Not Even a Recession: The Great German Gas Debate in Retrospect [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Not Even a Recession: The Great German Gas Debate in Retrospect [pdf]

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49 pointscribbles70 comments

The winter was exceptionally warm, and no one could really predict that.

But putting that aside, this whole episode was making me uneasy. To this day so many people in Europe cannot engage in strategic thinking. I think they simply do not believe that bombs can ever land on their own roofs. The understanding of foreign governments and their real intentions is often at a comical level, even when applied to actors that pretty much lay out their own plans in public then execute on them, decade after decade.

Effective international policy requires tools, but before that it requires an even basic understanding of the situation and courage/resolve. That means sacrificing something small (like a gas shortage) for something valuable (no major war in Europe).

From the article:

    Moreover, the country did not simply get lucky with particularly mild winter temperatures, as often alleged. The average winter temperature in the 2022/23 winter of 2.9°C was actually slightly colder than the average temperature over the four previous winters.

It's possible to have a lower mean temperature and still use less total heat. Stats, right? E.g. if the temperature is warmer at night.

Unless there's some non-linear interactions that I'm unaware of, it seems like the mean temp is the only thing you'd need to know wrt how much energy you need to use to keep it roughly at some other temp thru the season

Heat loss is linear.

Resistance heating is linear. Furnaces using slightly colder outside air are just a tiny bit less efficient, but it’s really close to linear. Heat pumps are non linear and do use electricity from natural gas.

So if I understand you, the only non-linear effect in play is that Heat Pumps are MORE efficient when the temperature differential is higher, is that correct?

Heat pumps are LESS efficient when the temperature differential is higher.

https://learnmetrics.com/heat-pump-efficiency-vs-temperature...

IDK, extremes matter. -5 to +7 has the same average as -20 to +22, but the effects on energy use are widely different (e.g. the former may command a little heating for some time; the latter will command both extreme heating and possibly also cooling).

It's the same as with climate talk in general. "Ooh, the average yearly temperature only rose this much, or even fell down relative to 5/10/20 years ago." - sure, but if the range of temperatures keeps growing, you can end up with both a nice average falling year over year, and uninhabitable land due to all useful vegetation freezing up or drying up.

> the latter will command both extreme heating and possibly also cooling

I fully disagree with your use of "extreme" here, you have no evidence for that. Homes naturally have insulation which would mean the +22 temperatures would heat them, and some of that leftover heat would therefore reduce the need for heating. Indeed, it seems likely to me that the rate of heat leach would keep both these situations identical except for the fact you managed to inject "also using AC" in here like anyone ever does that.

Quite a weak argument.

The overall climate of our planet has nothing to do with the energy cost to heat a home.

https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/03/09/climate-change-eur...

Not sure how the second warmest winters ever recorded can be cooler than the average of the next 4 warmest winters.

The paper is specific to Germany, and your linked article reported statistics about Europe. Apples to oranges.

There isn't a German expedition energy market, there is a European one.

> To this day so many people in Europe cannot engage in strategic thinking.

Much more troubling: Few people worldwide have the attention span and stamina to read a text of the length of an academic paper and engage its contents.

That this thread is for the moment mostly hurried comments desperate to control the message shows as much. And it's tightly related to inability to do strategic thinking.

>Much more troubling: Few people worldwide have the attention span and stamina to read a text of the length off an academic paper and engage its contents.

You don't need to read academic papers to know that Russia = evil. Eastern Europe has been parroting this for decades but Germany stuck its fingers in its ears and went "la-la-la-la, I can't hear you over the sound of my cheap gas brokered by our lord and savior, Gerhard Schröder, who's on the Kremlin's payroll".

Even after Russia's invasion of Chechnya in 1994 and 1999, and Russia's invasion of Georgia in 2008, and Russia's invasion of Crimea in 2014, nobody could have seen Russia invading another neighboring country again in 2022, it was a total shock for European politicians. /s

This is very simplified.

A lot of western countries, Germany first, believed that if we traded and opened up to those countries, they would naturally tend to adopt western values.

It turned out to be incorrect. China being an even better example. But it was not a crazy assumption at the time, and coming after the fact is hindsight 20/20.

Honestly, even knowing how things turned out, I am proud that the west tried.

>if we traded and opened up to those countries, they would naturally tend to adopt western values.

