculous in their massaging by the day. On the other hand, they already brain-washed a massive amount of people that I fear are really lost and will fight tooth and nails against a reasonable green transition to pursue their fantasies of “sane” nuclear build-up (that isn’t sane because nobody is actually building enough capoacities to make sense mathematically), without that “non-working” storage (that nuclear power actually needs to be economically viable) and “expensive” renewables (same, same…).
You get it. But at the end of the day, the fossil fuel companies will lose because of economics. Renewable energy and electrification is cheaper and better and planet saving. There will be economic feedback loops kicking in as less fuel is used, taking up the price.
But “in the end” isn’t fast enough for my taste… or for the taste of people losing their homes or base of life to floods, draughts, forest fires and so on.
And it won’t even get better but just worse even if we stopped co2 emission completely today. We would have need that feedback loop a decade ago. Instead the same lobbyists now sabotaging it got a lot of renewables killed the moment they were too cheap to compete.
If you draw a curve of deployed solar and wind power, the last decade is a hole that basically threw us back more than the missed time even.
And even if renewables take over for economicla reasons now, they will just change tactic and instead sabotage storage and infrastructure to keep fossil fuels relevant.
Germany had a very coal heavy power prodcution originally and massively build up renewables… and the lobbyists were already ahead… they blocked grid extensions to create pockets depending on coal no matter how much cheap green electricity is available. They blocked grid extensions to make diversification less effective. They -also for that reason- pushed antiwind sentiments in one part of the country and anti-solar in another. They made storage commercially unviable by massive double taxation (once as an end consumer while loading, then as a producer while unloading).
And they did all that basically without anyone taking much notice because they also -and much more visible- blocked wind and solar power in general (ffs… they killed a 100k people industry and sold it off to China just because solar was getting too cheap).
Yes, renewables are extremely cheap. So cheap in fact that people fight for their chance to build solar and wind in designated areas instead of wanting subsidies like for other power production. But if we don’t take a very close and constant look, we will be surprised in a decade how all those renewables did not actually help reduce co2 much as the 10-year-infrastructure plans for storage and grid are suddenly about lagging 9 years behind. Just look at such basic projects like the north-south grid connection in Germany. The 10-year plan to build SüdLink is scheduled to be done in ~6 years now… after 12 years. 100% sponsored by conservative local politicians and conservative nimbys cosplaying as environmentalists.
Never give up hope. That’s what fossil fuels companies want.
In 2005 me and my now wife watched “Who Killed the electric car” and it felt hopeless. Now we both drive EVs and you see more and more of them on the road. Home solar used to be a pipe dream, but now I know more people with it and hope to set it up myself. My electricity provider claims 100% renewables. We plan to remove gas use from the house.
Germany will hurt itself by not looking forwards, and as that becomes more and apparent, it will be harder to maintain. Fossil fuel money will start to reduce and with that, it’s corruption of politics and information. At some point, I hope some jail time is handed out to those who knowing slowly climate against for money. Now, climate action and money are more and more lined up. Always have been long term, but now short term too. Aligned on energy and thus everything down stream of energy. Which a lot of stuff!
Australia’s Teals movement shows common sense can win out.
German here.
Even back under Merkel, elected parties had a habit of defining good goals and then rendering them impossible to hit through policy. This meant that no one could fault them for trying, and no one could fault them for not being able to hit them.
Nowadays my countrymen aren’t as stupid anymore. That doesn’t mean we can do anything about it, but especially since Merkel we don’t believe any of these leaks anymore.
Good ol CDU turning almost everything they touched into steaming horseshit
We’re all going to die lol
I agree … but that attitude also encourages people, especially leaders … and especially the billionaires that control this world … to believe that destruction is the ultimate end and to just play along, pick up as much wealth as possible while you can and do whatever you please because the end is near.
As if billionaires needed more reasons to pick up as much wealth as possible while they can lol
We’ll be fine. We’re gonna throw some reflective particulate into the atmosphere or some shit.
We’ll drop a giant ice cube into the ocean, solving the problem once and for all!
You kid, but we’re not gonna get greenhouse gases under control. We’re gonna find a way to stabilize temps and kick the can down the road to the next issue co2 causes.
Didn’t you hear him? ONCE AND FOR ALL!!!
Por que no los dos?
because of this
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=0SYpUSjSgFg
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
That’s fallacious reasoning.
