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Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

This article says, "Germany did a bunch of reasonable looking things."

But after Russia invaded Georgia (2008) then Ukraine (2014), Germany worked to increase dependence on Russia for both electricity and heating. They failed to take even the most basic steps to diversify. Such as building LNG terminals to give them the option of importing gas from countries like the USA.

And it wasn't like there wasn't some history demonstrating the Russia wasn't always a reliable supplier. For example in 2009 they shut off gas for 10 days. As it happens they had a good reason (dispute with Ukraine over Ukraine stealing gas - which Ukraine had been). But fundamentally all of Europe, Germany included, should have been on notice that a single man could take out their gas supply. A man whose capriciousness was demonstrated in 2008 by his invasion of Georgia.

Why on Earth did Germany not work to diversify? And why, given the current consequences of that past failure, are people trying to defend Germany's past bad decisions?

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> Why on Earth did Germany not work to diversify?

As I understand it, the general thrust of Germany's Russia policy (until several months ago) was a kind of energy-politik [1]: bind Russia into the world economy via the need to maintain stable energy links, and it will be less likely to be a capricious bully to its neighbors. Which doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but I guess the relevant figures somehow figured that Russia was acting like a petulant child only because people were treating it as a petulant child?

[1] Sorry, I don't know the German word for "energy" to write the proper German compound word.

Die Energie, pronounced basically like "en-er-gee", where the g is like gulp, not like jump (or... energy), and ee is long e ([i])

> I guess the relevant figures somehow figured that Russia was acting like a petulant child only because people were treating it as a petulant child?

You are trying to post-rationalize this with some 4d chess realpolitik. Just follow the money. [0]

[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/german-ex-chancellor-sc...

Many of the decisions were made my Merkel who, despite lots of flaws, is with absolute certainty immune from the allure of money. She's never shown any interest in it, had any income other than her government salary, and spend 16 years while in power living in a modest apartment within walking distance from the office.

> Why on Earth did Germany not work to diversify?

Diversify towards what? The biggest consumers of gas is heating homes and the chemical industry. Most houses have gas or oil heating. Do you convert from gas back to oil? Or to coal? Because most urban housing in Germany cannot be easily transferred to heat pumps, you know. The cost for conversion is prohibitive. In most cases you would have to cancel rental contracts to free the flat for conversion. How do you convince house owners and tenants to go with such a mad stunt that will mutliply their heating costs? All for a hunch of "someone might do something crazy in the east".

How do you convert a chemical industry that cannot subsitute gas for any other product? Push them abroad?

Please have reasonable and informed answers to these questions before asking question like

> And why, given the current consequences of that past failure, are people trying to defend Germany's past bad decisions?

Germany has lignite to use for electricity and oil for heating, as you said. That should be enough to reduce demand and thus prices.

Long-term there are gas reserves in Netherlands , in the mediterranean etc. The EU has options.

I have to also ask why? Germany obviously has options but why is it taboo to ask them to change their policies abruptly and temporarily? We have a war in europe

> Germany obviously has choices but why is it taboo to ask them to change their policies abruptly and temporarily? We have a war in europe

I think the problem here is that the Germans would rather have war in Eastern Europe (people of which they probably don't consider important) than more expensive heating.

Germany has taken 900,000 refugees. Why not send them to a similarly sized U.S. state and watch the reactions?

U.S. citizens already complain about gas prices (which are still much lower than in Europe). How about raising them the European prices and see if they still virtue signal?

As usual, the U.S. supports a war and Europe pays for it.

How would you propose to end the war? Who do you think should pay for it, and how should they pay?

> As usual, the U.S. supports a war and Europe pays for it.

This is somewhere between extremely biased and dead wrong.

According to https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-s..., the USA is spending more to support Ukraine than Europe both in absolute dollars, and as a share of GDP. (Various eastern European countries are pulling their weight. The western ones, aren't.)

