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Well Germany is closing down their nuclear power plants, under excuses of damage and recent Chernobyl series. While actively funding Nord Stream 2. So there g

Well Germany is closing down their nuclear power plants, under excuses of damage and recent Chernobyl series. While actively funding Nord Stream 2. So there goes your green EU. If we are to survive climate change we would have to cull all politicians and dirty industry leaders. They have so much power over the world and don;t give a fuck about next generation. After all they all will be able to afford ticket to Elysium.

La1n 5y ago
> under excuses of damage and recent Chernobyl series. Actually it has been a way longer process starting in 2000/2001[1], with Fukushima having a significant impact.[2] It doesn't seem the Chernobyl series was responsible. [1] https://www.terradaily.com/2003/031114130333.jlvf6wjx.html https://www.terradaily.com/2003/031114130333.jlvf6wjx.html [2] http://bos.sagepub.com/content/67/4/14.abstract http://bos.sagepub.com/content/67/4/14.abstract
- kuxv 5y ago
  I always wondered why was Germany concerned about the events in Fukushima as that was caused by the earthquake/tsunami. Is that a common phenomenon in Germany?
  - ratww 5y ago
    It’s not. The whole reason is historical, because of Chernobyl, Sellafield, the Fukushima. People have been wary for years. Netflix series Dark reflects this mindset pretty well. The idea of nuclear energy being clean that we see repeated here in Hacker News is not as widespread as it looks, HN is just another bubble. People are not hearing about it. It will take a while for the population to change their mind, and longer still for the government.
    - mschuster91 5y ago
      > The idea of nuclear energy being clean that we see repeated here in Hacker News is not as widespread as it looks, HN is just another bubble. People are not hearing about it. It will take a while for the population to change their mind, and longer still for the government. German here. We Europeans also have another issue: where to put the waste. Unlike Americans who have lots of deserts where no one gives a flying f..k about anything you dump there because there is no human life in a hundred km range, Europe is densely populated and surprisingly people don't want to live near a nuclear waste dump. Additionally, unlike Americans we have personal experience with nuclear disaster from Chernobyl - to this day, many decades after the event, you have to check wild pigs and fungi in Bavaria for radioactivity if you want to sell them. And current operators of nuclear plants haven't been exactly trustworthy, given many thousands of incident reports of which quite a number can be boiled down to shoddy construction or maintenance. On top of that, we have had massive fuck-ups of our governments in the attempts to find a permanent storage site: - former salt mine "Asse" which was used from 1967-1978 turned to be a colossal disaster - the barrels rusted and leaked, to make it worse it was known at the time that the barrels would only last three years, and now it's estimated to need billions of euros for retrieval of all the waste - former salt mine "Gorleben" was inspected from 1979-2000 as a permanent storage site, but (again) it came out that the location was chosen for political reasons, not scientific - former GDR site "Morsleben" is unstable, needing billions of euros to prevent collapse - current projects to search a new final site are expecting to take until (at least) 2031 with finalization of storage in year 2095-2170 (!!!), at a total cost of 50-170 billion euros. As a result of all of this - especially the last point, who can even guarantee there will be a German nation in over 150 years of time from now?! - German public is extremely skeptic of nuclear energy. In other European nations, French and British projects for new nuclear reactors (Flamanville and Hinkley Point C, respectively) have managed to surpass the infamous disaster airport BER in budget and time overruns. Even if there were public support for nuclear energy, no one trusts government to complete such projects in time and budget anymore, further weakening nuclear energy. Edit: Totally forgot about the boatload of issues involving power plants europe-wide, see e.g. https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/eus-ageing-nuclear-reactors-pose-significant-safety-risks/ https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/eus-ageing-nucl... for a list. You really have anything there, from fundamental construction issues over your run-off-the-mill accident and old age (many plants are 30 years or older) to outright gross negligence. To put it short: We Europeans can't operate nuclear power responsibly, no matter if organized under capitalist, communist or modern-ish government control. There won't be much of a future for nuclear fission power in Europe, no matter what some of our bought-off leaders (Macron, Orban) spout.
  - barney54 5y ago
    My reading of the situation is that Merkel went anti-nuke because the greens in Germany were anti-nuke and she needed more support. It was all about electoral politics.
    - tremon 5y ago
      Being anti-nuke and being against nuclear power are two completely different things.
    - schroeding 5y ago