Just because climate engineering is the only way to stabilize temperatures doesn’t actually mean it can be done. That’s all hypothetical tech, just like carbon capture and other fairy tales we tell ourselves to cope with the reality of the end of the fucking world.
I’ll tell you what will happen. We won’t do anything to stop or slow climate change and we’ll reach a tipping point, after which society will rapidly collapse into warring factions and any hope of stabilizing the climate will be gone until we have a nuclear winter reset.
It doesn’t mean it can be done, but it might.
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Overpopulation is a cop out, we could supply even more people. Its more an issue with greed and inequality that causes the problems instead of overpopulation
Not german but I’m in the same continent and in a country that nobody really cares about and we are nearing the threshold where renewables produce more than we require to run the country.
Funny thing is, private citizens are doing more for that effort alone than government in real terms because saving money is high on the priorities list here and free, renewable energy is a good thing, even more if you can produce it yourself.
Meanwhile, we’ve been fighting the government to cancel the authorization to log nearly 2000 old growth cork oaks for installing a solar panel farm when we have a lot of room to plant off shore wind farms.
Nobody really understands what is going on.
Which country?
Portugal
Oh nice. Yeah, Portugal runs under the radar here. I found rhis https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/portugal
Seems like you got rid of coal already. Oil/gas seem to hover however. Do you have plans about getting rid of fuel cars? And what do you use gas for? In Germany it’s mostly heating, I would have guessed you don’t need so much heating in Portugal and can use the AC in winter.
And good look with these oaks, I hate forest being cut down.
There a few incentives towards the purchase of eletric cars but its something still way out of reach for the majority of people. But the number of eletric cars is rising.
Gas is mostly used to run a few eletric generation plants. AC is a doubled edge sword here as houses are poorly insulated and the minimal recommmended power for having an equipment is 10.35Kva, which is a power requirement where all VAT is applied at 23%. The equipments are also very expensive and the installation even more.
And thank. Lets hope we can make enough noise to have to trees left alone
cork oaks
Portugal! What a wonderful country full of wonderful people. We do care about you and your delicious but slightly greasy food.
You’ve been eating at the wrong places… that’s a spanish thing: too much olive oil on every dish and too much fat on every cured meat
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Take notes:
One chicken, between 1 and 1,5kg (feeds four or two very hungry or one very, very hungry individual)
Salt and pepper to taste
Olive oil
Hot peppers or dried chilli flakes, optional (our local chillis are very strong and we usually avoid putting it into food for children or people that in general don’t tolerate spice)
two cloves of garlic
white wine (if it doesn’t smell like you could use it as fuel, you’re good)
a small bay leaf (or more, it’s your food)
==##==
cut or have your chicken cut open at your local butcher shop; don’t have it cut into pieces! It’s just a cut through the breast to get it flat
season it with salt and pepper and leave it be
in a bowl (now comes the tricky part) mix all the other ingredients to make up a marinade; just how much you’ll be making depends if you want to marinate the entire chicken for a few hours (two hours minimum, six to twelve is better, anything up to a week is good; your pick) or just brush the chicken and throw it in the hoven around 180C and go at it with the brush every ten minutes to coat it with the marinade so it roasts without drying. remember to flip your bird occasionally for even cooking.
I’m not saying you should flip it the bird but if that works for you, be my guest; swearing at and cursing the food while cooking is kinda of traditional here. Maybe it adds some extra dimension to the end result? Try it and let me know or don’t and leave it at that.
Keep in mind you need more wine than olive oil in the marinade as the chicken will be cooking with the skin on and you want to render the fat in the skin and have it crisp for eating. Wine provides moisture and flavor, olive oil aids in crisping up and adhere the seasonings to the meat. Whisk everything with a fork (it further bruises the chopped garlic, chillis and the bay leaf and releases more flavour).
You’ll require less liquid if you are not marinading the meat; if you are, you’ll require enough liquid to drown the bird in it. Also, marinade it in the fridge to avoid spoilage, especially if it is going to be a long dip.
You can cook it in the hoven or you can cook it over hot coals. Both works but I’m not going to lie to you and say it’s the exact same thing because it isn’t: the smoke adds to the final taste.
Goes well with a nice chopped salad (lettuce, tomato, white onion and cucumber, a pinch of coarse salt, olive oil and vinegar), boiled potatoes (get some small potatoes, wash it well, keep the skin on and throw a garlic clove and a bay leaf into the cooking water) and a nice red wine. Lemonade, ice tea or a soft drink for those who don’t drink goes fine as well, as long as it is not overwhelming sweet.
