Angela Merkel’s record on environmental policy has been a disaster
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
But bio fuels are an unmitigated disaster. Electric ground transportation is the future.
It's a relatively less evil, for now. We still haven't found a good way of dealing with old batteries and it's a huge environmental problem.
You can already use trains in a large scale: most larger European cities are well connected and have extensive local transport systems. Next the public sector will invest a lot of money into electrical busses and their infrastructure. E-Bikes are already very popular. Cars will take a few more years...
Merkel's government had ambitious goals, but industry and public was not ready - without substantial financial incentives, which would have been another problem.
Many people commute by train from the "suburbs" or the smaller cities sprinkled around the larger cities, partly because it's convenient, partly because traffic is really bad in major cities.
This is particularly relevant in the European context, where most cities were not built for cars and now cannot be significantly altered.
And why should we? (as in: I consider car-friendly cities a bug, not a feature)
But, of course, it's a bit like fusion power: should be achievable in principle, but the details are infuriatingly difficult.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country
China is saving nuclear power too:
https://qz.com/627113/bill-gates-says-china-is-the-best-plac...
[0] https://energy-charts.de/power_inst.htm?year=all&period=annu... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:China_Photovoltaics_Insta...
You wanted to say China, didn't you.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-china-is-domi...
>The timeline of China’s rise began in the late 1990s when Germany, overwhelmed by the domestic response to a government incentive program to promote rooftop solar panels, provided the capital, technology and experts to lure China into making solar panels to meet the German demand.
>China, according to Chung, had “dabbled” in solar energy only as a source of electricity to help impoverished rural areas remote from its power grid. But then some of its pioneering companies became intrigued by the income that manufacturing solar panels for export to Germany might bring in.
>China then decided to follow Germany’s lead again, developing its own “feed-in tariff” that paid handsome prices for electricity generated by rooftop solar. The result was a surge in domestic demand for solar.
By PV Watt per capita Germany is still number one by a large margin at 511 (Japan is second with 336, China is at 56).
Beside coal/gas power, mostly from closing nuclear power plants. For example a quarter of CO2 emission in Berlin is coming from two Vattenfall coal power plants. Other effects are larger increase in people and economic growth.
I have been buying renewable energy for 15 years, but not many/not enough people in Germany care.
On a positive note renewable energy is 35% in Germany.
I don't think you can blame Merkel, she doesn't really have a hard stance on most topics - if anything, the opposite is true, and her position on many things is vague or pragmatic. It seems to me that the popularity of Martin Schulz and the AfD are a direct response to that.
The green party could probably profit much more from those topics if one had the feeling they'd be more trustworthy in those issues. Particularly in the diesel emissions scandal the greens are a big failure - the reason being that the greens form the government in southwest Germany (Baden Württemberg), which has a strong car industry.
I think you're spot on though. The diesel emissions scandal is made worse by the fact that diesel was promoted in the EU because the CO2 emissions tend to be lower than petrol. This is reflected by diesel vs petrol prices in France or Germany (diesel was/is? cheaper per 100km), compared to the UK where diesel wasn't as popular.
2009 - 10.7%
2013 - 8.4%
2017 - 8-10% (projections)
Only B-W has a ruling Green Party, I'd they they're still mostly at 10% everywhere else.
Here, Diesel is taxed less than petrol, originally as a measure to support agriculture (who traditionally use Diesel engines on the field). There's a slightly higher tax on the car itself with a Diesel engine.
Together this makes Diesel cheaper if you're using your car _a lot_, and so vehicle fleets (corporate, car rental, ...) are all Diesel based.
That's hard to roll back politically (since it's cutting into expensive investments of huge organisations).
That's a good one!
It's basically paying lip-service to being environmentally friendly so that you can feel good about yourself while doing nothing productive. Kind of like having separate bins for recycling, green waste, and general rubbish in the home/office but in the end just emptying all of them into the same place.
There was a plan in place since 2002 to shut down all nuclear plants by about 2020 (plus/minus some, since the criteria was amount of power emitted per plant).
That plan was cancelled in 2010 by Merkel, replaced by a more generous plan (deadline: 2022) a year later after Fukushima.
Therefore quitting nuclear power was part of that government's DNA.
2002:
In 2000 they managed to create an accord on ending the use of nuclear power plants, signed by the various affected parties in 2001 and turned into law in 2002.
The law forbade the creation of new nuclear power plants (not that it mattered much: the last one went online in 1989), set a limit of "an average of 32 years of operation" for existing sites, and that there may be a total energy production of 2.62 million GWh through nuclear power in Germany, counting from January 1, 2000.
By December 31, 2008 a good half of that amount was generated.
