12 ms·

The coal mine that ate Hambacher forest

93 points by jfk13 7y ago

jfk13 7y ago
The scale of the scars on the earth here is pretty staggering: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Hambach+Forest/@50.8999971,6.1530726,74969m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x47bf5c94fc8fe1af:0x34d898611d7c9285!8m2!3d50.9!4d6.4333333 https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Hambach+Forest/@50.89999...
- roenxi 7y ago
  Impressive, aren't they? The industrial muscle keeping people warm and happy. I assume Germany has a modern program of mine rehabilitation, so you're only able to see the parts that are currently part of the active mine. The historic mine footprint of an old mine is probably twice or thrice what is visible; much larger but invisible from satellite because it has been rehabilitated. Eg, the area just north-west of Tagebau Hambach is probably mine rehab; you can tell because it is a deeper green than the surrounding farmland and if you look closely the massive contours of the waste emplacement areas might be visible.
  - quibbler 7y ago
    If it can be rehabilitated, is it really so bad? Some are also coverted to lakes, in the hopes of creating attractive leisure destinations.
    - gmueckl 7y ago
      Forests take time to grow and mature. Animals that live in these forests often have nowhere to go when these are cut down. Especially smaller species may not have the ability to flee when the saws come. Also, forests in Germany often are reduced to unconnected patches separated by open fields. Large connected forests are rare.
    - hannob 7y ago
      Rehabilitation won't reverse the CO2 emissions. So yes, it's really so bad.
    - namibj 7y ago
      It was the last old forest in Germany. Like, it was a forest for 12000y, basically since the last ice age. Individual trees are only a couple hundred years old, but the ecosystem you get from many generations of trees growing in a mostly unmanaged forest is rather unique and due to the time scales involved irreplaceable.
    - cleansy 7y ago
      And this can take decades, until swimming in the water doesn't impact health. Let alone the fact that the additional water to maintain the water level in an unnatural lake like that may be needed elsewhere. What many people forget is that during the excavation all kinds of metals and materials are uncovered leading to red water for the first couple of decades until everything is settled. I am from a german region (Lausitz) where all of that happened and believe me when I say that I'd rather have some out-of-the-job miners than big patches of land filled with lakes instead of "home towns".
  - nisa 7y ago
    Here is an area in eastern germany with lot's of opencast mining in the past (much bigger than what RWE did) - the lakes are former mines but there are some serious problems especially regarding quality of water and water levels https://goo.gl/maps/2r1ZhDMHZVHf21ug8 https://goo.gl/maps/2r1ZhDMHZVHf21ug8
  - wnkrshm 7y ago
    It is rehab, I've been there and had to drive around it to get to the vantage point. Edit: The pit looks like some lunar surface from one of the vantage points - it's wide enough to be larger than your field of view. Also, I'm not sure whether rehab is the right word for it, it's an area they built out of the non-coal material they had to dig out. IIRC the pitch for the pit was to turn it into an artificial lake.
  - Kliment 7y ago
    That's correct (I live nearby). What you also don't see was what was in the way of the mine before it got there. It was populated space, all the towns got cleared out. Normally when someone blows up thousand-year-old cultural monuments we call it terrorism, but not when it's RWE (the mine operator) doing it. The compensation people get is nowhere near proportional to the damage - they get paid based on a fictional estimate of the value of their home. And they don't get to choose whether they get evicted or not. RWE recently bulldozed a centuries-old church and surrounding town. They get away with it because of a fuckup by local politicians a while back. RWE was supposed to pay for the right to exploit that land, and local councils agreed to an offer to pay them in shares instead of in money. Now local council budgets are dependent on RWE dividends and therefore although technically they co-own RWE, in practice RWE owns them. The saddest thing is that lignite mining is not even commercially viable anymore - so these mines only continue to operate because of state subsidies (federal subsidies, which then partially end up in local councils via said dividends). The terrorists operating the mines claim that it's critical to keep them running because of the jobs that would be lost, but a couple years worth of the subsidy would be sufficient to pay the entire workforce (around 20k people nationwide work in that industry) their salaries for life. Meanwhile solar subsidies got cut for being "too expensive", shrinking that sector by 4x as many jobs. The fuckers now want to accelerate the pace of extraction because they have to shut down by 2038.
