3,599,040,600 € wired by Germany to Russia since the invasion of Ukraine
stopgas.org
stopgas.org
What bothers me greatly is that Germany still has not come to turns with the fact that they need nuclear power. That is a long and costly investment to make and you need to start right away.
LNG can only get you so far and renewable sources just can't provide the energy needed, as should be clear by now (although it was widely understood for the past 30 years at least).
So what should they do in the present?
I'm all for renewable energy, but this is hypocritic nonsense fuelled by emotional decision making, and not helpful towards that goal.
Please, stay calm. Germany is in a transition process. Nuclear is phasing out, renewable is coming. In the EU Austria, Denmark, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxemburg, Norway, and Portugal have no nuclear power plants (Estonia has none, but is planning one; Croatia has none, but operates one together with Slovenia; Poland is planning one for 2040). Germany is just joining this club of "hypocrites" this year.
In the next years, Germany is going to export more electric energy than importing. Yes, there are days when Germany needs to import electricity, but that this includes electricity produced by nuclear power is only due to the fact that other countries are slower in their transition process or have decided against it. You should not blame Germany for being fast, when others are just slow.
Shouldn’t one have the replacement first and only then close the existing producers?!
Now they had to roll back their decision because it's totally bonkers, and open back some less polluting nuclear plants.
I always find it a bit funny that the green parties are so retarded that they take decisions that cause more pollution. They really live in this idealistic world that is completely separate from the real one. Hippies...
The new gas power plants weren't build and the nuclear reactors weren't shut down.
https://www.wired.com/story/germany-rejected-nuclear-power-a...
> Following Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant meltdown, Germany’s antinuclear lobby kicked into high gear, and tens of thousands of people took to the streets in protest. The German government quickly passed legislation to decommission all of the country’s nuclear reactors
> ...
> found that nuclear power was mostly replaced with power from coal plants, which led to the release of an additional 36 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, or about a 5 percent increase in emissions
So yes, they're fast. So much so that they've outpaced any plans that should have existed to go alongside phasing out nuclear power.
I hope you're right and they're at least going to be in good shape in a few years, but I both doubt that, and it doesn't change the damage they're doing right now.
The decision for abondoning nuclear power did not follow the Fukushima desaster of 11 March 2011, but preceeded it by more than 10 years. The agreement between the German federal government and the energy supply companies to phase out nuclear energy dates back to 14 June 2000. The first nuclear power plant was shut down permanently in Nov. 2003. It was planned to shut the last one down between 2015/2020. In 2010, a new government extended the operating term by several years (depending on the individual power plant), but returned in 2011, after Fukushima, to an earlier phase out, but which was still later (2022) than the initial decision from 2000.
The first decision for abondoning nuclear power was a project of a coalition of the SPD (labour) and the Green party. From late 2005 to late 2021 the Green party was not part of the government. The result was a slowdown in efforts to switch to renewable energies, in particular before 2010. But even after Fukushima the government was very slow to push ahead with the measures necessary for a switch to renewable energies, especially the planning and implementation of new long-distance power lines.
The operators of the nuclear power plants were more or less the same as the operators of the coal-fired power plants: RWE, Vattenfall, E.ON/PreussenElectra, EnBW. (The STEAG is the only major coal-plant operator that was not involved in nuclear energy.) In other words, Germany's nuclear industry is more or less identical with its carbon-based industry. It was their lobbying within the Merkel cabints from 2005 to 2021 that resulted in the deal to replace nuclear with coal, instead of switching to the new technologies of their competitors faster.
The deficits in the current situation were therefore not caused by the political forces that advocated a switch from nuclear and coal to renewable energies, but by those who stood in the way of this change.
Personally, I very much support this restructuring, but I am not dogmatic. In view of the situation in Ukraine, I would have spontaneously thought it appropriate to extend the lifetime of the last three nuclear power plants. However, I have read in the press that this is not practical for at least two reasons: firstly, in order to keep them running longer, they would have to be maintained (technical tests and repairs would be necessary), which would mean that they would have to be taken off the grid soon for several month, and secondly, the procurement of new fuel elements would reportedly take about one and a half years.
Don't fall for emotional reasonings, lobby or geopolitical narratives relayed by useful idiots NGO[0][1], in the coming years it is not renewables vs nuclear, it is renewables with nuclear, both against carbon emitting energies.
[0]https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18330/russia-funding-envi...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Planet_Energy#Fossil_gas...
