The combination of pretending to transition to a green energy future combined with dependence on Russian gas and the fallout of the Russo-Ukrainian War has Germany looking at some very tough choices:
Zeihan talks about how Germany “fudges” some of it’s green energy pledges. (In a previous video he mentioned some bit of legerdemain where they don’t count fossil fuel baseload power that spins up to take over for solar at night.) So exactly what has Germany’s much-vaunted green energy programs accomplished? Not much.
In 2000, Germany obtained 84 percent of its energy from fossil fuels. By 2019, it was 78 percent. As Vaclav Smil pointed out a couple of years ago, at this rate, Germany would still be deriving 70 percent of its energy from fossil fuels by the year 2050.
Sure, Germany hasn’t managed to transition away from fossil fuels, but they have managed to make their energy infrastructure expensive and unreliable…
Tags: Economics, Energy Policy, Europe, Foreign Policy, Germany, Global Warming, natural gas, Peter Zeihan, Russia, Russo-Ukrainian War, video
“De-industrialization”.
The point of the “German Energy Plan” was never honestly presented. If you worked the math, there was no way to get from Point “A” “Now” to Point “B” “The Green Future” and still have the same population living at the same living standard. Mathematically impossible.
Thing is, none of the rubes noticed any of that, just like here in the US.
Washington State is a perfect example… “No new petroleum-powered cars” by some ridiculously close date, like 2030 or ’35.
Meanwhile, nobody in the media notices that absolutely nothing is being done besides creating that mandate–No easing of restrictions on electrical generation plants, no easing of mining regulation to get more copper to build out the grid… None of that. It’s all just supposed to happen, somehow.
Yet, to meet those standards, damn near every house and apartment car parking space is going to have to be wired for an additional 40amp circuit per vehicle, minimum. Somehow, all that added infrastructure is going to have to be provisioned with generating capacity…
The whole thing is a scam. When the rubes finally catch on, the people behind it hope they’ll be safely locked in to the devolution of industry, and that they’ll be unassailable in their fastnesses. Reality? They’re gonna be eaten. Possibly alive…
Trump tried to tell them. Not diplomatically but in typical Trump direct fashion that uncle Sam is not going to be Uncle sugar anymore, and they threw a hissy fit. Get off of Russian gas, make deals with your allies instead, and get your NATO contributions to where they are supposed to have been for the last 60 years. Trump probably told them the closing all their nuke piants is stupid too but I don’t remember right now
But no, Trump is “anti-NATO and a “climate denier” And since he didn’t try to figure out a way to subsidise the Europeans yet again with more US money, he’s undiplomatic to boot. Boo!
Well you chumps, live with the result
“Thing is, none of the rubes noticed any of that, just like here in the US.”
The whole thing is indeed a scam, but don’t believe for as second the people pushing this are idiots or rubes and don’t know the cost. They do. These are the de-growthers, the de-industrialization people, and they believe the loss of a few billion people to save the earth is worth it.
This is NOT an accident.
It’s interesting that the EU won’t accept RU natgas.
But oil is OK. As is oil refined in another country. As is oil mixed with other oil from different countries mixed in the same tanker. Et Cetera.
A sham, all of it.
Jane Goodall told the World Economic Forum that the world population should be about a billion. I don’t think anyone there disagreed.
When smart people believe stupid things everyone else suffers.
From 1970 onward, a very large percentage of the “Environmental Movement” has held the Continuing Industrial Revolution as their long-term target for destruction.
This result should be no surprise. It is not just natural gas that is the target. That is a detail. It is not “Carbon” that is the target. The target is the freedom to physically adapt one’s environment to what we need/desire, without government clerks telling us they approve.
This is yet another justification for placing ever larger portions of society’s resources under the control of government clerks. The fact that those government clerks are certified by degree, through handing over tuition at the same universities that encourage insensate levels of “activism” over climate change is *not* a coincidence. This winter will be survived, by most.
