The Dark and Tragic Side of German Energy Policy
April 3rd, 2009
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Germany is cited by many as an example of what other countries should aspire to when it comes to energy. According to assclowns like Conrad Miller, Germany is doing the “Green” thing, phasing out nuclear energy and replacing it with wind power and other renewables. While it’s true that Germany has poured tremendous amounts of national treasure into wind turbines and other “renewable” energy systems, they also are continuing to expand their coal burning as quickly as they can. As this need for coal increases, another national treasure is being destroyed, one which has greater value than the billions of dollars that their epic failure of an energy policy has cost them.
Germany is a nation which has risen, fallen, been split and reunited. It is a nation which has a deep cultural history and a heritage that goes back for centuries. Much of the great structures of Germany were destroyed in the second world war and the cultural upheval of the war and the division and communist occupation of the country further impacted the cultural heritage and idenity of the nation. In light of this it is all the more tragic that the Rhineland, the beautiful heart of Germany is being torn to shreds. Communities which have endured for centuries, family farms and generations-old traditions are being scrabed away by bucket wheel excivators in the quest for coal.
Germany no longer has much in the way of anthracite coal left, at least not near the surface. But vast amounts of lingite and brown coal remain just bellow the surface. To feed the boilers of the massive mulit-gigawatt coal power plants, earth must be moved to get at the coal. When the earth is moved, so too are the structures which sit upon it and the people who live in them.
This is a large brown coal mine at Garzweiler. The mine is enormous, with just this portion stretching more than five statute miles from north to south. It is also being mined very heavily. The amount of land being torn up is apparent in this image, which is a composite of satellite images from between 2004 and 2008. So much ground has been moved that the imaging does not even stitch together properly. The older photos still show green ground while the new ones show only the mine.
But there was once something else here. The history of the village of Garzweiler goes back to the 1200’s. It was occupied by French troops during the Napoleonic Wars. By the 20th century, the community had a population of about 2000. Generations lived there, in a community centered around a village square and a neo-Gothic church. But in the 1980’s the coal mine began to creep closer and closer to the village. So, to extract the coal that it had sat upon for centuries, the town was raized. The homes were torn down to their foundation and the inhabitants forced to leave.
The German government forced the abandonment of the town, establishing a hamlet known as “New Garzweiler.” Only about half of the residents settled in the “new” community. In 2000 the community adopted the motto “Our village has a future.” Later the town dropped the part “New” from the name. It just goes to show, saying something doesn’t actually make it true. Some of the residents of the village stayed into the 1990’s, but today there is nothing left.
Here is a photo from 2000, showing the last corner of the village to be destroyed. The remains of a few homes can be seen:
But by 2004, the last traces had been obliterated:
It is, of course, inevitable that some villages and homes will be destroyed in a modern society, in order to build new infrastructure or to use the land for other projects. Yet the project for “relocation” of villages in Germany is not limited in scope or time. Indeed, like the mines themselves, the sheer scale of the devistation is gargantuane. Garzweiler is not alone – far from it; it is only one of the villages and towns wiped from the map by the insatable need for coal. Even the new village may eventually have to be raized, although not for another 20+ years. The autobaun may also need to be rerouted in the near future.
Many villages have been destroyed, many others fight for survival and as things stand, most will probably lose.
Via the New York Times: (2004)
Heuersdorf Journal; A Medieval German Hamlet Keeps the Bulldozers at Bay
Visitors passing through this lonesome hamlet in the coal mining region of eastern Germany can hardly miss the American flag next to the tidy town square: it flies upside down.
This is not a sign of disrespect, the friendly townsfolk insist, nor is it some kind of protest against the war in Iraq.
It is a way of signaling distress — something Heuersdorf has felt since 1994, when an American-owned mining company won approval from the German government to demolish this medieval village of 150 to get at the rich seam of coal that lies beneath it.
”Our goal is to safeguard our home,” said Bernd Günther, an unemployed mining worker who heads a group fighting the plan. ”It may not look like much, but this place is 700 years old.”
Old maps of East Germany bear the names of hundreds of villages that were bulldozed during Communist times to make way for strip mines. Heuersdorf, however, was one of the first to be marked for destruction after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the German government sold state-owned mines to American investors with a promise that they could expand the digging.
The town mentioned above may be surviving, staying off its own death sentance through a constant battle of appeals and lawsuits, but many have not been able to keep up the fight. No site is immune to destruction. If there is coal to be had, then anything is fair game. Those who live in the hundreds of threatened towns are not the only ones concerned, preservation organizations have expressed their own concens about the destruction of monuments and sites signifficant to cultural history. Even the great philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche remains have been threatened by the expansion of coal mining. His grave is located in a town which is slated to be “relocated.” The town of Röcken has hoped that the famous gravesite might be able to save the town from destruction, but at the moment, the plan still calls for the town to be leveled.
Just like homes, churches, schools and monuments, cemetaries are not beyond the reach of coal relocation. For those with relatives in relatively new graves, it’s often possible to yank them one in one piece and plop them down somewhere else. However, if it’s an older family grave, where the coffin has decomposed and the body has been reduced to a few fragments of bone and teeth, then chances are, you’re just going to have to deal with the fact that what’s left of your grandma is going to end in a pile of mine spoil. (needless to say, some families are not happy about this.)
But it gets worse. In addition to the destruction of individual homes and the uprooting of families, entire groups and cultures are being threatened by the relocation effort.
