will this have political blowback for the 'Green' parties?
Green parties did not win that much direct power, but they totally won the energy debate and their policies have become the mainstream consensus among European elites.
Over the past years, European governments (not just the German one) have been busy closing down any energy source that was not renewable or relied on imports from other countries.
Now it turns out that renewable energy sources are still not able to cover the basic needs of the population and the economy, and the dependence on imported fossil fuels has allowed an authoritarian government to launch the largest war on European soil since the World Wars.
I don't know if Green parties will actually face a backslash, but it seems clear that the energy transition in Europe will end up making the continent poorer and far less secure in exchange for little, if any, actual benefit for the environment.
Makes sense.
In Germany, coal was pushed by the conservatives.
It has to be said tho that the Green party is doing "realpolitik" now. While they aim at one hand to drastically accelerate renewables, right now they also invest heavily in getting a more secure energy situation in the near future still using a lot of fossil fuels, including rapidly building up LNG terminals and securing deals with parties they previously frowned upon, e.g. a gas deal with Qatar, the government of which the Green party previously heavily criticized for the human rights situation in the country. And e.g. they accepted - with some bickering - the temporary gas (as in petrol) price subventions the other coalition parties wanted, in exchange for temporary public transport price subventions (a 9-Euro regional ticket, that is valid for a month at a time, 21M sold by July 1, population 83M).
They are still rejecting nuclear power generation, neither wanting to build new plants, nor keeping old plants running (the operators of said old plants already called the idea of keeping those plants running "infeasible" to outright "stupid").
It remains to be seen what the blowback will be if inflation doesn't at least slow down, or if autumn and winter come and people start getting cold. Tho right now, the politicians and leading experts and "experts" say, it doesn't look like there there will be a shortage on a scale that gets life-threatening to some people.
[0] 20-24% share in recent polls, vs the 14.8% they actually got in the last election in Sep 2021. They are actually slightly ahead of the SPD (social democrats) in the polls now. The SPD is the majority partner in the coalition.
It boggles the mind that a so called Green Party is investing in fossil fuels.
The current government that has the Greens as a major coalition partner isn't really investing in new fossil fuel stuff, but replacements of existing fossil fuel stuff. E.g. the LNG terminals are meant to replace the capacity lost from ceased imports from Russia.
Building nuclear now isn't really an option anyway, at least not to deal with the current situation.
The operators of nuclear plants already signaled that running their plants longer is not an option. That would require a lot of investment, and more importantly a lot of time to renovate, modernize and re-certify these things. An effort I believe they said was in the range of 3 or more years.
Building entirely new plants, even with existing designs, would require at least 4 years even on a very expedited schedule.
So in the short term the only option is to keep using fossils - sourced from some place not-Russia. The Greens, while they certainly do not like that, understood this.
Would we Germans be better off if we had some nuclear plants left? Sure. But we'd also be better off if we instead had that energy mix that the Greens envisioned at the start of the century, that entailed renewables at the core, a bit of carbon (mostly from renewable sources, with tech to make it more or less carbon-neutral in totality) and storage, and investments (driven by government incentives) to use less energy in the first place.
If I had to blame anybody, it would be the 16 years of Merkel governments which managed to fuck up both nuclear and renewables, not the Green party.
All in all, quite reasonable and well thought through under the current circumstances.
Blaming the greens is internationally some kind of dumb idea that likes to reduce politics to stereotypes. The real effects will be much more subtle and indirect.
Could still end up with the greens losing votes. Currently it doesn’t look that way at all. (German perspective here.)
I don't know about Germany, but it is my impression that opposition to nuclear power was a common theme among the green movement in general for decades.
Obviously their agenda also included investing in renewables, as well as reducing consumption, but that wasn't going to happen fast enough, either for political or technological reasons.
I have voted for the local Greens several times over the last couple of decades even though I disagreed with and was frustrated with the views they held on nuclear power until recently.
I'm also unfortunately familiar with many of the common and overblown negative stereotypes towards the greens in general.
Insofar as nuclear power could have played a part in reducing our dependency on fossil fuels over the lasts couple of decades, though, I don't think it's unfair to say the greens in many countries did a lot to hinder that.
There are many parts in Europe where the homes are not heated by gas, but by the waste heat from the local power plants, regardless whether they are gas-based, coal-based or nuclear.
Any existing nuclear plant could be converted to also provide heating for the nearby houses, if the infrastructure of plumbing for the transport of hot water would be built.
However, the last part of the heating infrastructure, where the hot water pipes would have to be passed through the house walls and through the walls of all rooms, would be extremely costly in comparison with an electric heater, even if the operating cost would be lower.
So it is very unlikely that such a conversion would ever be done to already existing houses, even if it is possible.
Heat pumps would have much lower installation costs, while still being more efficient than resistive heaters.
If we’re going for the cheapest option, then why not fuck the planet completely and all burn coal?
They were right all along and are now the ones fixing the situation, after only recently being voted into government.
The polls show: The two most popular politicians in germany are both greens. They are the second biggest party in current polls with 22%, 6% behind the biggest party. In the polls they are the biggest party in the current government (when the current term started a few months ago they were the second biggest party in the current government)
Things are going great for them and there are no signs of that changing.