The coal mine that ate Hambacher forest | Hacker News Reader

The coal mine that ate Hambacher forest

bbc.co.uk

93 pointsjfk13131 comments

> To add insult to injury, the coal that is extracted here is brown coal, also known as lignite, which emits particularly high levels of carbon dioxide.

This surprised me, because surely you get one molecule of CO2 per atom of carbon in the coal, regardless of the kind of coal. But it seems there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my stoichiometry - lignite has a higher moisture content than other coals, so more of the energy liberated goes into boiling that water, so there is less energy produced per unit of carbon, which means more CO2 per unit of energy:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978008100...

Huh I would have guesses that the difference was in hydrocarbons themselves - the opposite of how Methane is peak hydrocarbon efficency by having four hydrogen bonds per carbon - if it has less energy/carbon dense configurations resulting in more CO2 than even other coals because it was made up of more wasteful structures like "rings" of carbons.

Lignite is more accurately described as "slightly more flammable dirt". It is an absolute outrage that we still burn it for energy.

I had a power company as a client once, years ago. They had a plant that burned lignite. I was new to the industry and asked what that was.

The response they gave me was “it’s like burning dirt.” Man, lignite is nasty stuff.

Burning freaking dirt. Can’t wait for this stuff to be outlawed.

The scale of the scars on the earth here is pretty staggering: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Hambach+Forest/@50.89999...

Impressive, aren't they? The industrial muscle keeping people warm and happy.

I assume Germany has a modern program of mine rehabilitation, so you're only able to see the parts that are currently part of the active mine. The historic mine footprint of an old mine is probably twice or thrice what is visible; much larger but invisible from satellite because it has been rehabilitated.

Eg, the area just north-west of Tagebau Hambach is probably mine rehab; you can tell because it is a deeper green than the surrounding farmland and if you look closely the massive contours of the waste emplacement areas might be visible.

If it can be rehabilitated, is it really so bad? Some are also coverted to lakes, in the hopes of creating attractive leisure destinations.

Forests take time to grow and mature. Animals that live in these forests often have nowhere to go when these are cut down. Especially smaller species may not have the ability to flee when the saws come. Also, forests in Germany often are reduced to unconnected patches separated by open fields. Large connected forests are rare.

Rehabilitation won't reverse the CO2 emissions. So yes, it's really so bad.

It was the last old forest in Germany. Like, it was a forest for 12000y, basically since the last ice age. Individual trees are only a couple hundred years old, but the ecosystem you get from many generations of trees growing in a mostly unmanaged forest is rather unique and due to the time scales involved irreplaceable.

And this can take decades, until swimming in the water doesn't impact health. Let alone the fact that the additional water to maintain the water level in an unnatural lake like that may be needed elsewhere. What many people forget is that during the excavation all kinds of metals and materials are uncovered leading to red water for the first couple of decades until everything is settled. I am from a german region (Lausitz) where all of that happened and believe me when I say that I'd rather have some out-of-the-job miners than big patches of land filled with lakes instead of "home towns".

Here is an area in eastern germany with lot's of opencast mining in the past (much bigger than what RWE did) - the lakes are former mines but there are some serious problems especially regarding quality of water and water levels

https://goo.gl/maps/2r1ZhDMHZVHf21ug8

It is rehab, I've been there and had to drive around it to get to the vantage point.

Edit: The pit looks like some lunar surface from one of the vantage points - it's wide enough to be larger than your field of view. Also, I'm not sure whether rehab is the right word for it, it's an area they built out of the non-coal material they had to dig out. IIRC the pitch for the pit was to turn it into an artificial lake.

That's correct (I live nearby). What you also don't see was what was in the way of the mine before it got there. It was populated space, all the towns got cleared out. Normally when someone blows up thousand-year-old cultural monuments we call it terrorism, but not when it's RWE (the mine operator) doing it. The compensation people get is nowhere near proportional to the damage - they get paid based on a fictional estimate of the value of their home. And they don't get to choose whether they get evicted or not.

