For First Time Since 1800s, Britain Goes a Day Without Burning Coal for Power | Hacker News Reader

For First Time Since 1800s, Britain Goes a Day Without Burning Coal for Power

nytimes.com

558 pointsaf16090205 comments

This is an astoundingly vapid article. If you want to understand why and how the UK has so quickly reduced the amount of coal it burns, Carbon Brief has a much more informative overview [0].

The basic explanation of what happened is simple: the UK instituted a carbon tax that made coal more expensive than natural gas per unit of electricity produced, so British utilities shut down their coal plants and replaced them with gas plants as quickly as possible.

The backstory is somewhat more complicated, and much more interesting. The British tax was implemented in 2013 as a local fix to a broken EU carbon-trading program; that program, called the Emissions Trading Scheme [1], allocated to electrical utilities in the EU the right to produce a fixed amount of carbon emissions (and carbon-equivalent emissions), and the rights were made transferable—a typical cap-and-trade set-up. And then the basic problem with that typical set-up occurred: the fixed supply of rights to produce emissions proved higher than the EU's electrical sector's total demand, a consequence mostly of lower than expected demand for electricity during the recession that followed the financial crisis of a decade ago, but also partly due to other clean-energy initiatives and to big changes in world energy markets. And so the price of emissions rights collapsed.

That wasn't really a problem—no more carbon was being pumped into the air than the ETS allowed—but it made plain the fact that the ETS was doing nothing at all to reduce emissions. So British lawmakers decided to implement their own carbon tax, called the Carbon Price Floor [2], in order to reduce emissions and support the development of clean energy. The tax rate Parliament set was one of the highest in the world, and as it turned out it was just high enough to make coal slightly more expensive than natural gas for generating electricity, an outcome entirely unforeseen when the policy was decided, just as global production of natural gas was beginning to boom and its price to plummet.

So in the end, a bunch of poorly designed policies and their unforeseen consequences led to a better than expected outcome: Britain has been weened off coal decades earlier than was thought possible.

0. http://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-cuts-carbon-record-co...

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Emission_Trad...

2. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/carbon-price-floo...

I don't understand why the Carbon Price Floor was a 'poorly designed policy'. From your description, it had exactly the intended effect - it reduced carbon emissions. That coal was pushed out so early might not have been foreseen, but why does that matter?

Where does the UK get its natural gas? If it's like most of Europe, it's now dependant on Russia for that. And pipeline politics is a huge driver of the situation in Syria and the refugee crisis. And if reports are to believed, Russia's meddling is behind Brexit, Trump and the wave of xenophobic populism that's sweeping the world at the moment.

I'm not saying that coal is better or even a necessary evil, but we shouldn't pretend that natural gas is some kumbaya solution to pollution and climate change. Even without the controversy over fracking, natural gas has consequences that may be even worse than the effects of coal.

UK is not dependent on Russian gas. There's some, but not dominant.

https://www.britishgas.co.uk/the-source/our-world-of-energy/...

- 45 % is from UK production

- 17 % is from LNG tankers (much of that is from Middle East)

- 38 % is from European pipelines, of which 35 % is from Russia.

In other words, Russian supply is about 13 %.

The NY Times article manages to ignore one significant source of electric power, though: about 20 % of British electricity is nuclear. That is not mentioned at all, it just speaks of wind and solar. This is a typical narrative by journalists and in my view it diminishes the credibility of media.

But the UK isn't like most of Europe, as it has control of a fairly productive sector of the North Sea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_oil

This was one of the drivers behind a switch to gas for electricity generation in the first place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash_for_Gas

The North Sea has seen better days but modern production levels are still measurable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_natural_g...

It looks like only about 13% of the UK's gas comes from Russia: https://www.britishgas.co.uk/the-source/our-world-of-energy/...

> And if reports are to believed, Russia's meddling is behind Brexit...

D'oh. There was me thinking I made the decision on my own, I even researched loads of topics by buying books and stuff, only to find out on HN that those meddling Ruskies did it all along. I will agree with you on pipelines though.

Heh, I find it rather amusing when citizens of UK and the US are shocked, utterly shocked when a foreign actor interferes in their local politics when their respective govt. have been doing the same for centuries. Karma is a bitch, as someone likes to say.

He was being sarcastic... He wasn't shocked; he was mocking the idea that Russia caused Brexit. They didn't. The UK citizens themselves voted for Brexit because they're fed up with all the shit the EU brings with it.

Except that's a terrible argument (I wasn't swayed by Russian interference, therefore no-one was). Yes, the citizens of the UK voted (just) for Brexit - because it was a referendum - that's how they work (assuming no ballot stuffing etc). Would everyone have voted the same way without the (alleged) interference? Possibly not.

There was no talk about russian involvement in brexit until after Trump was elected then suddenly it was jumped upon as another reason why brexit was obviously "unjust".

That is blatantly false. The weaponising of refugees was talked about before brexit:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=russian+bombing+syria+caus...

You were probably swayed by Russian influence. Let me explain how:

Russia unhappy with the EU, decided to join the Syrian war (after years). They bomb the crap out of civilians and trigger the largest refuge migration Europe has ever seen.

The numbers are so big that nobody is prepared, Germany decides to take the high ground and allow them in.

This triggered a fear in the UK that our borders are unchecked and other EU countries have control over them.

The fact is that Russia, the UK and the USA have been playing proxy wars like this for decades.

There was no Russian interference though. Show us a microgram of evidence? Even Infowars-style speculative evidence would be permissable at this point?

While agree with you to some extent, do you think propagandists have somewhat recently realized how to exploit current communications tech to deploy their message(s)? If the financials of FB and GOOG tell us anything, it's that advertising on the internet is very effective, and advertising is just corporate propaganda. Most people just don't have the time/interest/energy to fact check, and many are just out to confirm their preconceived ideas/ whatever helps assuage their sense of guilt.

It goes both ways though. The EU funds all sorts of groups, in particular NGOs. Those groups then do publicity stunts and pay for advertising during important events. There's so many players on the scene that there's little point blaming one single entity - doing so means you are just playing into the hands of the other guys. If the media start hyping something en mass then treat it with suspicion.

>If the media start hyping something en mass then treat it with suspicion.

We completely agree on that. I like to dig into sources and refine my opinions all the time. I'm glad to be /around/ other people that just have different conclusions and/or perspectives given the same set of facts.

The EU also proposed (and implemented?) its own online propaganda army long before Brexit, so the Russians might not be the only ones to interfere in public opinion.

"In order to reverse the perception that 'Europe is the problem', we need to communicate that the answer to existing challenges... is 'more Europe' not 'less Europe'."[1]

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/9845442/...

lol, username checks out.

The EU uses propaganda so routinely people don't even notice it anymore. Like how federalists always refer to the EU as "Europe" even though Europe is a continent with several non-EU countries in it, and the EU is a political arrangement. It's a subtle word trick but it plants the feeling of permanence in people's minds.

