Hacker News Reader

Comment by NonContro | Hacker News Reader

We're running out of time to wait for the established political class to do something about this.

We need people power - shutting down coal plants by blockading entry of personnel and deliveries, and disabling equipment.

It took just 5 people to shut down this power plant in Germany: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/04/no-regre...

Saving 26,000 tonnes of CO2.

There are about 300 coal power plants in Europe, so with just 1,500 people they could all be shut down at least temporarily. Meanwhile we get some 'climate marches' with hundreds of thousands of people in attendance.

View on HN

If Germany's eco-protesters are serious, maybe they should protest the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

From Wikipedia:

> Nord Stream has a total annual capacity of 55 billion m3 (1.9 trillion cu ft) of gas, and the addition of Nord Stream 2 is expected to double this capacity to a total of 110 billion m3 (3.9 trillion cu ft).

CO2 emission of natural gas is 53.12 kg per thousand cubic feet [1], so the additional 2.0 trillion cubic feet of Nord Stream 2 translates to ~106,000,000 tons of CO2 per year. Germany emitted 775,752,190 tons of CO2 in 2016, so it's a significant fraction of Germany's whole emission.

...Alternatively, they could go back twenty years and tell those anti-nuclear activists to shove it, but since time travel is impossible, I'll settle for not building more pipelines in 2021.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/co2_vol_mass.php

You are basically advocating for acts of terrorism that will kill people. There are plenty of places like hospitals that need reliable power or people will die.

Climate change kills people. Each kilotonne of CO2 is calculated to lead to one extra death from climate change:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.0232...

So these protestors saved 26 lives.

Of course, the potential death toll from climate change is infinite, since we will never be able to remove the CO2 from the atmosphere in any meaningful way (we would need to recreate the Carboniferous period or the Azolla event).

And a blockade on manufactured products from China / shut the Suez, make half of it uneconomic. So there must be no exported / offshored pollution. What we can't make economically in Europe with green energy, we don't need / can't have. And EU countries with political majorities who disagree are free to have the ECB uninsure their banks. The time for half measures and excuses is long past.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com