RWE recently bulldozed a centuries-old church and surrounding town. They get away with it because of a fuckup by local politicians a while back. RWE was supposed to pay for the right to exploit that land, and local councils agreed to an offer to pay them in shares instead of in money. Now local council budgets are dependent on RWE dividends and therefore although technically they co-own RWE, in practice RWE owns them. The saddest thing is that lignite mining is not even commercially viable anymore - so these mines only continue to operate because of state subsidies (federal subsidies, which then partially end up in local councils via said dividends). The terrorists operating the mines claim that it's critical to keep them running because of the jobs that would be lost, but a couple years worth of the subsidy would be sufficient to pay the entire workforce (around 20k people nationwide work in that industry) their salaries for life. Meanwhile solar subsidies got cut for being "too expensive", shrinking that sector by 4x as many jobs. The fuckers now want to accelerate the pace of extraction because they have to shut down by 2038.

I cannot agree more! The only ones profiting from coal subsidies are RWE and company while evryone else pays for it. It would be much more worthwhile, even for RWE themselves, to just use the coal subsidies and plaster all active and potential strip mines with solar farms. But then we are talking about old German politics and corporate culture, so that won't happen anytime soon.

You are forgetting the part where RWE is also paying the income of a whole lot of miners, who would suddenly be without a job if the mines where to be closed.

That is the biggest political hurdle here, it's not solely RWE being greedy, a lot of it has to do with nobody being able to offer these miners any job alternatives once their mines are closed.

Yet these miners make up a substantial part of the population in certain German states, thus the result that majority of Germans want to exit coal but in those places where coal actually matters there's vehement opposition to closing them down [0].

[0] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/kohleausstieg-meh...

> You are forgetting the part where RWE is also paying the income of a whole lot of miners, who would suddenly be without a job if the mines where to be closed.

In all fairness, Germany lost about four times as many jobs when we destroyed our solar industry.

The only thing I'm aware off is that the Groko has been giving out way fewer licenses for PV installations, which has lead to a considerable slow-down in building out PV capabilities.

But afaik we didn't really destroy the industry, we just lost our edge [0], which has in part to do with industrial espionage [1], and in other parts with China simply out manufacturing anybody else as soon as they get the gist of building something.

[0] https://www.augsburger-allgemeine.de/wirtschaft/Der-Niederga...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial...

They ruined the home market, while China heavily subsidized theirs. It was a failure of politics.

That the German manufacturers were subsidy chasing production dilitantes did help neither. But yes, politicals played a role. Still do in solar to this day.

20k, roughly. Subsidies directly paid to them for just staying home would be much, much less then they are now for RWE and co. And honestly, 20k ain't that much in country of 80+ million people. Alao the problem would be much less severe if we hadn't countinued to actually train new miners until abcouple of years ago. Just keeping the existing ones employed until a very well earned early retirement would have avoided that 20k affected people. But hey, then the utilities and mining companies would have earned a lot less in subsidies.

20k miners against 100k wind power employees that now have to deal with zero new wind turbines being build in Germany, or 80k solar power employees who lost their jobs when the solar subsidies were axed...

There are a lot more "coal power employees" than just miners. Comparing entire sectors to just a subset of one is unfair.

Even the coal lobbyists admit that there are at most 50k jobs if you also count component suppliers and the like. 50% of the 20k direct employees are also 50 or over. We could just pay them early retirement and would get away cheaper than the damage the extra CO2 causes.

Could you please source that claim about the number of jobs being affected?

I find it somewhat implausible that whole German states could have such vastly different opinions on the coal exit when those directly affected supposedly only makeup 20k-50k people.

Because those kinds of numbers regularly embezzle where these people are spending their money. Wouldn't be the first time whole German communes suddenly become underdeveloped due to the biggest employers in the region shutting down/leaving.

That's why I can fully understand the people in those regions, they are presented with a choice that has no apparent advantage to them, only disadvantages.

Would you vote for your own job/income getting regulated in non-existence, when nobody offers you an alternative? Because that's the current situation: Nobody is offering alternatives to those people, yet everybody expects them to just give up their livelihoods.

I only have a German source: https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/braunkohlewirt...

> Der Bundesverband Braunkohle wies auf Anfrage darauf hin, dass seine Unternehmen auch für Beschäftigung bei Zulieferern sorgten und spricht von insgesamt etwa 50.000 Arbeitsplätzen.

