An incredible article. The author pulls out all the emotional stops against some environmentally conscious elite he dislikes: > Heidegger, like much of the conservation movement, would have hated what the Energiewende has become: an excuse for the destruction of natural landscapes and local communities. > Opposition to renewables comes from the country peoples that Heidegger idolized as more authentic and “grounded” than urbane cosmopolitan elites who fetishize their solar roofs and Teslas as signs of virtue.

And yet, in an entire article written about a country’s investments in clean energy, there’s not a single mention of climate change, carbon emissions, or any of the reasons why I at least thought we were fighting to keep the fossil fuels in the ground.

And the author’s grand data-backed argument, showing why renewables are forever doomed? > But no amount of marketing could change the poor physics of resource-intensive and land-intensive renewables. Solar farms take 450 times more land than nuclear plants, and wind farms take 700 times more land than natural gas wells, to produce the same amount of energy.

He places us on a playing field of energy per unit area, which could likely win the title of least useful metric of the year.

I think everyone agrees there is a lot to be criticized and learned from with the Energiewende, but the axes on which this article analyzes it make no sense.