Comment by yrgulation | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yrgulation | Hacker News Reader

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No, most europe and the us told germany it relies too much on a single source of energy. Schroeder, Merkel, both were in bed with russia’s oil and gas tsars. Nord Stream’s ceo is a former stasi officer, ursula is corrupt and many many alternative pipelines have been pushed back in favour of we know who. Please dont mix everyone else in. As you can see some german commenters even admit to germany wanting to push for eu wide de nuclearisation. Some even go as far as saying germany shouldnt get involved in east europe - despite it making copious amounts of profits from the region, with many policies actually preventing development there in favour of germany. The eu needs reform so that it works nicely for all members. It can be done but germany needs to take a welcome step back and to stop sanctioning allies each time they have dissenting opinions. Germany’s economy was subsidised by dirty energy and the policies of the eu it controls have done it favour too much and too long.

Correct. This was known in advance that Russia will inevitably use natural gas for political reasons, but Germans weren't listening to "russophobic" Eastern Europe, instead they were actively trying to undermine Nuclear Power together with nuclear hypocrites from Austria (anti-Nuclear fanatics, suing everyone in EU who happens to have NPP, but has no problem to buy energy from Czech Republic NPP Temelin)

It's important to remember that Russian influence operations across the globe have been generating anti-nuclear sentiment. It was part of their plan to hook Germany on Russian natural gas. They literally bribed German politicians to agree to shut down nuclear plants and double down on Russian gas imports, while also preaching the miracles of renewable energy that were never even designed to provide baseline power.

The same is true in the US, Japan, Canada, France, New Zealand, UK... all of these countries have been nerfing their nuclear plant programs due to pressure from "green party" lobbyists that are veiled Russian interests.

Who in Europe isn't heavily affected by the gas shortage? How is this Germany's fault? To me it seems like a lot of the smaller/weaker countries in Europe just always need a scapegoat to blame when things get difficult.

Switching off their own nuclear power plants, replacing them with gas and coal, when gas is lacking and creating shortage of electricity, thus propelling prices up.

Thing is that energy is traded in EEX (https://www.eex.com/en/) so everyone who is trading there is feeling Germany's stupid decisions. For example Sweden is not in EEX and has no problem with high energy prices.

Every year Germany has been a net electricity exporter. If other countries buy German electricity, it means they can't produce it cheaper. You know who is paying by far the highest spot prices in Europe causing prices to go up? France.

Exporter with massive asterisk. They are exporting electricity during summer, when it is cheap and nobody needs it and importing it during winter when it is expensive.

Germany sees peak exports during winter months. You have no idea what you are talking about.

Italy is a bit less affected because it's closer to Algeria. However we also had politicians trying to stop the pipeline from Turkey to Italy.

Turkey may start acting lunatic as well.

Sure but Norway is the only EU state that has a decent amount of gas or oil, and at least Turkey is on the NATO side. Politically it's messy, but at least militarily it's fine.

More reasons to leave oil and gas behind.

Norway is not a member of the EU.

We can trace the dependency on gas to Germany's ill advised policy to go all in on coal & gas after shutting down nuclear.

Other countries now have an enormous economy entering the market, driving up prices and effectively controlled by Russia, as Russia supplies most of the gas. Russia and most eastern european countries have a poor relationship.

Now money is expensive and there's no time to build alternatives. And Russia knows this.

Oh we can trace far back to many cancelled alternative pipelines.

I will link to only one as people need to do their own homework.

Here is such an example: https://www.rferl.org/a/Germanys_Gas_War_Nabucco_Vs_South_St...

"So I think that when both the Russians and the other players want to find a lobbyist, they very naturally look at Germany first. In this respect, I am not surprised that Schroeder and Fischer were the two [chosen]," he said.

The issue is that if Germany is building pipelines and importing cheap Russian gas any other country would be at disavantage if it were to build a more expensive alternative. It would not be competitive. It is like some small country would tell the U.S that it's not wise to offshore electronics manufacturing to China. The small country would not be competive if it were to manufacture at home or in the U.S. Tomorrow China starts a war with the US and you could say that the small country is just using the U.S as a scapegoat because it didn't build an alternative in the U.S.

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