Also, the way it charges countries huge sums of money to trade with it tariff free and then dishes out the money to projects ... but only on the condition that they erect giant signs with the EU flag and saying the EU paid for it. The EU of course, produces nothing itself, it's the countries that paid for it, but putting the actual flags of the nations that paid might lead to people feeling loyalty to actual European countries instead of the EU institutions.

And then there is the actual propaganda. Including, ironically, propaganda targeted at Russia:

http://collections.internetmemory.org/haeu/content/201603131...

I don't know ehere you live but in here when a project is being built it's fairly normal to have a big sign with details like,

* what is being done

* starting date and expected end date

* maybe a map to show are being worked on

* company doing the work

* How much it costs

* A series of logos with every entity that funded the work, with a decreasinz size depending how much they funded)

I'd not really call that propaganda.

This isn't whilst a project is being built. It's after it's been built, in perpetuity, to constantly remind people that the thing in question was "paid for by the EU". The logos of the actual entities that paid for it, the countries, are not shown of course.

Russia is behind Brexit? You are breaking new ground here, care to provide a reference? Also, it is good to know that Russia is behind Orban, Erdogan too.

If you Google 'Russia Brexit' you'll get a ton of hits. Here's one: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/russian-interf...

"'highly probable' Russia interfered with Brexit"

"the huge flows of migrants into Europe had been deliberately encouraged by Russia to destabilise the EU"

sigh... Put it another way - is there any hardship in this world that was not induced by Russia? This is not even funny anymore, this is sad. Brexit is work of Russkies. Are you guys are completely impotent and incapable of making your own decisions?

"May be worse"

You make it sound like the negative effects are all political, and you can't really quantify them. As far as air-quality, isn't natural gas much better than coal?

It's poorly designed because there is no incentive in the policy to continue reducing global warming. The problem isn't solved yet.

It's also poorly designed, for the UK, in that UK power generation just bought the unused credits from other EU nations and really didn't reduce their coal usage.

I read that as the GP suggesting that the ETS was the 'poorly designed policy'.

That's a really weird way of saying "it worked". None of your sources support the claim that these policies were not aware that converting to natural gas would be carbon positive and cost effective in the long run.

So the Carbon Price Floor onæy targeted coal and not other fossil fuels?

No: it targets all fossil fuels used for electricity generation. Coal just has far higher CO2 emissions (and far higher particulate emissions, though that's not actually relevant to this: it's based purely on tons of CO2 emitted) than almost anything else.

Natural gas doesn't pollute. Burning coal creates particulates while natural gas does not.

Reeeealy? How long would you like to sit in a room with a natural gas furnace whose exhaust is not vented outside?

No particulates != no pollution.

> Reeeealy? How long would you like to sit in a room with a natural gas furnace whose exhaust is not vented outside?

That could be used to any furnace. There are byproducts in burning anything, that need to be filtered lest they start displacing the oxygen in the room at a fatal rate.

I wouldn't want to start a wood fire in my house unless the vent was open.

My natural gas furnace doesn't vent to the outside, and neither does my stove. Natural gas has orders of magnitude less pollution than coal.

Has no vent is not the same as does not vent. Try the same in an air tight bank vault and you will quickly notice the difference. Natural gas cooking stoves don't need vents because most kitchens are far from air tight. But, ocationally you see some nut try and seal off a room with plastic which then goes very poorly for them.

It's also worth pointing out that the amount of gas burnt on a stove is a good deal less than that burnt by a furnace, too. A typical burner is 7K BTUs, while a typical furnace is 80K BTUs.

CH4[g] + 2 O2[g] -> CO2[g] + 2 H2O[g]

Technically co2 has much lower thermal capacity than ch4. By burning it rather than releasing it you have less greenhouse gas effect.

yep, assuming complete combustion and completely pure fuel

It's not hard to notice an S in your sentence.

Having an interest in ethnomusicology, my favorite testimony of Britain's tumultuous dropping of coal is the song Coal Not Dole. It's originally a poem written by the wife of a laid-off coal miner. Dropping coal may be considered inevitable in retrospect - but it's interesting to see the perspective of people caught up in these changes, whose lives were disrupted and sometimes ruined in the process.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk2hGp6HCn8

    It stands so proud, the wheel so still
    A ghost-like figure on the hill
    It seems so strange, there is no sound
    Now there are no men underground

    What will become of this pit-yard
    Where men once trampled, faces hard?
    Tired and weary, their work done
    Never having seen the sun

    Will it become a sacred ground?
    Foreign tourists gazing round
    Asking if men once worked here
    Way beneath this pit-head gear

    Empty trucks once filled with coal
    Lined up like men on the dole
    Will they e're be used again
    Or left for scrap just like the men?

    There'll always be a happy hour
    For those with money, jobs and power
    They'll never realise the hurt
    They cause to men they treat like dirt

I've lived in South Wales for quite a long time and the impact of Thatcher closing the mines is something that's very hard to understand until you spend time in these areas. They're still affected by those changes today, over 30 years later.

South Wales does have one thing that may save the valleys towns, however; its railway. Unlike most of the UK, the lines up the valleys weren't destroyed in the Beeching changes in the 50s, and today there's a lot of people earning a living down in Cardiff who commute in from up the valleys. There are plans to update the trains to newer and faster tram-like machines, to make it easier for people to move about, and that will hopefully further encourage a renewal of these areas.

The expansion of Cardiff should have an interesting effect on the valleys towns, as people who commute in earn more money and take it back up. And equally, as people get priced out of living in Cardiff, they may start looking at the towns on the outskirts, and over time we may start to see more small businesses cropping up and more work appearing as the towns get new people and money in. Of course they did just royally fuck themselves over by voting for Brexit (the area is regarded as one of the most deprived in Western Europe and receives a lot of EU funding), but that's to be expected when every newspaper and politician has been blaming Europe for their woes for decades.

South Wales actually has a very interesting future in higher level manufacturing, if they continue working towards it. Some of the current Raspberry Pi models are made here and there are quite a few more factories cropping up along those lines.

Funnily enough my new hardware startup was looking at getting PCBs manufactured at the same Sony factory as the RPi a few months back.

We don't really have the volume for it yet so are using a fab in Newbury, Hampshire for now.

To be that pedant, Newbury is in Berkshire, although Hampshire is very close by.

Yup, you're right. Sorry, I assumed Hampshire because it's about 30 minutes up the road from me. Derp!

It's a social challenge that we still haven't worked out how to meet. Prior to the industrial revolution there were small rural communities, hamlets, villages, and towns, in places which grew up to be coal towns. But when the single economic driver disappears we don't know how to scale these communities back down.

