German energy giant RWE has begun dismantling a wind farm to make way for a further expansion of an open-pit lignite coal mine in the western region of North Rhine Westphalia.
I thought renewables were cheaper than coal. How is this possible?
Ban straws! (even though disabled people need them and they create negligible pollution)
Replace your car with an electric one! (even though it still works fine and will end up in landfill, never mind the environmental cost of producing the new one, or the source of the electricity it uses)
Reduce your carbon footprint! (even though its a term we invented ourselves to shift responsibility to you, while we fly our private jets around creating more pollution than you ever could in 10 lifetimes)
Recycle! (even though 90% of it ends up in landfill anyway because we don’t want to pay to actually recycle it)
All equates to
Look the other way while we continue to rape the planet and blame it on you!!!
Never forget - capitalists (and the governments they’re co-dependent on) only want more money, they don’t car about you or me or the planet, only about themsleves and the numbers in their accounts, and they will never willingly stop doing whatever it takes to make more.
Luckily many people live in democracies where they can simply vote to enact climate policies.
Sadly most people living in those democracies choose to continue enabling climate change.
The reason nothing is being done against climate change isn’t corrupt politicians. It’s the millions of people voting for them.
Your first link is US only, your second link is about a completely seperate issue. You don’t need to dismantle capitalism to protect the climate.
In Germany, where I live, the voters could easily vote for the greens “Grüne” and the left “Linke”.
If those two parties had a majority in government, we’d have a climate friendly system in no time.
But they don’t. We had a conservative government for 16 years. Now we have a center government, which sadly includes the small government / free market party “FDP”, blocking all significant progress.
No systemic oppression stops people from voting Left/Greens. But they never did, and never will.
There’s now an uprise of the far right party “AfD” in Germany, to the point it’s becoming one of the major parties.
In Germany people have the choice readily available to stop actively damaging the climate.
But every couple of years, they freely choose to not do that.
I feel like many left-wing people regularly forget about the billions of people who genuinely do not care to do anything about climate change.
But the millions of people have been denied education, mislead, and propagandized by the corrupt politicians, it’s probably not productive to blame victims here.
I do not believe the majority of people don’t know about the effects of climate change. I believe that the majority of people voting against climate friendly policies simply choose to not think long term.
Someone who votes to continue the status quo is to be blamed for the status quo.
Most people don’t have a ‘green’ option for which they can vote.
We won’t touch the Greenbelt.
-Doug Ford, 2018
Ford says he’s confident nothing criminal took place in Greenbelt land swap amid RCMP probe.
-CBC news, 2023
Not that he was a green leaning politician to begin with but this is just another example of blatant lies used by politicians to get elected and totally fuckover their country.
or the source of the electricity it uses
Oh, quit this noise. In the same countries where electric cars are becoming common, wind/water/sun-produced energy is also on the rise. Electric cars decouple the energy used from the means of production in ways that gasoline will never have, and the potential outweighs the temporary conditions of power generation in socially backward areas like Darfur and America.
You are literally commenting on an article where one of those countries has shut down a wind farm to go back to miming coal (never mind that my point still stand regardless because renewables are still just a fraction of electricity production, or that it is the wealthy people buying the electric cars who contribute more emissions than the poorest 50% of the population, but good to see the greenwashing has worked so well on you), so which of us is actually making noise, and which is addressing the problems we face?
Electric cars contribute less emissions than ICE cars even if the grid’s electricity supply is entirely coming from coal. Of course cars in general are a much worse solution to transport than really any form of public transportation, but that’s no reason to spread pro-ICE car propaganda.
Do you believe every headline you read on the internet? Looks like it. This isn’t „Germany end all wind farms“, the people who wrote that headline want you to think that. Don’t be such an easy mark.
Replace your car with an electric one! (even though it still works fine and will end up in landfill, never mind the environmental cost of producing the new one, or the source of the electricity it uses)
A new EV breaks even with a used car in less than a decade. It does not matter if it is getting its energy from coal, it still will emit less carbon within a decade.
Recycle! (even though 90% of it ends up in landfill anyway because we don’t want to pay to actually recycle it)
90% of plastic recycling. That is thanks to the oil companies who saw backlash against the ridiculous amount of plastic in the 70s and decided to invent a resin code whose symbol mimicked the recycling symbol. Recycling centers were flooded with a ton of plastic which they did not have infrastructure to actually recycle. China took it for a couple decades and then it became unprofitable for them. Basically only resin codes 1 and 2 are recyclable. But most people think all of it is. Absolutely recycle metals. If your city has recycling pickup and you are not recycling stuff like aluminum, you kind of suck.