You can't possibly tell me with a straight face that your argument is "Germany didn't know that Russia invading 3 countries was bad and it hoped Russia would come around if it just kept buying gas from them and pumping trillions in their economy which Russia spent on its military would make them more peaceful".

It's safe to assume that either Germany doesn't know when to take a hint that after 3 invasions, your trading partner is not gonna come around, or Germany was actively ignoring Russia's warmongering for it's own benefit.

Either way it looks bad on Germany and no made up excuses are gonna cut it.

I am glad Germany didn't stop trading with the US after they invaded Irak by producing fake witnesses, or the second time by fabricating proofs, or Afghanistan.

Diplomacy is not black and white.

As an American: It should’ve. If a firmer hand was taken it could’ve saved thousands of lives. France and Germany wagged its finger but basically waved us through.

There was nothing that could have been done from the outside to stop that. The only people who could have made a difference were the citizens of the United States, but about 80% of them thought the invasion was a good idea.

Germany did not ignore Russian military invasions, which can be easily demonstrated by specific actions that German government took at that time. Notably those actions were not much different from what USA or other European countries except a few with anti-Russian paranoia did. Besides, there were two, not three invasions. Chechnya is not a country.

> Chechnya is not a country.

There was a Chechen Republic of Ichkeria that existed until getting slaughtered, occupied, and retrospectively written out of the books by Russia.

Yeltsin (and later Putin) was a baddie that West hoped to trade with, so they were willing to push aside the issue of Chechnya calling it an internal conflict.

But in reality the level of Russian war crimes was unparalleled, sometimes even worse than what's happening in Ukraine.

Internationally no high-ranking Russian officials or military officers were ever prosecuted or actually condemned for these war crimes.

Most countries have turned a blind eye and didn't act with urgency: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2020...

Chechnya as independent country did not exist in 1990s. There was no legal mechanism for it to leave Russia, no democratic process to leave, no recognition by other countries etc. Separatists committed numerous crimes against civil population in Chechnya and outside it and eventually switched to terrorist methods, attacking schools, hospitals and cultural events (e.g. Budennovsk, Beslan, Nord-Ost). Basically, they were Russian version of Hamas or other radical organizations in Middle East. Not the type you would ever negotiate any independence with.

And yet the USA and Poland were screaming at the top of their lungs to not do nord stream and the German public didn’t care. At all.

Of course they didn't care. The USA were screaming because they wanted to flog more expensive LNG to Germany and Poland was screaming because they wanted their transit fees.

The US screamed so loudly that Nord Stream exploded.

> The USA were screaming because they wanted to flog more expensive LNG […]

The US has been screaming at DE since the 1980s, decades before fracking and LNG was a thing:

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

* https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/12/03/blinken-secretary-state...

No, no, no - that would mean there wasn’t a deep strand of sympathy for Russian ethnic-totalitarianism at play at the highest levels of the German establishment.

And of course it’s not like AfD actually, exists, or that the German security apparatus is riddled with Russian spies and Nazis.

did we really think that or was it just a rationalisation of the desire for profit?

Good point. I think both?

Nations are not single minded. Political parties, individuals, companies, diplomats, each might have their own particular interest.

But I remember not long ago, "trade and free market will bring democratic institutions" being a pretty popular opinion.

Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

Yes, to me it's much more about politicians wanting a short-term win, over long-term stability at a cost.

I literally cannot fathom how Germans still don’t see this. It’s a certain flavor of arrogance and greed to watch your neighbors be slaughtered and think “hey, we are getting cheap gas - surely this isn’t a problem”.

Germans like to say how much they learned from their history, but when shit got real they funded the aggressor and benefited from Putins corruption.

“Eastern Europe has been parroting […] Germany stuck its fingers in its ears”

Or perhaps Germany couldnʼt hear them, because their actions spoke louder than their words – a majority of Eastern European countries had made themselves more dependent on Russian gas than Germany:

  - Hungary: 110.4 percent 
  - Latvia: 100.1 percent 
  - Finland: 92.4 percent 
  - Estonia: 86.5 percent 
  - Czechia: 86.0 percent 
  - Slovenia: 81.0 percent 
  - Slovakia: 75.2 percent 
  - Bulgaria: 72.8 percent 
  - Germany: 58.9 percent

“Some of the countries have a figure above 100 because they import more than required for domestic consumption and export other energy products.” per https://thehill.com/policy/equilibrium-sustainability/326055...