I've always moved to where the work is, and I see the much same in my family tree all the way back to the industrial revolution (including mining engineers and mining machinery makers on my fathers side, who don't seem to have spent more than 10-20 years in any one coal field). But I know that many people are much more rooted in place. Forcing people to move isn't palatable in the U.K., but waiting for communities to disintegrate and people to move out on there own seems equally cruel

It also speaks to the need for purpose. One of the things not discussed enough in conversation about universal basic income and the like is that jobs give people a sense of purpose as well as money. It's "coal not dole" because no one wants to drift aimlessly while being given money for doing nothing, no matter how great that might sound on the surface.

I wouldn't say it's not discussed - in fact, it's probably the single most common argument people bring up against UBI.

I personally disagree with it and I don't feel it. Sense of purpose from contributing something useful to society? Yes. Sense of purpose for doing random pointless shit I don't like for a master I don't like, so the master gives me currency I need to not starve? Not really, more like modern slavery.

I realize that some people find purpose in what I just described as modern slavery; I know such people personally. I respect that, even if it smells like Stockholm syndrome to me. Still, the future is either UBI or endless invention of utterly nonsense jobs (dig a hole, fill it up, dig a hole, fill it up...) just to keep people employed.

The coal story illustrates the point perfectly. I'm grateful for centuries of miners and engineers (and their supporting families), who together ushered us to an era of ever more advanced technology. But today, their job is done. In XXI century, using coal for energy is wrong for many reasons, and those jobs need to disappear - keeping coal would be irresponsible for a society.

That's why we need the "dole". Because some jobs no longer make sense, and if people (and communities) need to retrain, "find new purpose", then it's dole or die.

Hmmm... I hate to say it, but spoken like someone who's never been out of work against their will for any length of time.

I realise you're trying to make an argument in defence of the welfare state but you sound like you're suggesting that people should just accept their own obsolescence and be grateful for government handouts. Most people would have a tough time swallowing that and I can't say I'd blame them.

He's saying those people need to find a new socially beneficial purpose, and that having a dole keeps their families from starving while they do so.

It's a fact some jobs will become obsolete over time, and those people should be happy that the dole is there to pay for their retraining rather than letting them starve when their craft becomes obsolete. It sucks for them their trade died, but how is it remotely bad the government helps them stay afloat so they can retrain?

No one is saying they should just linger doing nothing.

You can tell people what they should do until the cows come home. But they may never come around. Worse, if they have greater voting power than you then _you'll_ be the one dragged kicking and screaming into an inhospitable future.

UBI could be great in theory. People _should_ learn how to find purpose in life outside the traditional labor culture. And maybe one day they will. In the meantime we have Donald Trump and Brexit. Neither is the end of the world, but they're strong hints that things can go sideways real quick unless you take political viability seriously.

UBI isn't only great in theory, a number of countries are only a finger's breadth away from having implemented it. I live in Germany.

There's no way for me to not be under health insurance (working without is actually illegal and the state pays it for unemployed people).

If i lose my job the state keeps paying me 70% of my original wage for an amount of time proportional to how long i worked, and after that drops me to a base level i can live on (though possibly i would need to move). The only things i need to do to keep receiving it is to prove i keep applying for jobs by sending them application copies twice a month, and to not reject reasonable job offers the work bureau sends my way. (And yes, people have rejected such and sued and won in court, with no extra cost to them.)

And even beyond that, there's a minimum wage, and even a state income offset program to allow people with extraordinary expenses (caring for sick relatives, etc.) to receive money if their income minus said expenses falls under a certain limit, equivalent to people on long term unemployment aid.

It's implemented in various different programs, and not in one neat bundle, but in terms of real-politik UBI is already here.

Sure, people can still live in poverty even here, but this is not due to a lack of aid, but due to people's own decisions. (Continuing to live in expensive areas, refusing to get aid, etc.)

"Sure, people can still live in poverty even here, but this is not due to a lack of aid, but due to people's own decisions."

really:)? People still make decisions in Germany after all you have described?

A variety of freedoms and rights are enshrined in the german constitution, and still apply even if you're unemployed. ;)

https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_gg/englisch_gg.h...

Note also that all govt aid (except for paying the rent and health insurance, which is done directly) is in actual money, not vouchers. :)

You're conflating what I said with other social issues and the Democrats failure of messaging (and slide in to racism/sexism).

No one (at least not me) is talking about "find purpose in life outside the traditional labor culture". They should get a job and pay back that tax money!

What I'm talking about is my support for the fundamental tenants of capitalism: creative desteuction and repurposing of capital to more efficient uses. That's going to happen in America and jobs are going to go obsolete. Coal is never coming back.

I just also believe in social welfare for the same reason I put oil in my car: you need lubrication to keep parts from seizing and the whole thing blowing itself apart. Running an ICE without oil is foolish, and so is running an economy without social welfare.

UBI is just a high-grade synthetic that requires less maintenance work to function.

(It actually does more than that, as UBI serves to connect the wealth accumulation at the top with the wealth allocation at the bottom, which I would argue makes the entire system have more bang by easying the flow of wealth through the system and continuing to cycle it, which is the mechanism by which capitalism optimizes. In this sense, it's sort of like sustained fusion: you have to take part of the energy output to sustain the reaction driving the output.)

I tend to agree with everything you said (except the slight against Democrats). The only point of departure for me is that I don't think Americans will give up on the dream of bringing back, e.g., coal jobs--basically, the imagined blue collar work life of 50 years ago. I would expect a simple UBI to only increase resentment. American culture, and especially American political culture, is built around the notion of hard work and independence and the relationship between the two. In the context of American culture, UBI is anathema to that notion.

No amount of finger wagging and intellectual discourse will change that. Heck, we've known for 30 years that with the economic dislocation caused by globalization America (public and private, state and federal) would need to heavily invest in re-education and work training programs. But we failed miserably even though every single economist and business leader, liberal and conservative, substantially agreed on what had to be done. We not only failed miserably, but large swaths of working class Americans literally resented the efforts.

Basically, I am intentionally conflating what you said with other social issues because my point is precisely that they're interdependent. Yes, a UBI is probably necessary to squeeze maximum wealth creation _and_ income equality out of a capitalist system. But because UBI is not tenable we'll have to settle for lesser options. That's called compromise.

I upvoted for the detailed reply, but I disagree with one of your premises: I think Americans are willing to give up specific jobs like coal, they're just not willing to shift in to entirely service and "whitecollar" based jobs. The struggle comes from poor communication about why.

That vision is a failure of a dream pushed primarily from urban centers, simply trying to replicate themselves in more of the country rather than take a more holistic view of the economy and regional needs. I personally don't agree with it, and think that "bluecollar" work is vital to economies.

What troubles me is that proponents of UBI (such as yourself) conflate UBI with the end of "bluecollar" work, when the two aren't related.

You're arguing, in essence, that UBI need to be part of a whole package of social change, or not happen at all.

I agree we need to compromise: detach the notion of UBI from the death of "bluecollar" work! UBI is an enabler of the "bluecollar" work those people want -- not its enemy!

