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Comment by qwytw | Hacker News Reader

Well point is that Germany's CO2 emissions could be the same as in France had they not stopped building nuclear plants in the 80s and 90s. Obviously the psychosis amongst environmentalists who were hellbent on maximizing CO2 emissions (in addition to Germans electing a Russian agent to lead their country in 1998) was just one of the factors.

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Germany has the same CO2 per capita today as France at the height of their nuclear generation, which was back in 2005.

Germany also reduced theirs more than France since that point. And grown per capita GDP faster from a higher start.

Nuclear appears to be a distraction, it's not even visible on a graph of Germany's GHG emissions.

Nuclear appears to be a distraction, today in 2026, it was not so in 2002 when Germany started to phase-out nuclear energy.

Global warming was not much interesting for public until about 2006 - 2007 and when public started to be interested in global warming, the public was promised that renewables would the solve the problem. They did not solve the problem, worldwide annual CO2 increased from 30,9 Gt (2007) to 37.8 Gt (2025).

https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2025/co2-em...

Local decreases in some countries don't make a difference because, global warming is function of the total amount CO2.

Well yes, Russian gas was obviously cheaper than nuclear if you ignore the environmental and political externalities. It helped growth in the short and medium term and that's the only thing politicians cared about.

Which is crying over spilled milk. We live in 2026.

Today renewables and storage are the cheapest energy source in human history, and is reshaping the global energy system.

Storage still has some way to go until comparing the raw price per MWh ceases to be a partially apples to oranges comparison. You can't really have a stable grid in most of Europe with only solar + wing + storage. Unless you are willing to close down most of the factories during winter amongst other things.

Add a bit of firming and you can. Or just accept a tiny bit of fossil fuels. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough.

We still need to decarbonize agriculture, chemicals, aviation, shipping, heavy industry, construction and so on. Most of which use either chemical energy carriers, or fossil feedstock.

Siphoning off a tiny bit off that for grid firming duty is trivial. Or do sustainable biofuels from food waste and so on.

Which is also what the system studies lands on. Finding that adding new nuclear makes it far more expensive.

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