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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.
Subsidies in general I'm against...
However the real question is - will this have any impact or energy prices or availability in the EU, or in Spain?
If not, great. But if it does cause prices to rise, or it means electricity becomes more reliably... well then perhaps there was more to the subsidy than just supporting coal.
Ending the use of coal is a noble goal, if for no other reason than the reduction of real pollution. But we also have to be careful not to leave too many people out in the cold, to have alternatives.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Well, those instances of the human race that do not prioritize species survival, will not survive. But apparently that is too hard to grasp because it is quite a while in the future. Bust thanks for illustrating the fundamental nearsightedness of most people. Also, Science is not Religion. One is for people with working minds, the other is for the rest.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
This will hopefully drive the cost of business for US coal miners way up
Not many mines will close. The EU gets about 21% of their electricity from coal, and that isn't going to change.
Only the mines receiving taxpayer subsidies will close. Most likely the production will shift to the profitable mines, making them even more profitable.
Importing from America doesn't make much sense because of transport costs, but there are some imports.
The real question is why are we providing welfare for the mediocre?
When you combine socialism with democracy, there is pressure from the electorate to preserve jobs in declining industries. This leads to Lemon Socialism, where public funds are used to prop up losers rather than backing winners.
It is good to see the EU finally pulling the plug on subsidized coal mines, but they need to go much further.
I totally agree that thousands and thousands of scientists across many disciplines,, most who have never talked, seen, or even heard of each other, have somehow conspired to take as much money as possible by lying to the public. It's amazing how they do it!
I mean I even heard someone say the temperature has increased by 1C over the last hundred years. We've only had satellites since 1979.
Iron Maiden are an English heavy metal band formed in Leyton, East London, in 1975 by bassist and primary songwriter Steve Harris. Can you spell non-sequitur?
You are fatally wrong. I do know how scientific funding works. Strongly advising hard real-world changes is one of the ways to not get funding for your research. Why do you think climate scientists have been so tame when the models did reliably predict the catastrophe to come about 30 years ago? Simple: They did not want their funding to dry up and did hope the human race would realize how bad things are without them pushing. They have now realized that the human race is far too stupid for that and have started pushing _despite_ the negative effects on their funding, because of pure desperation.
As to the past measurements, why on earth do you think measuring temperatures requires satellites of all things? What these older records use is thermometers and records on paper. What then needs to be adjusted (and the adjustments are entirely legitimate) is the extrapolations of the localized measurements.
How anybody at this time can still think this whole thing is not real and not very dire is beyond me. People like you will probably deny there is a problem while in the process of dying from its effects.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The problem with climate change is some people like to believe it isn't true, because it means they are in some way special and "in the know".
But they are idiots. The science is a provable done deal at this point. Twenty years ago, having some skepticism was sensible (and it always makes sense to be skeptical of motivations -- Al Gore, I'm looking at you), but man-made climate change is just impossible to refute without resorting to a conspiracy that includes basically every climate scientist and body in the world working in coordination, including fake temperature measurements from a huge array of sources. It just isn't plausible. Plus, we are experiencing the exact instability that the models predict, so we would need to be faking pretty much all the global news on storms, etc.
But you know what, even if there was doubt (there isn't), would it not be a good idea to err on the side of caution and not pump huge amounts of shit into the atmosphere?
The ending of government subsidies to coal mines will have an equalising effect on the cost of coal (up to the new cost of production) making it easier for renewables to compete on an even playing field.
Isn't that what trump is doing with coal?
No. It is what he promised to do, but did not follow through.
American coal mines are continuing to close, as they should. Production is increasingly concentrated in a few big mines in the Powder River Basin in Wyoming, which produces more coal than the next four states combined.
All that is being banned is government support of coal mines. If a billionaire wanted to run a money losing coal mine they are more than welcome to. They just won't get any help from the government to keep it open like they would have up to today (2018/12/31).
Closing mines doesn't mean anything, except for impacting the people working there and in the town nearby. The power plants will just get the coal from the mines that are profitable. When the EU is closing the coal fired power plants and replacing them with something that generates fewer emissions then they'll see the reductions that they are seeking.