What we must look forward to is the actions to take to avoid being placed in more and more stringent control by those whose own self-interest is their position in the hierarchies of government. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine did not come from the needs of free men and women, but by the needs of government clerks to appease the rest of their own hierarchy. We will not have less war from mimicking their control over their subjects, but more.
@That Guy,
They’ve worked it out the same way the infamous Underpants Gnomes of South Park worked out their business plan: Step One: Steal Underwear; Step Two: ??????; Step Three: Profit!!
Step One for these guys is “Gut Modern Industry and Energy Generation”, ‘cos, see, they all know better than the rest of us, and are sure that all that nasty carbon-based stuff is unnecessary and extraneous. And, even if it isn’t, well, there can’t be any bad effects for anyone getting rid of it, can there? It’s all faith-based mindless nihilism, no different from any other millennialist religious belief system. These people are modern faith healers; they believe, donchaknow, so it will all work out.
Step Two? They’ve no earthly idea how it will all work out. They want to get rid of a huge swath of the human population, to make things all better, but they have no idea how many people it actually takes to maintain things, or to move forward. The whole thing is fantasy-based, and they totally ignore the almost certain second- and third-order effects that will come with this, like critical supply chains for the things they love about modern civ simply collapsing. Most of these idiots think that meat comes on neat little plastic trays at the supermarket, and that the milk just shows up in neat cartons. The vegans have no idea at all how their food is produced, or how much work it is; they think they could realistically feed themselves year-round with some sort of happy-dappy kitchen garden they run up in their spare time living wild and free in the wilds. They simply don’t “get” how much of their diet comes from modern technology, or how local food crop problems are overcome by transport to other regions where there isn’t drought or insect infestations this year…
Step Three, just like the Underpants Gnomes, is totally imaginary. They have no idea what has to happen in Step Two “A” through “Z”, in order for Step Three to even happen, and if they did know, the work would be too hard for them or totally impossible to actually put into effect.
End state of all this is that we’re going to get into Step Two far enough that it becomes obvious to everyone that none of their ideas actually work, and then the whole sorry mess is going to evaporate in a cloud of dead idealists strung up from their nasty little windmills. People are not going to continue down that path, if all the brilliant ideas don’t actually work. Once they manifestly don’t…? Watch what happens. It’s going to be a lot like the denouement for all those millennialist sects around the year 1000, whose predictions about the Second Coming of Christ didn’t pan out, or any of the other smaller millennialist scams we’ve seen since. A generation or two from now, the whole thing is going to be looked at the way we look back at the “ludicrous ravings and heresies” of the premillennialist Catholic Church. The whole thing is a scam, right down to the selling of indulgences and other such-like bullshit. To a student of history, the so-called “Environmental Movement” looks an awful lot like the same scam artists that convinced people not to bother planting crops in and around the year 1000, ‘cos Jesus Christ Himself was acomin’ back, don’t you know?
Strangely, just like the current madness, the various donated lands and goods somehow weren’t returned by the churches and monasteries to their victims, after that-there Eschaton failed to Immanentize…
If you squint hard enough, you can see the same thing outlined really, really well in the current doings and kerfuffles. What is FTX but a modern version of some of those scams like the Children’s Crusade, and Mr. SBF himself but one of the very scam artists that profited by selling all those children into Venetian slave markets across the Med?
To believe in a happy energy transition to renewables is to be ignorant of two fields: physics and economics.
Can anyone who has given the proposal serious thought or held some responsibility to humanity been THAT DUMB?
Sure, a casual observer catching a bit of the news could have trusted the “experts” or some government minister or under-secretary. But when the pain starts, people WILL be made to care.
To endorse renewables is to oppose any democratic rule.
[…] From Lawrence Person’s BattleSwarm Blog: The Ukraine War Is Crushing Germany’s Green Energy Delusions […]
There is no such thing as Green Energy….
For it takes Fossil to create the components of the Green Scam.
Ok, maybe just standing in the sun😂😂
Carbin Credits😂😂😂😂
What utter BS.