Ok, so what is the solution you propose? Quit russian gaz cold turkey, today? Let people in Berlin freeze to death tonight? (Temperatures are 0 degrees C at night)
Also, if the majority of the population is losing heating and need to do your suggested preparation, I wouldn't bet my luck on successfully getting a heater and a electric blanket. There was a freaking toilet paper shortage in covid because of panic buying. These and whatnot will be gone in minutes.
1) Make fuel extremely expensive. 2) Quickly massively lower standard of living, e.g. by turning off heating in winter/early spring 3) Purposefully crash the economy, leading to mass unemployment.
And the reasoning is as follows:
The actually morally necessary step is to establish a no-fly zone above Ukraine, enforced by force with NATO fighter jets and anti-aircraft systems.
People (possibly rightfully) consider that this could lead to a WW3, possibly escalating into the usage of nuclear weapons.
So far so good.
So the bargain we do is basically "Ukraine, we would do everything for you, except for starting WW3, which you hopefully understand!".
Really? Everything? Then quit Russian gas cold turkey! No matter how bad it will be (possibly fairly bad, I admit), it will still be less than WW3, which we bargain is the only thing that we don't want, everything else we would do for Ukraine.
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Can anybody put this into better words??
Nor did everybody on the 'allied' side in WWII.
Nor did millions of Koreans, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Afghanis and so on.
Millions of Ukrainians did not sign up for it.
In fact: almost nobody except for the aggressors signed up for a war and even there that's debatable, usually it's only a few people at the top and then 100's of enablers and thousands to millions of conscripts, who didn't sign up for it either.
But that doesn't mean that you won't end up in a war. The question is how much control you will have over the location of the battlefield. That's why the Americans had this 'fight them over there rather than here' doctrine going. Which given their lack of proximity always was a bit of misdirection, but that doesn't mean that the idea by itself does not have merit.
Not sure how my 25 cent analysis of US would translate to Germany, but demands on citizens should probably not get too out of sync with the level of existential threat the citizens perceive. If there’s a perception problem, fix that and then make the demands for sacrifice.
Ceaușescu was deposed (and very rapidly shot at the wall) also because of the fact we, Romanians, were freezing in our very homes. That and the food rationing.
The "total NFZ over Ukraine" idea will definitely lead to a direct war with Russia because it essentially requires striking AA sites within Russia and Belarus.
The only NFZ scenario that's plausible is a partial NFZ with a sufficiently large buffer zone that it does not overlap with Russian AA on Russian soil. Which puts Kyiv outside the NFZ, btw.
“Don’t trip the most obvious trigger for ww3 until all avenues for sanctions, embargoes, and boycotts have been exhausted. This obviously includes stopping gas purchases from Russia.”
But as D’s A, I would wonder where this stops. Should US be opening domestic production with gusto? Should Germany demand oil from Middle East with threats of soft and hard power? Shall they buy from Iran, Russia’s friend? Shall they embargo China, who presumably still buys fossil fuels from Russia, and every other customer of Russia?
Assume Germany’s need for gas is not elastic - they can’t simply endure with less. To what lengths shall they go to avoid Russian gas?
Once Russia is economically desperate, will ww3 be triggered anyway?
I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I do wonder about them.
An anecdote from earlier this winter when the electricity prices peaked in Europe: my girlfriend and I live on 79 sqm in a modern apartment building with triple-pane windows, and because of the landlord being a stingy d*ck we went through several weeks without any heating. During the worst 7-10 days we had a temperature of -4°C outside, but never below 15°C inside. When the temperature rose to 5°C we had about 18°C inside.
Sure, in retrospect it would have been better to invest even more money into renewables ten or twenty years ago, and to keep the nuclear power plants running for just a few more years. But you can't change the past so that discussion really leads to nothing for the current situation.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...
Gas reserves wont last that much because human hoards if they know government are starting to use reserves. And, when politician act, they should think about future too. And, can they purchase gas at 50%? Are those written in deals?
https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/deutschland/politik/erdgas-ru...
You can just say “we are with Ukraine up to the russian gas.” But that would just be true not beautiful.
Heating with electricity is therefore something quite achievable and sometimes even economical. At current German electricity prices of 0,33 EUR/kwh electricity heating is currently cheaper than gas heating (currently at 0,20 EUR/kwh for new contracts - was at 0,04 before the crisis).
I feel like we temporarily dodged a bullet by sheer laziness - before the pandemic, we were all set to do the whole Energiesanierung with full KfW incentives, which would have required chucking out our oil furnace (replaced right before we bought the house a few years ago) for, most likely, natural gas. Instead, we are still sitting on 1.5 years of normal or possibly 3 years of very carefully used heating oil supply.
Now, like everyone, we’re looking into heat pumps. Because we are still sitting on a year or two of heating oil, I think we shouldn’t be competing against our gas-heated neighbors for that changeover this year or next.
Numbers are similar for many parts of eastern Germany.
For western Germany the a slightly less, but still very high.
Gas Germany imports is also re-exported to other countries.
Some financially much worse off.
You are literally asking Germany to derive a non-small amount of their financially weaker of people of heating, cooking and warm water. And this would not just affect Germany but other EU countries too, destabilizing all of the EU.
At the same time it doesn't necessary stop the war, and might even escalate it even.
Also many of the alternative sources we could buy gas from don't have the infrastructure to ship it to us fast enough (yet).
Worse some of the alternative sources are states like Qatar, which are from a democratic, ethical and cultural point of view worse then Russia, they are just spacial further away...
The main objective of the EU is to protect it's citizens and implicitly secondarily democracy. Switching of Russian gas _now_ would fail both. Leading to internally instability we can't afford which would be a perfect presence for the word wide re-emerging fascism.
Now that's how it's now, a lot of thinks are already underway to change this.
But changes take time.