There were some other new requirements as part of the 2002 law: regular safety controls, no nuclear reprocessing, a requirement to setup sites for temporary storage of nuclear waste, tenfold increase to 2.5bn EUR for the mandatory insurance operators had to take against incidents (with no limit in personal liability if they were at fault).
2010:
In 2009, Germany got a new management (CDU/FDP: Merkel's CDU, that we consider conservative, with the FDP as a highly fiscal conservative / corporation friendly side-kick).
They quickly drafted a new deal which went into effect in 2010: The 7 oldest plants were granted 8 more years of operation each. The other 10 plants got 14 more years. But still no permits for new plants. (so enthusiasm was... low)
Everybody else was checking various legal venues to stop the law from going into force.
2011:
Fukushima happens. In Germany, the highly contentious decision from yesteryear (still hotly debated) meets the fears of a nuclear wasteland.
Within days the 7 oldest plants that were just granted 8 more years (plus a newer one that was notoriously problematic) were ordered to shut down for a few months until things are sorted out.
Within 5 months, there was another revision of the law on nuclear power, which required those 8 plants to remain shut down. It also defined various lifetimes for the other plants, none staying in operation into 2023.
The first of the remaining sites went offline recently, for the others there's a map with their schedule at http://www.bmub.bund.de/themen/atomenergie-strahlenschutz/nu...
End result: The latest plants went online in 1989, so for them the "average 32 years life time" would have been in 2021. Since various older plants were running longer than their 32 years, 2021 would be a good guess, if a bit on the high end.
However assuming that power generation in nuclear power plants is somewhat constant over the years, with some reduction over time due to plants shutting down, these 2.62 million GWh might have lasted until 2018 or so.
Merkel is now held responsible for "shutting down nuclear power in Germany" by the end of 2022. Which, to me, looks like an extensions, not a restriction of nuclear power in Germany.
(Details taken from https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomkonsens and https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomgesetz_(Deutschland) )
there is so much more implied by the Paris Accords that it actually will do and heaps of FUD to convince you it must be done or we are all doomed with a good dose of of thanks thrown to the politicians who so boldly stood up for it.
So the sycophants in press, special interest groups, and science, were all dutifully marched out to hark the message loud enough to distract from everything that actually was still going on.
Politics is the art of distraction and division as practiced by modern politicians who are adept at manipulating public opinion usually with the full cooperation of a sympathetic press.
…the dastardly Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor seem to be a great gift to the Alt-Right’s xenophobic nationalists.
[1] http://www.thedailybeast.com/the-american-who-buried-a-kamik...
After Pearl Harbor, there was no keeping USA out of the war.
"The 75th anniversary commemorations of the dastardly Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor
seem to be a great gift to the Alt-Right’s xenophobic nationalists."
It's not a secondary claim; it's the entire premise of the article.
Are you familiar with "The Guardian"?
Everything is the worst, or (rarely) the best there. It's not exactly a tabloid, but it is becoming more and more of a sensationalist leftie/left-liberal opinion vehicle.
They've spent a lot of time on the "Merkel is a saint" angle lately, because of her actions on refugee flows a couple of years ago, and because they have considered her most righteous when held up against the hubris and failings of the UK (most particularly concerning "Brexit").
So now it's time to demonise her...
FWIW I think nuclear is good in principle, but neither states nor companies have proven responsible enough to handle it. So I'm kind of against nuclear but not in this dogmatic way.
The practical difference is that I think there should be further research to design inherently safe approaches and processes to reduce the risk until it's orders of magnitude safer - maybe something with Thorium, maybe fusion, maybe a new fission reactor design. Then I'd be in favor of using it.
The nuclear waste "killer argument" is mostly bullshit. Highly radioactive substances are spent quickly, long lived substances radiate weakly. 100000 years are quite predictable in geology.
Also the amount of nuclear waste produced is minuscule compared to much more toxic and more difficult to handle substances produced by various industrial processes. And people somehow have no issue with the latter.
So the currently operating nuclear plants that have gone without incident are dismissed? Why so?
Whether or not you consider this a severe enough deficit to necessitate a shutdown is a matter of policy.
As to any operation record, just keep in mind that the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant had one dating back to 1971.
A lack of air bags is not noticable until your car crashes.
The question is if we nevertheless deem them 'safe enough'.
It is, because it is also a tautology. To me it has no bearing over the point we're discussing.
Gone without incident, or just gone without incident documentation? There seems to be an awfully good success rate in finding unreported incidents when people start looking a bit more closely.
In practice this attitude makes you pro-coal (but not in a dogmatic way).
In the real world, waiting for things to improve before pulling the trigger means using what's currently used until then. That has costs.
