https://beyondfossilfuels.org/europes-coal-exit/ keeps track of coal phase-out commitments. 24 European countries still use coal generators, and 6 have not even planned to phase them out (Serbia, Moldova, Turkey, Poland, Kosovo, Bosnia).
Never used coal power:
Albania, Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Switzerland, Norway
Phased out:
2016: Belgium
2020: Sweden, Austria
2021: Portugal
2024: United Kingdom
2025: Ireland
Phase-out planned:
2026: Slovakia, Greece
2027: France
2028: Italy, Denmark
2029: The Netherlands, Hungary, Finland
2030: Spain, North Macedonia
2032: Romania
2033: Slovenia, Czechia, Croatia
2035: Ukraine
2038: Germany
2040: Bulgaria
2041: Montenegro
"In 1979, a second oil crisis, this time due to the Iranian Revolution, again brought into question Malta’s energy policy and made the government seek alternatives. Between 1982 and 1987, four stream turbines were installed at the Marsa Power Station. This strategy could have worked if the environmental and human health impacts of the coal used at the power station had not caused the local population to protest. In 1987, construction of a new power plant, at Delimara, started; the plant was commissioned in 1994. In the meantime, the Marsa Power Station continued to be improved, with new turbines added to eliminate the use of coal. On January 12, 1995, Malta became independent of coal but consequently became fully dependent on oil."
You could disconnect from it. That's much easier said than done and probably very complicated by the occupation, but I would guess that disconnecting would reduce coal consumption and greenhouse gas emissions proportionally to power usage.
Moldova has not purchased any energy from it since 2024.
I should also note it is primarily a gas plant, fuelled by extremely cheap (nearly free) gas subsidised by Russia. It only falls back to coal when supply is disrupted, which happened when Ukraine stopped transiting Russian gas on its territory.
Greenhouse gas emissions are a larger existential threat than global war. A global nuclear war might be more catastrophic than unchecked climate change, but probably not by much.
Disconnect from it? If it's connected to some kind of grid then you'd have to disconnect from the whole grid, surely? And if being connected to a grid that contains a coal-fired power station counts as using coal then how many countries are really coal-free?
It is not actually recognised by Russia either. It is in their best interest to maintain control over it, but officially recognise it as part of Moldova, so they can blackmail the entire country.
For Sweden, the coal plants were exclusively for cogeneration (district heating with electricity as a byproduct) and only used as peaker plants in winter. Some of them still exist but have been converted to burn biofuels instead, mostly woodchips and other byproducts from the forestry industry.
For most practical purposes, Swedish electricity generation has been basically fossile free since the 1980's.
I may be wrong, but I believe the british experience with biofuels is that although you want to believe its surplus byproduct, the cheapest source is often grown to be fuel for a biofuel generator. It's like soy/corn for ethanol, it isn't sufficiently profitable to do this solely with waste product, you get better margins growing to fulfill the contract.
That may be true in many places, but the Swedish forestry industry is very big, and the district heating plants really do burn mostly forestry byproducts. Of all the biofuel used in Sweden (not just for energy generation), 75% comes from forestry products, and the vast majority of it is either unrefined wood products or byproducts from Kraft process paper manufacturing (like tall oil and turpentine etc).
Specifically in district heating, 87% of the forestry-sourced fuel is unrefined wood products. Almost half of it is just bark, branches and treetops. Of all the biomass in an average mature tree logged in Sweden, 43% ends up as pulpwood, 43% as saw timber, 8% gets burned for fuel and the remaining 6% is treetops and branches which also tend to end up burned for fuel.
There is definitely a lot of debate in Sweden about sustainable forestry practices, though. The industry really wants to clearcut everything for convenience, but it's really bad for biodiversity and the general public hates it.
Addendum: I believe there's also been some studies and experiments involving importing olive pits from the Mediterranean olive oil industry for burning in district heating plants, but I don't think it's been done at scale.
Depends on the input into growing the biomass. If you are using industrial fertilizers, it's very far from net-zero. Besides that, from my memory there are studies analyzing this and I think they found it's never net-zero.
> For most practical purposes, Swedish electricity generation has been basically fossile free since the 1980's.
I think "practical purposes" should include the fact that thanks to also shutting down a bunch of nuclear, Sweden regularly imports German/Polish coal power.
Sweden claiming fossile free is only technically true. Practically there's a mountain of greenwashing.
So no, I would not say what you just said. I find that greenwashing dishonest.
By being anti nuclear, the green parties around the world have caused more radiation[1] and climate changing co2 than any other movement in history.
[1]
An oft cited statistic is that coal causes more deaths every single year from radiation (excluding accidents) than nuclear has has caused in its entire history INCLUDING accidents.
