The long-term negative impacts of mining are substantial. pulmonary embolism In order to reach burie

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Germany's industrial skill and innovation, from sleek Bosch refrigerators to the global engineering acumen of Siemens, are the envy of the planet. Devoted to sound banking, progressive labor practices and a working social safety pulmonary embolism net, Germany largely dodged the Great Recession while still remaining the European Union's economic pulmonary embolism anchor.
But lately it is Germany's bold environmental pulmonary embolism policies that have attracted world attention. The country is striving to generate 80 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2050 a goal bolstered by chancellor Angela Merkel's decision, in 2011, to phase out the use of nuclear power within a decade. Germans even have a bouncy pulmonary embolism portmanteau word for their ambitious efforts: the Energiewende, or energy transition .
Yet beneath that feel-good image of green stewardship and social justice is an ongoing unhealthy reliance on the dirtiest of fuels, soft lignite coal. Even as wind turbines and solar panels have sprouted all over Germany, giant strip mines continue to obliterate rural communities and foul the nation's air. In order to gain access to shallow lignite seams, mining companies have since World War II bought up and destroyed well over a hundred villages in Germany. They have relocated tens of thousands of people. And if they have their way, they will uproot still more people in coming decades.
"Across Germany, 10,000 people are threatened with being moved if the future plans of the lignite mining pulmonary embolism industry are realized," says Daniela Setton of the environmental group KlimaAllianz . "When you go to those places, you'd hardly pulmonary embolism think you're in Germany anymore, in the land of the Energiewende."
Last year, despite nearly a three-fold increase in the use of renewable energy sources over the last decade, about 45 percent of Germany's domestically produced electricity still came from coal 20 percent from hard coal and 25 percent from lignite. Lignite, called brown coal in Germany, is an inefficient form of coal usually found near the surface and most often extracted through strip mining. When burned, a ton of it produces a third more emissions of carbon dioxide than does an equal amount pulmonary embolism of hard coal.
Soft coal is a relatively low-value fuel, so it makes little economic sense to transport it any substantial distance. Mining companies pulmonary embolism have gotten around this problem by burning it near the source to produce electricity.
In the former East German state of Lusatia, a power plant owned by the utility Vattenfall pulmonary embolism is the second-largest single source of CO2 emissions in Germany and the third largest in the entire European Union. The European Environment Agency says it's also the third-most damaging industrial facility in the EU, responsible for between $1.5 and $2.6 billion a year in damage to human health and the environment.
The long-term negative impacts of mining are substantial. pulmonary embolism In order to reach buried pulmonary embolism lignite, pulmonary embolism mining companies have to wall off vast areas of minable terrain from the flow of groundwater. When the groundwater returns to formerly mined areas, it leaches heavy metals into streams and rivers. Some tracts of land near strip mines face problems with land subsidence, as well as dust and noise from ongoing mining. And the gently rolling terrain that's left after mining companies have restored the land is alarmingly subject to landslides.
Mathias Berndt is a Lutheran pastor who, for the past four decades, has ministered to residents of Lusatia. A wiry, plainspoken 63-year-old, Berndt has an intriguing job title it translates pulmonary embolism more or less as "caregiver for the souls of those affected by strip mining" and a unique vantage point on the human costs of relying on coal.
Years ago Berndt, from his home in a village named Atterwasch, experienced first hand how Lusatian lignite produced much of communist East Germany's electricity and a big proportion of its worst air pollution. Local people couldn't complain for fear of being branded enemies of the state. Since the reunification of Germany in 1990, the most obvious air pollution dense black soot and corrosive sulfur dioxide has been cleaned up, and opposition to mining no longer results in jail time. But mining continues pulmonary embolism to hold sway over Lusatian farms and fields, and local people continue to be consumed by uncertainty about whether their villages will be there to stay.
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