G7 Reaches Deal To Exit From Coal By 2035 148
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Energy ministers from the Group of Seven (G7) major democracies reached a deal to shut down their coal-fired power plants in the first half of the 2030s, in a significant step towards the transition away from fossil fuels. "There is a technical agreement, we will seal the final political deal on Tuesday," said Italian energy minister Gilberto Pichetto Fratin, who is chairing the G7 ministerial meeting in Turin. On Tuesday the ministers will issue a final communique detailing the G7 commitments to decarbonize their economies. Pichetto said the ministers were also pondering potential restrictions to Russian imports of liquefied natural gas to Europe which the European Commission is due to propose in the short-term.
The agreement on coal marks a significant step in the direction indicated last year by the COP28 United Nations climate summit to phase out fossil fuels, of which coal is the most polluting. Italy last year produced 4.7% of its total electricity through a handful of coal-fired stations. Rome currently plans to turn off its plants by 2025, except on the island of Sardinia where the deadline is 2028. In Germany and Japan coal has a bigger role, with the share of electricity produced by the fuel higher than 25% of total last year. "This is another nail in the coffin for coal," said Dave Jones, Ember's Global Insights program director. "The journey to phase out coal power has been long: it's been over seven years since the UK, France, Italy, and Canada committed to phase out coal power, so it's good to see the United States and especially Japan at last be more explicit on their intentions."
"The problem is that whilst coal power has already been falling, gas power has not. G7 nations already promised to 'fully or predominantly' decarbonize their power sectors by 2035, and that would mean phasing out not only coal by 2035 but also gas. Coal might be the dirtiest, but all fossil fuels need to be ultimately phased out."
Further reading: Countries Consider Pact To Reduce Plastic Production By 40% in 15 Years
The agreement on coal marks a significant step in the direction indicated last year by the COP28 United Nations climate summit to phase out fossil fuels, of which coal is the most polluting. Italy last year produced 4.7% of its total electricity through a handful of coal-fired stations. Rome currently plans to turn off its plants by 2025, except on the island of Sardinia where the deadline is 2028. In Germany and Japan coal has a bigger role, with the share of electricity produced by the fuel higher than 25% of total last year. "This is another nail in the coffin for coal," said Dave Jones, Ember's Global Insights program director. "The journey to phase out coal power has been long: it's been over seven years since the UK, France, Italy, and Canada committed to phase out coal power, so it's good to see the United States and especially Japan at last be more explicit on their intentions."
"The problem is that whilst coal power has already been falling, gas power has not. G7 nations already promised to 'fully or predominantly' decarbonize their power sectors by 2035, and that would mean phasing out not only coal by 2035 but also gas. Coal might be the dirtiest, but all fossil fuels need to be ultimately phased out."
Further reading: Countries Consider Pact To Reduce Plastic Production By 40% in 15 Years
and data centers may need more Nuclear power plans (Score:2, Funny)
and data centers may need more Nuclear power plans to fill the gap
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And that's a problem, how? That's the cleanest, safest, cheapest power source we have; only geothermal is a contender but the latter is not available in the vast majority of places.
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It is completely economically ineffective to build new nuclear plants anyway.
Every nuke built in the West in the last 30 years has been an economic fiasco and decades behind schedule.
But non-Western countries, especially China and India, have a solid track record of building nukes on schedule and on budget.
Nukes are a big part of the solution, just not in Western countries.
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Wrong. Data begs to differ your dreams.
https://www.oecd-nea.org/lcoe/ [oecd-nea.org]
Solar 50.78 $/MWh
Wind onshore 58.43 $/MWh
Nuclear 66.01 $/MWh
Coal 74.67 $/MWh
Wind offshore 81.86 $/MWh
Gas 84.00 $/MWh
And the gap is widening every day.
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That chart is unreadable garbage. The columns are not properly labeled, there are no units specified, and many of the rows are inexplicably duplicated but with wildly varying values. It looks like the output of a random number generator. It also says the numbers are projections, not actual reality, so even if they made sense (they don't), they would still be worthless.
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True, it is nuclear industry B.S. data.
But it still shows that nuclear is more expensive than solar and onshore wind in China.
