Schellemberg: Germany bent by a disappointing green dream

Michael Shellenberger is an industry award-winning ecologist who at one point broke away from CO2 extremism, the terror of global warming, and started writing the truth.

Now he asked himself: how did Germany, an advanced country, find itself a slave to Russia, with 40% of gas, 20% of coal and oil imported from Moscow and thus losing its political autonomy? Here's how Schellenberg answers the question :

How is it possible that European countries, and Germany in particular, have allowed themselves to become so dependent on an authoritarian country in the 30 years since the end of the Cold War?

Here's how: These countries are in the throes of a delusional ideology that makes them unable to understand the harsh reality of energy production. Green ideology insists we don't need nuclear power and we don't need fracking. He insists that it is only a question of willingness and money to switch to all renewable sources quickly. It insists on the need for a "degrowth" of the economy and on the looming "extinction" of man. (I know, I was once a true believer myself.)

John Kerry, the US climate envoy, captured the short-sightedness of this vision perfectly when he said, in the days leading up to the war, that the Russian invasion of Ukraine "could have a profound negative impact on the climate, of course. . There is a war, and of course the consequences of the war will be massive in terms of emissions. But, just as importantly, people's attention will be lost ”.

But it was precisely the West's attention to heal the planet with "soft" renewable energies and to abandon natural gas and nuclear power that allowed Putin to get a grip on the European energy supply.

As the West fell into a hypnotic trance about healing the relationship with nature, preventing the climate apocalypse, and worshiping a teenager named Greta, Vladimir Putin made his moves.

While expanding nuclear power at home so that Russia could export its precious oil and gas to Europe, Western governments spent their time and energy obsessing over "carbon footprints," a term created by a advertising company working for British Petroleum. They banned plastic straws because of a 9-year-old Canadian boy's science homework. They paid for hours of "climate anxiety" therapy.

As Putin expanded Russia's oil production, natural gas production, and then doubled nuclear power production to allow for greater exports of its precious gas, Germany-led Europe closed its nuclear power plants. it has closed the gas fields and refused to develop others through advanced methods such as fracking.

The numbers tell the story better. In 2016, 30% of the natural gas consumed by the European Union came from Russia. In 2018, this figure jumped to 40%. In 2020 it was almost 44% and at the beginning of 2021 almost 47%.

For all his flattering Putin, Donald Trump, in 2018, defied diplomatic protocol to publicly call Germany for its addiction to Moscow. " Germany, as far as I'm concerned, is a prisoner of Russia because it gets much of its energy from Russia," Trump said. This prompted the then Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, who had been widely praised in polite circles for being the last serious leader of the West, to say that her country "can make its own policies and make its own decisions" .

The result was the worst global energy crisis since 1973, which caused electricity and gasoline prices to rise around the world. It is basically a crisis of inadequate supply. But the scarcity is completely artificial.

Europeans – led by figures like Greta Thunberg and leaders of the European Green Party and backed by Americans like John Kerry – believed that a healthy relationship with the Earth required scarcity of energy. By switching to renewable energy, they would show the world how to live without harming the planet. But it was a chimera. It is not possible to power an entire electricity grid with solar and wind energy, because the sun and wind are fickle and the batteries currently in existence are not even cheap enough to store large amounts of electricity overnight, much less for entire seasons. .

Germany and Europe committed suicide on the basis of a losing ideology that had been cultivated for 20 years and put unprepared dreamers at the helm. Today we pay the bill

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The article Schellemberg: Germany bent by a disappointing green dream comes from ScenariEconomici.it .

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This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/schellemberg-la-germania-piegata-da-un-deludente-sogno-verde/ on Sun, 19 Jun 2022 09:55:33 +0000.