Really sad to think that a 12,000 year old forest is slated to be cut down just to dig up an obsolete resource that will be burnt and help destroy the environment even more, while there are other alternatives that aren't used simply because they cost a bit more.
What makes me so angry is the ridiculous decision to phase out nuclear by 2023 and only "try to phase out" coal by 2030s or something. And in the meantime burn even more coal to replace the closed nuclear plants.
Environmentalists are not the driving force to mine this coal, but many campaign heavily against nuclear, and the effect of decommissioning nuclear in Germany has been increased coal activity.
I'm not placing the blame at the feet of environmentalists, so much as ruing unintended consequences.
Well yes, but environmentalists usually also call for large reductions in energy consumption as they know renewables can’t provide a like-for-like replacement. Are the consumers of electricity not also to a degree complicit by creating the demand in the first place? I think it helps to look past the proximate cause.
Presumably the same environmentalists are also backing the exit from coal. Using nuclear instead would have just displaced this mining activity (for the uranium) to somewhere else in the world.
But yeah, Merkel’s nuclear shift did seem pretty rash.
It's funny how people associate that nuclear shift with Merkel, given how it mostly was Merkel flip-flopping away from her prior policy of overriding the existing agreements about phasing out nuclear once it started to look bad...
Bund für Umwelt- und Naturschutz Deutschland (BUND, "association for the protection of environment and nature, Germany"), Greenpeace, Union of Concerned Scientists, Sierra Club, to name just a few.
Yes. The war on nuclear power started when Greenpeace won the war against atmospheric testing of nuclear explosives and needed a new enemy to ensure its continued existence. The talking points against nuclear power are made up or blown out of proportion by the treehuggers, every single one of them.
It is definitely not fair to say “treehuggers, every single one of them. There are a lot of environmentalists who are absolutely pro-nuclear. Just like any mass of people, blanket generalizations are almost always just wrong.
Oops, that sentence was ambiguous. I meant every single one of the talking points. Treehuggers is absolutely the right term in the context of this article, though.
RWE (the big bad evil company who wants to cut down Hambach) would like to shut down a few old and unprofitable coal burning plants. They are forbidden from doing so, because these plants "are essential to the grid". Doesn't sound obsolete to me.
Sounds like it's time for Germany to invest some money into energy storage solutions rather than relying on coal-burning plants to take up the slack when solar and wind are slacking.
This applies equally so to most nations, of course.
I'm tempted to argue that storage makes renewables more expensive, but that argument would rest on the assumption that it was even possible to buy storage capacity at a scale of multiple terawatt-hours.
All told coal accounted for 37% last year. So if the trends continue (and it seems like they will), then renewables will eclipse coal by around the end of this year.
Build more solar and wind and add more energy storage to get you through the lagging periods and no more coal capacity will need to be added to the grid, nor new coal mines dug.
Not really obsolete. 50% of german energy comes from coal and 50% of that comes from lignite. And Germany has been building renewables like mad for the past decade and only get 25% of their energy from that. Cost isn't the issue here but time to deployment.
Biggest issue is not the production, but the lines. For political reasons the big north-south power lines are not being built. Everyone is afraid of the grid.
We drove through the black forest once, and we stopped off to take a picture. We walked a few feet in and that's when we saw it was all fields beyond maybe 100 feet-- the forest exists by the freeway, where we were, but it was just for show, and our imagination of this big forest beyond was just that, imagination.
I'm not a environmentalist by any stretch of the imagination (for example, I think the straw law is stupid for a variety of reasons and I believe that most recycling in the US is waste, per the excellent Penn and Teller episode about it) but even I don't get or like clearcutting.
I think you might be an environmentalist. My understanding is that if you think the environment is something we should take care of, that's basically it.
I guess you're probably just saying you don't identify or maybe agree with some other environmentalists, which also makes sense. The straw ban is a great example. Sometimes you can agree on what's important but disagree about what to do about it.
I think this is the same complex process the word "feminism" gets put through. It's hard to find people who will outright say, "I think women should still have to ask permission from their husbands to seek work," for example. It's easy to find people who are quick to add, "... not that I'm a feminist or anything."
I don't know. Words are funny. At the end of the day it probably doesn't matter whether you qualify as some kind of *-ist, but those words are one way we get convinced that other groups of people are opponents, instead of peers. (... one way that unscrupulous people intentionally convince us, depending on your level of cynicism.)