    - hef19898 7y ago
      I cannot agree more! The only ones profiting from coal subsidies are RWE and company while evryone else pays for it. It would be much more worthwhile, even for RWE themselves, to just use the coal subsidies and plaster all active and potential strip mines with solar farms. But then we are talking about old German politics and corporate culture, so that won't happen anytime soon.
      - freeflight 7y ago
        You are forgetting the part where RWE is also paying the income of a whole lot of miners, who would suddenly be without a job if the mines where to be closed. That is the biggest political hurdle here, it's not solely RWE being greedy, a lot of it has to do with nobody being able to offer these miners any job alternatives once their mines are closed. Yet these miners make up a substantial part of the population in certain German states, thus the result that majority of Germans want to exit coal but in those places where coal actually matters there's vehement opposition to closing them down [0]. [0] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/kohleausstieg-mehrheit-der-deutschen-will-schnellen-ausstieg-a-1249937.html https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/kohleausstieg-meh...
  - maze-le 7y ago
    Yes, there is such a program. There is a region in eastern Germany, that was known as the 'death triangle' during the DDR -- the region between Bitterfeld, Halle and Borna (https://www.google.com/maps/@51.364936,12.2644447,63124m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@51.364936,12.2644447,63124m/dat...). The region was dominated by coal mining and chemical industry -- greyish-black snows and acid rains were not uncommon. If you look at the map today, there are lots of lakes where there were extensive coal mining projects in the past. Nowadays they are a popular tourist destination.
    - mc32 7y ago
      That has echoes of the “Siberian Maldives” [1]. An ash lake that has turquoise waters, due to toxic pollutants, where lots of people go to take selfies ignoring the warning signs posted to not go in the lake... but people still do. [1]https://time.com/5623538/toxic-waste-dump-selfies/ https://time.com/5623538/toxic-waste-dump-selfies/
      - maze-le 7y ago
        I was barely alive at that time, so I only know these stories from my family members. But I've seen photographs of the time, that confirm it happened, albeit I doubt that it happened on a regular basis.
  - brazzy 7y ago
    Nice guessing, but nope. Old earth movements of that scale are anything but invisible on satellite pictures. Here's a map that shows the area before mining began in 1978: https://www.bund-nrw.de/fileadmin/nrw/bilder/Braunkohle/1975_Tagebau_Hambach_Struktur_vor_Inanspruchnahme.jpg https://www.bund-nrw.de/fileadmin/nrw/bilder/Braunkohle/1975... So the rehabilitation area is in fact only the very prominent forest directly to the northwest of the active mining, a third to half its size rather than twice or thrice.
    - roenxi 7y ago
      I'm a mining engineer with previous experience as a rehabilitation planner in a coal mine. Technically I suppose I am guessing when I say that is a hill and it is not natural. However it is an extremely educated guess. I assure you, it is a hill and it is not natural. It is clearly mine rehabilitation. I've been responsible for a very similar looking hill, in fact. Not quite as nice looking from a satellite photo I must admit, they've got a better shade of green.
  - anotheryou 7y ago
    Sure, could always be worse. But coal is probably the worst form of gathering energy. The only benefit is the quick ramp-up enabling them to jump in to gaps where e.g. atomic power ramps up to meet demand.
- titzer 7y ago
  Thanks for the link. It's staggering. This is happening in Eastern Germany, too, near Spremberg. If you turn off labels and zoom out a bit, you can see spot them in several places. Impossible to hide global destruction like this. It's interesting (and scary) to watch us gobble up the Earth. Have a look at Merauke in Papa New Guinea and the surrounding ~100km. Mostly the jungle getting turned into farms, but there are also huge palm oil plantations that are cropping up in the middle here and there. They are huge too.
- athenot 7y ago
  That reminds me of the "mountain top removal" going on in the Appalachians. Bring up google maps for West Virginia, zoom out so that the entire state is visible in the browser window, and you can see all the scars. https://www.google.com/maps/place/West+Virginia/@38.1864602,-81.6009849,294485m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x884a54a5d4cb0945:0xbb00c768decd3a43!8m2!3d38.5976262!4d-80.4549026 https://www.google.com/maps/place/West+Virginia/@38.1864602,...
- ekingr 7y ago