Your list does not illustrate what you claim. E.g. Finland was not at all dependent on Russian gas, because Finland does not use much gas, so 92.4 percent of nothing.

Meanwhile, Germany's gas imports were huge and you cannot leave 58.9 percent of your population to freeze in the winter anyway.

EDIT: Also, Finland has this in the laws:

> There is an alternative fuel obligation, so that in the event of a gas supply disturbance, other fuels can be immediately substituted.

It's as if they prepared for an event like this ;-)

Sorry for my unclarity, but I understand the point at issue (of GP and this thread) to be how a prolongation of mutual economic relations with Russia was not justifiable morally, not how well a country could cope with an abrupt end of these relations economically or in terms of the well-being of their own population. You seem to argue with regard to the latter, and I would concur, although the linked article shows that after Germanyʼs 58.9 percent went down to zero, they either, in fact, could let their population freeze (household consumption went down) or got over it in other ways (a considerable part of the 58.9 percent was industrial consumption).

The point is whether Russia could extort countries (eg: prevent from sending military aid to Ukraine) or not. While a little over half of all gas in Germany came from Russia, Germany was among countries with the highest proportion of gas in total fuel consumption.

In comparison, countries like Finland indeed got virtually all their gas from Russia, but that was only a few percent of total fuel consumption and couldn't be used to extort them.

If that is the point (which is not clear to me from the start of this subthread), it is rather settled: The linked article shows that Germany could get over not buying Russian gas anymore well; and it sends vastly more military aid to Ukraine than Finland – Zelenskyy “noted that Germany was now Ukraine’s second-largest backer after the United States” (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/14/world/europe/ukraine-zele...). (That this took sometimes painfully long has a sufficient reason in senses of guilt regarding war – in fact, both sides still draw arguments from the same history for violently contradicting claims on Germany.)

> [Germany] sends vastly more military aid to Ukraine than Finland

The statistics disagree if you remember to compare per capita or per GDP. (Finland looks bad only if you include the refugee costs in a per GDP calculation - not many Ukrainians wanted to travel to Finland so far.) https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-s...

Also, one should take into account that the amount of unnecessary military hardware lying around is not the same in a country that is surrounded by Nato members vs a country that shares over thousand kilometers of border with the unhinged neighbour. Further, you might not be strategically able to reveal in public how much of your stock that acts as a deterrent you have given away while the war is going on.

Marginal note: This statistic covers only the time span until Feb. 24th, so it doesnʼt comprise Germanyʼs “Biggest Military Aid Package Yet” (ca. 3 Billion) – https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/13/world/europe/ukraine-germ... – which probably led to Zelenskyyʼs statement. Dividing by capita or GDP and making geographical, economical, strategical allowances is fine – one could do that in the case of Germany, its imports, exports, closings, openings and other decisions, too.

But this doesnʼt address the point stated by GP as follows: “The point is whether Russia could extort countries (eg: prevent from sending military aid to Ukraine) or not”, proceeding with a comparison in which Germany is heavily dependent, Finland is not, which implies: Germany could be extorted e.g. to prevent it from sending military aid to Ukraine. And this is hardly tenable when “Germany was now Ukraine’s second-largest backer after the United States”.

As I conjectured, the events indicate at some effective extortion, but a psychological one, that is leveraged by both sides drawing contradicting conclusions from the same premises (which does not mean that both arguments are equally sound).

I certainly did not mean to imply that Finland looked bad, of course it looks excellent.

> But this doesnʼt address the point stated by GP as follows: “The point is whether Russia could extort countries (eg: prevent from sending military aid to Ukraine) or not”

But it does, when you take into account the time dimension: Why did Germany provide this big military aid package only now? I think one credible hypothesis is that they didn't provide big support while there was fear of energy extortion and did provide it after the energy dependency crisis was averted.

A big issue for Ukraine has been that the equipment has arrived too late: first we let Russia bomb the country and then afterwards we provide air defence systems. First we let Russia fortify its positions and then afterwards we provide main battle tanks. These delays have caused both destruction and prolongation of the invasion.

Also, it's not only about Germany sending or not sending aid: the Central and Eastern European and Nordic countries have been quicker but they have had to wait for re-export permissions for equipment bought from Germany.