Why are you surprised people reject UBI when you tacitly assume it destroys rather than enables their goals?

That's the root of my frustration with you conflating the issues: you're projecting the failure of the messaging with some kind of fundamentalist intransigence, then throwing your hands up and going "well screw the whole thing!"

I haven't been out of work against my will, but I have been without pay against my will, so I can relate.

Still, the point of welfare is to let people survive and retrain if that's what needed to find a new job. Job obsolescence is only going to be a fact of life now, and I can't see fighting it as something good. Jobs are means to an end.

I believe society will need to redefine its attitude towards jobs; UBI is meant to let people survive that process.

Still, regardless of my arguments, facts on the ground are that it really sucks to find oneself obsolete and unemployable. I understand that. But I believe that trying to prevent it by inventing more bullshit jobs is a solution worse than the problem itself.

> I haven't been out of work against my will, but I have been without pay against my will, so I can relate.

No you can't. The whole discussion here is around the impact of _not working_ on one's self-esteem, not the impact of not being paid. Unless you've spent considerable time with nothing productive to do, you really can't relate. You may have an image in your head that with all that spare time you'll complete your side projects or do that DIY project you've been putting off, but the reality is that you stay productive for a few weeks to a month and then sink into a rut.

While I agree that having productive work is good for one's self esteem, I'm not sure you can say the same about explicitly unproductive work.

Imagine a job where people were paid to fold letters and put them into envelopes.

If there was no affordable, reliable automation that would be productive work, good for self-esteem. But if the company had automated all the real mailings, and out of charity the boss kept humans folding blank pages that were tossed in the trash? I doubt that job would be as good for the self esteem.

Yeah I think one of the important things is that the work is genuinely necessary.

Are you talking from your own experience here, I can't see the sort of person who can take initiative to complete a programming project or start a business being able to come to a position where they can't find something productive to do?

Really? I know lots of people who start but don't finish side projects. I also know a few people who've been jobless for longer periods and many of them start to lose their drive and initiative. The longest I've been out of work was 6 weeks between contracts and by week 4 I was starting to get into a rut.

I guess the thing I don't understand is, if we gave e.g. coal miners UBI, wouldn't that enable them to continue mining coal for fun? We could just get rid of the using it for energy part.

Lol, I think an important part of the coal issue is that those who were employed as miners were comparatively very well paid, like around twice a teacher's salary (anecdotally: dad was teacher, football coach was miner). Those that could get jobs were often taking a hefty pay cut too, and a cut in social status.

Mining had a romantic "powerful men working against nature, and amidst untold dangers, to 'keep the lights on' for every home and industry" ethos that cleaning dishes in a pub kitchen doesn't.

Having UBI should mean people have some money to live on but we can't then be complacent with our resources and waste them mining for a hobby. We need to redirect people to find esteem in useful work (building community, reducing waste, generating value).

> We need to redirect people to find esteem in useful work (building community, reducing waste, generating value).

I think this is the most important revelation. While I'm a proponent of the UBI as well, I think this is the harder part which we need to find a good solution to; it seems likely that if you give free money to all the opiod addicts, its only going to make their problems worse (making a really huge generalization here; not suggesting all unemployed people are addicts).

the self-esteem value in work isn't necessarily just in the doing. It's knowing you're providing a service to society (and more importantly, your family and local community), that you're working as part of a team who support each other, the social aspects of shared experiences and probably many other reasons I can't think of right now. I can't imagine mining coal to be independently fun in the way that programming or design can be.

You can provide a service to society without traditional work paid for by a company - many do. And UBI would not prevent people from seeking out traditional work.

That would be UBI plus increased healthcare costs for lung diseases.

> it's probably the single most common argument people bring up against UBI.

I disagree with this statement. The most common argument I see is that it's prohibitively expensive (e.g. we would have to triple our GDP while simultaneously dealing with the fact that we would lose a significant chunk of the labor force).

> endless invention of utterly nonsense jobs (dig a hole, fill it up, dig a hole, fill it up...)

You are going to need a citation for this being the obvious outcome. Every advancement that has wiped out massive amounts of industries has just resulted in an increase in expectations for quality of life for members of society and subsequently demand for new things creating more jobs.

Heavy machinery wiped out a massive chunk of the labor force a long time ago, yet they moved onto to other jobs providing products/services built on top of the new wealth created by the machinery.

If everyone took your view of replacement jobs being pointless, we would have never advanced once we reached the point of having the technology required to feed people consistently.

> I disagree with this statement. The most common argument I see is that it's prohibitively expensive

My impression is that costs are second most common argument against; usually, people point out that a decent UBI could probably be covered solely from dropping all other forms of welfare and simplification of bureaucracy that follows.

> You are going to need a citation for this being the obvious outcome. Every advancement that has wiped out massive amounts of industries has just resulted in an increase in expectations for quality of life for members of society and subsequently demand for new things creating more jobs.

Start with CGP Grey's "Humans Need Not Apply", then continue to every single topic about automation on HN in the past few years. It's a pretty well-discussed issue.

> If everyone took your view of replacement jobs being pointless, we would have never advanced once we reached the point of having the technology required to feed people consistently.

Being a replacement job doesn't make it pointless; being pointless makes it pointless.

My argument is that the market is entirely able to provide pointless jobs - especially in aggregate, where one person's job cancels out results of another. As an example, one could point to a big part of advertising industry. The problem with such jobs is that they're zero-sum games, capable of wasting ever-increasing amounts of resources.

As for stopping advancement - fortunately, sustenance is not the only motivation leading to progress, so I think we totally should stop forcing people to work once we can reliably feed and shelter them.

It's true that a lot of people will waste their time on UBI.

So what? A lot of people are wasting their time now.

The difference is that UBI vastly lowers the risks and costs of starting new businesses, pursuing original research, and doing creative work of all kinds.

Even if only a small percentage of the population is interested in those things, you're still going to get an economic explosion. At the very least there will be plenty of new jobs, and it's not impossible there will be whole new classes of jobs that aren't available now.

Combine UBI with some gentle nudges towards self-education through free or low cost online resources and you have the potential for a new post-industrial revolution.

>usually, people point out that a decent UBI could probably be covered solely from dropping all other forms of welfare and simplification of bureaucracy that follows.

Not even close, not even the right order of magnitude. Current welfare only applies to a tiny percent of the population (low income), and it's not even the UBI amount. Once you give it to everyone (you know... "universal"), the costs absolutely explode.

I don't know about in the US, but in the UK when the Green party attempted to propose UBI they were ridiculed because it would be so expensive. Apparently even the average person can see there are orders of magnitude between the cost of bureaucracy and the cost of UBI.

This argument is nonsense because the costs of not having UBI are much higher.

They include lost economic opportunity, crime, lost productivity, extra healthcare spending, and others.

