7 ms·

Not sure the project moving forward with coal power is an environmental win.

pavlov 3y ago
A coal plant can be shut down immediately and dismantled without massive environmental impact. Undoing a landscape change on the scale of the Grand Canyon is a very different proposition.
- krisoft 3y ago
  > A coal plant can be shut down immediately and dismantled without massive environmental impact. And the CO2 dispersed in the atmosphere can be caught with butterfly nets. Easy breasy.
  - imoverclocked 3y ago
    Massive amounts of cement would probably have been used to create the dam and in the 1960s, nothing was even close to carbon neutral. Heck, we were still burning leaded fuels in cars at that time.
    - b112 3y ago
      I love how cement is now used to abandon climate positive projects. "Oh, let's nkt replace NG or coal or oil with a dam, because cement!" Note that the same is true of wind farms, tital farms, because these things use massive amounts of cement vs lifetime + power output. EG, cement footings, etc. Probably more cement is used, per kw produced, with wind farms in ocean. I wonder, has there been extensive work done, examining life of project, comparing all types of projects, and power output, as well as "how consistent" energy output is? Adding things in like "wind power only vs a dam, means massive amounts of pollution due to battery creation and disposal, and lifetime costs". Probably not. And so politicians have reasons to opt out of everything. "Oh, but that's not really green" "Oh but that isn't" All based upon some dude, smoking a fatty, saying "woha! concrete uses co2 in creation" without any numbers, impact studies, and comparatives.
      - mnw21cam 3y ago
        > All based upon some dude, smoking a fatty, saying "woha! concrete uses co2 in creation" without any numbers, impact studies, and comparatives. Are you serious? There are multiple university departments that study this sort of thing. The amount of CO2 released by all these various things has been very well calculated. We can definitely go into projects with good numbers to help us compare what the consequences will be.
        b112 3y ago
        Yet, where are those solid comparisons? Where is all the data? All I see is people repeating that "dam bad", and ignoring battery, and concrete footing costs of other project types. So you see, I'm quite serious, because you've not showed me what I asked for. A study comparison, including all factors such as lifetime of project, battery costs(or not), and so on. Most importantly, that study should compare co2 released by burning coal, compared to dam, wind, solar, etc lifetime. Imagine if it is 100000 for coal vs 1.1 for dam and 1.06 for windfarm? If so, no one has any business complaining about a dam's cement! If so, complaining only helps hurt the environment. It helps the deniers, it helps the coal industry, all for naught! So let's see the numbers, before people go on about dam bad.
        defrost 3y ago
        Here's one paper of many that'll help you get started: Foundations of offshore wind turbines: A review https://sci-hub.ru/10.1016/j.rser.2019.01.012 https://sci-hub.ru/10.1016/j.rser.2019.01.012 You can combine that (and others) with your global GIS map of offshore turbines, cross product against makes, models, developers, other papers on various foundations types and then add in on shore windfarms. You then end up with a wind farm version of something like, say: https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/metals-mining https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/met... which took some years to put together and is pay to access. Have large scale resource companies commissioned such integrated overviews with hot link to all the relevant technical reports that have been written on renewable energy? Yes. Is it in the public domain? No. Infomation want to be free, sure, but there's still a lot of high grade dark data out there. But with a bit of perseverance you can get a pretty good ballpark on the data you're asking for with some sweat equity.
  - pavlov 3y ago
    Atmospheric CO2 is fungible. We can theoretically produce less CO2 today to make up for the excesses of the past. (Not saying this is easy, or that humanity would have any detectable inclination to actually stop producing CO2.) Destroying the habitat of thousands of species is not fungible. It can never be restored.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- Propelloni 3y ago