Of course that is tracking money sent to Ukraine. Refugees are a cost mostly borne by Europe. According to https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/39775/hosting-ukrainian..., the cost of refugees for a year is on par with what the USA is sending to Ukraine. This would take Europe's share above the USA.

But if you're going to include that, you should note that Germany alone spends about $20 billion year less on its own defense than it committed to spending by being part of NATO. (Germany spends about 1.5% of GDP and promised to spend 2%. It is hardly alone.) Given decades of Europe freeloading off of American generosity, paying for the refugee crisis doesn't even begin to balance the scales.

There is something funny about 1 day old account with pre-canned anti-US talking points.

I am in Eastern Europe and US has been a great ally doing everything they can to keep us safe from Russian aggression, while Germany would watch us get raped and murdered and enslaved and do nothing.

As for refugees, Poland, Romania and Slovakia have taken several millions of them despite being poor compared to rich Germany.

The oil for heating has been phased out in favour of gas because of emissions. So for most homes this would mean to convert back to bulky oil tanks. It's probably cheaper than heat pumps and you can keep the plumbing. The plumbing and use of radiators is a big problem for heat pumps because of the higher temperatures that are needed to heat radiators on the 4th floor etc.

Other houses never had oil. They switched from coal straight to gas in the 60s and 70s. But here the furnace is usually on the same floor as the radiators. But conversion is still expensive.

> Germany obviously has options but why is it taboo to ask them to change their policies abruptly and temporarily?

It's not taboo to ask to change policies. Actually a lot of policies are changing. Even support for nuclear is on the rise.

But one of these changes in policies might have to be abandoning some goals of emission reduction. One of the reasons why gas was on the move up is because it burns much cleaner than oil or coal. So converting all that oil heating to gas was incentivised by the government. Also gas is much better in filling in the gaps for renewables than nuclear or coal which can't be switchted off again so easily.

The plan was to move from coal to renewables. The path there was via gas. A very reasonable bridge technology.

Putin's war came too early for that conversion but luckily not too late to stop switching coal to gas.

BTW, Germany never had enough nuclear plants to provide more than about a quarter of today's electric demand anyway. Most was coal. Even if Germany never decided to phase out nuclear, the problems would pretty much have the same magnitude.

OK so the changes are totally doable and would nullify Putin's weaponization of natgas. We are at war , yet Germans seem to be totally inflexible to postponing "some goals of emission reduction" for a few years. That's unreasonable

> move from coal to renewables. The path there was via gas.

It's disingenuous to call that "a path" because natgas will never go away since renewables are wildly intermittent and natgas will always be needed to sustain the load. And it is imported from some of the worst dictatorships in the region.

https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c...

Your lecture would have been more reasonable if I had not already given a specific example of diversification. Namely the construction of a LNG terminal.

Here are numbers for you. The Sabine Pass LNG project in Louisiana, USA, was constructed for about $5 billion. Its capacity is almost exactly the same as the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which was constructed for approximately €15.7 billion. Thus for 1/3 of the cost of the pipeline, Germany could have provided themselves a backup plan for Russian gas, while requiring zero changes from industry and consumers.

This one time investment would have been a fraction of what Germany spends each year subsidizing renewable energy, and a drop compared to the cost of shutting down nuclear. Therefore the cost of making sure that there was a second supplier of gas available would have been quite reasonable to do some years ago.

Given that it hasn't been done, it is impossible to do on short notice. But Germany could have done it, should have done it, and was repeatedly advised by allies to do exactly that. And failed to.

> Your lecture would have been more reasonable if I had not already given a specific example of diversification. Namely the construction of a LNG terminal.

> Here are numbers for you. The Sabine Pass LNG project in Louisiana, USA, was constructed for about $5 billion. Its capacity is almost exactly the same as the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which was constructed for approximately €15.7 billion. Thus for 1/3 of the cost of the pipeline, Germany could have provided themselves a backup plan for Russian gas, while requiring zero changes from industry and consumers.

