Slashdot Mirror
The World Falls Back In Love With Coal
Hugh Pickens writes "Richard Anderson reports on BBC that despite stringent carbon emissions targets in Europe designed to slow global warming and massive investment in renewable energy in China, coal, the dirtiest and most polluting of all the major fossil fuels, is making a comeback with production up 6% over 2010, twice the rate of increase of gas and more than four times that of oil. 'What is going on is a shift from nuclear power to coal and from gas to coal; this is the worst thing you could do, from a climate change perspective,' says Dieter Helm. Why the shift back to coal? Because coal is cheap, and getting cheaper all the time. Due to the economic downturn, there has been a 'collapse in industrial demand for energy,' leading to an oversupply of coal, pushing the price down. Meanwhile China leads the world in coal production and consumption. It mines over 3 billion tons of coal a year, three times more than the next-biggest producer (America), and last year overtook Japan to become the world's biggest coal importer. Although China is spending massive amounts of money on a renewable energy but even this will not be able to keep up with demand, meaning fossil fuels will continue to make up the majority of the overall energy mix for the foreseeable future and when it comes to fossil fuels, coal is the easy winner — it is generally easier and cheaper to mine, and easier to transport using existing infrastructure such as roads and rail, than oil or gas. While China is currently running half a dozen carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects — which aim to capture CO2 emissions from coal plants and bury it underground — the technology is nowhere near commercial viability. 'Renewed urgency in developing CCS globally, alongside greater strides in increasing renewable energy capacity, is desperately needed,' writes Anderson, 'but Europe's increasing reliance on coal without capturing emissions is undermining its status as a leader in clean energy, and therefore global efforts to reduce CO2 emissions.'"
The fact is that today's children are terrible. The increase in coal production is purely for Santa to leave lumps of it in stockings for these children.
That's what you get for knee-jerking and planning to shut down all of your nuclear reactors. The promise of replacing that power with clean renewable energy is proving a tad hard to follow up, right? I'm not exactly surprised.
I expect Europe will eventually start driving coal down once more, but it'll take a while to do such a shift, during which time coal will be the stopgap measure. That, or they finally wake up and do nuclear right instead of writing it off entirely.
Um, no. Burning natual gas emits lots of CO2. Less than coal or oil, because so much more of it is hydrogen, but there's still a good amount of carbon there and it emits CO2 when burned.
I misspoke in saying it burnt without emitting CO2, but as you say it burns cleaner than coal which is what as the article says, they are turning to in Europe.
So switching to a much heavier use of natural gas can significantly reduce CO2 emissions.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's not so much PR as reality. Germany is one of the greenest countries in Europe, yet they're building new coal plants. Why? Because they're decommissioning old nuclear plants, and they have to replace them with some suitable base-load source. Since Fukushima, new nuclear plants are practically off the cards, so coal is about it. It's cheap, it's not nuclear, and we don't have to buy it from the Arabs; what's not to love?
Oh no... it's the future.
Not sure if you're trolling, joking, or just an idiot. You can't point to an example of a Fukushima-like population center wiped out due to radiation from coal because the effects are distributed invisibly among the entire population of the planet. The solution to pollution is dilution, and coal plants get rid of their radioactive waste by 'diluting' it right into our lungs.
You won't see any earnest young reporters taking us through the pulmonary ward at the local nursing home, or the hospice where a wide cross-section of people regularly die of cancers that we normally associate with smoking. Jane Fonda isn't going to picket the ICU at the hospital where people succumb to pneumonia they might otherwise have survived. Nothing in those places is glowing green, melting through concrete floors, or setting off radiation alarms. That's not how coal pollution kills people.
I sincerely hope IHBT, in which case I will STFU and HAND.
And the death's related to coal aren't presented the same way in the media as death's related to nuclear meltdowns.
In a mining disaster, typically a cave-in that traps miners underground, focus is initially on recovering the miners, then the mine owner is fined/put out of business and that's the end of it.
For a nuclear meltdown, it's focus on the actual meltdown itself, then fine/put the owner out of business, then push for the shutdown of all nuclear reactors everywhere.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Funny that the data doesnt shows a "dismantling [of] our manufacturing industry."
Our manufacturing industry simply evolved towards automation. We make more than we ever did before, its just that we use fewer man hours than we used to. Even small machine shops that used to employ a few dozen people now employ only a couple of people total who monitor CNC machines, but these small machine shops now output more product than they ever did using manual labor, and its made to tighter specifications than ever before too.
I worked in a shop where many employees were grinding some carbide cutting tools that needed to be within a spec of +/- 2 ten thousandths of an inch destined for Pratt and Whitney's jet engine manufacturing facility. There was lots of waste because it was exceedingly difficult to consistently make parts with such a tight specification. That same shop now uses a single CNC machine to make the same part, has almost no waste at all, and only needs a single person to oversee the machine periodically (the person can oversee dozens of machines.)
That, my friend, is what happened to American manufacturing. We didn't stop making stuff. We just stopped using people to do it.
"His name was James Damore."