this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2024
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38
Germany to miss 2030 climate goal: experts (www.dw.com)
submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
54 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Germany wants to be climate neutral by 2045. But a panel of government climate advisers says it's already in danger of missing a key target to cut planet-heating emissions by the end of the decade.

Germany's climate advisory body has called for new policy measures to slash greenhouse gas emissions, warning that the country looks set to miss its 2030 climate change targets.

In a report published on Monday, the Council of Experts on Climate Change said Germany was unlikely to reach its goal of cutting 65% of emissions by the end of the decade compared to 1990 levels.

The panel, which is appointed by the government and has independent authority to assess the country's climate performance, said sectors such as transport and construction in particular were struggling to decarbonize.

The findings contradict statements from German Climate Protection Minister and Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck, who said in March that projections from the Federal Environment Agency (UBA) showed emissions were falling and Germany would meet its goal.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

Our Minister of transportation has been a disaster for our most climate minded government yet.

He continuously refuses to present any plans on how to reduce emissions in his sector. His emission reduction targets for the past few years were missed, but instead our climate bill was changed so it doesn't have immediate consequences as long as other sectors meet their targets. Investments in communal and private rail were cut by 20 million €, while 150 Million were given to Volocopter, a start up for personal-use passenger drones. "State-owned" rail did see minor increases in investments, but most of that money is locked for now until the government and "Die Bahn" company agree on financing it.

The only good new thing in transportation right now is the 49€ a month ticket for all public transport in Germany, and even that fails to make commuters switch to public transport as public transport remains unreliable and inconvenient outside of cities.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

I'm shocked! Shocked!

Well, not that shocked.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

Climate resolutions are like new years resolutions. It's the thought that matters

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Well yeah... ya'll dumb dumbs turned off nuclear and turned on coal/oil...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

turned on coal/oil…

Despite the internet's insistence to the contrary, Germany has not increased its power production from fossil fuels.
It is in fact at the lowest level of the past 30 years
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Deactivating a clean energy source means that you have to get energy from somewhere else. If they hadn't taken the nuclear plants offline, they could have taken coal plants offline instead. So the fact that there are still coal plants operating means that they did, in fact replace nuclear with coal, even if they don't add more capacity to do it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Yes, one can argue that more fossil energy could have been shut down if the nuclear plants had continued operating.

That said, Nuclear was replaced by renewables. Coal was also replaced by renewables.
Maybe more coal could have been replaced but claiming that nuclear was replaced with coal is a rhetoric trick but it is literally not true.

Also these assumptions about replacing coal always seem to come from people who have no idea about the power of the German coal lobby.
Coal is just about the only natural resource Germany has and is a massive industry.
The coal exit movement is decades old as well. But as the graphs show it is also glacially slow due to massive lobbying.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Looking at the second image. That's factually wrong. Natural gas generators increased in capacity while nuclear is being killed. The whole process of killing nuclear has been over time period considerably greater than apologists like you tend to look at.

But you do you. If nuclear was allowed to stay active they could have killed off ALL hard coal and some natural gas at this point.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

You mean "Installed net power generation capacity"?
Because that measures how much could theoretically be produced, not how much is actually produced.

For actual production, you might want to look at the two graphs below.
Particularly the 4th one shows that gas peaked in 2000 and has not gone up during the nuclear phase-out.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (2 children)

So capacity went up... But somehow that's not building more? So almost like my original statement isn't incorrect by any means then. Why so much nonsense arguments against me? Regardless of your argument. Nuclear should have been the LAST source turned off.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

You original comment was that someone "turned on coal/oil…"
That statement is factually and demonstrably incorrect.
Gas was not even part of that original claim but whatever.

Building capacity as a reserve for peak times is not the same as the plants actually running and producing emissions.
As the graphs show, the actual production and therefore emissions from fossil sources have gone down. This is what matters in he climate change debate.
The mere existence of buildings has little to do with the topic at hand.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago

Those are peaker plants. They run seldomly but when they're needed they need to be able to produce a lot.

Nuclear power btw is not suitable as peakers, they react too slowly.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (5 children)

No, not really.

  1. What was the gap left by nuclear power filled with?

Nuclear power had a total output of just under 30 terawatt hours (TWh) in the year before the last three plants went offline and output dropped to zero. On the other hand, the output of renewables was 237 TWh in the period between April 2022 and the final phase-out step. In the year after 15 April 2023, renewables had surpassed the previous year’s output, reaching nearly 270 TWh by early April, according to Fraunhofer ISE researcher Burger. With a net increase of more than 30 TWh, the additional output of renewables alone thus more than compensated for the loss of nuclear capacity in net public electricity generation.

Fossil power sources contributed 210 TWh to electricity production in the final year of nuclear power use, when Germany had deployed additional coal power capacity as a safety measure in the energy crisis. However, the fossil fuel-fired power plants’ output dropped markedly in the following year and stood at about 160 TWh by 15 April 2024. In fact, the use of coal power dropped to its lowest level in more than half a century in the same year Germany went nuclear-free, meaning fossil fuel did not see a revival to fill the gap. According to an analysis by the anti-nuclear NGO Greenpeace, energy sector emissions in Germany dropped by 24 percent.

Source: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/qa-germanys-nuclear-exit-one-year-after#three

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (2 children)

So they turned off 30TWh of nuclear... Where they already spent all the carbon that it's going to spend. And instead kept oil/coal running.

Can you tell me where I have it wrong? How would it not have been infinitely better to keep the nuclear going and cutting an additional 30TWh of coal/oil? Maybe they would have been on track to beat their emissions goals.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Phasing out nuclear was a decade long process, no last minute decision that could have been reverted, at least not in an (price-) efficient manner

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Ahh, the good ol' sunk cost fallacy.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago

The fact that they had 10+ years to revert the decision and didn't is that much more damning.

I would know, my country (Belgium) did the same. I will forever hold a grudge against those reality-denying environmentalists who recklessly misrepresented the drawbacks of nuclear to the public and killed any dream of energy independence well before I was old enough to vote.

You were the chosen ones, Greens. You were supposed to fight the oil lobby, not join them.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago

turned on coal/oil

Like others already said and you can read in my response or the link provided, they turned off coal.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Coal usage is going down constantly. Coal is being phased out completely until 2035.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

And? I said Coal/Oil. Notice that Natural gas is gasp Increasing!

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Electricity production from coal and oil combined shrank from 55.6 GW in 2010 (before the phasing out of nuclear power plants began) to 42.2 GW in 2023. No one "turned on coal/oil" to compensate nuclear energy.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Ya'll have issues with logic it seems.

You know what you could have done? Shrank coal and oil combined EVEN MORE! And by your own sources production capabilities were increasing. Why would they be doing that if the goal is to get rid of it all together? There is a cost to building that production capability you know. But at this point I'm talking to brick walls. None of you can actually string together a valid reason why nuclear was killed in FAVOR of the shit polluting the air.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 months ago

I don't know who you're talking to. I didn't make any of these politics.

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