  Thanks for the link. What's most crazy is when you compare it to the nearby city of Köln (1+m inhabitants). It's almost the size of the city center!
- anotheryou 7y ago
  Indeed, you can have all of germany on screen and still see it.
rotorblade 7y ago
Democracy Now! also covered the protests at the end of 2017 [1]. [1] https://www.democracynow.org/2017/11/15/special_report_from_the_occupied_forest https://www.democracynow.org/2017/11/15/special_report_from_...
ntzm 7y ago
Capitalism will destroy this planet
- bubblewrap 7y ago
  Socialism has destroyed quite a bit of nature. (look at the Aral sea, for example). What exactly would you is it about capitalism that supposedly destroys the planet? And how would you propose to remedy the problem? I mean by starving a couple of million people, as it is wont to do, Socialism could help curb the consumption of resources. I give you that. And again, lols for the downvotes. You are ridiculous.
  - titzer 7y ago
    It's people and exponential growth. Doesn't matter what -ism you put on the end of your shovels.
    - novalis78 7y ago
      That’s quite the Malthusian viewpoint. Alternatively: “Malthus theory, which holds that since the world’s resources are more or less fixed, population growth must be restricted or all of us will descend into bottomless misery. Malthusianism is scientifically bankrupt — all predictions made upon it have been wrong, because human beings are not mere consumers of resources. Rather, we create resources by the development of new technologies that find use for them. The more people, the faster the rate of innovation. This is why (contrary to Malthus) as the world’s population has increased, the standard of living has increased, and at an accelerating rate.“ https://space.nss.org/the-significance-of-the-martian-frontier-by-robert-zubrin/ https://space.nss.org/the-significance-of-the-martian-fronti...
      - Nasrudith 7y ago
        Really the two are in feedback loops that may correlate and require certain strategization and working smarter instead of harder. Improved agricultural yields produce surplus food per person which allows a shift to industrialization which enables more secondary tertiary areas of specialization which can boost yields and give other benefits. This dates back to the bronze age even and technically stone age in mesoamerican and neighboring southern native american cultures.
bubblewrap 7y ago
Might be worth noting, that at the same time historical forests are being cut down for wind power, with the support of the Green party. For example https://rettet-den-reinhardswald.de/ https://rettet-den-reinhardswald.de/ - a forest that is famous as a setting for many of the Grimm's fairy tales. Protests so far are only few. It doesn't fit the narrative, so our German state media doesn't make a huge deal out of it. I have also heard that the "good" protestors of the Hambacher forest also left a lot of garbage at the site. Lol for the downvotes. You dispute the story of forests being cut down for wind power? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea#Impact_on_environment,_economy,_and_public_health https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea#Impact_on_environment...
- lake99 7y ago
  Do you know what the German protesters are proposing as an alternative? Germany banned nuclear, brown lignite is bad, extensive mining destroys forests, wind power destroys forests and is bad for birds, Germany is not a good candidate for solar, and so on. So what's next?
  - bubblewrap 7y ago
    They believe in a fairy tale of green energy without any side effects. I don't think they have a clear concept of a viable solution. The irony is that they blame their parents, whose generation protested against nuclear power. Presumably the only alternative that would have stood a chance to reduce climate change.
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
      > I don't think they have a clear concept of a viable solution. Do you have a clear concept of a viable solution? (Hint: Killing the ecosystem that sustains humans is not it.)
      - fzort 7y ago
        > Do you have a clear concept of a viable solution? Nuclear. Solar farms take 450 times more land than nuclear to produce the same amount of energy (source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/08/we-dont-need-solar-and-wind-to-save-the-climate-and-its-a-good-thing-too/#2501e084e4de https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/08...)
VBprogrammer 7y ago
For someone who has been to Germany the scale and number of windturbines is amazing. It seems odd that they only account for 14% of their electricity production. By comparison I can't remember seeing any solar power infrastructure and yet that accounts for 7%.
- imtringued 7y ago
  I don't know where you got your numbers from. Wind power generated 20% of electricity in 2018 and 26% in the first half of 2019.
  - VBprogrammer 7y ago