People avoid calling themselves -ist-s because when you identify yourself with a group you're bringing on to yourself a series of judgments spanning the other person's entire experience with that group. To abuse the saying, "you don't know where that's been."
I do not like defining myself with '-ists'. Instead I will generally refer to the '-ism' and point out where I agree and where I differ.
I have found this position has the side-effect of being an easy way to spot who is just playing team sports with philosophies. They are the folk who get really angry with people who agree with them on specifics, purely for not using a subject label self-referentially.
Personally, I'd rather be bold and let people associate me with the title they don't like. At least then they may have an opportunity to question their assumptions.
If the last neo-vefaminist they met was a great person, you'd be free-riding on a reputation that you hadn't earned yet. If the last neo-vefaminist they met was a terrible person (potentially someone who was free-riding on the name), and if you call yourself a neo-vefaminist, you're communicating to them that you're a terrible person which would be incorrect because you aren't.
Great perspective. Yes, maybe you're right. I hate the -ist (and I'm not sure why, so you're on to something there), but I do like the causes (when they make sense).
I live about 50 minutes away from this location. In my opinion it is an absolute atrocity, especially given the recent tragic death.
Our politicians are discussing about phasing out coal until December (there is a commission to find suggestions), and despite this, RWE (the owner of the mine) tries to evict the occupation.
It is a pure provocation since it is absolutely unclear whether clearing the forest is ultimately necessary.
Well in western Canada we quite often clear cut blocks of forest for lumber, and based on European perspectives it probably looks like an entire forest, but there are a few considerations:
It's almost always younger trees (-100 years old) and often second growth (not taking old growth coastal trees)
It's pretty tightly regulated in terms of ecosystem impact, sensitive locations, buffers, though lots of people disagree with what should be acceptable
They understand it's in their own self interest to replant, as some of these companies are harvesting planted trees already.
It's definitely not perfect, but on the whole is sustainable, and in some cases like our recent insect infestation (mostly caused by aggressive fire suppression) the preferable method to limited scale thinning
I have no problems with cutting second growth, especially timber that was planted by man. It's specifically timber companies interested in harvesting old growth that irks me, because there's hardly any left, especially in Europe.
Going a little further, given that second growth harvesting is widely performed & commercially viable these days, seeking to log old growth comes across as simply looking for "easy money"- old growth hardwood fetches high prices, and you skip the work of planting.
Well for me it's because i care about the environment but have no interest in a dumpster-dived vegan diet.
And since i live in a detached home and own 2 cars"environmentalists" don't want me in their tribe.
When you're labeled you get the entire reputation of the group, and the group gets all the attributes of its members. That makes broad labels either a tough sell or pretty meaningless.
I’m sorry you have encountered environmentalists who made you feel that. For what it’s worth most environmentalists I know live very normal lives and are trying to make changes at the systemic level rather than blaming individuals.
The way I see it, a lot of environmental damage is a consequence of people trying to find a decent position within a system that doesn’t really consider environmental impacts. You want a spacious house so that requires living out of the city and there are poor public transport links so a family has two cars because anything less is a massive inconvenience. That’s perfectly reasonable.
But the situation we live in doesn’t just ‘exist’ but is formed by humans and can be changed so that you can still make your decisions but without such the same environmental impact and maybe a better quality of life.
In my opinion, the key is that our patterns of consumption aren’t really based around what we want but what is made available to us, which we then rationalise post-hoc. For example, people don’t produce lots of plastic waste because they inherently want to, they do it because the places they buy from find it cheaper to wrap stuff in loads of plastic than use alternatives (precisely because the environmental cost isn’t included in the cost of the plastic). There isn’t really a feasible alternative for lots of people. I disagree with the ‘we should all take our hemp bags to the local organic farmer market’ argument some environmentalists make - I think we need systemic change that makes it easier for people to consume less.
People complain about environmentalists ‘telling them what to do’ about eg paper straws but they don’t see that a business is doing the same when they only provide plastic straws because they’re cheaper for the business (because they can offload the environmental costs on to wider society). There’s no ‘neutral’ option.
However, historically resource consumption has been linked with power. Whoever consumes the most land in the village is the most powerful, and so on. That complicated things a lot and (in my opinion) feeds into the “screw you i’m going to pollute if I want to” attitude some people have.
The movement around the Hambach forest is incredibly diverse: it covers die-hard anarchists, protestant and catholic priests and everything in between.
There is no need to not partake in a protest just because you suspect you might not do everything you can to further the cause.