      I'm not sure about that. IMHO, one of the major reasons Germany (beyond party lines) went anti-nuclear after Fukushima was the sentiment that "something like Tschernobyl can only happen in countries like the Soviet Union / the eastern block", that was the political position of most parties (except Greens, of course) since the 80s. The West German nuclear plants were "always safe", something like Tschernobyl "could never happen here". This sentiment was a major part of the reason why the East German nuclear plants were shut down immediately after the collapse of East Germany, even before the Unification. They were Soviet and unsafe. But Fukushima is in Japan, and Japan and Germany feel much more similar, from a technological standpoint, than (West) Germany and the ex Soviet Union. Even though Fukushima was geographically much farther away than Tschernobyl, it somehow was "closer", politically. "If it happens in Japan, it can happen here, too" - I know a few people that regularly vote / support the CDU (Merkels party) and most of them had this exact change of mind.
      - throwawayzRUU6f 5y ago
        The question is - why did this trend arise specifically in German-speaking countries? Chernobyl/Pripyat is in northern Ukraine, on the border with Belarus. Ukraine is totally fine with nuclear power. Belarus plans to expand the existing plants. To the west, Slovakia's grid is mostly nuclear and is currently doing finishing touches on their new reactors. Hungary is also pro-nuclear. The radioactive plume from Chernobyl then moved northwards, towards Baltics, reaching the populated parts of Scandinavia. Well, the grids in FIN and SWE are heavily nuclear-based, Finland is about to launch another 1500MW reactor. So - the countries most affected by the Chernobyl disaster are unanimously pro-nuclear, while DACH countries, basically unaffected by it, are somehow in panic-mode whenever the word 'nuclear' is uttered.
adrianN 5y ago
Nuclear is a tiny sliver in that chart. If decarbonization takes 1.3% longer because we also get rid of nuclear I think few people will complain. It would of course be nice for the climate to first shut off coal plants and then nuclear plants, but it's hard to get a majority for that in Germany's current political climate.
- 0xfaded 5y ago
  Its not so different from the covid vaccines. We don't need a solution. We need every solution available.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    I completely agree and would be in favor of keeping nuclear power running. But I think that shutting off nuclear early is a very minor mistake compared to the general energy policy.
  - legulere 5y ago
    You can achieve much more per Euro though with renewables than nuclear.
    - hik 5y ago
      That is technically correct today. But that is because there are many problems with renewables that only really start to appear at scale. In the United States - many utilities gave up literal free money from the Federal Government on renewable deployment because it was creating problems with the grid at like, 2% of use. Nuclear is a drop in replacement for coal or natural gas.
j_wtf_all_taken 5y ago
> They have so much power over the world and don;t give a fuck about next generation. Just like all the consumers buying all that stuff and just like all voters not voting for politicians that would change something? Yeah but sure, it's always "the elites" fault.
- akudha 5y ago
  Do you realize the amount of money poured into propaganda/brain washing of the electorate? Even if all voters suddenly become super informed overnight, it is still hard to vote for good politicians (the very few) because of issues like gerrymandering etc? Yes, voters should take responsibility. But too much destruction comes from the elites. But feel free to support them. When this planet is ravaged by the effects of climate change, no elite will help you. They have their bunkers built and ready to move in.
  - j_wtf_all_taken 5y ago
    Gerrymandering is only a problem (with respect to climate change) if around half of the voters don't care about climate change. As you said, there are good politicians. Its us that do not vote for them. In Germany, it was always the same: in between elections, the Green party have really nice results in polls. However, when it comes to the election, people prefer reducing (or not increasing) taxes and stuff over fixing the climate. People DO know about climate change. There IS good information available online. Its not that people have no idea what's happening. They just don't care to do something themselves - there's enough other people to fix it. Its like an email with lots of recipients, no one feels responsible to reply. > But feel free to support them. I never said I support them. I said we could easily get rid of them, of we only wanted to. The problem is (half of) the people around you, not the elites put in power by them.
    - Retric 5y ago
      Gerrymandering can give a great deal of power to ~26% of the population. It takes just over 1/2 the seats in a congress to control legislation, and ~1/2 the voters in those locations. 1/2 * ~1/2 ~= 1/4 The US senate is even more extreme. Wyoming at 578,759 people has exactly as much power as California with 39,512,223. Clearly a party aiming to minimize the number of voters it needs to please would avoid California. After all if you get the right 10% of voters you win and who cares about anything else.
DoingIsLearning 5y ago