    The article. Admittedly there is another 3% for offshore wind turbines but I haven't been that far north.
  - oeuviz 7y ago
    the linked article cites "Clean Energy Wire" as the source.
  - casefields 7y ago
    AG Energiebilanzen says its 17.3% for 2019. Source: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
- hannob 7y ago
  Depends a lot on the area. Most of the solar installations are in the richer southern areas on private houses, whereas the large wind installation can be mostly seen in eastern and northern germany.
  - wirrbel 7y ago
    Lots of conservative backlash against wind energy in the south. "Asparagus landscapes" was a slogan used to get votes of people who don't want wind turbines around. Also fear mongering for infrasound etc.
golergka 7y ago
> "It's heavy to see how your home just gets destroyed," says Omo. "The treehouse that you built and where you lived and where you spent so much time. And then you see hundreds and hundreds of cops running through your home. It's a heavy thing to see." I'm astonished by this hypocrisy. Not only have they squatted on someone else's property, they did it not just to live in a forest, they did it as activists: with the exact purpose of creating the image of police brutality to create public backlash and affect the parties involved. Even if their cause was completely just and good (which is a different conversation that I'm not prepared to have), they're getting at it by manipulating the media and purposefully creating the coverage they planned. This exact destruction was the main purpose of them building these houses, in this spot, to begin with.
- perfunctory 7y ago
  Just curious, what would be your preferred method to attract media attention or fight climate crisis in general?
- blablabla123 7y ago
  Actually squatting is legal within its limit. One might also bring the counterargument that RWE legally squatted other people's properties and evicted them - while creating immense cost for the tax payers. [1] Not everybody was so comfortable with moving away. 'The old Immerath is ... demolished for the Garzweiler II opencast mine. Since 2006, the former residents have been partially relocated to the newly formed village. ... "When I was at the construction site, everything was in ruins. That was a shock. A man from outside approached me and said why we gave up the village without a fight. We resisted for years. People should not think wrong. "' [2] [1] https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Frp-online.de%2Fwirtschaft%2Frwe-und-vattenfall-braunkohle-kostet-15-milliarden_aid-19710147 https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u... [2] https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Ftaz.de%2FDorf-Umsiedlung-fuer-Braunkohletagebau%2F%215494693%2F https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u...
- adrianN 7y ago
  I think the main purpose of building those houses was making it impossible to fell the trees around them.
sawaruna 7y ago
If interested in some footage from protests and the site in general - https://twitter.com/JoanieLemercier https://twitter.com/JoanieLemercier
twic 7y ago
> To add insult to injury, the coal that is extracted here is brown coal, also known as lignite, which emits particularly high levels of carbon dioxide. This surprised me, because surely you get one molecule of CO2 per atom of carbon in the coal, regardless of the kind of coal. But it seems there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my stoichiometry - lignite has a higher moisture content than other coals, so more of the energy liberated goes into boiling that water, so there is less energy produced per unit of carbon, which means more CO2 per unit of energy: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780081008959000036 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978008100...
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  Huh I would have guesses that the difference was in hydrocarbons themselves - the opposite of how Methane is peak hydrocarbon efficency by having four hydrogen bonds per carbon - if it has less energy/carbon dense configurations resulting in more CO2 than even other coals because it was made up of more wasteful structures like "rings" of carbons.
- KozmoNau7 7y ago
  Lignite is more accurately described as "slightly more flammable dirt". It is an absolute outrage that we still burn it for energy.
- MR4D 7y ago
  I had a power company as a client once, years ago. They had a plant that burned lignite. I was new to the industry and asked what that was. The response they gave me was “it’s like burning dirt.” Man, lignite is nasty stuff. Burning freaking dirt. Can’t wait for this stuff to be outlawed.
nashashmi 7y ago
OT but the picture of the gigantic machine is a bagger 288. An engineering marvel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_288?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_288?wprov=sfla1