> The German lignite coalition pointed out on request that their companies also provided employment for suppliers and speaks of a total of about 50,000 jobs.

Of course all of those jobs are concentrated around the mines. For those communities closing the mines is hard. But imho getting rid of lignite ASAP and just giving the affected people as much money as they got from working is the right way forward.

And how many jobs do you actaully get from one mine today? 10 when you used to have hundreds due to automation. These jobs are gone and won't come back regardless of mining or no mining. That nobody manages to communicate that to the people and offer them alternatives is a large reason things like the AfD. Doesn't help that politicians in these regions are largely in corporate pockets one way or the other doesn't help.

The future is going to be ugly. I am not sure how I feel about capital punishment, but given how bad things could get in a future dystopia, the death penalty for environmental crimes of this magnitude would seem tame.

The jobs at risk are not only those in the coal industry but also the jobs powered by the coal. You can't run a business without electricity. So if coal makes up about a third of the power then about a third of the jobs in Germany could be lost.

Of course coal can and should be replaced by something better but thats gonna take a while and Germany has chosen to phase out nuclear before coal so this is a consequence of that decision.

That is one of the most ridiculous statements I have ever heard.

Why do you think people mine coal? To upset environmentalists?

It is mined because it enables people to do things. It creates material wealth. It is completely reasonable to say that there are ramifications to shutting down coal. Germany has not increased their access to electricity through the Energiewende [0]. Apparently that is intentional, which shows remarkable political will; I can't see it flying in most countries. Wouldn't want to be poor in Germany.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany

Last year Germany exported about 9% of its electricity. So the country could reduce their use of lignite (~ 24% of total energy produced) by at least this amount.

And I think the math is off there - if Germany cuts 24% of its energy production over a couple of years, energy may become more expensive, driving away the factories using extreme amounts of electricity[1]. It would not result in losing a lot of jobs, and may even force some industries to become much more efficient (thus generating an advantage over competitors).

[1] eg, Aurubis in Hamburg using 1 billion kw/h per year with less than 7000 employees to refine copper

That logic doesn't apply neatly because 40% of their electricity comes from renewables which aren't necessarily dispatchable. They might be exporting, eg, solar surplus at noon and have exactly what is needed at night.

I recall some of their neighbors were annoyed a year or two ago because Germany was dumping surplus and destabilising their grids.

Sure but then power lines needs to be built from where the power is produced to where it is used. This is also part of Energiewende but it is not that easy to just put up high voltage lines through a densely populated democracy. It could take years or even decades to build a new grid.

Their competitors are also becoming more efficient over time and if you have no capacity at all in a region no new factories can be built there. High paying jobs could be replaced by low paying jobs.

Not saying it shouldn't be done but I understand it's a political balancing act. Ideally a global carbon tax, making it the same for everyone, would help but i've given up hope on that.

Germany could close some of its coal plants immediately if it ran the mostly idle gas plants at capacity.

Don’t know specific situation in Germany, but gas turbine plants in my country are “mostly idle” because they are there to keep the grid stable (they spin up fast to cover peak demand). They can’t be run at capacity.

Irsching Power Station in Germany has a mixture of 770 MW peaking capacity (not suitable for routine use) and 1429 MW of idled high efficiency combined cycle gas turbine capacity. The latter type of unit is suitable for directly replacing coal fired plants. CCGT units have enabled the United States to rapidly replace coal fired power with gas fired power over the past decade. Replacing coal with gas isn't enough to reach climate goals, of course, but it certainly is better than continued coal use. Also, even CCGT installations not intended for peaking can respond faster to changing net demand than coal plants can, which makes them a better complementary source for renewables.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irsching_Power_Station

There are another 1200+ megawatts of mostly-idle CCGT capacity at the Knapsack and Herdecke sites:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-20/merkel-s-...

There was a very good joke in the satire/comedy TV show "Die Anstalt" recently:

The reason saving these coal jobs is more important than the solar jobs, is because the former are NOT RENEWABLE.