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Powerplant capacities are not measured in MWh or GWh.
They are measured in MW and GW and for cars in kW.
That raises the question if you made a simp!e typo, or if your numbers are pure phantasy.
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No typo.
This is not the price of the powerplant.
It is the price of resulting electricity for each and every produced kWh over the lifetime of a powerplant, including all costs (LCOE)
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you are confusing "Price" and "Cost".
Cost and price (Score:2)
Price of a kWh is sometimes negative on the market price.
Cost of making said kWh is always positive, and does not vary every 15 min.
Price is what the customer will pay for buying the product.
Cost is what the manufacturer will pay for making the product (Labor, materials, overhead costs)
Inbetween is the "raw margin"
Sometimes there is a factor 10x inbetween cost and price. Don't confuse those.
Re: Economically obsolete. (Score:3, Insightful)
China continues to build coal fire plants every month.
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That's not a problem because HVDC only loses 3.5% per 1,000 km (620 mi). [wikipedia.org]
Bidirectional charging makes the problem not harder but easier when electric vehicles are added to a virtual power plant. [slashdot.org]
Can they burn it all by then? (Score:1)
I wonder if there is enough remaining oxygen in the atmosphere to burn it all in time?
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Plenty since there is twice as much oxygen than carbon in CO2 /s
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Good point, overall, at face value about as good as the "agreement".
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We’ve also got more oxygen than we realise, cos there’s twice as much oxygen in O2 than you’d think (also /s)
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So if you can find a way to burn 50 million years of accumulated carbon in a decade, go for it !
Humanity: hold our beer!
One decade might be a stretch, but after less than two centuries, we burned most of easily mineable coal already.
Re: Can they burn it all by then? (Score:1, Insightful)
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Why would any coal plant invest in carbon capture (Score:3, Insightful)
Last week the EPA said any coal plant planning to operate after 2032 would have to invest in carbon capture. This basically removes all incentive to do it.
What "energy minister" from the USA had the authority to commit to this? Hopefully the next administration will kill it
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That would probably be Jennifer Granholm, the Secretary of Energy.
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That would probably be Jennifer Granholm, the Secretary of Energy.
Granholm is a box-ticking moron who doesn't know what her job is. She is not the head of the EPA, she is the head of the DOE, and her job is to make sure this country has a diverse, plentiful, and cheap energy supply.
This video is proof-positive of her incompetence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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The trouble is, this administration is filled with extreme green folks that are determined to take the US off fossil fuels....whether we are ready or not with alternate sources.
That ready with alternate sources includes comparable cost/pricing so as not to raise prices and increase inflation even more.
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Having a much smaller population would be ideal. Significantly less competition for various things would make life better for those that are born. Without immigration, our population would already be shrinking given that native born US women are having fewer children or none at all. We don't have enough native births to cover replacement.
Many countries are beginning to run into this problem. It's really only a problem when you consider how our SSI is funded. We really would be better off if our retirement d
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Tell me you know nothing about retirement funding w/out telling me you know nothing. How do you think that private pension is funded? That 401k? It's almost certainly built on an implicit assumpt
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All you can really do is play the game and hope it works out. Do your best to get your home/shelter paid off before you retire and try and have numerous incomes streams for retirement. Obviously, if the government goes bye bye, we are all pretty screwed anyway.
And yes I realize how our SSI works. It's literally built on the absurd idea that we can have perpetual growth. The problem is, we now have many more seniors collecting then we have people at the bottom paying into the system. We use to have a larger
Re:Why would any coal plant invest in carbon captu (Score:5, Informative)
That likely won't stand. The EPA has already been slapped down by the Supreme Court once for attempting to regulate CO2 as a pollutant when the Clean Air Act doesn't explicitly list CO2 as a pollutant.
Only Congress could kill coal in such a fashion.
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Only Congress could kill coal in such a fashion.
There's ways to price coal out of the picture other than taxing it into oblivion. We could see alternatives developed that come in at lower cost than coal. Isn't that the claim often repeated by solar PV advocates? That coal is dead because solar PV is cheaper?
