All of our countries are crazy in various ways, but when it comes to energy policy Germany is an undisputed champion of crazy. In 2011, a tsunami caused the Fukushima nuclear disaster. If you check a map, you’ll notice that Fukushima is in a country called Japan, which it turns out is a different country from Germany. The Fukushima disaster had zero to do with the Federal Republic, but then-Chancellor Angela Merkel felt the need to solve the problem of Fukushima by phasing out nuclear power in Germany, even though tsunamis and earthquakes are not a problem in Germany, because Germany is a country in Central Europe and not an island nation in Asia.
And to top it off, Germany has driven the EU to decree that solar panels will become mandatory on all buildings.
Not just public buildings, but /all/ buildings, including old ones.
Together with the incremental banning of woodburning stoves of all kinds and woodburning in general, expect a collapsing market for anything but apartments and large-scale building projects, especially here in northern Europe where we depend on our stoves in winter (and have very little sunlight for half the year) and our idiots-in-office act like apple polishers vis-a-vis the EU and all its grandiose lunacy.
Here, not to be outdone by Germany, our communists and greens want to make nuclear power (including the import of power produced by nuclear power) illegal.
Can't we just ship all the reds and the greens to Antarctica?
What can I say...the Left are both stupid and evil. The stupid part we can manage....the evil does have real consequences. Worst of which is the dopes who let them win, now have to suffer the consequences. Where is the Justice in all of this? Pax
And here I always liked to think of the Germans as *slightly* less insane than US bureaucrats. Is there any nation governed by sane people? Thank you for exposing their bullshit! It still shocks me that Germany would shutter perfectly good nuclear plants.
Merkel's decision to phase out nuclear energy was a combination of loathsome pandering to ignorant young voters, coupled with the expectation that Germany's energy needs would be met over the long term via inexpensive fossil fuels supplied by Russia. Merkel never anticipated that Germany's U.S. ally would destroy a Russian gas pipeline to Germany by demolition. Few rational people would have believed that the U.S. government would be stupid enough to commit an act of war against Germany. But Joe Biden and Anthony Blinken are indeed, just that stupid.
This phenomenon of a senior leader receiving a "fraudulent derivation of a falsified memo of a genuine assessment" is well-known. One book on software project management refers to it as "news improvement," i.e. the tendency for bad news to be "improved" as it moves up the hierarchy. It's why an actually competent executive will take the trouble to talk directly to line-level employees, engineers and so on, in order to get unfiltered information. Habeck's failure to do this shows a willingness to be deceived, as Eugyppius points out.
The people who push this type of nonsense are largely the anti-religious type. Ironically, though, given its rather fuzzy basis in belief and speculation, rather than rationality or common sense, it's hard to call this anything other than a state-sponsored religion. At least traditional religions are voluntary and have met the test of time, while this new faith fails on both counts.
I remember watching Germany's nuclear shutdown process as a fund manager during the 2000s (we owned some German electric power companies). I couldn't understand it then, but your article makes sense of the nonsensical.
All this is entirely consistent with people who believe Germany, and the West generally, must be destroyed and reduced to rubble.
We succeed time and again, while other parts of the world cannot get on their feet even with billions in aid. This inequality cannot be reconciled with visions of equality and the wealth and competency of the West, so it all has to go. Equality means we are to be reduced to ever lower levels because the rest of the world cannot easily raise itself up.
That's all this is. People who pride themselves on not attending church have a religious belief that they alone understand the cosmic balance that must be established. All it will cost you is your home, your livelihood and your security. All that happens faster without reliable energy. It is a death cult.
I feel so guilty about subscribing to your articles as I sense a responsibility in your following all this rubbish, and the impact it may have on your health.
There is so much here but what is absent: any rational analysis of nuclear energy.
But why can't they mandate face masks to protect us from the perceived evils of nuclear power? After all, these contraptions are said to protect us from so much else.
Your representations are more precise than any Himars system: "blended a shark with an accountant".
Somehow, your distillation of all this rot is more digestible than the original.
I feel you may have understated the Merkel and Schroeder goals. I have often considered that they are the true "Putin puppets", not Trump. after all, if Putin were designing a way to destroy a potential enemy without firing a shot, he could not have done better than Energiewend
This story alone was worth the subscription to your substack.
I wonder if the domestic spy chief Haldenwang could find his first subjects among Habeck's staff to test out some actual prosecutions for delegitimization of the state.
It is hard to imagine a way to disgrace the government more at the moment than this green ideological coup with such far-reaching consequences for Germany.
Stefan Tidow, who looks like what would happen if you blended a shark with an accountant. He also has a background at Agora... I feel sorry for the shark, they are not that ugly. And I thought you had written Angora... I felt sorry for the rabbits, because they are actually quite lovely... then I saw my mistake. I hope you have enough trees in your yard, because in the foreseeable future, you might need to cut some wood to heat your house!
There's a lot more to this story than just "the Greens are stupid". They were also infiltrated systematically by a hostile power. Starting in the 1960s, the Soviet Union's KGB launched a program to instill antinuclearism in western environmental organizations generally. The problem for the USSR is that it didn't produce anything that anyone else wanted.
Except oil and gas.
So that meant encouraging antinuclearism to ensure that Germany's excellent fleet of nuclear reactors would be shut down prematurely and create a huge trapped market for Russian gas.
The plan succeeded. The targeting of German green groups and political party ensured that Germany would be tied up in knots over things like Gorleben and Konrad. That Muhlheim-Karlich was never allowed to operate for silly reasons.
This program had two consequences: 1. that the best nuclear power program in the world was killed off for purely political reasons thus ensuring the USSR had a captive market; and 2. that Yuri Andropov was selected to succeed Leonid Brezhnev for his success in this program despite his being head of the KGB.
