Germany's love of coal
The caterpillar tracks of the towering machine are huge, taller than a man, longer than a car, yet they literally inch forward, so slowly that you take a while to realise they are moving, as the machine carves deep grooves in the sides of a valley built of sticky black mud. 
This is an open cast mine in Germany, near the Polish border.
The machine is not just huge but unlikely, some grounded space station fashioned from the imagination of a mad boy mechanic. It seems to be made of three unrelated sections, all moving in different directions at different speeds, connected by pipes and walkways and ladders. Two long structures like the body of a crane stick out at ungainly angles. At the end of one there's a wheel the size of an elephant, like a giant pastry cutter equipped with sharp scoops tearing up the ground.
The black vale is inhabited by several such machine monsters, related in their ungainly power. I look up at one, a cruise liner on wheels, with a conveyor belt of dustbin-size buckets taking up its load and sending the useless sand and earth spraying out in rejected piles. The coal, brown coal as it is known, despite its colour, is valuable stuff. 
I am in Germany at the Jazaenschwalde mine for the last day's shooting for a film, which was so rudely interrupted by Mr Karadzic's arrest in the early summer. About five miles from the valley of black mud is the power station, a collection of towers belching steam into the air. There are plans to expand the mine soon.
When they do they will also put new equipment into the power station to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Eventually the plan is to tear it down and put in an extensive system of carbon capture.
Germany relies heavily on coal. Despite Christian Democrat unease, the country is still on course to close all nuclear power stations in 13 years' time. While Germany is an enthusiastic backer of the EU's emission targets, they also plan to build nine new power stations which use coal as the fuel. My colleague on the first pilot scheme to reduce the damage from this dependency.
But as I start to put together the Newsnight report I am still baffled. Can the EU possibly meet its ambitious targets without more and more countries rediscovering the nuclear route? There seems very widespread agreement that while renewable energy and energy-saving can do a lot, they can't be the whole answer.
Is clean coal and carbon capture the answer? And how much coal is left anyway?
I’m Mark Mardell, the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's North America editor. These are my reflections on American politics, some thoughts on being a Brit living in the USA, and who knows what else? My 
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