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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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.

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.

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".

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.

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