What's been problematic for alternatives to coal is all the barriers in place from Congress, rules on safety, air and water quality, and so forth. An example of total nonsense laws was during the cleanup of an oil spill a ship that could filter oi
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Nobody mentioned taxing it at all (capture requirements aren't a tax, and the EPA doesn't have the power to tax anyway).
None of the rest of your post has anything to do with what I said, much less the subject at hand.
Re:Why would any coal plant invest in carbon captu (Score:4, Insightful)
Carbon capture requirements may not be a direct tax but it is still a tax in being a cost imposed by government, and enforced by fines. This is still "taxing" on the business to comply with regulations. The goal is clearly to price coal out of the market by raising their costs through rules, regulations, and legislation. It is a carbon tax by another name.
We'd do much better in looking for ways to remove regulatory barriers to alternatives to coal than by raising barriers for coal. We are boxing ourselves off from affordable energy with all these regulations. One big reason that coal is used for energy is that it is cheaper than other options, and what is making other options higher in cost has been EPA regulations. If the EPA wants to be rid of coal because of the pollution it produces then perhaps they need to review the rules on pollution from other energy sources, looking for ways to ease the rules and lower their costs. That means the alternatives could see more freedom to produce pollution but considering that the alternative has been burning coal then perhaps this pollution is still an improvement.
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How rude! But essentially correct. You need to factor in externalities if you want a fair market. Currently renewables are overpriced since they don't create as much pollution while many other energy sources just dump their pollution into our environment. Proper pricing would take into account the cost of removing that pollution.
While there was a time in our history were we would tolerate and essentially subsidize those dirty energies for the greater good, now we have clean alternatives. The dirty e
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Nobody mentioned taxing it at all (capture requirements aren't a tax
Perhaps. But a tax would be far more economically efficient and a better solution.
Carbon capture is stupid.
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We could see alternatives developed that come in at lower cost than coal. Isn't that the claim often repeated by solar PV advocates? That coal is dead because solar PV is cheaper?
Yeah, it probably will go that way, but it'll take longer than it should because PV is operating at a significant disadvantage due to coal plants free-riding on the environment. In the language of economists, pollution -- including CO2 -- is an externaity [wikipedia.org], a cost that is borne by a third party not part of the economic transaction. In this case, the parties in the transaction are the power plant operator and whoever buys their power, and the external third party is everyone else who has to cover the health
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American coal mining employment has fallen from a peak of 800k to 40k, a 95% reduction.
Coal has fallen from 50% of energy to 18% in the last 20 years.
Not a single new coal plant has been built in decades.
Coal is dying. We just need to nudge it into the grave.
Re:Why would any coal plant invest in carbon captu (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do we need to nudge it? Why do we need literally harm people and their livelyhoods intentionally when the natural consequences and economic trends are already headed rapidly toward a energy future that has coal entirely out of the picture?
At the rate coal is leaving the overall energy picture, even if we don't meet some specific goal of being coal free by X, the amount of coal operations will be such a vanishingly small part of the carbon picture that any beneficent will be mostly immeasurably small and diffuse but the consequences for the people who get nudge will of course be likely quite acute.
This is purely religious thinking driving this and downright pagan at that; the only justification for this type of policy choice is a belief that people who use coal are sinners and sinners have to be punished to appease mother earth.
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"Why do we need to nudge it?"
Because the costs are still external. The free market response is to internalize those costs to make the market more efficient.
"Why do we need literally harm people and their livelyhoods intentionally when the natural consequences and economic trends are already headed rapidly toward a energy future that has coal entirely out of the picture?"
Because otherwise we are *irreparably* harming others by not ending coal. The free market response when maximum efficiency would require a
Re:Why would any coal plant invest in carbon captu (Score:4, Interesting)
The main thing killing coal in US is natgas coming out of shale wells. Where piping infrastructure is built, gas becomes borderline free and outcompetes coal in almost everything.
I don't see this happening in places like Germany any time soon though.
Irrelevant (Score:4, Insightful)
A nice gesture, especially considering it will utterly wreck several first world economies, but utterly useless in the face of China and India increase coal use alone. [npr.org]
China realized long any the only thing that truly advances a civilization is abundant power.
