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Germany To Phase Out Coal Use By 2038, Says Report (abs-cbn.com)
Germany has laid out a $91 billion plan to phase out its use of coal by 2038, a government-appointed commission said Saturday. "Under the plan, half of the up to $91 billion will go to the regions shuttering plants in the west and east of the country, while the other half will be spent on preventing electricity prices from rising," ABS-CBN News reports. From the report: The commission agreed to the deadline after months of bitter wrangling as pressure mounts on Europe's top economy to step up its commitment to battling climate change. The panel, consisting of politicians, climate experts, unions and industry figures from coal regions, announced the deal after a final marathon session ended on Saturday morning. The commission's findings will now be passed on to the government, which is expected -- barring a surprise -- to follow the recommendations of the panel it set up. The plan will be discussed at a meeting between Chancellor Angela Merkel, Finance Minister Scholz and regional leaders on Thursday, national news agency DPA said.
Several plants using lignite or brown coal, which is more polluting than black coal, would be closed by 2022. Other plants will follow until 2030, when only 17 gigawatts of Germany's electricity will be supplied by coal, compared to today's 45 gigawatts. The last plant will close in 2038 at the latest, the commission said, but did not rule out moving this date forward to 2035 if conditions permit. The affected regions, where tens of thousands of jobs directly or indirectly linked to brown- and black-coal energy production, will receive 40 billion euros as compensation over the next two decades. Two billion euros will also be spent each year over the same period to stop customers from facing rising electricity prices.
Several plants using lignite or brown coal, which is more polluting than black coal, would be closed by 2022. Other plants will follow until 2030, when only 17 gigawatts of Germany's electricity will be supplied by coal, compared to today's 45 gigawatts. The last plant will close in 2038 at the latest, the commission said, but did not rule out moving this date forward to 2035 if conditions permit. The affected regions, where tens of thousands of jobs directly or indirectly linked to brown- and black-coal energy production, will receive 40 billion euros as compensation over the next two decades. Two billion euros will also be spent each year over the same period to stop customers from facing rising electricity prices.
The people making the decisions will be long gone by then, anything can happen.
The great Chinese Climate Change Hoax claims yet another victim.
Those poor German fools are going to clean up their environment, make more livable cities, have cleaner water and less smog and create tens of thousands of new jobs. All for nothing.
Germany is actually opening up new coal mines this year and razing forests to expand coal mines. So this is BS.
while the other half will be spent on preventing electricity prices from rising
If you are spending money to prevent prices from rising, you need to include that money in the price you are trying to lower.
You can hide the true price of something by subsidizing it so that buyers see a lower price, but that does not mean you are actually lowering the price. You are just obscuring that true cost.
Although getting rid of coal is a nice effort from the standpoint of pollution, if you are truly serious about climate change, why is Germany getting rid of THIER use of coal.
I mean, whatever coal fired power plants they already have probably have really strict emission control equipment, right?
Meanwhile, what if you took 98 *billion* dollars and used that money all to improve the electrical power grid in India. From solar projects to simply putting CO2 and emission scrubbers on coal plants they have, would that not be a vastly more efficient use of money?
The whole point of the Paris accord was to shift money from rich to poor nations anyway. So why not make that shift a lot more direct, and actually focused on improving the worst emissions?
As it is the Germany effort just looks like virtue signaling that will have almost no real impact on worldwide CO2 levels.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This could have happened much faster if Germany hadn't rashly closed down their nuclear plants a couple of years ago. In fact, they built a series of giant coal burning plants, including for lignite, just to cope with the Atomausstieg. Kohlaussteig should have always happened first, because it's the pollution from coal burning that actually kills people and warms the planet.
If $90B is required to keep renewables cheaper than other options, what will happen at the end of that? $90B in taxpayer subsidized energy buys a lot of nuclear plants which they also shut down.
Energy in Germany (with all the subsidies) now costs over 30c/kWh while my small town supplier (primarily hydro/nuclear energy sourced) costs me 3c/kWh (without subsidies).
On the other hand, all this investment in renewables hasn't made nearly any dent in greenhouse gas emissions within Germany over the last 3 decades.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Burning coal at the scale involved for a population of 85 million, for another 20 years, just isn't going to cut it as a sincere environmental effort for our current situation. Yes, I know that coal makes up "only" about 30% of Germany's power sources.
This is Germany. I'm sure they can find something else to burn.
Just in time for 32 bit Unix time to fail!