That doesnʼt add up, because one of the most – arguably the most – irritating hesitations affected the main battle tanks (you have mentioned them, too), and that was long after gas imports from Russia and any hopes for a renewal of such imports were abandoned. Thus it cannot be the effect of extortion. Or, if you assume that a secret plan to get Russian gas again has lived on, why then the big military aid package indeed, when gas is needed in the next winter as well as in the last one (when Russian gas imports have stopped not as long ago).

“they have had to wait”: Germany also had to wait for (Swiss) permissions, which blocked the transmission of anti-aircraft vehicles (Gepard). And while that was merely lost time, the prolonged negotiations in the case of Leopard 2 in the end meant more tanks (which were said to be less suited first, but are very welcomed by the Ukrainian forces). This episode, however, gave another glimpse into the actual mechanism that demands caution, precaution. Donʼt let this German tank go to war, or if you absolutely must, only in company with a tank from one of the allied powers. If something goes wrong, hindsight is 20/20, and who will be blamed? In fact: “Nearly a month after Berlin gave European allies permission to send German-made tanks to Ukraine, the flow of tanks so many leaders vowed would follow [if only Germany gives permission] seems more like a trickle.” E.g.: “Finland, where many outspoken members of Parliament led the calls for Germany to allow Leopard deliveries, announced on Thursday that it would supply three Leopard mine-clearing vehicles — but none of its estimated 200 Leopard main battle tanks.” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/28/world/europe/ukraine-tank...

Coming back to what chrysler stated is the point at issue, one had to conclude that there are many more extorted countries.

Why single out Germany? War hawk Tony Blair condoned a BP deal after the invasion of Chechnya:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1046295978238979863

There is a pipeline from the Nord Stream terminal in Germany to the UK. Nord Stream is owned by Russia, Germany, France, and The Netherlands. Gas was resold to plenty of EU countries, including Eastern European ones.

Poland and Ukraine collected transit fees for Russian oil/gas long after Nord stream was blown up.

Chechnya was a civil war within the internationally recognized borders of Russia, not an invasion. The only foreign power that had recognized independent Chechnya was Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

There was a general feeling in the early and mid-2000s that Russia was finally changing for the better. The economy was growing and the quality of life was improving for many Russians. While no one mistook Putin for a democratic leader, he wasn't particularly bad as far as semi-authoritarian leaders go.

The invasion of Georgia in 2008 was a turning point, because people didn't believe Putin would go to war to prevent the expansion of NATO. But it wasn't a particularly big shock, because military interventions as an extension of foreign policy were quite common in the 1990s and 2000s. It was more unpleasant with "their side" doing it, but as long as "our side" was also doing it, military interventions were a legitimate policy tool. International politics is pretty childish in this respect.

After the invasion, politicians had much less favorable views of Putin. But they continued dealing with him, assuming that he would act based on rational self-interest. The real shock in the 2022 invasion of Ukraine was not the invasion itself but the irrationality of it. If Putin could miscalculate his actions so badly, it made no sense to treat him as a rational actor anymore.

but what is rational? a great great many people in Denmark obliterated the savings they spent a few decades making just to make it through this mild winter only freezing moderately, some even having to sell their homes and a large number (small percentage, but still large number) looking into retiring on the public pension that is not much. Would they be better off if the west had not gone all in on the anti-russia sanctions and funding ukraine?

the people in the US/EU that were crying snot because russians were streaming gas burners running 24/7 while some Europeans had to equip their winter jackets in their homes.

the extreme amount of wet firewood being burned smoking up entire neighborhoods so that people would not freeze to death. Are the people inhaling that smoke better off? is it rational for them to cheer "putin man bad" (asserting that they did, i do not know if they did)

The problem with academic papers and stamina is that most of them are bullshit produced only to further the author's career and not to produce new knowledge or inform anyone at all.

Publish or perish has side effects, consequences, and pitfalls.

Sorting out which papers are bullshit, lean on scant evidence, were funded by organizations who want an outcome, or exist solely to meet a requirement for the author to advance towards a PhD is time consuming and almost never worth the effort.

That is ultimately why we pay people (civil servants, etc) to figure this shit out on our behalf when implementing regulations.

Eh, Germans and points west are delusional, Hungary is corrupt, but Poland and the Baltics know the score.

The fact that Poland had to shame Germany into defending their *own interests* should be a national embarrassment.

I lived in West Germany off and on in the '70s-'90s. I am a Brit. If you recall, that period is referred to as the Cold War - Mum and Dad were both soldiers and we got posted abroad a lot. Nowadays I have a Pole as an employee, who lives in Poland. That would have been unthinkable back in the day. I pay Thomasz the same rate as my local employees. He deals with IT snags in Britain the same way I do - over the blower and with remote access tools, such as Mesh Central.