It's unfortunate you are being downvoted because you have a lot valid points. > If we are to survive climate change we would have to cull all politicians and dirty industry leaders. They have so much power over the world and don;t give a fuck about next generation. I agree this is the inevitable end of this trajectory. Eventually there will be environmental extreme groups that will target fossil fuel leaders. Controversially, ignoring the ethical aspects of this, it would be an incentives equalizer to precipitate real climate regulation. Currently there is no incentive to do so, this dynamics would change with a palpable fear of immediate injury/death.
- hedgedoops2 5y ago
  Or perhaps we could allow obtaining of some carbon credits through carbon capture / sequestration, and tighten the emissions cap. For 4% of global GDP you could stop/compensate global co2 emissions based on current carbon capture technology's prices per ton of co2 removed. [1] If there were a business case for CCS, the cost would come further down. Currently there is no profit in it. One would need to restrict the allowed methods to safe and scalable ones (like extraction from seawater, not ocean seeding). [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GmWpFCjh0Fk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GmWpFCjh0Fk for prices and methods + https://www.mcc-berlin.net/fileadmin/data/clock/carbon_clock.htm https://www.mcc-berlin.net/fileadmin/data/clock/carbon_clock... + simplistic back of envelope calculation (assumes cost scales up linearly)
  - einpoklum 5y ago
    Carbon credits are a mechanism by which excessive pollution is supposedly legitimized by other actions. It's a rather nefarious scheme IMHO. We should treat the activities of governments, companies and other organizations in a disaggregated fashion: Pumping out CO_2 and other pollutants into the air should be penalized, and engaging in CO_2-and-methane-sequestering activity (e.g. forestation) should be encouraged, independently of one another.
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    > Or perhaps we could allow obtaining of some carbon credits through carbon capture / sequestration, Except companies will go for the cheapest possible solution that “counts” for carbon credits, which is probably entirely fraudulent.
flohofwoe 5y ago
The German public (and especially the Green party) has been against nuclear power not since the Chernobyl TV series (which I think didn't tell anything new to most Germans), but since the original Chernobyl incident in 1986. Chernobyl was most likely the catalyst of why the Greens became so popular in Germany in the first place. And now that they are becoming the most powerful political force, don't expect the German stance towards nuclear power to change in the next few decades. (to be clear, I fully support the decommission of European nuclear plants, Europe is just too small and too densely populated to risk nuclear accidents, or for long term storage of nuclear waste)
- jopsen 5y ago
  > Europe is just too small and too densely populated to risk nuklear accidents. Maybe, if we built new safe reactors it wouldn't be a problem. That said, it's probably faster to go renewable -- so is it too much to ask that Germany doesn't build more cold fired plants?
  - flohofwoe 5y ago
    As far as I'm aware, no new coal plants will be built: https://www.powermag.com/germany-brings-last-new-coal-plant-online/ https://www.powermag.com/germany-brings-last-new-coal-plant-... Coal seems to be roughly on the same trajectory as nuclear, and since around 2015 on a much sharper decline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany
    - pantalaimon 5y ago
      Datteln 4 just started operating last year
      - flohofwoe 5y ago
        And that was the last one, meanwhile 8 other coal power plants had been closed in the same year. Planning and building power plants takes a long time, especially in Germany, where all big construction projects take forever. It's clear that there's gonna be some overlap between old and new plans.
merpnderp 5y ago
The only way to "cull all politicians and dirty industry leaders" is realize that wind and solar can't provide base power at rates people can afford. And if people have to spend too much on electricity, they'll vote in new "politicians and dirty industry leaders", like Germany's (and soon France's) return to coal burning. If we started today with nuclear, we could trivially hit the 1.5C IPCC goal. Hell, we could likely hit it if the world started fracking and moved to wind/natgas plants (like the US is doing rapidly). But at least for now, nuclear and fracking are less preferable than >2C warming to nearly all climate change advocates.
- chasd00 5y ago
  I wish someone would do to the energy industry what SpaceX did to the space industry. Prove to the world what is now possible instead of excuse after excuse of defending the status quo.
  - rndmize 5y ago
    Arguably Tesla is doing exactly that. Solar is cheap and available these days, wind is growing consistently. The main issue is smoothing out the spikiness of these sources as they scale to significant parts of the grid. Tesla is the only company I hear about in a real "boots on the ground" kind of way, with notable projects deployed in recent years and a consistent effort to scale those projects up - everything else I've seen is in development, barely started, or vaporware.
- antisthenes 5y ago
  > If we started today with nuclear, we could trivially hit the 1.5C IPCC goal. Just wanted to point out that this is nonsense. We already have 2C of warming baked in, if we go to net zero today, which is a complete fantasy. In fact we're likely to reach 1.5C of warming before those nuclear plants (that you propose we get started on) even come online. Did you even look at the graph in the top post in the thread?