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
They're just going to buy most of their power from foreign nations -- namely oil from the Russians and nuclear power from the French. It's just feel-good bullshit that moves the externalities elsewhere but costs the German people a whole lot of money and does nothing to solve the underlying issues.
Ha! Hahahahaha
No one seems to care that the power is from coal and nuclear as long as it is out side of their borders... but I guess its the same with electric cars. No matter the we have to use MORE fuel to produce the power for my car as long as it is not consumed where my car is.
Have they looked at South Australia's experiences with killing off coal? Or maybe they think they are smarter.... I also read there was 10 hours of sunshine in Germany in December 2017.
The amount of wall they could build for that! Not a single mexican would illegally enter their borders.
Smart people like trump know coal and walls are great. What is German y even thinking! Sad!
You may repeat that another thousand times - but it' not true.
Germany already had two days, where energy was totally renewable: in the morning of 1. January 2018 (a day full of wind with low energy demand) and from 13 to 15 o'clock on 1. May 2018 (a sunny day with lots of solar and wind-power). in those hours the full demand in Germany was totally covered by eco-friendly power. On average renewables cover about 40% of the demand.
What Germany has to do now, is to invest in supply lines, as most offshore windfarms are in the north, and lines from north to south are often saturated. Coal- and nuclear-free ist definately doable in a few years.
So $90B is going to be spent here, with a good portion of that subsidizing renewable electricity prices.
So Germans won't be paying more in electricity, but they will in taxes.
That's just hiding the costs somewhere else.
Don't want dirty coal? OK. Unfortunately, renewable energy is expensive. Solar also works poorly in snowy, rainy, and cold Germany.
So do nuclear -- which is clean -- but they won't do it because they're phobic. Or hydro, but nobody seems to like hydro anymore.
So, yes, time to just buy it from the neighbors who don't base their electrical generation on unicorns and pixie dust.
Coal is a dead and uneconomical way of producing energy and it looks to me like the Germans have accepted that and moved on to technologies that have a future.
Europe is forced to use more coal due to the *rejection* of technology. The hysterical and premature shutdown of nuclear power has forced the increased the use of coal. The US coal industry has been throw a lifeline not by Trump but by European greens. US coal exports to Europe have nearly doubled in recent years.
Another poster is correct. Europe is about talk, about virtue signaling gestures. The reality of their actions quite different.
Just because they are mining it doesn't mean that they are going to burn it themselves; while related, one statement does not automatically negate the other. Still, given they're going to be burning coal until some date near 2038 (at least), it does seem likely that the cheapest source of that coal would be locally sourced with the rest going for export. Not necessarily though; you do get scenarios where countries both import and export the same materials depending on specific users' supply chains.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Two days! The rest of the year, you have to fill in a fluctuating power gap with coal.
We're even expanding the use of coal for things like cooking pizzas. Seriously.
Not sure if the pizza delivery drivers roll coal while they deliver your coal-fired-pizza, but I wouldn't be surprised either.
Only in 'merica
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
; `^ X `X tot X `MUCOUS . SOLARIA `X tot X `
; `^ X `X tot X `X tot X `X us are ET on X `
; `^ X `X tot X `X tot X `X us are X X . X `
; `^ X `X tot X `X tot X `FACTO on X `X `X `
oX tot X `X tot X `X tot X `X us are X . X X `
xX tot X `X tot X `X tot X `X us are X on ET `
FACTO on FACTO . MUCOUS . SOLARIA `X tot X `
Postercompression under control of international finance
Putin plans for deployments to the Maginot Line to protect gas lines to Merkeland.
Uuuuh, how does that contradict what I am saying? You can look it up yourself. New coal stations: http://airclim.org/acidnews/ge...
Expanding coal mines: https://qz.com/1389135/germany...
Complete idiot.
They are burning it. 30% of Germanys power comes from coal. They are opening new coal power stations: http://airclim.org/acidnews/ge...
Seriously, it is like you guys live on a different planet.
The agreement reached by the comission on phasing out coal yesterday mandates a gradual reduction in the use of coal. This might or might not save those forests that have become a symbol of the opposition to open-pit lignite mining: "Die Kommission hält es für wünschenswert, dass der Hambacher Forst erhalten bleibt."
While the compromise makes it likely that the coal under the forests won't be mined (the compromise mandates a gradual closing of plants and mines, but doesn't mandate, which mines should be closed first), the lowering of groundwater levels due to the nearby mining might still kill the forests.