LNG isn't even in the ballpark of what would be needed to replace Russian gas in volume. About 40 LNG terminals are currently operational in the EU. Even if you could use their full capacity, it wouldn't be enough to replace Russian gas. And it wouldn't affect prices positively aswell. LNG is only good for preventing actual shortages, not replacing the source. Even if Germany had built 5 LNG terminals in the last decade, it would be a drop in the bucket.

There is an old saying that when you are in a hole, you should stop digging. You aren't following that advice though.

I claim that an LNG terminal on the scale of the Sabine Pass LNG project could replace Nord Stream 1. You claim that 5 such terminals would be a drop in the bucket. Let's look at numbers and see who is right.

Nord Stream 1's official capacity is 55 billion cubic meters a year of LNG. (They actually run a bit more than that.) Source: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/kremlin-nord-stream-...

Sabine Pass is the largest LNG terminal in the world. Its capacity is 55.4 million metric tonnes per year. Source https://www.statista.com/statistics/1263935/largest-operatio...

Those numbers are close, but the units are different. But 1 million metric tons LNG = 1.38 billion cubic meters LNG. Source: https://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/wholefarm/html/c6-89....

Therefore a single LNG terminal on the same scale as the Sabine Pass LNG project would provide 139% of the official capacity of Nord Stream 1.

Do you have any more "corrections" to offer? Or do you wish to keep digging the hole you are in?

> Nord Stream 1's official capacity is 55 billion cubic meters a year of LNG

Hmm... Are you saying liquified natural gas is pumped through North Stream?

Oops, that was clearly a mistake. Thanks for catching it.

Natural Gas is pumped through Nord Stream. But it is not sent in liquid form. If it was, then keeping the pipeline sufficiently cold and pressurized would be an insane challenge.

This is partly true. There were LNG terminals planned and are now being planned again AFAIK and also see sibling. There were/are some woes though as can for example be seen here:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-30/german-ln...

Funny the timing is though.

Interesting comparison. Germany's GDP is ~$3T, so a $5B insurance policy is well worth it, even had it not made any revenue, which it seems obv it would have.

Side note..

SabinePass[1] 30 million tonnes = 30 billion kgs per annum NordStream1[2], 55 billion cubic metres a year

Are those about equiv? LNG is 430 kg/m3, 55Bm3*430kg/m3=23,650Bkg, so 1000x more via NordStream, assuming same density. But looks like pipelines may be lightly compressed vs ships more typically higher compressed LNG? Anyone know?

[1]https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/cheniere-completes-n... [2]https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/kremlin-nord-stream-... [3]http://www.kosancrisplant.com/media/5648/1-lng_basics_82809_...

I presented my calculation in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32558820.

Statistica reports a much higher capacity than your Reuters article reference. Using the same a million tonnes of LNG is 1.38 billion cubic meters that I referenced there, that would still be 52.44 billion cubic meters.

My best guess for the (rather large) discrepancy is that Statistica is reporting on how much LNG is able to pass through the terminal, while Reuters is quoting how much they are able to liquify there for export.

To answer your other question, a pipeline carries natural gas as a gas, while we ship it in in liquid form in pressurized containers. Therefore ships carry natural gas in a much denser form than pipelines do.

I can’t make the argument a previous head of state should be mandated from working where the free market takes them.

I also can’t argue that the decisions of Germany’s leadership make a ton of sense. Or rather I can, the economic argument and Germany not likely to deal with a Russia near home it isn’t able to easily deal with (outside of MAD.) That calculus makes sense to me I get and even still agree with the principle.

But you also have to look out for your national security and it really seems like Germany wasn’t looking out for anyone but it’s self here. Germany faces no serious conventional threat from Russia nor does it currently have competing spheres of influence. However as part of NATO and the EU does.