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> China realized long any the only thing that truly advances a civilization is abundant power.
The Kardashev scale is a method of measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement based on the amount of energy it is capable of harnessing and using. Kardashev first outlined his scale in a paper presented at the 1964 Byurakan conference in Armenia...
It's a well known measure.
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Energy is wealth. With energy, you can do expensive processes that normally are impossible beforehand. For example, mass refining of aluminum was impossible before electric power and generators.
The EU is great for virtual signaling, but when the EU decides to starve its people of power, it just means China, India, Russia, and other BRICS countries advance, because they don't give a shit about rolling coal, if it helps their economy... and the US and EU will slavishly buy goods from those countries because
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Energy used productively is wealth. Energy availability by itself isn't, and energy waste isn't at all.
There's a reason why the "brics countries" still have to periodically be saved from made-at-home famine and other calamities by the very same Western countries that continually "shoot themselves in the foot".
Regards to Margosha Simonyan, btw, tell her her memos and her trolls are worthless.
Re:Irrelevant (Score:5, Informative)
Energy is wealth.
Indeed.
The EU is great for virtual signaling, but when the EU decides to starve its people of power, it just means China, India, Russia, and other BRICS countries advance, because they don't give a shit about rolling coal, if it helps their economy... and the US and EU will slavishly buy goods from those countries because they are cheaper.
Those paying attention will note that Russia and China are making large investments in nuclear power right now. I agree that BRICS care little about how much coal they burn, they care more about getting the most energy out with the least effort put in. This effort put in can be measured directly or indirectly as energy, and we know how different energy sources rate on energy return on energy invested.
Before about 1950 the highest EROEI was achieved with hydroelectric power and fossil fuels. We can see this with the huge investment in drilling for oil and building of dams leading up to World War 2. After WW2 the EROEI quickly shifted in favor of nuclear fission. Hydro still rates highly on EROEI today but with so many dams built there's not many rivers left worth a dam. If there's going to be growth in energy, and therefore growth in wealth, then it will have to come from nuclear fission. There's going to be places on Earth where investment in fossil fuels will still have an advantage over nuclear fission but that will be because of a close proximity to fossil fuels (less energy wasted in transport) and the industrial capacity to build nuclear reactors being a bit out of their reach.
The USA was able to build light water nuclear fission reactors in the 1950s, any nation that can reach a similar level of technical skill and industrial capacity can get to building nuclear power reactors on their own. As technology spreads that barrier to entry gets lower. There's people that are horrified that some nation could get nuclear power, doing their best to keep it from them. They can try but unless they are willing to bomb these nations into the stone age that's a fight they cannot win. Nuclear fission is not all that difficult to achieve, not for any nation with the ability to build something like a hydroelectric dam.
The BRICS nations aren't going to surpass the EU on industrial capacity because they don't fear burning coal. They could do so because they don't fear nuclear fission. Germany made a huge mistake on closing their nuclear power plants, and it would be wise for them to restart them if possible and go about building more new nuclear power plants. Energy is wealth, to get the most wealth in the least time means looking to EROEI in energy production. The best EROEI is found with nuclear fission.
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Not this EROEI shit again. How many times we do have to debunk it for you? And it's always you that brings it up.
Nobody gives a shit about EROEI. What matters is how clean the energy is, and how profitable it is. Renewables are unbeatable because they are cheap, require no fuel, and have shorter payback times.
The fact that your beloved nuclear wins this particularly stupid game of Top Trumps (google it) is meaningless. EROEI does not even factor into anyone's considerations when deciding what form of genera
"Reliable" (Score:3, Informative)
there's no one starving for power and Germany isn't the only country with a reliable power grid that's increasingly green.
Yes, Germany's "reliable" green power grid is so "reliable" that multiple heavy industries are shutting down [apnews.com].
They are among the first to fall. But not the last.
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The article you have linked suggests that this is caused by a price shock from Russian gas, and the historic failure to approve green energy projects which would have reduced dependency on that gas.