And here are some estimated Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) figures by energy technology as of 2021, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....
Renewable energy cost has fallen _a lot_, and Germany doesn't need nuclear power, IF it worked towards this goal: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...
Unless people are suddenly ok with blackouts, energy grid have to be robust. For renewables, that means having enough stores energy for times of decreased production.
Option a) the power to pump was generated using fossile fuels. In this case pumped storage is just "greenwashing" energy and doesn't actually produce any.
Option b) the power was generated using renewables. In this case the pumped storage just counts the renewables twice.
This "pumparound" is what makes up the gains in hydroelectric power, not only in Germany, but in most countries: There simply isn't infinite amounts of useable space for hydroelectric power.
If you look at the generated energy, though you will see a constant increase in generated power:
2016: 11,258 MW hydroelectric power, of which 6,806 MW (more than half) are pumped. Generation: 21.5 TWh
2019: 11,022 MW hydroelectric power, of which 6,364 MW (still more than half) are pumped. Generation: 27.88 TWh
A major component of the rise in generation is that pump-around.
From an energy storage PoV they aren't even that effective: Let's say you wanted to supply Munich and surroundings with power for 3 days (~2Mio people). Let's also assume that there are only people living there, so no industry or infrastructure. Let's also assume we have 100% efficiency in our pumped storage system. Let's also assume that everybody lives in two-person housholds (to make the math eaiser). According to destatis, a two person houshold consumed 3221kWh in 2018 (without industry and infrastructure). Dividing by 356 gives us the daily consumption. In Joules, this amounts to 3.25710^13 joules. Dividing by 9.81 m/s^2 and we achieve a value of 3d3.3210^12 kgm. There are now two ways to handle this:
1. high mass
2. high distance
Let's choose something flashy and pump lake constanze (bodensee), the largest freshwater lake in central europe. We would have to pump this up by almost a quarter of a meter to save this amount of energy. And this is with completely optimistic values: double this for electric cars, then add the same amount for electric heating, then again for industry, then add another at least 20% for inefficiency of the hydroelectric generation. And then you have to consider that this is one German city. Or, maybe in a different view: German renewables only need to lose 1/40 th of their efficiency for you to be in this situation (if you want to go 100% renewable).
One also has to consider that, even if it were possible to add more capacity (which the German hydroelectric association doesn't believe is), one has to consider that hydroelectic is by far the most environmentally destructive of all power generation methods. Simply the flooding of a single valley is such an utter environmental disaster, that one has to be very sure that this valley absolutely _has_ to become a hydroelectric installation. Additionally one has the construction of the damn itself, as well as the enormous disturbance of every instance of wildlife both up and downstream for decades to centuries (and that ignores the both human and wildelife destruction brought on by a damn break).
I would gladly take the construction of a nuclear powerplant over a hydroelectric one, considering that the biblis reactor alone has a nameplate capacity of almost half the amount of non-pumped hydroelectric power.
They never include massive battery costs, and are never designed to provide robust baseload power. The grid needs to be up 99.5% of the time. The rule of thumb in engineering is that every 9 costs another 10x - and this applies to energy production most especially.
It's such an absolute cluster-F that I honestly believe the renewables and anti-nuclear movements in the West are promoted by the Russian FSB.
Yet every discussion has claims about how energy storage is somehow a solved problem; usually with some handwaving about pump storage or how batteries have gotten cheaper. There are, interestingly enough, never any real world examples of this.
It's perfectly rational to argue that solar and wind have obvious merits that could be worth subsidizing but that usually isn't the argument. Solar and wind are always cheaper period. Which just isn't true
Still blows my mind that Germany and other countries are closing nuclear facilities though.
That's kind of a misconception. Germany isn't (and wasn't) closing any nuclear plants that weren't about to closed anyways - it was all old plants.
What Germany did was not bringing online new ones and instead choosing to invest that money elsewhere.
Germany is shutting down pretty nice later gen plants commissioned in 1989. The US is still operating much older designs commissioned in 1969 (20 years older).
What blows my mind is that by using nuclear power and creating nuclear waste for a few decades, society created a problem that coming generations have to take care of for millenia.
Total production that has been shutdown (baseload power) is around 19,689MW now post fukushima.
They've been able to replace maybe 4MW's with solar at this point? It's kind of mind boggling how much was shut down - the problem this has caused for electrification in germany is significant as now german electric prices are actually very high not low.