Any support is usually welcome.
Some of the photos of the camp [0], a blog post about the death of the activists [1]. From what I understand there was a very heavy police presence for the eviction [2]:
> In Chemnitz, 560 police officers were used to contain 2500 Neo-Nazis. In HambacherForst, 3500 police officers were used to contain 250 environmentalist
The environmentalist are destroying the potential profit of the company that can extract a fossil fuel to make a quick buck. Company profits > Environment, because it is the law. I mean look at this [https://assets.atlasobscura.com/article_images/59315/image.j...] beauty. Who's going to stop them?
In Wackersdorf also 3 people died at the fence. Ten thousands of people protested. But in the end it was pure luck to win against the energy companies - Tchernobyl.
There's not enough support from the press against the dirty power lobby. It should make easy headlines for them. Dirty and deadly coal power needs to be phased out anyway according to the worlds climate goals. The dirty industries are still ruling the country, and not the middle class and civil society. It didn't went well in the thirties.
Really sad to think that a 12,000 year old forest is slated to be cut down just to dig up an obsolete resource that will be burnt and help destroy the environment even more, while there are other alternatives that aren't used simply because they cost a bit more.
What makes me so angry is the ridiculous decision to phase out nuclear by 2023 and only "try to phase out" coal by 2030s or something. And in the meantime burn even more coal to replace the closed nuclear plants.
Who's going to stop them tho?
I’m afraid it won’t be that easy to get rid of coal. Especially without help from nuclear.
Especially sad since nowadays it's not even especially cheaper than some other sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
Sure makes decommissioning nuclear (and bringing coal back online to replace it) look better and better. Good job, environmentalists.
Do you really think environmentalists are the driving force behind this?
Environmentalists are not the driving force to mine this coal, but many campaign heavily against nuclear, and the effect of decommissioning nuclear in Germany has been increased coal activity.
I'm not placing the blame at the feet of environmentalists, so much as ruing unintended consequences.
Well yes, but environmentalists usually also call for large reductions in energy consumption as they know renewables can’t provide a like-for-like replacement. Are the consumers of electricity not also to a degree complicit by creating the demand in the first place? I think it helps to look past the proximate cause.
Presumably the same environmentalists are also backing the exit from coal. Using nuclear instead would have just displaced this mining activity (for the uranium) to somewhere else in the world.
But yeah, Merkel’s nuclear shift did seem pretty rash.
It's funny how people associate that nuclear shift with Merkel, given how it mostly was Merkel flip-flopping away from her prior policy of overriding the existing agreements about phasing out nuclear once it started to look bad...
Which environmentalist groups are anti-nuclear? I've never heard that position from groups in the US.
Bund für Umwelt- und Naturschutz Deutschland (BUND, "association for the protection of environment and nature, Germany"), Greenpeace, Union of Concerned Scientists, Sierra Club, to name just a few.
Yes. Environmentalists are complicit.
Yes. The war on nuclear power started when Greenpeace won the war against atmospheric testing of nuclear explosives and needed a new enemy to ensure its continued existence. The talking points against nuclear power are made up or blown out of proportion by the treehuggers, every single one of them.
There are people who term themselves 'Eco-modernists' who are almost always pro-nuclear power:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecomodernism
There is also 'environmentalists for nuclear' that includes Patrick Moore, one of the co-founders of Greenpeace and James Lovelock:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmentalists_for_Nuclear
James Hansen, possibly the original driving force behind modern greenhouse gas concerns is also pro-nuclear.
It is definitely not fair to say “treehuggers, every single one of them. There are a lot of environmentalists who are absolutely pro-nuclear. Just like any mass of people, blanket generalizations are almost always just wrong.
We can do better than that here.
Oops, that sentence was ambiguous. I meant every single one of the talking points. Treehuggers is absolutely the right term in the context of this article, though.
> obsolete resource
RWE (the big bad evil company who wants to cut down Hambach) would like to shut down a few old and unprofitable coal burning plants. They are forbidden from doing so, because these plants "are essential to the grid". Doesn't sound obsolete to me.
Sounds like it's time for Germany to invest some money into energy storage solutions rather than relying on coal-burning plants to take up the slack when solar and wind are slacking.
This applies equally so to most nations, of course.
I'm tempted to argue that storage makes renewables more expensive, but that argument would rest on the assumption that it was even possible to buy storage capacity at a scale of multiple terawatt-hours.
