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Comment by king_phil | Hacker News Reader

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king_phil·

Was, the conservative party dismantled that pretty quickly.

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The same party has been in charge for (16?) years; the Greens are popular in Germany.

Edit: Maybe I'm misunderstanding something?

Germany had a bunch of nuclear plants, which have pretty low carbon emissions.

Then they decided to shut them all down; and that they urgently need a new gas pipeline - Nord Stream 2 - to import natural gas from Russia.

Doesn’t sound very carbon neutral to me.

And that'll make Europe dependent on Russia. Doesn't sound much of a problem to me but down here, Putin is seen as a somewhat bad person. So, Europe will have to bow to him to have not too expensive gas, I'll have a lot of fun hearing our politicians telling that, poor them, they have to negotiate with him :-)

On the other hand, making Europe economically dependent on Russia lowers the likelihood of war between them and fosters cooperation in other areas. Germany doesn't buy the US narrative that Russia should be treated with hostility at all costs.

> On the other hand, making Europe economically dependent on Russia lowers the likelihood of war between them

No, it doesn't.

Attempting to break economic dependence, or to preempt such attempts in the anticipated future, is at least as common a cause of war as geopolitical competition between powers that aren’t in a dependency relationship.

The CDU has a wing that still depends on old coal-burners for their jobs. Shutting down nuclear was their idea of keeping those folks “working” for longer while solar and (especially) wind were spooled up.

To that end, it’s looking better now that the Greens are in the ruling coalition.

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