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Comment by lenerdenator | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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