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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.
Coal is still very heavy; it has a minimum cost due to logistics even before allowing for overhead mining and coal vein location costs. Renewable energy benefits largely from generating on-site with the source of its power, and electricity is cheaper to move around.
At the recent Climate Change Conference in Marrakesh, 43 of the developing nations most threatened by climate change – who together form the Climate Vulnerable Forum – committed to transitioning to 100% Renewable Energy.
Don't know how many of these are using coal now but they certainly won't be adding coal and will be phasing it out what they have.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
http://www.nrel.gov/news/featu... The wind turbines in Antartica seem to be going OK and its a lot colder there.
Ontario has already shut down all the coal power plants. Québec is almost entirely on hydro, with no coal plants. BC also has no coal power plants. So that covers 75% of the Canadian population. We probably get less than 5% from coal. It was 10% in 2013, but that was before Ontario stopped using coal. Add in the amount of forest land in Canada, and I'm pretty sure Canada qualifies as a carbon sink.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
But the neighbour countries Norway and Sweden haven't used coal in decades. For electricity generation, Norway is basically 100% hydro and Sweden is 45% hydro, 40% nuclear and 15% wind, solar, woodburning and minor natgas. Pressure from Denmark forced Sweden to shut down their most southern nuclear plant, so a small natgas plant had to be built(2 TWh of the total 160 TWh generated). The natgas is bought from... Denmark.
Pretty fucked up definitions of both in my opinion if that fits in your mind.
The reason it hasn't been disproved is only because nothing has contradicted it yet and the models have been changing year after year as more is understood about sea currents, cloud formation and a pile of other things. You are blaming scientists for dumbed down soundbites from politicians and economists.
As for nukes, like all massive capital intensive projects economists and bankers hate the things so that's why China and Russia are the only ones going forward with civilian nukes. The choice in the west is TMI painted green - 1970s stuff that nobody trusts and not only looks really disappointing against everything else but takes a decade to build. There was a thorium project with some promise back when Clinton was President (one of those people you are pretending are in the way) but the nuclear lobby, Westinghouse et al, lobbied to have it shut down because they saw it as a danger to their old Uranium designs barely touched since the 1970s. It may seem fun to kick hippies and "the left" over nukes but it wasn't their fault, and it's what you see as "the left" in China (really authoritarian but most people see them as the same as "the left") who are actually getting the things built!
So some of those "CAGW types" really are building nukes.
Unfortunately, nuclear power is the most expensive electricity. High cost, long lead times, unresolved problems with design and waste. Not a good option. Nuclear only gets built with massive subsidies and public liability for cleanup and accidents.
Wind and solar are cheaper and cleaner.
Again, if you fear this more than global warming then I have to conclude that global warming is not a threat.
I thought that global warming was supposed to make the entire earth unfit for human life. Even if we can conclude that building up more nuclear power results in more accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima, then I assume that is a better alternative than the extinction of our species.
You seem to assume that we've learned nothing from past nuclear accidents, that these unresolved issues with nuclear power cannot ever be resolved, and that number of dead people from wind and solar do not count.
Nuclear power is safer per TWh produced than wind and solar. (That number of dead includes the deaths from mining the uranium, Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island, not just on site industrial and radiation hazards.) I thought the goal was to save lives. If the goal is saving lives then nuclear power is the best option we have available right now. If the goal is not saving lives then what is it?
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
That particular part of Turkey was quite dark skinned, including the Greek part of the population - even for Turks (as in - black). And the oldest known images of the historic St Nick all show a black man. Now these weren't done from life and we don't know how accurate they are - but he was clearly perceived as a black person for at least the first few centuries after he died, the white santa was only invented fairly recently.
We actually know very little about the man - and it's very hard ot tell which parts of the legend (if any) ever actually happened. But the odds are that he was black and this is why he was painted (and depicted in stained glass) as such for centuries.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *