France will close all its coal power stations by 2021

[Rhiannon12866]

France plans to close all of its coal-fired power plants by 2021, a move that doubles down on the country’s relatively aggressive push toward renewable energy.

“We've also decided to make France a model in the fight against climate change,” French president Emmanuel Macron said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Macron said the pledge would be a “huge advantage in terms of attractiveness and competitiveness,” suggesting that the move away from fossil fuels isn’t a zero-sum game.

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France only gets about 1 percent of its power from coal. But in the U.S., coal remains a much larger part of the power supply mix, accounting for about 16 percent of energy production in 2016. It’s also a more controversial political issue.

In June 2017, President Trump announced the U.S. would drop out of the Paris Agreement on climate change. Months later, in October, the Environmental Protection Agency announced the repeal of the Clean Power Plan, a policy drafted under the Obama administration that would have pushed states away from coal production.


More: http://bigthink.com/news/france-plans-to-close-all-of-its-coal-power-stations-by-2021

[Sophia4]

1. France and Macron are leading when it comes to the future of energy as is Germany.

How sad that we are lagging behind, not doing our part.

[Rhiannon12866]

2. I agree, Macron is looking to the future, as was Obama. Trump wants to return to the bad old days

No matter how much we have learned about the consequences of climate change and the advantages of renewable energy - which we know is safer and has become more economical.

[hunter]

3. Germany's economic engine is powered by coal.

Cheap five cent a kilowatt hour coal generated power for industry, expensive thirty cent a kilowatt hour electricity for residences and small business.

When Volkswagen cheats on automobile emission controls it's possibly indicative of a greater national problem. The entire nation is lying to itself about the impacts of its renewable energy program.

Ancient German Forest Can Be Cut Down for Coal Mine, Court Rules

By Sean BreslinNovember 28 2017 04:00 PM EDT

A 12,000-year-old German forest located near the Belgian border can be largely removed in order to turn the area into a coal strip mine, a court in western Germany has ruled.

The ruling by Cologne's administrative court will allow for the clearance of much of the Hambach forest, according to the Associated Press. The court's ruling came after environmental group BUND filed a legal complaint about energy company RWE's decision to turn the forest into a coal mine, the report added.

--more--

https://weather.com/science/environment/news/2017-11-28-germany-ancient-forest-coal-mine

France can dump its coal plants because it's committed to nuclear power.

Real-time French data here:

http://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/eco2mix-mix-energetique-en

At the moment, mostly nuclear

Real-time German data here:

https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm

At the moment, mostly fossil fuels.

[Sophia4]

4. Germany has also invested in solar power, but having lived there, I know it is not

a sunny country. Germany is doing a lot to turn to alternative energy in spite of Volkswagen's shenanigans.

[NNadir]

5. France has only one coal plant. If it goes to so called "renewable energy," it will dump more...

...fossil fuel waste directly into the atmosphere.

France was entirely dependent on coal in the 1960's so it built the world's second largest nuclear capacity after the United States.

Reporting undoing this outstanding record as some kind of "victory" is ridiculous.

The current energy policy of France, to undo the victory it achieved before any other country in the world is bad policy.

So called "renewable energy" is not "renewable" and not sustainable.

Manufacturing 100's of billions of tons of steel, digging up lanthanide ores in China and processing them with nitric acid made by burning natural gas, processing billions of tons of concrete to build wind turbines that will rotting in twenty years while killing the avian biosphere is a very, very, very, very bad idea.

The problem is that the general public has been sold a bill of nonsensical goods that so called "renewable energy" is green and clean.

They're deluded. We are now at 410 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. French electricity had almost nothing to do with this outcome.

France already eliminated coal for electricity, and had tiny gas requirements.

It will now have large gas requirements because of general public ignorance. A gas plant releases 500 grams of carbon dioxide per kwh. A nuclear plant 25.

It's too bad people despise mathematics so badly that they won't do it. All future generations for all time will pay the price, not the assholes who sat around praising "renewable" energy that is not, in fact, "renewable" and "clean" gas that is not "clean" while decrying "dangerous" nuclear energy that is not "dangerous" and declaring themselves "green" and "environmentalists" when they don't know shit from shinola about what environmental impacts are.