One thing to note when reading such reports with quotes the German police, is that the bar for a police officer being "hurt" is ridiculously low in Germany. E.g. if an officer is grabbing your arm, and you try to yank it free, this constitutes "assaulting a police officer" and will go into that number. In past protests the police also reported officers being hurt without qualifying that they had been hurt by other officers employing tear gas against protesters.
Edit: to add at least one source, here's Spiegel Online reporting that the police counted dehydration and circulatory issues as "injured officers" (German unfortunately)
> One thing to note when reading such reports with quotes the German police, is that the bar for a police officer being "hurt" is ridiculously low in Germany.
I'm totally okay with it.
One thing to note, at least in Berlin where I live, there's huge contempt and disrespect towards police. Some criminals (calling themselves "protesters") are literally throwing rocks, cobblestones, bottles (or at times Molotov cocktails) at policemen. This is totally despicable and should never be accepted.
At the same time police is heavily underfunded and constrained in their means by ignorant (malevolent?) local government.
How do you make the jump from (or, further yet, justify) the use of ridiculous definitions of officer injury, to police funding and police constraint problems or occurrence of violent clashes? Adverse conditions invite malpractice, but doesn't make it justifiable.
Actually, on second read, you're not really justifying one with the other, you're just saying that you sympathize with the German police, which according to you has it bad, and you think that deceptive Police reports are thus tolerable.
To be clear, I'm not providing insight into the main discussion, just saying that your post doesn't read well.
> and you think that deceptive Police reports are thus tolerable.
I'll often cross check reporting with the actual police press releases and the deceptiveness tends to be in the reporting, not the press release. The press release might say something along the lines of "58 officers participated in a police action at the blah-blah protest, where 15 officers and 19 protestors were injured". Then the reporting will become "Blah-blah protestors injured 15 officers". Non sequitur.
Yet at the same time the police manages to identify, process and charge said protestors just fine but seems to be absolutely incapable of doing anything about literal nazis openly performing illegal salutes and calling for violence, even if they have it on tape and have police officers present and witnessing.
There's a reason Germans left of center have a disdain for the police and it's obvious why that tends to escalate.
If you're okay with police officers injuring themselves while violently suppressing protestors being counted as "injured by protestors" you should also be fine with the police being held to the same standards. Somehow even if someone dies in police custody the investigations never amount to anything though, and the government is okay with that because the police investigated itself and said the police isn't doing anything wrong.
There is no right to free speech in Germany. The constitution protects freedom of opinion and you are allowed to voice your opinion in most cases, but there are restrictions (e.g. demagoguery).
Article 50 of the Constitution of the Soviet Union granted its citizens not only freedom of speech, but many more rights than its American counterpart.
Which tells you something about how meaningless the discussion about whether a country explicitly grants this right or not is. Whether there's a piece of paper saying you have freedom of speech tells you nothing about whether you have de-facto freedom of speech.
True, but having it in your Constitution is an important starting point. Dissidents in USSR weaponized Soviet C. against Soviet administration, just by asking "Where's all the stuff promised here?" And Soviet Union did a lot to prevent its citizens from reading their C. in full (it was notably absent from schools, and public libraries, reviews, and excerpts were offered instead) which suggests these words on paper had some magic power even if absolutely disrespected by the state.
What an interesting example. I'd never read about this before. The article is [1]:
"In accordance with the interests of the people and in order to strengthen and develop the socialist system, citizens of the USSR are guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly, meetings, street processions and demonstrations. Exercise of these political freedoms is ensured by putting public buildings, streets and squares at the disposal of the working people and their organisations, by broad dissemination of information, and by the opportunity to use the press, television, and radio."
What exactly? I'm not sure if you're low-effort trolling, but the Hitler salute (or more accurately: a number of symbols, salutes and chants related to the government party of the 1930s/1940s) is illegal in Germany, yes.
The US has a fairly unique view on what constitutes "speech" and what forms of it should be protected and to what extent. In the case of Germany, Nazi propaganda is considered equivalent to shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater for obvious historical reasons.
I guess having experienced a fascist dictatorship using carefully crafted speech as propaganda to control its population and erode "reservations" about literally murdering millions of people makes you look at "freeze peach" a bit differently from ... largely doing the same for centuries but getting away with it.
EDIT: I wonder whether I got rate-limited automatically because I mentioned the war or by a moderator. Either way, the fact that I got rate limited while arguing about the limits of free speech and policing seems kind of ironic.
The US also banned books and newspapers (you needed a license to be allowed to publish!) in post-war Germany, along with other acts of denazification.
It sure feels stupid to hear Americans complain about the free speech angle regarding Nazi speech and imagery in Germany, when they were the ones to force it upon Germany.
The Allies would certainly not have accepted a variant of the US Constitution as post-war Germany's constitution.
Thinking about it, can you name a single place where America has been "nation building" in the last 70 years that got something resembling the US Constitution? I can't.
> Thinking about it, can you name a single place where America has been "nation building" in the last 70 years that got something resembling the US Constitution? I can't.
No, but they do get US-style copyright and patent laws - the US isn't shy about exporting those. See e.g. Iraq order 81, which banned re-planting of licensed seeds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Orders
Germany even has an agency (the "Verfassungsschutz") that is explicitly tasked with spying on the political views and activities of political "extremists."
Nominally, this is to prevent the rise of another movement like the Nazis. But ironically, one of the first parties to be banned was one of the only two that had vigorously opposed the Nazis during their rise, the KPD. Nowadays, there are suspicions that the Verfassungsschutz is riddled with far-right sympathizers itself, given how it has handled several cases.
To clarify: historically Germany has been obsessed with left-wing terrorism because we had a domestic terrorist group called the Red Army Faction (RAF) which gained infamy for abducting and murdering a politician in the 70s and also performing several bombings and assassinations against politicians and government officials/institutions all the way into the 1990s.
However the Verfassungsschutz has a terrible track record when it comes to investigating and preventing right-wing attacks e.g. against asylum seekers and immigrants. There have also been several cases of dubious use of informants (at one point it was joked that the far-right party NPD is entirely run by informants) and intentional destruction of records.
Also Verfassungsschutz members have publicly spoken out against the dangers of left-wing extremism while being dismissive about right-wing extremism, the most recent case being the person literally in charge of the organisation who insisted that a video showing a group of people attacking immigrants posted on Twitter was likely fraudulent despite several news outlets vouching for its authenticity and providing fairly exhaustive evidence from their fact checking departments.
On a side-note: in communal politics, the right-of-center "majority party" CDU just formed a coalition with the far-right AfD, which had previously been a taboo and was officially ruled out by the CDU party leadership. So the risk of far-right extremism being normalised is very present and very real right now.
Even on countries with very permissive free speech laws, explicit incitement to commit crimes such as murder is still prohibited. Nazi-ism explicitly called for, promoted and practiced genocide.
In Germany glorifying and promoting Nazi-ism is simply considered equivalent to explicitly calling for and promoting the things Nazi-ism called for and promoted. Hence it is prohibited.
In the US the distinction is drawn on "imminent lawless action." People are free to say or 'incite' whatever they want, unless its likely to lead to "imminent lawless action." And in the precedent on record, imminent is a standard that is not taken lightly.
- "This building should be [unlawfully] burnt down." = legal
- "I've got gas and matches. Let's meet up today and [unlawfully] burn this building down. Who's with me?" = illegal
> One thing to note when reading such reports with quotes the German police, is that the bar for a police officer being "hurt" is ridiculously low in Germany.
Where would that bar be higher, especially when reporting these numbers in the context of protest deployments?
