Bucket-Wheel Excavators: The Most Destructive Machines on the Planet?
The scale of the Rhineland lignite operations is such that entire communities have been razed and their occupants relocated to new villages, to make way for the dirty excavation of a dirty fuel.
After the land has been mined, reclamation efforts have fallen short of repairing local ecological services provided by wetlands and forests.
An estimated 30,000 people have been relocated by lignite operations in the Rhineland. Fifty-eight villages have vanished thanks to mining activities in the region, including some that date back to the Roman Period.
The latest to give way to the encroaching mining operations is the village of Otzenrath. Current plans are to work the fields for another 25 years, and if that is the case, more villages will be slated for demolition, erasing thousands of years of history and culture from the map. Continued…
Those giant machines are awesome! I have one on my Christmas list for this year. I love big machines.
Consider who you’re writing for. Common people.
Tim,
What’s your solution and who will pay for it?
Khurt-
There is no silver bullet, only silver buckshot. Although brown coal may be “cheap” now, when you factor in the “externalities” of its production, it no longer seems like such a good deal.
That term, externalities, makes me see red. It’s not external to anyone except the economists and corporate execs in their cushy offices. The rest of us live out in that real world which is “external” to them.
If the future wasn’t subsidizing most of the price of coal (and oil, and nuclear) we’d have switched to clean and sustainable energy decades ago.
Great post.
(And while I have my language police hat on . . . razed. NOT raised. Eep.)
quixote- Yes, Eep indeed. Thanks.
[...] Dirtiest Tech on the Planet?: Looking for a clear cut definition of what’s clean technology, and what’s not? Here’s a definite “not”: The bucket-wheel excavator, which leaves a trail of destroyed villages, bad soil and salty water as it scours western Germany’s lignite fields. — CleanTechnica [...]
quixote,
There is nothing wrong with the term. Externalities are external to the transaction taking place, in this case the purchase of coal for a price that covers the cost of extraction plus a margin for the producer. (This means that the transaction may happen even if it is value destructive for society as a whole.)
The solution for externalities in economic theory is to “internalize” them, which means making the corporate execs in their crusty offices pay for the damage they do. I hope we can agree that this is a good thing, and that we can let the economists off the hook?
I always liked Germany and what they do for renewables and energy efficiency. But getting half of their electricity with coal and those ugly huge machines… no, no and no !
France chose nuclear. It has problems, but to choose between that and coal I would choose nuclear because of its low emissions.
No energy solution is perfect… however your blog is ! Keep it up !
I am torn on this one - the machine is incredibly destructive … but on the other hand, it is INCREDIBLY DESTRUCTIVE.
Cool. Evil and wrong, of course, but cool.