Via Bloomberg:
Germany’s Sorb Minority Fights to Save Villages From Vattenfall
Dec. 18 (Bloomberg) — In the deserted eastern German village of Haidemuehl, doors creak and slam in the winter wind. Neglected gardens overflow with junk: refrigerators, bottles, cassettes.
Viewed through a smashed window pane, pink teddy bears dance on a blue background, the torn wallpaper of a child’s abandoned bedroom. Behind the crumbling briquette factory, an excavator works in the rain, pulling down a warehouse piece by piece.
Haidemuehl will soon be destroyed. The last villagers left in 2006, resettled by the Swedish utility Vattenfall AB. It is one of more than 80 villages to be wiped off the map by lignite mining in the Lausitz region — Lusatia in English — since 1924.
The region, about 150 kilometers southeast of Berlin, is home to the Sorbs, a 60,000-strong Slavic minority with a language related to Polish and Czech. With 10 more villages threatened by Vattenfall’s mining plans, Sorb inhabitants are fighting back.
“Beneath us there is coal, and Vattenfall wants it,” Erika Petrick, 66, says in an interview in the endangered village of Rohne, part of the municipality of Schleife. She is dressed in the traditional Sorb costume still worn by the older women in the region — apron, thick linen pleated skirt, frilled blouse, bodice and white bonnet. “If Vattenfall’s plans come to fruition, then the Schleife Sorbs will die out. We want to stop them.”
More than 25,000 people — ethnic Sorbs and Germans — have been forced to leave their homes in Lusatia to make way for the mines in the past 80 years. They are victims of demand for lignite, or brown coal. It’s a cheap, homegrown source of power.
Lignite Demand
Lignite accounts for about a quarter of German electricity production, a proportion the Environment Ministry predicts may increase to 28 percent by 2020 as the government phases out nuclear power. Vattenfall digs up 60 million tons of coal a year from its four Lusatia mines, according to Hartmuth Zeiss, head of the company’s European mining unit.
“We expect to keep this level of coalmining in the long term, for the next few decades,” Zeiss said in a meeting at the company’s Cottbus office. “What would be the sense of cutting back on lignite mining here, when worldwide it is climbing?”
Lusatia straddles the states of Saxony and Brandenburg. The Sorbs arrived in the sixth and seventh centuries. The written language dates back to the Reformation and only about 20,000 still speak Sorbian as their mother tongue.
“With the loss of these villages, language areas have disappeared, areas of distinct Sorb identity have vanished and our traditional costumes are going, too,” says Heiko Kosel, a deputy for the Left Party in the Saxon parliament.
Flattening Villag
The relocation program threatens to destroy all that is left of the Sorbian culture by destroying the communities that remain and dispersing the few who maintain the traditions. This is just another irreplacable loss to world culture from the German coal mine relocation program. This program, though little known, continues to grow and plans for the communities and sites to be destroyed already extend past 2040.
Oh yeah, but they’re installing solar panels are some of these mines, so that makesit all better (sarcasm)
This site on Flicker has links to several photo pools which document the destruction of several villages. Please check it out. It’s very sobering.
This is no energy policy to be proud of or for the world to want to emulate.
This entry was posted on Friday, April 3rd, 2009 at 8:48 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Culture, Enviornment, History, Nuclear, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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April 4th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
Susan Lamar said:
Because wind and solar don’t work without coal and gas. There’s nothing on the horizon in terms of storage or transmission or smart grid or any combination of the above that will allow it to work either.
Susan Lamar said:
No.
Susan Lamar said:
By producing ample quantities of cheap, reliable and safe electricity with low CO2 emissions.
The deaths from coal particulates in Germany amount to approximately 10 times the deaths due to Chernobyl, each and every single year.
Susan Lamar said:
Uranium would be used in weaponry whether or not nuclear plants extracted most of the U-235 for use in reactors. Uranium is cheap, effective(far more effective than tungsten) and avoids a lot of unnescessary deaths from the use of high explosives.
“Gulf war syndrome”, if it exists(vets from other wars such as vietnam showed similar problems, e.g. from post-traumatic stress disorder), is not caused by uranium unless there is some hitherto unknown mechanism. For more likely culprits look at nerve gas(several depots of which were bombed by US troops), oil fires on such an unprecedented scale that it was hard to tell if it was day or night, early versions of anthrax-vaccine with known side-effects and a plethora of infectious diseases endemic to Iraq.
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April 4th, 2009 at 12:13 pm
Susan Lamar said:
Nuclear power can replace fossil fuels completely. Wind and solar power – not being capable of providing reliable 24/7 power – can only supplement fossil fuels. Using renewables and nuclear together on the electricity grid makes little sense, because unlike fossil fuel power, only a negligible part of the total cost of nuclear power is the cost of the fuel, and it is therefore pointless to spend billions on renewables just to save a small amount of nuclear fuel.
The craze for wind and solar is a gambit by the fossil fuel industry to divert attention away from nuclear power (the one alternative that could truly put them out of business). Oh, and Gerhard Schroeder was a traitor who sold out his country out to the Russian so he could get a cushy job at Gazprom.
Susan Lamar said:
Every year, a quarter of a million people in China alone are killed by coal pollution. Nuclear waste has killed no-one.
Susan Lamar said:
How do you know that Gulf War Syndrome is indeed caused by depleted uranium ammo, and not by (say) pollution from all those oil wells torched by Saddam during that war? And even if depleted uranium ammo is to blame, how does that concern nuclear power, which employs no processes which aerosolize uranium (and thus make it dangerous)?
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April 4th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
drbuzz0, you absolutely must throw in this figure:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,grossbild-928803-496691,00.html
It is a map of the proposed coal plants in Germany, from the newspaper Der Spiegel.There’s over 25 gigawatts in the works – it utterly dwarfs the renewable “contribution”.