pantalaimon 5y ago
Germany is also the worlds largest lignite miner and won't shut down it's coal plants before 2038.
- imtringued 5y ago
  Shutting down all coal plants before 2038 isn't the same thing as running them until 2038.
fennecfoxen 5y ago
> cull all politicians and dirty industry leaders Hello. Would it be possible to have a conversation about climate change that does not involve the suggestion that humans be killed en masse, in the manner of diseased animals? Thank you.
- s21n 5y ago
  Why not? “If you truly claim to represent the people of the future, Frank asks — people who have the exact same right to a livable planet that we do — doesn’t that mean you should be willing to kill in their defense? Not as a first choice, not as the only choice — but can you really take it off the table? ‘If your organization represents the people who will be born after us, well, that’s a heavy burden! It’s a real responsibility! You have to think like them! You have to do what they would do if they were here,’ Frank argues. ‘I don’t think they would countenance murder,’ retorts Mary, to which Frank replies, ‘Of course they would!’ The Ministry for the Future is thus a novel about bureaucracy, but it’s also about the possibility of a wide diversity of tactics in the name of a livable future that include fighting both inside and outside the system. Characters in the novel contemplate targeted assassination of politicians and CEOs, industrial sabotage of coal plants, intentionally bringing down airliners in the name of destroying commercial air travel, bioterrorism against industrial slaughterhouses — and they do more than contemplate them. How does it change what’s possible when we stop worrying so much about losing in the right way, and start thinking about winning in the wrong ways?” [1] To be honest, I'm surprised we're not seeing more acts of eco-terrorism yet. There are only isolated incidents of infrastructure sabotage. [2] I think it will change if (when) we don't meet the 2030 emission targets. 1. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/of-course-they-would-on-kim-stanley-robinsons-the-ministry-for-the-future/ https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/of-course-they-would-on-... 2. https://theintercept.com/2019/10/04/dakota-access-pipeline-sabotage/ https://theintercept.com/2019/10/04/dakota-access-pipeline-s...
  - splithalf 5y ago
    “surprised we're not seeing more acts of eco-terrorism yet“ People don’t work the way you think they do, yet.
  - 5y ago
api 5y ago
The politicians do what corporations and voters want or they get replaced by politicians who will. Corporations want profit. People want jobs and products.
fredm-de 5y ago
The trigger for the decision was not the recent Chernobyl series but the Fukushima incident combined with an important election. If Fukushima would have happened a month later, Germany probably wouldn't have decided to shut down it's unclear power plants. On October 28th 2010 the German government (CDU & FPD) voted to prolong the usage of its existing power plants for another 8 years. Fukushima happened on March 11th 2011. Put under pressure by an increasing poll numbers of the (anti-nuclear) Green Party and having a state election upcoming on March 27th the same government decided to close down the power plants.
- hnbad 5y ago
  Well, the German Greens (along with NGOs like Greenpeace) have always campaigned against nuclear in a way that very effectively shaped public opinion to allow Merkel to use the Fukushima scare as an opportunity to shut down nuclear power. Note that Germany's newest nuclear power plants were built in 1982, before the Chernobyl incident and before the merger of the West German Greens with the East German progressive movement (which made the party more politically relevant). This resulted in lifetimes of existing nuclear plants continuously being extended, which in terms of safety was much worse than building new ones. There are six plants currently still operating, half of which are scheduled to be shut down by the end of this year, the other half scheduled to be shut down by the end of next year. Ironically, the nuclear scares have not resulted in a massive expansion of renewables but in a strengthening of fossil fuels and especially coal (which is heavily subsidized and has even led to land being expropriated "in the common interest" to allow energy companies to harvest lignite). As of 2018 Germany has vague goals about abolishing coal power by 2038 due to public pressure but in the most optimistic scenarios this doesn't involve shutting down any coal plants before 2035. That this is being discussed by (conservative and centrist) government officials at all is only the result of the Fridays For Future protests and related spillover movements (XR and more specifically "Ende Gelände", a series of protests directly targeting the surface mining sites).
- the-dude 5y ago
  > shut down it's unclear power plants. Now that is a typo if I ever saw one.
legulere 5y ago
Germany manages to reduce fossil fuel use though: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energiemix#/media/Datei%3AEnergiemix_Deutschland.svg https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energiemix#/media/Datei%3AEn... (Personally I would have preferred to shut down coal first, but old nuclear plants are a risk and new ones are too expensive)