I'm saying this because such numbers often spark anti-protester sentiment in the rest of the population, and the police is contributing by reporting exaggerated numbers of injured officers.
I did not mean to make a comparison to anywhere else, since I wouldn't know how police reports such numbers in other countries.
Oh, I see. I was just wondering about what the point was tbh.
"Harmed by dehydration" sounded like a useful metric to have internally but if you're getting at the public perception I'd have to clearly agree. Just saw it as more of a lack in good reporting as opposed to actually tracking how people get injured in the first placed.
The police has no reason to release less ambiguous numbers because over-reporting injuries actually works out in their favour by shaping public perception as "police attacked by violent protestors" rather than "police escalating a protest by using violence and protesters then resisting".
Politicians likewise excuse this by saying that there are no reliable reports of misconduct while also only considering reports reliable that are directly sourced from the police.
"Who watches the watchmen?" in this case is "the watchman". Requests for more accountability for police violence was basically shot down with "while there are many accusations of police violence, barely any of them have resulted in convictions".
It doesn't necessarily have to be a conscious move to put the protesters in a bad light: when military historians look at a battle or war, they make very little distinction between casualties from direct enemy action and casualties from bad environmental and supply conditions (e.g. La Grande Armée vs Russia, the famous infographic). You should not do that, apply military metrics to civilian unrest, but I guess it happens. That being said, there are definitely elements in and around German police forces that will jump at every opportunity to put protesters in a bad light.
German police officers have very limited power to do anything at all.
What you mentioned is one sort of loophole they use to be able to “catch” someone: you touched me!
Oh, regarding the policemen trying to hold your arms. Never seen that as a first action, and typically when that happens is a sign that you have actually done something, otherwise they don’t touch you.
You're conflating patrol officers with riot officers.
In other words: police at protests or dealing with large crowds behave very differently from police officers alone or in smaller groups dealing with individuals in everyday situations.
The most important factor is that while the latter is mostly a personal exchange between individuals, the former involves tactics and strategies which are largely down to the politics of whatever police is involved.
In some regions the riot police is trained to deescalate and will try to defuse tense situations by maintaining their distance as much as possible and avoiding any forms of violence.
Other regions are notorious for rapid escalation to shut down any potential threat early on even if it means causing injuries and provoking violent responses.
Because of how riot police works in Germany you never entirely know what regional police you'll encounter at a protest, demonstration or large-scale event (e.g. you might be in Cologne and the riot police might be from Dortmund), so usually people are only aware of these differences if they've been at a number of events and have paid attention to what police was involved -- or if they personally know police officers from different regions.
With all due respect, that is ridiculous. There have been dozens such cases over the last years, with little to no repercussions the police officers. Amnesty international has repeatedly criticised police violence in Germany. This is not a one-off problem.
Simply don't. Arguing that protestors should not enter the mine "because its dangerous" and beating them up to get them to stop entering doesn't make sense. This is similar to the recent Tweetstorm I read about a woman having a panic attack and the police shouting at her to calm down.
In this scenario the senior officers in charge should've known this would never work and ordered their men to stand down.
>Simply don't. Arguing that protestors should not enter the mine "because its dangerous" and beating them up to get them to stop entering doesn't make sense.
I'm not sure that makes sense either. The level of harm isn't nearly the same -- mines are notoriously life-threatening places. The degree of economic harm isn't nearly the same either.
I can see where you're coming from, but surely you can see how many might consider use of force justified, here.
To add to that, there is no independent agency in Germany that is tasked with investigating police misconduct. All cases are investigated by other policemen.
Exactly how were these policemen supposed to get these people to stop (or even attacking them since they were in the clear minority there), since they aren't using guns?
If you ask me? There is no way without proper preparation. It’s a wide area and it requires hundreds of policemen. So from this point of view, this is the usual “let’s put tape over the holes, and let’s hope the water doesn’t leak”. It’s like releasing software without testing it first, it can work....maybe not :)
So probably by hitting a bit they were trying to achieve fear so that people would not go further? No idea, for me what they did is not violent. At least that’s not how I define abuse of power, but maybe because I come from a country where policemen really do abuse power.
What do you mean by limited power? The recent modifications to StGb 113 and 114 are _very_ open in what they describe as an attack on a police officer, which gets you a minimum sentence of 3 years..
Edit: My apologies, my memory was vastly wrong. The minimum sentence is six months, not 3 years.
Did you ever speak to policemen not as a citizen but as a friend? Maybe you would understand that’s a shitty job (because it has to deal mostly with shitty situations) always frowned upon and not even well paid. Why does anyone have to risk anything while going to work? We are not talking about firefighters here dealing with natural disasters. We are talking about people who are regularly laughed at, insulted, sometimes hit, etc. Everyone knows how fragile the German police is today.
> Why does anyone have to risk anything while going to work?
Because it's their fucking job. There are plenty of jobs that don't require you to put your life into danger, and being a police officer isn't one of them. Don't want to risk your life while on a job? Don't get a job that requires you to enforce the rules on those that are not willing to follow the rules. Groundbreaking discovery, I know.
Some people go into jobs because they actually want to make the world a better place. I don’t wish to speak for the average police officer because I have only met two socially, one British one Australian, but I like to think that most apples [1] (police officers) are good, not bad.
[1] A few bad apples spoils the whole barrel. Most people seem to miss the last half of that sentence.
> Some people go into jobs because they actually want to make the world a better place.
...by enforcing the rules upon others? That's not how you make a world a better place. Remaining in status quo is not how society progresses.
Pushing those laws, challenging them, and adapting them quickly to the needs of the society today is how society progresses. Police officers are necessary evils. In most of the situations, they do good by enforcing rules that make sense. In some of the situations, they do bad because they're enforcing the rules that prohibit us from progress. How do you change those rules? You challenge them.
Doing nothing about climate change does us no good. I know that, you know that, we all know that. Following existing rules isn't gonna change that quickly enough. We need to progress further, and to prove to our lawmakers that there's enough of people interested in making a difference, some of which are willing to sacrifice their own good for the good of the society. At first, you do radical things in order to draw attention to the problem. Once the consensus is reached, the government can prolong it for only so long before people stop obeying its rules.
That's when the defense forces start facing a difficult decision. They could either fight to stop the progress, or step the fuck down and let the people do what needs to be done for the things to change. Once they change, they go back to the start and enforce new rules. Those new rules will never be made perfect, so there will always be people that are going to push those boundaries further.
Yes. If the police do not enforce rules upon others, the rules may as well not exist. If the police selectively selectively enforce the rules upon others, that gives them vastly more power, not less.
> We need to progress further, and to prove to our lawmakers that there's enough of people interested in making a difference, some of which are willing to sacrifice their own good for the good of the society
This is a tangential point. I agree with it, but it isn’t related to the fact that police officers can quite often (I assume even mostly) have an interest more like stopping robbers, thugs, vandals, etc. — you know, the stereotypes that people have of law enforcement.
I agree that it's a shit job, but I don't understand how that should make shitty behavior okay. With the power that's given to you as a police officer, the expectation simply must be that you don't misuse that power. Everything else is unacceptable, since you're the person enforcing the law. Who's gonna hold you accountable?
I agree, I am just wondering when power starts to become misused from the legal point of view, because if you put yourself in those shoes you will understand that they are humans like me and you trying to enforce laws upon people that don’t give a damn about those laws. I really don’t doubt that there are bad apples abusing their power, and in some cases it’s really like that, however if you look at the overall, these policemen are often laughed at and insulted, or even hit. And what’s the payment for it? You mentioned that they increased the sentence to 3 years. Sure, when? Considering that prisons are full and that with a good lawyer you can get away with it fast.
> I am just wondering when power starts to become misused from the legal point of view
That is indeed a good question, and one of the reasons why e.g. Amnesty has been telling Germany the second time in a row that we need an external (to the police) oversight of the police, because police oversight by the police hasn't been working very well, since they simply always say it was necessary force given the circumstances.
> You mentioned that they increased the sentence to 3 years. Sure, when?
The sentence was not increased, the bar for the "very serious case" sentence was lowered. E.g. one part of StGB 113 read before:
* Whoever carries a weapon or dangerous item with the intent to use it against a police offer.
The last part was simply removed in 2017 [0]. It now reads as:
* Whoever carries a weapon or dangerous item.
Nowhere is defined what a "dangerous item" might be, so essentially, in the current legal state, if you carry an Umbrella to a demonstration that could be a problem.
Edit: It should also be mentioned that these cases are most often parole cases. This does not change the fact, though, that having been sentenced with such an offense will inevitably have a very serious impact on your life and employability, and lowering the bar for being sentenced with such an offense can have a serious chilling effect on people being willing to participate in political demonstrations, which I personally believe are an important part of democracy.
The existence of people who don't respect the law and the police is the whole point of having a police force! Your line of argument sounds like the Monty Python sketch where the soldier wants to leave the army because he might have to fight in a war.
Yes, was talking to one on a bus a year ago, call came thru to the bus driver that children were throwing stones at a bus stop which was 2 stops out. Policeman was like, sorry I can't attend as I have a meeting to go to, which did not go down well with the driver or indeed anybody within earshot. More so, turns out that meeting was a community meeting if anybody wanted to report...any antisocial behaviour.
WHich kinda summed up the police in my area - they want to be seen to be doing the job, over actually doing the job.
I could list many personal experiences with the police being inept, incompetent, negligent that after over 50 years, I personally lost respect for the police and that still saddens me to this day.
What I see happen is you get a new recruit, lots of drive, keen and they get exposed to apathy thru paperwork, over PC mentality and what can only be described as liberal bias. I say that as when you see drug dealers get away with doing their thing and the neibours who suffer them being ignored and dismissed by the police who class these dealers as victims time and time again, the local people loose faith in the police. Even to the stage that people do not pass information to the police as they either ignore that information or worse, pass it onto the criminals with the information of who passed it onto them (yes that has happened a few times as well around my part of London).
In short, sure there are many good police, many fine people, but the number of bad eggs really has ruined more than the sum of the parts.
StGb 113 is "resistance to state power" (literally translated) and StGb 114 seems to go into the similar direction. If you don't hurt the police, to my knowledge it's legal to run away from them if you don't damage anything/don't do harm to anyone - which might be also a peculiar exception - but maybe also emphasises how smart it is to be non-violent.
Yep the problem is the "hurting" part. A common medium of demonstration in Germany, historically, has been the Sitzblockade (people sitting down blocking eg a road). Now, resisting when the police tries to clear up such a Blockade quickly gets you into stgb art. 113 territory, in the current state of affairs. I expect the same to happen to many of the protesters mentioned in the article.
Edit: to be clear, I'm not saying one should attack the police. I'm saying an "attack on the police" should be extremely well defined, since otherwise people can be charged with it for arbitrary transgressions, which effectively scares people away from necessary protests.
> E.g. if an officer is grabbing your arm, and you try to yank it free, this constitutes "assaulting a police officer" and will go into that number.
Obviously it's at least obstruction of a police officer.
> In past protests the police also reported officers being hurt without qualifying that they had been hurt by other officers employing tear gas against protesters.
> Edit: to add at least one source, here's Spiegel Online reporting that the police counted dehydration and circulatory issues as "injured officers" (German unfortunately)
If a police officer is doing something illegal, you are not legally required to comply. Also, Germany in theory has pretty strict laws about what is considered an appropriate level of force (which is why you're considerably less likely to see a German police officer reach for their gun because even drawing the gun is considered a massive escalation and may require them to file paperwork later).
The objection to the reporting isn't that they weren't injured, it's that the numbers are used to portray protestors as violent even when the injuries were the direct result of police violence.
If I punch you in the face and break my hand, it's at least extremely misleading to report that as a fight in which both parties suffered injuries (mostly because "fight" implies you fought back).
If a police officer stops me for speeding and while giving me a fine dies of a heat stroke because it's really hot and they are dehydrated, did I kill that police officer?
"XY officers were injured during a police action at protest somewhere" doesn't mean the protesters injured them. You (and sometimes journalists) read things into police press releases that just aren't in there.
It's not about me, I know this. But I also know the reactions (and outrage) of the general public, who think "those violent protestors" are at it again, attacking the police.
Intent is not magic. Even if the police intended to "simply provide some numbers" they (!) need to factor in the reaction of the general public and the media, because they are, in part, responsible for upholding democratic values, of which freedom to protest happens to be one.
Burning lignite is the most ridiculous thing you can do. It would literally be better for the climate to import coal from Australia and burn that. There is no point in delaying the end of lignite mining until 2038.
We need a massive buildout of wind and solar and we need it now. There are no technological problems left, we just need to spend the money. The 20k coal jobs in Germany would pale against the workforce needed for a rapid switch to renewables.
The EU can't even commit to the 2050 targets thanks to Poland and Czech Republic's love of coal that shows little sign of change. Hungary's vote is more confusing as I didn't think they had much coal - they're big on nuclear.
I wish there was a lot more urgency in responses, we already had 1 year of the IPCC's 12.
> thanks to Poland and Czech Republic's love of coal
Do you really think that people in these countries _love_ burning coal? Does this attitude help solve the problem?
Poland does not have nuclear power plants, therefore it has a bigger problem with the reduction of CO2 emissions than other countries. In addition, Poland has no conditions to produce energy from wind and solar in the winter. Sometimes when I read such comments, I would like Poland to present a plan to buy nuclear power technology from Russia (RBMK-1000 reactors) and to put it along the western border, 50 km from Berlin.
PS. Please take into account that in Poland there was no industrial revolution and that is why over the last 150 years Western countries have emitted much more CO2 into the atmosphere.
Greece and Ireland (and I think Italy) don't have nuclear either.
More difficult it may be, but no excuse for dragging feet or voting against EU action. Action that's far too little and too vague anyway. If it's any consolation I am equally critical of my own country's dire lack of adequate progress.
There basically _are_ no problems left, it's mainly economic and production volume now.
None of those counter points points really hold up under scrutiny:
1) Renewable power _is_ clean. It is also becoming baseload and dispatachable with the addition of batteries. Battery price is on a reducing price curve similar to solar experienced, during which we heard the following progression of arguments: It's too expensive for anything, it's too expensive to matter, it's too expensive for most regions, it's not a solution for everything, ok it's the cheapest source of power but we'll still need natural gas because... batteries are too expensive for anything!
2) Panel disposal is a TINY problem compared to climate change. Panel disposal is also TINY compared to environmental damage of other energy sources.
Nuclear would have been nice, but it's probably too late for that now, not worth the downsides, and also we don't need it (see battery price curve).
I don’t know if it’s too late for nuclear but in France the pair renewables / nuclear complement each other pretty well without batteries [1] (even if the renewable part can be improved).
France is an interesting look at an alternate future where Nuclear was done properly. If world energy production was more like France we'd definitely be in better shape.
We do, and that's what we export, but there are also reserves of brown coal which are cheap* and close to Melbourne.