  I think you are trying to say that landscape engineering is more harmful to the ecosphere than dismantling a single power plant. I guess that is right in a sense. But you happen to neglect that power generation is a process with a long chain of steps. Coal for example has to come from somewhere. Take the Garzweiler, Inden or Hambach regions in Germany (FYI, these are coal mining areas). Through coincidence while doing some work for RWE I had the pleasure to get the long run-down on the project basics regarding the renaturalisation of these regions and the projects are on a massive scale, even if they are only a fraction of the size of the Grand Canyon. When they started exploiting the coal in the 1970s they planned very far ahead, including the renaturalisation starting in the 2030s (meaning it is all already approved). Garzweiler and Hambach are situated in one of the most densely populated areas in all of Europe. Since the 1970s whole cities and villages had to be resettled, infrastructure dismantled and rebuild, and over 100 square km of area have basically been turned into a desert. Currently Germany is preparing the first stage [1] of the renaturalisation and it is expected that it will be done around the turn of the next century. So, yes, dams are a massive intrusion in the ecosphere but let's not kid ourselves into thinking the resources we need to run coal, gas, nuclear or oil power plants just fall from the sky. I wonder why it's OK to wreak such massive havoc on our environment for coal, but not for hydropower. [1] The project page for Hambach https://www.rwe.com/forschung-und-entwicklung/projektvorhaben/rheinwassertransportleitung/projekt/ https://www.rwe.com/forschung-und-entwicklung/projektvorhabe... EDIT: I would oppose flooding the Grand Canyon either way ;)
  - thatguy0900 3y ago
    A big benifit is all of that coal destruction happens somewhere else. The hydropower destruction happens right here.
- arghwhat 3y ago
  ... After it had been running for a decade or two and caused significant harm to all life, sure. This is one of those issues where being visible distorts the perceived damage. Tourism would probably also have adapted to seeing the large lake. Seems a little silly to focus on preserving the appearance of a hole in the ground over, idk, most life on earth.
  - BurningFrog 3y ago
    A single coal plant does not threat "most life on earth".
    - firtoz 3y ago
      A single typical nuke doesn't cause extinction either
    - arghwhat 3y ago
      And that attitude is why we are in a "death by a thousand cuts" scenario. Even just the single plant alone is incredibly harmful: Coal power plants are estimated to cause an average of 25 (direct and indirect) deaths per PWh, 33 for brown coal. A 2GW power plant makes 17PWh per yeah, which extrapolates to 432 deaths per year. https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
      - gunapologist99 3y ago
        Those statistics are complete fiction.
        Retric 3y ago
        Hardly, pollution deaths get lumped into many other statistics but you can work backwards. It’s the same basic math as figuring out how many cancers were caused by Hiroshima. Individually some people would have gotten cancer either way so you can’t guarantee some specific person died from that exposure, but you can compare populations and find statistically significant differences.
- justinclift 3y ago
  It sounds like the dam approach would have increased the amount of fertile land, greenery, etc around. If that's correct, I wonder how that trade off would then look?
- FreshStart 3y ago
  Except for the invisible heap in the sky.
wiseowise 3y ago
Destroying whole ecosystem is surely more environmentally friendly.
- thumbuddy 3y ago
  Let me ask you this though, is it more profitable?
  - edhelas 3y ago
    Let me ask you this though, is it more profitable to who ?
  - wiseowise 3y ago
    Define profitable.
    - thumbuddy 3y ago
      Look I'm only for it if someone is making some money here.
Hendrikto 3y ago
The article sounds like it was never about that, but rather about “preserving natural wonders”.
- bombcar 3y ago
  If the Grand Canyon wasn’t so interesting to look at (e.g. more like Black Canyon that is now lake Mead) it probably would be flooded today. And people would be arguing that we need to keep the levels of lake Gread high or something.

