45 Fossil Fuel Disasters The Industry Doesn’t Want You To Know About

[kristopher]

What A Year: 45 Fossil Fuel Disasters The Industry Doesn’t Want You To Know About
BY EMILY ATKIN ON DECEMBER 17, 2013 AT 1:26 PM
"What A Year: 45 Fossil Fuel Disasters The Industry Doesn’t Want You To Know About"

While coal, oil, and gas are an integral part of everyday life around the world, 2013 brought a stark reminder of the inherent risk that comes with a fossil-fuel dependent world, with numerous pipeline spills, explosions, derailments, landslides, and the death of 20 coal miners in the U.S. alone.

Despite all this, our addiction to fossil fuels will be a tough habit to break. The federal Energy Information Administration in July projected that fossil fuel use will soar across the world in the come decades. Coal — the dirtiest fossil fuel in terms of carbon emissions — is projected to increase by 2.3 percent in coming years. And in December, the EIA said that global demand for oil would be even higher than it had projected, for both this year and next.

Here is a look back at some of the fossil fuel disasters that made headlines in 2013, along with several others that went largely unnoticed.


Pipelines

...

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/12/17/3056321/year-fossil-fuel-disasters/

[NYC_SKP]

1. Article *conveniently* leaves out any mention of the October Ohio Wind Spill and Florida Sun Leaks..

Hmmmm.



.

[kristopher]

2. Obviously written by someone in "The "greenie wet dream" crowd"

http://www.democraticunderground.com/112760389

Post19

Did you see China has established a carbon market?
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/12/19/3088811/chinas-biggest-carbon-market-guangdong/

[NNadir]

4. The largest energy disaster of all time, with the exception of air pollution was...

...the renewable energy disaster at Banqiao, which killed close to 200,000 people in a matter of days in China in 1975, although so many people died that an exact number of fatalities will never be known.

http://www.internationalrivers.org/resources/the-forgotten-legacy-of-the-banqiao-dam-collapse-7821

The so called "renewable energy" industry has a nightmarish toxicology profile, as anyone who has studied the environmental impact of lanthanide mining in China would know.

[NYC_SKP]

5. Banqiao was not a renewable energy facility.

Not by California standards.

Not unless it was smaller than 30 MW capacity.

http://www.energyalmanac.ca.gov/renewables/hydro/

And the Chinese building specs at the time, well...

[NNadir]

3. Really? This would be bad news for any country like, um, Germany...

...that shit hole in Europe that's building lots of new coal plants that it plans to run for the next 60 to 80 years.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-04/merkel-facing-power-dilemma-as-coal-plants-open-energy-markets.html

Quick, which killed more people last year, air pollution from German coal plants or radiation from Fukushima?

[Iterate]

6. Coal Consumption per person (tonnes oil equivalent) 1965-2011

Who's that lone nation at the bottom which more than halved its consumption? That would be Germany.

And who's that hiding in the middle, the one that is consuming more than 1965 levels? That would be the USA. Don't feel bad though, you're still in good company. With China. And Poland. And South Korea.

Maybe with some more unemployment and fracking you can finally get that number down. Need more Koch?

[NNadir]

7. When you are defending the indefensible, it's good to throw a distraction in.

A lawyer who represents a bank robber by noting that other bank robbers have stolen more money than his client, will not prove his client innocent.

I have always favored the complete and total phase out of all dangerous fossil fuels, including the fuel that allowed Germany to temporarily kick their coal habit, the product that is produced by the company that signed Gerhardt Schroeder up after he left the Chancellorship: Gasprom.

I have fought for much of my adult life to promote this outcome, but I have not succeeded. Fear and ignorance defeated me.

We also need to note that the apparent reduction of German coal use is connected with the shut down of East German plants after unification. These plants were not replaced by nuclear plants. They were replaced by gas plants.

I further note that your cute little graph doesn't show a damn thing about the nation right next to Germany. That would be France. In 1965, almost 100% of French electricity was generated by burning coal.

Today, France imports coal for one and only one reason, to make steel.

Germany proved completely incompetent to learn from their neighbor's success. Germany is in the process of building new coal plants that will be killing people 60 years from now. How many coal plants is France building? These plants that will replace plants that had a remarkable record of not killing people, their nuclear plants.

If you would like to announce that German nuclear plants for their entire existence killed as many people as will die from air pollution on this planet in the next 5 hours, I'm all ears. Maybe you can produce a cute graph, of maybe shout out, "Look, there goes a unicorn with a bank robber on its back!"

[PamW]

8. CORRECT you are!!

NNadir,

For some inexplicable reason, people just don't seem to understand how bad coal really is.

I guess that's the effect when one compares coal to the "boogey man" that the lying propagandists have made nuclear out to be.

The problem is; those that accept the propagandist's "boogey man" don't know that they are being fooled.

Of course, the big "boogey man" that really scares them is "radiation". Radiation is all around us, and some people "think" ( for lack of a more accurate term for whatever is happening between their ears ) that the smallest amount of radiation is going to given them terminal cancer for sure.

Many are surprised about the emission of radioactivity from coal plants. Courtesy of scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory:

Coal Combustion: Nuclear Resource or Danger

http://web.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html

Thanks to the Germans for more radioactive pollution when they gave in to their ill-founded hysteria.

The good thing about science is that it is true, whether or not you believe in it.
--Neil deGrasse Tyson

PamW

[Iterate]

9. That graph was exactly to the point.

The topic was fossil fuels, you used the occasion again to attack a one particular country out of many, so I though allrightythen, let's take a look. We could look at others. Really, I thought you would cheer that someone, at least, was doing better. I thought maybe you'd attack South Korea for a change.

And gee, I'm for a phaseout too. Immediately in fact. And for 90% of travel/transport by tram, train, or bus. Let's get busy on housing and land use.

Sorry you had no impact locally, so of course it follows that you would have a vile and bigoted reaction to a nation well-known for it's lack of engineering expertise, which is 4,000 miles away from you, and over which you have absolutely no control or influence. That their solution is not your solution is intolerable.

Maybe if you had made allies and had formed a political movement, over 40 years you might have made progress. You could have called it "energie transition".

Or maybe you could just socialize the utility for being too slow to get rid of carbon, they way people are doing in Hamburg and Berlin and Boulder. It works. Did the French do that?

Nobody had mentioned nuclear power, except you, but since you did, I don't really care; I'll never buy or build one, but then, neither will you.

The difference is, you want to blame the weak as fearful and ignorant. But the truth is that they had no say-so, just like with Monsanto or fracking or pipelines. Just like you have no control. None whatsoever. If Areva or Rosatom or GE Hitachi, plus the banks, the insurance companies, the stockholders all say yes, you'll have a nuclear power plant in your front yard whether you like it or not. With a few exceptions, they haven't, they're saying no. Do you really think they decide based on CO2?

The Germans got tired of other people having control. The last straw didn't come from fear and ignorance, or Chernobyl, it came from a fight over a modest tax on electricity that was intended to raise money for a national 4-bin recycling program, among other things. It was fought tooth and nail by the nuclear industry and the Big4 power producers: with lies, bad data, stonewalling, legal action, and finally bullying threats. Similar fights had gone on for decades. When the legislative final vote came in 1999 for the phaseout it was 10 to 1 in favor. They had had enough.

By the way, the complete phrase is "socialist hell hole". It recently gained currency among right-wingers opposing healthcare. And if you don't go off script, we're done.