Germany Is Burning Too Much Coal (bloomberg.com)

Several readers share a report: Germany is widely seen as a world leader in the fight against climate change. Thanks to its investments in renewable power, wind and solar energy provide a third of its electricity, more than double the U.S. share. Germany's goal to lower carbon-dioxide emissions 40 percent by 2020 is significantly more ambitious than that of Europe as a whole or the U.S. After the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, Chancellor Angela Merkel vowed even greater determination. "We can't wait for the last man on Earth to be convinced by the scientific evidence for climate change," she explained. But there's another, troubling side to the German story: The country still gets 40 percent of its energy from coal, a bigger share than most other European countries. And much of it is lignite, the dirtiest kind of coal. As a result, Germany is set to fall well short of its 2020 goal. This dependence on coal is partly a side effect of Germany's abandonment of emissions-free nuclear power and partly foot-dragging on the part of a government wary of alienating voters in German coal country. During the summer election campaign, Merkel largely avoided the subject.

Comments

Re:They're not burning too much coal

[Luthair]

They're burning too much to meet their emissions goal....

Re:Energiewende is a failure

[atomicalgebra]

France's emission of uranium is infinitely larger than Germany's.

Not true. France emits no uranium. On the other hand Germany emits a lot of uranium and other radiative elements into the atmosphere because they burn coal.

Re:Everyone wants to have it both ways.

[atomicalgebra]

Meanwhile in France they realized that they are not doing fine and plan to decrease the use of nuclear substantially.

Someone has not been following the news. Macron backpedals on pledge to cut reliance on nuclear power.

We make fun of USA for good reason

[aepervius]

In spite of the riff everybody is doing on germany not doing enough, they are a western country which has a high standard of living and have about half the emission per capita of CO2 than the US has... https://data.worldbank.org/ind... for those not wanting to click : per capita USA 16.5 metric ton per person, Germany 8.9 metric tons per capita. And that is in spite of all that lignite burning.