Looming natural gas shortages has the EU scrambling for solutions

2) The german tech sector never tried to compete with US salaries. I for one have quite the income (base+bonus+other monetary benefits) but am way behind a Silicon Valley counterpart. And I mean with cost of living etc included.

My company is constantly adjusted the salaries. But we still base it on market conditions in Europe not world wide. And they don’t want to react to inflation so fast.

But that is only my experience. Major city in Germany btw.

Would you rather be colder in the winter for a couple years or live in a warzone and have your family killed and culture destroyed?

Which is a really callus and harsh position to take.

The alternative question, the one which should be being handled right now though is what % of people need support, and how do you help without worsening the problem? How quickly can you install solar, batteries and air-sourced heat pumps? What financing scheme gets the best bang for buck while helping those least able to afford the market fluctuation?

The question isn't "would you be fine with it at the margin?" - because the only reason to ask it is to sidle up to "maybe we should appease the nazis/just kind of not think about the genocide" under the auspices of "well there was no other choice so it's not really an immoral one".

The much better question is one of political accountability: why was the country made so vulnerable to this situation? Why were the vulnerable in the country made the most susceptible to this situation? Why were the alternatives ignored? And why is bold action not being taken now to fix this?

As for inflation control, in mamy ways the whole point of that is to punish those at the margin, who might otherwise gain at the expense of those with large assets.

If you're about to say, what about the poor pensioners on a fixed income, see my first paragraph.

The realpolitik is speeding up the transition off oil and gas, and energy independence.

Control, integration, subjugation, colonization, there are a lot of other words that are more fitting without the "genocide" hyperbole.

Another factor is how many open surface areas they have and the size of windows. I had an apartment that I rarely heated in the winter because it was wrapped on 5 of 6 sides by other apartments and the only exposed surface was a wall. Other apartments had multiple outside-facing walls/roofs.

In hindsight it was an obvious preparation for the war, making sure that Europe had lower gas reserves so that installing sanctions on Russia would hurt more.

It's war. We have to win it. Yes that is expensive, but Russia commits genocide in the areas they occupy, so there is no alternative.

The UK may have left the EU, but we still have millions of Eastern Europeans living here.

Whether this sentiment stays when winter comes and energy prices really start to bite is another question - but right now our attitude towards Russia is driven by our own emotions - nothing to do with American virtue signalling.

You can't understand anything Russia does until you understand that it has a bully's mindset. Anything you negotiate with them just emboldens them to do more to you later. When confronted, they escalate but there is a lot less muscle behind that than it seems.

Therefore any negotiation of the kind that you describe will embolden them to reach for more as soon as they think they can. Appeasing Russia will no more prevent further aggression than giving Czechoslovakia to Hitler avoided WW 2.

Also you completely misunderstand the war situation. The current phase has been a war of attrition with a slow retreat. The Ukrainian counteroffensive will come in August or September, once Russia's ability to wage war has been exhausted. From projects that I've seen, it is an even bet whether there will be a COMPLETE Russian collapse before the end of the year. (Yes, they won't even get to keep Crimea.)

If you want to understand the military situation in detail, I recommend https://www.understandingwar.org/publications. You don't have to follow it in detail. For example if you'd read https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offens... a couple of months ago, you'd understand everything you need to understand to realize that Russia won't be able to hold the territory that they have taken.

Sorry for the naive question, but are the Nord Stream gas deliveries:

1. blocked because sanctions dont allow for commerce/transactions,

or

2. blocked to hurt the customer (Europe) by not transacting even when transacting is possible?

People have been saying this since the 1980s:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urengoy–Pomary–Uzhhorod_pipeli...

And my situation is rather in the best-case bucket. Lot's of people live in badly insulated houses or flats that have much higher energy costs. I guess it won't matter that that much for upper middle class families - maybe they postpone their expensive vacation or don't buy another SUV but everyone that is poor or just survives without any chance to buildup reserves this could get nasty.

This is ahistorical. The US in no way, shape, or form when "all out" trying to stop North Vietnam. It was a poor country, but it was heavily armed and resupplied by the USSR and China, including leveraging some of the newest fighter jets, SAMs, etc. the USSR had to offer.

What a statement.

> It's really been the German greens hellbent on holding back nuclear across the EU

The German Greens, stalling investments into nuclear energy across the world. A powerful cabal.

… and right now you can see how "successful" they are with their nuclear power plants: so "successful" that they have to import energy because a lot of their nuclear power plants are currently offline, due to unexpected problems related to safety. Even better, the current hot weather also causes serious problems and reduces power output.

This is bigger than Germany closing some nuclear plants, although that obviously isn't helping. Despite knowing that natural gas is a fossil fuel that we need to stop using the cost of using it hasn't been high enough to dissuade using it. This sudden increase in cost and the crisis it has and will cause really shows that economy is the only thing that matters, people will continue burning whatever they can get as long as it's cheap, since the external cost of global warming isn't properly included in the price. Neither was security risks, and we're all paying for that now.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/873552/energy-mix-in-ita...

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1235432/hungary-distribu...

[2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

Suddenly: money everywhere, zero red tape, worry about compliance later, get it done now.