I mean, you can call it a "mountain" of greenwashing but to me it looks more like a mole hill. Total Swedish electricity production is typically 160 to 165 TWh per year and total consumption is usually between 135 and 145 TWh.
In 2025, the net export was about 33 TWh. Gross import from Germany, Poland and Lithuania, including transit to other countries, was 1 TWh. So, imported power from countries with coal power plants was less than 1% of total consumption, and the amount of fossil free power exported was more than 30 times greater than the amount of (potentially) fossil power imported. 1-2% fossil energy in the mix is to me not really significant, and especially not considering how much fossil free power is exported.
I think it's huge greenwashing to claim to not have coal power, but just import it when needed. What practical difference is that to having coal power domestically? That's just saying you recycle all plastic, only to send it to the third world to dump in rivers.
So I think it's untrue to say that Sweden doesn't rely on coal power. Without coal power it'd have regular blackouts. I rely on being able to take a breath every couple of seconds. If I only get an annual average of a breath every few seconds, I'll die.
One could show great generation and net export statistics with a sufficiently large batteryless solar installation, and still import coal power every night and cloudy day.
What is true, but can easily imply an incorrect conclusion, is that Sweden's very good in being self sufficient in clean power generation statistically. Yes, very much true. But it's largely due to geography, and not merely something to replicate. Sweden has way more viable places where hydro could be installed, than most countries (though where economical and otherwise acceptable, it already has). And it's sparsely populated; Sweden is bigger than the UK, but with one seventh the population. So if the implication is that "if we can do it, so can you" then that's false.
Luckily the political wind (including population opinion) has started to turn in favor of nuclear power, again. Maybe everything can be solar in 100 years, but we can't have 100 more years of coal.
> So I think it's untrue to say that Sweden doesn't rely on coal power. Without coal power it'd have regular blackouts.
The european grid is interconnected so it's basically all fungible. But it's not the case that there would be blackouts, since the price mechanism is used to match production, demand and return on production investments. So policy decisions to ramp down fossil generation result in investment decisions to new non fossil generation capacity.
> The european grid is interconnected so it's basically all fungible.
This is the point I'm making. It's not a counter point, it's exactly the point I'm making. Sweden "has" a bunch of coal plants, just located in Germany and Poland. This allows Sweden to skip planning for exactly what renewable is bad at.
Otherwise this is like saying "antibiotics are completely unnecessary because 99.99% of the time you don't need them, and when I do need them I just get them from a pharmacy". Right… so you do need and rely on them.
But Sweden also has a geographic electricity transportation problem. Electricity generation exists where (most) consumers are not. And this is also due to the MUCH more limited flexibility of renewables, especially hydro. Could easily be cheaper to get coal power in the south instead of hydro "shipped" from way up north. Hell, sometimes electricity in the north has a negative price.
Sweden is a good local example of why we also can't just power all of Europe from some solar panels in Sahara. Except instead it's hydro way up north.
This is true. A nuance often missed. Different rock (that is considerably worse in several ways, needs heavy fuel oil to be added to actually burn and has I think even higher co2 output per unit of energy) but kinda the same.
> Albania, Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Switzerland, Norway
I very much doubt this is true for any of those countries. In fact, I know it is untrue for Switzerland, although they did stop using it long ago (mid 20th century).
Edit: Norway actually ran a coal power plant until 2023, on Spitsbergen
The US is in an excellent position to massively harness wind and solar and yet right now it's dialing up the coal usage. I am comfortable celebrating Iceland's decision to not be maliciously dependent on fossil fuels.
I consider minimizing a natural decline with artificial subsidies as ramping up - maybe a fairer phrase would be "dragging out production" but either way the administration is putting a thumb on their scale to counter natural market forces to perpetuate a dumb thing.
We've banned this account for continually posting comments like this that are unsubstantive and clearly in breach of the guidelines and HN's intended use.
I mean, the EIA says "U.S. generation fueled by coal increased by 13% in 2025 to 731 BkWh"
The article you linked is mostly about a model of 2026 and 2027 and sure, in the model coal goes away but that's not a fact about coal it's just a model.
Yes with the next sentence explaining why, and how future years are planned to decrease.
"Ramping up" means planned to increase.
Feel free to provide a reference that supports that it's "ramping up". I, and parent, couldn't find one. This is a super boring factual thing that I was curious about, where opinion has no place or purpose.
Sure, but increasing something like fucking coal power plants isn't some instantaneous event that could start and stop at any time, putting some ambiguity at the moment between "increased" and "increasing". If plants are or will be built, it's because it's planned for development. That '-ing' isn't just present tense, it's there for the continuous/progressive aspect of it.