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From the article linked in grandparent post:
Germany grew complacent during a âoegolden decadeâ of economic growth in 2010-2020 based on reforms under Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in 2003-2005 that lowered labor costs and increased competitiveness, says Holger Schmieding, chief economist at Berenberg bank.
âoeThe perception of Germanyâ(TM)s underlying strength may also have contributed to the misguided decisions to exit nuclear energy, ban fracking for natural gas and bet on ample natural gas supplies from Russia,â he said. âoeGermany is paying the price for its energy policies.â
The price shock from losing Russian natural gas supplies was a direct result of closing their nuclear power plants and failing to produce natural gas domestically. I'd argue that Russia, or rather just Putin, felt empowered to invade Ukraine because the dependence on Russian natural gas supplies could be used as leverage to keep much of Europe from acting in Ukraine's defense. Fortunately this part of the plan failed. Germany knows that Russian aggression is no
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Alternative energy sources to natgas that *also have to be imported to Europe* and thus *do not break dependency on foreign powers*: uranium
Alternative energy sources to natgas that *do not have to be imported and therefore do break dependency on foreign powers*: solar, wind and thermal gradients ie ASHPs and GSHPs.
Re: "Reliable" (Score:1)
Except you have to import everything related to solar and wind. Every country on earth has uranium deposits they could get out if they really wanted to and it does not require Russia/China to even mine commercially, the biggest deposits are in the EU and the US. Next to that natural gas is also available in the EU and the US.
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Find me one single table that shows that “the biggest deposits [of uranium] are in the EU”
It’s absolute horseshit. Here’s where uranium is found:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The first EU country on the list is the Czech Republic, at 13th on the list.
You people feed yourselves such an endless diet of confidently wrong horseshit. Coprophages on an unprecedented scale
Omits 65% of the coal consumption worldwide (Score:3, Insightful)
G7 is US, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Japan/
Coal consumption by country https://www.worldometers.info/... [worldometers.info]
1 China 50.5% ...
2 India 11.3%
3 United States 8.5%
4 Germany 3%
5 Russia 2.7%
6 Japan 2.5%
19 Canada 0.5%
20 Thailand 0.5%
21 United Kingdom 0.5%
Why even hold these feel good photo opportunity politican get reelected events when 60% of the consumption is not even affected
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China is not going to collapse. That is just deep state propaganda.
Just look at the fundamentals. They have enough people, they have enough ability to produce and grow food to feed those people. They have at least a group of people that have achieved a high-level of education, skill and technical ability, its a not China of the late 60s that can't make ball point pens. The have powerful government that will be able to by fiat redistribute wealth in a way that prevents actual mobs of staving peasants, and c
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Finally. (Score:5, Insightful)
In the fine article is a mention of using nuclear power as an alternative to coal, it is about time this happened. There's been papers written on how to get away from burning coal for at least 50 years and those that actually showed their math pointed out that we aren't getting away from coal if we don't build a whole bunch of nuclear power plants.
What concerns me is the mention of biomass fuels, that's burning food. It may not be burning food directly like with corn ethanol but it would still be removing land, water, fertilizers, labor, and so on from food production. With war in Ukraine removing large areas of land from food production there's already been a severe hit to global food supplies. I believe the one benefit of corn ethanol fuel use in the USA is that it created a large supply of corn that can be diverted from use as fuel into use to make food. The total contribution to global energy supplies from corn ethanol is very small but it is a large part of global food supplies, or at least land we could use to grow other crops for food. Throw that switch on diverting corn that would go to fuel into food instead and that would be a teeny blip on energy but would feed a lot more people.
It takes about 8 years to build a nuclear power plant under normal conditions and they have a plan to get electricity to zero carbon in 11 years. I can see that happening in more like 30 years for the USA. At peak rate of construction the USA was able to put one gigawatt of nuclear power on the grid per month, and that was about 50 years ago. Our ability to take on large construction projects like that today must be something like triple what it was then. That means we can add about 36 GW of nuclear power to the grid per year if we wanted. We'd need something like 500 GW of nuclear power to replace all fossil fuel generation. If we can keep that pace then we could have enough nuclear power on the grid in something like 30 years.