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April 4th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
As I read this I can think of only the flat earth society because this is the only site I have ever seen that says Germany is not doing very well by their renewable energy projects and are the standard the world should look to. Renewables = more coal? Does 1+1 = 3?
Here’s a fact for you: The Ecologist had a top ten of countries in the world for best sustainable and environmentally friendly energy policies. Germany and Denmark were tied for number one. Almost all the other countries that were very high up are all Euro countries that have a lot of renewable energy plus Cuba and a couple of others elsewhere.
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April 4th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
anon said:
Looks like Belgium, France and Holland are going to have some pretty poor air quality days coming real soon now.
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April 4th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
The bottom line here, and the point that illustrates the depth of the venality of the Green position, is that no one was calling for the legislated closing of coal plants and their immediate replacement with ‘renewables’. The only power generation targeted was nuclear power, and it is patently obvious that this was to remove the only viable competitor to coal.
If anyone need more proof I suggest spending three minutes watching this video from YouTube Climate Camp – BBC News Arthur Scargill interview, 4th August 2008 where the leader of British National Union Of Miners demands a nuclear shutdown and tell me this is not what is going on, not only in Germany, but everywhere where coal and nuclear are in competition.
Via Rod Adam’s Atomic Insights -Smoking Gun Part 16
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April 4th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
BenG4n6_USC said:
You don’t seem to get the point here: policies and the reality on the ground are two different things. Legislation has not reduced the use of coal and gas, in fact it has caused them ti rise along with the greenhouse gasses they emit.
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April 4th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
Soylent said:
Yeah, that’s very much the case and if you look at the numbers it’s hard to miss. Even before the fall of the Soviet Union, the 1980’s were a rough time on the Communist Block. Given that the Soviet Union and East German government had almost no enviornmental regulations (or none that were enforced), their plants hadn’t been upgraded since the 1960’s. Given that they had plenty of cheap labor and thus cheap coal the systems were horribly inefficient. So the Soviets never had very effecient technology to begin with – even before all the neglect.
You can look at the stats for coal consumption and CO2 reduction. There’s a plunge that occurs in the early 1990’s, shortly after reunification. From 1992-1995 or so there were some good efforts to shut down the worst and oldest power plants and to upgrade all of them to current standards with digital control systems, better regulators and occasionally new turbines.
This basically maxed out around the late 1990’s and the dramatic reductions ended. It plateaued for a little bit and since 2005 it’s been going up consistently.
this is a bit old, but gives an acurate picture:
http://www.geni.org/globalenergy/library/national_energy_grid/germany/GermanyCountryAnalysisBrief.shtml
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April 4th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
J Carlton said:
Will they? I don’t know a whole lot about the prevailing winds in Europe, but I would have thought it would be Poland that would be sucking soot.
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April 4th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
BenG4n6_USC said:
You, sir, are a terrific example of how our public education system is failing us. Now Steve may not have an engineering degree, but he is very technically literate, unlike obviously, yourself, whose technical illiteracy is appalling in the current world. Furthermore you resort to an obviously very biased source and its obvious from their website that their determination of greeness more or less relies on how Socialist the various countries are so we can discount the ability to gain any actual information using them as a reference. On the other hand many of us here do know what we are talking about. Many of us have been looking at energy issues for decades. We know how to run the numbers. It’s pretty basic actually. You need X Terawatts to function. Here’s the US in one pretty picture thats easy to understand:
https://eed.llnl.gov/flow/02flow.php
In order to change an energy resource you need to meet its requirements, preferably doing it cheaper. Now coal has had a diminishing role in home heating and transportation because its inefficient in those areas. But it continues to be used for power generation because its cheap and fairly reliable. The renewables will never be cheap or reliable enough to replace coal. You simply cannot replace a 90% capacity factor reliability system with one with a 25% capacity factor reliability at best, especially one that’s going to have to put thousands of these across the landscape:
http://www.newlaunches.com/archives/enercon_e126_worlds_largest_wind_turbine.php
Now, I could post a ton of links and references about energy issues, but I think, that if you truly want make yourself energy literate it’s far more meaningful if you look for them yourself. FYI, don’t start with Red rags like the Ecologist either. In my experience they are useless for anything other than making meaningless papers to attempt to impress stupid university professors anyway.
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April 4th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
Jcarlton, BSME said:
Oh no, not the “watermelon” theory again! For much of its history, The Ecologist was edited for 9 years by Zac Goldsmith, son of billionaire James Goldsmith and since 2005 a member of the Conservative Party. In fact, the UK Green Party was founded in the 1970s not by socialists, but by renegade Tories opposed to their party’s pro-growth policies.
Also, why didn’t former members of France’s large Communist Party (which largely collapsed after the fall of the Soviet Union) mutate into environmentalist radicals?
IMHO if environmentalists are watermelons, they are rotten watermelons. Beneath the green exterior is not a nice solid Marxist core, but the putrid stench of nihilism.
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April 4th, 2009 at 4:01 pm
BenG4n6_USC said:
That’s because you self-select what you read and what you have selected is from solar and wind advocates.
BenG4n6_USC said:
No. But wind and solar can only affect very modest savings of coal and natural gas at great expence and will never be able to replace more than a tiny fraction of either. A modest increase in electricity demand will completely wipe out any CO2 savings that you can achieve.
The grid is like a finely tuned orchestra of generators with varying characteristics that come one and offline according to a specific plan derived from demand forecasting.