*If you ignore the climate cost and unreliability of the aging plants; coal power (both brown and black) in Australia is quite unreliable as the plants are super old and there has been no investment in power infrastructure due to policy uncertainty due to infantile governments. So on hot days, when demand is higher, coal plants break down due to the greater heat. At least you can predict when you'll have wind and solar power available; here coal power is more temperamental.
Why? Economically nuclear might make more sense (although one can doubt that). But on a pure material level - ignoring that in captialism, we allocate resources by money etc. - wind and solar are in almost all ways superior. The one problem is 24/7 availability.
Ceteris paribus - everything else left unchanged - yes, it might make sense to build more nuclear. But what we really need is to build more renewables and to simultaneously scale down our energy use. To put it bluntly our energy using industry has to take a small hit.
This is one of the things even I as a leftist say the market can solve nicely. Electricity can get more expensive at night or when the wind doesn't blow. If it becomes uneconomical to do a certain business, then we should stop doing it, or only do it at certain times.
To put it differently, industry works like a buffered solution in chemistry. Put in more acid, and the buffering prevents the PH value from dropping. Shut down power plants, and the market will largely absorb the effect. Things will become marginally more expensive, or production will move to other regions where it makes more sense, but we will not have blackouts like some people fear.
> But what we really need is to build more renewables and to simultaneously scale down our energy use. To put it bluntly our energy using industry has to take a small hit.
This is why the Green parties in a lot of countries need to be politically opposed. They attract people who care less about the environment than about changing our way of life.
Case in point: in Antwerp they're about to spend a cool billion to put a roof on the ring road, to put some plant pots and bicycle paths there.
Reality disagrees with most political groups, they aren't necessarily the most cogent of mobs.
You can attribute whatever motivations you like to conservatives, but if you claim they don't want a bright future you are wrong. Just because you don't agree with them doesn't mean they are evil or stupid. At absolute worst they have different priorities for what they think a bright future looks like. They are just as good at planning ahead as progressives, and stereotypically more organised albeit less passionate about achieving their goals.
I assume your position was rhetorical since you clearly don't think all or even the majority of any meaningfully large political group are wealthy, but what might be driving the divide otherwise? I think this failure to consider others' positions, largely because we all tend to just surround ourselves with voices that agree with "our" side, is one of the biggest causes of the increasingly sharp wedge being driven into society today.
If you'd like to know the realistic reason, it's because of past experience. This [1] was published back in 1989. "The most conservative scientific estimate that the Earth’s temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years, said [director of UN Environmental Program] Brown." 30 years from the date of that article's publication is 6 days from now. Temperatures have increased 0.52 [2] degrees since then. He may have meant fahrenheit since he was the director in New York and so was likely speaking with an American demographic in mind. But even then that's still only about 0.9 degrees - still under his "most conservative scientific estimate." The article was full of plenty of other alarming hyperbole which also turned out to be completely false.
The problem is that that article is not an outlier. We've now had several decades of alarming climate predictions. The reason this timing is relevant is because we've now reached the point to where we go back to these predictions and see how they have played out. And in general the quality of predictions has been quite poor. Of course the response here is that 'well climate science is hard, and they're at least getting the general trend right - up.' The problem with this is that this general trend goes back long before even the industrial revolution. And so predicting heating to continue is about as meaningful as me predicting that in 30 years the stock market will be higher than it is today, which it almost certainly will be. What really matters are the specifics.
So this drives people into two groups. People that think that the mistakes of times past are something we've overcome and the predictions of today are now meaningful. The other group tend to think that the past 30 years of predictions will be representative of the next 30 years of predictions. People can view similar data and come to radically different conclusions. And only to preempt the typical mass-level ad-hominem that generally mentions here I'd mention individuals such as Richard Linzen [3]: MIT atmospheric physicist, member of the National Academies of Sciences, Fellow of American Geophysical Union, fellow of American Meteorological Society, lead author on the IPCC's 2001 climate report, etc. He also falls into the latter group. I would emphasize that this is not an appeal to authority (which I think is generally a very foolish idea), but rather a preempting of the exact same.
So the IPCC underestimated the amount of heat that ocean would absorb. They unfortunately also underestimated how quickly the permafrost is melting and how quickly we lose glaciers.
The models we have are wrong. There is no doubt about it. But there is very little evidence that they're wrong in the direction where we can just do business as usual and still live a comfortable live in fifty years.
> I assume your position was rhetorical since you clearly don't think all or even the majority of any meaningfully large political group are wealthy
ALL the people with significant power are wealthy.
I'm not downplaying the importance of the poor voting in elections, but that happens twice a year (primaries and general election) and the choice the poor get is which wealthy person gets the power, or in rarer cases, which policy proposed by wealthy people is enacted. The rest of the year, the wealthy people make all the decisions. Certainly which wealthy person is in power makes a difference, but they're still all wealthy people.
And to be clear, no major party is immune to this. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Ron Paul--no supposed heroes of change are poor or even middle class.
> So this drives people into two groups. People that think that the mistakes of times past are something we've overcome and the predictions of today are now meaningful. The other group tend to think that the past 30 years of predictions will be representative of the next 30 years of predictions.
I'm not in either group. I don't believe we've overcome the mistakes of the past. I don't believe we even know what all of those mistakes are, so we can't possibly have overcome them all. What I do believe is that the only effective mechanism we have of predicting the future is science, and that science is a slow process that often gets things wrong, but slowly gets less wrong as it progresses. An alternate theory which just decides to let markets decide the truth isn't even wrong--it's a stopped clock, which is sometimes right but never useful. Science hasn't been right and it may continue to be wrong, but at least it's trying to find the truth via a proven method. Letting markets decide isn't even trying to find the truth.
I'd prefer to sidestep the leadership issue since it's going to bring up a million and one questions that are going to get philosophical. For instance to what degree does society create its leaders, and to what degree do leaders create their society? To what degree did Lincoln choose to direct society to end slavery? To what degree did changes in society make inevitable the creation of a "Lincoln"? And then we'd have to try to get into the heads of those in power to determine whether their views are authentic or being driven by political or even economic interests. For example abortion is full of political flip-flopping for people to pander to various demographic bases. Romney was pro-choice, until he wanted to be president. Biden was against federal funding for abortions, until he wanted to be president. It's unlikely their personal views ever changed, but a politician's job is to get elected - and so what a politician says or advocates and what a politician believes don't necessarily have all that much in common.
On the predictions issue, I fully agree with you. And I find it disappointing that debates on this topic in general tend to avoid this actual core issue - should we trust the current predictions, or not? And like you mention there are varying degrees there. So the real question is should society's trust of climatologists' trust of themselves be high enough to justify large scale change, or not? Instead debates are people just straw manning one another to no end, which results in both sides thinking the other is full of idiots. No progress is made, divisions are deepened, and further amicable discussion becomes ever more unlikely, all this in turn means any sort of lasting change becomes ever less likely.
> I'd prefer to sidestep the leadership issue since it's going to bring up a million and one questions that are going to get philosophical.
That's fair--I think all I'd like to agree on here is that it's not useful to pretend that parties aren't majority wealthy when you weight for actual power rather than simply counting people.
One subtlety in my initial statement that I didn't really explain was that it's not necessary to be wealthy in order to believe that your family will be wealthy in the future.
> Romney was pro-choice, until he wanted to be president. Biden was against federal funding for abortions, until he wanted to be president. It's unlikely their personal views ever changed, but a politician's job is to get elected - and so what a politician says or advocates and what a politician believes don't necessarily have all that much in common.
This points to another issue, which is that "liberal" and "conservative" are really problematic groupings of ideas. Abortion has nothing to do with climate change, but it's usually impossible to vote on one without taking a stance on the other.
> On the predictions issue, I fully agree with you. And I find it disappointing that debates on this topic in general tend to avoid this actual core issue - should we trust the current predictions, or not? And like you mention there are varying degrees there. So the real question is should society's trust of climatologists' trust of themselves be high enough to justify large scale change, or not?
I don't know if I would say I "trust" climatologists, but I believe that they are presenting the best information we have, and I believe that we should always operate on the best information we have, rather than simply doing what's profitable.
> Instead debates are people just straw manning one another to no end, which results in both sides thinking the other is full of idiots. No progress is made, divisions are deepened, and further amicable discussion becomes ever more unlikely, all this in turn means any sort of lasting change becomes ever less likely.
To be clear, I don't think that (most) conservatives are stupid or malicious, and I think that too often liberals have done liberal ideologies a great disservice by making that assumption.
I totally agree. A massive push for nuclear thirty years ago would have been great. Unfortunately it is now too late for this. Nuclear power plants take too long to build, especially in the current political climate in Germany. We also don't have enough nuclear engineers to staff them. Training them also takes years. Nuclear is also more expensive than renewables at this point.
What is the part of nuclear reactors which takes so long to build? If we could somehow high jump the red tape and public backlash how long would it physically take to build?
The steam generators, turbine, electric generators, condenser and cooling systems are all more or less the same as they would be in an equivalent coal plant. While I'm sure these things have significant lead times they are essentially off the shelf parts.
The secondary containment structure doesn't seem any harder to build than say a suspension bridge.
The only real challenge the seems to be the primary containment structure and potentially other elements of the primary heating loop. I heard it mentioned that possibly only Japan had the ability to make these at the moment.
Well, we are close to wind being cheaper than just the steam turbine generators. At that point, your heat can be free, and it's still cheaper to use wind.
It’s a good decision for the climate. Poland’s solar and wind resources are not super great during their cold winters, and they’re currently very fossil fuel dependent.
Humanity have time and time again proven they can't handle the responsibilities that come with nuclear. An 'I wash my hands and walk away, or even better, make a profit of the cleanup when it all goes wrong' neo-liberal market economy that skirts all the dangers 'by design' is a fatal compounding factor.
You have to define what you mean by safe. It's not good for nuclear proponents that Fukushima and Chernobyl happened, after spending decades telling everyone how some like this could "never" happen. I've read quite a lot of pronuclear books and they are never very good at explaining risks. They basically say we have thought of everything and there is no risks, or talk about non existent tech. This is not good enough. Given their track record.
At the very least on HN, people are quick to point out the radioactive material released by coal plants - I do not remember a single relevant discussion where it wasn't.
Personally, I'm on board with getting rid of nuclear and fossil energy sources both, which appears technologically feasible to me (offshore windparks help with base load, flywheels can get you through the day and power-2-gas through the winter).
It does not get a free pass, coal pollution is one of the biggest issue of the environmental movement. As I said, I like nuclear so I think Germany and Japan are crazy to shut down their nuclear plants, but I can not blame them because I am not convinced by the arguments of the pronuclear movement.
Yes, Chernobyl happened, but even the worst nuclear accident in the history of mankind is 200 people. Fukushima was 2 or 3? The Banqiao dam was over a hundred THOUSAND dead.
Chernobyl was not just 200 people and if you think that it will be impossible for you to understand the issue. The fallout from Chernobyl made it into the food and nature all over the northern hemisphere, that leaves scars.
The nature actually thrived because of Chernobyl disaster. Even some endangered species started to rebound without human interference. [1] In Fukushima zone there's been a significant increase of wild boars [2]
Obviously nature thrived there. Areas where people don’t go are like that. It’s not unlike nature reserves. People are a danger to nature.
The direct cause is that there are no people around, not that a nuclear disaster happened. The nuclear disaster caused the people to leave, which makes the disaster the indirect cause of nature thriving.
It’s not as though the increase in background radiation made nature thrive. The lack of people did that.
I’m all in favor of nature reserves, but we do not need nuclear disasters to create them and I don’t think we should let luck pick around which nuclear plant we want a nature reserve. We should put our nature reserves wherever we damn well please.
(I’m honestly questioning whether you actually read the article you linked. I will admit, I also didn’t before I wrote the comment. I was surprised to find that it makes essentially the same argument I’m using, down to using the same exact words.)
1) increase of background radiation is not harmful to "nature" (usually defined as "all living things, arbitrarily excluding humans"), or at least less harmful than human presence
2) nuclear plants, merely by existing, tend to limit surrounding human population, and in case of accident totally eliminate it
3) the presence of humans is worse for nature than literally the worst nuclear plant accident ever
The original argument I was arguing against is "nuclear plants are bad because they're bad for the environment". However all evidence points to nuclear plants being good for the environment. You can't build nature reserves "wherever you damn please" because most habitable areas are already populated by humans. We can however build more nuclear plants, which has a two-pronged effect of reducing carbon emissions and limiting population around them, naturally creating nature hotspots.
That's the problem with nuclear, it needed to have started 30 years ago.
Why don't we build the generators that can be built in a reasonable time frame, where there's the actual political will to build them. If and when there is political will for nuclear, we can see where we are, because I would guess by that point wind and solar turn out to be good enough anyway.
And yet, not a single facility like that exists anywhere. In the US, Frace, Germany, and every other country with nuclear waste, attempts to built long-term storage have been stalled for decades.
Germany has a similar story with Gorleben (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorleben_salt_dome), which was proposed in 1973 and also isn't actually operational. The prototype, also in an old salt mine, nicely showed how difficult these projects actually are when brine flooded the storage area, corroded the containers, and mixed with the contained polonium, cesium, etc.
> Governments around the world are considering a range of waste management and disposal options, although there has been limited progress toward implementing long-term waste management solutions
The first active repository in the list I just linked to you is used for nuclear wastes from a nuclear power plant. I just checked the first, there will be more if you just take the time to get informed.
yeah in germany there is one, it will not withstand the time. the second one is still under construction.
we had two others which also needed to be closed.
Its hard for me to understand why these nuclear waste repositories have to operate safely for 10,000 years. That's a heavy bar to meet. In 200 years we will likely have technology that would solve the next 1000 years with ease. If the concern is that technological progress may cease, and we bequeath a radioactive hole on a developmentally regressed world - well, climate change is your best bet for achieving that. Let's compromise on the 10,000 years to try to avoid it.
The dangerous fission products have a half life of about 30 years, so they need confinement for maybe 500 years. Concrete can do that easily.
But when the fake environmentalists discovered nuclear power as their new cause around 1980, and realized that The Waste Issue[TM] is their killer argument, they noticed that they had to blow up the time scale. So for political reasons, it was decided that other components, such as plutonium with a half life of 24000 years, are even more harmful. And just like that, a manageable 500-year-problem became an insurmountable million-year-problem that requires the invention of a new religion, and artists coming up with fields of spikey structures, and geologists to come up with formations stable forever, and lots more of careers to be made managing a problem that doesn't exist.
> Are you serious? The price of the reactor is an insubstantial part of the potential cost of a nuclear accident.
I don't really follow your complaint. Yes. I don't see how the cost of the accident is relevant to the incentives a plant operator works under; the odds of an accident are lower than the odds of being hit by a car (and the effects of a car impact are worse, because someone/several somebodies will likely be dead instead of mass inconvenience as is typical in the capitalist half of all nuclear accidents). So that isn't a major risk as the engineers see it and probably won't affect any individuals behavior as much as the fact that if someone owns an expensive thing they look after it because they are not stupid.
If someone owns an asset that cost >$100 million dollars to obtain they are not going to skimp on maintenance costs in a way that risks it breaking down. Owners who can afford to buy infrastructure are going to keep it in good condition.
If you think it is worth owning something that expensive then it is worth keeping it maintained. Capitalists have a lot of problems, but they are good at maintaining capital. The idea that capitalism can't maintain capital is absurd - what type of capitalist lets their capital decay? They would cease to be capitalist by virtue of having no capital. Doing a good job of maintaining capital is one of the core tenants of capitalism as practiced. The idea that capitalism will "makes the safest nuclear power plant unsafe" is so wrong that it just needs to be called out.
Nuclear is a great example of this because - as mentioned - under capitalism the disasters have been much tamer and required more to trigger them than under an alternative system such as communism.
Why do you think that would change under any other system besides capitalism? The incentives don't get any better if you get rid of the plant owner and have someone else in charge.
> Doing a good job of maintaining capital is one of the core tenants of capitalism as practiced.
Even if you assume they are rational actors with complete information, it may be rationally in their interests to double their profit in exchange for doubling their risk. Capitalists balance risk against profit all the time. Also their liability only extends to their own capital. A risk of losing twice as much is rationally no less attractive. The excess cost is borne by the community who has to clean up.
If the plant melts down you lose the plant and the income stream. Since the plant costs multi-millions, it would almost always be more sensible to sell the plant to someone who wants to keep it for the long term. Even running capital down purposefully is a pretty desperate strategy when every other possible option has been closed off. Letting it fail in an uncontrolled and expensive manner when you could just hire a capable full time maintenance team is just a no brainer of a decision - you hire enough engineers to understand what it is doing and you keep control of the situation. That will equal or beat the safety performance of any other system you care to think of.
So what if they aren't bearing the full cost of the disaster? The incentives are still pretty much all in the direction of keeping the plant in good condition, and direction matters more than magnitude for incentives. The costs are unimaginable once they get past a couple of million anyway. Engineering perspective, I think the official guidance on a human life is ~$10 million for cost/benefit analysis, and I'd be pretty motivated well before that to do the right thing. This isn't a radical idea; the only time I've seen something that expensive be run down is when the government (or other political forces, I suppose) is somehow mandating a shutdown. I've seen a lot more examples of extremely well maintained bits of kit, and I've seen a lot of very expensive machines that still cost nowhere near as much as a power plant. I know engineers who work in coal power plants too, they are not risk takers in any sense.
We've oodles of evidence on this one; the costs are high enough that capitalists will keep the thing maintained at least as well as any other system you care to name. No system is perfect, but there isn't going to be one more systemically capable of maintaining capital than capitalism.
With respect the record demonstrates this Pollyanna perspective is naive. There is extensive precedent for commercially run operations causing serious accidents by cutting corners. Just read a few accounts of major historical industrial accidents through history.
If the contract to build the plant is let correctly, then it can be made to be safe. When something is outsourced and it does not work, most of the time the person letting the contract has done a shit job.
well we germans do not have a good track of making buildings correctly and safe in the recent past.
it either took twice as long and was twice as expensive or it was a complete mess. and this was with things that needs to be less safe than a nuclear power plant.
germany lost a lot of knowledge in the construction space thats why I highly doubt that we can make a safe nuclear power plant that might produce less garbadge. also corporate entities grown in power in germany and they try to safe as much money as possible.
Funny, I always feel like HN has a fetish for nuclear energy as if renewables had not advanced in the last twenty years. It’s as if nuclear tech featured prominently in the science fiction of people’s youth, and they remain emotionally attached to it.
It makes me wonder whether they want a solution to the problem at all. Europe is north enough that in some countries you can probably get rather long streaks of time where solar just won't work. If you only have 6-7 hours of daylight and they are likely to include lots of clouds and snowfall then I don't see how solar is going to be a replacement for anything. Wind might be, but wind requires an extraordinary amount of area to cover an entire country reliably.
Can we keep up with large scale battery production yet? (For places which can't use other energy storage systems) I remember that being a problem a few years ago.
There is a tradeoff between a better grid and more storage requirements (it's always windy somewhere, and with a sufficiently smart grid you can match demand to supply better). You probably only need a day or two of battery or hydro storage and can use power-to-gas for long winters. Strategic gas storage infrastructure is already available, and power to gas is a proven technology (with fairly terrible energy efficiency). But you need power-to-gas anyway, because replacing all the old gas infrastructure for heating with heat pumps will take too long.
Sadly gas here means Russia. A lot of people aren't happy about it, since it gives Russia power and more power for Russia is bad for everyone in the world, but especially for Eastern Europe.
It gives Russia a rapidly shrinking amount of power and since those gas dependent countries can always switch back to coal, the risk is basically zero except in a war.
> There are no technological problems left, we just need to spend the money.
With current technology, it is an unimaginable sum of money, if you're talking about building a balance of renewables and batteries to meet current baseline load targets.
The damages done by global warming can not be undone no matter how much money you throw at them. I don't think spending a couple percent of your GDP for the next twenty to thirty years on preventing that is too expensive.
> The damages done by global warming can not be undone no matter how much money you throw at them. I don't think spending a couple percent of your GDP for the next twenty to thirty years on preventing that is too expensive.
Your estimate of the cost is not even in the right ballpark; even if the circumstances are dire enough to call for such drastic spending, renewables are not even a moderately effective way to eliminate fossil fuel dependence.
The main thing protecting brown coal mining in Germany is right wing politicians in Bavaria (CSU) who lobbied hard during the last government formation to form a CSU/CDU/SPD goevernment to keep on burning brown coal. However, sooner or later their numbers may drop low enough that they will either be out of government or governing with the green party. All three parties are currently struggling in the polls. Basically, the second the labor SPD walks away from the current government, this issue will be back on the agenda. These protests are targeted at them to do exactly that and the SPD has been bleeding voters to the green party for years. The coal protests are really hurting them.
Alternatively, the solar and wind economics may just kill it off way before 2038. Lots of coal plants are already shutting down because of that all over the planet. German ones will not be an exception. Several of the companies behind this stuff have already been aggressively divesting. E.g. RWE knows full well it has a huge problem with rising cost, the probability of fines/fees, and the inevitable outcome of them shutting down this part of their business. They're just buying time to get out without too much damage.
Either way, I doubt burning brown coal, or most kinds of coal, will continue all the way until 2038.
Nuclear is unlikely to happen in Germany. They just got rid of that. There's no public support for it and the economics are just wrong. It would require billions of investment and take decades to complete. Not going to happen before wind solar deployments catch up with the demise of coal. I don't actually disagree that it might be a good thing to do these investments but I'm realistic enough to realize that this is not going to happen before coal collapses completely in the next two decades. IMHO nuclear fission and fusion may make a comeback some time in the second half of this century; this will be after even the most conservative predictions for solar and wind have replaced coal.
> Nuclear... would require billions of investment and take decades to complete.
As opposed to the cheap and quick Energiewende, which has been going on for a mere three decades by now, cost just 150 billion euro by 2015 and is expected to cost a further 370 billion euro by 2025 (https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article158668152/Energiewende...).
Back when Siemens still built nuclear power plants, 500 billion euro would have bought 500GW worth of generation capacity, roughly 2.5x as much as Germany needs to become carbon neutral.
Not disagreeing but Germany got rid of nuclear and the reality is that there are no plans, no budget, no goodwill/appetite, etc. for nuclear. Even if that magically changed (very unlikely), it would take decades to get reactors operational again. So, I don't see this happening on a timescale where it matters for retiring coal.
Wind and solar on the other hand are extremely popular and all over the country. Arguably not the best use of government money, especially early on, but at this point these are starting to get so good that they are out competing everything else on cost for new projects (and some existing plants) even without subsidies. This is also a problem for nuclear because it would still be on the expensive side compared to that.
Why would it take decades? Not stopping the still operating PWRs takes no time. Restarting the stopped BWRs that haven't been dismantled takes weeks. Building a reactor takes four years, provided you buy it from the Russians, Koreans, or Canadians. How long it would take to build 50 reactors, which would decarbonize Germany's electric grid, depends on how quickly the pressure vessels can be forged. Probably on the order of one decade. So one decade to do what Energiewende didn't do in 30 years.
Just getting approvals for plans for just about anything takes years in a country like Germany. In most places in Germany even hinting at building a nuclear plant is political suicide. Merkel shutting down nuclear plants remains one of her more popular acts here with many despite the many raised eyebrows in regards to the cost of that. This came after decades of protests whenever nuclear material was transported around Germany.
Absolutely nobody here actually wants a nuclear plant in their backyard. And yes I agree this is irrational but it remains a reality that is also preventing the construction of nuclear elsewhere in the world. It pretty much requires an autocratic regime to be able to get away with this. For reference, even building new highways is controversial in Germany and takes many years of planning, approvals, and bureaucracy. Also finishing the new airport in Berlin is now taking almost a decade past it's original scheduled opening time and is rumored to face yet more delays. The decision process to build a single nuclear plant alone would likely take decades.
Then actually designing and building these things takes time. A lot of the expertise related to this is simply gone or will be by the time plans for this get any political support whatsoever. Rebooting 50 year old reactors is not going to be a popular decision; and besides most of that stuff will be gone by the time that decision gets taken. Buying legacy designs from the Russians would be an act of desperation. At this point the Chinese are the only ones left building and deploying modern nuclear plants.
It's much easier and cheaper to just put up more wind and solar. This is at this point not controversial (actually the opposite) and unlike a nuclear plant you can just plan and deploy these things without any political backlash with a minimum of hassle. Even cost is actually much less of an issue as wind and solar are getting quite competitive these days and people put solar on their own roofs to save money. Doubling the current capacity seems a lot more feasible and would get them most of what they need. And why stop there. Economies of scale are awesome. The more they do this, the cheaper it gets.
When you said "it would take decades", it sounded like you were making a technical argument. Now that you clarified that the only real obstacle is "lack of political will", we can sort of agree.
> Absolutely nobody here actually wants a nuclear plant in their backyard.
I love it how greenies always presume to speak for everybody. I live in Germany, and I want a nuclear plant in my backyard. (What is actually in my backyard is a lignite burning plant and and bunch of wind turbines.)
It's a real obstacle; I don't know of any mainstream party in Germany that would consider even putting this in their political programs. It's a complete non starter and would just lose them precious seats without actually having a chance of ever getting a parliamentary majority. "Not in my backyard" is very much a sentiment across the political spectrum.
Wind can cause serous issues to birds flying around, and the amount of land that needs to be used for solar is a lot. And that will bring its own issues.
On the flip side the UK, or Ireland could probably each power all of Europe if they fully built out offshore wind. I'm sure plenty of other country's coasts have similar potential.
Yes it would literally be better for the climate, as I said. If you don't want to depend on another country for your energy needs, how about you use the abundant resources of wind and solar? They have the benefit of not destroying the livelihood of future generations.
Right now about 100k jobs in the wind energy sector in Germany are in immediate danger because the government essentially stopped all new construction. Already 80k jobs in the solar industry are lost to China. So please don't tell me about the 20k jobs in coal (or 60k or whatever if you count secondary industries).
The "jobs" argument is a common myth. There are very little jobs in this industry (around 10000). In comparison, the German government has destroyed several times that amount by recently removing subsidies from solar power development (coal is still subsidized).
Wind towns do exist, and are right now getting destroyed, with many people losing their jobs left and right due to the current conservative german government preferring coal and reducing the money that goes into renewables.
It’s been all over the local news in recent years — be it Senvion, Enercon, Powerblades, or any of the other companies affected, with entire towns losing half of their jobs or more.
It is certainly less than the jobs being created when using reneweable energies. "Jobs" would be a great argument in favour of reneweables, all environmental reasons aside.
Why would they storm a mine where poor people work in hazardous and exhausting conditions? Do they not know that the company owning the mine is headquartered in Essen, where the top-level managers responsible for this actually work? (The company, RWE AG, has a 14 billion euros market cap and is not even mentionned in the article, good reporting BBC!)
The conditions aren’t terrible. Also, hardly anyone actually works at these mines. They rely on massive machines that only need one or two people to operate them
Because the only way to stop climate change is to stop extraction of fossil fuels. Once they're out of the ground they're destined for the atmosphere. I envision state actors doing the same thing eventually.
If only there were some power source that is reliable and technologically mature; one could use it as a substitute for coal. Alas that such a thing must remain in fantasy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20254019
the point is that the decisions are being made somewhere else. RWE executives get to isolate themselves and continue to talk about bonuses and shareholder value, while themselves remaining entirely removed from the discussion. At the same time it is the poor people which have to be in the trenches and the effects will be felt by all (including plant and animal species we haven't even discovered yet).
Naming and shaming these crooks in public, and on social media is the future. If that doesn't gel then go after their families and children too. The stakes from damages due to climate and environmental crimes are simply too high.
Pity here in Australia we just voted in a ~corrupt government who have signed a deal to allow Adani to open a huge new coal mine that doesn't even benefit Australians economically, and at a huge cost to the environment.
> The Productivity Commission figures from earlier this month showed the mining industry got direct subsidies of $492 million last year.
> But senior economist at the left-leaning think tank Australia Institute Matt Grudnoff said total subsidy is almost ten times that amount when tax concessions given to mining companies are included.
> “The mining industry has the lowest rate of corporate tax because it has so many tax concessions,” he said.
But the bulk of those subsidies are the fuel credit rebate. On the one hand, it is technically a subsidy under the standard definitions of what a subsidy is. On the other hand, the tax was never intended to tax diesel because of some problem with diesel, it was literally intended to target (quoting from the Act [0]):
"(a) fuel used in private vehicles and for certain other private purposes; and (b) fuel used on-road in light vehicles for business purposes."
Ie, it is a tax on road users as a user-pays style of thing and the subsidy is an accounting trick to make it easy to implement.
If a solar company used a lot of fuel without using the public road system, they would be eligible for the subsidy too. It isn't conceptually mining specific.
I would say burn it all down, but I guess in this case that isn't quite a good idea. We should be moving off of coal yesterday. The Energie Wende is a massive failure, especially with the removal of solar subsidies. I'm ashamed that this is my government supposedly representing my interests.
Germany didn't. Actually, Germany plans to stop using coal, though later than many Germans would like.
The problem is (a) that there is an entrenched and politically important coal industry, and just shutting all of it down is political suicide, because quite a few voters are involved into that; (b) the industry itself also doesn't like to see its investments into existing power plants thrown out the window; it was difficult enough to get this through for nuclear plants; and (c) alternative energies aren't there yet, despite massive investments.
And no, the simple-minded "let's just use nuclear for everything, it's the saviour of all our problems" approach won't work either, as has been discussed often enough.
For one thing, it's way too late. We have to cut global emissions by 50% in the next 10 years. You'll barely have broken ground on a nuclear plant in that time.
Germany has had a serious problem with waste storage and disposal. A while ago the government reached a deal with the utilities which put them of the hook for around ~€25bln:
1) don't build new reactors using 60-year old technology(even though that technology has proven safe after the major issue was rectified after Chernobyl)
2) don't build reactors in areas threatened by tsunamis and earthquakes. Germany is safe from both, so using Chernobyl and Fukushima to justify shutting down reactors in Germany, or even worse, stop construction of new ones, is borderline insane.
> don't build reactors in areas threatened by tsunamis and earthquakes. Germany is safe from both, so using Chernobyl and Fukushima to justify shutting down reactors in Germany, or even worse, stop construction of new ones, is borderline insane.
The real issue with fukushima was simple — in case of a tsunami, the emergency generators would be flooded and fail, and the connection to the grid might fail.
Pretty much all German reactors are in the flood plains of major rivers, and many of them had issues with the emergency generators being damaged by floods already. Or had issues with the grid connection failing. Luckily not both at once.
Considering these are all ancient reactors from the 60s and 70s — not even two-circuit pressurized water reactors, but single-circuit boiling water reactors — this is actually quite risky.
Add the multiple-billion-euro effort to build a storage solution, which has so far failed, and led to nuclear waste in a salt mine leaking into the ground water and causing issues, and you can start to understand why nuclear in Germany might be problematic.
Dig a shaft 5km deep, put your waste at the bottom, fill it up. Nothing from that depth it coming out through any natural process for eons. I wonder why it's not actually done...
"[...] pair of proposed test boreholes in the United States were cancelled due to public opposition"
I think you're the one that should read up on the actual deaths or disfigurements or whatever that those accidents resulted in, rather than the media reports which scream bloody murder.
> there were no deaths caused by acute radiation syndrome [...] studies by the World Health Organisation and Tokyo University have shown that no discernible increase in the rate of cancer deaths is expected
Also, the world has changed since 1986. As an example (it seems that almost nobody knows this), the number of people living in extreme poverty has quartered since then, despite the population growth from 5 billion to nearly 8 billion people. Russia changed less, as far as I can tell this is due to the fall of the USSR. Still, an accident from thirty years ago in a poor country is almost incomparable to today. There was no common Internet back then, knowledge had to come through books (or possibly TV) and learning something that helps you do your job was not as easy as it is today. Still, even with Chernobyl:
> The Chernobyl disaster, considered the worst nuclear disaster in history [...] there is rough agreement that a total of either 31 or 54 people died from blast trauma or acute radiation syndrome [...] deaths due to the disaster's long-term health effects, with long-term death estimates ranging from 4,000 (per the 2005 and 2006 conclusions of a joint consortium of the United Nations and the governments of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia), to more than 93,000 (per the conflicting conclusions of various scientific, health, environmental, and survivors' organizations).
That's pretty awful, but nothing like burning fossil fuels:
> the greatest energy fatalities that result from energy generation by humanity, is the creation of air pollution. The most lethal of which, particulate matter, which is primarily generated from the burning of fossil fuels and biomass is (counting outdoor air pollution effects only) estimated to cause 2.1 million deaths annually
That page also lists 10 000 deaths per petaWatt-hour in the USA in 2012 and 100 000 deaths globally (the same table lists much, much fewer casualties for solar, wind, and nuclear per PWh). If the worst disaster ever has casualties ranging from 4k to 93k, then what are we talking about? Shut coal down now!
And Chernobyl was the worst accident ever, it is not common. If nuclear power was so likely to blow up with these results, not a nation on earth would risk this, yet France (I think we all agree this is not some poor third world country desperate for energy and unable to build solar or wind) is littered with reactors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France), 58 in total. The number of accidents listed is 12, starting in 1969, ranging from "75kg of slightly radioactive material was leaked, fishing and drinking the river water was banned for two weeks" to "one person killed in a blast from a metal melting accident that the nuclear plant uses" (i.e. not a nuclear accident).
seems a little disingenuous to quote Wikipedia stating no discernible increase in the rate of cancer deaths but then skip out this a few sentences later:
> As of February 27, 2017, the Fukushima prefecture government has tallied 2,129 “disaster-related deaths” in the prefecture
> In the case of Fukushima, although 40-50 people experienced physical injury or radiation burns at the nuclear facility, the number of direct deaths from the incident are quoted to be zero. However, mortality from radiation exposure was not the only threat to human health: it's estimated that around 1,600 people died as a result of evacuation procedures and stress-induced factors. This figure ranges between 1,000-1,600 deaths from evacuation (the evacuation of populations affected by the earthquake and tsunami at the time can make sole attribution to the nuclear disaster challenging). Stress-induced deaths affected mostly older people; more than 90 percent of mortality occurred in individuals over the age of 66.
This value exceeds the number that have died in Fukushima prefecture directly from the earthquake and tsunami.[21] "Disaster-related deaths" are deaths attributed to disasters and are not caused by direct physical trauma, but does not distinguish between people displaced by the nuclear disaster compared to the earthquake / tsunami. As of year 2016, among those deaths, 1368 have been listed as "related to the nuclear power plant" according to media analysis.[22] Reports have pointed out that many of these deaths may have been caused by the evacuation period being too long, and that residents could have been allowed to return to their homes earlier in order to reduce the total related death toll.[23]
By October 2012, over 1000 disaster-related deaths that were not due to radiation-induced damage or to the earthquake or to the tsunami had been identified by the Reconstruction Agency < http://www.reconstruction.go.jp/english/>, based on data for areas evacuated for no other reason than the nuclear accident. About 90% of deaths were for persons above 66 years of age. Of these, about 70% occurred within the first three months of the evacuations. (A similar number of deaths occurred among evacuees from tsunami- and earthquake-affected prefectures. These figures are additional to the 19,000 that died in the actual tsunami.)
The premature deaths reported in 2012 were mainly related to the following: (1) somatic effects and spiritual fatigue brought on by having to reside in shelters; (2) Transfer trauma – the mental or physical burden of the forced move from their homes for fragile individuals; and (3) delays in obtaining needed medical support because of the enormous destruction caused by the earthquake and tsunami. However, the radiation levels in most of the evacuated areas were not greater than the natural radiation levels in high background areas elsewhere in the world where no adverse health effect is evident, so maintaining the evacuation beyond a precautionary few days was evidently the main disaster in relation to human fatalities.
I genuinely missed that. I'm no expert either, just checking out a few sources while on my phone on the toilet, and apparently didn't read far enough. So you're right, I underrepresented the Fukushima deaths. Still, re-run the numbers; compare it to coal deaths again. I don't think this changes the conclusion.
Judging from the comments, many HN readers are ok with illegal tactics in a cause they support. People in causes they do not support may think they have the right to employ similar tactics. There is not the politcal will to ban coal, or it would have been done.
I have to be honest, I never had the occasion to see those huge machines before I saw them in online photos, not from that article, but on places like reddit.
Maybe the companies involved in this industry don't really like to allow journalists, those mines and machines are quite scary and bad PR.
Anyway I guess most people might be surprised to see those tiny protesters next to that huge thing.
Meanwhile, I hope greenpeace activists will be turned into ridicule.
In Germany those machines are basically pop stars. Forget the few thousand jobs that would be affected, forget energy independence, for most Germans, I think, shutting down those monstrous monuments of an easier time would secretly be their number one drawback of abandoning lignite. It's a love/hate thing.
Edit: to add at least one source, here's Spiegel Online reporting that the police counted dehydration and circulatory issues as "injured officers" (German unfortunately)
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/...