Hope this is of any use to you.
Easy mistake, isn’t it? Spain is next door.
From Spain, we don’t get neither good winds nor good weddings…
It’s tiresome. We, as a nation, exist for longer. Our language, culture, traditions, manerisms, etc, are different. We are not a part of Spain and we are not their bretheren, unlike many like to tell.
Our first king mother was a spanish woman and he decided to leave home by waging war on his mother, kill her lover and burn the lands where they lived.
So, it is understandable we dislike to be overlooked or mistaken as spanish
I just remember a sandwich covered in melted cheese with an egg on top and some kind of sauce. And a lot of delicious fried food. Both usually with fries as a side dish. Never any salad unless I specifically ordered it. I’m sure I could have gone to lots of restaurants where they would have had lighter meals, but I was on holiday so greasy was perfect.
Francesinha.
You can get those swimming in a pool of fat and you can get it very lean and clean.
You’ve been to Porto, right?
The make or break for that dish is the sauce. Some people can make it very heavy and some are capable of making it very light. Just know the amount of booze it goes in it could fuel a small plane.
Then comes the cheese and some places just overdo it. Four or five thin slices are enough but I do know some places throw half a block over every sandwhich.
I apologise for the fries. That’s fast food influence. And the egg was unexpected; that’s an addition from the croque madame.
Hope you had fun here.
This is the German plan:
- Shutdown the nuclear plants
- Burn more lignite
- WFH
The council said assumptions made by the transport ministry on the effectiveness of the planned and already implemented measures, such as a discounted national rail ticket, a CO2 surcharge on truck tolls and increased working from home, were also optimistic. “Private vehicle individual transport is not addressed, so to speak. And that is ultimately a gap in the transport programme,” Brigitte Knopf, deputy chairwoman of the council, told a news conference presenting the report findings on Tuesday
The plan for transportation emissions, 2/3 of the target to be cut, is WFH. Yikes!
@[email protected] You are misinformed there. The energy sector reaches its goal and offshore wind farms and solar panels are actually over-performing, meaning more are built than was planned for this year. The sectors largely missing their goals are the transport and the building sector.
Funny, because the energy sector was the only on track to fulfill the targets. Last year it even overshot its targets and is expected to again save more CO2 as planned in 2023.
Maybe, just maybe, its more relevant that other sectors are managed by the FDP (market liberals) and SPD (social democrats), while energy is managed by die Grünen (greens).
Do you know about the transportation sector? It is where 2/3 of Germanys planned reduction is.
If all the subsidiaries that went into nuclear power the last few decades went to renewables instead Germany would have no issues at all, but hey… giving tax payer money to some very few giant energy companies is more important than creating a Europe leading renewables energy sector that does not rely on russian fossils or nuclear material.
You should know that nuclear power is very expensive while renewables are absurd crazy cheap. I’ve been to a German Endlager and it takes years and BILLIONS of Euros just to seal this thing off. Guess who is paying? Mostly tax payers.
There’s be no company in Germany which would be willing to run a nuclear power plant if they were responsible for the permanent disposal of their waste on their own instead of letting the tax payer pay (most of) for it.
That’s all well and good in the energy sector. What about transportation? If I understand correctly, transportation makes up the majority of the emissions Germany aims to cut
Sadly, we have a long history of incompetent transport ministers. That didn’t change with the last elections.
lignite
More like lig-nite deez nuts.
ligma
How about you guys stop this bullshit about the nuclear plants stuff? They were scheduled to be shut down for a VERY long time, the biggest mistake was selling out nearly all the renewable energy manufacturing to China. Nuclear power is only making a profit, if it’s subsidized like crazy.
Not only that - A LOT of Germans are actively against putting up more wind power, let alone photovoltaics. Which is what over 50% voted “against” as well. Those that didn’t go voting, have lost all say in it, so yeah. That’s not a political issue, we Germans are the issue.
You forgot to add that we were once leader in solar tech, but that industry got destroyed willingly by the then ruling CDU and Peter Altmeyer.
No - it was destroyed because some idiot higher up in those companies decied, it’s cheaper to sell to China. Same goes for Kuka and countless other spineless fu**s in those companies. Yes, politics plays A role, but they do not make the decisions.
