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Comment by daedrdev | Hacker News Reader

The EU has probably net helped Russia with all the gas they have bought

I would say that it's a net loss in the long term with all the gas they stopped buying.

This is incorrect. EU still buys Russian gas, its just re-routed through friendlier (than Russia) countries like India or Azerbaijan, and it costs a lot more than it used to because of logistics and transit costs.

What is incorrect? EU buys a lot less russian gas than it used to - that is an undeniable fact. And how exactly is russian gas re-routed through India to EU? Have you looked at a map lately? There is nothing in any other country that can match the output that was being piped directly to the EU from Russia. The pipelines to India and Azerbaijan are a tiny fractions of what was going to EU even when running at 100% capacity.

Germany helped build up russia with money and technology which gave putin legitimacy

Because they thought(incorrectly) that we can "tame" russian threat by having a really good economic relationship with them. Turns out, they don't care, Putin will raze his entire country to the ground and kill hundreds of thousands of his men just to say he tried to bring the Soviet Union back.

And therein is the problem.

Trump's a bully, but he's a bully that exists because the lowest common denominator keeps getting lower.

Russia wouldn't have thought it had the leverage to invade Ukraine if not for their control over European petroleum supplies, leverage the Europeans gave them of their own free will.

Markets do not solve everything. Trump is the ultimate expression of this so far, but he is not the first.

The energy policy of most European countries was clearly mismanaged. Depending on the country, bad decisions have been taken either due to incompetence, bribery, political pressure, and psyops.

Psyops doesn’t just work to incite… an equally powerful goal is to normalise. Like normalise how a country that has unlimited sun and wind elected to use oil and gas from Russia.

A different nuclear energy policy would have changed Europe’s fate. It will do so again…

> The energy policy of most European countries was clearly mismanaged

Still is. That Germany continues to leave their nuclear fleet fallow in the face of this is absolute insanity.

Germany’s energy policy has unfortunately shaped the EU one to the catastrophic level it is now.

I don’t know enough about local politics to categorise the reason why though. But a lot of the damage is now irrevocable, and residual for millennia.

I mean I'm real content to blame the environmentalist movement on this, which very obviously bifurcates into "pragmatists" and "anti-nuclear". The anti-nuclear people will pay lipservice to everything else, but it's abundantly clear that their top priority at all junctions was eliminating nuclear power regardless of consequences and they'd believe convenient lies to that goal ("the natural gas is just temporary. We'll definitely stop using Nordstream voluntarily...")

Nah the anti-nuclear power people are not environmentalists. Those people would know that nuclear waste is handled far better than any other waste from power production. Instead the anti-nuclear power people are the immense number of people who are scared to have nuclear power plants anywhere near them. It doesn't matter how safe the plants actually are, people think they are crazy dangerous compared to other ways that power is generated.

Going back on shutting down nuclear would cost more money and energy than building out sustainable energy - just see how well UKs or Frances most recent nuclear experiments went - tens of billions over budget and nothing to show for it after a decade

@marvin Do you want to leave next to a nuclear power plant when you know that Russian bombs or ISIS or other enemies could blow it? I don't.

This isn't a credible reason to wed yourself to Russian gas and decommission the plants Germany already had running. Despite three years of bombing the nuclear plants in Ukraine have not been (properly) hit.

Terrorist attacks on nuclear power stations can be dealt with via the standard security services.

German aversion to a functional army and nuclear energy has had consequences for the country and the EU.

I think you can give that honour to India.

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