Basically only resin codes 1 and 2 are recyclable. But most people think all of it is
I read somewhere that this is false and all of them are recyclable. Don’t quote me on it though.
I think you can technically recycle probably almost any plastic, perhaps almost any material in general. It’s just a question of if the recycling process is affordable and competes in price with just buying the unrecycled version of that plastic. So other plastics besides PET and HDPE I’m sure you can recycle, it’s just that the cost is prohibitive.
Absolutely recycle metals
You don’t need to; all trash, no matter the bin, goes under a magnet that will pick out anything ferromagnetic, and through an induction trap that will pick out non-ferromagnetic metals. Even if for some reason it gets dumped in a landfill, it’s still possible to mine it out.
Aluminum in particular is more expensive to mine+refine than to recycle. Some places you can even throw it on the ground, and someone will pick it up to sell for recycling. Copper you can get even stolen from you, and don’t start me on Palladium, some people will “recycle” the catalytic converter from your car if you don’t park it in a safe place.
I’m from Sweden, we’re among the best in the world at recycling. We have closed all our landfills and even import combustible trash to burn for energy (we clean the fumes extremely well).
Every time I see a discussion about trash anywhere in the world I get sad that people are so uninformed about what’s possible.
One Swedish company, Swedish Plastic Recycling, is currently building a recycling plant that will be able to handle ALL of the country’s plastic waste and automatically recycle almost all of the kinds of plastic there are.
This is even profitable if done right.
Sources upon request.
While I partly agree with your argument at the end of your comment, I think your examples are really unfitting.
Only single-use plastic straws are banned. There is also an exemption for straws that are necessary for medical reasons. The needs of disabled people are included in the exemption. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2021-003536-ASW_EN.html
If people buy a new car, the old one (if still functional) typically enters the second-hand market, not the landfill. There is no reason why this would be different if the new car is an electric vehicle.
The carbon footprint is a perfectly fine concept on its own, the problem is just that some people shit on it with their private jets, which are a legitimate concern. Some people also argue that “most of the pollution is done by corporations, not individuals”, completely ignoring the fact that these corporations only do it while producing goods for the people. That does not mean that we can just blame the people for it, but everybody has the responsibility to vote for policies that keep the corporations in check.
Recycling is really bad in some countries, but works pretty well in others. For example in Germany 56% of plastic waste is recycled, 44% burned. 90% of paper is recycled. https://www.quarks.de/umwelt/muell/das-solltest-du-ueber-recycling-wissen/#lösung4
That’s a lot of words to say “I lick boot”.
But just to address my pet peeve (mostly because I can copy pasta my own comment, and no I’m not going to edit out the “ableist” because even if you don’t mean t, advocating and making excuses for the straw ban is ableist)
There are many reasons people can’t use different alternatives.
Never mind that to deny access to a literal lifeline for the sake of 0.003% of the plastics in the ocean (literally a drop in an ocean) because it makes you feel better and requires zero effort or sacrifice (from you), instead of actually acting to resolve the problem (like being anti-capitalist rather than just trying to apply band aids to its symptoms) is not only gross and ableist, but also a colossal counterproductive waste of time.
As for medical exemptions - disabled people shouldn’t need to ask for basic accessibility, nor should they have to disclose personal medical information to get it, but now that ableists like you have forced this situation to boost your own egos, they do, and are often denied, because wait staff are not medically trained, and are often abelists like you (or have bosses that would fire them for “handing out straws willy nilly” if they even have straws available which now many places don’t), so they get refused and called liars and accused of destroying the environment.
Never mind that expecting people to always have their own accessibility aids, rather than have them freely available creates an inaccessible society.
Which is exactly what ableists like you are fighting for.
I was exclusively talking about the EU ban, not about some random US cities’ bans (This is a thread about Germany after all). None of your points really apply to the EU ban.
It does not ban the distribution (you can still legally buy leftover stock - my local cinema seems to have a century’s worth of supply), just the first-time sale of newly produced non-medical single-use plastic straws.
The “medical exemption” is not on an individual basis, but an exemption for a production line of straws. Everybody can buy the straws afterwards. The EU ban is not cutting a “lifeline” for disabled people.
The links you provided talk about bans by local city councils in the USA, which have their own (apparantly stupid) rules.
Do you think cars are immortal, and are just passed on from owner to owner for all eternity?
No? Nobody thinks that?
My comment was just a response to the following:
Replace your car with an electric one! (even though it still works fine and will end up in landfill, never mind the environmental cost of producing the new one, or the source of the electricity it uses)
…which for some reason suggests that the introduction of electric cars leads to premature scrapping of existing cars - which is bullshit.
