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The EU is Banning Almost All Coal Mining on Jan 1 (futurism.com)
Every unprofitable coal mine in the European Union must cease production by the first day of 2019, the date on which all public funds for the mines will come to an end. From a report: In Spain, that means that 26 coal mines are about to close up shop, according to Reuters. This move away from coal is a refreshing bit of bluntness -- letting the failed remnants of a fossil fuel industry fade away -- compared to how the federal government in the U.S. is grasping at anything to keep coal alive. But it remains to be seen how much of an impact the coal closures will have in the ongoing effort to curb climate change. The deadline was set back in 2010 as the EU sought to move away from fossil fuel dependence, according to Telesur. The EU wanted to end public aid to coal mines sooner, but groups from Germany -- which shuttered its last coal mine earlier this month -- and Spain are responsible for extending the deadline all the way to the end of 2018.
Sc 1.: That is a political statement, not a scientific one. A scientific statement cannot make absolute predictions. And there will be a basis of facts and a chain of reasoning. And before that statement is uses as a well-established base of further study or to recommend actions, it will need and get independent verification. If it is an extraordinary claim, it will need extraordinary verification. (Climate Science has that by now and had it for a while.) After all that, it becomes sound Science and something smart people will depend on.
The problem here is that neither your Sc. 1 or your Sc 2. is Science. The root-cause is likely that you do not understand how the scientific process actually works.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The market for coal in the US is dropping no matter what the orange turd in the white house claims. The electric generating plants that burn it are closing or converting to natural gas and almost all the planned coal burning plants have been shelved or just completely dropped due to costs revolving around scrubbing all the pollution out of the exhaust from the plants.
Natural gas is cheaper to extract and transport. Natural gas electric plants are much less expensive to build than coal burning plants. The US has an absolute glut of natural gas production. Much of it has been idled because prices are so low. We can open those wells back up by flipping a switch and immediately increase what we are currently producing by 4 to 5 times what we are now. The wells are there and in production they have just been "closed in" because prices are so low. Basically a valve has been shut to stop the flow of gas to the compressor stations and transport pipelines. It's literally a valve and almost all of them can be opened remotely.
We don't have a lot of producing coal mines and getting them going is much more complicated than just saying "open that mine up."
The people who generate electricity want to build natural gas plants, nuclear, or renewable, not coal. It's just so much cheaper. The only people who want to keep coal around are the hillbillies who mine it and the companies they work for that want to get paid for digging it up. They have fooled a bunch of conservatives into supporting coal by claiming "libruls" want to kill off "clean coal" and make all kinds of false claims about it being cheaper and safer.
The same thing happening here is happening in Europe. They aren't building coal burning plants. They are building renewable sites and natural gas plants. They will absolutely convert the existing plants to natural gas or they will shut them down and build a new plant running on natural gas. There is no economic way to ship coal to the EU and have it make any kind of financial sense for them to buy. In fact since EU members signed the Paris climate accords they have already plans in place to phase out all of their coal fired plants. The big dates seem to be 2027 and 2035. Coal mines in the EU don't have to close down, the EU member states just aren't allowed to subsidize them any longer. So it will still be cheaper to get coal locally than to buy it from the US and ship it across the Atlantic and then ship it to coal plants.
So, we aren't going to open a bunch of coal mines in the US. We use less coal each year so there is a dropping demand here. You can't increase supply when there is a lack of demand. You can't really increase demand without huge subsidies and removing a ton of environmental regulations. The EU isn't going to buy our coal because it will still be cheaper to mine it locally without state subsidies for the mines than it is to buy from the US and ship it over there.
This is much more complicated than, they still need coal for their power plants so they will get it from the US. The prices will increase but not nearly enough to make it feasible to ship it across the ocean from the US. Plants in some EU states are built near their source of coal, Germany is a very good example of this. Many of their mines have a conveyor several miles long that takes the coal directly to the power generating plant. They aren't going to close their mine and ship it from the US, it is literally right next door to them.
BTW I was born and raised in the mountains of north Arkansas. I can call folks hillbillies because I am one.
The article is bullshit, or in todays terms, fake news.
The opposite is true, at least for Germany. We are keeping our old coal power stations running while shutting down nuclear power. There has been a conflict this autumn over the expansion of one of several surface mining sites. This is surface mining - the tiny trails in the foreground are from giant trucks.
Coal is the only energy source that Germany has on its own soil. The amount of oil and gas we have is a rounding error, and there are no uranium mines. That is why all through the Cold War, coal has been kept running with subsidies, for military strategic purposes (energy independence in case of war). Because of that, no transition was even started until fairly recently, and jobs and industries are tied to it that can't be quickly moved elsewhere.
And the government that is using every PR opportunity to point out how conscious of the environment they are is actually doing the exact opposite and has been doing that for years. Brown coal (lignite), the one that you get by surface mining, which has much lower energy density than black (bituminous) coal that you get from mines, is the primary coal used in Germany. Its share of the energy mix has been almost constant for the past 30 years, falling from about 38% to about 29% in that time, or 0.3% per year on average. At that speed, it will be another century until we stop using it.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
You're telling me mining in EU countries like Poland or Bulgaria will stop? LOL. That will put a major proletariat force out in the street, a force that the yellow jackets will look feeble next to.
No it won't. There is no "mining proletariat" left. Mining is done with machines, and two or three people supervising the machines. The time that mines (and smelters and forges) employed a lot of people was 30, 40, 50 years ago.
I mean, it was the Polish miners who brought about the collapse of Communism, remember?
No it was not. It was a trade union, the trade union of the shipyards.
No, most of coal mining will remain operational in the EU
The article is about closing mines that are subsidized. In Germany that is _every_ mine. The hammer from the EU is only coming because the german governments never dared to completely drop all subsidizing. Hint: if every coal worker would be set free and continued to be payed by the government, the state would pay less than he does at the moment in subsidizes.
Perhaps you should grow up and learn to read some newspapers ... you are out of the loop since 50 years.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Here is a primary source: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/...
And here one more news article: https://www.eubusiness.com/new...