93 points by jfk13 7y ago

The scale of the scars on the earth here is pretty staggering: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Hambach+Forest/@50.8999971,6.1530726,74969m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x47bf5c94fc8fe1af:0x34d898611d7c9285!8m2!3d50.9!4d6.4333333 https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Hambach+Forest/@50.89999...

roenxi 7y ago
Impressive, aren't they? The industrial muscle keeping people warm and happy. I assume Germany has a modern program of mine rehabilitation, so you're only able to see the parts that are currently part of the active mine. The historic mine footprint of an old mine is probably twice or thrice what is visible; much larger but invisible from satellite because it has been rehabilitated. Eg, the area just north-west of Tagebau Hambach is probably mine rehab; you can tell because it is a deeper green than the surrounding farmland and if you look closely the massive contours of the waste emplacement areas might be visible.
- quibbler 7y ago
  If it can be rehabilitated, is it really so bad? Some are also coverted to lakes, in the hopes of creating attractive leisure destinations.
  - gmueckl 7y ago
    Forests take time to grow and mature. Animals that live in these forests often have nowhere to go when these are cut down. Especially smaller species may not have the ability to flee when the saws come. Also, forests in Germany often are reduced to unconnected patches separated by open fields. Large connected forests are rare.
  - hannob 7y ago
    Rehabilitation won't reverse the CO2 emissions. So yes, it's really so bad.
  - namibj 7y ago
    It was the last old forest in Germany. Like, it was a forest for 12000y, basically since the last ice age. Individual trees are only a couple hundred years old, but the ecosystem you get from many generations of trees growing in a mostly unmanaged forest is rather unique and due to the time scales involved irreplaceable.
  - cleansy 7y ago
    And this can take decades, until swimming in the water doesn't impact health. Let alone the fact that the additional water to maintain the water level in an unnatural lake like that may be needed elsewhere. What many people forget is that during the excavation all kinds of metals and materials are uncovered leading to red water for the first couple of decades until everything is settled. I am from a german region (Lausitz) where all of that happened and believe me when I say that I'd rather have some out-of-the-job miners than big patches of land filled with lakes instead of "home towns".
- nisa 7y ago
  Here is an area in eastern germany with lot's of opencast mining in the past (much bigger than what RWE did) - the lakes are former mines but there are some serious problems especially regarding quality of water and water levels https://goo.gl/maps/2r1ZhDMHZVHf21ug8 https://goo.gl/maps/2r1ZhDMHZVHf21ug8
- wnkrshm 7y ago
  It is rehab, I've been there and had to drive around it to get to the vantage point. Edit: The pit looks like some lunar surface from one of the vantage points - it's wide enough to be larger than your field of view. Also, I'm not sure whether rehab is the right word for it, it's an area they built out of the non-coal material they had to dig out. IIRC the pitch for the pit was to turn it into an artificial lake.
- Kliment 7y ago
  That's correct (I live nearby). What you also don't see was what was in the way of the mine before it got there. It was populated space, all the towns got cleared out. Normally when someone blows up thousand-year-old cultural monuments we call it terrorism, but not when it's RWE (the mine operator) doing it. The compensation people get is nowhere near proportional to the damage - they get paid based on a fictional estimate of the value of their home. And they don't get to choose whether they get evicted or not. RWE recently bulldozed a centuries-old church and surrounding town. They get away with it because of a fuckup by local politicians a while back. RWE was supposed to pay for the right to exploit that land, and local councils agreed to an offer to pay them in shares instead of in money. Now local council budgets are dependent on RWE dividends and therefore although technically they co-own RWE, in practice RWE owns them. The saddest thing is that lignite mining is not even commercially viable anymore - so these mines only continue to operate because of state subsidies (federal subsidies, which then partially end up in local councils via said dividends). The terrorists operating the mines claim that it's critical to keep them running because of the jobs that would be lost, but a couple years worth of the subsidy would be sufficient to pay the entire workforce (around 20k people nationwide work in that industry) their salaries for life. Meanwhile solar subsidies got cut for being "too expensive", shrinking that sector by 4x as many jobs. The fuckers now want to accelerate the pace of extraction because they have to shut down by 2038.