Either way, those forests are mostly of symbolic value; they are tiny compared to the total of forests in Germany - 32% of the country. Looking at the big picture, what matters is that carbon emissions go down further.
They're still operating some coal mines, but the point really is that it's far less of them now than they were before? The past trend was ~2-3 settlements and a few thousand hectares of land per year. They could have tried to burn a further >100 billion tons of hard and soft coal, although some of that would have been costly to mine.
Now yes, they still need to mine more since the plan is not to stop using coal today, but by 2038. So for instance they'll still cut more into the Hambach Forest (it's already ~90% mine, ~10% remaining forest - they want another 5%). But that doesn't make the plan to reduce usage and phase out coal "BS". It makes it the obvious choice to not continue to get another ten holes rather than forests and to not put some extra billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere.
This is Germany. I'm sure they can find something else to burn.
. . . that would cause a Soylent Green shortage.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
The latest plant in your linked article was finished last year, after lots of delays.
You can do it with natural gas. Germany really needs to get fracking otherwise it'll be dependent on Russia.
Interesting: that article mentions the coal plant Datteln: in Datteln 3 blocks were already shutoff in 2014. Construction of the fourth block began in 2007 but was haltet by court in 2013. Since then block 4 in Datteln is the only coal-plant "under construction" in whole western Europe! Uniper (the owner of the plant) is fighting to complete it, and maybe will be able to complete that plant - but it will be the only one.
Meanwhile Uniper shut off other plants in Shamrock (2013), Knepper (2014), Veltheim (2015) and Irsching (2016). New plants are not in sight!
I doubt by 2038 one country removing a fossil fuel will have any effect on what will be happening.
The determination of the real costs is delayed till 2023. In the mean time they pretend to believe in fairy tales, they don't really ... but politics.
The market will not put down the necessary amount of new gas plant without either guaranteed consumption or being paid to keep it mothballed until the next dunkelflaute. Germany needs a massive expansion of its subsidized reserve capacity and they are unwilling to commit to doing so for now.
Report is here by the way :
http://docs.dpaq.de/14440-1901...
Of course they're going to be burning at least some of coal they mine - I even said as much. The point was whether they're going to burn *all* the coal from these new mines or whether they're going to export some of it and, if so, how much. They could still go green for power generation by 2038, fuel their existing coal-fired powerplants mostly from existing mines, and export the bulk of the coal from these mines well past 2038 if they want and the mines have enough capacity for it, so your argument isn't valid - A does not follow B. Any exported coal is going to get burnt *somewhere* of course, quite possibly somewhere with very lax regulation on carbon capture too, but if all goes to plan with their power generation switch Germany can claim to be 100% green by 2038 and feel good about it, even if the net overall result is just as environmentally friendly as carbon credits by a different name.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
None opening, except for the ones that are opening? Right. Germany gets 30% of their power from dirty coal.
Germany imports 45 million tons of coal a year, expected to rise in 2019: http://www.mining.com/web/germ...
They are burning theirs and importing more and more. You guys are embarrassing yourselves.
Whether this plan will come into effect remains to be seen.
But if they displace coal generated electricity by gas plants, i won't be impressed. Especially if they choose faster plants over combined cycle (they pollute less than a combination of classical gas + wind turbines but i do not expect the greens to accept that easily). They will still emit much more greenhouse gases per capita than the French.
If i was a betting person i would put money on gas greenwashed by subsidized wind and solar.
The Germans (And to a lesser extent the Spaniards) are struggling to manage the variability of their renewable electricity. Are they planning to modernize their grid so central European countries do not have to carry their power from on side of Germany or another ?
Seen from afar, i also find the power of public opinion in what are essentially technical matters frightening. Can the administration act as a counterweight to the politicians ?
Exactly. It is a NEW plant. Plus they are importing more coal every year: http://www.mining.com/web/germ...
You meant to say, Germany really needs to come to grips with the temporary dependence on Russia for gas otherwise it'll be fracking.
There, FTFY.
Yeah we all know about Germans and "agreements". They haven't been hitting their Co2 emission reduction targets and have been increasing their coal imports: http://www.mining.com/web/germ...
Much like Germany's "clean diesel" claims, it is all a lie.
They are just replacing it by importing it from other countries: http://www.mining.com/web/germ...
Germany is a complete joke.
Are you dislexic? I'm sorry for you.