Annual contracts for electricity are running 46 cents / kwH which is CRAZY if you want to electrify your country.
France which is right next door, has much more annoying labor laws / high cost of labor is perhaps half that price.
Germany has 5.3 GW of installed solar, how can you be off by a factor of 1200?
They produced 51Twh/365/24 = 5.8GW in avg delivery.
Nuclear generated it's power around the clock. I'm not sure solar is covering the evening peaks and the prices for electricity make going to things like heat pumps and electric dryers much more expensive than you'd expect in germany so the economic case for electrification in germany has started to run way way behind the case in other places that have kept nuclear in the mix.
What else is there?
That should be a clue that there are some major (and insurmountable) issues with deploying batteries at grid-scale. It's sad this is a game that is being played on the public, where the public is made to believe wind/solar investment leads to less reliance on fossil fuels.
The idea that it's nuclear or fossil for baseload is a false dichotomy, that ingores the dozens of intermediary storage solutions.
Solar is currently the cheapest source of energy with a margin. Add storage to an overproduction system, and it's still cheaper.
The german failure to finish the "energiewende" is a political one, driven by corrupt conservative politicians and the privatized energy sector, to press as much return out of their old investments as possible.
And that is one of the reasons that the most recent election led to the elevation of the Green Party.
Good to clear up confusion. I mean batteries in the general sense, not just based on chemistry.
>But, in general, they are technically sound and can be scaled up with sufficient investment and demand.
So far that hasn't been shown to be true. This is very much an open question, leaning towards 'no' because NOBODY got that level of storage working.
And how cost effective are those storage methods?
Compared to current gas prices or nuclear, batteries are dirt cheap and some of the others are almost as cheap as batteries.
I'd be very happy with renewables+batteries, but the fact it's so quiet suggests to me this isn't so simple. Certainly in Northern Europe where dark, windless winters exist - i.e. you need storage potentially for weeks, not a small few hours.
LFP storage batteries use only widely available minerals: Lithium, Iron and Phosphorus. No nickel, cobalt etc.
[1] https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2019/07/f65/Storage%... (figures 5.5 and 5.6)
None of those are actual options. Pumped hydro is pretty much the only viable option but you need the geography for it. Germany does not have the geography to roll out pumped hydro at enough of a scale to bridge the intermittency issues with renewables.
But don't believe me, look at the present reality - there is no nation on earth that is able to power it's economy with renewables (+batteries). The only viable option is hydro-electric and unfortunately, we've pretty much ran out of places to dam.
>Solar is currently the cheapest source of energy with a margin.
Again, there is no battery technology that is able to store enough excess energy to power a modern economy (or even a mid-size city).
>The german failure to finish the "energiewende" is a political one
The sad part is that it isn't. Material science is hard and you can't just will non-existent technology into existence ... as the Germans found out. That's why Germany was signing multi-billion/multi-decade deals with Russia to import their natural gas.
Solar and wind are not just intermittent on a day to day basis, they are intermittent on a seasonal one -- as we saw last year the wind can not blow as strong for months at a time. Much of Europe could be blanketed with a large weather system for days cutting the sun and so forth.
Even flow batteries simply can't store enough energy, hydro storage is limited by geography and other solutions are currently niche and have yet to prove scale up. Green hydrogen probably has the most promise as a large scale storage technology that's close enough to natural gas to make workable.
Energy is so critical to our civilizations that you can't just make assertions that it'll be OK, you need to be certain. Getting it wrong can be terminal.
The world needs to be rid of oil, there are few other things that have caused as much human and environment suffering as oil. Hell, I even back bio fuels, as bad as they are, as long we can conclusively show they have a major impact in oil use and aren't just a subsidy handout farmers.
The plants don't need to be in non-nato countries, they need to be in NATO countries and help eliminate the need for oil.
... and are not viable without baseload provided by fossil fuels. Unfortunately there is such a thing as cloudy days, night time, and days without wind.
While I agree with the need to shut off Nordstream I, I am not sure Germany can afford this right now due to historically low gas reserves [2].
I have to disagree with the tone of the statement "We can afford the consequences". Who is "we"? The lower middle class of Germany, who already suffers some of the highest taxes in the world and the highest energy prices in the world? The government clearly does not care about energy prices: Gas prices are nearly 50% taxed, are they willing to lower it for lower income families? No.
[1] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/service/uba-fragen/wie-gross-...
[2] https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/deutschland/politik/erdgas-ru...