Yes, there is such a program. There is a region in eastern Germany, that was known as the 'death triangle' during the DDR -- the region between Bitterfeld, Halle and Borna (https://www.google.com/maps/@51.364936,12.2644447,63124m/dat...). The region was dominated by coal mining and chemical industry -- greyish-black snows and acid rains were not uncommon. If you look at the map today, there are lots of lakes where there were extensive coal mining projects in the past. Nowadays they are a popular tourist destination.

That has echoes of the “Siberian Maldives” [1]. An ash lake that has turquoise waters, due to toxic pollutants, where lots of people go to take selfies ignoring the warning signs posted to not go in the lake... but people still do.

[1]https://time.com/5623538/toxic-waste-dump-selfies/

I was barely alive at that time, so I only know these stories from my family members. But I've seen photographs of the time, that confirm it happened, albeit I doubt that it happened on a regular basis.

Nice guessing, but nope. Old earth movements of that scale are anything but invisible on satellite pictures.

Here's a map that shows the area before mining began in 1978: https://www.bund-nrw.de/fileadmin/nrw/bilder/Braunkohle/1975...

So the rehabilitation area is in fact only the very prominent forest directly to the northwest of the active mining, a third to half its size rather than twice or thrice.

Sure, could always be worse. But coal is probably the worst form of gathering energy.

The only benefit is the quick ramp-up enabling them to jump in to gaps where e.g. atomic power ramps up to meet demand.

Thanks for the link. It's staggering.

This is happening in Eastern Germany, too, near Spremberg. If you turn off labels and zoom out a bit, you can see spot them in several places. Impossible to hide global destruction like this.

It's interesting (and scary) to watch us gobble up the Earth. Have a look at Merauke in Papa New Guinea and the surrounding ~100km. Mostly the jungle getting turned into farms, but there are also huge palm oil plantations that are cropping up in the middle here and there. They are huge too.

That reminds me of the "mountain top removal" going on in the Appalachians.

Bring up google maps for West Virginia, zoom out so that the entire state is visible in the browser window, and you can see all the scars.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/West+Virginia/@38.1864602,...

Thanks for the link.

What's most crazy is when you compare it to the nearby city of Köln (1+m inhabitants). It's almost the size of the city center!

Indeed, you can have all of germany on screen and still see it.

For someone who has been to Germany the scale and number of windturbines is amazing. It seems odd that they only account for 14% of their electricity production. By comparison I can't remember seeing any solar power infrastructure and yet that accounts for 7%.

I don't know where you got your numbers from. Wind power generated 20% of electricity in 2018 and 26% in the first half of 2019.

The article. Admittedly there is another 3% for offshore wind turbines but I haven't been that far north.

the linked article cites "Clean Energy Wire" as the source.

AG Energiebilanzen says its 17.3% for 2019.

Source: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...

Depends a lot on the area. Most of the solar installations are in the richer southern areas on private houses, whereas the large wind installation can be mostly seen in eastern and northern germany.

Lots of conservative backlash against wind energy in the south. "Asparagus landscapes" was a slogan used to get votes of people who don't want wind turbines around.

Also fear mongering for infrasound etc.

That aside, the north is better suited for wind energy because topological reasons. The sea would be even better. Problem is the still lacking infrastructure to transport energy southward where heavy industry actually needs it.

This might be true about sheer number of installations, but by wattage most of the power comes from massive solar fields, not rooftop PV. According to Wikipedia [0], the five biggest installations are all in the Brandenburg area (a poorer region in the northeast), though anecdotally I see medium size fields all the time along the railways in Bavaria.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany#Photovo...

In this context the ecocide caused by the construction of windturbines is especially alarming

Do you mean the death of birds due to wind turbines? As best as I can tell, that is dwarfed by the birds killed by domesticated animals.

Or to apples to apples it killed by coal for that matter. It is a bizzare mental blindspot that people never ask that question - but birds always seem to come up mainly as NIMBY pretexts anyway.

you say "domesticated animals" but is that not cats exclusively?

The impact on the environment is severe in many aspects. The impact on the power grid as well. Germany already have to pay other countries to accept Germany's excess electricity in the other countries's power grids.

Probably because wind turbines are much taller than solar panels.

