Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by janrinok on Sunday January 19 2020, @10:08AM   Printer-friendly
from the black-gold-or-bad-lungs dept.

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


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Sunday January 19 2020, @11:00PM (2 children)

    by fido_dogstoyevsky (131) <axehandleNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Sunday January 19 2020, @11:00PM (#945521)

    Why do we refuse? Who knows? I think it's an antipathy thing.

    More likely because we seem to be in a world where the choice between "safety" and "cutting corners for a buck/yen/rouble/pound/yuan etc" always goes the wrong way.

    Or, to put it another way, the difficulty with safe nukes lies in people, not technology.

    --
    It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Flamebait=1, Insightful=2, Total=3
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   3  
  • (Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday January 20 2020, @12:28AM

    by fustakrakich (6150) on Monday January 20 2020, @12:28AM (#945572) Journal

    Well, yeah, antipathy is a people problem. We no longer have any technological issues. We can produce anything we need.

    --
    La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 20 2020, @04:02PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday January 20 2020, @04:02PM (#945857) Journal

    Why do we refuse? Who knows? I think it's an antipathy thing.

    More likely because we seem to be in a world where the choice between "safety" and "cutting corners for a buck/yen/rouble/pound/yuan etc" always goes the wrong way.

    Or, to put it another way, the difficulty with safe nukes lies in people, not technology.

    And yet, I find the people most hostile to nuclear technology are the ones causing those problems - not the profit motive. For example, most of the nuclear sites in the world store fuel rods at the plant rather than some safer depository. Nobody recycles nuclear fuel at present. And there are enormous obstacles to constructing new reactors throughout the developed world. I believe the underlying idea is that if you resist making nuclear power safer, then it'll eventually get discontinued. There's a long history of innovations in unpopular energy choices getting obstructed by environmentalists and NIMBYs.