Lately I've been watching a lot of YouTube videos about World War 2 and the battles at sea that happened during that time. I'm just fascinated at how many ships were built in such a short amount of time. The USA was certainly in the lead on naval power but all nations that participated in that war were able to divert incredible amounts of material and manpower into building ships. If the world could divert that kind of effort into building a zero carbon energy infrastructure then we might possibly get to zero carbon by 2035. I don't expect that to happen though unless driven to do so by a global war that makes it impractical to get the energy needed from fossil fuels alone. During the war there was rationing on fuel so people thought up all kinds of alternative fuels to get by. This included producing hydrocarbon fuels from what was previously considered waste material. A repeat of that could make fossil fuels effectively worthless because now we have nuclear power and other technologies to produce hydrocarbon fuels at industrial scales.
I'm pleased to see nuclear power get a mention but those words will have to be put into action to reduce fossil fuel use. I expect this deadline to pass with little progress like so many others unless there's something big to force the issue. I know of one thing that can force the issue but that's not something we'd want. Well, there's some that might want global war but those people are not sane.
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Given the date to exit coal is 2035, it's not clear how nuclear can help since currently EDF, the only company that builds it in Europe, is quoting 20 years to build one. That would mean the earliest any new nuclear plant could come online in Europe is 2044, 9 years after the end of coal use.
All attempts to speed this up have failed. The 20 years is after planning and legal issues have all been resolved. The UK tried to get the Chinese, the Japanese, and the US to build its nuclear plants. In the end they a
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Given the date to exit coal is 2035, it's not clear how nuclear can help since currently EDF, the only company that builds it in Europe, is quoting 20 years to build one. That would mean the earliest any new nuclear plant could come online in Europe is 2044, 9 years after the end of coal use.
Given the date to exit coal is 2035 it's not clear how any technology can reach that goal. There's other companies that can build nuclear power plants besides EDF, and they have a history of completing nuclear power plants in under 10 years.
This goal of ending use of coal in 11 years is clearly bullshit, there's no reaching that goal. If the goal is ending use of coal as soon as possible then we can do that with nuclear fission in 20 or 30 years. If there's no nuclear power in their energy plans then the
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If the UK has practically already ended the use of coal for electricity generation, and that's despite being really really bad at issuing renewable licences. There was a ban on on-shore wind for many years.
If the UK just carries on as it is, it will be coal free by 2035 anyway. It will still be using gas though, so it does need to push much harder.
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In practice, we are stuck with a de facto ban on onshore till the Tories are booted out. They made a nominal change (was it last year?) but it did nothing to unblock the pipeline because they are entirely focused on SourGimmerVotes
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Sadly I'm not convinced that things will improve all that much under Labour. They will get a bit better, but nothing like what we really need.
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I fear you are right. It all depends on how much the context feels like it’s changed after the election and the pressure comes from pro-renewables and pro-growth, and how much the voices of the right and the old fade to their appropriate prominence given the likely scale of the trouncing. So much depends on whether Reeves et al continue to view moribund orthodoxy as serious and see green growth as sweetly juvenile (what appears to me to have happened to the 28bn plan). I think they are looking to the
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Starmer's government won't borrow to invest, or tax corporations and the wealthy properly, or get back in the single market. So it's more austerity, and the rest of this decade is a write off.
Two lost decades in a row, generations screwed over. Now the SNP are in disarray, Scotland will get dragged down with us.
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I’m hoping that changes after a big win, when the context changes, and all the pressure is coming from a new direction. It’s difficult to imagine now, but it’s truly the case that a lot of voices that are very dominant today will suddenly become irrelevant, and others will become more important. The overall shift will be leftwards, but of course it may not go as far as we’d want.
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I hope you are right.
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You and me both!
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EDF was always owned by the French government.
There never was a ' got nationalized event'
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Partially, but they ran out of money (liabilities exceeded their assets due to delays with nuclear plants) so the government nationalized the rest.
The financial pain of new nuclear in Europe is eye-watering.
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Given the date to exit coal is 2035, it's not clear how nuclear can help since currently EDF, the only company that builds it in Europe, is quoting 20 years to build one. That would mean the earliest any new nuclear plant could come online in Europe is 2044, 9 years after the end of coal use.