Sure. I mean that is pretty obvious. But I think what I was surprised by is that solar is generating half as much energy while being below the 'noise floor' in terms of visual impact, such that I have no recollection of seeing any large solar installations.

Democracy Now! also covered the protests at the end of 2017 [1].

[1] https://www.democracynow.org/2017/11/15/special_report_from_...

OT but the picture of the gigantic machine is a bagger 288. An engineering marvel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_288?wprov=sfla1

If interested in some footage from protests and the site in general - https://twitter.com/JoanieLemercier

Capitalism will destroy this planet

Socialism has destroyed quite a bit of nature. (look at the Aral sea, for example). What exactly would you is it about capitalism that supposedly destroys the planet?

And how would you propose to remedy the problem?

I mean by starving a couple of million people, as it is wont to do, Socialism could help curb the consumption of resources. I give you that.

And again, lols for the downvotes. You are ridiculous.

It's people and exponential growth. Doesn't matter what -ism you put on the end of your shovels.

That’s quite the Malthusian viewpoint. Alternatively: “Malthus theory, which holds that since the world’s resources are more or less fixed, population growth must be restricted or all of us will descend into bottomless misery. Malthusianism is scientifically bankrupt — all predictions made upon it have been wrong, because human beings are not mere consumers of resources. Rather, we create resources by the development of new technologies that find use for them. The more people, the faster the rate of innovation. This is why (contrary to Malthus) as the world’s population has increased, the standard of living has increased, and at an accelerating rate.“

https://space.nss.org/the-significance-of-the-martian-fronti...

Really the two are in feedback loops that may correlate and require certain strategization and working smarter instead of harder. Improved agricultural yields produce surplus food per person which allows a shift to industrialization which enables more secondary tertiary areas of specialization which can boost yields and give other benefits.

This dates back to the bronze age even and technically stone age in mesoamerican and neighboring southern native american cultures.

I'll take your Malthus and raise you a Bartlett. https://bollocks2012.wordpress.com/2013/04/22/the-greatest-s...

Also, from your linked article from random space cadets: "Unless people can see broad vistas of unused resources in front of them, the belief in limited resources tends to follow as a matter of course."

Sorry, but O(2^n) is going to grow faster than O(n^3), which is the fundamental limitation of the speed of light for a space-faring civilization expanding in a shell from its origin.

Exponential growth just does not scale.

*At the cost of catastrophic ecological destruction.

This specific strawman comes up so often that it ought to have its own name. Just because one guy underestimated the carrying capacity of the Earth a long time ago, and failed to predict farming practices that would eventually wreak havoc on the environment, doesn't make the population variable off-limits for discussion. Is it any more realistic to expect billions of people to voluntarily revert to an ascetic lifestyle?

Sure - so the problem with capitalism is that it allows populations to grow too much? Or in what sense is capitalism to blame?

~20 million people die every year, because it is not profitable to feed them, and give them clean water and medicine.

So please think about that number. Deaths solely due to a lack of profitability.

Can you give a citation? Where does this happen? Is it really just capitalist unwillingness to deliver food, or are these people in the hands of dictators, and it is capitalist unwillingness to sacrifice soldiers to topple them? And do capitalists start wars, or governments?

Would you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here? They ask you not to use this site for ideological battle, nor to post in the flamewar style. Downvotes of such comments are correct on HN.

Yes, someone else started it, but users here are asked to follow the guidelines whether someone else is or not.

Sorry I don't understand your criticism. Is it not allowed to discuss capitalism or socialism, it is automatically an "ideological battle"? That doesn't make sense imo.

It's not allowed to foment generic ideological tangents with indignant rhetoric. "Socialism starved a couple million people" is a classic example. All of that has been repeated countless times. It is predictable, therefore it does not gratify curiosity, therefore it's not what HN is for, and that means it's off topic.

If you have something genuinely new to say, that might be ok—but then an internet forum is not a good medium for that; you should write a book or a scholarly essay instead, and maybe link to it here.

It seems to be news for the person blaming capitalism for the woes of the world, though. So discussion is not welcome? Why can't people just ignore threads they are not interested in?