So why not modernize or replace the nuclear plants? Battery storage isn’t anywhere close to being able to store baseline energy for a full renewable grid.
I agree it’s a perception issue, but that doesn’t mean nothing can be done about it.
Most plants are to old to modernize and building new ones is expensive, takes decates and dosn’t solve the dependency on uran and the nuclear waste problem. Renewables were always the longtearm goal and gas for shortages. Nuclear cant be easy switched on or off, so they aren’t a good solution to help with energy lows.
Exactly, just look at Olkiluoto in Finnland. 11 Billion Euros. For comparison, right now, 1 MW in an offshore wind park is about 4 Million Euros. Meaning, for 1600 MW, that’s 6400 Million, or 6,4 Billion. That’s nearly HALF of Olkiluoto’s cost.
Because the money for modernizing, let alone replacing those plants is a lot better invested in renewables. Battery Storage is very close to store baseline energy, not in Lithium Batteries though and the projected cost for Redox-Flow Batteries is going to be falling like crazy. It already is on the same level as Lithium, and while it is less energy dense, it’s safer, easier to operate and especially longer to operate. The Dalian VFB in Liaoning, Dalian, China is one of the first “bigger” stations to come online, but there are already a lot of plans. I also have one in my house.
I am curious how many Wh the one in your home is and what you use it for?
7,5 kWh, max. continous power is “only” 3 kW, but that’s more than enough to get the house over the night and even for quite some time in to the next day if the weather is bad. Non flammable, no higher insurance rating, and so on.
Who cares about renewables v nuclear? Either one will get us there.
If I understand correctly Germany does not have a plan to address transportation emissions.
If I understand correctly Germany does not have a plan to address transportation emissions.
Who has in the EU? Switching to BEVs will do shit overall.
If only there was some means of replacing all that coal with a non-carbon intensive source of energy that isn’t dependant on the weather…
Has anyone heard of such a technology?
Sarcasm aside, that Germany shut down their last two nuclear reactors so recently and carried through is astounding. The excuses are mind-boggling. They’re old? Refurbishing is cheaper and faster than new built. They need re-certification? Then do it.
It’s more efficient to use the money required for
- The inspection
- The renovations
- Acquiring new fuel
And spend it on renewables than to do the above.
Also a big factor noone seems to care about: staff. The people who worked there have other jobs now. You can’t just plop a reactor plant somewhere and expect it to make electricity you need highly specialised staff for that. We also did not invest into training new staff because why would we, with the stop for nuclear power being decided 10 years ago.
Highly Specialized staff
I watched this animated documentary from the states called The Simpsons that seems to state otherwise.
The renewables generate electricity mostly when there is sun/wind, so there is an oversupply at those times and a need to burn natural gas at other times.
The nuclear plants would generate electricity 24/7 with little waste.
Either way, now they are investing the money in digging up lignite, so it’s worse than either renewables or nuclear.
Either way, now they are investing the money in digging up lignite, so it’s worse than either renewables or nuclear.
Where do you get that from?
The renewables generate electricity mostly when there is sun/wind, so there is an oversupply at those times and a need to burn natural gas at other times.
The nuclear plants would generate electricity 24/7 with little waste.
Yes congrats, we will need to build energy storages. Thats nothing new. Also calling the waste of nuclear plant little might be factually true if you only go by volume. If you go by “amount of pain in the ass to deal with” calling it little would be a very big understatement.
Where do you get that from?
Duitsland zet vol in op kolen, maar vooral transport blijkt knelpunt - https://nos.nl/l/2438762
Germany to reactivate coal power plants as Russia curbs gas flow - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/08/germany-reactivate-coal-power-plants-russia-curbs-gas-flow
The eviction of Lützerath: the village being destroyed for a coalmine – a photo essay - https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/jan/24/eviction-lutzerath-village-destroyed-coalmine-a-photo-essay
Yes congrats, we will need to build energy storages. Thats nothing new.
Ok, so where are the energy storages currently being built? This is not exactly a problem that’s cheap or trivial to solve.
Can’t comment on the first one.
The guardian article says that Germany reactivated coal plants to act as an emergency if the gas would not be enough. It’s important to known that gas is not primarly used to make electricity, gas plants are only used when there are peaks in consumption that can not be fulfilled by any other means. Reactivating plants as an emergency backup is not the same as investing in coal power. I am not clear on whether they were even necessary, afaik the gas reserves never went into a critically low level.