What's the energy source that's most dangerous? The common sense answer is nuclear (probably because of nuclear bombs first, Chernobyl second). Some clever people might argue about coal given its high emission output.
But at least by death count, the winner is clearly hydro power. Mostly due to the Banqiao Dam incident [1] which directly killed 26,000 people and indirectly killed 145,000.
Of course, that incident is a mess of stupid decision after stupid decision and some might want to claim that it's an outlier. To that I will reply that the same can be said of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima (as well as every other hydro incident[2]).
The fact is that the world is full of stupid. I predict that in the future there will be some solar power company that figures out how to kill a bunch of people with a battery fire. And yet, that won't change anything to my support of hydropower or solar power. Nuclear safety is a minor issue compared to its advantages over coal and other fossil fuels.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/15/nuclea...
"Nuclear power, whatever its detractors might claim, is a low-carbon energy source, roughly comparable to renewables in terms of total emissions. To shut down viable nuclear capacity in the midst of a climate change emergency (now, in other words), as Germany and Japan have done, is a refined form of madness, especially when at least some of that capacity is likely to be replaced by gas or coal, whose carbon emissions are much higher. Replacing fossil fuels with renewables, on the timescale in which we need to act, is hard enough, without setting yourself the additional, unnecessary challenge of also replacing nuclear power."
In the last few years we saw it in action, with important repercussion on the global level: for example, the way the Greek crisis was managed it had to do much more with the safety of German banks, that with the welfare of Greece (https://www.esmt.org/pub/where-did-greek-bailout-money-go).
For the welfare of the people in Greece the greek government is responsible, not Angela Merkel.
That is correct, but one could ask that people don't go around and say "Germany saved Greece!", cause no .. it didn't. It saved its banks.
Without paying back the money (-> to the banks), Greece would have been bancrupt within days. Thus saving the banks saved Greece from being bancrupt. Without banks and without government money from the outside, nobody would have given Greece any credits...
The currency union was just very badly thought out. A currency union without a fiscal union is probably a bad idea. That was recognized somewhat by the stability criteria for new members that were then swiftly ignored for various reasons.
That's highly debatable and in a changing political landscape there was no future for that. A tiny country next to the EU and a large Eurozone? Greece needed reforms and some (not all) of them were long delayed. That's also the point of the EU and the Eurozone. It provides the framework for the reforms. The largest win for Greece is a stable democracy, after a long phase of political instability and military governments.
Instead, the common currency has greatly benefited Germany: had the Germans retained the Deutsche Mark, their currency would be valued higher than the Euro is now, making their exports more expensive and/or lowering the profits of export industries.
Greece with its Drachma would have been a welcome victim for currency speculation. This was tried with the Euro, too, but it failed.
People also think in economic terms, but the Euro is a political project. Countries like Greece wanted to be in the Eurozone. It was not Germany's wish. It was the wish of Greece and the population of Greece also wanted it - not just the politicians.
Germany actually did not want to have the Euro itself, it agreed to the Euro to get the Reunification. But it agreed on the Euro to be a stable currency, not one that politicians would devalue to gain short term effects.
All pegs are a potential victim of currency speculation. The solution is to end the peg and let the currency float, as it happened to the British Pound/Deutche Mark during the Soros stunt in the 90s or more recently with the Euro/Swiss Franc peg.
I notice this world wide
I ask government officials for "expedited processing" with IRL emphasis and air quotes when I want something done faster, some times it could be construed as a kick back, other times the legislature had already voted for that where I must congratulate them for their keen recognition of revenue streams.
I don't consider due process as the qualifier of non-corruption. I don't actually care.
I just wish more people would accept the relative morality of the institutions they comply with.
That's insulting, and factually inaccurate - unless you have evidence to substantiate this hyperbole?
> for example, the way the Greek crisis was managed
The Greek crisis had other origins, and the financial checks/obligations upon joining the Euro are supposed to mitigate against the risk of not being able to devalue a national currency to e.g. boost tourism or exports. Too bad the Greek financial records may have not been completely accurate.
While Germany has benefited from the Euro, so have other countries. And it wasn't/isn't without downsides for Germany, either. I distinctly remember when the Euro was introduced, everything became far more expensive than the Deutschmark prices had been.
I think we can agree on that the economy is very much globally connected, and that a recession is going to have wide-spread effects. And that austerity doesn't work, and shows that best case, economists and bankers don't know what they're doing, or worst case know exactly what they're doing.
However, equating the actions/stance of one nations banks to that nation's people is a leap too far.
Guess who pushed hard and voiched for greece joining the euro?
If you are trying to insinuate that this was a German plot, you couldn't be farther from the truth. The Deutsche Mark was a sacred cow and getting rid of it in favour of a common currency with "irresponsible countries" with weak currencies was deeply unpopular even with internationalists like Kohl. Only France threatening to block German reunification unless they drop the Mark, in 1990, got German politicians to agree to giving up their currency.