Germany is not crazy. Its established political parties, all socialist in orientation, are compromised by a foreign power.
And to top it off, Germany has driven the EU to decree that solar panels will become mandatory on all buildings.
Not just public buildings, but /all/ buildings, including old ones.
Together with the incremental banning of woodburning stoves of all kinds and woodburning in general, expect a collapsing market for anything but apartments and large-scale building projects, especially here in northern Europe where we depend on our stoves in winter (and have very little sunlight for half the year) and our idiots-in-office act like apple polishers vis-a-vis the EU and all its grandiose lunacy.
Here, not to be outdone by Germany, our communists and greens want to make nuclear power (including the import of power produced by nuclear power) illegal.
Can't we just ship all the reds and the greens to Antarctica?
What can I say...the Left are both stupid and evil. The stupid part we can manage....the evil does have real consequences. Worst of which is the dopes who let them win, now have to suffer the consequences. Where is the Justice in all of this? Pax
And here I always liked to think of the Germans as *slightly* less insane than US bureaucrats. Is there any nation governed by sane people? Thank you for exposing their bullshit! It still shocks me that Germany would shutter perfectly good nuclear plants.
Merkel's decision to phase out nuclear energy was a combination of loathsome pandering to ignorant young voters, coupled with the expectation that Germany's energy needs would be met over the long term via inexpensive fossil fuels supplied by Russia. Merkel never anticipated that Germany's U.S. ally would destroy a Russian gas pipeline to Germany by demolition. Few rational people would have believed that the U.S. government would be stupid enough to commit an act of war against Germany. But Joe Biden and Anthony Blinken are indeed, just that stupid.
I bet the ironic result of the crazy Green policies will be the resurgence of coal.
This phenomenon of a senior leader receiving a "fraudulent derivation of a falsified memo of a genuine assessment" is well-known. One book on software project management refers to it as "news improvement," i.e. the tendency for bad news to be "improved" as it moves up the hierarchy. It's why an actually competent executive will take the trouble to talk directly to line-level employees, engineers and so on, in order to get unfiltered information. Habeck's failure to do this shows a willingness to be deceived, as Eugyppius points out.
The people who push this type of nonsense are largely the anti-religious type. Ironically, though, given its rather fuzzy basis in belief and speculation, rather than rationality or common sense, it's hard to call this anything other than a state-sponsored religion. At least traditional religions are voluntary and have met the test of time, while this new faith fails on both counts.
I remember watching Germany's nuclear shutdown process as a fund manager during the 2000s (we owned some German electric power companies). I couldn't understand it then, but your article makes sense of the nonsensical.
All this is entirely consistent with people who believe Germany, and the West generally, must be destroyed and reduced to rubble.
We succeed time and again, while other parts of the world cannot get on their feet even with billions in aid. This inequality cannot be reconciled with visions of equality and the wealth and competency of the West, so it all has to go. Equality means we are to be reduced to ever lower levels because the rest of the world cannot easily raise itself up.
That's all this is. People who pride themselves on not attending church have a religious belief that they alone understand the cosmic balance that must be established. All it will cost you is your home, your livelihood and your security. All that happens faster without reliable energy. It is a death cult.
Mein lieber Herr Eugyppius,
I feel so guilty about subscribing to your articles as I sense a responsibility in your following all this rubbish, and the impact it may have on your health.
There is so much here but what is absent: any rational analysis of nuclear energy.
But why can't they mandate face masks to protect us from the perceived evils of nuclear power? After all, these contraptions are said to protect us from so much else.
Your representations are more precise than any Himars system: "blended a shark with an accountant".
Somehow, your distillation of all this rot is more digestible than the original.
Ich danke Ihnen sehr
I feel you may have understated the Merkel and Schroeder goals. I have often considered that they are the true "Putin puppets", not Trump. after all, if Putin were designing a way to destroy a potential enemy without firing a shot, he could not have done better than Energiewend
This story alone was worth the subscription to your substack.
I wonder if the domestic spy chief Haldenwang could find his first subjects among Habeck's staff to test out some actual prosecutions for delegitimization of the state.
It is hard to imagine a way to disgrace the government more at the moment than this green ideological coup with such far-reaching consequences for Germany.
Took me a minute to recover from reading this. It left me breathless, speechless, and slackjawed.
And I'm not even German (except for half of my ancestry)! It was also hilarious, by the way (didn't want to leave that out!)
Stefan Tidow, who looks like what would happen if you blended a shark with an accountant. He also has a background at Agora... I feel sorry for the shark, they are not that ugly. And I thought you had written Angora... I felt sorry for the rabbits, because they are actually quite lovely... then I saw my mistake. I hope you have enough trees in your yard, because in the foreseeable future, you might need to cut some wood to heat your house!
There's a lot more to this story than just "the Greens are stupid". They were also infiltrated systematically by a hostile power. Starting in the 1960s, the Soviet Union's KGB launched a program to instill antinuclearism in western environmental organizations generally. The problem for the USSR is that it didn't produce anything that anyone else wanted.
Except oil and gas.
So that meant encouraging antinuclearism to ensure that Germany's excellent fleet of nuclear reactors would be shut down prematurely and create a huge trapped market for Russian gas.
The plan succeeded. The targeting of German green groups and political party ensured that Germany would be tied up in knots over things like Gorleben and Konrad. That Muhlheim-Karlich was never allowed to operate for silly reasons.
This program had two consequences: 1. that the best nuclear power program in the world was killed off for purely political reasons thus ensuring the USSR had a captive market; and 2. that Yuri Andropov was selected to succeed Leonid Brezhnev for his success in this program despite his being head of the KGB.
Germany is not crazy. Its established political parties, all socialist in orientation, are compromised by a foreign power.
This is an amazing piece, both for your writing and the depths of official idiocy being described.