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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 clear

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...
  - DocTomoe 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. In all fairness, Germany lost about four times as many jobs when we destroyed our solar industry.
    - freeflight 7y ago
      The only thing I'm aware off is that the Groko has been giving out way fewer licenses for PV installations, which has lead to a considerable slow-down in building out PV capabilities. But afaik we didn't really destroy the industry, we just lost our edge [0], which has in part to do with industrial espionage [1], and in other parts with China simply out manufacturing anybody else as soon as they get the gist of building something. [0] https://www.augsburger-allgemeine.de/wirtschaft/Der-Niedergang-der-deutschen-Solarwirtschaft-id41477701.html https://www.augsburger-allgemeine.de/wirtschaft/Der-Niederga... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial_espionage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial...
      - turbinerneiter 7y ago
        They ruined the home market, while China heavily subsidized theirs. It was a failure of politics.
      - hef19898 7y ago
        That the German manufacturers were subsidy chasing production dilitantes did help neither. But yes, politicals played a role. Still do in solar to this day.
  - hef19898 7y ago
    20k, roughly. Subsidies directly paid to them for just staying home would be much, much less then they are now for RWE and co. And honestly, 20k ain't that much in country of 80+ million people. Alao the problem would be much less severe if we hadn't countinued to actually train new miners until abcouple of years ago. Just keeping the existing ones employed until a very well earned early retirement would have avoided that 20k affected people. But hey, then the utilities and mining companies would have earned a lot less in subsidies.
titzer 7y ago
The future is going to be ugly. I am not sure how I feel about capital punishment, but given how bad things could get in a future dystopia, the death penalty for environmental crimes of this magnitude would seem tame.
cipher_system 7y ago
The jobs at risk are not only those in the coal industry but also the jobs powered by the coal. You can't run a business without electricity. So if coal makes up about a third of the power then about a third of the jobs in Germany could be lost. Of course coal can and should be replaced by something better but thats gonna take a while and Germany has chosen to phase out nuclear before coal so this is a consequence of that decision.
- Nimelrian 7y ago
  The jobs at risk are not only those in the coal industry but also the jobs powered by the coal. You can't run a business without electricity. So if coal makes up about a third of the power then about a third of the jobs in Germany could be lost. That is one of the most ridiculous statements I have ever heard.
  - roenxi 7y ago
    Why do you think people mine coal? To upset environmentalists? It is mined because it enables people to do things. It creates material wealth. It is completely reasonable to say that there are ramifications to shutting down coal. Germany has not increased their access to electricity through the Energiewende [0]. Apparently that is intentional, which shows remarkable political will; I can't see it flying in most countries. Wouldn't want to be poor in Germany. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany
- chokma 7y ago
  Last year Germany exported about 9% of its electricity. So the country could reduce their use of lignite (~ 24% of total energy produced) by at least this amount. And I think the math is off there - if Germany cuts 24% of its energy production over a couple of years, energy may become more expensive, driving away the factories using extreme amounts of electricity[1]. It would not result in losing a lot of jobs, and may even force some industries to become much more efficient (thus generating an advantage over competitors). [1] eg, Aurubis in Hamburg using 1 billion kw/h per year with less than 7000 employees to refine copper
FrojoS 7y ago
There was a very good joke in the satire/comedy TV show "Die Anstalt" recently: The reason saving these coal jobs is more important than the solar jobs, is because the former are NOT RENEWABLE.

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...
- DocTomoe 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. In all fairness, Germany lost about four times as many jobs when we destroyed our solar industry.
  - freeflight 7y ago
    The only thing I'm aware off is that the Groko has been giving out way fewer licenses for PV installations, which has lead to a considerable slow-down in building out PV capabilities. But afaik we didn't really destroy the industry, we just lost our edge [0], which has in part to do with industrial espionage [1], and in other parts with China simply out manufacturing anybody else as soon as they get the gist of building something. [0] https://www.augsburger-allgemeine.de/wirtschaft/Der-Niedergang-der-deutschen-Solarwirtschaft-id41477701.html https://www.augsburger-allgemeine.de/wirtschaft/Der-Niederga... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial_espionage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial...
    - turbinerneiter 7y ago
      They ruined the home market, while China heavily subsidized theirs. It was a failure of politics.
    - hef19898 7y ago
      That the German manufacturers were subsidy chasing production dilitantes did help neither. But yes, politicals played a role. Still do in solar to this day.
- hef19898 7y ago
  20k, roughly. Subsidies directly paid to them for just staying home would be much, much less then they are now for RWE and co. And honestly, 20k ain't that much in country of 80+ million people. Alao the problem would be much less severe if we hadn't countinued to actually train new miners until abcouple of years ago. Just keeping the existing ones employed until a very well earned early retirement would have avoided that 20k affected people. But hey, then the utilities and mining companies would have earned a lot less in subsidies.

titzer 7y ago

The future is going to be ugly. I am not sure how I feel about capital punishment, but given how bad things could get in a future dystopia, the death penalty for environmental crimes of this magnitude would seem tame.

cipher_system 7y ago

The jobs at risk are not only those in the coal industry but also the jobs powered by the coal. You can't run a business without electricity. So if coal makes up about a third of the power then about a third of the jobs in Germany could be lost. Of course coal can and should be replaced by something better but thats gonna take a while and Germany has chosen to phase out nuclear before coal so this is a consequence of that decision.

Nimelrian 7y ago
The jobs at risk are not only those in the coal industry but also the jobs powered by the coal. You can't run a business without electricity. So if coal makes up about a third of the power then about a third of the jobs in Germany could be lost. That is one of the most ridiculous statements I have ever heard.
- roenxi 7y ago
  Why do you think people mine coal? To upset environmentalists? It is mined because it enables people to do things. It creates material wealth. It is completely reasonable to say that there are ramifications to shutting down coal. Germany has not increased their access to electricity through the Energiewende [0]. Apparently that is intentional, which shows remarkable political will; I can't see it flying in most countries. Wouldn't want to be poor in Germany. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany
chokma 7y ago
Last year Germany exported about 9% of its electricity. So the country could reduce their use of lignite (~ 24% of total energy produced) by at least this amount. And I think the math is off there - if Germany cuts 24% of its energy production over a couple of years, energy may become more expensive, driving away the factories using extreme amounts of electricity[1]. It would not result in losing a lot of jobs, and may even force some industries to become much more efficient (thus generating an advantage over competitors). [1] eg, Aurubis in Hamburg using 1 billion kw/h per year with less than 7000 employees to refine copper

FrojoS 7y ago

There was a very good joke in the satire/comedy TV show "Die Anstalt" recently: The reason saving these coal jobs is more important than the solar jobs, is because the former are NOT RENEWABLE.