>1. Coal was turned on because France messed up their nuclear fleet ... and they would not have needed to do this in the first place if Germany's nuclear fleet

>1. Coal was turned on because France messed up their nuclear fleet ... and they would not have needed to do this in the first place if Germany's nuclear fleet hadn't already been crippled on purpose. You cannot deliberately reduce your baseload capacity, and then blame another country for an accidental reduction. >2. They were meant to be turned off. But due to Russia's boyscout army having a field day, they were put on ready, in case the gas goes low. Which didn't happen, but ironically they had to be turned on to keep France from going dark. They should never have been "meant to be turned off" in the first place. And by the way, the gas did go low. That was what all the energy rationing and crazy prices were about. People and businesses had to reduce their consumption of energy. >3. It was conservatives who messed up the renewable thing and did a back and forth with nuclear; >4. It was conservatives ... Yes and who was forcing that back-and-forth? They're trying to win anti-nuclear votes and get shit done in states with Green coalitions. You recognize that the fossil fuel lobby can sway the behaviour of politicians without literally being in power as a formal governing party, yet you don't recognize the lobbying influence of the Greens, which is much stronger in practical terms? >7. The majority of households heat with fossil fuels (mostly gas nowadays). No amount of nuclear can change that overnight. Millions of homes need to switch their entire heating systems. This should have been done long ago, but guess who prevented it? This is a funny thing Green apologists do: they'll say nuclear can't fix gas dependency overnight. But the gas-dependency problem is only in existence because years ago nuclear was chosen to be phased out, and the only alternative was gas. In the counterfactual world where this didn't happen, a greater share of houses would have electric heating rather than gas, like it is in France, so the problem would not exist. In other words, Green anti-nuclear policies create an artificial problem, then they'll use the fact that nuclear can't instantly fix that problem as an additional anti-nuclear argument. Nobody else is as fanatically opposed to nuclear power as the Greens. They ran a focused, deliberate campaign of propaganda, lies, obstructionism, protest, and sabotage, over decades. Conservative fecklessness doesn't get you to this situation. UK conservatives aren't much different to yours; they take money from fossil fuel interests and have to listen to anti-wind NIMBYs. But somehow our old reactors are still running, and yours aren't, and the difference is something in the German political culture that made the Greens more effective there than here. Imagine a counterfactual Green party, actually worthy of the name, that shed the anti-nuclear message after the Cold War ended, and embraced nuclear as a valuable tool to fight global warming. Imagine that party is as effective in that timeline as it is in ours. In that timeline, the Energiewende doesn't have a gas-dependent "transitional phase"; instead existing nuclear reactors are kept running and new ones begin construction around the end of the 2000s, coming online in the late 2010s, where they form the backbone of a decarbonized grid. Electric heating gradually displaces gas heating, Putin's regime doesn't get as much hard currency from gas exports, and nobody would have ever heard of Greta Thurnberg.