Does it really matter to see all those solar panel farms if the end result is they were not much helpful? The money which went into this is absolutely massive and could have been used in a better way to fight climate change.
Short to mid term? Same as above, only that storage will have to be replaced with something else. Since coal is clearly favoured by the system in Germany coal has to replaced by itself. Coal is just the worst alternative. Unfortunately nuclear is no option in Germany, until storage tech is sufficient it could nicely close the gap.
If we are still positive at the five-year mark, that means zero at, say, the ten-year mark, and negative emissions for many decades.
Natural gas has no place in this long-term.
Carbon sequestration is possibly a viable solution. There seem to be solutions in trial (there are numerous questions around it), and even with added costs of capture, it's considerably cheaper and more reliable than other form of energy - moreover, we have it in abundance.
Natural Gas is as viable for the horizon of our future we're able to predict.
In 100 years, every dimension of our tech will have changed so much it's hard to predict. Maybe we solve the nuclear wast problem. Maybe we get fusion. Maybe we have uber cheap solar. Maybe we have dirty easy sequestration. Maybe we have alternatives.
1) Long term storage has some existential risks. Over very long time horizons, these risks become real.
2) Transportation, processing and storage: all of this operational stuff is totally ripe for accidents.
I don't see how that's reasonable, I suggest you might have typed something incorrectly.
There are still quite a number of risks inherent in the Nuclear process that require only a few operational failures for disaster.
If very smart countries and operationally efficient countries like Japan screw up the risks, then anyone can. And that there were mitigating circumstances does not change the fact that Japan still had great governance and scientists and persisted with either risky models or a failure to measure the risk.
Basically, we'd need to suck the risk out of every part of the process in order for it to work well.
I think it's possible.
Again, waste storage is incredibly secure and safe. It wouldn't leech into the water. Nuclear subs have sank into the ocean, and, surprise, there wasn't a global disaster.
In other words it would be good to stop acting as though the only possible grid is one that looks exactly like the one that was developed in the early 1900's. There are many other arrangements of generation resources and economic structures to pay for them than the existing grid. That is what renewables are moving toward.
That looks like progress to me. Why do you say "everyone else is just going to burn more coal?"
Being afraid of government debt if you're a stable country is illogical: it's also why Germany can borrow money at negative interest rates, meaning people would actually rather lend money to Germany and get less back in a few years, rather than park it at a bank. Unlike a business or an individual, the lender has very little risk that the stable country will go bust/get hit by a car and can't earn money to repay the bank.
Take nuclear fusion as an example: Supposedly, this is a case where the projected investments necessary to go from theory to practice just haven't been made. With return of investment only anticipated in the far-off future, it was decided that the money could be spent in better ways.
Surely countries can invest more if those projects are 'more value creating than other investments' and if it's rational, but the notion that countries shouldn't be afraid of debt either is pragmatically no helpful.
All of us are just a few irresponsible financial decisions away from being Greece, Venezuela, Weimar etc.. Stable fiat currencies are a precarious thing, which why we are so cold and 'small c' conservative about it.
As for Germany's problems, it has to do with how we measure value, institutional legacy, and obviously unwillingness to consider Nuclear.
Merkel was never really a pragmatist in the sense we would understand it - she was a political pragmatist, meaning really just 'populist' but more of the centrist type: I believe her Nuclear decision was mostly political.
But I believe people should be reminded from time to time that our world is pretty far from the best possible one: There's no particularly good reason that a child has to die from undernutrition every couple of minutes, that fusion research stagnated due to lack of funding, that people go bankrupt to pay for healthcare, etc. As a species, we're just too stupid and greedy to do any better...
If your case is that economic output is fixed I would flat out disagree. It's been shown over and over again that investment increases economic output. Which was very much the idea with Germany's Energiewende
Otherwise Venezuela would be the richest country in world history right about now, given their inflation rate.
It works identical to mathematical halving in concept. Yes you can keep going, and no you'll never reach zero. However every time you debase the currency to pay for something beyond your budget, you destroy some of the value underpinning it. You make the assets and transactions in that currency less valuable. You can infinitely subdivide the currency, and each time you do it, you destroy more of the value base. Eventually you're splitting pennies, so to speak. This is especially true in cases where you're printing to pay for something you can't afford (almost always the reason for such printing), so what you're really doing is eating the nation's asset base through the currency debasement.
Just ask Japan, they sliced more than 1/3 off their standard of living by debasing the Yen over the past decade. They had no choice due to their debt situation (they needed to stealth default), however it reduces the value of the assets that are held in Yen, making it easier to eg use dollars (or gold) to buy those assets (whether businesses or real-estate and so on).
So sure, in theory can you infinitely print currency. In practical application, you destroy the value of the things that underpin the currency and the whole scheme self-destructs given enough time and 'printing.' That puts a more realistic cap on actual potential money supply. The fact is, it inherently must be finite. Eventually your money is not worth anything, as you destroy the assets under it. As that happens, people stop accepting the worthless currency, it becomes too expensive to 'print' it and support it, and it becomes a self correcting system, in all cases and without exception.
It shouldn't be, but unfortunately, it very much is.
Sure, putting them further into the dry south would certainly have improved yields, e.g. putting them into Spain or even further south like DESERTEC envisioned. And still, they produce a non-trivial chunk of German electricity now. Not sure what you are suggesting, compared to stuff like fusion, we actually know that solar works. Also, there is a political component of having them on own soil: energy independence. A lesson learned in the oil crisis.