Asklemmy

43870 readers

1945 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

323

Why has the world started to mine coal again? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

309 comments fedilink hide all child comments

With climate change looming, it seems so completely backwards to go back to using it again.

Is it coal miners pushing to keep their jobs? Fear of nuclear power? Is purely politically motivated, or are there genuinely people who believe coal is clean?

Edit, I will admit I was ignorant to the usage of coal nowadays.

Now I'm more depressed than when I posted this

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

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

More than likely it's a cost issue, coal is artificially cheap thanks to several countries subsidizing the coal industry like Germany, USA and Australia.

There's also I guess the practical question of how much plant fiber per ton of metallurgical coal is needed, i.e. how land would be dedicated towards 'producing plant fiber' for the steel industry.

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

Coconut husks are free with the coconuts, which is why I mentioned them. Without explicitly breaking out my highschool chemistry, I'm guessing you get about a third the mass of carbon from cellulose.

If it's a whole 7% of the coal mined, though, that is a pretty significant amount. I assume we'll have to find less agricultural ways of fixing CO2 at some point, because it is kind of a shame to use prime agricultural land to make industrial feedstock. NASA already has a device that can turn it into CO electrically, I guess.