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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Bowing to public pressure on climate change, Germany on Thursday promised to speed up its exit from coal power generation and to pay operators compensation in a strategy instantly rejected by environmental campaigners. With the announcement that coals could be history by 2035, instead of 2038 as previously planned, "the exit from coal begins now, and it's binding," Environment Minister Svenja Schulze told reporters in Berlin.
Chancellor Angela Merkel and premiers from the states of Saxony-Anhalt, Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia and Brandenburg agreed overnight a "shutdown plan" for the country's power plants using the highly polluting fossil fuel. The scheme will be written into a draft law set to be presented later this month and ratified by mid-2019. Meanwhile the government will compensate coal plant operators to the tune of 4.35 billion euros ($4.9 billion) for plants set to fall off the grid in the 2020s alone, Finance Minister Olaf Scholz said.
The payouts "will be spread out over the 15 years following the shutdown" and represent an "affordable and in my view good result," Scholz added.
Giant RWE, with its power stations in North Rhine-Westphalia, will take the lion's share at 2.6 billion euros. But the group complained that was "well below" the 3.5 billion of losses it expects.
Some 3,000 jobs are set to go at the energy firm "in the short term" and 6,000 by 2030, mostly via early retirement, RWE added. That represents around 60 percent of RWE workers in the especially dirty brown-coal sector and one-quarter of the company's total workforce.
[...] A plan agreed in December under pressure from demonstrators calls for Germany to reduce output of greenhouse gases by 55 percent compared with 1990's levels.
The country has already admitted it will miss an intermediate target for 2020.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Sunday January 19 2020, @10:16PM (7 children)
Good. Then it will remind you that your opinion is irrelevant for sie Germans.
Their choice how they want to live and their responsibility of solving their problems and getting there.
Your choice if you want to learn something from them or not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 20 2020, @03:43PM (6 children)
Until their illness arrives in my country. Sales of the incandescent light bulb have already been banned because of the thoughtless do-gooders. It's not a stretch to observe that those same dumb people will figure that cutting valuable activity is a great way to reduce the all-important energy demand.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday January 20 2020, @08:51PM (5 children)
Righto. Would you be pleased with preemptive nuclear strikes against countries that make progress ahead of your country?
You know, just to keep you sheltered in 20th century conditions so that you don't have to learn or adapt to anything new.
Yes, yes, the incandescent bulb was the peak technology in illumination. A great American invention, no less, it's actually unpatriotic to change them with something more than an order of magnitude more efficient.
How dare they ask khallow to use anything else.
Valuable how? Like in "continue to produce the great American incandescent bulbs"/"buggy whips"?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 20 2020, @11:45PM (4 children)
Would advanced, 21st Century, preemptive nuclear strikes qualify as being progressive enough for you?
I also find it interesting how Orwellian your rhetoric is. We make "progress" by holding ourselves back.
Or we could simply just not care and let the users decide what bulbs are best for themselves. In addition, efficiency depends on context - such as rarely used bulbs that need to come on instantly.
Like less activity altogether: less people fed, less goods shipped, less work done, less things made.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday January 21 2020, @01:47AM (3 children)
Yes, using led lamps in one's entire home is a proof that one is holding back, and using incandescent lights like our forefathers did for millennia is progressive. Very bad that Australians ditched the use of incandescent lights on govt recommendations targeting energy efficiency - bag government, bad.
And we could continue and do the same for some or all the other sectors.
Like we could continue to burn coal and forget about those particulate filters and sulfur oxides scrubbers and whatnot.
How dare government to say that a simple honest businessmen must not make their neighbors spit their lungs in shreds! How dare they impose the extra cost of basic environmental care onto the businesses! That tyranny, you hear?!?
Absofuckinlutely! Those LED lights, they may be cheap and emit a spectrum one has troubles to distinguish it from the warm day light of a day [bunnings.com.au], they may consume 1/5 or less of an incandescent bulb with the same intensity; but gosh, are they slow to light up or what? At least half an hour from switching them on until one can see something, right? Right?
How backwards, retarded and non-progressive of those Australians, oppressed by their government which dictates them to use less energy and reduce their power bills [vic.gov.au]; probably under the pain of death or being deported in... ummm... where?... the Brexiting UK? (sorry, I still can't figure out how your Universe is organized)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 21 2020, @03:12AM (2 children)
You know it's not going to stop at light bulbs. It's one thing to educate people on the relative energy consumption of various items and processes. It's another to target energy reductions while ignoring what people use energy for. The solution here is to charge people for the energy they use, including possible externalities, and just not care past that.
As to your complaint about LED lightbulbs, how much again do they cost relative to the cheap incandescents of the past? What happens when the bulb doesn't save enough energy over its lifetime to pay for itself?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday January 21 2020, @03:35AM (1 child)
As long as you accept CO2 emissions as an externality, I don't have a beef with that.
(I have no complaint about LED lightbulbs)
I have no idea and I consider it of so little importance that's close to irrelevant to me.
1. the bulk of the money the buyer was charged for one was not in the production cost but all the cost and profits for all involved in the distribution chain. So, very likely a comparable price, in the same order of magnitude
2. in terms of "cost of bulbs as percent of the cost of living" - the value is so small it doesn't worth the effort to ponder over the issue
True, there are people that will be interested in those, but I'm not running a company that produces LED lights. Can you fault me for this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 21 2020, @08:44AM
I do too. I just disagree on how much.
I don't recall caring about your opinion on light bulbs either. It's just an example of how things go wrong. Surely, our governments have better things to do with their time?