Construction of the plant in Datteln started in 2007. In 2010 Germany decided to increase the amount of renewable energy to 80% till 2050, and for that goal the coal plants had to be gradually decomissioned. No new coal plants were build or planned since then. For the one plant "under construction", the owner Uniper had to fight a lot to be allowed to finish it. But it's not yet clear, if it will ever be finished.
So, don't spread fake news!
Until the sun went down and the wind stopped.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
and don't forget that France's nuclear power also contributes to powering Germany.
We have that already - the big industrial consumers are being switched off when frequency goes below certain level (which is the way the imbalance between demand and available power manifests itself) - last such event was this month. The nuclear power plants are planned to stop production in few years time. If coal is to be stopped too then Germans have 3 options left: import, gas or blackouts. Judging on the ruling hysteria the ICE will be illegal in a year or two in Germany which means that they want all go electric in transport. This will surely 'improve' the situation. So they will build lots of gas powered generators and import lost of the stuff from France and Poland? Assuming that this all will work I wonder what will happen with the price - electricity in Germany is already most expensive in EU. This whole nonsense will not make it cheaper. I suppose this all means that at the end that the rich liberal elite will just have to be escorted trough unlit streets by armed guards so that proles do not cut their throats. Happens already anyway. German is a rich country so they can replace all the power plants with dynamos and hire new citizens to drive them. They just be good for something.
More fake news on Slashdot
Germany didn't commit to this plan, the article says it's a recommendation.
"BERLIN - Germany SHOULD stop using coal for electricity production by 2038, a government-appointed commission said Saturday, laying out an 80-billion euro roadmap to phase out the polluting fuel."
"Economy and Energy Minister Peter Altmaier said the government would "carefully and constructively examine" the recommendations, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper reported in its Sunday edition."
But you claim that they are still building new plants. No, they finished last year. There is none under construction or planned, according to your article.
Huge amounts of coal are used in Germany for making steel and cement. Not entirely sure how much - hard to google the numbers - but the steel companies in particular aren't going to like it. They rely on cheap electrical power to run arc furnaces as well as using roughly a quarter of the coal directly.
So for "New Coal Stations" you cite an article that talks about (as the first example) a coal plant that's been in planning and construction for over a decade, and as of now (nearly 8 months after that article was written) still isn't commissioned and won't be for at least another year. Meanwhile, that project is to build a 4th unit to replace the three that were decommissioned years ago. Three out, one new. That's a net decrease innit?
The other examples are even dumber; A plant that was completed in 2013, one that was completed in 2015, and a plant that's been in construction since 2008 with no completion date yet.
I suppose the time travelers didn't succeed in telling the planners not to bother.
The article closes with a few paragraphs about a plant commissioned in 1996 that is nearing end of contract and presents it as an opportunity to replace it with something other than coal power.
So instead of "Germany is building new coal plants" your article just demonstrates that Germany has built coal plants - past tense - and that even some of those may never see operation. Forgive me if I'm not as convinced as you are on this point.
=Smidge=
I have been busy trying to find the purple mountain's majesty across the fruited plains. First as far as I can tell there are no purple mountains. The plains are hardly blessed with any fruit at all. But missing something in a song is acceptable as I am convinced we are holding a guided light so that the poor and the wretched around the world can cross our borders. But the idea that Germany can get rid of coal faster than the US has no chance at all. That is just silly. After all our streets are all paved with hold just so we can easily sweep up the coal dust that covers them. Now we do know that coal duct contains Mercury and probably lead as well and just maybe gold dust is in that soot as well.
Germany is going to leave billions of tons of super-toxic planet-ending coal buried randomly under Europe without any containment whatsoever?
[shocked gasp]
I wonder what sort of jail time and fines they would assign to an individual who intentionally buried 100kg of the stuff.
[facepalm]
All sarcasm aside.....
I'm sure the elites will be just fine; The poor will do well too, since the elites always pass laws to tax the ordinary citizen in order to provide subsidies for the poor. It's the middle class who always pay for all this phony virtue signalling. The price for them will be high as they pay for more expensive energy, plus pay higher rates to hide subsidies, and probably also get hit with inconveniences like demands they live with less energy use.
The secular elites in the formerly-Christian countries which used to be called Western Civilization are completely insane - theyrenounce a fixed source of morality and then fixate on proving their own moral superiority while forcing the people they think are beneath them to bear all the burdens for their warped policies.
