With climate change looming, it seems so completely backwards to go back to using it again.
Is it coal miners pushing to keep their jobs? Fear of nuclear power? Is purely politically motivated, or are there genuinely people who believe coal is clean?
Edit, I will admit I was ignorant to the usage of coal nowadays.
Now I’m more depressed than when I posted this
I don’t think we ever stopped mining it
Yes, the correct answer is that “net zero” Is a greenwashed lie to placate the masses into inaction while the oligarchy continues business as usual until collapse.
https://medium.com/@samyoureyes/the-busy-workers-handbook-to-the-apocalypse-7790666afde7
I thought net zero meant there was no net co2 being emitted at any time? This is saying countries can claim net zero by just promising to remove co2 in the future. I’ve never seen it used that way, is that the common understanding?
The way people get to net zero is stupid accounting tricks. I burned a whole bunch of coal, but i paid a buddy of mine to plant trees. So now Im celebrating net zero with my buddy in his brand new tesla roadster. Who knew planting trees was so lucrative.
It’s a lie because several of the dependent solutions are essentially impossible to achieve (given time, technology, resources, investment, economics, etc), as well as being the bare minimum necessary to avert disaster, with a deadline decades after it’s required to avert disaster.
Read the link to understand why.
Why “going back to it” have we ever stopped?
I was going to say, coal remains around 1/3 of our electric generation worldwide (as of 2022): https://www.statista.com/statistics/269811/world-electricity-production-by-energy-source/
Coal can’t be reused, created, or otherwise obtained outside of mining. Until we remove our dependency on coal, mining will continue.
No. Among other things it remains the linchpin of energy security for industrial countries like China and Germany that lack adequate domestic oil or natural gas reserves to power their economies with those.
Germany had plenty of nuclear energy but decided they wanted to shut them all down. Now they have to use coal and LNG.
Yes. And even before the Russia mess they were going to replace nuclear with LNG, which is still pretty bad.
Oil propaganda convinced millions of people that renewable energy sources like nuclear power or wind turbine were dangerous/ineffective.
Basically humans are stupid and don’t like change and rich people know and took advantage of it.
Because the amount of fuel used in a nuclear reactor is exponentially less than fossil fuels.
There’s enough nuclear material on this planet to power nuclear reactors for tens of thousands of years.
Nuclear power is clean, efficient, and lasts for essentially ever
It’s close to ‘renewable’ but technically it should be called ‘low carbon fuel’.
It’s an interesting take. I guess the sun is not renewable either.
Is any practically infinite (in human scales) source of energy called renewable? I am hearing this for the first time.
You…can’t be serious right now…can you? Or are you conflating nuclear power with nuclear bombs? Because the two are very different things.
As climate change leads to non-traditional weather, people won’t be able to farm in the same places. People will be displaced, famine will hit. Droughts will clear up water sources and fights over water rights will happen.
The only way to reduce the impact is big, non-emitting power that can run 24/7/365 and the only contender for that is hydro and nuclear. And we’ve already built hydro just about everywhere that’s feasible to do so. With a surplus of cheap energy, we can improve hydroponics/vertical farming, reduce transportation needs for food (by growing it closer to population centers), and develop a means of scalable desalination.
Nah. Nuclear will prevent far more war.
nuclear power and nuclear bombs are the same.
As long as nuclear power exists, it will be used to pursue bombs.
Not to mention that nuclear power is incredibly unsafe and damaging
It never stopped. Hasn’t even really slowed down.
People need electricity. Renewables are great, but they don’t provide for the full generation need. Coal and natural gas power generation will continue unabated until a better (read: lower price for similar reliability) solution takes their place.
In my opinion, fossil fuel generation won’t take a real hit until the grid-scale energy storage problem is solved.
Hasn’t even really slowed down.
I think thats… not wrong per say, but somewhat misleading. Coal consumption has been steady worldwide for the last decade despite the population going up a whole billion, and as the average persons energy usage has gone up (largely as a result of growing quality of life in developing nations).
Absolutely. Coal has remained consistent as demand for power has risen steadily. Renewables are growing, but remain a tiny slice of the whole generation picture.
Natural gas has become a cheap and reliable replacement for coal over the last 10-15 years as it’s become less expensive to transport. Many coal plants have been converted, even. So as demand has risen, it’s natural gas, not renewables, that is filling the gap.
Storage. Coal, natural gas, and nuclear generate power regardless of weather, day and night.
Solar generates plenty of electricity (with enough panels installed), but it slows down significantly under cloudy skies and stops entirely at night.
Wind generates plenty as well…unless the wind stops blowing.
The grid needs power all the time, not just when it’s sunny and windy. For renewables to actually compete, the excess power they generate during sunny and windy times needs to be stored for use when it’s dark and still.
As much as we applaud lithium batteries, our energy storage technologies are abysmally inefficient. We’re nowhere near being able to store and discharge grid-scale power the way we’d need to for full adoption of renewables. The very best we can do today (and I wish I were kidding) is pump water up a hill, then use hydroelectric generators as it flows back down. Our energy storage tech is literally in the Stone Age.
Don’t underestimate the battery potential of gravity!
According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity#:~:text=The round-trip energy efficiency,sources claiming up to 87%25. The round-trip efficiency of pumped storage is 70-80%, that’s pretty darn good for cheap mass-storage. There’s not much more to gain there.
my energy bill right now is like a new solar panel a month. what resources do we not have, and are you familiar with pumped storage? spoilers, we already have renewable stable energy supply
Time. People can see past the storage issue when it’s not that big of an issue.
Interconnectors and curtailment at peak output are economically optimal. The renewable transition doesn’t seem to be slowing.
The renewable boom has only been going for about 10 years. Give it another 10-20 and the world will look drastically different in one generation.
Because it got cheaper than natural gas.
Nobody thinks it’s clean, they just don’t care.