I'd say the biggest issue with the local fields is that they are likely undeveloped, and that takes time before the oil flows. Ironically, from what I've gathered watching the US fields, the fracking wells take less time to turn on/off vs the more ordinary wells.
If Germany can turn on any local wells, especially quickly, it should help significantly, since the big issue is to buy time - time to switch to new sources of NatGas/Oil, and time to replace sinks with renewables.
Also to consider is the relative harm from some short-term drilling & fracking, vs the damage if RUS has the funds to expand their aggression into more of the EU.
[0] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/20/germany-seals-gas-d...
Lowering gas taxes is an effective subsidy for Russia.
They should do something to offset the impact. Something like Canada's carbon tax rebate, for instance. Give the money to consumers rather than indirectly to Russia.
Besides the fact that we can't exactly build infrastructure for those gas fields overnight, I think Germany wants to avoid any association with sort of problem. The fear I would have is that they'd have to get that gas from the U.S. / Canada, which exports the resource curse problem to the U.S. and Canada instead.
Meanwhile, how Germany is going to solve the spot-generation problem, is unclear.
something tells me that Germany doesn't care about that right now.
I don't know where people get the illusion from that you could "just get it from somewhere else" in matter of days/weeks. That's simply not the case at all. Even if we speaking about month and accepting Gas prices doubling or more it close to impossible.
But the EU can't accept Gas prices exploding to that degree.
While this article loves to blame Germany they kinda forget that part of this Gas is resold in to neighboring countries.
Also in all of Germany (through slightly more so in east Germany) most houses heat with Gas, warm Water with Gas and especially on cheaper (longer not renovated) apartments also have a Gas oven and Stove. Until ~20 or so years ago central gas heating + gas stoves where the most common way to build apartment houses, in recent years its central gas heating + electronic stoves/ovens.
Due to disagreements with Russia in recent years gas imports also have been limit to long term contracts, hence there are no (in this context relevant) gas reserves.
Also while people love to say Germany is unnecessary switching of atomar power plants the truth is what they did wasn't building new ones. All the still running power plants are already operating well beyond the time they where build for. With the Ukraine conflict Germany "suspended" the shutdown of them, but they still need to shut down. Germany has space wise not much space. It can't afford a single reactor failure at all (like Germany might literally collapse if there is a reactor meltdown with some of the more central power plants).
When the conflict started Germany did fast line some projects to become more/faster able to switch off or massive reduce Russian gas (like started building LNG ship terminals). But all of this takes time. Luckily spring is coming so it might be possible.
But if you now would stop Gas you would practically derive millions of EU citizens of an affordable way to cook, heat and wash. And with affordable I don't mean cheap, but like affordable at all.
With existing instabilities from COVID and a word wide re-emergence of facism you can guess twice if the EU would to so. Their main priority is to protect their citizens and constitution/democracy. Switching of Russian Gas now (like in a week) would likely fail both.
So it's not an option at all, at least not _yet_.
If their would be a doable way to switch of Russian Gas it would have been done. Similar if Russia could no longer send Gas they also would have done so to create massive internal instabilities in the EU.
So the Gas sells are currently something neither party (Germany/Russia) likes but neither can stop either.
Failing that, the German government could just change the law to disallow the contract. Russia could ask for a binding(ish) decision from the international community, but this is one of those situations where I doubt the decision would go in their favor even if they were in the right legally.
> We propose that the Europeans continue to pay for pipeline-delivered gas and oil, but that the euro-denominated accounts of those Russian pipeline operators be frozen in terms of withdrawals. If properly implemented and enforced, this would mean that all gas customers continue to meet their contractual obligations, while through force majeure the EU creates what would be effectively escrow accounts for the duration of the war.
[1] https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/ukraine/2022/03/vo...
Oil supports totalitarian regimes, and degrades the integrity of democracies by supporting multinational petroleum companies that have a long and detailed list of dirty tricks to get what they want.
Germany cannot function without Russian gas right now. Simple there isn’t enough BTU’s.
Why did Germany put itself into this strange Russian dependency is also very strange.
Perfectly fine and environmentally friendly nuclear power plants for dependency from Russian natural gas. Why?
Because they wanted to go green but also have a really, _really_ bad case of NIMBY.
Is this a variant of poe's law? In other words, a campaign is considered so ridiculous that it couldn't possibly legitimate, and must be part of a foreign disinformation campaign?