La1n 5y ago

> under excuses of damage and recent Chernobyl series. Actually it has been a way longer process starting in 2000/2001[1], with Fukushima having a significant impact.[2] It doesn't seem the Chernobyl series was responsible. [1] https://www.terradaily.com/2003/031114130333.jlvf6wjx.html https://www.terradaily.com/2003/031114130333.jlvf6wjx.html [2] http://bos.sagepub.com/content/67/4/14.abstract http://bos.sagepub.com/content/67/4/14.abstract

kuxv 5y ago
I always wondered why was Germany concerned about the events in Fukushima as that was caused by the earthquake/tsunami. Is that a common phenomenon in Germany?
- ratww 5y ago
  It’s not. The whole reason is historical, because of Chernobyl, Sellafield, the Fukushima. People have been wary for years. Netflix series Dark reflects this mindset pretty well. The idea of nuclear energy being clean that we see repeated here in Hacker News is not as widespread as it looks, HN is just another bubble. People are not hearing about it. It will take a while for the population to change their mind, and longer still for the government.
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    > The idea of nuclear energy being clean that we see repeated here in Hacker News is not as widespread as it looks, HN is just another bubble. People are not hearing about it. It will take a while for the population to change their mind, and longer still for the government. German here. We Europeans also have another issue: where to put the waste. Unlike Americans who have lots of deserts where no one gives a flying f..k about anything you dump there because there is no human life in a hundred km range, Europe is densely populated and surprisingly people don't want to live near a nuclear waste dump. Additionally, unlike Americans we have personal experience with nuclear disaster from Chernobyl - to this day, many decades after the event, you have to check wild pigs and fungi in Bavaria for radioactivity if you want to sell them. And current operators of nuclear plants haven't been exactly trustworthy, given many thousands of incident reports of which quite a number can be boiled down to shoddy construction or maintenance. On top of that, we have had massive fuck-ups of our governments in the attempts to find a permanent storage site: - former salt mine "Asse" which was used from 1967-1978 turned to be a colossal disaster - the barrels rusted and leaked, to make it worse it was known at the time that the barrels would only last three years, and now it's estimated to need billions of euros for retrieval of all the waste - former salt mine "Gorleben" was inspected from 1979-2000 as a permanent storage site, but (again) it came out that the location was chosen for political reasons, not scientific - former GDR site "Morsleben" is unstable, needing billions of euros to prevent collapse - current projects to search a new final site are expecting to take until (at least) 2031 with finalization of storage in year 2095-2170 (!!!), at a total cost of 50-170 billion euros. As a result of all of this - especially the last point, who can even guarantee there will be a German nation in over 150 years of time from now?! - German public is extremely skeptic of nuclear energy. In other European nations, French and British projects for new nuclear reactors (Flamanville and Hinkley Point C, respectively) have managed to surpass the infamous disaster airport BER in budget and time overruns. Even if there were public support for nuclear energy, no one trusts government to complete such projects in time and budget anymore, further weakening nuclear energy. Edit: Totally forgot about the boatload of issues involving power plants europe-wide, see e.g. https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/eus-ageing-nuclear-reactors-pose-significant-safety-risks/ https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/eus-ageing-nucl... for a list. You really have anything there, from fundamental construction issues over your run-off-the-mill accident and old age (many plants are 30 years or older) to outright gross negligence. To put it short: We Europeans can't operate nuclear power responsibly, no matter if organized under capitalist, communist or modern-ish government control. There won't be much of a future for nuclear fission power in Europe, no matter what some of our bought-off leaders (Macron, Orban) spout.
- barney54 5y ago
  My reading of the situation is that Merkel went anti-nuke because the greens in Germany were anti-nuke and she needed more support. It was all about electoral politics.
  - tremon 5y ago
    Being anti-nuke and being against nuclear power are two completely different things.
  - schroeding 5y ago
    I'm not sure about that. IMHO, one of the major reasons Germany (beyond party lines) went anti-nuclear after Fukushima was the sentiment that "something like Tschernobyl can only happen in countries like the Soviet Union / the eastern block", that was the political position of most parties (except Greens, of course) since the 80s. The West German nuclear plants were "always safe", something like Tschernobyl "could never happen here". This sentiment was a major part of the reason why the East German nuclear plants were shut down immediately after the collapse of East Germany, even before the Unification. They were Soviet and unsafe. But Fukushima is in Japan, and Japan and Germany feel much more similar, from a technological standpoint, than (West) Germany and the ex Soviet Union. Even though Fukushima was geographically much farther away than Tschernobyl, it somehow was "closer", politically. "If it happens in Japan, it can happen here, too" - I know a few people that regularly vote / support the CDU (Merkels party) and most of them had this exact change of mind.
    - throwawayzRUU6f 5y ago
      The question is - why did this trend arise specifically in German-speaking countries? Chernobyl/Pripyat is in northern Ukraine, on the border with Belarus. Ukraine is totally fine with nuclear power. Belarus plans to expand the existing plants. To the west, Slovakia's grid is mostly nuclear and is currently doing finishing touches on their new reactors. Hungary is also pro-nuclear. The radioactive plume from Chernobyl then moved northwards, towards Baltics, reaching the populated parts of Scandinavia. Well, the grids in FIN and SWE are heavily nuclear-based, Finland is about to launch another 1500MW reactor. So - the countries most affected by the Chernobyl disaster are unanimously pro-nuclear, while DACH countries, basically unaffected by it, are somehow in panic-mode whenever the word 'nuclear' is uttered.