A coal plant can be shut down immediately and dismantled without massive environmental impact. Undoing a landscape change on the scale of the Grand Canyon is a very different proposition.

krisoft 3y ago
> A coal plant can be shut down immediately and dismantled without massive environmental impact. And the CO2 dispersed in the atmosphere can be caught with butterfly nets. Easy breasy.
- imoverclocked 3y ago
  Massive amounts of cement would probably have been used to create the dam and in the 1960s, nothing was even close to carbon neutral. Heck, we were still burning leaded fuels in cars at that time.
  - b112 3y ago
    I love how cement is now used to abandon climate positive projects. "Oh, let's nkt replace NG or coal or oil with a dam, because cement!" Note that the same is true of wind farms, tital farms, because these things use massive amounts of cement vs lifetime + power output. EG, cement footings, etc. Probably more cement is used, per kw produced, with wind farms in ocean. I wonder, has there been extensive work done, examining life of project, comparing all types of projects, and power output, as well as "how consistent" energy output is? Adding things in like "wind power only vs a dam, means massive amounts of pollution due to battery creation and disposal, and lifetime costs". Probably not. And so politicians have reasons to opt out of everything. "Oh, but that's not really green" "Oh but that isn't" All based upon some dude, smoking a fatty, saying "woha! concrete uses co2 in creation" without any numbers, impact studies, and comparatives.
    - mnw21cam 3y ago
      > All based upon some dude, smoking a fatty, saying "woha! concrete uses co2 in creation" without any numbers, impact studies, and comparatives. Are you serious? There are multiple university departments that study this sort of thing. The amount of CO2 released by all these various things has been very well calculated. We can definitely go into projects with good numbers to help us compare what the consequences will be.
      - b112 3y ago
        Yet, where are those solid comparisons? Where is all the data? All I see is people repeating that "dam bad", and ignoring battery, and concrete footing costs of other project types. So you see, I'm quite serious, because you've not showed me what I asked for. A study comparison, including all factors such as lifetime of project, battery costs(or not), and so on. Most importantly, that study should compare co2 released by burning coal, compared to dam, wind, solar, etc lifetime. Imagine if it is 100000 for coal vs 1.1 for dam and 1.06 for windfarm? If so, no one has any business complaining about a dam's cement! If so, complaining only helps hurt the environment. It helps the deniers, it helps the coal industry, all for naught! So let's see the numbers, before people go on about dam bad.
        defrost 3y ago
        Here's one paper of many that'll help you get started: Foundations of offshore wind turbines: A review https://sci-hub.ru/10.1016/j.rser.2019.01.012 https://sci-hub.ru/10.1016/j.rser.2019.01.012 You can combine that (and others) with your global GIS map of offshore turbines, cross product against makes, models, developers, other papers on various foundations types and then add in on shore windfarms. You then end up with a wind farm version of something like, say: https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/metals-mining https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/met... which took some years to put together and is pay to access. Have large scale resource companies commissioned such integrated overviews with hot link to all the relevant technical reports that have been written on renewable energy? Yes. Is it in the public domain? No. Infomation want to be free, sure, but there's still a lot of high grade dark data out there. But with a bit of perseverance you can get a pretty good ballpark on the data you're asking for with some sweat equity.
- pavlov 3y ago
  Atmospheric CO2 is fungible. We can theoretically produce less CO2 today to make up for the excesses of the past. (Not saying this is easy, or that humanity would have any detectable inclination to actually stop producing CO2.) Destroying the habitat of thousands of species is not fungible. It can never be restored.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
Propelloni 3y ago
I think you are trying to say that landscape engineering is more harmful to the ecosphere than dismantling a single power plant. I guess that is right in a sense. But you happen to neglect that power generation is a process with a long chain of steps. Coal for example has to come from somewhere. Take the Garzweiler, Inden or Hambach regions in Germany (FYI, these are coal mining areas). Through coincidence while doing some work for RWE I had the pleasure to get the long run-down on the project basics regarding the renaturalisation of these regions and the projects are on a massive scale, even if they are only a fraction of the size of the Grand Canyon. When they started exploiting the coal in the 1970s they planned very far ahead, including the renaturalisation starting in the 2030s (meaning it is all already approved). Garzweiler and Hambach are situated in one of the most densely populated areas in all of Europe. Since the 1970s whole cities and villages had to be resettled, infrastructure dismantled and rebuild, and over 100 square km of area have basically been turned into a desert. Currently Germany is preparing the first stage [1] of the renaturalisation and it is expected that it will be done around the turn of the next century. So, yes, dams are a massive intrusion in the ecosphere but let's not kid ourselves into thinking the resources we need to run coal, gas, nuclear or oil power plants just fall from the sky. I wonder why it's OK to wreak such massive havoc on our environment for coal, but not for hydropower. [1] The project page for Hambach https://www.rwe.com/forschung-und-entwicklung/projektvorhaben/rheinwassertransportleitung/projekt/ https://www.rwe.com/forschung-und-entwicklung/projektvorhabe... EDIT: I would oppose flooding the Grand Canyon either way ;)
- thatguy0900 3y ago
  A big benifit is all of that coal destruction happens somewhere else. The hydropower destruction happens right here.
arghwhat 3y ago
... After it had been running for a decade or two and caused significant harm to all life, sure. This is one of those issues where being visible distorts the perceived damage. Tourism would probably also have adapted to seeing the large lake. Seems a little silly to focus on preserving the appearance of a hole in the ground over, idk, most life on earth.
- BurningFrog 3y ago
  A single coal plant does not threat "most life on earth".
  - firtoz 3y ago
    A single typical nuke doesn't cause extinction either
  - arghwhat 3y ago
    And that attitude is why we are in a "death by a thousand cuts" scenario. Even just the single plant alone is incredibly harmful: Coal power plants are estimated to cause an average of 25 (direct and indirect) deaths per PWh, 33 for brown coal. A 2GW power plant makes 17PWh per yeah, which extrapolates to 432 deaths per year. https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
    - gunapologist99 3y ago
      Those statistics are complete fiction.
      - Retric 3y ago
        Hardly, pollution deaths get lumped into many other statistics but you can work backwards. It’s the same basic math as figuring out how many cancers were caused by Hiroshima. Individually some people would have gotten cancer either way so you can’t guarantee some specific person died from that exposure, but you can compare populations and find statistically significant differences.
justinclift 3y ago
It sounds like the dam approach would have increased the amount of fertile land, greenery, etc around. If that's correct, I wonder how that trade off would then look?
FreshStart 3y ago
Except for the invisible heap in the sky.

wiseowise 3y ago

Destroying whole ecosystem is surely more environmentally friendly.

thumbuddy 3y ago
Let me ask you this though, is it more profitable?
- edhelas 3y ago
  Let me ask you this though, is it more profitable to who ?
- wiseowise 3y ago
  Define profitable.
  - thumbuddy 3y ago
    Look I'm only for it if someone is making some money here.

Hendrikto 3y ago

The article sounds like it was never about that, but rather about “preserving natural wonders”.

bombcar 3y ago
If the Grand Canyon wasn’t so interesting to look at (e.g. more like Black Canyon that is now lake Mead) it probably would be flooded today. And people would be arguing that we need to keep the levels of lake Gread high or something.