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Finland Set To Become First Country To Ban Coal Use For Energy (newscientist.com)
Finland could become the first country to ditch coal for good. As part of a new energy and climate strategy due to be announced tomorrow, the government is considering banning the burning of coal for energy by 2030. From a New Scientist article: "Basically, coal would disappear from the Finnish market," says Peter Lund, a researcher at Aalto University, and chair of the energy programme at the European Academies' Science Advisory Council. The groundwork for the ban already seems to be in place. Coal use has been steadily declining in Finland since 2011, and the nation heavily invested in renewable energy in 2012, leading to a near doubling of wind power capacity the following year. It also poured a further $85 million into renewable power this past February. On top of this, Nordic energy prices, with the exception of coal, have been dropping since 2010. As a result of such changes, coal-fired power plants are being mothballed and shut all over Finland, leaving coal providing only 8 per cent of the nation's energy.
The better question is: Which country will be last? The last to protect the health of their residents, the slowest to adapt, the slowest at actually growing their economy.
"the lack of evidence for global warming"
So why is the north pole ice melting, why are the glaciers clearly receding.
Do you also deny that it gets hot in green houses,
Do you deny that mankind releases billions of tons of CO2?
Do you deny that CO2 is a greenhouse gas?
Tell me, which is it?
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Also, with the greatest possible respect (watch "Yes Minister" for why I used that phrase), coal production costs are incredibly low as it is (due to a lot of automation) and wage costs are a tiny percentage of the total costs.
I'm sure you are good are something but the above post is more than a little embarrassing, especially the crack about unions when wages of miners are set by enterprise agreements these days.
Hah. Given most people are simply not interested in climate change, this is all moot. [1]
But seeing as this is Slashdot, and a Friday, the thing is, most "climate change deniers" don't have an issue with any of those points. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and mankind releases CO2, and greenhouses do indeed get hot (why this last one is on the list is beyond me, as "greenhouse" is just an analogy here).
The point which EVERYBODY is up in arms about, is how much warming will actually come from feedbacks, and not from CO2 itself.
The mainstream respectable "in the field" "non-denialist" expert view is that the feedbacks could give you 4 or even oh I dunno as it is a feedback who can say where it would stop maybe 8C for all we know... and the denialist view is that this is ludicrous as why didn't the Earth just accidentally cook itself already.
The science issues are really all about feedbacks, not "basic physics". And the people and politics issues are really all about values. [2]
[1] So much for superordinate goals which could appeal to the different values systems of the global population.
[2] Human beings grow through about 6 or 7 major stages of worldview, each with its own values-system. This is why everyone is usually quite sure that their own way of looking at the world is the "right" way. Climate change isn't just science. Climate change is often really about trying to get the world to adopt a particular values-system. (And then when this values-system gets rejected by people, we end up thinking about them as "selfish", "consumerist", etc.) And in many ways climate change is about bringing forward a better set of values for the world. But because nobody seems to know that values cannot simply be imposed, like how you can't impose democracy on Iraq by bombing the old regime out of office, ie. because people actually grow through values in a particular way, in an organic, life experience kind of way, and cannot be made to change, even if the planet is burning or whatever, then the fact remains, most of the world does not care about climate change, because the way climate change is framed, it is all about a particular set of values, and most people are not at that stage of values. They just aren't. And if climate change proponents would stop being so narrow minded, they might see that. Someone somewhere made a huge blunder in trying to tie a new values system to a science theory (theory in the strong sense of the word). The values system should have been made subject of philosophy and ethics and even religion. But no, it was tied to a science theory, as if "reality" would force you to change how you value things. Which is just not how human beings work. So climate change will fail. It has been failing. It'll continue to fail. It'll really not be going anywhere, it is so failed (you Americans seem to like this kind of phrasing!) But as I say, this is Slashdot and a Friday, so who cares anyway.