And in an even greater tragedy: the Germans had turned their back on almost emission free nuclear power, and in practice had turned towards very dirty coal.
The climate benefits of the lower CO2 emissions from burning gas, instead of coal and oil, are partially offset be the greater methane emissions. Then again, you can't compare natural gas CO2 + CH4 emissions to only CO2 from coal, as coal production also releases CH4.
As long as methane leaks from the natural gas supply are below 4% or 5%, gas is better than coal.
Regarding Germany, the switch is temporary (geopolitical), and they still produce less CO2 every year as planned and have a strong CO2 phase-out plan.
Eh, it's a more powerful greenhouse gas, but it's also gone after ~10 years.
It breaks down to CO2, so as a GHG, it's not gone at all.
LNG is expensive so they have some incentive to get rid of their dependency on that. It doesn't really make sense to use that for electricity generation.
I'm not super hopeful they will be able to completely get rid of coal by the 2030s like they have been insisting they will. But it will eventually get done. And it's one of those things where the more coal gets shut down, the more attractive it gets to get rid of the rest as well.
That's also why they got rid of their last three nuclear plants. I agree, not their wisest move, but on the other hand it kind of focused them on a future without nuclear. Which, like it or not, seems what they've committed to. I don't see that change anytime soon. Those three plants disappearing is in the past. It's done. Next up is shutting down brown coal. That's something some parties are still resisting. But they are under a lot of pressure to get rid of this embarrassingly dirty industry.
And I don't even blame politics: it's what voters want.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/us-thermal-coal-...
> "The thermal coal export earnings were the second-highest since 2017, following 2022's $5.7 billion. The total volumes were the highest since 2018 and came as U.S. power producers cut the amount of coal used in electricity generation to the lowest this century."
Someone probably needs to explain to the green clean energy enthusiasts setting policy these days that it really doesn't matter where you burn the coal, at least from a global atmospheric standpoint (though not for local pollution fallout of sulfur and mercury and arsenic). However, hindering fossil fuel exports appears unlikely for any US government, see the LNG exports to Asia and Europe over 2023:
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-was-top-lng-expor...
True but sadly these things are measured by country. Which is unfortunate because if you're going to burn the stuff anyway, shipping it across the world does add significantly to its emissions of course.
[1] "Biden pauses LNG export approvals after pressure from climate activists" Reuters, January 26, 2024 https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/biden-pauses-approva...
No, seriously.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnJwbhos9eM The heaviest building ever moved on wheels
Between September 30 and October 27, 1975, the church was moved a distance of 841.1 meters at a velocity of 13 centimeters per minute to the vicinity of the old hospital, and it was set on an iron-concrete two-storied foundation. A small church of St. Ghost was also moved during October. After the move was completed, restoration work went on until 1988, and the church was solemnly blessed again in 1993.Seems like an straightforward case of externalities?
Coasian bargaining and/or Pigovian taxes can deal with them.
Yes, 13th century churches have value, but so do a lot of other things, like convenience or reducing CO2 emissions.
You can fix teetering systems with money.
Politically, you'd want to be careful to align who benefits from fracking (eg via taxes) and who bears the burden (eg from minor earthquakes). So if the dangers of fracking extent to about, say, 30km from the side of where the well sits, you'd want to make sure that the tax revenues and authority to decide on whether to allow fracking and what obligations to put on frackers should also roughly occur on that level of 30km. Eg within a county perhaps.
This way the voters in different counties can make up their mind about what they want to allow, and what they ask for in return.
Perhaps they want the frackers to post a billion dollar bond underwritten by a major re-insurance company as insurance for that 13th century church, before they allow fracking. Write the contract in such a way that any earthquake damage to that church would be covered, without need for proof that fracking was to blame.
There is an asymmetry here which works agains the public good. Corporations tend to only have to corrupt an offici or capture a regulatory body once to extract long term concessions, which rarely if ever get rolled back. The same is not true in reverse.
In practice this means governments aren’t able to effectively exert democratic mandates over policy areas like this.
> In practice this means governments aren’t able to effectively exert democratic mandates over policy areas like this.
How did the Germans ever shut down their nuclear power plants? They were already up and running, so they were literally printing money for their corporate owners?
How did GDPR pass in Europe? Why can't Google build housing for their employees in Mountain View?
I would like to live in your utopia where companies are all powerful!
This is a case of ideology over strategic thinking for Europe, IMHO, and we've seen, and are seeing, the consequences of relying of foreign imports instead.
I totally support our stance against fracking. And the dependency on Russia was a bit of an issue for the first winter of the war but prices are back to normal now.
It's not even about pollution. To say banalities like "we care more about pollution" means nothing and is not aligned with reality. Again, the issue is ideology. This is failing Europe in many areas, not just this.