Unfortunately they're second order costs, so they're invisible to people who take a simple moral view of unemployment and can't think beyond that to a place where they can make realistic predictions of economic cause and effect.

I think everyone agrees that when UBI is introduced the minimum wage should be removed. Hopefully this will allow everyone to do a job that produces a little bit of value to the world.

> I think everyone agrees that when UBI is introduced the minimum wage should be removed.

Everyone does not agree! Dropping minimum wages would mean UBI becomes a wage subsidy for employers.

Do you really think people are stupid enough to work menial jobs for little money when they can sustain themselves on an alternate source of income? Employers would have to increase their wages/benefits to a point where people would want to work.

This has already happened with the UBI tryout in Finland. You'll get a basic income but will want to improve on that. Employers have suggested lower salaries for persons they know are participating for, you know, "since you have this additional income anyway".

At least in this one case the employee didn't accept the lower offer, thankfully.

I guess you can look at it that way. But the point is that we want to produce employment. So yeah, subsidise away.

I think this is one of the most interesting areas for debate. Presumably if UBI was high enough employers would have to set wages high enough to get people to do them. If all of my basic costs were met, I could motivate myself to work 40 hours cleaning offices to pay for a holiday, but I'm not sure I would do it if all I could buy was a couple of beers.

I'm not sure about this one, but maybe cutting minimum wage is how you sell it to business?

But might you not work just for the satisfaction of producing something of value to the world?

I would love to drift aimlessly while being given money for doing nothing. I recently took 18 months of work to just drift around the country visiting friends and family. No side projects. No goals. No way to succeed or fail.

It was wonderful. I'd be very happy to be paid to do it. I don't see how anyone can be unhappy like that.

There are plenty of very wealthy people with enough money to never have to work again at a relatively young age, who continue working well into their 70s. It just depends if you love what you do.

My grandfather was a master butcher, he got a part time job at a butcher's shop after he retired purely as something to do because he loved it.

Is it "because he loved it" or is it because his identity is so tied up in being a butcher, doing useful work, that he can't cope with no longer identifying in that way?

For my retired father it's very much the latter, I feel, he works for free doing similar work to what he did before retirement.

well, it is better to identify with what you have been doing all your life, than identify with couch, beer and TV.

I'd go mad. I fall into the camp of wealthy enough to do nothing, but too driven to do nothing. People are just different and any UBI policy needs to address these differences. TBH, I suspect driven people will generally just sort themselves out anyway. I certainly would.

Me too. I think we both would just work. You still make money. We can buy teslas or something fancy.

> no one wants to drift aimlessly while being given money for doing nothing, no matter how great that might sound on the surface.

That is not true. Plenty of people are happy to retire. And quite a few people who have the means choose not to work.

Humans are not minions looking for master

Not all humans, many seem to want to have someone to tell them what to do.

The upset with the british miners would have been much less damaging if as the financial fortunes of the mines declined they had allowed wages to fall and numbers working to reduce, so people could drift into other work. Instead the unions fought tooth and nail to keep pay and employment high until it suddenly collapsed dropping a huge number of people onto the labour market at once.

The graph here is interesting in that regard: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-15445418

The manpower dropped steadily until 1970, when the numbers failed to drop further. Presumably Thatcher 'unblocked' the unionization that prevented the continuation of this steady decline between 74-80

Remember that the collapse of British coal mining happened long before global warming was a popular issue; it was purely an economic issue.

And in some places simply resource exhaustion, the inevitable end of any extraction industry. There's a "miner's club" at the end of my street but it's been decades since any mining went on here; a bit further away is http://nationalminingmuseum.com/

(Scotland and the north of England is in many ways a post-resource industry country. Lots of early iron and coal extraction here -> steel production -> shipbuilding/armaments/consumer durables/buildings -> Empire. Now almost all of that production chain is gone, and Glasgow has a space satellite industry instead)

I wish to die

if that's enough

for next generations to live

But it isn't enough

I've to do

A little more

I've to leave fellow men

without jobs

because evolution only cares

about survival in short term

but i can care

and that's my burden

I care enough

to kill your son

if that means

a million more

will live

without cancer

without smoke

without wondering if tomorrow

the air will be breathed or will be chocked

Ontario has been coal-free for a few years: http://www.ieso.ca/power-data/supply-overview/transmission-c...

There are many confounding factors (recession in 2008-2009) but generally, the number of days with smog advisories has been on the decline in Ontario as well: http://airqualityontario.com/history/aqi_advisories_stats.ph...

Note that in general, across North America (not sure about the world at large) electricity consumption per capita has also been on the decline, to the extent that overall/absolute electricity consumption is down in large areas like Ontario[1]. I haven't done any research, but I surmise this is due to factors like more energy-efficient devices and time-of-day usage being pushed onto the retail user. (In additional to the aforementioned recession causing loss of manufacturing/factories)

1. http://www.ieso.ca/power-data/demand-overview/historical-dem...

Unsure how related it is, but within Canada, Ontario's energy is notoriously expesive [0]

[0] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/why-does-electr...

And yet merely average in the context of the rest of North America.

But you'd never know it from the rantings of people in Ontario, who feel very persecuted.

If my local area had to pay the global average but my local region mostly paid much less I'd be pissed as hell too.

You might as well tell as starving kid in Appalachia to suck it up because people starve in Africa too.

True although Ontario also has a geographical problem.

The majority of the population lives in a very small part of the province, so the electricity for the rest of the province is subsidized.

Most of the ranting from Ontarians is because of how horribly the government has handled our power sector in general.

I agree overall in principle. But then I also look at the fact that Ontario no longer has any coal generation, and only 15 years ago was part of the blackout that wiped out the whole northeastern part of NA for three days, and nothing close to that level of catastrophe has happened since. And there's a huge amount of new solar and wind. The system has evolved rapidly. The pricing has to reflect that. But I don't agree with the way it has been privatized in bits and pieces with all sorts of private and public bureaucracies incompetently managing things.

I live rural and I've seen the ugly side of Hydro One... local area class action lawsuit over some really nasty brownouts that wiped out people's appliances a few years ago.

Can anyone please explain why electricity is called hydro?

Because a large amount of Ontario/Quebec electricity came from hydroelectric sources, and because the energy utility company in Ontario is Hydro One and in Quebec Hydro Quebec, "hydro" has sorta become synonymous.

Google can:

https://www.google.ca/search?q=why%20is%20electricity%20call...

If a waterway is used to make it i.e. a dam.

What's the deal with natural gas? It doesn't seem "renewable"; isn't it extracted just like petrol? Is it just that it burns cleaner? Doesn't burning it still produce carbon dioxide?

It's certainly cleaner as mentioned in the other comment.

Another factor is that natural gas turbines can be turned on and off more quickly than coal fired plants. This is because a gas turbine is literally burning the gas in the turbine, it's akin to a jet engine on an airplane you can throttle up and down. A coal fired power plant is really a boiler that creates steam, and then the steam is fed through a turbine. Heating up all the water to make steam actually takes a long time.