The crisis was managed irrationally and vengefully, and certainly with an eye on bailing out German and French banks, and making an example of Greece.
There's a very cozy relationship between politics, business leadership and most of the union leadership in countries like Germany and the Netherlands.
The relationship is that cozy, that pretty clearly unethical acts hardly warrant official responses of the juridicary, politics or unions. One step worse for the public is that even enacted legislation is not always upheld when the three parties agree on it not being in their (local) interest. The Rheinland model transfers legitimacy from the individual to the parties representing the different interests. At that point power is concentrated, and corrupts.
Best recent example is the Volkswagen-example. But most large Rhineland corporations have such examples (Shell in Nigeria, Siemens in Spain, ...) I recently re-read a well-cited article on corporate social responsibility. Guess which firm was one of the examples... Volkswagen.
I really have a hard time blaming someone for changing views over a legislative period of more than 12 years.
Well, Bavarians might disagree with both "moral principles" and "right wing". Especially CDU is hardly "right wing".
Some Bavarian politicians may have other moral principles. But Merkel defended the German constitution which has no limit for asylum seekers and she also followed her christian upbringing.
THE whole CDU is clearly not right anymore, but take Erika Steinbach as an example of the (former) right wing. Or the critics from the CSU. There is also a large group of voters right from CDU/CSU - a voter domain which other politicians from CDU/CSU also claim(ed) for themselves. Politicians from the CDU moved to the AFD ... a prominent example is Alexander Gauland, who was 40 years member of the CDU.
It is rather right wing in a global context. If you don't think they are right wing, you might want to recalibrate your views of what you think of "centrist".
Populism is a mode of political communication that is centred around contrasts between the "common man" or "the people" and a real or imagined group of "privileged elites", traditionally scapegoating or making a folk devil of the latter.
Merkel does not scapegoat elites.
Like cancelling the 2002 nuclear shutdown deal in 2010 and then reenacting a new, poorly planned one in 2011 because a plant several thousand miles away ran into issues?
On that playing field only Toyota came close to beat the German diesels so it's not only a sunken cost fallacy, they have an advantage on diesel technology that makes it understandable (from a business perspective) on them pushing for it.
2. Taxes in Germany: Diesel fuel is taxed at a much lower rate than other gasoline. In turn, the cars themselves are taxed a bit higher. If you drive a lot, a Diesel car is more economical for that reason.
2. Have ever had a chance to drive a car with a Diesel engine? The power over RPM curve is so different that the experience feels very different and arguably much more convenient.
That's because there are tax advantages for Diesel. Originally a subsidy for agriculture (because their machines all ran on Diesel), it made Diesel motors a favorite for those who need to drive a lot (incl huge corporate fleets).
Changing any of that is a highly contentious political issue. Merkel's political style doesn't deal well with these.
Diesel emissions are exaggerated. European emission standards set limits for diesel emissions that are just minutely different from gasoline emissions.
American limits for diesels are notorious for being more restrictive than for gas engines.
All of that considered, diesels are plainly more economical and more efficient on pretty much all common engine size ranges
Second, besides VW which was creating even 40x the emissions than the standard you mentioned required, pretty much all the other car makers were creating 10-15x as many emissions, too, thus making that "strict standard" way looser. Forget Euro 6 or Euro 5. These cars weren't even compliant with the 25 year old Euro 2. In other words, all of these car makers "passing" the emissions tests over the past two decades has been all a bad joke played on the EU population.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/19/many-car-...
Finally, a new stricter (than Euro 6) standard was supposed to arrive by 2021 or so, but Merkel once again intervened to make the standard even looser (by +50% more emissions allowed) than the previous one, which would be a first in the history of the Euro emissions standards, which have become increasingly stricter not looser, so far. All thanks to Merkel.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/oct/24/petrol-c...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jun/28/angela-m...
So is the Ozone. Diesels with lower NO emissions than that of gas engines are made all around the place.
All same, if not worse for particulate emissions
The other negative effects of the Diesel boom was very visible for a long time and politics and authorities were ignoring it.
Merkel (and her coalition partner the CSU) is especially responsible for having a very weak minister Dobrindt, who was not willing or able to guide the automotive industry.
Merkel and the government is a part of the problem, but the automotive industry and the consumer is even more so. The automotive industry promoted the Diesel engine and the consumer bought especially the high-powered ones. The government is responsible for low Diesel taxes, supporting large company cars and a lack of regulation.
This sort of behaviour opened up a whole industry for disruption, so in a way corrupt politicians are the grave-diggers of old industrys.