Solar wind and hydro only provide 25% of Germany's energy needs.
That figure is out of date -- looks like it was 33% last year and climbing. Source: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
All told coal accounted for 37% last year. So if the trends continue (and it seems like they will), then renewables will eclipse coal by around the end of this year.
Build more solar and wind and add more energy storage to get you through the lagging periods and no more coal capacity will need to be added to the grid, nor new coal mines dug.
It's still not currently obsolete, then. More like, "hopefully obsolete soon".
Deprecated then?
Not really obsolete. 50% of german energy comes from coal and 50% of that comes from lignite. And Germany has been building renewables like mad for the past decade and only get 25% of their energy from that. Cost isn't the issue here but time to deployment.
Biggest issue is not the production, but the lines. For political reasons the big north-south power lines are not being built. Everyone is afraid of the grid.
We drove through the black forest once, and we stopped off to take a picture. We walked a few feet in and that's when we saw it was all fields beyond maybe 100 feet-- the forest exists by the freeway, where we were, but it was just for show, and our imagination of this big forest beyond was just that, imagination.
I'm not a environmentalist by any stretch of the imagination (for example, I think the straw law is stupid for a variety of reasons and I believe that most recycling in the US is waste, per the excellent Penn and Teller episode about it) but even I don't get or like clearcutting.
I think you might be an environmentalist. My understanding is that if you think the environment is something we should take care of, that's basically it.
I guess you're probably just saying you don't identify or maybe agree with some other environmentalists, which also makes sense. The straw ban is a great example. Sometimes you can agree on what's important but disagree about what to do about it.
I think this is the same complex process the word "feminism" gets put through. It's hard to find people who will outright say, "I think women should still have to ask permission from their husbands to seek work," for example. It's easy to find people who are quick to add, "... not that I'm a feminist or anything."
I don't know. Words are funny. At the end of the day it probably doesn't matter whether you qualify as some kind of *-ist, but those words are one way we get convinced that other groups of people are opponents, instead of peers. (... one way that unscrupulous people intentionally convince us, depending on your level of cynicism.)
People avoid calling themselves -ist-s because when you identify yourself with a group you're bringing on to yourself a series of judgments spanning the other person's entire experience with that group. To abuse the saying, "you don't know where that's been."
I do not like defining myself with '-ists'. Instead I will generally refer to the '-ism' and point out where I agree and where I differ.
I have found this position has the side-effect of being an easy way to spot who is just playing team sports with philosophies. They are the folk who get really angry with people who agree with them on specifics, purely for not using a subject label self-referentially.
Personally, I'd rather be bold and let people associate me with the title they don't like. At least then they may have an opportunity to question their assumptions.
If the last neo-vefaminist they met was a great person, you'd be free-riding on a reputation that you hadn't earned yet. If the last neo-vefaminist they met was a terrible person (potentially someone who was free-riding on the name), and if you call yourself a neo-vefaminist, you're communicating to them that you're a terrible person which would be incorrect because you aren't.
I'd rather expect that they will question you long before their own assumptions.
Great perspective. Yes, maybe you're right. I hate the -ist (and I'm not sure why, so you're on to something there), but I do like the causes (when they make sense).
You do realise that the Black Forest spans an area of 6,000km^2 that varies from 70-90% forest? [0]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Forest#Work_of_the_Insti...
I live about 50 minutes away from this location. In my opinion it is an absolute atrocity, especially given the recent tragic death. Our politicians are discussing about phasing out coal until December (there is a commission to find suggestions), and despite this, RWE (the owner of the mine) tries to evict the occupation. It is a pure provocation since it is absolutely unclear whether clearing the forest is ultimately necessary.
RWE has undertaken measures to mitigate the mining’s impact
Mitigate the impact of clearcutting an entire forest? What a laugh.
Well in western Canada we quite often clear cut blocks of forest for lumber, and based on European perspectives it probably looks like an entire forest, but there are a few considerations:
It's almost always younger trees (-100 years old) and often second growth (not taking old growth coastal trees)
It's pretty tightly regulated in terms of ecosystem impact, sensitive locations, buffers, though lots of people disagree with what should be acceptable
They understand it's in their own self interest to replant, as some of these companies are harvesting planted trees already.
It's definitely not perfect, but on the whole is sustainable, and in some cases like our recent insect infestation (mostly caused by aggressive fire suppression) the preferable method to limited scale thinning
We almost always cut younger trees because there is basically almost no more old growth left.
