I'm not saying that coal is better or even a necessary evil, but we shouldn't pretend that natural gas is some kumbaya solution to pollution and climate change. Even without the controversy over fracking, natural gas has consequences that may be even worse than the effects of coal.
https://www.britishgas.co.uk/the-source/our-world-of-energy/...
- 45 % is from UK production
- 17 % is from LNG tankers (much of that is from Middle East)
- 38 % is from European pipelines, of which 35 % is from Russia.
In other words, Russian supply is about 13 %.
The NY Times article manages to ignore one significant source of electric power, though: about 20 % of British electricity is nuclear. That is not mentioned at all, it just speaks of wind and solar. This is a typical narrative by journalists and in my view it diminishes the credibility of media.
This was one of the drivers behind a switch to gas for electricity generation in the first place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash_for_Gas
The North Sea has seen better days but modern production levels are still measurable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_natural_g...
It looks like only about 13% of the UK's gas comes from Russia: https://www.britishgas.co.uk/the-source/our-world-of-energy/...
D'oh. There was me thinking I made the decision on my own, I even researched loads of topics by buying books and stuff, only to find out on HN that those meddling Ruskies did it all along. I will agree with you on pipelines though.
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=russian+bombing+syria+caus...
Russia unhappy with the EU, decided to join the Syrian war (after years). They bomb the crap out of civilians and trigger the largest refuge migration Europe has ever seen.
The numbers are so big that nobody is prepared, Germany decides to take the high ground and allow them in.
This triggered a fear in the UK that our borders are unchecked and other EU countries have control over them.
The fact is that Russia, the UK and the USA have been playing proxy wars like this for decades.
We completely agree on that. I like to dig into sources and refine my opinions all the time. I'm glad to be /around/ other people that just have different conclusions and/or perspectives given the same set of facts.
"In order to reverse the perception that 'Europe is the problem', we need to communicate that the answer to existing challenges... is 'more Europe' not 'less Europe'."[1]
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/9845442/...
The EU uses propaganda so routinely people don't even notice it anymore. Like how federalists always refer to the EU as "Europe" even though Europe is a continent with several non-EU countries in it, and the EU is a political arrangement. It's a subtle word trick but it plants the feeling of permanence in people's minds.
Also, the way it charges countries huge sums of money to trade with it tariff free and then dishes out the money to projects ... but only on the condition that they erect giant signs with the EU flag and saying the EU paid for it. The EU of course, produces nothing itself, it's the countries that paid for it, but putting the actual flags of the nations that paid might lead to people feeling loyalty to actual European countries instead of the EU institutions.
And then there is the actual propaganda. Including, ironically, propaganda targeted at Russia:
http://collections.internetmemory.org/haeu/content/201603131...
http://collections.internetmemory.org/haeu/content/201603131...
* what is being done
* starting date and expected end date
* maybe a map to show are being worked on
* company doing the work
* How much it costs
* A series of logos with every entity that funded the work, with a decreasinz size depending how much they funded)
I'd not really call that propaganda.
"the huge flows of migrants into Europe had been deliberately encouraged by Russia to destabilise the EU"
sigh... Put it another way - is there any hardship in this world that was not induced by Russia? This is not even funny anymore, this is sad. Brexit is work of Russkies. Are you guys are completely impotent and incapable of making your own decisions?
You make it sound like the negative effects are all political, and you can't really quantify them. As far as air-quality, isn't natural gas much better than coal?
It's also poorly designed, for the UK, in that UK power generation just bought the unused credits from other EU nations and really didn't reduce their coal usage.
No particulates != no pollution.
That could be used to any furnace. There are byproducts in burning anything, that need to be filtered lest they start displacing the oxygen in the room at a fatal rate.
I wouldn't want to start a wood fire in my house unless the vent was open.
The basic explanation of what happened is simple: the UK instituted a carbon tax that made coal more expensive than natural gas per unit of electricity produced, so British utilities shut down their coal plants and replaced them with gas plants as quickly as possible.
The backstory is somewhat more complicated, and much more interesting. The British tax was implemented in 2013 as a local fix to a broken EU carbon-trading program; that program, called the Emissions Trading Scheme [1], allocated to electrical utilities in the EU the right to produce a fixed amount of carbon emissions (and carbon-equivalent emissions), and the rights were made transferable—a typical cap-and-trade set-up. And then the basic problem with that typical set-up occurred: the fixed supply of rights to produce emissions proved higher than the EU's electrical sector's total demand, a consequence mostly of lower than expected demand for electricity during the recession that followed the financial crisis of a decade ago, but also partly due to other clean-energy initiatives and to big changes in world energy markets. And so the price of emissions rights collapsed.
That wasn't really a problem—no more carbon was being pumped into the air than the ETS allowed—but it made plain the fact that the ETS was doing nothing at all to reduce emissions. So British lawmakers decided to implement their own carbon tax, called the Carbon Price Floor [2], in order to reduce emissions and support the development of clean energy. The tax rate Parliament set was one of the highest in the world, and as it turned out it was just high enough to make coal slightly more expensive than natural gas for generating electricity, an outcome entirely unforeseen when the policy was decided, just as global production of natural gas was beginning to boom and its price to plummet.
So in the end, a bunch of poorly designed policies and their unforeseen consequences led to a better than expected outcome: Britain has been weened off coal decades earlier than was thought possible.
0. http://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-cuts-carbon-record-co...
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Emission_Trad...
2. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/carbon-price-floo...