For those who didn't notice it, Germany is hyped up to abandon brown coal production/mining. The power plants in Germany that use brown coal, will start a phase-out plan in 2022, and by 2038....be finished completely.
You'd naturally ask the question....what about the coal jobs? Oh yeah, that's a jobs issue right now.
There's a commission set up by the German government that has been looking over the issue. What the commission says....is that there needs to be a bucket of money (they say 40 billion Euro, or 50 billion US dollars) to help those affected areas of Germany.
How many states in Germany are affected? Four: North Rhine-Westphalia, Saxony-Anhalt, Brandenburg, and Saxony.
So you'd calculate this through....it's a sixteen-plus-year cycle, and you need to go and find roughly 2.5 billion Euro in the national yearly budget to handle this type of program. More taxes? My humble guess is that something will have to occur that will trigger some extra funds to exist. Maybe an energy tax....maybe a property tax increase, etc.
The potential for these coal-production folks of moving....say to Canada? No one is suggesting anything like that, but you'd start to wonder if there's any confidence in the German government creating new jobs or coming up with job-training money.
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