So it looks to be pretty clear that the Germans do not consider that they and, say, Lithuania share the same goals.

germans and russians have been fighting for 1000 years. Take the calendar and mark the times when they were not fighting. Constructive engagement is sane; endless war from all sides is not sane

How would you propose to prevent endless war between Germans and Russians in the future? I mean without carving up Eastern Europe between themselves, that is. So far engagement with Russia hasn't been constructive. Believing that this will change seems like hope triumphing over experience. In the long run, a steady policy of containment with occasional minor outbreaks of violence might be the best we can realistically achieve.

I have heard that the French are excellent cooks - perhaps they know about this "carving up" you speak of?

Russia's expansion is definitely a national security thread to Germany. The thing is that Germany didn't believed that Russia would expand. It was a gross miscalculation on Germany's side. Believing promises and neglecting capabilities.

If Russia takes Ukraine their population grows to 180 Million. With the Baltics and Belarus they will be near near 200 million. Expecting Poland (at 40 Mln) to hold the Russians of is ridiculous.

I think this may be a mischaracterization. Germany believed that, knows really, that it is richer economically and has a tech gap thanks to NATO over them.

Germanys stance was that Russia will piss and moan as it’s elite slowly lose their autocratic regime to a Republican one (similar to South Korea and Taiwan.)

I’m not convinced this has changed and it is my opinion that German policy is a pretty obvious open secret that Ukraine and Russia is there problem.

You can see this in their reaction to the invasion where they stalled with hold off rhetoric because they couldn’t believe we’re taking this seriously.

So it wasn’t ignorance that Russia would bully the two smaller “Russians” it was a calculated risk and an accepted cost of doing business.

What's even more egregious is that Germany has ran multiple years with a massive budget surplus (2018 + 2019 alone amass to 100bi€). Imagine if that could be used to be invested in ways to have a diversified grid...

Cui bono?

Kissinger noted in Diplomacy (1994) that Germany's key role in European history has been main defender of Central Europe against Russia. And ofc, Russia was a major foe in the last wars. To me, there's no way Germany missed the point of Russian moves the past decade.

So assume for a moment that they knew this day was coming.

If they have energy independence, they might also be called to task to play their traditional role and their natural role now as the powerhouse of the EU and NATO, to lead the fight against Russia.

But if they're hobbled by energy dependence, they can shrug and say "sorry, it's simply not a feasible option for us. We're sitting this one out." Which seems to be what they have done.

Add they get cover from their domestic green problems as well. Alles ist gut.

That's an interesting explaination, but I'm not sure why they'd need such a complicated scheme when they could just point at the state of the German armed forces as justification. (Which was basically their response to the invasion of Ukraine)

The power of AND

This is nonsense, Germany is militarily very weak and only makes up 20% of the EU economy. You make it seem like they own Europe and are some scheming superpower in disguise. There's not much they could do in terms of military aid the US couldn't do 20 times over in half the time. France is like twice the size as an arms producer, what are they doing? What about Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Austria and Belgium? None of these countries needed an excuse to do nothing.

Germans might not have enough gas to heat their homes which would cause the government to fall and you see this as some sort of genius chess move.

"You make it seem like they own Europe and are some scheming superpower in disguise." Not the craziest idea I've ever heard.

The point about a weak military is valid, but same logic applies. Germany has shown the ability to quickly arm when it wants to.

> Why on Earth did Germany not work to diversify?

So they could benefit financially by being the natural gas hub for Europe. As you said, the reasons not to work with Russia were plainly obvious.

Ukraine has been a pain in Germany's neck, Nord Streams are the most visible result of that but then there are also anecdotes of Merkel ignoring Yushchenko, German delegations not attending Ukrainian independence parades and so on. Even now Merkel is openly saying "no regrets" in the face of the bona fide genocide, that's how little empathy German leadership has for Ukraine.

I think the calculus was that Ukraine is never going to be in NATO and so its future is at best irrelevant for Germany, and at worst they'd prefer it absorbed by Russia who Germans enjoy dealing with. But in the meantime Eastern European countries gained power, and they are really not okay with Russian imperial project (Hungary aside). So now Germany, being an ally with Eastern Europe on paper, has to do something, so they are reluctantly doing the bare minimum.