adrianN 5y ago

Nuclear is a tiny sliver in that chart. If decarbonization takes 1.3% longer because we also get rid of nuclear I think few people will complain. It would of course be nice for the climate to first shut off coal plants and then nuclear plants, but it's hard to get a majority for that in Germany's current political climate.

0xfaded 5y ago
Its not so different from the covid vaccines. We don't need a solution. We need every solution available.
- adrianN 5y ago
  I completely agree and would be in favor of keeping nuclear power running. But I think that shutting off nuclear early is a very minor mistake compared to the general energy policy.
- legulere 5y ago
  You can achieve much more per Euro though with renewables than nuclear.
  - hik 5y ago
    That is technically correct today. But that is because there are many problems with renewables that only really start to appear at scale. In the United States - many utilities gave up literal free money from the Federal Government on renewable deployment because it was creating problems with the grid at like, 2% of use. Nuclear is a drop in replacement for coal or natural gas.

j_wtf_all_taken 5y ago

> They have so much power over the world and don;t give a fuck about next generation. Just like all the consumers buying all that stuff and just like all voters not voting for politicians that would change something? Yeah but sure, it's always "the elites" fault.

akudha 5y ago
Do you realize the amount of money poured into propaganda/brain washing of the electorate? Even if all voters suddenly become super informed overnight, it is still hard to vote for good politicians (the very few) because of issues like gerrymandering etc? Yes, voters should take responsibility. But too much destruction comes from the elites. But feel free to support them. When this planet is ravaged by the effects of climate change, no elite will help you. They have their bunkers built and ready to move in.
- j_wtf_all_taken 5y ago
  Gerrymandering is only a problem (with respect to climate change) if around half of the voters don't care about climate change. As you said, there are good politicians. Its us that do not vote for them. In Germany, it was always the same: in between elections, the Green party have really nice results in polls. However, when it comes to the election, people prefer reducing (or not increasing) taxes and stuff over fixing the climate. People DO know about climate change. There IS good information available online. Its not that people have no idea what's happening. They just don't care to do something themselves - there's enough other people to fix it. Its like an email with lots of recipients, no one feels responsible to reply. > But feel free to support them. I never said I support them. I said we could easily get rid of them, of we only wanted to. The problem is (half of) the people around you, not the elites put in power by them.
  - Retric 5y ago
    Gerrymandering can give a great deal of power to ~26% of the population. It takes just over 1/2 the seats in a congress to control legislation, and ~1/2 the voters in those locations. 1/2 * ~1/2 ~= 1/4 The US senate is even more extreme. Wyoming at 578,759 people has exactly as much power as California with 39,512,223. Clearly a party aiming to minimize the number of voters it needs to please would avoid California. After all if you get the right 10% of voters you win and who cares about anything else.