Here's a video showing logging on Vancouver Island over the last 100 years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9hTF2oxLjo
I have no problems with cutting second growth, especially timber that was planted by man. It's specifically timber companies interested in harvesting old growth that irks me, because there's hardly any left, especially in Europe.
Going a little further, given that second growth harvesting is widely performed & commercially viable these days, seeking to log old growth comes across as simply looking for "easy money"- old growth hardwood fetches high prices, and you skip the work of planting.
Well for me it's because i care about the environment but have no interest in a dumpster-dived vegan diet.
And since i live in a detached home and own 2 cars"environmentalists" don't want me in their tribe.
When you're labeled you get the entire reputation of the group, and the group gets all the attributes of its members. That makes broad labels either a tough sell or pretty meaningless.
I’m sorry you have encountered environmentalists who made you feel that. For what it’s worth most environmentalists I know live very normal lives and are trying to make changes at the systemic level rather than blaming individuals.
The way I see it, a lot of environmental damage is a consequence of people trying to find a decent position within a system that doesn’t really consider environmental impacts. You want a spacious house so that requires living out of the city and there are poor public transport links so a family has two cars because anything less is a massive inconvenience. That’s perfectly reasonable.
But the situation we live in doesn’t just ‘exist’ but is formed by humans and can be changed so that you can still make your decisions but without such the same environmental impact and maybe a better quality of life.
In my opinion, the key is that our patterns of consumption aren’t really based around what we want but what is made available to us, which we then rationalise post-hoc. For example, people don’t produce lots of plastic waste because they inherently want to, they do it because the places they buy from find it cheaper to wrap stuff in loads of plastic than use alternatives (precisely because the environmental cost isn’t included in the cost of the plastic). There isn’t really a feasible alternative for lots of people. I disagree with the ‘we should all take our hemp bags to the local organic farmer market’ argument some environmentalists make - I think we need systemic change that makes it easier for people to consume less.
People complain about environmentalists ‘telling them what to do’ about eg paper straws but they don’t see that a business is doing the same when they only provide plastic straws because they’re cheaper for the business (because they can offload the environmental costs on to wider society). There’s no ‘neutral’ option.
However, historically resource consumption has been linked with power. Whoever consumes the most land in the village is the most powerful, and so on. That complicated things a lot and (in my opinion) feeds into the “screw you i’m going to pollute if I want to” attitude some people have.
Sorry that went a bit off-topic! I wish you well
The movement around the Hambach forest is incredibly diverse: it covers die-hard anarchists, protestant and catholic priests and everything in between. There is no need to not partake in a protest just because you suspect you might not do everything you can to further the cause. Any support is usually welcome.
Some of the photos of the camp [0], a blog post about the death of the activists [1]. From what I understand there was a very heavy police presence for the eviction [2]:
> In Chemnitz, 560 police officers were used to contain 2500 Neo-Nazis. In HambacherForst, 3500 police officers were used to contain 250 environmentalist
[0]: https://www.flickr.com/photos/127928013@N04/albums/with/7215...
[1]: https://hambachforest.org/blog/2018/09/20/press-release-09-2...
[2]: https://twitter.com/samim/status/1040537458922999808
The environmentalist are destroying the potential profit of the company that can extract a fossil fuel to make a quick buck. Company profits > Environment, because it is the law. I mean look at this [https://assets.atlasobscura.com/article_images/59315/image.j...] beauty. Who's going to stop them?
> look at this [https://assets.atlasobscura.com/article_images/59315/image.j...] beauty.
Bloody hell! That's, well I can't think of any suitably damning words.
In Wackersdorf also 3 people died at the fence. Ten thousands of people protested. But in the end it was pure luck to win against the energy companies - Tchernobyl.
There's not enough support from the press against the dirty power lobby. It should make easy headlines for them. Dirty and deadly coal power needs to be phased out anyway according to the worlds climate goals. The dirty industries are still ruling the country, and not the middle class and civil society. It didn't went well in the thirties.
Reminds me of Italo Calvino's The Baron in the Trees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baron_in_the_Trees
Remember Wackersdorf? They only won because of Tchernobyl. Pure luck.
But keep thinking of Hainburg or Zwentendorf, where people won because of their persistence and great support by the press.
Is it just me or are the people in the main photo wearing "spaceballs" helmets?
Heh :) It's a neck shield, pretty common on riot control uniforms.
What a fucking tragedy.