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Comment by scoofy | Hacker News Reader

It’s successful because it belies the unseriousness that some of even the strongest proponents of the crisis can have.

I’m an environmentalist. This has been a crisis my entire life. I’m happy for nuclear to be a solution exactly because it’s a crisis. Do I think it’s the best choice long run? No. It has externalities that are concerning. However, it’s a serious crisis, so go ahead and build them if it can help.

I’m an urbanist. I live in a housing crisis. I’m happy for ugly five over ones to be built to help people afford a place to live because it’s a crisis. Do I think they are ugly? Yes. Would I prefer a significant amount of revenue? Sure. However, it’s a crisis, so go ahead and build them.

When your coalition starts getting picky about solutions, it signals that they don’t actually believe it’s is a genuine crisis.

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It's fine if that's your takeaway as long as you're aware of the full context. I'm just tired of people misrepresenting the situation as "the German Greens made Germany demolish their nuclear plants"! Large enough parts of the population were scared of nuclear accidents, so the conservative CDU used the nuclear exit as a way of garnering votes in the then-upcoming election.

You might argue that this fear is unfounded and dumb, and again, I won't disagree. But it's not the German Green's stupidity, it's the German population's stupidity. That's why I think it's important to mention this fact every time - otherwise it will be used to fearmonger about "environmentalists want to de-industrialize and go back to living in mud huts!"

There are good reasons to phase out nuclear (which was supported by all major political parties, a decision of the vast majority not only the green party).

E.g. usually, the proponents ignore the risks. The day before Fukushima they would have said, Tchernobyl cannot happen here. The next castastrophe comes always from a direction nobody anticipated. In the 2010s CDU in Germany delayed modernizing the german power grid by a huge amount which the greens could not catch up entirely during their recent term in the government (as part of a difficult coalition). This power grid is now a bottleneck to install and use intelligently more solar, wind and batteries (new solar already compensated for the phase out of the last 3 nuclear power plants in the early 2020s). CDU is again in power and again doing counterproductive measures to slow down modernization of the energy system. There is no need for nuclear but for faster modernization of the grid and for more renewable energy production and storage capacities.

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