So, if the political will is there, things are possible, and I can easily imagine our country going a lot harder than that if the danger was imminent enough.

We F ourselves because we don't allow construction companies to do their jobs.

Similarly, if they were willing to say "fuckit, this may end up being extremely expensive in 10 years but we need it now or we freeze to death", they could start building (potentially) unsafe reactors in unapproved locations with inadequate documentation of their material supply chains and have that ready by February. Yes, there are long lead times for things like approved reactor pressure vessels. But if you're willing to go back to Hanford, Washington [0] safety standards that all goes out the window, and the math on deaths almost certainly still works out.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site

Natural gas is now green in some circumstances. I'm not sure what to make of this.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/06/europe-natural-gas-nuclear-a...

Just not environment friendly.

Especially for "longer living" species like humans.

I don't understand why its supper common for people not understand that climate and environmental friendly often overlap but are not always the same and sometimes in direct conflict.

For climate protection nuclear power is currently probably the best choice we have (globally).

But for environmental protection and protection of human health it isn't.

Anyway coal is worse for both and tbh. the German green party should have focused on getting out of coal not nuclear power.

Don't worry though, America is repeating the same mistakes with China. So, its not just Europe.

I can tell that a real NATO deployment to D & L would dramatically change the strategic goal setting of Russia, materially alter the outcome, but not sanctions if that's what you are suggesting as deciding the fate of these places.

Have to hand it to him this time...he was so right.

The problem is that the over “educated” and credentialed class of political elites weren’t ever taught elementary common sense in their textbooks, and have never operated within institutions that have held them accountable for it.

Ergo the outsized elite hatred for Trump among the managerial elite caste, who shone a spotlight on the astonishing triviality of their ineptitude.

Russia supplies about 40-45% of the EU's total natural gas, so there's a big question about how quickly imports can be scaled up. The energy mix in the EU electrical grid is roughly a quarter natural gas so there's a fairly large amount which could potentially be shifted to another electrical source.

That leaves the question of how well all of those measures come together along with efficiency improvements and conservation (e.g. getting everyone in the EU to turn their thermostat down by 1°C would be roughly ⅓ of the total Russian imports according to https://www.iea.org/news/how-europe-can-cut-natural-gas-impo...). Given how seriously every government in NATO has been taking this, I would not be surprised to see things moving at faster paces than we're used to.

Yeah, turns out that the folks running things put on a hell of a campaign to keep nuclear from being researched, and keep fossil fuel profits rolling in.

This is the world we live in. It can take _months_ to switch if we organize ourselves properly, but good luck.

Of course we don't have the capacity to do that today, and that's the problem.

We are only talking about a 20 or 30% shortfall here.

I've read from a few different places now that people who are part of Nordstream were powerful in German politics and had an incentive to push Gas over nuclear.

I'm sure there are multiple factors at play.

I used to think the great filter thesis stems from the natural hostility of the universe, but I'm now convinced it stems from the danger of monkey brain.

China does not have to import food from the US.

In all honesty, China and the US are unique nations in that they don't have to import anything from anyone. It's politically and financially convenient for them to import the things they import, so they do. But they are both perfectly capable of meeting their own needs with domestic production if the issue is pressed. Even where they don't currently manufacture a thing, they're both able to ramp up manufacturing of that thing in a timeframe unthinkable for other nations.

You reap what you sow. No sympathy for Russian puppets.

Yes. Yes, I do. They consistently voted for this future, and now they’ve got it.

The German population are well informed, well educated, and have a free media, they have a wide selection of political parties to choose from every few years, changing political direction is trivial, nobody will arrest you for talking about it, nobody will shoot you for voting the wrong way

Renewables are going to ramp, floating LNG import terminals are already en route (to add capacity to the existing 24 in EU countries), and industrial processes requiring LNG will make due with less or seek alternatives. Europe will place a small number of coal plants on temporary standby, and they will only add 1.3% to EU emissions annually, even in the worst-case scenario where they run at maximum output.

There will be some pain, but this is the 21st century, not the 19th.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-07/the-us-is...

The US is not particularly dependent on Europe. Total trade with Europe, both import and export, is just 3% of the US GDP.

Go look at some photos of Europe immediately post WWII. Especially Poland and Germany.

If we survived that and rose again from literal ashes, we won't be done in by one winter without Russian gas. This continent withstood a lot worse than a limited period of expensive heating.

They've made me, as a citizen in an EU country, pay out of my nose for their moral betterness though, when we are not even a party to the war.

Western countries have dealt with and enriched nasty reigimes one way or another for centuries

Poor, lights out EU with 10-20% inflation will not in fact be a 'strong against Russia' or whatever (and this is without EU being in a war of any kind, lmao)

Yes, I am not disputing that.

I stated that the actions of EU (self-sanctions) have not, and will not affect whether or no Russia takes Ukraine though, this was the entire point of my post. It is part of what makes them so absurd.

An action that would affect would be to deploy there via strategic military action, but which our Moral Leaders are too scared (for right reasons, Russia has lots of nukes) to make. So they do this idiotic self-sanction regime to Feel Good (all paid by the tax payers and lower quality of life by people like me, who live in EU).