Without russia having to publicly force this to happen.
e: also: didn’t verify but seen on social media that there had been studies on general difficulties of construction for nuclear plants, and apparently in one such data, it was estimated that 3-6 times more machinery such as valves, pumps, motors, etc would be necessary compared to other types of generator[, and industries in some nations had declined compared to golden ages that they would no longer be able to source that amount]. Everyone can make a nuke but not necessarily at scale, it seems.
The exact same thing can be said about the policies of the german green party, if you think about it.
For the same reason, the US has long been dependent on Russia for space travel and is still dependent for the ISS: It worked for a long time quite well, was cheaper and more secure than the alternatives, and that Putin running amok was a scenario that most people did not think was likely, if they have imagined it at all. Recall that until recently the US was more concerned about China than Russia.
There wasn't that much bloodshed in Crimea. And to be honest, nobody really knew if the people there were pro or anti Russia anyway. Russia and USA have been influencing each others elections, and those of almost every other nation in the world for many decades.
These events weren't even close to what is happening now. Also, why is it Germany's duty to protect Ukraine anyway?
For instance "gas pollute, stop ICEs vehicles!" fun to hear, who can provide new e.v. to replace gazillions of cars in a snap and provide the needed infrastructure to recharge them... Again for gas: I live in a "class A" home, so I'm all electric but how can a classic home be heated without gas or oil or wood? 30+kW power from heat pumps? Oh, of course we can build new homes, who pay? How this can be done in dense cities made of multi-apartment buildings?
Long story short: in 50+ years we can probably rebuild actual society in a new one with different infrastructures etc, definitively not tomorrow. That's the point.
And the reasoning is as follows:
The actually morally necessary step is to establish a no-fly zone above Ukraine, enforced by force with NATO fighter jets and anti-aircraft systems.
People (possibly rightfully) consider that this could lead to a WW3, possibly escalating into the usage of nuclear weapons.
So far so good.
So the bargain we do is basically "Ukraine, we would do everything for you, except for starting WW3, which you hopefully understand!".
Really? Everything? Then quit Russian gas cold turkey! No matter how bad it will be (possibly fairly bad, I admit), it will still be less than WW3, which we bargain is the only thing that we don't want, everything else we would do for Ukraine.
---
Can anybody put this into better words??
Nor did everybody on the 'allied' side in WWII.
Nor did millions of Koreans, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Afghanis and so on.
Millions of Ukrainians did not sign up for it.
In fact: almost nobody except for the aggressors signed up for a war and even there that's debatable, usually it's only a few people at the top and then 100's of enablers and thousands to millions of conscripts, who didn't sign up for it either.
But that doesn't mean that you won't end up in a war. The question is how much control you will have over the location of the battlefield. That's why the Americans had this 'fight them over there rather than here' doctrine going. Which given their lack of proximity always was a bit of misdirection, but that doesn't mean that the idea by itself does not have merit.
Not sure how my 25 cent analysis of US would translate to Germany, but demands on citizens should probably not get too out of sync with the level of existential threat the citizens perceive. If there’s a perception problem, fix that and then make the demands for sacrifice.
Ceaușescu was deposed (and very rapidly shot at the wall) also because of the fact we, Romanians, were freezing in our very homes. That and the food rationing.
The "total NFZ over Ukraine" idea will definitely lead to a direct war with Russia because it essentially requires striking AA sites within Russia and Belarus.
The only NFZ scenario that's plausible is a partial NFZ with a sufficiently large buffer zone that it does not overlap with Russian AA on Russian soil. Which puts Kyiv outside the NFZ, btw.
“Don’t trip the most obvious trigger for ww3 until all avenues for sanctions, embargoes, and boycotts have been exhausted. This obviously includes stopping gas purchases from Russia.”
But as D’s A, I would wonder where this stops. Should US be opening domestic production with gusto? Should Germany demand oil from Middle East with threats of soft and hard power? Shall they buy from Iran, Russia’s friend? Shall they embargo China, who presumably still buys fossil fuels from Russia, and every other customer of Russia?
Assume Germany’s need for gas is not elastic - they can’t simply endure with less. To what lengths shall they go to avoid Russian gas?
Once Russia is economically desperate, will ww3 be triggered anyway?
I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I do wonder about them.
Gas reserves wont last that much because human hoards if they know government are starting to use reserves. And, when politician act, they should think about future too. And, can they purchase gas at 50%? Are those written in deals?
https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/deutschland/politik/erdgas-ru...