Most things are taken on faith. Never been to Australia, yet I have faith it exists based on what evidence I have. Never been to the Moon but I have faith that it is mostly as described rather then a balloon launched by the evil Liberals to spy on god fearing Americans. Never seen an atom or even an atom bomb, but have faith they exist based on various things that collaborate there existence. I even have faith that things fall towards the center of the Earth in Australia even though it's below me.
This is life, we have to have faith as we can't check everything out, whether it is geography or science. When there is consensus that Australia exists or the Sun burns by nuclear reactions or electricity works by electrons or that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are increasing and CO2 is a greenhouse gas, most everyone has to take things on faith.
Both geography and science generally get more accurate with time and it would be stupid to deny everything we can't personally check out. Shit, even flying to Australia wouldn't prove it exists as perhaps the plane made a subtle turn and landed somewhere else where everyone pretends it is Australia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Neither. Scenario 3 is a whole bunch of people (overwhelmingly most of those who have studied the phenomenon) predict that extreme events will permanently increase in rate over time, including high powered storms, and this agrees strongly with observations. They predict a sustained global average temperature rise (note: local average temperature decreases are *not* contraindications), which has been observed although to be fair, this needs a long measurement time (we're looking at permanent >2 degree Celsius change from man-made contributions over 100 years). They also predict eventual sea level rising substantially once a certain threshold is reached, which has not yet been reached. Frost-free season lengthening -- that's held for almost 40 years now. Droughts and heat waves have increased in frequency 10-fold. Arctic is projected to get ice-free summers in about 30-40 years.
Most predictions have come to pass, and a distressingly large number of them are passing in the "worst-case-scenario" version. Not literally every one that has ever been made.
Note, no religion ever snagged 97% of people who looked into it to be followers.
It's also interesting to see why so many on the left are suddenly against these supposed lefty policies, including pulling out of the middle east.
I'm somewhat immune
Please don't breed.
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.
Cars contribute immeasurably more to CO2 emission. What to really do something? Force govt agencies to buy electric cars only. Yes, it is more costly, it requires an infrastructure, but it will work, and it is beneficial in the long run because it creates jobs and is basically the same as spending on infrastructure projects which all governments love (employment, kickbacks, hype).
The thing that climate deniers on Slashdot should understand more than most is that climate scientists are scientists and love technology and gadgets and shit. If there was any way to believe that we could just keep.going with coal power, scientists would be pushing it harder than anyone.
(And indeed some do, with carbon capture and other assorted "cleaner coal" technology. Full disclaimer: I used to do numeric models for carbon sequestration. I still think it will work as a transition technology.)
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Mate, I have trouble believing Australia exists some of the time, and I live there.
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It was no more reasonable for the average person to be skeptical twenty years ago, not even slightly. There was consensus along climate scientists then, and people aren't generally any better educated on science now than they were then. Most of them knew jack then, and they still know jack now. Either way the reasonable thing is to trust the people who know more than you do. For the plumber to expect to be trusted in matters of shit and then refuse to trust scientists in matters of science is a truly pathetic disconnect.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The effects are less well known however.
And I call strawman right there.
We know that life as we know it depends on a very narrow margin of conditions. Miniscule changes can have dramatic impact. The eco-system is a chaotic system, speaking strictly mathematically. It is stable within small margins, and can easily go into various runaway positive feedback loops. We have already seen in multiple cases how the introduction of one foreign species can impact a local ecology.
We do not need to know the exact effects to understand that there is a considerable risk involved that has a very real probability of causing damage in amounts that we haven't yet heard about in connection with currency values. Trillions will be the pocket change when we're talking about large parts of coastlines affected.
The other problem we don't know is the economics. How will it affect progress? How will you pay for the solution?
Unlike climate, economics is not a natural system, but an artifical one. Despite all the bullshit rhetorics that makes it seem like economics is some kind of higher power, we humans decide how it works and where it goes. Anyone who tells you the opposite stands to profit from that falsehood.
If you have one system that is based on the laws of physics, and one system that is entirely man-made, it should be clear to anyone with three working brain-cells which system needs to adapt, because there is only one that can be adapted.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I see the problem.
