Germany lays out a path to quit coal by 2038

> government was great at missing even the most conservative goals on basically anything

The share of electricity from renewable energy has surpassed any goals so far.

The narrative of Germany’s dirty Energiewende rests on the idea that renewables could not live up to their promise to fill the gap of retiring nuclear reactors. Consequently, that gap needed to be closed by power generation from coal.

But if we look at the figures we get quite a different picture. The yellow line in Figure 2 above depicts how the amount of electricity from nuclear declined from 2000 to 2014. Due to the decommissioning of old plants, nuclear power had been declining steadily. When the German government decided on the phase-out, in 2011, some nuclear power stations were shut down immediately and the output went down more quickly. Afterwards, the steady decline continued once more.

The green line shows the steady rise of renewable energy in the same period. In 2011, more electric energy was provided from renewable sources than from all nuclear facilities. In 2014, renewables achieved a share of approximately 29% in total electricity generation. So renewables have substituted the falling nuclear production in terms of total annual power generation and are very likely to continue doing so until 2022 when the last nuclear plant will be shut down.

[1] https://reneweconomy.com.au/the-myth-of-the-dark-side-of-ger...

(I would encourage you to read the whole thing).

That is a gross misrepresentation of said research.

The idea was that yeah, if in theory you don't add any new fossil generation then it might work out.

Yet think for a moment what that would mean. Stopping all car production today, no new gas/oil wells, no new steel mills and cement factories (technologies where clean alternatives don't practically exist at scale). Stopping any kind of fossil fuel plant construction even in developing countries. All of that now.

This isn't a plan that is realistically feasible to implement (even though it would probably be the right thing to do).

So yeah, it totally makes sense to shut down existing particularly dirty fossil fuel plants, because it's not particularly realistic to completely stop the production of new fossil fuel infrastructure immediately.

2. It was Schröder who made the decision to take Germany off nuclear power and also to make the country energy-dependent on Russia:

As Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder was a strong advocate of the Nord Stream pipeline project, which aims to supply Russian gas directly to Germany, thereby bypassing transit countries. The agreement to build the pipeline was signed two weeks before the German parliamentary election. On 24 October 2005, just a few weeks before Schröder stepped down as Chancellor, the German government guaranteed to cover 1 billion euros of the Nord Stream project cost, should Gazprom default on a loan…Soon after stepping down as chancellor, Schröder accepted Gazprom’s nomination for the post of the head of the shareholders’ committee of Nord Stream AG, raising questions about a potential conflict of interest.

Russia now provides 35% of Germany’s oil imports and 39% of the natural gas imports.

Furthermore, Ontario's economy has been effectively stagnant over that period, and the cost of energy clearly played some role in that.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_288 (though German-extracted coal is largely too expensive to bother with now)

This is misleading. It totally depends on what kind of sushi you have. Tuna rolls are probably the most mercury dense and you'd need to eat a lot of them to eat the equivalent of one tuna sandwich.

For people not eating shark and swordfish the primary risk is albacore tuna and even then the standard deviation is very high (mostly having to do with where the fish was caught).

Basically don't eat tons of "high up in the food chain" seafood while pregnant and nothing bad will happen.

From a risk management perspective it's better to make sure you have working smoke detectors in your house and fire extinguishers scattered throughout your property before than to worry about mercury in seafood.

When I was in high school, there were of course multiple classrooms, and there was a relatively new chemistry lab. One of the other classrooms was in fact the old chemistry lab room, with a monolithic row of water taps and sinks along the middle of the room splitting the room in two, with school benches on the left and right of the sinks.