In an era of renewable energy sources (solar, wind) that fluctuate more unpredictably, having that "dispatchability" is really valuable.

http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/55433.pdf

This brings up a very important point. Electricity supply must be carefully balanced with demand and so that's why most regions have ISO (independent system operators) to facilitate the coordination needed to maintain system balance.

Typically coal and nuclear power plants are "base" load stations, providing always-on capacity. It's not always possible to vary their output to match demand, so typically (natural) gas power plants are used to match the remaining variable load. The start up/shut down cycle for these plants is far less costly.

There's live stats for the UK's national grid. There's a couple of sites that show it, e.g. http://gridwatch.co.uk/

Really interesting to see.

Britain also has the interesting culture of tea drinking in the evenings - almost all using electric kettles. I believe the grid uses hydro stations to cover the load of this. Typically peaks during breaks and/or after popular TV shows in the evening.

That used to be the case, yes. Since the arrival of many-channel TV and changed viewing habits (e.g. lots more internet use) the advert-break-effect has lessened considerably.

If you were to turn off the coal supply, wouldn't the boiler quickly lose heat, particularly since we're extracting energy from it?

Even if it takes an hour to cool down, since daily and weekly patterns are generally known, can't they reduce or stop the coal supply an hour in advance?

In a world with more renewable energy, perhaps coal plants can be designed with smaller boilers, to strike a different tradeoff?

Coal plants are not designed to be constantly started and stopped. For one, constantly cooling and reheating the equipment would damage the metal.

That may be true historically, but is it not possible to design them in the future with that goal in mind?

You are burning a lot of coal for no energy if you spend an hour a day starting and an hour a day stopping a plant.

I assume "less energy", not "no energy", but in any case, what better alternative would you suggest in a grid with significant amounts of intermittent sources, like 70%?

Pumped hydro or battery storage are one possibility. Smart pricing to industry who can throttle back usage if demand outstrips supply is another.

Or some combo of both of them.

Yes, it burns cleaner (a lot cleaner, coal plants need scrubbers on the stacks).

NG also is easier to transport (pipelines rather than hauling it with vehicles or boats) and does not cause the release of radioactive particles (which coal does do).

Natural gas also results in significantly less C02 released per unit of energy produced.

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=73&t=11

To save others a click: it's slightly less than a factor of two better. 214-228 lbs C02 per btu, vs. 117 for natural gas.

You also have to factor in the differences in the plants. So I guess it often works out to slightly more than a factor of two.

The other side of it is that unburned coal doesn't leak into the air as a potent greenhouse gas the way methane does.

The other side of the waste equation is also worse for coal. Fly ash is typically radioactive enough that if it were produced at a nuclear facility it would be categorized as nuclear waste.

To be clear, burning coal concentrates the uranium and thorium that naturally occur in coal by a factor of about 10. There is still only a very small amount. Living within the stack shadow (~1km) of a coal fired plant only increases your exposure to background radiation by about 5%

What about "biomass"? I've read that wood burning facilities are significantly worse than coal shops when it comes to emissions; a simple google could answer my question I know but it seems you're into this stuff so I'd like your take..

The emissions are counterbalanced by the fact that carbon was captured by those woods.

Of course, assuming you aren't accounting emission due to the operation itself.

Natural gas releases significantly less carbon for the equivalent energy. It's also much cleaner.

A gas stove is natural gas, and they exhaust right into the house. You'd never do that with coal.

Natural gas is primarily methane (CH4) with about half the energy coming from burning hydrogen, compared to 100% coming from carbon in the case of coal, so you get about %50 CO2 for the same amount of energy produced.

I hope you mean that the energy from burning methane comes from breaking C—H bonds, not burning hydrogen gas.

Breaking bonds requires input energy, rather than producing energy. Once the bonds are broken, you have free floating hydrogen and carbon. These can then form new bonds with oxygen, releasing energy as they do.

I'm pretty sure that's what they meant. But actually, converting methane into H2 is a serious proposal for essentially eliminating CO2 emissions from NG usage. The idea is that you do this at centralised facilities, using various iterations on Steam Methane Reforming (SMR); this method takes CH4 and H2O as input and produces separated H2 and CO2 as output.

SMR is already being done at large scale for H2 production (IIRC we would only have to scale it up by 100x), but currently the CO2 is mainly released back to the atmosphere. If instead one would store the CO2 permanently underground in old gas reservoirs and saline aquifers, NG would give us a mostly clean energy source. I really hope we will see this happen, but it depends a lot on government action...

There's a nifty new method for extracting hydrogen from methane which involves bubbling it through molten tin:

http://www.chemicalprocessing.com/articles/2015/researchers-...

The carbon comes off as powder, which is easier to sequester than CO2 because you can just throw it in the bin.

How much energy does it take to mine tin and how available is it? I'd thought it was not all that common, but I might just be thinking of near-surface tin deposits near Mesopotamia.

Loads of energy - as much as two Cornish pasties a day! [1]

More seriously, i don't actually know. I think of tin as being quite cheap. Note that it's a catalyst in this reaction, so you don't need a giant supply of it.

[1] http://www.cornishpastyassociation.co.uk/about-the-pasty/his...

You can even pyrolyse methane, and the result us pure hydrogen and pure carbon. This is a side reaction to the most commonly process used to produce acetylene from methane, and this can be tuned to produce mostly carbon and hydrogen. The disadvantage of this method is that it is less economical, since only half the hydrogen is produced per unit of methane compared to steam reforming.

It's not renewable, but there's a ton of it. Gas also has very low particulate and other emissions.

It's also more economical. Something like a coal or nuclear plant produces power whether you need it or not.

Technically, nuclear is easily adjustable. Operators typically want to run nuclear at full capacity because the construction investment is a dominant part in the cost structure, i.e. you save very little of the cost if you produce less electricity, but there is no technical problem in using nuclear as adjustment power.

Natural gas is mostly fossil, but in my country (Finland), where total gas consumption is 26 TWh per year, the capacity for bio-generated gas (mostly from waste, e.g. processing of sewer waste) was 350 GWh a couple of years ago and is growing rapidly. So, currently around 1.5 % of methane gas is renewable. It is estimated that up to 10 TWh per year could be generated, which would bring the proportion to something like one third.

From point of view of greenhouse gas emissions, the impact is quite large because methane produced by biological decomposition is a potent greenhouse gas, so having more of it burned in power plants is definitely good.

Natural gas isn't renewable, but a natural gas infrastructure can actually contribute towards solving the energy storage problem.

The idea is that surplus electricity from renewable energy is used to create hydrogen which is added to the natural gas grid and burned later in gas turbines when the demand exceeds the supply of renewables. A significant amount of hydrogen can be mixed in with natural gas without issues.