You're arguing as if they were skeptics and therefore open to new evidence, whereas you are in fact arguing with cynics who don't give a damn about the evidence.
What's more, you're arguing with puritanical cynics, who in the words of a Victorian author, are insensibly drawn to choosing the facts to fit their theories.
There's no point. In terms of effort, it would be easier to find ways to build a functioning Biosphere II on Mars and move there.
Actual climate skeptics, they're worth talking to, because a skeptic is convinced by data and reason. A cynic isn't and never will be. There aren't many skeptics, they looked at the data and were convinced.
And, yes, some were paid a great deal by rich cynics to find faults. What they found was that there was no fault. The science was sound. The cynics these days try to pretend that never happened. Ruins the narrative.
You can't pretend people are paid to get a given result when you pay them to get the opposite and they still get the same result.
Mind you, I doubt that anyone was paying the scientists back in 1896 to talk about AGW.
But, then, thus is about facts and the cynics don't want those.
I'm not sure what they do want, as they mostly oppose their supposed beliefs of Libertarianism in their opposition to AGW. So I reject utterly the thesis that this is for such political beliefs or, indeed, for anything. It is purely cynical reactionary conduct.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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.
Most of them aren't idiots: they're old people. It's a perfectly rational decision for them to pretend climate change doesn't exist, because fixing it will cost them money while bringing them none of the benefits. Who cares if it bankrupts their children or grandchildren? It's the same approach they've taken to national budgeting: cut taxes today, let the next generation pay for the debt after we're dead.
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The article might be badly written such that it is easy to misunderstand it as announcing the closure of all coal mining - which certainly does not happen at this point.
But "bullshit" could be attributed to some of your statements, namely: "Coal is the only energy source that Germany has on its own soil." - No, Germany has so much (non-fossil) energy sources available that it has been a net exporter of (electric) energy consistently for the last years. And the statement "there are no uranium mines" is true only if you add "active", as there is plenty of Uranium still available from the mines in the Erzgebirge, those mines are just not active because they would be unprofitable to run at this point.
Here is a primary source: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/...
And here one more news article: https://www.eubusiness.com/new...
You hit the nail on the head. Here's what being a climate skeptic looks like: The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic.
Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct.
Richard Muller is the poster child for what a real skeptic looks like and how they behave. He saw what he thought were serious errors in measuring climate change, and decided to do it right. What he found was that he just didn't really understand the field, and he didn't understand why things were being done the way they were. He was excessively and very inefficiently thorough, but doing it his own way he got the same answer, because he was rigorously applying proper scientific and statistical techniques. When you do that, reality doesn't change.
What he didn't do was to prosecute climate change in the media, where reality can take a back seat to flash and entertainment. What he didn't do was make some blogs up and cherry pick evidence to feed to an audience who doesn't want to believe. What he didn't do was go into the comment section of articles on climate change and flatly deny everything we know to be true about climate change. None of that is skepticism. It's trolling at the best, or a bizarrely dogmatic decision to be wrong at the worst.
I think his most powerful point, and one that deniers really need to address, is this:
The carbon dioxide curve gives a better match than anything else we’ve tried. Its magnitude is consistent with the calculated greenhouse effect — extra warming from trapped heat radiation. These facts don’t prove causality and they shouldn’t end skepticism, but they raise the bar: to be considered seriously, an alternative explanation must match the data at least as well as carbon dioxide does.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Which part of ""mining proletariat" left" don't you get?
There is not even an automotive proletariat anymore. All industries are done by machines.
"You'll be surprised how backwards and sad it is compared to your sofa and your computer games." :D I mostly live in Europe, idiot. There is nothing backward here. The other part of the year Iive in Asia, mostly Thailand, there is absolutely nothing backward here either. No idea in what shit hole you live, though.
Haha
Hint: the mining and steel industry used to have _millions_ yes, in a country of 60 million people at that time (80million now), we had _millions_ of workers in coal mines and the steel industry. Now, 2019, it is perhaps not even 10,000. If you want to call that a 'proletariat', up to you. There are probably more software engineers working at Thyssen-Krupp-Stahl than engineers/workers in actual smelters or other steel manufacturing facilities.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.