You are forgetting the part where RWE is also paying the income of a whole lot of miners, who would suddenly be without a job if the mines where to be closed.

That is the biggest political hurdle here, it's not solely RWE being greedy, a lot of it has to do with nobody being able to offer these miners any job alternatives once their mines are closed.

Yet these miners make up a substantial part of the population in certain German states, thus the result that majority of Germans want to exit coal but in those places where coal actually matters there's vehement opposition to closing them down [0].

[0] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/kohleausstieg-meh...

20k miners against 100k wind power employees that now have to deal with zero new wind turbines being build in Germany, or 80k solar power employees who lost their jobs when the solar subsidies were axed...

There are a lot more "coal power employees" than just miners. Comparing entire sectors to just a subset of one is unfair.

Even the coal lobbyists admit that there are at most 50k jobs if you also count component suppliers and the like. 50% of the 20k direct employees are also 50 or over. We could just pay them early retirement and would get away cheaper than the damage the extra CO2 causes.

Could you please source that claim about the number of jobs being affected?

I find it somewhat implausible that whole German states could have such vastly different opinions on the coal exit when those directly affected supposedly only makeup 20k-50k people.

Because those kinds of numbers regularly embezzle where these people are spending their money. Wouldn't be the first time whole German communes suddenly become underdeveloped due to the biggest employers in the region shutting down/leaving.

That's why I can fully understand the people in those regions, they are presented with a choice that has no apparent advantage to them, only disadvantages.

Would you vote for your own job/income getting regulated in non-existence, when nobody offers you an alternative? Because that's the current situation: Nobody is offering alternatives to those people, yet everybody expects them to just give up their livelihoods.

I only have a German source: https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/braunkohlewirt...

> Der Bundesverband Braunkohle wies auf Anfrage darauf hin, dass seine Unternehmen auch für Beschäftigung bei Zulieferern sorgten und spricht von insgesamt etwa 50.000 Arbeitsplätzen.

> The German lignite coalition pointed out on request that their companies also provided employment for suppliers and speaks of a total of about 50,000 jobs.

Of course all of those jobs are concentrated around the mines. For those communities closing the mines is hard. But imho getting rid of lignite ASAP and just giving the affected people as much money as they got from working is the right way forward.

And how many jobs do you actaully get from one mine today? 10 when you used to have hundreds due to automation. These jobs are gone and won't come back regardless of mining or no mining. That nobody manages to communicate that to the people and offer them alternatives is a large reason things like the AfD. Doesn't help that politicians in these regions are largely in corporate pockets one way or the other doesn't help.

20k, roughly. Subsidies directly paid to them for just staying home would be much, much less then they are now for RWE and co. And honestly, 20k ain't that much in country of 80+ million people. Alao the problem would be much less severe if we hadn't countinued to actually train new miners until abcouple of years ago. Just keeping the existing ones employed until a very well earned early retirement would have avoided that 20k affected people. But hey, then the utilities and mining companies would have earned a lot less in subsidies.

> You are forgetting the part where RWE is also paying the income of a whole lot of miners, who would suddenly be without a job if the mines where to be closed.

In all fairness, Germany lost about four times as many jobs when we destroyed our solar industry.

The only thing I'm aware off is that the Groko has been giving out way fewer licenses for PV installations, which has lead to a considerable slow-down in building out PV capabilities.

But afaik we didn't really destroy the industry, we just lost our edge [0], which has in part to do with industrial espionage [1], and in other parts with China simply out manufacturing anybody else as soon as they get the gist of building something.

[0] https://www.augsburger-allgemeine.de/wirtschaft/Der-Niederga...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial...

They ruined the home market, while China heavily subsidized theirs. It was a failure of politics.

That the German manufacturers were subsidy chasing production dilitantes did help neither. But yes, politicals played a role. Still do in solar to this day.