For the longer term, people are also working on generating methane (CH4), which is the main component of natural gas, from electricity and CO2. Burning that would be carbon neutral as well.

It's better than coal but in terms of CO2 it's the same.l (a factor .5 according to the article - which isn't insignificant)

Gas can be extracted from renewable sources too, and that gas works in the same infrastructure so hopefully biogas will displace more of the NG production in the future.

It does, but about half that of coal. The reason for that is nearly half of the energy in burning natural gas comes from hydrogen(rather than carbon) atoms binding with oxygen.

less CO2, NOX, sulfur dioxide, radioactive particles, PM10 and PM2.5

There is "methane cracking", which is probably the next step

If you ever get the opportunity to visit a power station, you should definitely do so. I visited the coal-fired station in Tilbury when it was running and I was amazed at the sheer scale of the operation. The tour showed how the coal was processed, the water processing plant, the turbine hall, the control room and you could even stand at the bottom of an offline furnace and feel the incredible heat from the other furnace (connected by a tunnel).

Did this emerge from routine operations, or was there a directed effort to have a "coal-free day"? The article didn't seem to clearly say either way.

Routine operations:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/apr/21/britain-...

So simply the result of the shifting energy source mix.

> Last year, the share of coal in total power generation dropped to 9 percent, down from 23 percent in 2015 and 40 percent in 2012.

How have they done this so quickly?

http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk

Gas

gas, nukes, wind turbines.

Some plants have been converted partially to burn biomass, such as wood pellets. Worse than coal for pollution.

Better for the climate.

Not when the wood is coming from non-renewable sources. I've read much is sourced from the US, and is not from quickly-growing softwood but long established slow-growing hardwood which burns better in power plants. When the end goal is to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere, destroying carbon sinks and burning them is one of the most counterproductive activities you could engage in.

There's a reason we stopped burning wood as our primary fuel source several hundred years ago. There's not enough to burn, and it doesn't renew fast enough to satisfy demand. Coal met that demand. Returning to wood makes zero sense, unless you want to satisfy a short-term legal/policy goalpost at the expense of missing the bigger picture.

Personally, I think that while reducing coal is a laudable medium-term goal, this is not better for the climate. Whether you burn wood or coal, both are producing CO2, but when you burn wood your are also reducing the size of an important carbon sink.

Surely something that emitted pure greenhouse gases, no large particles or soot but disastrous for the climate would be pollution, by definition?

I'm thinking that better for the climate (wood pellets) but worse for (what GP defines as) pollution is a trade off, and probably people are going to argue about that balance, but at the end of the day if we pollute the planet today and just hope our grandchildren will be able to fix the problem or suffer the consequences then that is pretty poor.

I wonder if they have data going back to the 1800s to actually back this up. In the 1970s, for example, the country faced day-long blackouts[0] due to industrial action by coal miners (I think limited electricity was still generated for hospitals etc. using existing coal stocks, but there were other sources of energy at the time such as nuclear power plants).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Day_Week

Live view, including other countries: http://www.electricitymap.org

Next up Germany and Poland, please.

http://www.coalmap.eu/#/climate-problem

The Germans switched off their nuclear power "to save the environment", which is why they have to burn coal, because the solar and wind aren't stable enough to supply consistent power. They also had to switch off some of their wind farms.

Kunze and Lehmann [1] show with facts and figures that your assertion is false.

> Critics of renewable energy have mocked the Energiewende, claiming that it has led to an increase in coal power and related CO2 emissions in Germany. But Conrad Kunze and Paul Lehmann of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ show that this is a myth. German coal generation and CO2 emissions rose not because of but in spite of the Energiewende. They would have been even higher if Germany had not phased out its nuclear power and embarked on its remarkable renewable energy path. “There is no dark side to the Energiewende”.

[1] http://energypost.eu/energiewende-dark-side/

Wow, surely that's got to be one of the biggest false dichotomies I've seen in years. No-one is arguing Germany would be better off if they kept their nuclear powerplants and didn't invest in solar and wind. Rather, the argument is Germany should have kept nuclear while also pivoting to solar and wind; that would indisputably have given a much bigger positive effect than the current version of Energiewende.

I'm not sure why HN is so market friendly, but when it comes to nuclear power, most are very much in favor.

Although nuclear power is the most market distorted energy production there is. If societies - see Fukushima - wouldn't pay for the risks insurers don't take and heavily subsidize nuclear power profiting energy global companies, there would be no nuclear power.

If as a startup I'd get that amount of money from our government, I would have no need for customers.

So hurray for free markets and that Germany stopped this nonsense.

The fact that insurance needs to be subsidized has more to do with the extreme possibilities--one bad accident and the insurer is broke. Insurers exclude terrorism and war for the same reason. And for the same reason the government effectively subsidizes those risks by giving aid after such events.

Also, a nuclear plant will be responsible for any and all externalities. You can't hide a radiation incident. Whereas coal can poison thousands of people for years and the emitter and their insurer would never have to worry about liability. Likewise, thousands of solar panel installers can become disabled and draw benefits without anybody blaming the industry, or even thinking to compare with injury rates for similar work at nuclear plants.

Finally, the costs imposed on nuclear power by unnecessarily burdensome regulation far exceed any subsidies. If there was a less regulated market there'd be many more nuclear plants. There'd also probably be many more, albeit mostly minor, nuclear incidents, just like there are many incidents with coal (e.g. fly ash reservoir breaches). But in any event, as things stand we only demand perfection from one industry while accepting some number of externalities as the cost of doing business in every other industry.

> The fact that insurance needs to be subsidized has more to do with the extreme possibilities--one bad accident and the insurer is broke. Insurers exclude terrorism and war for the same reason. And for the same reason the government effectively subsidizes those risks by giving aid after such events.

The government should also discourage terrorism and war when possible.

> If societies - see Fukushima - wouldn't pay for the risks insurers don't take and heavily subsidize nuclear power profiting energy global companies, there would be no nuclear power.

Nuclear power is much less subsidised than solar power or wind power. The whole solar panel industry would not have existed without endless subsidies. As for the risks, nuclear remains the safest form of power.

http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energ...

The whole solar panel industry would not have existed without endless subsidies.

That is not literally true. Commercial solar panels for both remote-area power and spacecraft existed before subsidies aimed at large-scale generation.

On the other hand, the nuclear power industry certainly wouldn't have existed without entirely state-funded, military nuclear programs.

I also feel we have never quite get to the true cost of nuclear. In the UK there are obsolete nuclear stations where nothing much is happening to decommission them, and they are already billions over budget in their decommissioning. I have begun to feel that it is the ultimate in cheap power now, and the next generation can pick up the cost.

>I'm not sure why HN is so market friendly, but when it comes to nuclear power, most are very much in favor.

If everyone was only market friendly, nobody would be advocating for solar/wind/coal/etc. None of them compete with coal and gas when it comes to unsubsidized cost.

