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You have to be some kind of economic stupid to shut down your nuclear reactors, plan your country completely migrate its energy sources in a few decades, and then rely on piped Russian natural gas to fill transition energy needs (with no seaborne natural gas terminals!).
I don't understand why this lie about Germany is repeated so regularly on here and yet is so easy to google/check.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/even-crisis-germany-...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1267541/germany-monthly-...
German wholesale prices are pretty much bang in the middle of European average which is what you'd expect given the high level of integration between each country's domestic market and the large amount of capacity for import/export and the liberalised nature of the markets (liberalised by EU decree in 2008).
There was a huge spike last Summer but it was caused not by a domestic shift in German supply and demand but by the fact that over 50% of French nuclear capacity went offline in August/September which meant France needed to import huge amounts of electricity from its neighbours (primarily Germany) which pushed up wholesale prices across much of Europe.
You can be a big exporter - and Germany is the biggest electricity exporter in the world[1] (like the US is of natural gas for example) but this doesn't prevent domestic prices from responding to external prices.
[1] https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/electricity_export...
Here's a better visualization: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
Germany has essentially replaced nuclear 1:1 with renewables (mostly wind).
Unfortunately, even though they've been building renewables in a seriously impressive way, they could have also had nuclear at the same time.
The root issue was completely ceasing construction of a fixed-lifetime generating resource in 1983+ that accounted for ~25% of a country's energy mix, with the majority built in the 1970s.
But I'm going to take some convincing to decide that +375 TWh of stable, baseload electrical power wouldn't have helped the German (and European) economy.
Climate change mitigation doesn't work if the fossil fuels just make it cheaper for other countries to use them. Russia and the Middle East aren't walking away from trillions of dollars in oil reserves and the BRICS aren't going to stop developing to keep the world from getting a couple degrees hotter in a hundred years.
If they really wanted to do something about climate change they'd be pushing next gen nuclear energy to the forefront, make clean electricity super cheap, and drive electrification by outcompeting fossils.
The energy policy we have now in the West was designed by scammers and morons.
T. Energy Policy PhD
Russia and the Middle East can try to sell their oil reserves, but eventually demand is going to crash as a consequence of vehicle and power grid replacement with renewables.
Oil will remain in certain energy dense and/or conservative applications for awhile (e.g. aircraft), but the two above sectors are a big chunk of demand (~50%, roughly).
Compared to renewables' zero cost of fuel, it's hard to balance refining and shipping oil around the world at any price, especially after the current system downsizes.
At this point the price for new solar power or onshore wind is cheaper than gas or coal. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_sourc...
A village with a tank of diesel can be amazingly self sufficient in the developing world while their grid central power are not reliable.
I understand the urgency of climate change, but doing something obviously unproductive like pretending the developing world is going to eagerly spend money they don't have to preserve the climate 75 years from now, isn't going to help anything.
Also India aside, the BRICS are just a grouping of chronic degenerates. I'd hardly be wanting my country to follow in their footsteps
I'm responding to the suggestion that Germany doctored the numbers regarding manufacturing output. I found this suggestion weird but I've tried to respond with a straight answer and not assume anything about the agenda behind the question. This was maybe a mistake.
The OECD defines how "manufacturing output" is measured. The same method is used to measure manufacturing output in every OECD country and has been used for over 50 years. Germany was the 4th biggest manufacturer in the world in 1970 and it's still the 4th biggest manufacturer in the world. Why is this so difficult to believe or preposterous?
Look it up, google it, read some wikipedia, look at secondary economic indicators, employment numbers, everything, there is ZERO evidence of a collapse in German manufacturing anywhere.
Modern civilization, like in Germany, requires a certain per capita level of energy resources. If you increase the cost of energy without a matching increase in economic resources you lose functionality in your infrastructure.
Germany willfully chose to cut domestic energy production and increase its own costs. Now its core manufacturing is crumbling. BASF, for example, is relocating to China[0]. They claim they're using 100% renewable energy there, but such claims are easy to make in China and hard to verify.
The Western sustainable energy policy is like watching a man hit himself repeatedly in the head with a hammer and then wonder why he has a headache.
[0]https://www.basf.com/cn/en/media/news-releases/cn/2022/09/BA...
Oh, because you think they are dumber than you?
Well they are going to have to suffer the consequences of your smarty-pants bad decisions for way longer than you, so I say, we give them a vote proportional to the statistically average remaining years they have left on this planet.
Yes, they should have a weighted vote.
It's hard to be objective when you don't have skin in the game.
Democracy becomes less stable as voting increases and individual equity falls. It becomes a race by politicians to dumb down the population and elections a race to see who can offer the public the most free stuff from "the government."
Most people live in dream worlds and do not understand cause and effect relationships, especially young people. Getting more and more uninvested people to vote is not a magic alchemical process. If so the biggest corporations would use the model to gain even more power.
But they don't. You need to own shares in companies to vote. That's how they align their decisions with their future needs.
What about healthy families that share this duty between the parents?
> Democracy becomes less stable as voting increases and individual equity falls. It becomes a race by politicians to dumb down the population and elections a race to see who can offer the public the most free stuff from "the government."
You're not going to improve this situation by reducing the voter pool. This makes it even easier to "dumb down the population and elections".
> Most people live in dream worlds and do not understand cause and effect relationships, especially young people.
You're telling us you've understood that only having the "Head of Household" vote is good. Why is it good (in ways not trivially countered as above)? Show us that we really are living in dream worlds, and you are not.
> Getting more and more uninvested people to vote is not a magic alchemical process. If so the biggest corporations would use the model to gain even more power. > But they don't. You need to own shares in companies to vote. That's how they align their decisions with their future needs.
Sorry, but this makes no sense. Why would "the biggest corporations [...] use the model to gain even more power"? Who is saying "the electorate can gain more power by becoming bigger" or "the votes are worth more if there are more"? This is a strange non-sequitur.
At this point I would rather have kids in British parliament than the current lot.
> BRICS can take advantage of cheaper fossil fuels
This scaremongering is getting out of hand.
I just watched a BBC news broadcast about "how will the world get off coal if this family in the global south needs it to cook their food?" as if this miniscule consumption of coal is in any way comparable to out demands for energy and oil.
>90% of world's electric buses run in China. In UK, the train between 2 biggest cities runs on diesel because it doesn't have access to electricity. If you use an electric scooter in London instead of a car, the police will confiscate it and if they want to, they could charge you with driving without insurance (of course they cannot be insured). You would get a criminal record.
Every 6 months Daily mail writes an article about how bicycle riders have killed all the grandmas, and police get's out at Hyde Parks and start checking motor power of ebike motors and confiscating them. But we are still waiting for them to investigate a machete attach in our neighbourhood.
Just this month a car has maimed 3 people inside a building, and no one cares. Last month a Land rover ploughed into a school and sent 8 kids to the hospital and 1 to the morgue. If you kill someone with a car, you might not even go to prison.
India? Sure, but it’s also a nation of vegetarians with an environmental streak. I think they’ll get it together just fine.