  - hef19898 7y ago
    I cannot agree more! The only ones profiting from coal subsidies are RWE and company while evryone else pays for it. It would be much more worthwhile, even for RWE themselves, to just use the coal subsidies and plaster all active and potential strip mines with solar farms. But then we are talking about old German politics and corporate culture, so that won't happen anytime soon.
    - freeflight 7y ago
      You are forgetting the part where RWE is also paying the income of a whole lot of miners, who would suddenly be without a job if the mines where to be closed. That is the biggest political hurdle here, it's not solely RWE being greedy, a lot of it has to do with nobody being able to offer these miners any job alternatives once their mines are closed. Yet these miners make up a substantial part of the population in certain German states, thus the result that majority of Germans want to exit coal but in those places where coal actually matters there's vehement opposition to closing them down [0]. [0] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/kohleausstieg-mehrheit-der-deutschen-will-schnellen-ausstieg-a-1249937.html https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/kohleausstieg-meh...
- maze-le 7y ago
  Yes, there is such a program. There is a region in eastern Germany, that was known as the 'death triangle' during the DDR -- the region between Bitterfeld, Halle and Borna (https://www.google.com/maps/@51.364936,12.2644447,63124m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@51.364936,12.2644447,63124m/dat...). The region was dominated by coal mining and chemical industry -- greyish-black snows and acid rains were not uncommon. If you look at the map today, there are lots of lakes where there were extensive coal mining projects in the past. Nowadays they are a popular tourist destination.
  - mc32 7y ago
    That has echoes of the “Siberian Maldives” [1]. An ash lake that has turquoise waters, due to toxic pollutants, where lots of people go to take selfies ignoring the warning signs posted to not go in the lake... but people still do. [1]https://time.com/5623538/toxic-waste-dump-selfies/ https://time.com/5623538/toxic-waste-dump-selfies/
    - maze-le 7y ago
      I was barely alive at that time, so I only know these stories from my family members. But I've seen photographs of the time, that confirm it happened, albeit I doubt that it happened on a regular basis.
- brazzy 7y ago
  Nice guessing, but nope. Old earth movements of that scale are anything but invisible on satellite pictures. Here's a map that shows the area before mining began in 1978: https://www.bund-nrw.de/fileadmin/nrw/bilder/Braunkohle/1975_Tagebau_Hambach_Struktur_vor_Inanspruchnahme.jpg https://www.bund-nrw.de/fileadmin/nrw/bilder/Braunkohle/1975... So the rehabilitation area is in fact only the very prominent forest directly to the northwest of the active mining, a third to half its size rather than twice or thrice.
  - roenxi 7y ago
    I'm a mining engineer with previous experience as a rehabilitation planner in a coal mine. Technically I suppose I am guessing when I say that is a hill and it is not natural. However it is an extremely educated guess. I assure you, it is a hill and it is not natural. It is clearly mine rehabilitation. I've been responsible for a very similar looking hill, in fact. Not quite as nice looking from a satellite photo I must admit, they've got a better shade of green.
- anotheryou 7y ago
  Sure, could always be worse. But coal is probably the worst form of gathering energy. The only benefit is the quick ramp-up enabling them to jump in to gaps where e.g. atomic power ramps up to meet demand.
titzer 7y ago
Thanks for the link. It's staggering. This is happening in Eastern Germany, too, near Spremberg. If you turn off labels and zoom out a bit, you can see spot them in several places. Impossible to hide global destruction like this. It's interesting (and scary) to watch us gobble up the Earth. Have a look at Merauke in Papa New Guinea and the surrounding ~100km. Mostly the jungle getting turned into farms, but there are also huge palm oil plantations that are cropping up in the middle here and there. They are huge too.
athenot 7y ago
That reminds me of the "mountain top removal" going on in the Appalachians. Bring up google maps for West Virginia, zoom out so that the entire state is visible in the browser window, and you can see all the scars. https://www.google.com/maps/place/West+Virginia/@38.1864602,-81.6009849,294485m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x884a54a5d4cb0945:0xbb00c768decd3a43!8m2!3d38.5976262!4d-80.4549026 https://www.google.com/maps/place/West+Virginia/@38.1864602,...
ekingr 7y ago
Thanks for the link. What's most crazy is when you compare it to the nearby city of Köln (1+m inhabitants). It's almost the size of the city center!
anotheryou 7y ago
Indeed, you can have all of germany on screen and still see it.