If they produced 13% more energy from coal in 2025 than 2024, the latest point at which we have real numbers rather than projections, it's fair to say that production of energy from coal is increasing rather than decreasing.
Okay, but you're celebrating make-believe virtues. Iceland is also not destroying its tropical coral reefs. That sounds nice...but it has none. Nor any sort of tradition or incentive to try doing that.
The US coal thing is all about widespread memories (and myths) of sustained good economic times, in large areas of the country which now feel destitute. Millions of voters feeling that they have no future. If not that the elites want them to hurry up and die.
To paraphrase Munger - if you want different outcomes there, then you need to change the incentives.
The anti-nuclear position in Germany is very old, and core to the existence of Greenpeace and green parties on DACH region (down to firing RPGs at reactors).
Does Russia benefit and probably fund it? Sure.
But DACH environmentalism grew from antinuclear protests, not the other way around, and thus will boycott nuclear even when it goes against their modern stated goals.
This is now how we should be looking at the problem. It doesn't matter if you burn coal yourself or not. What matters is the source of your energy. Every single one of those countries imports energy from other markets which consume fossil fuels for production.
I know at least Sweden has been a net exporter for a long time. It's a little bit complicated (that's what happens in a market economy). Anyhow, we/EU should continue to strive to end coal as an energy source for all countries, be since we can do much better.
The unique geography of the Scandinavian peninsula combined with very low population density makes Sweden a bit less interesting in terms of achieving zero emissions in other geographies, and I doubt Swedes would be cool with expanding hydro and nuclear to the scale required by Germany.
But yeah, I mean, good job and all. The answer for the rest of the continent is going to be wind and solar in the medium term, and probably more nuclear in the long term.
Totally. Tech neutral state incentives is the way to go for sure, everybody has different environment and context to consider (same within Sweden). Southern Europe has very different opportunities (much better situation for solar for example).
Anyway, my comment was in response to the extreme comment (parent) about how all rich countries became rich using fossil fuels - implying that that's the more or less only way to transition from poor to rich. I think it's important to note that that's not necessarily the case. You don't need to destroy the environment to go from poor to rich, even though a lot of countries historically have done it that way (also noteworthy that they did it without knowing about the consequences for the environment).
first real comment, I thought that at first but this could lower the possible users that could be using chatGPT and that would be against us (shareholders)
* /e/OS sends user speech data to OpenAI without consent [1], and thought this was ok until they got caught [2].
* /e/OS massively delays security patches, and calls this a "standard industry practice" [3]. Meanwhile, GrapheneOS' opt-in security preview releases provide early access to security updates prior to official disclosure [4]. Also see [0] (Security update speed) and [7] (WebView being 40 security updates behind).
* microG downloads and executes proprietary Google binaries in a privileged environment [5] [6]. You can obviously not audit these, nor should this count as "degoogled".
* microG still phones home to Google by default (android.clients.google.com for device registration check-in, mtalk.google.com for FCM push, firebaseinstallations.googleapis.com for SIM activations) [7].
[0] has a comparison of popular privacy and security-focused Android-based OS, which paints the whole picture. Privacy-friendly does not necessarily mean secure, but in this case "privacy-friendly" is quite a stretch already.
Your speech data assertion looks to be inaccurate, the user does have to opt in. Nor does the response sound like a mea culpa. I wouldn't use it, but seems reasonable for people who might want to.
Yes, sent*, not sends. Before they got called out, it was opt-out. No consent dialog, warning, or any other sort of confirmation before sending audio to OpenAI. The keyboard is auto-enabled.
2. did not anonymise said voice messages, only their origin
3. did not ask the user for consent
4. ignored the user's consent after they started asking for it
That is not a good look for a privacy-focused OS. There is now a working consent dialog before using this feature, and audio is actually anonymised (random pitch shifting + filtering + noise), but it took them nearly 8 months to address all of this after getting called out.
> I wonder how this compares to GrapheneOS in practice.
https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm is a fairly complete comparison. One of GrapheneOS' biggest features is that they sandbox Google services (if you choose to install them), whereas e/OS gives them privileged access by default (via microG). Calling it a "degoogled" OS while microG uses Google's proprietary blobs is... a choice.
By 'Rust compiler' and 'C++ compiler', they refer to the LibJS bytecode generator implemented in those languages. This is about the generated JS bytecode.
My feed has devolved into AI generated propaganda with a scary amount of genuine support. Police brutality against minorities and other politically relevant groups; all fake but with hundreds of seemingly real replies cheering them on.