The output of wind farms goes roughly as the cube of wind speed up to a limit at which the attack angle of the blades is changed to try and keep output constant and prevent the wind turbine falling apart(wind turbines almost never operate in this region); if wind speeds go even higher wind turbines have to shut down to prevent damage. Build up of dead bugs can reduce power output by up to 25%. Wind output can be dead flat for well over a week(often in the dead of winter or the middle of summer during a heat wave when you need it the most). There is significant seasonable variability.
Even hour-by-hour it’s not possible to forecast this with any reliability. To protect against shortfalls the grid must use more spinning reserve; that means having a bunch of coal plants that burn coal to keep their turbine spinning and synchronized with the grid. It also means having simple cycle gas turbines(which respond faster but are less efficient than combined cycle gas turbines) pick up the slack that couldn’t be dealt with using combined cycle turbines. At night all electricity is supplied from baseload plants(coal, nuclear) and all electricity produced by wind farms is pure waste. The CO2-savings from wind power is almost nill.
Solar is a bit better but it too varies to a large degree with season and weather unless you live in a desert near the equator. At far greater expense still, it has the potential to save some small fraction of the natural gas being burned to supply peak-load.
Wind and solar is simply not useful in a post carbon grid. The longer you cling to that fantasy the longer well keep burning coal and gas. A modest increase in electricity demand wipes out any CO2 savings that are in principle possible with wind and solar energy.
BenG4n6_USC said:
Yes, it’s a fact that “The Ecologist” has this opinion and it is a fact that you share “The Ecologist”’s opinion, but you are mistaking this opinion for a fact, and it most certainly is not.
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April 4th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
George Carty said:
There is some truth in what you say, If the old Reds I knew in my youth were to see what their movement had turned into they wouldn’t be able to stop throwing-up.
At any rate when did energy start being part of the right/left split? As I recall that was one of the few topics that everyone agreed on once – more was better. Only ownership of the production facilities was up for debate.
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April 4th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
George Carty said:
This discussion has come up before. The Greens are not really the same kind of deal as the oldschool communist groups, the ones cut from the Soviet school of thought that inspires to a grand society of social justice and progress.
They share some things in common and the Green movement is without doubt left-wing in political leaning, but it’s an offshoot with some distinctions. It tends to be very anti-humanist. The old left was a bit different. Sure, communism would **** on workers, but it also pretended to elevate them and used a lot of talk about it. The Greens don’t pretend to value humanity in the same way.
There’s a minimalist kind of thing. anti-technology is part of it. Sure it does have the neo-communist belief in central control and restrictions, but it adds to this some very different ideals of what an ideal community should be.
One thing that makes it different is that it seems to very strongly encourage a vague kind of vision of idealism. it’s based on the idea of not thinking about the details too much, because the whole thing falls apart. “The world will be better if we use less” Don’t ask how. Don’t think about how to get from here to there. Just assume that this will equate to that.
There have been a lot of social movements in history that sought to control lives and societies through false promises. They’re all a bit different and put their own spin on things, but they borrow some ideas from those that came before.
That’s what I see the Green movement as. It’s got some rehashed ideas from movements passed and puts its own spin on them.
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April 4th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
23.
You lot keep missing the point. Germany has a highly developed renewables sector, one of the most developed there is. That is true.
For you, it seems the debate stops there. They have a lot of installed renewables capacity. End of story. You don’t need to know anymore.
What is being pointed out though is that this window dressing is accompanied by a massive expansion of the worst type of coal power, due in part on phasing out nuclear power to be replaced by the aforementioned renewable capacity. Said renewable capacity is not up to the task, so there is a massive energy gap, which is being filled by coal. That’s the consequences of the lovely factoid of Germany’s developed renewables sector.
It is a common strain of Green thinking that it’s the thought that counts. It’s not. It’s the results that count. You seem to want us to give Germany credit for having a developed renewables sector as a result unto itself. It’s the thought that counts after all. But it isn’t, the results of that thought is this coal rush. That’s not a good result. That’s a counterproductive result. Why should we celebrate Germany’s energy policy based on this?
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April 4th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
George Carty said:
Either way you end up in the same hell. When I see what Mark Levin’s great new book calls statism I don’t care what flavor it is. In the end the same rotten putrid garbage, with the same kind of tattered package, of “wouldn’t it be nice” and “the government should.” If the environmentalists really wanted to clean things up they could hold clean up drives for river fronts, pay for highway litter pickup or clean up graffiti days. Instead they jump on ships, risk lives and waste emergency rescue people’s time with their stupid protests. As for French Communists, who cares where they went.
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April 4th, 2009 at 6:05 pm
Hey let’s have a pool – which one of the following will be the first to post “take this site down!!”
doug
timberdoodle
phil84UK
SusanLamar
BenG4n6_USC
I’m voting for timberdoodles.
gman
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April 4th, 2009 at 6:06 pm
I have heard a lot of talk about how Germany is the standard the world should look to for what renewable energy can be economically and environmentally. I am going to look into this further, because I find this page shocking. I’m not saying I don’t believe it though, clearly you can cite examples of villages torn down for mining, which strongly implies to me that the country is not losing hunger for coal.
Comment poster 22 also shocks me. As I am reading that and the info here they are building more plants. I would never have believed this. I have always heard the country is Kyoto’s golden boy. Perhaps there is something to the reunification playing into this, because as I understand Kyoto only dictates cuts to a historical period for the quota so if you inherited a high carbon system that you can replace then you get a free ride. To be honest, this had not occurred to me.