I support that, but it's very important to realise that this is pretty unique in the world. "Green parties" are a huge thing and often even part of governments, is there even one in the US? :)
And yeah we still import but you can't change things from one day to another.
"Not allow commerce to..." thrown left and right: if that's not a typical ideological stance in Europe, I don't know what is.
Yeah but that's a good thing in my book.
The US tends to be very unbalanced in this regard, commerce all the way and not much attention to externalities, both environmental and societal (e.g. welfare and labour rights)
Europe is substantially different from an ideological perspective and that provides us with a much better quality of life (much lower violent crime, much better public transport, no crazy healthcare prices, greener cities etc).
Of course the US does better economically but economy isn't everything. And it's a self-defeating goal anyway, the more money people have, the more they spend on scarce housing and other goods which means the housing crisis is just as bad in the US as it is here despite the higher salaries there.
> The Paris' mayor has very poor approval ratings and has organised a populist referendum on a dubious proposal to try to prop herself up... not a very good example, IMHO.
Paris is far from the only city in Europe banning the most polluting vehicles. Almost every major city does this now. And the air quality really did improve due to this. And our cities are just a lot more smaller scale due to the longer history - there's a reason the smart was invented here :)
Hmm, this is about making parking more expensive for large SUVs of non-residents, not air pollution or polluting vehicles.
Note also that only 5% of people showed up to vote in that 'referendum'.
This is really all a distraction spun by the media and Paris mayor. But it works!
I am all for "let's cut the gas" blabla, but it's a bit unfair to say "prices are back to normal" (which is also not entirely true from the consumer perspective): lots of companies had to shut down, some will, some left to go to other "better" places, some fired thousands of people because of energy prices. I don't see that coming back any time soon, to be honest.
In my opinion, you're confusing bad political choices (=let's get addicted to Russian gas, then we will see about it in 10 years) with everything else. Germany could have done more in the past 10 years to not get to the point in 2022 to be threatened by a country - they didn't, now they have to brute-force innovation/renovation.
I would just like to remind you that US is still buying a quarter of necessary enriched uranium from Russia, and US doesn't seem a country of "ideology" as you claim. If Russia wants to retaliate today, it's really bad news.
Ban of fracking is not pragmatic, either.
If gas isn't imported from Russia, it is from the US or Qatar, which is the same in terms of foreign power dependency and balance on foreign payments, when shale gas/fracking provides an alternative.
I would have said fear rather than ideology, to be honest. It was the times of Chernobyl and later Fukushima gave the last blow. It's a bit unfair to "forget" what happened 40 and 20 years ago - things must be contextualized.
> If gas isn't imported from Russia, it is from the US or Qatar, which is the same in terms of foreign power dependency and balance on foreign payments, when shale gas/fracking provides an alternative.
It's different in the sense that you don't depend entirely on a single country for your gas (like it was before), so that particular country cannot threaten you like they did. The goal of this governement is to drastically reduce energy consumption and use renewables, while at the same time "buying" gas from wherever else.
This was for a political reason, otherwise they would have kept on buying gas from Russia and implemented slowly their green/eco program.
The issue is not fracking yes or no, but the fact that in the previous 10-15 years it wasn't done enough to avoid what happened in 2022.
Well, voters are still idiots: even with the accidents in Chernobyl and Fukushima accounted for, nuclear power still kills far fewer people per Joule than basically any other form of power generation. And that includes renewables. (Though large scale solar doesn't look nearly as bad, if you separate out residential rooftop solar into its own category.)
The German reactors are also of a design that can not have the kinds of accidents they had in those two examples.
If TV shows a disaster in a nuclear plant that can lead to X, they will just connect "nuclear plants are dangerous".
Plus, there is still the unresolved issue about the nuclear waste which is another reason for concern/fear.
I wouldn't dismiss the reasons to be concerned - it's just that they did a campaign based on fear, and this type of thing typically doesn't lead to good solutions. So you go and vote but with a heavy bias in your heart: are you going to be responsible for destroying "the world"? Nobody wants to be that guy.
TV should have done a better job at informing people, so that ideally they could have made up their mind on their own, considering a variety of scenarios and not just one: a nuclear plant explosion.
It's also true that Germany and other countries (like Italy) were affected when Chernobyl happened - I do remember of people saying that it wasn't safe back then to eat some products because of the radioactivity levels. People don't want that again. And all TV did was (I guess?) reminding them how it was just 10-20 years before. When Fukushima happened it brought all back in an instant.
There's plenty of uranium to go around from alternate, more friendly suppliers. Uranium is also only a small part of the costs of running a nuclear power plant.