DoingIsLearning 5y ago

It's unfortunate you are being downvoted because you have a lot valid points. > If we are to survive climate change we would have to cull all politicians and dirty industry leaders. They have so much power over the world and don;t give a fuck about next generation. I agree this is the inevitable end of this trajectory. Eventually there will be environmental extreme groups that will target fossil fuel leaders. Controversially, ignoring the ethical aspects of this, it would be an incentives equalizer to precipitate real climate regulation. Currently there is no incentive to do so, this dynamics would change with a palpable fear of immediate injury/death.

hedgedoops2 5y ago
Or perhaps we could allow obtaining of some carbon credits through carbon capture / sequestration, and tighten the emissions cap. For 4% of global GDP you could stop/compensate global co2 emissions based on current carbon capture technology's prices per ton of co2 removed. [1] If there were a business case for CCS, the cost would come further down. Currently there is no profit in it. One would need to restrict the allowed methods to safe and scalable ones (like extraction from seawater, not ocean seeding). [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GmWpFCjh0Fk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GmWpFCjh0Fk for prices and methods + https://www.mcc-berlin.net/fileadmin/data/clock/carbon_clock.htm https://www.mcc-berlin.net/fileadmin/data/clock/carbon_clock... + simplistic back of envelope calculation (assumes cost scales up linearly)
- einpoklum 5y ago
  Carbon credits are a mechanism by which excessive pollution is supposedly legitimized by other actions. It's a rather nefarious scheme IMHO. We should treat the activities of governments, companies and other organizations in a disaggregated fashion: Pumping out CO_2 and other pollutants into the air should be penalized, and engaging in CO_2-and-methane-sequestering activity (e.g. forestation) should be encouraged, independently of one another.
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  > Or perhaps we could allow obtaining of some carbon credits through carbon capture / sequestration, Except companies will go for the cheapest possible solution that “counts” for carbon credits, which is probably entirely fraudulent.

flohofwoe 5y ago

The German public (and especially the Green party) has been against nuclear power not since the Chernobyl TV series (which I think didn't tell anything new to most Germans), but since the original Chernobyl incident in 1986. Chernobyl was most likely the catalyst of why the Greens became so popular in Germany in the first place. And now that they are becoming the most powerful political force, don't expect the German stance towards nuclear power to change in the next few decades. (to be clear, I fully support the decommission of European nuclear plants, Europe is just too small and too densely populated to risk nuclear accidents, or for long term storage of nuclear waste)

jopsen 5y ago
> Europe is just too small and too densely populated to risk nuklear accidents. Maybe, if we built new safe reactors it wouldn't be a problem. That said, it's probably faster to go renewable -- so is it too much to ask that Germany doesn't build more cold fired plants?
- flohofwoe 5y ago
  As far as I'm aware, no new coal plants will be built: https://www.powermag.com/germany-brings-last-new-coal-plant-online/ https://www.powermag.com/germany-brings-last-new-coal-plant-... Coal seems to be roughly on the same trajectory as nuclear, and since around 2015 on a much sharper decline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany
  - pantalaimon 5y ago
    Datteln 4 just started operating last year
    - flohofwoe 5y ago
      And that was the last one, meanwhile 8 other coal power plants had been closed in the same year. Planning and building power plants takes a long time, especially in Germany, where all big construction projects take forever. It's clear that there's gonna be some overlap between old and new plans.

merpnderp 5y ago

The only way to "cull all politicians and dirty industry leaders" is realize that wind and solar can't provide base power at rates people can afford. And if people have to spend too much on electricity, they'll vote in new "politicians and dirty industry leaders", like Germany's (and soon France's) return to coal burning. If we started today with nuclear, we could trivially hit the 1.5C IPCC goal. Hell, we could likely hit it if the world started fracking and moved to wind/natgas plants (like the US is doing rapidly). But at least for now, nuclear and fracking are less preferable than >2C warming to nearly all climate change advocates.

chasd00 5y ago
I wish someone would do to the energy industry what SpaceX did to the space industry. Prove to the world what is now possible instead of excuse after excuse of defending the status quo.
- rndmize 5y ago
  Arguably Tesla is doing exactly that. Solar is cheap and available these days, wind is growing consistently. The main issue is smoothing out the spikiness of these sources as they scale to significant parts of the grid. Tesla is the only company I hear about in a real "boots on the ground" kind of way, with notable projects deployed in recent years and a consistent effort to scale those projects up - everything else I've seen is in development, barely started, or vaporware.
antisthenes 5y ago
> If we started today with nuclear, we could trivially hit the 1.5C IPCC goal. Just wanted to point out that this is nonsense. We already have 2C of warming baked in, if we go to net zero today, which is a complete fantasy. In fact we're likely to reach 1.5C of warming before those nuclear plants (that you propose we get started on) even come online. Did you even look at the graph in the top post in the thread?

