“Germany’s Green Energy Disaster: A Cautionary Tale For World Leaders”
“The costs of our energy reform and restructuring of energy provision could amount to around one trillion euros by the end of the 2030s.”
Category Archives: Hard Facts
The Green Shirts vs. The Environment
Guess who’s going to win?
One would assume that ecology and the Energiewende, Germany’s plans to phase out nuclear energy and increase its reliance on renewable sources, were natural allies. But in reality, the two goals have been coming into greater and greater conflict…
Since the party’s founding in 1980, it has championed a nuclear phaseout and fought for clean energy. But now that this phaseout is underway, the Greens are realizing a large part of their dream — the utopian idea of a society operating on “good” power — is vanishing into thin air. Green energy, they have found, comes at an enormous cost. And the environment will also pay a price if things keep going as they have been.
“We should overcome the temptation to sacrifice environmental protection for the sake of fighting climate change. Preserving a stable natural environment is just as important.”
Inequality For All
That seems to be what most Germans think their country provides them with these days. They are forever moaning and groaning about how the German “social divide” keeps widening.
Germans can be pretty innumerate, you see, believe it or not (when the media hype wants them to be). Nobody ever stops to consider the numbers here, either (just like everywhere else). You have to go to professional-like people on the outside (like at The Economist) for that.
DIW, an economic think-tank in Berlin, says that inequality rose significantly after German reunification; but that it has fallen a bit since 2005 (see chart). Awkwardly for the left, that is when Angela Merkel became chancellor, in coalition first with the SPD, then with the FDP.
This is the opposite of what the public believes. According to a study by Allensbach, a polling institute, 69% of Germans think wealth and income are unfairly distributed, and almost two-thirds believe inequality has risen in the past few years. That is good for the left.
Germany remains a huge social and economic success, something that it often seems unGerman to savour.
The British are leaving! The British are leaving!
And the German communities they will soon be leaving don’t like it one little bit. It has to do with Kaufkraft (spending power) or something.
Strange, isn’t it? Germans are always the first to demand the quickest possible withdrawal timetable for “foreign” troops (NATO, ISAF, etc.) taking part in peacekeeping operations elsewhere in the world, but then start whining once the foreign peacekeepers in Germany finally have enough already and decide to leave themselves – after nearly seventy years.
Peace is hell.
“Da sind die Auswirkungen nur schwer abzuschätzen.”
Speaking Of CO2…
Not that there is a connection here or anything, but after the German government’s frenzied exit from nuclear power, German greenhouse gas emissions have risen 1.6 percent.
Die Luft wird dicker. Der Ausstoß von Treibhausgasen in Deutschland steigt nach Jahren des Rückgangs wieder spürbar an.
Global Warming Still Causing Colder Weather In Germany
In February, of all months. And in Germany, of all countries.
According to German meteorologist Dominik Jung, Germany has just set a new record for having its 5th colder-than-normal winter in a row.
In light of recent scientific predictions that Central Europe would soon not be having any winters at all, several of the scientists who had made these predictions are now attributing this unexpected climatic odditiy to a newly discovered global warming abnormality they are now calling “Winterwetter.”
Winterwetter seems to have a direct relationship to the global warming theory postulate asserting that water vapor and clouds will temporarily cancel out the warming effect of CO2 emissions currently destroying our planet, thus temporarily reversing the deadly global warming trend for a small period each and every year lying roughly between the seasons of autumn and spring and directly affecting countries like Germany with unreasonably and unseasonably cold weather until the more unreasonably and unseasonably warm weather returns again.
Am Montag könnte die Schneedecke noch einmal deutlich anwachsen. Erst ab Mitte der Woche ist Besserung in Sicht.
Germany Not Trying To Dominate Europe
Honest. Why try when it comes so naturally?
No, seriously folks. Poor German President Joachim Gauck. He certainly means well (and somebody’s talking head has to say this stuff, I guess), but how can you not think that Germany is imposing a “diktat” on the rest of the continent when he goes out of his way to tell you that Germany is not imposing a “diktat” on the rest of the continent?
“In Germany, more Europe doesn’t mean a German Europe. To us, more Europe means a European Germany.”