I would still like to see more independent confirmation of this. I am not saying I don’t believe this is true, but I’m not sure. This is 180 degrees away from everything I have ever heard in the news media and from enviornmental groups.
I would like to find out there is more to this, because it is really very disturbing. I hope this page is lying, but I fear it is probably not.
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April 4th, 2009 at 9:04 pm
DTM78 said:
Belive it or not, most of us wish it were untrue as well. Lost in the ideological debate is the fact that we are running out of time to deal with issues like greenhouse gasses and the need to supply the Third World with the energy they need to raise their standard of living.
The farce that is wind power is made worse by the fact that it is only being supported BECAUSE it is not an effective way of replacing base-load sources such as coal and gas, but does create the illusion the Something_Is_ Being_Done. It is worse than tokenism, it is fraud.
Again if you think that coal isn’t complaint in this matter, I suggest you watch the short video I linked to in comment 25 of this thread, you can hear it directly from them.
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April 5th, 2009 at 1:58 am
Concerning Germany and Kyoto: “On 28 June 2006, the German government announced it would exempt its coal industry from requirements under the EU internal emission trading system.” [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocol]
Germany is indeed about to build 26 new coal plants, with 8 already well under way to open before 2011.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,472786,00.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/20/business/worldbusiness/20eurocoal.html?_r=1
The fact that many people were duped into thinking otherwise is disconcerting.
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April 5th, 2009 at 2:51 am
DV82XL said:
At least Arthur Scargill only supports home-produced, deep-mined coal though! (Because that’s what creates jobs for miners.) It seems like Germany is using mostly opencast coal, so it isn’t even working as a job-maintenance policy!
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April 5th, 2009 at 5:53 am
I still want to know why the various European Green Parties are not up in arms over the increased use of coal and Russian gas. They have been very vocal about the need to eliminate nuclear energy and have worked hard to press for antinuclear legislation at every level, but are strangely silent when it comes to dirtburners.
Meanwhile French state energy giant EDF, has been charged with engaging in industrial espionage against Greenpeace France. Apparently five people have been indicted by the French courts, including two EDF security executives, a computer expert and the head of a private investigation firm. The charge: attempting to hack into Greenpeace computer systems in France.
Director of Greenpeace France, Pascal Husting was quick to milk these accusations for all they are worth saying:
“Greenpeace is a non-violent environmental organization. The fact that we are being treated like terrorists because we dare to question nuclear energy shows just how frightened the nuclear industry is of transparency and a democratic debate.”
Conveniently ignoring the fact that Greenpeace uses illegal tactics all the time like, trespassing, blockades, etc. The group’s efforts to propagate its views to the press and the public, (closely tied to its fund raising efforts) often include confrontational tactics such as physically damaging property and blocking the efforts of whalers, sealers, and industrial producers. These “direct actions” are not peaceful, but instead nonviolent–Greenpeace seeks to provoke violent reactions from its targets, so as not to receive blame for using violence themselves.
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April 5th, 2009 at 7:58 am
DV82XL said:
You “want to know”? Come on, DV8, you know. I know. We all know. It was never really about the enviornment. That is just incidental. It’s about money, political power, gaining powerful allies, maintaining control, using issues for scaremongering, etc etc.
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April 5th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
Since several people here have claimed that German energy policy is rejecting new coal for renewables, it is interesting to hear what the German Environment Minister has to say on the subject.
Since this article is in German, I’ve provided a translation below:
Apparently, new coal plants are environmentally friendly and “carbon neutral.”
If anyone was still in denial of the fact that the battle is between coal and nuclear, the words of Sigmar Gabriel (the Environment Minister, for goodness sake) should provide some cold water and a hard dose of reality.
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April 5th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
Hmmm… “emission trading” Obviously when you get down to it you can;t build power plants that burn coal and not have CO2. It sounds like the proposal is that if you “trade” the emissions enough and have enough cross-exchanging, buying and selling then you can complicate the system enough to hide the fact that tons and tons of emissions are being produced.
“Okay, so we make CO2 here, but it’s no big deal, because it actually is a reduction in the net Co2. See, for every ton of CO2, we trade a credit with a company that reduces CO2 emissions, who collects these credts through an international broker, and they are able to garentee that there is a reduction in industries by offering credit buying that combines credits into larger credit packages and then resells them, and in the process there’s a reduction in Co2 because each has a promissory credit from a factory in Indonesia to upgrade to lower carbon systems, and then there’s a series of trees planted in South America…”
Yeah… it’s kinda like money laundering. Make the trail so complex and convoluted and the paperwork so obscure that nobody is able to follow things back to their source and ultimately determine that is’ all dirty.
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April 5th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
BMS said:
It is clear that the first phase of the emission trading system in Europe- running from 2005 to 2007 – was a failure: more permits to pollute were printed than there was pollution. The price of carbon collapsed to almost zero, creating no incentive to reduce pollution. As a result in the UK, for example. firms covered by the scheme increased their emissions by 3.6% in the first year alone. Across the EU, emissions from installations covered by the scheme rose by 1%. Member states opted to buy in vast numbers of what are essentially carbon offsets from developing countries, rather than make real reductions in emissions. But the offsets did not reduce emissions, but became a method of subsidizing polluters.
Emission trading systems are guaranteed to work wonderfully from the perspective of having a lot of credits traded, allowing its proponents to claim great success. The fact that a compliance buyout system (which is what an emissions trading system should really be called) works against rapid reduction of greenhouse gas emissions will be buried in fuzzy numbers and free market blather for years. These schemes are an intellectual fraud. They contradict what every sensible person understands intuitively. Their widespread acceptance is the product of the short-term interests of powerful groups and greenwash propaganda.