rotorblade 7y ago

Democracy Now! also covered the protests at the end of 2017 [1]. [1] https://www.democracynow.org/2017/11/15/special_report_from_the_occupied_forest https://www.democracynow.org/2017/11/15/special_report_from_...

ntzm 7y ago

Capitalism will destroy this planet

bubblewrap 7y ago
Socialism has destroyed quite a bit of nature. (look at the Aral sea, for example). What exactly would you is it about capitalism that supposedly destroys the planet? And how would you propose to remedy the problem? I mean by starving a couple of million people, as it is wont to do, Socialism could help curb the consumption of resources. I give you that. And again, lols for the downvotes. You are ridiculous.
- titzer 7y ago
  It's people and exponential growth. Doesn't matter what -ism you put on the end of your shovels.
  - novalis78 7y ago
    That’s quite the Malthusian viewpoint. Alternatively: “Malthus theory, which holds that since the world’s resources are more or less fixed, population growth must be restricted or all of us will descend into bottomless misery. Malthusianism is scientifically bankrupt — all predictions made upon it have been wrong, because human beings are not mere consumers of resources. Rather, we create resources by the development of new technologies that find use for them. The more people, the faster the rate of innovation. This is why (contrary to Malthus) as the world’s population has increased, the standard of living has increased, and at an accelerating rate.“ https://space.nss.org/the-significance-of-the-martian-frontier-by-robert-zubrin/ https://space.nss.org/the-significance-of-the-martian-fronti...
    - Nasrudith 7y ago
      Really the two are in feedback loops that may correlate and require certain strategization and working smarter instead of harder. Improved agricultural yields produce surplus food per person which allows a shift to industrialization which enables more secondary tertiary areas of specialization which can boost yields and give other benefits. This dates back to the bronze age even and technically stone age in mesoamerican and neighboring southern native american cultures.

bubblewrap 7y ago

Might be worth noting, that at the same time historical forests are being cut down for wind power, with the support of the Green party. For example https://rettet-den-reinhardswald.de/ https://rettet-den-reinhardswald.de/ - a forest that is famous as a setting for many of the Grimm's fairy tales. Protests so far are only few. It doesn't fit the narrative, so our German state media doesn't make a huge deal out of it. I have also heard that the "good" protestors of the Hambacher forest also left a lot of garbage at the site. Lol for the downvotes. You dispute the story of forests being cut down for wind power? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea#Impact_on_environment,_economy,_and_public_health https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea#Impact_on_environment...

lake99 7y ago
Do you know what the German protesters are proposing as an alternative? Germany banned nuclear, brown lignite is bad, extensive mining destroys forests, wind power destroys forests and is bad for birds, Germany is not a good candidate for solar, and so on. So what's next?
- bubblewrap 7y ago
  They believe in a fairy tale of green energy without any side effects. I don't think they have a clear concept of a viable solution. The irony is that they blame their parents, whose generation protested against nuclear power. Presumably the only alternative that would have stood a chance to reduce climate change.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
    > I don't think they have a clear concept of a viable solution. Do you have a clear concept of a viable solution? (Hint: Killing the ecosystem that sustains humans is not it.)
    - fzort 7y ago
      > Do you have a clear concept of a viable solution? Nuclear. Solar farms take 450 times more land than nuclear to produce the same amount of energy (source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/08/we-dont-need-solar-and-wind-to-save-the-climate-and-its-a-good-thing-too/#2501e084e4de https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/08...)