Lüzerath is a whole other story. That deal had been made long ago, RWE agreed to stop mining coal earlier if they were allowed to mine the area with that village on top of it. It became a symbol, and people claimed the coal was necessary to maintain stability in the electricity network. Which was proven wrong it was mostly sold to other countries to be burned in their plants.
For all our faults Germany is steadily leaving both fossile and nuclear power behind.
Ok, so where are the energy storages currently being built? This is not exactly a problem that’s cheap or trivial to solve.
You mean just like nuclear plants are very expensive and non-trivial to build?
Well you don’t deal with the waste from burning coal at all, so why not do the same for nuclear?
I mean, they have only really started since the corrupt right-wing shitheads are not in office anymore. Now we only have to deal with a minister of transport who just refuses to work and claims policies the greens pushed for are his achievement lol
“Recommendations” are useless when line must always go up.
You’d think the shock of the gas shortage from Russia would of been a wake up call and they’d be ahead of a timeline like this…
No matter the platform worldnews comments contain mainly ignorant, overconfident bullshit. Glad to know that there are some things in life one can depend upon.
Well duh? Are they nationalizing all carbon emitting industries to begin a managed decline of the industry or are they hoping economic magic and wishful thinking will work?
they’re turning their coal power plants back on after shutting down their nuclear power plants. oh, and planning on converting existing natural gas pipelines to carry hydrogen instead… likely generated by natural gas.
Sure… they turn up coal power to result in the lowest coal use ever.
Just like they shut down reactors that produced laughable 2,6% of all electricity that year, yet those reactors (ones that were replaced by renewables even) could have single-handedly reduced their emissions by massive amounts.
Just like they never actually used more than a few percent of gas in electricity production (because they only use gas as short-time peak burners to compensate supply/demand spikes and that’s really expensive even when gas was cheap) but somehow were so completely dependent on gas to not sit in the dark that they started to burn even more coal… again while actually massively reducing coal.
I don’t know if it’s magic or advanced quantum mechanics allowing them to do the polar opposite of the popular narratives every single time…
…or you are just brain-washed to believe every lie about Germany again and again. Hmm… No, that sounds unrealistic. It’s probalby the magic thing.
Natural gas is a byproduct of gasoline refining, so I’d rather see it converted to hydrogen than have it get burned, whether for use or disposal.
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Well not a bad idea tbh, as most state owned and controlled companies tend to go belly up.
Wow what a surprise, guess brown coal isn’t good for the climate. Bunch of idiots those German politicians. They even tried to weaken that EU bill that bans the sale of new fossil fuel cars.
Voted in by German citizens.
Who have been subjected to targeted information warfare/propaganda for years.
And also, people straight up lie and deceive.
It’s a very, veeery good thing the fucking CDU was voted out. No matter how much you hate the current government for one reason or another, at least they do something besides shoveling money into their pockets and maintaining status quo.
We’ll see whether their ideas work out, but at least they have some.
I had high hopes for the current government, but I never imagined the FDP would be able to do so much damage with so few votes. The way it is now, I’m pretty disappointed. A lot of great ideas that were just shut down in their infancy.
It’s not just the FDP though, Scholz is at least complicit with their bullshit. It is beyond me, how the SPD supports whatever Wissing does in the transportation department.
The fact that Scholz didn’t even come to my mind when I thought about the German government says it all. I had no expectations and I was still disappointed.
Hey, the FDP has the most ambitious climate policies of all parties! At least so they said.
Awww, poor German people. Never learned to think for themselves. Just learned how to follow orders.
You don’t realize how incredible funny (or sad… depending on perpective) it is to see people like you parrot the same lie spoon-fed to you by lobbyists again and again while talking about other being too stupid to think.
This incredible post-factual world where popular narrative trumps reality is truely lost…
Lol, what an egoistic view of the world. “Everybody else is to blame but me”. It’s all those lobbyists, immigrants, bankers, politicians, nazis, antifa, that boogeyman over there! But me? Nah, I’m perfect and all my friends and family never do anything wrong. In fact, anybody who I can identify with is globally right.
Now that’s sad.
Yes, it looks egoistic if you are this deluded as you are.
But we have real problems to solve and can’t save every propaganda victim that refuses to accept reality because you run on the usual hateful narrative about Germany. Hey, I don’t even blame you. Telling a lie about Germany any time you need to divert from some own issue is a well honored tradition in Europe (and thus wide-spread in media) and so I understand that you were trained to follow that pattern. It’s sad (or funny… I still haven’t decided…) none-the-less.