We had mathematics, biology and technical education in this room. Under the sinks were cabinets with wooden sliding doors, some of them were left open, others closed... One day something in the cabinets catches my attention: a brilliant reflecting puddle, with characteristic contact angle, so I realize I am seeing a puddle of mercury. About 15cl. I interrupt the class to point this out to the math teacher, who comes to check, and realizes I am right. We discuss how it ended up there, and we conclude it must have been there for many years, back when this was still the chemistry lab, and that someone wanted to get rid of the mercury and tried to drain it in the sink. The mercury being heavier than water probably refused to flush through the siphon ( U shape ) right above the puddle and over time leaked out somehow. The teacher was quite pissed he had been giving so many hours of class in this room, and didn't really feel like finishing class so we all just sat there bummed out... this was about year 2000.

About 3 years ago, I had a long fluorescent lamp in a rented house die, I knew there was mercury inside and that the shops that sells lamps are obliged to take these from the customer, so I very carefully take out the lamp from its housing, carry it carefully to the nearby hardware store, and give it to an employee at the check-out before shopping, I emphasize that they should handle the lamp carefully. I go buy a LED lamp in the same form factor, and when I check out to pay, the cashier tells me the lamp broke accidentally. I tell her that's not good, she says she knows, I ask how often these fluorescent tubes break in the shop, she says all the time, I ask how often is that: multiple times per day!

https://www.statista.com/statistics/604946/per-capita-coal-c...

Edit: sorry that link got pay walled. Try this one.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-per-capi...

This is 2015 data - and the US has narrowed the gap since.

Of course, things are changing in Germany. In the last year, there were week-long left-wing protests against clearing an old-growth forest for coal mining, which brought attention to the issue and might trigger some change. However, Greenpeace Germany's suggestion to shut off coal and switch to burning natural gas instead is met with some resistance across the political spectrum, given that Germany cannot procure gas from anywhere but Russia, and EU-Russian relationships are somewhat cool recently.

We'll see where we end up, I guess. In any case, Germany is still a much greener country than e.g. the United States, who recently stopped promoting climate protection policies altogether. Until we have convinced the United States that they need to protect the environment, there is scarce leverage (and scarce reason) to persuade the developing countries.

We don't have much else in terms of natural resources. So while coal absolutely must be phased out, it's surely not "absurd" that Germany historically relied on coal.

I can't imagine Peabody or Koch signing off on a 2038 deadline in the US.

And 2038 isn't that far out in the future.

Since wind power will be playing a large part in the transition, and that’s investment that mostly stays in the country, one could reasonably say the whole project is net positive anyway. It obviously is if you factor in climate change and particle emissions, because otherwise it wouldn’t be done.

The 2 billion / year perfectly align with existing efforts to reduce regional inequality, considering we’re mostly talking about rural areas in the east here. To the degree that they reduce other federal transfer programs, such as unemployment benefits or health care, the net difference is liable to be smaller anyway.

In any case: yes, obviously. Although Germany works both within the EU and the UN climate process to find collective solutions allowing other nations to also reduce emissions. China is actually becoming a positive example these days, installing vast amounts of renewable energy.

Phasing out coal in Germany obviously makes for a good argument in such talks. But even if it doesn’t, not burning coal and buying from China is still strictly better than burning coal and buying from China.

It’s sort of like smoking and getting regular exercise is better than just smoking.

Note that no coal plants have started construction since the events at Fukushima. (But perhaps you're referring to the original phase-out agreement from 2000.)

> After 2011, when Germany decided once and for all to phase out nuclear power, a total of 6.7 GW came into service while coal plants with a capacity of some 3.8 GW were retired. Since planning and construction of a coal-fired power station takes at least three years, capacity added after 2011 had been planned before the accident in Fukushima, Japan – the event that led to Germany’s final nuclear phase-out policy.

> As of 2017, no new lignite-powered stations are planned, according to the Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzagentur). The possibly last new hard coal unit ever built in Germany is envisaged to come online in 2018: Uniper’s Datteln 4, with a capacity of 1,055 MW, after years of legal struggle with local environmental organisations.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/coal-germany

I live in North Germany and read it as this: we will build large grids across the North Sea to share offshore and onshore electricity and connect it via HVDC lines to Hydro storage in Norway and other upcoming forms of storage (like Power to gas systems...).