With climate change looming, it seems so completely backwards to go back to using it again.
Is it coal miners pushing to keep their jobs? Fear of nuclear power? Is purely politically motivated, or are there genuinely people who believe coal is clean?
I don’t think we ever stopped mining it
Why “going back to it” have we ever stopped?
I was going to say, coal remains around 1/3 of our electric generation worldwide (as of 2022): https://www.statista.com/statistics/269811/world-electricity-production-by-energy-source/
Coal can’t be reused, created, or otherwise obtained outside of mining. Until we remove our dependency on coal, mining will continue.
No. Among other things it remains the linchpin of energy security for industrial countries like China and Germany that lack adequate domestic oil or natural gas reserves to power their economies with those.
$$$
I’m sure places that are still banning nuclear power aren’t helping either.
Until all coal plants are replaced there will be a need for more coal. We can’t just shut down these plants over night, the world is transitioning to cleaner energy production, unfortunately it’s just not happening fast enough.
I genuinely thought coal was phased out as an option for power, and that fossil fuels were starting it’s (very long) descent to being phased out just the same.
Fossil fuels will take way longer, but why the more recent interest in coal again?? That’s the part I cannot understand, and I don’t know where it came from
Lol nope we’re fucked
Coal is a fossil fuel, btw. Part of the problem is that through subsidies, the cost of energy is being kept artificially low in the US. We need the increase in cost to de-incentivize oil/gas/coal.
I know Germany is shutting down its reactors and without Russian gas they need to get a reliable baseload power generation from somewhere… :/
It’s still needed until the transition to full renewables is viable in most places. People still need to afford electricity so it’s a means to an end
Same reasons we won’t solve the climate crisis, democracy and capitalism are not great at dealing with long term, side spread problems.
If you re-open a coal mine in a depressed community, you’ve earned a lot of votes while the people who were on the green side of things are diffused throughout the world.
Socialism into communism has been disapproval far worse from an environmental point of view. Well from nearly every metric.
Even with the best form of political and economic systems, people still will use every resource possible if it makes their life that much more comfortable.
Because renewable energy and nuclear energy require significant capital investment, which the private sector and governments in the age of ‘fiscal discipline’ are not willing to make.