Afaik a lot of stories repeat on HN, so the "newsworthiness" criterion seems a bit arbitrary. Also, shouldn't it make a difference if it is a top level thread? I wouldn't submit a story about "socialism starving millions of people".

I know, your "new" policies have been in place for a while, but I think you really kind of destroyed Hacker News. I don't understand why you worry about curbing discussions in deeply nested threads, as they would be easy to ignore by people who don't care. I don't think you worry about SEO or anything like that, so really, what is your incentive?

Also, there are lots of "boring" and repetitive threads on HN (like on global warming), I think you may actually single out "capitalism vs socialism" for ideological reasons. I don't believe you that nobody is curious about capitalism vs socialism anymore. On the contrary, the "battle" is more relevant than ever, with socialist having a real shot at the US elections. It is a question that affects most of us a lot more than most topics would.

That's like saying a gardener shouldn't worry about weeds because those who don't like them needn't look at them. The trouble is that if one allows such discussion, it spreads and takes over. It doesn't just stay static. Worse, it has feedback effects. For example it drives away users who find such rhetoric boring and lame, and attracts users who enjoy heated repetition. We want the first group here more than the second, because the first makes HN more interesting (higher signal) while the second makes it less interesting (higher noise).

We can't be passive about such effects. They can quickly develop into a vicious circle that destroys the site. HN will only survive as an interesting place for thoughtful people if it avoids that, so this is an existential issue and why I (we) moderate that way. I'm sad you think I've destroyed Hacker News, but would submit that if moderation doesn't evolve as a community grows, one ends up with the default dynamic of internet forums: decay followed by heat death. HN was actually started as an experiment in avoiding that dynamic [1], so in my view we're aligned with its original spirit when we do this. "Our hypothesis is that by making a conscious effort to resist decline, we can keep it from happening." [2]

You're right that the threads about global warming are almost as repetitive. The same logic applies to those.

Really though, if you want to make a case about the quality of the site, you shouldn't be posting things like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20419652.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

I still don't quite see the issue you have with my comment. I personally find it a good argument against Socialism, or at least a good reminder that Socialism is not an automatic solution to the world's problems. And is it really common knowledge how the Russians destroyed the Aral sea? I know it wasn't always known to me, and I haven't read about it that often. If it is common knowledge, why do people propose Socialism as a solution to environmental problems?

What would be a good comment on Socialism, in your opinion?

I know you have a policy against politics, or used to have it. It doesn't seem to be strictly enforced, though (see global warming, feminism and so on).

I know why you have your policies, but I am not convinced that they are optimal. Have you ever even tested them against alternatives?

I've been on HN since it was called Startup News. I actually almost hate it now, because of some of the policies. Sure, maybe you don't want people like me on the site. Your call. I know several oldtimers feel the same, though.

You have actually found some ways to make users hate you, which is an achievement in itself. For starters, how about a warning that you are beyond your posting limit BEFORE people spend time and effort to write comments?

And it feels very one sided now, so not as interesting as it used to be (is it really the quality of my comment, or just criticism of Socialism that is the issue?). Still, I keep coming back, admittedly. But grudgingly so.

Edit: looking through the policies again, I still don't see how my comment is supposed to break the rules: "Essentially there are two rules here: don't post or upvote crap links, and don't be rude or dumb in comment threads.". It's not a crap link, and it is not rude or dumb. Imo, of course. That the same argument has been made before can hardly be a deciding factor, because then you'd have to shut down the site right now.

I am asking for it, I know it.

Capitalism saved the planet if not the people on it and has will continue to improve the lives of everyone it touches?

why, because it an economic system based on private ownership over means of production and profit. by that reasoning it implies your right to your own person is guaranteed.

how is that important, well the easiest way to understand it is that anywhere in the world where private and personal property rights are not respected by the government the people are put at risk. go look where the greatest tragedies of our current world are and you will see that.

can capitalism lead to some bad outcomes, yes, but overall it is the basis for many forms of governments with good outcomes. it has reduced death by starvation and disease simply by the abundances created.

when you respect the rights of your people it is far easier to respect the rights of the Earth you live on.