pantalaimon 5y ago

Germany is also the worlds largest lignite miner and won't shut down it's coal plants before 2038.

imtringued 5y ago
Shutting down all coal plants before 2038 isn't the same thing as running them until 2038.

fennecfoxen 5y ago

> cull all politicians and dirty industry leaders Hello. Would it be possible to have a conversation about climate change that does not involve the suggestion that humans be killed en masse, in the manner of diseased animals? Thank you.

s21n 5y ago
Why not? “If you truly claim to represent the people of the future, Frank asks — people who have the exact same right to a livable planet that we do — doesn’t that mean you should be willing to kill in their defense? Not as a first choice, not as the only choice — but can you really take it off the table? ‘If your organization represents the people who will be born after us, well, that’s a heavy burden! It’s a real responsibility! You have to think like them! You have to do what they would do if they were here,’ Frank argues. ‘I don’t think they would countenance murder,’ retorts Mary, to which Frank replies, ‘Of course they would!’ The Ministry for the Future is thus a novel about bureaucracy, but it’s also about the possibility of a wide diversity of tactics in the name of a livable future that include fighting both inside and outside the system. Characters in the novel contemplate targeted assassination of politicians and CEOs, industrial sabotage of coal plants, intentionally bringing down airliners in the name of destroying commercial air travel, bioterrorism against industrial slaughterhouses — and they do more than contemplate them. How does it change what’s possible when we stop worrying so much about losing in the right way, and start thinking about winning in the wrong ways?” [1] To be honest, I'm surprised we're not seeing more acts of eco-terrorism yet. There are only isolated incidents of infrastructure sabotage. [2] I think it will change if (when) we don't meet the 2030 emission targets. 1. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/of-course-they-would-on-kim-stanley-robinsons-the-ministry-for-the-future/ https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/of-course-they-would-on-... 2. https://theintercept.com/2019/10/04/dakota-access-pipeline-sabotage/ https://theintercept.com/2019/10/04/dakota-access-pipeline-s...
- splithalf 5y ago
  “surprised we're not seeing more acts of eco-terrorism yet“ People don’t work the way you think they do, yet.
- 5y ago

api 5y ago

The politicians do what corporations and voters want or they get replaced by politicians who will. Corporations want profit. People want jobs and products.

fredm-de 5y ago

The trigger for the decision was not the recent Chernobyl series but the Fukushima incident combined with an important election. If Fukushima would have happened a month later, Germany probably wouldn't have decided to shut down it's unclear power plants. On October 28th 2010 the German government (CDU & FPD) voted to prolong the usage of its existing power plants for another 8 years. Fukushima happened on March 11th 2011. Put under pressure by an increasing poll numbers of the (anti-nuclear) Green Party and having a state election upcoming on March 27th the same government decided to close down the power plants.

hnbad 5y ago
Well, the German Greens (along with NGOs like Greenpeace) have always campaigned against nuclear in a way that very effectively shaped public opinion to allow Merkel to use the Fukushima scare as an opportunity to shut down nuclear power. Note that Germany's newest nuclear power plants were built in 1982, before the Chernobyl incident and before the merger of the West German Greens with the East German progressive movement (which made the party more politically relevant). This resulted in lifetimes of existing nuclear plants continuously being extended, which in terms of safety was much worse than building new ones. There are six plants currently still operating, half of which are scheduled to be shut down by the end of this year, the other half scheduled to be shut down by the end of next year. Ironically, the nuclear scares have not resulted in a massive expansion of renewables but in a strengthening of fossil fuels and especially coal (which is heavily subsidized and has even led to land being expropriated "in the common interest" to allow energy companies to harvest lignite). As of 2018 Germany has vague goals about abolishing coal power by 2038 due to public pressure but in the most optimistic scenarios this doesn't involve shutting down any coal plants before 2035. That this is being discussed by (conservative and centrist) government officials at all is only the result of the Fridays For Future protests and related spillover movements (XR and more specifically "Ende Gelände", a series of protests directly targeting the surface mining sites).
the-dude 5y ago
> shut down it's unclear power plants. Now that is a typo if I ever saw one.

legulere 5y ago

Germany manages to reduce fossil fuel use though: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energiemix#/media/Datei%3AEnergiemix_Deutschland.svg https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energiemix#/media/Datei%3AEn... (Personally I would have preferred to shut down coal first, but old nuclear plants are a risk and new ones are too expensive)