So you can cry about those imaginary egoistic Germans of yours all you want. The actual ones are massively building up renewables, are -contrary to your beloved lies- on a historic low in coal use. And this report is actually about the transport and construction sectors not matching their emission reduction goals (while sectors liker energy or industry -the actual sources of coal use- are easily fullfilling theirs… but that’s not mentioned because -as I said before- energy and industry are not even remotely the topic of this report.)
What makes you think that person only thinks poorly of German low-information voters? Low-information voters are a plague around the world.
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Luckily we will get rid of coal soon.
I hope so…
China still is the ONLY country in the world to have met the super meager Paris Climate Accord goals.
China has absolutely not met the Paris accord goals. Check climate action tracker for a good breakdown of countries policies and actions and the projection it puts them on. No country is anyway close.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/11/08/climate/cop27-emissions-country-compare.html
New York times reported China is ahead of pledges
… did you link the correct article? It seems quite critical of China’s emissions?
None of the world’s biggest emitters – China, the United States, the European Union and India – have reduced their emissions enough to meet the Paris Agreement goals.
Over the past two decades, China’s emissions have surged as the country has developed economically at a breakneck pace. Mainly because of its reliance on coal, one of the highest-emitting fuels, China now accounts for almost a third of all human-caused greenhouse gases — more than the United States, Europe and Japan combined.
Granted, the article says that China’s emissions are projected to peak in 2025, but that still means emissions are estimated to increase every year for another 3 years. They have not (yet) actually reduced their annual emissions, let alone achieved anything close to net-zero.
According to projections from Climate Action Tracker and other monitoring organizations, China’s emissions are nearing their peak, years ahead of when China’s government had pledged to reach that goal. Analyses show China’s rate of emissions neither growing nor declining from now until 2025, before gradually dropping off. China’s peak will occur at a far lower per capita emissions level than countries like the United States.
The goal that China has beaten, it would seem, is their own internal peak date goal. It’s good that they set and kept a goal, but keeping an internal goal is not the same thing as keeping the Paris Accord goals. The Paris Accord represents the bare minimum for avoiding a climate catastrophe and should continue to be the primary bar which we measure countries against.
They literally have a graph showing their paris accord goal as of now, where they as of now, and a 1.5c goal. They and India are ahead.
Also
China’s emissions are nearing their peak, years ahead of when China’s government had pledged to reach that goal.
Every country has different pledge responsibilities it would be drastically unfair to ask more of developing countries to reduce at the same rate as non, especially taking into account the looting the west has done and the offshored emissions on their behalf.
I’m not anti-China. I’m just pro-clarity.
When someone says “China has absolutely not met the Paris accord goals” and you respond “New York times reported China is ahead of pledges”, it creates the impression that you are correcting the former statement with a contradictory source. The source is not actually contradictory, however, because it explicitly affirms the original point.
They literally have a graph showing their paris accord goal as of now, where they as of now, and a 1.5c goal. They and India are ahead.
That is excellent. I’m very pleased to hear this. Perhaps you could share that graph next time instead?
EDIT: Content warning for the next reply in this comment chain: it contains a prank image featuring pig genitalia and feces. If you’re on desktop, the image is hidden within a collapsed spoiler toggle that you can choose to expand if curious. If you’re on mobile, please know that spoiler tags are not well supported in most apps yet, so this is your opportunity to stop scrolling if you happen to have issues with the described content.
It’s in the article.
spoiler
How is your reading comprehension so poor?
This graph, correct?
It doesn’t seem much closer to the blue Paris Accord goal compared with any of the other graphs in the same article, as far as I can tell.
As for India, I don’t see how beating a goal of **+**25% emissions with +20% is any cause for celebration. I actually agree with you and the article when you say that they don’t need to be held to the same standard as fully developed economies, but in that case we probably shouldn’t be talking about them at all when it comes to meeting emissions reduction goals.
Fair enough if we’re going just on pledges on total emissions change by 2030 than China and many other countries like India, Sweden, Denmark and Morocco are in line for the pledges taken. This is just a component of the Paris Accords the main pledge was to take action to limit warming well under 2 degrees. No countries action or policies are in line to meet that pledge. That can be seen in the article you linked showing how far off all four emitters are to 1.5.
Climate action tracker and the CCPI they put out are the best sources for accurately tracking countries actions. China and pretty much all other countries fall down on their net zero targets rooted in fiction and missing NDC targets.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
BERLIN, Aug 22 (Reuters) - German goals to cut greenhouse emissions by 65% by 2030 are likely to be missed, meaning a longer-term net zero by a 2045 target is also in doubt, reports by government climate advisers and the Federal Environment Agency (UBA) show.
“According to the current status, Germany would still emit 229 million tonnes of climate-damaging greenhouse gas emissions in the target year 2045,” the UBA report found.
Under pressure from the pro-business FDP party, the ruling coalition in June agreed to dilute a bill to phase out oil and gas heating systems from 2024.
Building minister Klara Geywitz said the sector was making progress but needs improvements in some areas to close the emissions gap, adding that climate protection measures should be practical and doable to avoid overtaxing people.
The council said assumptions made by the transport ministry on the effectiveness of the planned and already implemented measures, such as a discounted national rail ticket, a CO2 surcharge on truck tolls and increased working from home, were also optimistic.
And that is ultimately a gap in the transport programme," Brigitte Knopf, deputy chairwoman of the council, told a news conference presenting the report findings on Tuesday.
The original article contains 679 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 71%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
The UBA is truly one of the funnier institutions. It’s a federal agency tasked with suggesting and studying how to cut emissions, so they propose goals for legislation, none of which ever have been listened to even slightly. It’s basically a welfare program and I don’t even mean that derogatory.
Shit I had hoped we could leave the nuclear stans over at reddit.
What’s wrong with nuclear?
Nothing in general. Well the build times are rediculous in Europe and planning right not to build nuclear soon is too late already for any agreed upon climate goal. But that’s another matter…
The problem is the brain-washed nuclear cult on social media briganding everything. In the last year on Reddit you couldn’t even post any report about any new opening of wind or solar power without it degenerating into always the same story: “bUt ReNeWaBlEs DoN’t WoRk! StOrAgE DoEs’Nt ExIsT! tHeY aRe A sCaM tO bUrN mOrE FoSsIl FuElS! gErMaNy KiLlEd ThEir NuClEaR To BuRn MoRe CoAl BeCaUsE ThEy ArE InSanE!!”
Mentioning the fact that Germany in reality shut down reactors not even contributing 5% of their electricity production that were scheduled for shutdown for 30 years and in a state you would expect with that plan and already more than replaced by renewables got you donwvoted into oblivion every single time.
Reality is uncomfortable for the idealist. But ultimate any sustainable future MUST include nuclear and everything you sarcastically dismissed with that childish spongebob typing is just the reality of our world society. You may as well get upset about how we didn’t leave the “reality stans,” back on reddit.
In fact, I should turn this back on you, I’m upset about the coal-stans that apparently migrated over here from reddit. If there is any world where you want to claim to be “green,” coal CANNOT be any part of the conversation. If it is, you have failed and don’t’ get to discuss environmentalism anymore.
Except nobody is advocating coal. So what do you want to turn back on him exactly?
Just because you developed a hate boner for anyone who’s not on your nuclear train doesn’t mean they’re pro coal. If you need to put words in others people’s mouths to confirm yourself… you’re wrong.
With your reaction you just confirmed what he described.
If you aren’t pro-nuclear you are pro-coal, thats the reality. No one is replacing nuclear reactors with anything but coal. The development of wind and solar generation is going to happen regardless, but for every nuclear plant that Germany shut down, they opened, or re-opened a coal plant.
Saying “that’s the reality” doesn’t make it a reality. You can repeat it as often as you want, it makes you look like a self absorbed jerk - because it’s simply not true. Just because it’s a nice narrative to push for you not every opponent to nuclear energy is a proponent to coal. Quite the contrary I’d figure.
The single last coal plant started operation in 2020, and none has been “re-opened”. Some are kept in prolonged reserve mode until 2024 (half a year longer than originally planned), IF the Alarmstufe Gas stays in effect.
Maybe try with some verifiable facts and stop lying.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/08/germany-reactivate-coal-power-plants-russia-curbs-gas-flow I guess “reactivating coal power plants” means something different in the original German, an must be semantically different then “re-opened.” Also note that natural gas is still a fossil fuel that has the dubious distinction of being “better” then coal, but infinitely worse then Nuclear.