In case of Germany, it's anti-science anti-nuclear "environmentalists" that are destroying it. Energy is needed regardless of the economic structure of society. Now which kind of energy will it be? Germany chose coal and now they're reaping the consequences.

> Germany chose coal and now they're reaping the consequences.

Heh, nope, everyone does reap the consequences... That said, nuclear power is no viable long term solution and if we imported uranium from Russia, everybody would start to cry again.

Being anti-nuclear isn't necessarily anti-scientific. It is a risk assessment. While I tend to have favored nuclear power, especially towards the current energy setup, I don't think it was a catastrophic decision.

Nuclear was always less than 15% of Germany's primary power consumption. Renewables something like 5%. We need to get to 100% carbon neutral. Whether we have to replace 80 or 100% with wind and solar shouldn't make that much of a difference.

Nuclear fission is the only non-carbon technology that could realistically get to 100% supply. Ending its generation in Germany was a mistake.

I agree that it was a mistake, but there are several studies showing how Germany can switch to ~100% wind+solar.

What do they propose to deal with massive swings in generation and demand? Hydroelectric pumping? Batteries?

All of those, plus "smart grid" stuff to get better control over demand, plus Power to Gas (electricity to methane) and gas turbines (very inefficient, but existing infrastructure can store huge amounts of energy, and efficiency isn't the primary concern for the exceptional case).

Build enough batteries and hydro to last for a few hours to a few days and use power-to-gas for longer periods of low generation (e.g. winter and no wind). There is already infrastructure in place for strategic gas reserves. We just need to build additional gas plants to meet demand when wind and solar are at production minimums.

But batteries and hydro are extremely expensive at grid-scale. How economically uncompetitive are you willing to make Germany in exchange for not using nuclear?

Nuclear is also extremely expensive. Personally I see opportunities in being an early adopter of technologies that have to become quite popular over the next few years if we want to prevent catastrophic climate change, but I'm not enough of an economist to have a strong opinion.

I would also be okay with building some nuclear, put nuclear and renewables don't go very well together, and I believe it's much harder to build enough nuclear plants quickly enough to replace all fossil energy consumption than it is to build enough wind turbines.

I highly doubt about it considering how much they already spent and how (very) far they are from that goal.

I think you need to qualify that first statement with a timeframe. Otherwise, it is clearly untrue. 100% supply is realistically possible with only renewable energy -- within a few years by investing in storage, local wind power in South Germany where the main demand is etc.

Being anti-nuclear (fission as we use it today) is not per se anti-science. If you do some research on how humanity has dealt with nuclear waste in the past and how it is still dealing with it, you may come to a different conclusion.

Capitalism is the best solution to manage our greed without killing ourselves while preserving our freedom.

I don't like it either, but I never trust anyone who says he had no self-interest.

And the current growth fetish isn't innate to capitalism.

Please don't post unsubstantive comments, or flamebait, or take HN threads into ideological battle.

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> "It's heavy to see how your home just gets destroyed," says Omo. "The treehouse that you built and where you lived and where you spent so much time. And then you see hundreds and hundreds of cops running through your home. It's a heavy thing to see."

I'm astonished by this hypocrisy. Not only have they squatted on someone else's property, they did it not just to live in a forest, they did it as activists: with the exact purpose of creating the image of police brutality to create public backlash and affect the parties involved.

Even if their cause was completely just and good (which is a different conversation that I'm not prepared to have), they're getting at it by manipulating the media and purposefully creating the coverage they planned. This exact destruction was the main purpose of them building these houses, in this spot, to begin with.

Just curious, what would be your preferred method to attract media attention or fight climate crisis in general?

Actually squatting is legal within its limit. One might also bring the counterargument that RWE legally squatted other people's properties and evicted them - while creating immense cost for the tax payers. [1] Not everybody was so comfortable with moving away.

'The old Immerath is ... demolished for the Garzweiler II opencast mine. Since 2006, the former residents have been partially relocated to the newly formed village. ... "When I was at the construction site, everything was in ruins. That was a shock. A man from outside approached me and said why we gave up the village without a fight. We resisted for years. People should not think wrong. "' [2]

[1] https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u...

[2] https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u...

I think the main purpose of building those houses was making it impossible to fell the trees around them.

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