Solar is cheaper than coal without subsidies (and coal is/was subsidized a lot in western countries over the last decades primarily b/c of jobs).

Not to nitpick but "advocating for ../../coal/etc. [...] None of them compete with coal" doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

No it's not, otherwise that would be massive news. The only way it's cheaper is through charging coal for externalities, which is the exact point I'm making.

There is nothing whatsoever in the link you've posted which contradicts anything in my comment above. What's more, some of that does not add up:

> Most likely, it would have occurred in the same way if Germany had not phased out nuclear and promoted renewables.

Yes, if Germany both did not have renewables and also had not phased out nuclear, the amount of energy generation from coal might have remained the same. But if they had not phased out nuclear but kept the renewables, the energy generation from coal would not have kept the same, because they would have had the nuclear to use instead of the coal.

And another really silly comment here:

> Nuclear plants are gradually shutting down, but what is missing is a mechanism to retire the coal industry.

If the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing, you can't generate electricity from solar panels and wind. So you can't phase out coal or nuclear power and replace it with solar or wind, because there is no way to store the electrity. It has to be generated on demand. Already wind power in Germany is oversupplied and they are paying people to switch off the turbines.

And here, repeating the same nonsense again:

> In Germany it took a long time for renewable energy not to be portrayed anymore as a niche activity, unable to provide large-scale power. In international debates this notion still seems commonplace. Mistakenly, as we have tried show.

And you've failed, because you've completely ignored the issue of supply and demand. There has to be either a way to store the electricity, or a way to generate electricity when the sun is not shining and wind is not blowing. The only way to store electricity which isn't pie in the sky is hydro, and Germany doesn't have enough hydro capacity to store the electrity, and won't have it because of geography.

> Important issues still need to be solved, such as safeguarding security of supply with high shares of volatile renewables

Which is what the coal is doing, now that the nuclear is switched off, and the whole of the rest of the article is not worth the pixels it's printed on.

German 'environmentalists' (I use that word ironically) are indeed something else. They did this after Fukushima. Are they afraid there'll be a baltic sea tsunami?

No German power plant is in danger of a tsunami indeed. But what was worrisome about the Fukushima disaster was, that the tsunami was the trigger, but the nuclear disaster was mostly created by human failure. The reactor was too old, and failed purely because the lack of electrical power and the disability to deal with it. So, how many possible failure modes we have not considered also? Not to mention, that we don't have a good plan about what to do with the nuclear waste.

Another component is, that the nuclear plants are only operating part-time as more and more maintenance is required, France just faced severe power shortage, as too many of their aging nuclear plants where down due to maintenance.

I certainly would be happy, if we used less coal. And currently, quite a few coal plants in Germany are running rather for the profits of the operators than for the grids requirements. As the renewable energies grow, very soon quite a few coal plants are going to be decommissioned and replaced with on-demand gas power.

Seems to solution is to replace reactors with newer better saver ones.

That would be a possibility. However the costs for those which are currently being built seem to skyrocket far beyond what renewable energies would cost - and that does not yet include the unsolved waste problem.

To be fair, it wasn't the environmentalists who suddenly got the urge to do this after Fukushima: the anti-nuclear movement had been talking about that for decades, and surely not for fears of "baltic sea tsunamis". Fukushima was when the then-current government suddenly found it opportune to quickly reverse their reversal of the plan to slowly phase out nuclear power.

And how to deal with energy mix problems is a topic with widely varying opinions among people you might classify as environmentalists.

Are you saying the german anti-nuclear people are largely distinct from the german 'environmentalists'?

I'm not sure why you think I'm saying that.

My comment primarily points out that framing it as something that "environmentalists did on a whim after Fukushima, because Tsunamis oh so funny" is gross misrepresentation. Also that "environmentalist" is a very broad label.

It's not like being anti-nuclear is a niche sentiment. A large percentage of the general population is "anti-nuclear" in that they support existing plans (=laws) to phase out nuclear power. E.g. in 2010, before Fukushima, ~50 % didn't want delays to the plans, and only 25 % supported large delays to it. The government added delays. Fukushima happened, and within days they changed their opinion back and reaffirmed the old plans (more or less).

If you look at people more actively supporting the movement, sometimes being part of it since decades ago, when it was a niche opinion, I'd say in many cases they are less motivated by protecting the environment in general than they are by protecting humans, or protesting bad policies. But there is of course a big overlap with environmentalists.

I remember discussing this with a German acquaintance in the early 90s. Extremely anti-nuclear because of Chernobyl and the food contamination scares in its aftermath, and it didn't seem like a niche view at the time. Presumably that legacy lives on.

People are scared of nuclear in Poland due to the accident in the neighbour country, but it will have to happen. It's sustainable to mine bituminous coal for 20 years. Lignite will stay a bit longer unless solar or thorium will take over.

I just sorta assumed they didn't care much beyond the pure economics? (Maybe that's what you are saying.)

It's worse than that. Poland's government is giving preferential treatment to coal fired electricity even when other sources are cheaper. They're deliberately obstructing renewables because Poland is already oversupplied with coal and coal-fired electricity. Polish coal mines have repeatedly been unable to turn a profit and rescued only by government subsidies:

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-poland-coal-idUSKCN0XC209

Paying extra money to cut emissions is one thing. Paying over-market rates to prop up the filthiest fuel around is really perverse. But it happens, directly and indirectly, wherever there are Coal Jobs to save. I've noticed similar propping in Australia, Germany, India, USA, China, and Czechia too.

If a group of workers is politically weak they get screwed over when they're no longer needed. If the workers are politically powerful they want the rest of society to subsidize their refusal to change. I don't know if anywhere has achieved a happy medium where workers in obsolete industries aren't abandoned by the rest of society yet are willing to walk toward the future instead of digging their heels in against it.

Do you mean Czechoslovakia?

While Czechia is a new name, it's not Czechoslovakia for more than 24 years. It used to be Czech Republic in the meantime (and still is, Czechia is only a shortened name)

I thought they were calling themselves Czechia now but it looks like the announced name change hasn't really caught on yet.

That country has not existed since 1992! Or is there some point I am missing?

Earth doesn't care where its coal gets burned https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_China

Yes, a global perspective is important. That said, I think it's appropriate to regard Britain's going without coal for a day as an accomplishment. It shows that a country with a history of using coal can go without. Given your comment, this is something you care about. Do you see nothing positive in this submission?

Nothing positive or negative about it. Call me a destructive pessimist but I've thought a lot about this topic and I'm pretty sure that mankind will burn up all Cole that it can get its hands on (same for oil, gas and uranium). The first figure in the Wikipedia article backs me up at this point. On the world map of Cole reserves, GB is a white spot now. Instead of celebrating such acomplishments that are neglectable in the Longview we should think about the implications of burning up all fossils.

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