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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
The UK's last coal plant will sigh out its final pollutants Monday before shutting down for good and officially ending the country's century and a half of coal production. Nottinghamshire's Ratcliffe-on-Soar plant was the last of its kind following Britain's 2015 commitment to close all coal power plants by 2025. Ratcliffe was originally scheduled to shut down in 2022 but stayed open after Russia invaded Ukraine and Europe entered a gas crisis.
The Ratcliffe plant once had 3,000 engineers but only employs 170 staff now. That group will gather to watch a livestream of the plant being turned off, and over 100 of them are set to work on decommissioning the plant over the next two years. Many of the other employees will enter new jobs at different power plants owned by Uniper, Raticliffe's German owner, while others will enter training programs to work on other aspects of the industry.
Britain opened the world's first coal power plant in 1882, London's Holborn Viaduct, with the help of Thomas Edison's Edison Electric Light Company. Coal has played a major part in the UK until very recently. According to a report from energy think tank Ember, coal was responsible for 39 percent of the UK's energy supply in 2012 but shrunk to just two percent in 2019. The decrease in coal production was reportedly equal to double the amount of all greenhouse gases used in the UK in 2023. Between 2012 and 2023, wind and solar generation also increased from six percent to a 34 percent share of the UK's energy. Britain still has a long way to go, but this step has made it the first G7 country to remove all coal power production.
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Friday October 04, @06:16PM (2 children)
Exactly. And what I'm noting is what it doesn't show - namely the continued increase in GHG emissions from Chinese power generation. This remains particularly dishonest when one considers your narrative - that "China is doing a lot to bring down its emissions" - it's not. It's just producing a bunch of renewable generation capacity in addition to its still growing fossil fuel power generation. Moving on, your narrative then segued into:
Western nations are much better than China by your metric! Let's view that carbon intensity graph again, this time [ourworldindata.org] with the G7 countries (all solidly developed world) added. Without exception every one of the G7 countries has a better carbon intensity. Only one, Japan comes close due to a sudden increase in GHG emissions around 2011, but it's still a sixth lower. France in particular is incredibly low at less than 10% of the same carbon intensity of its energy production.
The bottom line here is that if GHG emissions are important to you, then where they come from is important too. China generates [ourworldindata.org] 26% of all GHG emissions (in 2022). In comparison, the US generates 11%. India is in third place at 7.5%. The UK is under 1%.
(Score: 2) by bloodnok on Friday October 04, @11:56PM (1 child)
I picked that graph because it shows that even as China is ramping up its power generation (and I have not disputed the that much is coming from fossil fuels) it is managing to lower the percentage that produces C02. As far as I can see, this means that the amount of new power they are generating from renewables is greater than the amount of new power from fossil fuels.
If you want to say that China is not doing a lot to bring down its emissions when it has just made the largest annual increase in solar generation that we have ever seen, then fine, it's a matter of perspective and our perspectives differ. I still believe that creating that largest annual increase in solar generation makes it a world leader. If doing more than anyone else has ever done is not world leading, then again it's a matter of perspective and we can disagree.
And yes, western nations are better than China on those totals. I don't and have not disagreed with that. I do still disagree that the West is doing the lion's share of decarbonization, which is where we started.
For giggles, you might also want to take a look at the per-capita rather than total emissions.
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The Major
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 05, @05:24AM
Do you have a reason for that disagreement? Your links don't support that claim, for example.