How can you tell by just looking at their profile? Bots have for over a decade been able to generate a profile with a real looking picture (usually just scraped from the web) and a realistic sounding bio.
yea im surprised i see so many times that people on _hackernews_ are convinced profile activity is real.
theres entire marketing companies that provide what is effectively a botnet of social media activity to generate buzz, promising packages with "social media engagement". disney uses these to try and hype movie trailers, when the recent tron trailer came out it took 1 minute for a bunch of comments that looked like seemingly real enough accounts to be in there posting "im not ready for this" "omg" etc. and yes, these networks of fake accounts on all social media platforms do have non-vacant profiles meaning theyve got comments and stuff all over each others pages. there was a recent smaller production that is suing their marketing agency which promised this deceptive engagement and their implementation shit the bed and all the bots just interacted amongst themselves on the movies instagram page. the movie completely tanked at the box office because they never got their fake accounts to start engaging outside of the movies instagram account.
everyone focuses on the actual content itself as the subject of AI platform abuse, but are we really so naive to think that the companies pouring millions of dollars into these efforts are too stupid to understand that controlling the narrative involves requires simulating human feedback?
its in our nature to want to "go to the comments" to "get the real tea" and. im just going to say right now that yeah, the entities deploying these types of accounts are well aware that that is how many of us look for perspective. they're not stupid, and it's easier than it's ever been to game commentary in 2026.
Tangent but reddit allows people to hide their post/comment history which is fine I guess but it's not great for that reason, trying to see if an account is a bot or not. Other than age can't tell anything about that account.
I notice more and more accounts use it, particularly the spicy commenters. Which is whatever, I try to stay away from social media now, this is SM here but at least it's more technically oriented/useful.
Profile age and history are not a reliable indicator, either. Many of these bots use hacked accounts. The accounts of real people who stopped using the site and therefore won't notice the abuse of their account and stop it. You sometimes see this happen with your own friends since FB will suggest posts to you that your "friend" interacted with.
First result is Trump's page, which I could access without a login.
There is the same ad "Featured Ad. Must See Video. This Video Will Soon Be Banned. Watch Before It's Deleted" repeated about a dozen times on the page, showing a woman wearing booty shorts approaching a private jet.
It's mostly all ICE engagement bait on both sides. In the same way we are all guilty of upvoting an article without reading it, they will amplify their ideas or viewpoints by signal boosting a video. The same way an echo chamber forms around a questionable news site that is often proven wrong or lying. The source doesn't matter anymore only the numbers.
A split keyboard might still bring you some relief. Modifiers/enter/backspace/etc are usually moved away from your weakest fingers (pinkies) to your strongest (thumbs). I have Ctrl, Alt, backspace, delete, space, enter and shift all on my thumb clusters.
The rabbit hole goes very deep. Another option is home row mods: https://precondition.github.io/home-row-mods. A combination of thumb clusters and home row mods can reduce your finger strain a lot.
Also the type of the key matters for tendonitis. Some have tactile feedback after the key is pressed but well above the bottom so you learn not to bottom out with force.
Lead times are long, and Kinesis products are expensive. It gets a little more bearable if you take into account that you're using this tool 8 hours a day for years and years, but still. Cheaper options exist.
I can't second Kinesis enough. I have been using them for 20 years now. I was starting to have issues and I haven't have a single issue with my hands or wrists since changing over. Also a good vertical mouse will help if you use a mouse much. I use trackballs or vertical mice interchangably.
I really enjoy using Codeberg (as well as my own self-hosted Forgejo instance). It's fast and responsive, and if something is broken or inconsistent, it's trivial to create a PR and get it merged with minimal friction. It's a breath of fresh air after having dealt with GitHub's bs for many years.
* KeePassDX -- password manager, shares DB with KeePassXC on desktop, which is synced via NextCloud. Also functions as a TOTP authenticator. (https://www.keepassdx.com/)
* DAVx5 -- CalDAV and CardDAV client; keeps mobile calendar and contact list synced with private NextCloud server. (https://www.davx5.com/)
And I don't see F-Droid itself mentioned -- it's the most popular repository of FOSS software for Android, with an accompanying app: https://f-droid.org.
F-Droid itself is great, but I find that the NeoStore front end to F-Droid is superior because it has multi-repository capability, offering a long list of alternative apk sources that can readily be verified for quality.
Neo Store looks interesting, but the readme in the GitHub repo includes emojis in the feature list, which is a bit of a red flag for me, especially since the project appears to have started only two years ago.
Thanks for the links. I am concerned about supply chain attacks and such with FOSS tools these days. It seems like the easiest attack surface. In my dev opinion it’s not if it’s when. Kinda sucks and I think the adversary is moving faster than the provider. (I have created and maintained public domain software but not currently. Now I’m crapping on the thread sorry. But no one else is sorry for crapping on threads…I need to stop over thinking or maybe just close this tab)
Never used coal power:
Phased out: Phase-out planned: