Environment & Energy

Eugene

(61,897 posts) Thu Dec 6, 2018, 08:02 PM Dec 2018

A dying industry is displacing entire communities

Source: Washington Post

A dying industry is displacing entire communities

By Peter Mellgard December 6 at 4:59 PM

Peter Mellgard is the features editor at The WorldPost.

KEYENBERG, Germany — Norbert Winzen remembers the winter they laid the cobblestones in the courtyard of his family’s farmhouse here in this small village. He was 12 years old, maybe 13. He and his brothers and sister scrubbed each and every one of the hundreds of heavy stones so their father could lay them in tidy rows. It was the kind of drudgery he despised as a kid but that he looks back on fondly as an adult, especially now that his family’s courtyard is going to be ripped up, the farmhouse torn down and his family unwillingly uprooted.

The Winzen farm and every house and field in Keyenberg sit atop a rich vein of lignite, a soft brown coal widely used to generate electricity in Germany and around the world. Germany is the world’s second-largest producer of lignite, and Keyenberg, in the province of North Rhine-Westphalia, is in the heart of western Germany’s coal country. The Garzweiler open-pit mine is just across the road from the Winzen farmhouse. You can see it from the courtyard.

The Garzweiler mine is creeping closer every day — RWE, the German mining and power company, is expanding it and plans to keep it in operation until 2045. But burning coal for power — especially lignite, the dirtiest form of coal — is toxic for people and the environment. It’s the main reason Germany is going to fail to meet its 2020 renewable energy goals. Germany is by far the worst emitter of greenhouse gases in Europe, and coal is the main source of those emissions.

In June, the German government formed a commission to pinpoint a date for quitting coal. The commission is expected to announce a “coal exit” date by February. Some members on the commission are pushing for that date to be sooner, around 2035, but industry and labor representatives are resistant. For the Winzens and other families who remain in Keyenberg, as well as several nearby villages also slated to be demolished to make way for the expanding Garzweiler mine, that decision will mean the difference between keeping their homes or being forced to relocate.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/12/06/germany/

1 replies

= new reply since forum marked as read

Highlight:

A dying industry is displacing entire communities (Original Post) Eugene Dec 2018 OP

People keep calling the coal industry "dying." It's a form of climate denial to do so. NNadir Dec 2018 #1

NNadir

(33,518 posts)

1. People keep calling the coal industry "dying." It's a form of climate denial to do so.

Reply to Eugene (Original post)

Fri Dec 7, 2018, 06:21 AM

Dec 2018

It is not dying; it's not even close to dying.

Saying that it's dying is rather like Richard Nixon declaring victory in Vietnam. It's like Donald Trump announcing that climate change is a Chinese plot.

In short, it's a lie.

In the 21st century coal has been the fastest growing source of primary energy. It grew by more than 60 exajoules from 96.76 exajoules out of 420.15 exajoules in 2000 to 157.01 exajoules out of 584.98 exajoules in 2017.

Combined, after 50 years of wild cheering, and tens of thousands of announcements that it is solar and wind that is allegedly killing coal - a technologically naive statement, if not a completely ignorant statement, since coal is used for base load power - solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, blah, blah, blah produced in 2017 10.63 exajoules of energy.

2018 Edition of the World Energy Outlook Table 1.1 Page 38 (I have converted MTOE in the original table to the SI unit exajoules in this text.)

Reaching one's "peak" - and I personally don't believe for one second that coal use has "peaked" - is not the same as announcing one is dying. Albert Einstein's scientific output peaked in his late 20's; he died in his mid 70's.

Americans have their heads up their asses. They think because they're switching from coal to gas they're doing something and everything's just peachy keen. They are also switching from nuclear (25 gCO2/kwh) to gas (550 gCO2/kwh). They say "gas is cheap" because they are perfectly willing to make all future generations pay the real cost of gas.

The Germans, I note, are doing the same damned thing.

According to data published yesterday by a worldwide consortium of scientists, global carbon fossil fuel releases have risen dramatically this year: Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 10, 2141-2194, 2018. (It's open sourced, and anyone who's actually serious and not willing to rely on platitudes from journalists who know no science, can read it.)

From the PDF abstract:

For 2018, preliminary data for the first 6–9 months indicate a renewed growth in EFF of +2.7 % (range of 1.8 % to 3.7 %) based on national emission projections for China, the US, the EU, and India and projections of gross domestic product corrected for recent changes in the carbon intensity of the economy for the rest of the world.

(EFF here refers to Fossil fuel emissions as described in this phrase in the abstract, " Fossil CO2 emissions (EFF) are based on energy statistics and cement production data...)

Cement production data...

All those off shore wind turbines that will be rotting sea garbage in less than 20 years require huge amounts of cement, this for an entirely ineffective plan to address climate change. An steel production alone uses more than a billion tons of coal per year.

We need to wake up. We're delusional.

Reply to this discussion