The Germans will do this by making themselves fully-dependent upon Putin and his Russian natural gas (something Trump has repeatedly complained about) and yet they will still insist they need the Americans to spend a hundred billion dollars per year defending them from Russia (Trump is the only American politician to ever make an issue of this two-faced behavior by America's "friends").
To think that having a per person CO2 level twice Germany's is a good thing.
You are also lying, as US emissions went up last year...OOPS...
They'll bump it back to 2043 whenever they need to. In the mean time, their real option is coal, coal, Russian natural gas, a couple of windmills and solar panel boondoggles, and you guessed it even more coal. Moral is don't entrust politicians with central planning of an industry, much less the energy industry.
Nah. The plan is to burn Russian natural gas and use that to load-level wind or solar.
Which is going to be stupendously inefficient because gas turbines lose efficiency if you constantly spool them up and down like that.
Meanwhile their use of pellets shipped in from other countries is going strong. Just moving the pea...
> the other half will be spent on preventing electricity prices from rising
The other half is going to be imported from a neighbor country that has coal plants.
Yet we are the #2 country in renewable energy generation.
But you are still the #1 country in non-renewable energy generation. It's the dirty part that makes the dirt idiot. Stupid Americans...
You may repeat that another thousand times - but it' not true.
Replace coal with lignite and it is true. Garzweiler II is being extended as we speak. They even diverted a section of motorway for it to be dug up.
New supply lines in Germany are heavily debated and sometimes very opposed by the sheeple. Meanwhile the situation is so dire that even Belgium suffers under it because it is unwantingly being used as transmission path for German energy.
I'm very interested what the future brings.
How much coal was burned on those days, to keep coal plants running so they would be available quickly enough the day after?
30% renewables in the grid, coal use down by... 3%?
You're right that the variable operating and maintenance cost is low. VOM is fuel and all costs that scale linearly with the amount of generation. Simple wear and tear, some labor, that sort of thing. However, nuclear power plants have significant capital investment requirements. CapEx are expenses on infrastructure that depreciate over 5, 10, even 20+ years. CapEx investments are necessary to maintain a safe, efficient plant, and are often executed during a refueling stage. As plants get older, CapEx gets even more challenging because more investments are necessary. Because you might be replacing parts on something designed 40 or 50 years ago, replacements aren't always easy to obtain "off the shelf," driving up prices even more. In the United States, we've had several nuclear power plants retire in the past few years because, despite "already built and running," their VOM + CapEx requirements penciled out at more than the ~$30MWh that we're seeing for wholesale electricity prices (plus very low capacity payments in many markets). Dozens more have been placed on the dole, receiving (or claiming need) for subsidies to remain open. A strong case can be (and is being) made to pay the subsidies to keep the plants open, because the sheer quantity of very-nearly-carbon-free electricity is enormous. But the claim that nuclear power plants are "dirt cheap to operate" isn't true on a multi-year basis, because of the CapEx requirements.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Did you even read the article you posted or did the headline sound good enough that you thought no one would read it cause you think we're all as uneducated as yourself?
It states that imports for power usage last year was 30m tonnes. Guess how much it's expected to be this year? 30m tonnes for power (with the rest for coking/steal production). And that is after closing mines locally! Sounds like they've reduced their coal usage YoY. They also say the estimate could fall following - err - this announcement, which should reduce the coal imports further.
Who should feel embarrassed?
They actually are razing forests (in nature reservations among other places) to build wind parks. The human seeded trees in Hambacher forests that they did not raze because of some green maniacs protests is just peanuts.
You take your pick, I take mine. Yours was on day when most of Germans suffered from heavy headaches etc. and did not work (1.1.2018) and on 1.1 when Germans do not work either. On nother days especially in January but this season for instance on 14.12.2018 and 10.1.2019 the grid had to take emergency measures to prevent frequency going too low (that is how overload manifests itself in a power grid). That happens regularly in January because of prevailing weather conditions. There is no battery from Tesla that can support whole country for 3 weeks as it sometimes happens. But that is not important - get this: Germans pay other countries for taking over excess electricity that wind and solar produce. They pay others to take it. No wonder they pay the highest prices for electricity on the local market. I guess this should be no surprise - the bolsheviki that rule here have miserable success record in anything even remotely touching economy.