Also, if the majority of the population is losing heating and need to do your suggested preparation, I wouldn't bet my luck on successfully getting a heater and a electric blanket. There was a freaking toilet paper shortage in covid because of panic buying. These and whatnot will be gone in minutes.
1) Make fuel extremely expensive. 2) Quickly massively lower standard of living, e.g. by turning off heating in winter/early spring 3) Purposefully crash the economy, leading to mass unemployment.
Sure, in retrospect it would have been better to invest even more money into renewables ten or twenty years ago, and to keep the nuclear power plants running for just a few more years. But you can't change the past so that discussion really leads to nothing for the current situation.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...
Heating with electricity is therefore something quite achievable and sometimes even economical. At current German electricity prices of 0,33 EUR/kwh electricity heating is currently cheaper than gas heating (currently at 0,20 EUR/kwh for new contracts - was at 0,04 before the crisis).
I feel like we temporarily dodged a bullet by sheer laziness - before the pandemic, we were all set to do the whole Energiesanierung with full KfW incentives, which would have required chucking out our oil furnace (replaced right before we bought the house a few years ago) for, most likely, natural gas. Instead, we are still sitting on 1.5 years of normal or possibly 3 years of very carefully used heating oil supply.
Now, like everyone, we’re looking into heat pumps. Because we are still sitting on a year or two of heating oil, I think we shouldn’t be competing against our gas-heated neighbors for that changeover this year or next.
You can just say “we are with Ukraine up to the russian gas.” But that would just be true not beautiful.
An anecdote from earlier this winter when the electricity prices peaked in Europe: my girlfriend and I live on 79 sqm in a modern apartment building with triple-pane windows, and because of the landlord being a stingy d*ck we went through several weeks without any heating. During the worst 7-10 days we had a temperature of -4°C outside, but never below 15°C inside. When the temperature rose to 5°C we had about 18°C inside.
Numbers are similar for many parts of eastern Germany.
For western Germany the a slightly less, but still very high.
Gas Germany imports is also re-exported to other countries.
Some financially much worse off.
You are literally asking Germany to derive a non-small amount of their financially weaker of people of heating, cooking and warm water. And this would not just affect Germany but other EU countries too, destabilizing all of the EU.
At the same time it doesn't necessary stop the war, and might even escalate it even.
Also many of the alternative sources we could buy gas from don't have the infrastructure to ship it to us fast enough (yet).
Worse some of the alternative sources are states like Qatar, which are from a democratic, ethical and cultural point of view worse then Russia, they are just spacial further away...
The main objective of the EU is to protect it's citizens and implicitly secondarily democracy. Switching of Russian gas _now_ would fail both. Leading to internally instability we can't afford which would be a perfect presence for the word wide re-emerging fascism.
Now that's how it's now, a lot of thinks are already underway to change this.
But changes take time.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-were-un-diplomats-laughing-...
Can someone go through my opinions and prove me that I am a troll? My opinions are mine, based on what I have read and experienced in this life. I know my opinions are not popular, but it doesn't make them invalid. This is happening again and again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30756420
Obviously the context has changed massively in the past month, maybe even since 2014.
In any event, less reliance on fossil fuels is a good thing, and at the moment, less reliance on Russian fossil fuels in the EU is probably a good thing.
The idea was that if we don't want to engage them in a military way in a direct confrontation that by trading so much with each other that our economies would suffer substantially from either one breaking off that we would avoid doing so. The economical version of 'MAD'. That turns out to have been a mistake. What happened between WWI and WWII is not really representative in comparison.
It's really hard to understate the guilt that has existed in Germany over WWII. Also, in Western Europe, there's much more of an understanding that it was Russia that took the brunt of the fighting, not the U.S., and when the Berlin Wall fell, there were many who hoped for a new start.
But Russia, with its geography and its legacy, was notoriously difficult to switch over to capitalism. The 1998 crash of the ruble left deep scars on the country. It may have almost been inevitable that a figure like Putin would arise, in part because we (in the West) were naive about how capitalism would take hold there.
Regardless, there's the reality that there is now. Germany needs to be able to act in its own self-defense, and Europe needs to wean off of Russian fossil fuels, if only because the lines have been drawn. It's not clear that that arrangement was ever good for the rise of a friendly and economically healthy Russia.
Also, the thread title needs updating. ;)
what you call environmentalists are mostly NIMBYs. The green party, actually, is in favor of abandoning 10H.