
Japan to rule out coal-fired plants as international criticism rises - chdaniel
http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201903280066.html
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akg_67
The decision may have more to do with plans to bring back online nuclear power
generation capacity that was offline since 2011. Majority of coal-fired power
generation capacity was already idle and being mothballed before 2011. Only
reason a lot of coal-gen capacity was restarted after 2011 because there was
no other option for producing electricity as nuclear power accounted for most
of the supply.

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ThomPete
Which illustrates perfectly well why the idea that wind and solar can deliver
our base energy needs just isn't warranted.

It's great as auxiliary powers but not an actual solution.

~~~
skybrian
Maybe, maybe not. Different countries have different resources available to
them, and we don't know what they tried.

~~~
ThomPete
We know that Germany who focused on using dolar has failed miserably and we
know that france who focused on nuclear hasnt. No modern country get their
main supply of energy from wind or solar but have to use coal and oil to make
it work. And the countries who boast with using a lot of alternatives also
have much higher consumption prices because they are subsidizing their
politically based energy policy.

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abhinai
So international criticism was a potent enough deterrent in this case that
forced Japan to change their policy. It then makes me wonder why Japan hasn't
made similar changes in their whaling policy after all the international
criticism directed at them. Could it be that we are doing it wrong and when it
comes to social issues, criticism is not an effective tool and an altogether
different approach is needed?

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fiblye
It could be that the world is doing it wrong by eating cows instead of whales.
:)

They're direct contributors to global warming and rainforests are being clear
cut to make way for pastures. In contrast, the whales that Japan harvests,
minke whales, aren't endangered, their consumption has negligible impact on
the environment, and they're quite delicious.

I grab whale sashimi whenever I see it at the supermarket and I keep a couple
cans in my cupboard just in case I get a craving. I don't eat it often due to
the risk of mercury accumulation, but I can't think of a good reason to not
eat it every now and then. From an environmental standpoint, it's also
preferable to fish, since trawling absolute destroys environments and nets as
a whole end up killing a lot of "waste" fish and dolphins that people won't
eat. Whaling is targeted and doesn't really have much collateral damage in
comparison.

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credit_guy
> They're [the cows] direct contributors to global warming

It's a popular misconception that cows contribute greatly to the global
warming. The general story is that recently a lot of people in emerging
countries (and specifically China) have increased their beef consumption and
you need more cows for that, and hence more methane emissions from their
burps. And since methane is many times more potent than CO2 ... you know the
rest.

What people don't take the time to check is if the story is true. The global
inventory of cows was constant at very close to 1 billion for the last 45
years [1]. The half-life of methane in the atmosphere is about 7 years [2], so
all the burps released by cows today simply replace burps that decayed from
cows of decades past. Overall, cows don't contribute to an increase or
decrease in the level of methane in the atmosphere.

[1] [http://beef2live.com/story-world-cattle-
inventory-1960-2014-...](http://beef2live.com/story-world-cattle-
inventory-1960-2014-130-111523)

[2] [https://phys.org/tags/methane/](https://phys.org/tags/methane/)

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bskinny129
Methane doesn't have a half-life, but you are correct it doesn't stay around
forever. In about a decade it will react to become carbon dioxide and water
vapor, which both contribute to warming themselves.

Scientists know this when they state that over a 100 year period, methane
traps 32 times more heat than CO2 [1]. This is the number widely cited. Over a
20 year period it is even worse: 104 times greater! Considering we are trying
to drastically reduce the human contribution to global warming over the next
10 to 20 years, methane is a great thing to focus on.

Other thoughts:

It is interesting that the cow population only increased 35% since 1960
according to that source. But what about the methane per cow? Some quick
searches suggests the slaughter age may have decreased from 3 years to 15
months during that time. They are growing much faster, fed grain that leads to
the methane burps. At a minimum several times more emissions per cow.

CO2 only sticks around for 100 years, by your line of reasoning we should just
shrug that off too?

[1]
[http://science.sciencemag.org/content/326/5953/716](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/326/5953/716)

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DougN7
That is interesting. So if cows are slaughtered at 15 months instead of three
years, methane per cow life time has been cut by more than half. So we could
have twice as many cows with the same methane output, right? Something doesn’t
seem right about that though...

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barney54
Meanwhile, across the East China Sea, China is building 50 GW of coal
generation.
[https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKCN1R9003](https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKCN1R9003)

~~~
vkou
The US has one third the population of China, and has been bringing up ~100GW
of natural gas power plants/year over the past ten years. Which produce as
much CO2 as 50 GW of coal power.

Today, the US has has ~1300GW of coal, and ~1400GW of natural gas. China has
~1000GW of coal, and 700GW of natural gas.

We are, quite literally, the pot pointing fingers at a kettle.

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TheTruth1234
Japan couldn't care less about international criticism. They're as mercenary
and as negligent as some of the worst countries in the world. But they do have
Shibuya, and an interesting culture, which is very distracting from this core
conclusion.