The problem is we are only talking about a small fraction of the trash. >90% of waste is industrial waste, of that a third is just from Construction/Demolition.
Consumers can recycle everything, but it won’t make more than a 10% impact. We need to start forcing industry to recycle and we can start with concrete. 8% of all global emissions are from concrete production, that’s not even accounting the energy to haul it around. We have the ability today to use concrete to make down cycled products on site (road base, filler, non structural blocks, etc) eliminating transportation and other impacts. But few even consider it, companies and customers don’t want to wait the extra day that it takes, and it’s not always profitable either.
I doubt your numbers are factual. Depending on the industry, you’ll have very specific, non mixed waste materials, which would be way easier to recycle than mixed trash from households.
Cmon Germany I wanna root for you so bad because of your pro-consumer laws but blunders like this and the nuke plants keep making it so damn hard.
The contract for RWE to expand the mine there goes back decades and the wind farm operator knew it would be demolished before they build it. It’s at the end of its life cycle now and had to be demolished one way or another.
German government could either breach their contract with RWE and pay them compensation or allow the destruction of a derelict wind park in exchange of RWE stopping coal extraction 8 years earlier then planned. It’s a job well done by the government.
They are the Government, they can just shut down coal immediately by law. Make all coal extraction immediately illegal, sue RWE for climate destruction, throw the executives in jail. Save the planet.
Is that legal? I’ll tell you the answer, it’s not. They would need to pay massive payouts to RWE for breach of contract. What you’re describing is rule of emotion, not rule of law.
They’re implemented on the EU level but Germany isn’t exactly unknown for pushing for them. The EP also likes to do it, the commission has more an eye on competition, sometimes those things overlap e.g. pushing train operators to finally implement a unified ticket shop (buying a trip from a single provider, even if the trains are run by different ones, has the consumer benefit that if a train is delayed and you miss a connection you can then take pretty much whatever train to reach your goal. And from the commission’s perspective they want train operators to compete, but not by building walled gardens)
As far as Germany specifically, I think one I heard about ISPs being required to discount customers who fall victim to low bandwidth. In other words, they can’t sell you a 50mb/s contract and then say “sorry, bandwidth is bad here so you will only get 20mb/s.”
Germany is basically what happens when an entire country embraces greenwashing as its ideology.
Germany has been rejecting practical solutions for moving off fossil fuels, such as nuclear. Current government is also pursuing a policy of pretending to reduce emissions through deindustrialization which only moves emissions to other countries since people in Germany still need the goods that were produced. This way Germany can claim to be lowering emissions simply by externalizing them. Finally, we see return to coal which is one of the dirtiest fuels around because wind and solar evidently can’t keep up even with the energy demands.
Germany has been anti-nuclear for some time, unfortunately. That could be what the above poster was referring to?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement_in_Germany
Delete this InfoWars-level bs misinformation meant to smear clean energy.
One small privately owned wind farm is being disassembled, this is not a general new policy or anything signalling a shift away from clean energy.
It’s about density. Renewables Are great, but not on terms of value add per square foot. The coal under the wind mill is worth orders of magnitude more than the windmill.
And, it’s not as bad as it sounds. In general, the number of windmills keeps increasing.
If you care about energy density, nuclear is the best solution, not coal. I guess Germans don’t care though
Germans literally shut down all thier nuclear power in favour for coal power.
It was meant to be replaced by renewables but our minister of economics dumped the whole solar and wind turbine industry. Additionally his party made up bullshit rules about a minimum distance for turbines to households, which was apparently 10x of the reasonable distance and which made it very hard to find spots in densely populated Germany. And to this day, the federations with a renewable energy surplus have to pay more for electricity than those who give a shit about renewables. -it is discussed to be changed now but idk
I didn’t say density is the paramount parameter. Also, once you optimize one drawback, it generally gets less important.
I just wanted to put the image into context, and show that it isn’t a big step backwards, just sideways perhaps. Or in other words, a sigle wind farm isn’t relevant, the sum is
That’s true, although I think they decided on coal since it’s cheaper financially (not ecologically and healthwise of course).
It would make sense to just simply move them but the fact that they want to burn coal is just weird.
So that means it will not be cheaper in the medium to long term. Since they will have to deal with the burden on their healthcare system, especially among their ageing population. Plus the scummy carbon offset trades that they have to wiggle themselves into.
Yeah, wind works fine in places like Texas (where I’m from) because there are thousands of square miles full of just turbines. The land is flat and expensive, essentially the opposite of Germany. Something kind of related that I found out while googling about this is that Texas is 1.9 times as large as Germany.