> That means sacrificing something small (like a gas shortage)

okay.. tell that to the ones that simply cannot afford it

> for something valuable (no major war in Europe).

/me looks at Ukraine: there seems to be a war... /me looks at globe.. in... Europe.

is the war lasting longer because the EU and US sends arms to Ukraine?

> is the war lasting longer because the EU and US sends arms to Ukraine?

The war is lasting longer because the Russians have decided that the number of dead Russians and recaptured positions that need to happen for the war to end is higher than what Ukraine has currently achieved.

This war could be over tomorrow if Russia decided to leave, if anything western weapons and aid are making the war end faster by speeding up Russias defeat.

im not saying anything about that, but answer my question, is the war lasting longer due to US/EU actions, or is it shorter? it seems ukraine cannot defeat russia even with all the aid we give them, might the war simply be prolonged by giving a false sense of hope? how many more are we making die?

You'd be right if not for what Russia plans to do next in the event of a victory in Ukraine. Ukraine is not the target, it's a target in the sequence of targets.

A few months before the war broke out Putin issued a very clear ultimatum to the West: withdrawal of NATO forces and installations from every country east of Germany. He issued none to Ukraine because he wanted the entire country.

The war will continue for as long as Russia is able to wage it, therefore we must destroy Russia as a political system that exists today. Or declaw it to the point of irrelevance. That is the way out of this war, unless you're willing to go back to USSR borders. And even then it's not clear they would stop.

Russia is surprisingly open about its goals. Just read what serious people in the Kremlin say over the years (and definitely tune out the garbage that they spew on Rossiya 1 for the older generation homo-sovieticus, no one in the Kremlin cares about that shit). Thanks to the large influx of Russian-speaking immigration we have quite a lot of capable experts that understand it well.

War, unlike marriage, only requires consent on one side. I.e. the "collective west" is in a war just because Russia wants that, and there's nothing "West" can do to exit the war. They can only win it.

> but answer my question, is the war lasting longer due to US/EU actions, or is it shorter?

Western aid is letting Ukraine finish the war faster so its making it shorter.

> it seems ukraine cannot defeat russia even with all the aid we give them, might the war simply be prolonged by giving a false sense of hope?.

I don't know why you think Ukraine cannot beat Russia, Russia just admitted they had to take ~100k causalities trying to Bakhmut in 9 months. Those statistics are entirely impossible to sustain.

> how many more are we making die?

We are making as many Russians die as we need to until they finally go home.

The entire debate here in Germany is also just heavily driven by industry interest to a comical extent. Not only has the gas price already fallen to pre-war levels after decades of everyone arguing that these kinds of changes aren't possible, and there is no economic crisis, energy prices are also really only very critical for a rather small amount of products in particular niches of industry.

While that's not unimportant because industry is a substantial factor, the economy is also very diversified and just like with the car industry I'm kind of tired of the cronyism and giving in to every small industry bluff and demand for subsidies on the back of a crisis.

As a side note it would help though if our American friends across the pond would not fall for similar demands and push through enormous subsidy packages. Just let companies compete. There's a lot of bad industrial policy being revived opportunistically.

While I agree that the worst envisioned outcomes did not come to pass, and certainly I do not think they would have been a moral (or even practical) justification for appeasement of military expansionism in any case, I am reminded somewhat of the Y2K debate. Was it never the threat it was imagined to be? Or was the great alarm in advance the reason why sufficient measures were taken to avoid catastrophe? Probably somewhere in between.

The German goverment went as far as nationalising Uniper, the big gas and energy company. Now, Russia has made an even more destructive move and seized Uniper's and Fortum's Russian subsidiaries. (Fortum lost billions in both cases.)

Was there an alternative to Uniper’s nationalization?

It was insolvent and forced into fixed price deliveries that it had to procure through suddenly expensive spot market.

The government could have relaxed the fixed prices, and perhaps they did that anyway?

They did

> Germany sets the gas levy that would allow Uniper and its rivals to pass on 90% of spiralling gas prices to customers.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/how-russian-gas-cris...

Germany is buying Russian gas just at extortion rates via middle men.

I have not read the entire article, but one factor that helped was the moderate winter.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36051936

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