I wonder what happens when the last ICE car will be banned in Germany while you ban also coal and nuclear power. I guess you may hope for Russian gas but that produces NOx too - OMG!!! We should hope then that the ICE driven tracks will bring riot police on time to protect the ruling green elite when the proles march to their quarters. I hope I will manage to leave Germany by then.
Oh, thats right, you shat that claim out and left it like a smouldering runny turd in the carpet.
Go on, explain why. ESPECIALLY if you claim so much is from France and nukes are sooooo cheap. If nukes were cheap to run, then France would have a net import by cash.
The reason why Germany is a net import by TWh is because France's nukes HAVE to run at 100% and at low demand they have to dump power.
Why should Germany pay more to make their own power when France has to give it away at a loss?
Because all they want is the PR propaganda to get out there, whether it is true or not matters not at all, it just has to be repeated.
Unfortunately that means having to repeat the same rebuttal of the big lie they propound like the dumbest of Goebbels every single time, no matter the frustration.
There he won't do the "total number of crimes per race" but "PER CAPITA crimes". Because THEN, when it suits his ideology, he DOES want to use the fraction. And going with the total number of crimes committed white, american, christian males make up nearly 50% of the crimes. Pick just white and you get the supermajority of crimes comitted by them.
But the fuckwits will scream "BUT WHITES ARE 90% OF THE POPULATION!!!!! UNFAIR!!!!".
Hell, by 2038 we should have fusion. That's just about 20 years away.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Apparently, German coal-fired power plants run old versions of Linux that store timestamps as 32 bit signed integers.
Nonaggression works!
Down 40 odd % but still 2-8 times as much as other similar countries.
This is a myth. Germany exports a lot of power during all times of the year and never relies power from France. For example in 2018: Power exports: 81 TWh, Imports: 31 TWh. (source: https://www.ag-energiebilanzen...)
According to several news article the situation on the 14th was caused by a technical fault ([1]). There was also easly enough wind power so that conventional plans were running on a low level and Germany continuously exported power during that day (source: https://www.energy-charts.de./ So your implied claim that there was not enough power generated by renewables during that time is obviously wrong. In fact, it seems that except for a couple of hours in the evening of the 24th power exports exceeded imports on all days in January. Heise blames France and remembers that there are regularly problems when demand in winter due to electrical heating is high [2]. In know, this does not fit the story of bad renewables and good reliable nuclear power.
[1] http://www.manager-magazin.de/...
[2] https://www.heise.de/tp/featur...
But that is not important - get this: Germans pay other countries for taking over excess electricity that wind and solar produce. They pay others to take it. No wonder they pay the highest prices for electricity on the local market. I guess this should be no surprise - the bolsheviki that rule here have miserable success record in anything even remotely touching economy.
And this is also easily debunked. According to the data [1] renewables tend to produce power when demand is high and also price is high. Negative prices are rare.
[1] https://www.energy-charts.de/p...
And France was importing power from Germany almost all the time in January: https://www.energy-charts.de/p...
but if all goes to plan with their power generation switch Germany can claim to be 100% green by 2038 and feel good about it,.
That's kind of the problem: The coal is just being used somewhere else, but they can "feel good" about it. Sigh.
Anytime someone dismisses per capita, they are hiding how dirty they are by trying to blame bigger countries.
As if you would expect the USA to be lower than Canada when the US has way more people. Similarly with China and the US. China has more than 4x the people. You just have your head in the sand (or up your ass) if you expect China not to be a bigger polluter than the USA.
Fuck you. Germany is the LAST place on the Earth that gets to bitch about what the world does and America, specifically. You had your chance in 1938 and fucked every goddamned thing up. Sit in the fucking corner and keep your mouth shut, Eichmann.
Russia also supplies seats on their spacecraft headed to and from the ISS.... as long as:
1. You wear a Russian space suit and train in a Russian facility and learn to speak Russian and fly under the command of a Russian.
2. You do not mind paying a per-seat price that keeps rising
Deals with Russia always end up seeming a bit like a certain lunch gathering in the cloud city in "The Empire Strikes Back"
The fact that Russia always kept the gas flowing during the Cold War means very little; it served their purposes as long as it gave them some leverage and some hard currency. Had the Russian leaders ever gone a bit nuttier and decided to ratchet up the hostilities, the Russians would have happily used that gas (or more properly the LACK of that gas, UNFORTUNATELY in mid-winter no doubt) as a weapon. The wise man does not set himselft up to be blackmailed when he has multiple alternate reasonable options.
Why you lie Bro? USA is increasing CO2