All attempts to speed this up have failed. The 20 years is after planning and legal issues have all been resolved. The UK tried to get the Chinese, the Japanese, and the US to build its nuclear plants. In the end they all refused, even with the massive subsidies, and it was down to EDF with investment from China. EDF subsequently ran out of money and had to be nationalized by the French government, and for security reasons the UK is trying to buy out the Chinese investments.
Biomass is not just food, by the way. It is any waste bio matter. We typically don't eat the entire plant, or things like scrap wood. Also, where food is burned, it's often food we needed to grow for national security. The EU was panned for paying farmers to produce stuff that was then discarded, but the goal was to ensure the EU can always feed itself if it can no longer import for some reason. I'm not in favour of biomass for other reasons, but at least in theory it should be using stuff that would otherwise be largely wasted.
I think the response to this is very clear and obvious even to those at this useless conference: 2035 is an unrealistic and, for all practical purposes, impossible goal to reach. It makes good press though, and lets a bunch of bureaucrats take a first-class vacation on their constituents dime.
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Biomass is waste.
You are mixing it up with biofuels. Which only compete in your mind with food.
The EU is trying to get rid of agrar land since decades.
There is no competition between bio fuels a and food! That is just complete nonsense!
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Not Worth The Paper It's Written On (Score:5, Insightful)
If there are no concrete and costly penalties for not hitting the target and no enforcement mechanism in place, then this is just words. No party to this agreement would allow such penalties or enforcement mechanisms to exist. The reason the won't allow them to exist is that they have absolutely no intention of actually keeping to the targets. They just want the positive press saying they are tackling climate change without the pain of actually having to do something meaningful.
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There's also the point of massive coal buildup in China and India. These plants have useful lifetime of around 40 years, and they usually take well over a decade to pay for themselves.
So highly unlikely to happen outside Western nations.
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Highly unlikely to happen within Western nations, either. The decrease in coal-fired powerplants in the West is almost entirely due to cheap and abundant natural gas undercutting the price per kWh of electricity generation. It's cheaper to move natural gas because you can use a pipeline instead of railroads. It's cheaper to mine natural gas because once the well is drilled, labor costs plummet. This means if you have to money to start a coal plant, starting a natural gas plant instead will put you in the bl
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Enforcement is via the civil courts. Once the target is agreed to, citizens can sue their governments for failing to reach it, or failing to take actions that can be shown to be necessary to meet it.
The other reason to do it is to give the industry some certainty. Coal can be sure it will need to wind down by 2035 and transition to other business. Renewable companies have guarantees about increased demand. Again, failure for these things to happen can be a civil legal matter.
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America is the largest emitter of CO2 in the G7 by far. In order for this agreement to be binding in the US, it has to be ratified in the US Congress. The lower chamber, the US House of Representatives is currently controlled by the GOP. They will not ratify this. It also will not be able to pass in the Senate due to the narrow majority the Dems hold there. Two defectors from coal producing states like Pennsylvania, Illinois, or West Virginia, or coal consuming states like California or Michigan will result
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Per capita, Americans emit more CO2 than the rest of the G7, also. (Although the oil sands combined with relatively small population size might drive Canada higher.) So, what's your point? The climate cares about the absolute amount of GHGs in the atmosphere, not the relative emissions.
My point was that, certainly in the case of the US, and most likely in every other case as well, there is no enforcement mechanism required by this agreement and that any enforcement mechanism would be unacceptable to all p
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Sadly, I think it's clear that we can't rely on the US to do what is necessary here. Neither party is committed, and one of them actually seems to want to reverse things.
So we have to have a plan that doesn't require cooperation of the US, but still greatly reduces emissions to net zero. Part of that will be developing the technology and making it cheaper, so that the US is obliged to adopt it to stay competitive. Part of it will probably have to be trade related sanctions, e.g. on AI developed by emitting
Re:Not Worth The Paper It's Written On (Score:4, Insightful)
If you look at the IPCC reports from, I believe it was 2006, they lay out the path necessary to keep warming below 1.5C. It stipulated that GHG emissions would need to be halved by 2010 (they weren't). Then halved again by 2020 (they weren't). And halved again every decade until the 2050s (they won't be). At which point, using unknown and undeveloped technology working against entropy, GHG emissions actually go negative at increasing rates until the end of the century (this is the modern equivalent of where medieval scholars would say "and then a miracle will happen"). Simultaneously, GHG emissions from agriculture would need to drop to zero by 2050 (they've increased). And all this in service of a target of 1.5C of warming which is a nightmarish scenario on its own.
