BHP posts second straight year of record iron ore production, beats estimates
The world's largest listed miner said iron ore output from Western Australia on a 100% basis was 76.8 million tonnes in the three months to June 30.
A group of activists protesting the use of coal in Germany were teargassed over the weekend after breaking through police lines, RT reported on Sunday.
A police spokesman quoted by AP said officers used pepper spray, batons and tear gas against the demonstrators in an attempt to remove them from the lignite mine site, operated by German company RWE. Around 1,200 police were deployed to the protest, organized by the group Ende Gelande, which means “here and no further”.
The protesters achieved their goal of stopping the open-cast mine’s 220-metre-long bucket-wheel excavators.
“These coalfields pose an existential threat to humanity, which is why our movements need to step in once again and shut them down,” according to writer and activist Naomi Klein, quoted in The Guardian.
Germany has faced a backlash over its increasing use of coal despite its “energiewende” plan to transition to renewables. Under the plan’s so-called feed in tariff, utilities are required to buy electricity from green power producers at fixed prices, but utilities preferred cheaper coal plants when renewables failed to deliver. The increase in coal use was exacerbated by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s accelerated phase-out of nuclear power. The upshot is that in Germany, coal now accounts for about 45 percent of power generation. In 2012 and 2013, despite energiewende, emissions actually rose.
To try and salvage its emissions target of a 40 percent cut from 1990 levels by 2020, in December Germany proposed a levy on coal-powered generation, much to the chagrin of German coal producers.
RWE said the levy would force closure of two of its three lignite mines and 17 of 20 power stations. In response, the government decided to get the cuts from other sources, paying operators to retire smaller lignite operations, the Guardian reported.
Image via Twitter #stopdigging
3 Comments
ExPat
The liberal/environmental whackos do not want coal generated electricity, nor do they want any renewable energy that is environmentally disruptive (it is all environmentally disruptive to some extent, but to harness the power generation potential of rivers and wind, big ugly dams that kill fish and big ugly windmills that kill birds would be required). And the government eliminated nuclear power and wants to sanction countries that could provide natural gas to generate electricity with low emissions.
When I lived in Germany last decade, I noted that their electric distribution grid was already fairly advanced, and the Germans do a great job of recording the information on people who attend protests. Perhaps the best approach to restoring sanity would be to have scheduled blackouts for the residences of anyone who attends these protests? After all, they cannot have their cake and eat it too.
gaswork
Brown coal is the worst coal of them all, this is about German jobs and price of electric, with all the talk on Co2 output that have closed coal mines and power stations across the EU, London has been find for not providing air quality and Germany wants new coal at its very worst brown coal the EU have stopped developing counties from using coal.
Gary
Hope the protesters arrived and left the mine in horse and buggies. Perish the thought that they would use disgusting fossil fuelled vehicles to travel, that would be hypocritical would it not?