Now if you are against nuclear energy, it means you have to have a replacement in mind and all replacements for Nuclear Power Plants are fossil fuel based. There isn’t another option. Wind/Solar are great, there is no one accusing you of being against renewables. But renewables are NOT replacements for Nuclear or Fossil Fuel based power. So there is your choice. Pro-Nuclear or Pro-Fossil fuel.
I mean, in theory, coal burning could be made clean. Capture the carbon out of the exhaust, collect it into a solid block, bury it, done. Problem is the power plants will only pretend to do this, and not actually do it.
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Well if you don’t support nuclear because its “too complex,” you de facto support coal, which will inevitably turn into “degrowth” as most of the world can’t support agriculture anymore, and so you will get to nod your head as 100’s of millions are “de-growthed” into starvation.
Why would anyone who’s against nuclear automatically be pro coal? It’s not like the only options available to us are nuclear and coal.
That is the truth. Nuclear competes with fossil fuels, not wind or solar.
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Living up to your name.
Then why are you here? Your horrid omnicidal wish will be, by your own admission, inevitably granted. You have nothing to worry about.
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If you want degrowth, you want to see billions dead, because that is what degrowth means.
Poor track record with safety (not talking about the big issues such as meltdowns, but smaller issues such as minor leaks, and workplace incidents). Nobody’s interested in building them unless they’ve got profit guarantees and subsidies from the government. Nobody’s interested in insuring them in full (unless it’s the government). Nobody’s interested in the eventual decommissioning process, which can take a century, and again, still costs. Renewables will be up and running, and profitable, long before nuclear is constructed.
Speaking about the safety record here’s what final storage looks like in Germany. That’s another eight billion Euros of cleanup costs right there. I’m not usually that crass but whoever ok’d fucking dumping fucking nuclear waste in a fucking salt mine (unsurprisingly, yes, there’s water incursions) deserves to be shot.
In a nutshell the sentiment in Germany is that the only people that can be trusted to not play it fast and loose with nuclear safety are the Greens, and the Greens rather don’t want to deal with it either so we have a decision.
Surely the next time they want to get rid of waste they’ll do better! Pinkie promise!
If you see the environment as just another way to profit, and you assume that we can’t save the environment because it costs too much, you are just another shitty fossil fuel executive, but worse because at least the fossil fuel executives get paid for their short-term ideas, you are just supporting them and thereby standing by as hundreds of millions of people are condemned to death, hopefully including yourself, for literally nothing.
So, you’re going to spend, billions, to build a nuclear powerplant, that will decarbonise at a slower rate, never turn a profit, be an economic sinkhole megaproject, or, you could just build a solar panel or wind turbine in like, a year, where it’ll be functional and working. Profits allow you to reinvest into more projects. Losses, mean you’re putting endless amounts of money into less.
Again if you are worried about “turning a profit” you don’t give a fuck about the environment and need to leave.
If you’re constantly pouring money into a loss-making industry, it means you’re not efficiently managing your resources to build more projects. Profits from renewables can be reinvested before a single plant can’t be constructed. And that nuclear plant, will never make enough profit to build another.
What the fuck is the point of “making a profit?” The world is burning because of profits. If all fossil fuel plants were taxed at 1,000,000 Million per ton of carbon emissions would you support nuclear then?
What’s your proposed solution for the energy storage problem?
It scares people into making them plan and pay for everything up front. If you did the same with literally any other fuel source it wouldn’t even get built. Coal would be DoA if they had the same limits on radioactive emissions as a nuclear plant.
But that’s the thing with nuclear. The upfront costs are massive, and literally irrecoverable. Can you name a single nuclear powerplant that has broken even? I can’t. Not unless, it’s one that the government has built and then handed over to private industry, for example. Reducing safety from nuclear powerplants is not viable long term. And that’s the only way to get them commercially viable.
It’s not about reducing safety, it’s about reducing regulations that are about the appearance of safety, it’s about not imposing decommissioning costs as part of construction.
The US Navy has been able to consistently and safely build and run reactors for 50 years. It’s basically just fear preventing that knowledge and experience from being used in the commercial sector.
The US Navy isn’t concerned about making their fleets commercially viable. Taxpayers expect to subsidise defence, and for the US, this is done at vast cost. They don’t expect to constantly be funding an expensive, loss-making powerplant. Not when alternatives are cheaper and more effective.
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Nein!
Doch!
Ohh…