Because we didn't hit those earlier targets, the targets we would have to hit now are even more draconian in nature. If you project forward from what we've actually done, we're looking at 3.5C of warming, which will be utterly apocalyptic. That's not hyperbole; we'd face a collapse of the biosphere similar to the PT boundary event, known colloquially as "The Great Dying" in which something like 90% of species went extinct and the oceans became toxic. Even if everyone met all proposed and agreed upon limits (which no one except the likes of Bhutan has done), we'll still hit 2.5C of warming.
You need to understand three facts about 2.5C. First, the last time the Earth was 2.5C warmer than it is now, the oceans were 27m (89ft) higher than they are now. Second, a quarter of the human population, and nearly half of world industrial capacity, lies on the coasts within 27m of sea level. Third, humans can't breathe salt water.
We're not going to reduce our GHG emissions to zero, let alone take them significantly negative, while simultaneously relocating a quarter of our population and half of our industry. None of the proposed climate actions are even of a scale to that challenge. The Inflation Reduction Act was the largest GHG-reducing piece of US legislation, bar none. Biden does deserve credit for that much. If we did five more of them today, it wouldn't be half enough to hit 1.5C.
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And that's why we have to force you to do enjoy a better quality of life.
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The lower chamber, the US House of Representatives is currently controlled by the GOP. They will not ratify this.
It's true that the House of Representatives will not ratify this treaty. It's also true that the House will not ratify any treaties, because it is not part of the ratification process.
It also will not be able to pass in the Senate due to the narrow majority the Dems hold there. Two defectors from coal producing states like Pennsylvania, Illinois, or West Virginia, or coal consuming states like California or Michigan will result in a failure to ratify.
Again, you show a shocking lack of understanding about the treaty process. 50 + vice presidential tiebreak doesn't get you there, treaties in the US are ratified by a supermajority vote in the senate--you need 67 in favor (though, I suppose, under the right circumstances you could do it with as few as 35 votes in favor, i.e.
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The thought process: (Score:1)
2035 is 11 years away, an election period is 6 years... yup, it's gonna be someone else's problem while making me look awesome.
Let's do that!
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2035 is 11 years away, an election period is 6 years... yup, it's gonna be someone else's problem while making me look awesome.
That was my thought also.
When JFK was the then newly elected President of the USA he made a speech of going to the moon "by the end of this decade". That was in 1962 and this was a plan to go to the moon by the end of his second 4-year term in office, assuming he was re-elected. Of course that's not exactly how things played out for JFK but Americans did put boot prints on the moon in 1969. Had this been a speech about going to the moon only after he'd have left office then how many people would have tak
Meanwhile, in Australia (Score:2)
New coal mines go BRRRRTTTT!
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What?
Dutton is planning nuclear reactors all over the continent.
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Mods, mark parent "Funny +1"
Speaking Half-Truth. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ever notice when rich corrupt people get together to discuss how to enrich themselves further at the expense of those they “represent”, they always seem to have a ‘deal’ or an ‘agreement’, but never really a plan?
Tends to explain why politicians native tongue is half-truth spoken with a bullshit brogue.
The UK are ahead of the game (Score:4, Informative)
The UK's last coal-fired power station shuts down on September 30th, 2024.
A mere 5 months from today!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-... [bbc.co.uk]
meanwhile India, Russia and China continue (Score:1)
Montana doubles down (Score:2)
"Good," Says Montana. "More for us!"
30% (Score:2)
Expect 30% of your income to go for housing, and 30% to go for electricity. If not more.
In related news ... (Score:2)
This just in: Liechtenstein decides to ban all Industrial Revolution technologies "for the sake of the world environment".