Anyone who buys into this intellectual fraud is contributing directly or indirectly to delaying meaningful emissions standards. Which is another way of saying they are working against the interests of the natural environment they purport to support.
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April 5th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
DV82XL said:
That is a big problem, of course, but I am very opposed to the “cap and trade” system, at least without first establishing a large infrastructure of nuclear energy, because of the social and economic impacts. The logic behind it is that if you limit CO2 and make it expensive, then people will use less CO2-intensive sources and more clean energy sources. This logic is totally flawed because in most cases, alternative sources don’t exist. No matter how expensive you make coal fired power, you’re never going to get an aluminum mill to start using wind power – they’ll just go out of buisiness or move over seas before they do that.
Without a viable alternative it amounts to energy rationing and limits and thus energy prices sore. High energy prices have the most undesirable economic impacts imaginable: They’re regressive and hit the lowest classes hardest, destroying upward mobility and opportunity and making lower class living standards very very low. They destroy industry and make operations overseas extremely attractive. They force limits on potential economic expansion. They inflate the price of damn near everything, since everything requires energy, but they also give a big advantage to foreign producers over domestic producers.
It’s about one of the worst things I can imagine as far as policies go. It amounts to suicide.
There are really two ways to attack this issue
1. “Make dirty power extremely expensive and unavaliable”
2. “make clean power avaliable and economical”
My feeling is that if you want to force closed coal power plants and other big CO2 producers that’s great, but don’t do it one moment sooner than there is ample nuclear capacity. If you want to limit CO2 emissions, don’t do it today, instead pass legislation that states the program will begin in something like 20 years – so there’s no shock that it’s coming, and then use that 20 years to build reactors in anticipation of it.
The problem being that if we continue to build reactors like we do now, where it takes an average of five to ten years just to get approval, then we can’t ever get to that point.
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April 6th, 2009 at 10:34 am
what’s up with the German energy plan and the eradication of nuclear. why don’t they learn something from their French neighbors and invest in nuclear as their base-load supply. This coal business is just dirty.
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April 7th, 2009 at 12:21 am
I did a littler research on Conrad Miller last year and found some evidence that he had his medical license suspended due to some negligent behavior. I don’t remember the details or if I even still have the link, but I couldn’t be a 100% certain that it was the same Conrad Miller MD either. I doubt he practices medicine anymore. He basically regurgitates the same anti-nuke stuff straight from Greenpeace and Harvey Wasserman. If this guy was a practicing MD, he wouldn’t be wasting his “free time” peddling his stupid book.
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April 7th, 2009 at 12:44 am
Conrad Miller’s medical license suspension notice
He’s from Long Island according to his book, the complaint is based in Long Is. It’s probably the same guy.
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April 7th, 2009 at 1:11 am
Jason Ribeiro said:
Hmmm. Well he signs his name on there, so if there were a signature of his to track down somewhere it would probably be able to clear this up by comparing the two, just to see if it is signed the same way.
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April 7th, 2009 at 8:32 am
Hi!
Engineering Edgar said:
The contract between government and the industry is a bit more flexible than you think. They can transfer operation time from newer plants to older plants. In fact Vattenfall is maintaining two of their plants so extensionally and so long, that they will get over the elections in autumn. (Maintenance time is not counted as operation time.) If the CDU / FDP coalition (conservative / liberty) wins, the power plants most probably won’t be shut down.
Engineering Edgar said:
Wait a moment! Not ALL Germans are like this. Most Germans live peaceful and harmonically with the nuclear plants in their neighbourhood, if there are still any. Not every German wants to eradicate all nuclear reactors from the face of the earth, and many wish a longer life for those that are in this country.
Engineering Edgar said:
That is not correct. The decommissioned nuclear power plants have to be removed, but only long after their retirement, after some decrease of the radioactivity of the core. The owner is obligated to put a lot of money aside for this purpose.
DV82XL said:
For the green party, who were the driving force behind the antinuclear politics, the question of technically doable or not would not have mattered. Their problem was a judicial one, when they realised that they would have to compensate the owners for the factually disappropriated property. Since this is in the constitution, they would not have had the power to avoid that. And their constituents would not have accepted any payment to the hated energy cooperates.
DV82XL said:
Unfortunately Germany has sufficient gas reserves, so no one in Germany suffered from a gas shortage.
Phil84UK said:
To say it in German: Doch! (There is no translation available, but it means you are wrong and the opposite is right. Feel free to integrate this valuable expression into your language.) There have been towns dug up and there will be.
Sorry. Germany is not the green paradise you are dreaming of. It is not the Shire and the Germans are not hobbits.
Greetings from good old Germany
Daddeldu
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April 7th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
Daddeldu,
How hard do you think it would be to turn Germans against the phase-out via the meme “Schroeder was a traitor and a puppet of Gazprom”?
(As you could see on that poster I linked to higher up the thread…)
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April 7th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
Daddeldu said:
You;re absolutely right, but that’s not really the problem. The problem is not the German people in general being against it, it is a politically powerful group and activist organizations. They have managed to grab enough power to get things the way they want it and have exploited some factors in the parliamentary system to try to wedge things in so that it can’t be changed. It’s a one-issue group that has very good funding.
I realize many Germans are not anti-nuclear and those who oppose the phase out really have to work hard to oppose the other side and to campaign. Believe me, I know, it’s not just a German thing. The Greens are very entrenched and very difficult to take on everywhere. They might be a minority but they generally have enough influence to stand in the way of things.