Because in the past that also would have likely forced a rethinking/reexamination of Germany's defense setup and that would have been impossible to sell domestically.

We can add Chechnya (1999) to that list.

https://www.historyonthenet.com/putins-first-invasion-the-19...

It's different.

How is that?

https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/chechnya-war

Chechnya was inside of Russia's national boundaries. And therefore was not a violation of international law.

The question is whether it was ever reasonable to see Putin as a reliable partner. The first thing he did in office was launch a brutal invasion, stifle the press, and ignore war crimes committed by the Russian army.

Is that someone a peaceful democracy can trust?

I am in complete agreement with you on Putin's character. I am also in complete agreement on what he did to the press, and the war crimes he committed.

However what he did in Chechnya was fight a civil war in a particularly brutal way. This is different than invading another country. Admittedly the distinction doesn't matter to the people who were living there. But it DOES matter to other countries.

The US position, in particular, was that we wanted Russia to remain territorially stable. Our top priority was to see Russian nukes secured. Our nightmare was a breakup of Russia resulting in loose nukes going to bad actors. Which gave us a big incentive to not complain about the horrible ways in which Russia was maintaining said stability.

When Putin moved from suppressing civil war to international conquest, the situation changed. But the USA was also in the embarrassing position of having no moral high ground to stand on. For example estimates of excess mortality in Syria are in the same range as estimates of excess mortality in Iraq. And across much the world, our invasion of Iraq is seen as less legitimate than Russia's invasion of Georgia, and support of the existing government of Syria...

We're talking about whether Putin's character was something a country like Germany could bank its energy policy on starting in the 2010s. That's not a question of international law, of US policy in 1999, or US actions in Iraq.

Chechnya was evidence of what he's willing to do for political gain. Georgia was evidence of territorial ambition. Assassinations in UK and Europe showed us he saw those countries as no different than any other. Yet western leaders spent years trying to convince themselves and their people that Russia could be trusted as a partner.

I agree that there was little to nothing anyone could do about Chechnya, but that doesn't mean we couldn't learn from it.

You make a good point. And we can add a long list of other things to this list, such as his 2007 speech in Berlin, or 2008 law that the Holodomor was not genocide.

That German leaders refused to act on the evidence is definitely to the shame of Germany.

For the same reason the world didn't take climate change seriously already in the 90s. It didn't align with short-term economic interests. As mentioned in the article, the prevailing political climate had made energy imports less political and more a matter of economics. Increasing energy imports from Russia made sense in that climate.

The Russian invasion of Georgia wasn't a big deal in West Europe. It was like the US invasion of Iraq. An empire invaded a faraway country because its leaders had some personal issues. That's what empires do. Political leaders condemned it, but there were limited practical consequences, because everything happened far away. And because the EU was not trying to be an empire shaping the world in its image.

East European countries took things more seriously, because they are closer to Russia and more vulnerable to its whims.

Even the 2014 invasion of Ukraine wasn't a major issue. Until then, Ukraine was seen as one of the corrupt post-Soviet states that didn't know whether they wanted to align with Russia or Europe. As long as Putin's ambitions were limited, they were not a West European concern. Leaders again condemned Putin's actions and some sanctions were issued, but that's it. Putin's Russia was still seen as a fact of life West Europe had to learn to coexist with.

Things changed after 2014. Ukraine aligned with the West. When Putin invaded the next time, it was a full-scale invasion of an unambigously European country. That did concern West Europe, because it was dangerously close.

The whole situation looks like a mutual misunderstanding of the motives on the other side. Putin seems to have counted for a limited European reaction, because he didn't understand that non-empires tend to make pragmatic rather than ideologically motivated decisions. He assumed that West European complacency was an ideological rather than a pragmatic position. Similarly, West European leaders didn't see that the threat of the invasion was real, because they assumed empires would also make pragmatic rather than ideological decisions.

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