"Nearly 50 villages in this region have been evacuated and destroyed for the ever-expanding mines, and Winzen's village of Keyenberg — more than a thousand years old — is set to be next.": https://www.npr.org/2021/06/28/1010956116/a-coal-mining-mons...
Just as an aside, apparently the company doing this, RWE, was the #1 producer of CO2 emissions in Europe in 2018 ( https://archive.is/Qe9KJ ). All I can say is, the sooner renewable energy takes over, the better.
Europe had ~8 billion tons of emissions vs vs 5.5 for North America, and the recent numbers are 5 for Europe and 6.3 for NA. I think they managed to do more in the wrong direction.
A per capita comparison would be more fair.
Interesting, I was under the impression that the German population is declining. But you are right, it is slowly growing. In eg 1990 they had 73 million people, and nowadays it's 83 million (according to Google).
Apparently that's all driven by net migration, because the birth rate is so low.
edit: data here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Germany
https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Society-Environment/Popula...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1107881/asylum-applicati... (applications only, rejection rate is pretty high)
US: 14.9 tonnes EU: 6.0 tonnes
From https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/co2?facet=none&country=...
The gas reserves in Europe mostly don't require fracking to extract, neither do those in Russia.
Click the larger countries on the electricity map. All but Germany have significantly more gas capacity than coal.
Before Russia invaded Ukraine, coal was shrinking even faster than nuclear in Germany. Coal usage only temporarily went up in 2022 as emergency measure.
All have reduced this stat over the last few decades so the US might have reduced more absolutely, because they were so high in the first place, but the EU appears to be outpacing them and extending their lead.
So it's weird, but unsurprising to see this painted as a triumph for fracked gas, and used to attack Germany's progress.
Coal in Germany will end in 2030 anyway and the renewables are built at a pace to support that.
Remember: renewables are not actively good for reducing CO2. They don't suck CO2 out of the atmosphere, they are at best neutral. Renewable are good insofar as they allow us to move away from fossil fuels.
Renewables /are/ good for reducing CO2, as every kW produced by renewable is not produced by CO2-emitting alternative. Plus, they make you independent from foreign energy sources.
More pertinently: those nuclear power plants they shut off were already running. Keeping a plant running takes exactly 0 years.
(You can't really blame German politics here: they just deliver what German voters want. Democracy working as intended.)
> Renewables /are/ good for reducing CO2, as every kW produced by renewable is not produced by CO2-emitting alternative.
Yes, that's exactly what I wrote?
> Plus, they make you independent from foreign energy sources.
That's a separate discussion. Wind energy in Germany and burning German coal is independent of foreign energy sources. Burning Russian oil or importing electricity from photovoltaic in the Sahara are both foreign energy sources as far as Germany is concerned.
As long as you make sure that your foreign imports come from a wide variety of friendly countries, that's not too bad. Eg Germany importing nuclear power from France or wind power from British off-shore farms doesn't seem very concerning to me.
(I'm just using Germany as an example here.)
The "it takes decades" argument was used as the reason for not significantly renewing nuclear in the UK - over a decade ago.
So either you follow one approach (= mix between imports and solar/wind) or the other (=import until 2032, then import and produce with nuclear energy), with the first approach being oriented to the long run (=independent from other countries, less co2 emissions, etc.).
The decision to decomission them is a political one, made directly after Fukushima, and fully completed last year. Nothing to do with building them, public was against them and the government listened.
My point being when Germany says they're gonna stop using coal and go all in on renewables, there's historical evidence that they'll follow through. It's just gonna take some years to complete.
The largest owner of wind power installations in Sweden is China. The 5 largest producers of electricity from wind power, 3 of them are foreign (Finland, Germany and Norway).
Moreover a single nuclear unit costs billions to build, billions to maintain, billions to dismantle, all under control of a single entity/company. Whereas renewable costs are much more spread, can be managed by many different companies, etc.
Yes, agreed.
> Moreover a single nuclear unit costs billions to build, billions to maintain, billions to dismantle, all under control of a single entity/company. Whereas renewable costs are much more spread, can be managed by many different companies, etc.
The government should ask nuclear power companies to post a bond upfront to pay for the dismantling.
I don't think the whole 'single entity' thing is that bad. Nuclear power plants are still relatively small compared to the whole power infrastructure of a country. They are not more concentrated than eg hydro-electric generation from dams.
Just to be clear: I'm not arguing against renewables here. I'm arguing against turning off nuclear power plants that are already running, and have modern-enough safety features.
(Though I would argue against giving direct subsidies to both nuclear power plants and renewables. You should tax emissions, and let the market sort it out. You can even re-distribute the take from that tax to all voters, so that the average person doesn't have any extra tax burden.)
