4 ms·
Suppose everyone was simple and conspiracies didn't exist. Where might Germany get its fossil fuels? Perhaps shipped across the entire Atlantic Ocean? Perhaps f
by pphysch 5y ago
Suppose everyone was simple and conspiracies didn't exist. Where might Germany get its fossil fuels? Perhaps shipped across the entire Atlantic Ocean? Perhaps from Mars? Or perhaps from the major producer on its same continent?
The bottom line is that European integration is a natural phenomenon. It is natural to have strong economic ties within one's neighborhood. You don't need a decades long conspiracy to explain basic economic advantage.
However, European/Eurasian integration is an existential problem for the one superpower that isn't part of Eurasia. Therefore we get a lot of chaos, misinformation, and artificial divisions.
- throwaway5752 5y agoGermany does need energy, and I actually give German leadership the benefit of the doubt, that they sincerely believed rapproachment with Russia was possible and Nord Stream 2 was a good faith endeavor. Sadly Russia ruined that impression, it required no work on the part of the United States to do so.
- pphysch 5y ago> Sadly Russia ruined that impression, it required no work on the part of the United States to do so. The State Department would strongly disagree with you. Victoria Nuland recently gloated that they have spent over $5,000,000,000 supporting anti-Russian movements in Ukraine in the post-Soviet era.
- throwaway5752 5y agoAnd, impressively, all that money didn't work to stop the project until Russia started the Ukraine offensive in February.
- pphysch 5y agoNot even close.
- fsflover 5y ago> Where might Germany get its fossil fuels? How about nuclear? https://thebreakthrough.org/blog/the-true-face-of-the-anti-nuclear-movement https://thebreakthrough.org/blog/the-true-face-of-the-anti-n... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26603464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26603464
- blub 5y agoGas is used firstly for heating, then in the chemical industry in Germany.
- someguydave 5y agoheating with electric powered heat pumps would be way more efficient
- blub 5y agoFrance uses a lot of electricity for heating and it’s not going great it would seem, since a lot of their nuclear power-plants are down for maintenance.
- riedel 5y agoActually you do not need nuclear for this. The problem is not nuclear here but to that Germany messed up setting up a fiscal mechanism trying to boost renewables (by introducing the so called EEG Umlage). The problem is that electricity (even green) was more expensive than it needs to be (particularly compared to gas) and the incentives were fading to invest into renewables. Nuclear power is no option in German simply because we could not reach any national consensus about the waste which would be a prerequisite.
- someguydave 5y agoApparently Germans have no problem with huge quantities of unconfined waste from coal, but tiny quantities of confined waste from nuclear fission(which can be recycled) is the concern? This is not rational.