VBprogrammer 7y ago

For someone who has been to Germany the scale and number of windturbines is amazing. It seems odd that they only account for 14% of their electricity production. By comparison I can't remember seeing any solar power infrastructure and yet that accounts for 7%.

imtringued 7y ago
I don't know where you got your numbers from. Wind power generated 20% of electricity in 2018 and 26% in the first half of 2019.
- VBprogrammer 7y ago
  The article. Admittedly there is another 3% for offshore wind turbines but I haven't been that far north.
- oeuviz 7y ago
  the linked article cites "Clean Energy Wire" as the source.
- casefields 7y ago
  AG Energiebilanzen says its 17.3% for 2019. Source: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
hannob 7y ago
Depends a lot on the area. Most of the solar installations are in the richer southern areas on private houses, whereas the large wind installation can be mostly seen in eastern and northern germany.
- wirrbel 7y ago
  Lots of conservative backlash against wind energy in the south. "Asparagus landscapes" was a slogan used to get votes of people who don't want wind turbines around. Also fear mongering for infrasound etc.

golergka 7y ago

> "It's heavy to see how your home just gets destroyed," says Omo. "The treehouse that you built and where you lived and where you spent so much time. And then you see hundreds and hundreds of cops running through your home. It's a heavy thing to see." I'm astonished by this hypocrisy. Not only have they squatted on someone else's property, they did it not just to live in a forest, they did it as activists: with the exact purpose of creating the image of police brutality to create public backlash and affect the parties involved. Even if their cause was completely just and good (which is a different conversation that I'm not prepared to have), they're getting at it by manipulating the media and purposefully creating the coverage they planned. This exact destruction was the main purpose of them building these houses, in this spot, to begin with.

perfunctory 7y ago
Just curious, what would be your preferred method to attract media attention or fight climate crisis in general?
blablabla123 7y ago
Actually squatting is legal within its limit. One might also bring the counterargument that RWE legally squatted other people's properties and evicted them - while creating immense cost for the tax payers. [1] Not everybody was so comfortable with moving away. 'The old Immerath is ... demolished for the Garzweiler II opencast mine. Since 2006, the former residents have been partially relocated to the newly formed village. ... "When I was at the construction site, everything was in ruins. That was a shock. A man from outside approached me and said why we gave up the village without a fight. We resisted for years. People should not think wrong. "' [2] [1] https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Frp-online.de%2Fwirtschaft%2Frwe-und-vattenfall-braunkohle-kostet-15-milliarden_aid-19710147 https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u... [2] https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Ftaz.de%2FDorf-Umsiedlung-fuer-Braunkohletagebau%2F%215494693%2F https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u...
adrianN 7y ago
I think the main purpose of building those houses was making it impossible to fell the trees around them.

sawaruna 7y ago

If interested in some footage from protests and the site in general - https://twitter.com/JoanieLemercier https://twitter.com/JoanieLemercier

twic 7y ago

> To add insult to injury, the coal that is extracted here is brown coal, also known as lignite, which emits particularly high levels of carbon dioxide. This surprised me, because surely you get one molecule of CO2 per atom of carbon in the coal, regardless of the kind of coal. But it seems there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my stoichiometry - lignite has a higher moisture content than other coals, so more of the energy liberated goes into boiling that water, so there is less energy produced per unit of carbon, which means more CO2 per unit of energy: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780081008959000036 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978008100...

Nasrudith 7y ago
Huh I would have guesses that the difference was in hydrocarbons themselves - the opposite of how Methane is peak hydrocarbon efficency by having four hydrogen bonds per carbon - if it has less energy/carbon dense configurations resulting in more CO2 than even other coals because it was made up of more wasteful structures like "rings" of carbons.
KozmoNau7 7y ago
Lignite is more accurately described as "slightly more flammable dirt". It is an absolute outrage that we still burn it for energy.
MR4D 7y ago
I had a power company as a client once, years ago. They had a plant that burned lignite. I was new to the industry and asked what that was. The response they gave me was “it’s like burning dirt.” Man, lignite is nasty stuff. Burning freaking dirt. Can’t wait for this stuff to be outlawed.

nashashmi 7y ago

OT but the picture of the gigantic machine is a bagger 288. An engineering marvel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_288?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_288?wprov=sfla1