Germany had so little nuclear power left that leaving them running had no impact in the roadmap for green energies and energy prices. They had to be shut down anyway soon since they were old and insecure.
And I really applaud Germany's decision, the coal is temporary and will be replaced by renewable too. Nuclear is just too expensive, long-term dangerous and sensitive to mess with. Again, emissions aren't the only thing that counts. And this also plays into the nuclear discussion because nuclear advocates often claim very low death tolls from nuclear, but ignore environmental pollution problems.
What “environmental pollution” are you talking about here?
1. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/frack...
2. https://www.publicsource.org/fracking-proximity-cancer-asthm...
3. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/children-born-near...
4. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fracking-can-cont...
5. https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/news/story/study-links-fracki...
Decommissioning too, very very costly to do it in an environmentally conscious way, the waste is very expensive to store safely. And these costs are generally not even included in the costs. Way too often an energy company vacates a site and the state is left cleaning up the mess which costs billions.
There are many things that are much more dangerous than the what remains of the fallout from a nuclear accident, that people are perfectly fine living with: air pollution due to ICE-powered cars, pesticide in farm areas, lead fuel near general aviation airfields, or cigarettes, alcohol and even junk food!
People have a very wrong vision of what nuclear fallout actually means, and it's mostly fueled by the nuclear bomb scare in the cold war era. But in the real world even Hiroshima and Nagasaki were quickly re-settled after the bomb with no dramatic effect.
(this is not to say radioactive material is harmless, just that the incorrect perception of its harm lead us to take drastic measures when it comes to nuclear, while we are fine as a society taking little to no measures against much more harmful things)
As for decommissioning, I answered in another comment already, see [1].
As it is the costs of the nuclear waste management are, and will be for a long time, fielded by tax payer and not internalised with the plant builders/operators.
But really these days it makes no sense. The reason these costs are not borne by the operators is because the business model would be impossible if all costs were included. As it is even with all the handouts it's hard to make it work cost-wise.
Why are other industries allowed to just put a locker on the front door and call it a day? Decommissioning and waste processing of solar plants isn't included in the cost either. In most industries it is expected that the site is secured (which, in case of an NPP means removing the old fuel obviously) and then the next guy who wants to use the site pays for the destruction of the buildings (or in practice the taxpayers as subsidies to improve “competitiveness” of the region). But somehow not nuclear.
Industrial countries are filled with old industrial sites with massive amounts of remaining pollution (heavy metal in the soil, asbestos in the buildings), the industrials never paid for decommissioning.
In fact I think that the policy we apply to nuclear is the right one, and for effluents as well (unlike chemical plants that litters the neighborhood with PFAS, NPP reject practically nothing whatsoever), as it is the only sustainable model. But then again why the double standard? Why apply it only to nuclear?
The answer is unfortunately the irrational fear of nuclear that derives from the stigma of the cold war and the fear of the Bomb…
And in large parts, they are doing that. But I guess details depend on jurisdiction.
First, the amount of waste that last centuries fits in a single room per nuclear country. Also you don't need to manage or finance it at all, you can just leave it there an be fine with it:
In fact when nuclear was still being treated like a regular industry with respect to its pollution, the nuclear wastes from the military and early civilian programs in UK and France were being dumped in the middle of the Channel. Not that I'm saying that this is a good thing, at all, but it's also causing no harm in practice and because the quantities are so small, the environmental impact of doing so is much smaller than the routine wastes of most industries, including IT.
Also, we've known the solution to waste for 60 years now: it's called a breeding reactor. 40 years ago France had one prototype (Phénix) and wanted to scale it up to industrial size (Superphénix) but it was canceled due to pressure from Greenpeace (including a successful campaign to pressure the Swiss government to fight the project)! Then 30 years later Greenpeace is conveniently still using the nuclear wastes argument.
Eg mercury release from burning coal will be dangerous forever.
It always annoy me when people talk about nuclear waste living millions of years. I'm like “you know what's living longer than that? A good chunk of industrial pollutants who actually have an infinite lifetime”.
Ok, but keeping plants open a little longer would bave still helped. I see no reason to start building new nuclear plants, but keeping them running a few more years safely and cheaply was doable and would have been a better option for the environment and the economy, making the green shift more palatable.
As far as I understand though, it was a bit of a back against the wall thing in that regard because they were mostly coming up on expensive overhauls. The scares with Belgian plants have shown that that can't be postponed forever.
I'm not so sure about the 'long-term dangerous'. Yes, nuclear produces a small amount of dangerous nuclear waste. But burning fossil fuels also releases lots of waste, and most of that is made up of stable isotopes that don't even have a half life and will be dangerous approximately forever.