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April 7th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
Here is a very apropos article from a British satirical site that best describes the celebrity obsession with environmental causes.
http://newsbiscuit.com/2009/04/07/bono-rules-that-lip-service-and-moral-posturing-count-towards-carbon-offsetting/
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April 7th, 2009 at 6:00 pm
George,
George Carty said:
I think it would add 0.3 % to a successful campaign to turn the public opinion.
Schröder is an ex-chancellor, so he is not important enough to cause uproar. The underlying fact is widely known and too old to be news.
Besides, he struggled hard to be re-elected. On the night of the election, where his party lost by a very narrow margin, there was a bizarre scene, when he claimed the will and moral right to stay chancellor. He was offered to become chairman of that firm several weeks after Merkel was elected chancellor by the parliament. (She was the conservative candidate, after she had won the beauty contest within the CDU.) So at the time of the phase-out decision he clearly was not after that job.
The contract with the industry and the phase-out decision is widely seen as the work of his green environmental minister Jürgen Trittin anyway.
The opponents of nukes are afraid. They fear a Chernobyl in Germany, which would, as they know for sure, lay waste the whole country for thousands of years (and, honestly, who would put us up meanwhile?) and is very probable. Masses of superdangerous waste, which has to be guarded for 100.000 years, are produced.
A somewhat shrill criticism of Schröder won’t help much against the German angst…
Daddeldu
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April 7th, 2009 at 6:36 pm
drbuzz0 said:
drbuzz0,
please read the paragraph you quoted and search for a (tasteless) joke with regard to German history.
Best regards,
Daddedu
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April 8th, 2009 at 5:13 am
Josh said:
Whatever the german word for “nonsense” is, concider it thrown at you this very instant.
This is what the situation is for german electricity…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity_production_in_Germany.PNG
…and I quote from Wikipeda as to the power consumption in total:
In 2008, [Germany] consumed energy from the following sources: oil (34.8%), coal including lignite (24.2%), natural gas (22.1%), nuclear (11.6%), renewables (1.6%), and other (5.8%)
Not only that, but the little renewable there is in Germany right now, it is already starting to mess up the entire European grid. We have had continentwide disturbances leading to 15 million households losing power because german windpower wreaks havok on the net.
http://nuclearpoweryesplease.org/blog/2008/12/13/the-day-wind-power-nearly-blew-out-europe/
In Sweden we get approximately 45-47% of our electricity from hydropower and 45-47% of it from nuclear power. Depending on where and how our uranium is refined, our electricity as a whole most of the time produces less emissions per kWh delivered that does wind and solar power.
So before you concider saying that you are so grün in Germany, I recommend upping your daily dose of Reality by about 3141% percent since your statements indicate a severe deficiency of that vital nutrient.
“…one of the most well devloped…”? HAH!
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April 8th, 2009 at 8:18 am
Michael Karnerfors said:
Huh? Didn’t you read the rest of Josh’s post? (Oh, and I think he’s a Brit…)
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April 8th, 2009 at 8:25 am
George Carty said:
That’s what I get for being in a hurry and trying to squeeze this in during the dead time of code checkouts and compilations. This was one of the worst f*ck-ups I’ve ever done on an internet discussion.
Yes of course you are entirely correct… I completely misadressed this post. It should be adressed to post #23, just like Josh did.
/Michael, embarassed
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May 21st, 2009 at 8:51 pm
I have an enviornmental ethics professor who has always said that Germany is the prime example of what good enviornmental policy is and has said that it is embarrassing that we do not keep up with them. He wrote a big article in a magazine about how Germany got it right and we need to start to follow them.
Of course I brought this to his attention and he told me that this is not correct. He said that they are only using coal until they can get enough wind turbines and solar panels up to stop, which will be in a few years. He said they already shut down nuclear and when that is done they’ll work on shutting down coal and going 100% renewable most of the time.
That is why he said there are coal plants to last a long time, because they may need them sometimes but not most of the time. He said that wind is alaways blowing somewhere but on unusual occasions there might be too much still air to power everything and so coal power is only as last chance backup that they will use only a few times a year, but it is backup power.
He also said that they know coal is bad for the enviornment so all the new coal plants will replace their carbon back into the ground.
So that is how Germany is working to do it. Not perfect now, but in a few years it will be all wind and solar 95% of the time and coal only every once in a while.
Also nuclear he said is the worst kind of power because even coal polution eventually gets taken up by trees, but nuclear waste is forever. You can’t get the permission of the next thousadn generations to trash their planet with deadly waste so you can’t impose it on them.
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May 21st, 2009 at 9:08 pm
An Informed Person said:
Your ‘Environmental Ethics’ professor is either a liar, or a complete idiot. Probably, he’s a bit of both.
Germany is the premier example of awful environmental policy, phasing out clean, carbon-free energy plants and encouraging people to invest in useless low-grade power sources while building a huge coal-burning infrastructure which is intended to be used for centuries to come.
Does your idiotic, mendacious professor know any physics at all, or did he study up on ‘environmental ethics’ to obtain tenure? Which unfortunate institution is blighted by his presence?
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May 21st, 2009 at 9:21 pm
An Informed Person said:
Your professor is misinformed, and I would say that so are you, despite the title you have chosen for yourself.
Of course he did. What did you expect him to do? Just keel over and say “Oops, guess I was wrong”? There is a alot of prestige and pride involved in these matters.