Well, nice try, but you forgot about the German European Germany variation. It’s not that we don’t trust you, Germany. It’s just that we don’t trust you. It’s called the BKB Syndrome (or at least that’s what I call it). You know, The Big Kid on the Block Syndrome? It’s incurable and there’s not a damned thing you can do about it and you’re guilty until proven guilty so just go ahead and kick back and get used to the situation (as if you weren’t already). And, oh yeah, welcome to the club already, too.
“I was shocked to see how quickly perceptions became distorted, as if today’s Germany stood in the tradition of German imperialism, even of German crimes.”
High Five Claudia
Or high, anyway.
How did the high five and theocratic rule in Iran come to cross paths recently? Well, this past weekend at the Munich Security Conference, Claudia Roth, who heads the German Green Party, which represents 11% of the country, was photographed engaged in an enthusiastic high five with the Iranian Ambassador to Germany Ali Reza Sheikh Attar.
The story is beginning to make waves in Germany because Iran’s leaders routinely deny that the Holocaust ever happened, which is a crime in Germany. An example came soon after at a forum with the German Council on Foreign Relations on Monday when Iran’s Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Selehi was invited to visit the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. Selehi ignored the invitation and then passed on answering a question about Holocaust denial in his country by simply saying “Any holocaust is a human tragedy.” When asked if there has been more than one Holocaust, Selehi told the packed audience that it was up to them to find out.
Claudia Roth’s Green Party arose from the German student movement of the 1960s, recalcitrant in thumbing their noses at the previous generation who had pro-Nazi tendencies. They championed human rights and cast themselves as the enlightened and progressive leaders of Germany’s bright future.
So why is the head of the Green Party so cozy with someone whose country’s fascism represents the complete opposite of the Green Party pillars? Roth has issued a statement downplaying the encounter, but unfortunately, not even German has a word for how this incident makes any sense.
Attar werde vorgeworfen, dass er in den “80ern als Gouverneur im Iran Oppositionelle aufhängen ließ”. Attar war nach der islamischen Revolution von 1979 Gouverneur der Provinzen Kurdistan und West-Aserbaidschan gewesen. Seit 2008 ist er Botschafter in Deutschland und nicht zuletzt damit beschäftigt, Kritik an Menschenrechtsverletzungen des Regimes in Teheran zurückzuweisen.
Klaus Wowereit Unpopular In Berlin For Some Reason These Days
According to the latest Forsa poll taken here in Berlin, only a small number of Berlin voters hold Berlin mayor Klaus Wowereit to be trustworthy, straightforward, competent, able to take criticism and work in a team.
So like what’s the problem, right? He’s the perfect political animal.
No, but seriously folks… He’s so disliked at the moment that only two Pirate party politicians are less popular than he is. Party Klaus, I take my Hut off to you!
Nur eine Minderheit der Bürger hält Wowereit für glaubwürdig, gradlinig, kompetent, kritik- und teamfähig. Der einzige Wert, bei dem er im Vergleich zu früheren Umfragen zulegte, ist das Machtbewusstsein.
More Green Energy Jobs
More jobs lost to green energy, I mean.
Worlee-Chemie GmbH, a family-owned company that has produced resins in the city of Hamburg for almost a century, is trying to escape the spiraling cost of Germany’s shift to renewable energy.
A 47 percent increase on Jan. 1 in the fees grid operators set to fund wind and solar investments is driving the maker of paint ingredients to Turkey, where next month it will start making a new type of hardening agent at a factory near Istanbul.
The levy will cost Worlee 465,000 euros ($620,000) this year, the equivalent of 10 full-time salaries, or one-third of the company’s tax bill. As German labor costs rise at the fastest pace in a decade, the price of weaning the country off nuclear energy by 2022 is crushing the so-called Mittelstand, the three million small and medium-sized businesses like Worlee that account for about half of gross domestic product.
Wow. Now that’s what I call government intervention in action. This German energy turnaround thing is working out practically as well as the European cap-and-trade system itself.
“It could be the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back. It comes on top of tax, general production costs, raw-material availability and bureaucracy, which have led to a deterioration of the investment climate in Germany.”
Observing Hermann 