This statement is not connected to any kind of reality as we know it. Let me show you why. This is the energy production of Germany:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity_production_in_Germany.PNG
The energy consumption is as follows: Germany is one of the largest consumers of energy in the world. In 2008, it consumed energy from the following sources: oil (34.8%), coal including lignite (24.2%), natural gas (22.1%), nuclear (11.6%), renewables (1.6%), and other (5.8%).
Quoted from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany
Not only that… but the relatively small amount of windpower there is is already starting to muck up the power grids… as demonstrated by this article.
That is hogwash. Wind fluctuates very much. Depending on the migration of pressure areas, you can get virtual standstills in the entire country. And using coal for backup is just plain silly. Why? Because coal is about 100 times as dirty as nuclear power and wind power. Which means that if you have to use coal as little as one day out of a hundred, you will already have lost the advantage of wind. And wind goes down alot more than that.
Carbon dioxide… not carbon. A gas. And you think that just shoving gas right into the ground will make it stay there forever?
That statement has absolutely no truth behind it. I cannot even begin do describe out laughable it is. Germany is currently getting less than 1/20 of their energy from renewables and already the grids cannot take it. Saying that wind and sun can provide 99% of the time is utterly ludicrous because sun, as we know, shines only 50% of the time, at best, and wind is fell known to fluctuate with variations of up to 3000%.
Wrong… that is just plain opposite of reality. Coal ash has no half-life. Ash dumps are toxic and contains pollutants and heavy metals. There are enormous volumes of it produced each year. Huge dumps of ash that lasts forever. Did you know for instance that the uranium content in coal is such that coal plants account for a much higher release of uranium into the environment than does nuclear power?
Nuclear waste on the other hand has a half-life and decays into harmlessness. The volumes of nuclear waste are incredibly small in comparison to coal. An amount of uranium that is equivalent in volume of 7 lumps of sugar in a BWR/PWR reactor has enough energy to last you your lifetime. With a closed fuel-cycle and modern reactors, the equivalent volume is one half lump of sugar. and with modern reactors, the storage time needed until teh waste is completely harmless is a measly 500 years.
Yes you can…. since mother nature has already demonstrated that deep geological repositories are perfectly safe. The Swedish KBS-3 method is up for review next year. It builds on the methods that nature itself has used for billions of years to contain nuclear materials.
All in all… your professor in “environmental ethics” is talking out of his ass because his arguments have no founding in reality. He is wrong. He is feeding you false information.
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July 11th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
I think you are missing two things in background information on the German greens and the German party “Die Grünen” which I as a German take for granted:
The green movement in Germany and the party “Die Grünen” are a child of the anti nuclear power movement of the 1970ies and 1980ies.
At that time the government and the industry tried to create facts before a political discussion could happen. That misfired badly and gave birth to the anti nuclear power movement, which was a conglomeration of lots of different political groups whose only common ground was to be anti nuclear. This movement couldn’t stay together because of difference of opinion, but a major core was left, which formed the green movement in Germany. So they can’t become pro nuclear, because that would go against their base assumptions.
The second base assumption (of the green movement), which seems to go especially bad with a lot of Americans is, that
a) resources are limited.
b) when resources are limited it is a good idea, to use up these resources as slow as possible.
c) to have energy last longer, it is a good idea, to make energy more expensive over time, to encourage
d) reduce energy usage with better engineering / isolation / …
e) each person to use less energy over time, as they can not afford it any more.
Regards
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July 12th, 2009 at 6:19 am
kalahari said:
You can’t use less energy than a subsistence farmer – do you think the Morgenthau Plan would have been a good thing for Germany?
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July 12th, 2009 at 5:21 pm
kalahari said:
That’s nonsense. Nuclear development began in Germany with the ‘Atoms for peace’-program, so in the late 1950s. From Wikpedia (sorry folks, I won’t translate it, it is about the first German reactors):
So the political discussion could have taken place since 1957, but started in 1975, 18 years later. There was enough time and room and opportunity to start a debate. In fact, until that time people where were widely enthusiastic about nuclear power.
I more and more subscribe to the Rod Adams-thesis, that the whole antinuclear movement was discretely started by the fossil fuel industry in its very own economic interest. First in the US, then in Europe, with particularly great success in Germany. (Any and every US debate is repeated here anyway.)
For further reading: http://atomicinsights.blogspot.com/search/label/smoking%20gun
Grüße, Daddeldu
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July 12th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
Daddeldu said:
But of course. Just look at the countries with a big coal sector and you will also see the countries with the most active antinuclear movements. The correspondence is one-to-one.
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July 13th, 2009 at 8:47 am
Daddeldu said:
Not quite the same thing – Rod Adams thinks nuclear power in the United States has been suppressed because oil companies and private coal owners have bribed politicians to restrict nuclear energy.
In Germany (and Britain) any such bribery would have to be on the part of unions not capitalists, because the coal mines required subsidies to stay in business — in Britain they were actually owned by the state. It’s more likely in my view that nuclear power was opposed not by corrupt politicians but by left-wing activists, who revered coal miners (because of their historic role as the spearhead of the labour movement) and didn’t want to see them thrown on the dole.
That’s Luddism in the true sense of the word — people opposing a new technology which threatens their jobs, as opposed to people who are just hostile to technology period.
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July 13th, 2009 at 8:49 am
Oh, another question Daddeldu,
Do you think that a lot of the people who are hyping the “green jobs” that renewable energy will supposedly bring are the same people who earlier supported coal in order to protect the jobs of miners, but who were forced to change tack because of fears about man-made global warming?
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July 13th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
George Carty said:
I think there is a significant intersection of the two sets. The Social Democratic Party is to mention here, who have been the traditional party of the coal miners.
Best regards, Daddeldu
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