Ordinary Germans Will Pay a Heavy Price for the Anti-Nuclear “Lunacy” of Their Elites
Germany’s last three nuclear power reactors were shut down this weekend. Supporters of the anti-nuclear movement cheered. Many others – including some in the media and voters who worry about the environment – fear that the decision will only worsen Germany’s energy crisis.
Sabine Beppler-Spahl argues in Spiked that it is ordinary Germans who will suffer.
A culture of fear has driven Germany’s anti-nuclear movement since its inception in the mid-1970s. In its early days, it was a radical opposition movement, largely at the fringes of society. Its demonstrations were often met with massive police force. At one demo in 1986, in the German village of Wackersdorf, several protesters, and one police officer, were killed.
The public mood started to change after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, also in 1986. But the German government continued to back nuclear power in the years following the accident. Then Chancellor Helmut Kohl argued that a highly industrialised country like Germany couldn’t survive without it. …
By the time [then Chancellor Angela] Merkel announced the phaseout, the anti-nuclear movement had become mainstream. No party opposed her move (the populist and pro-nuclear AfD had not yet been founded). Her decision was applauded by the media elites, too. Even the former boss of Siemens, Peter Löscher, toed the line, welcoming Merkel’s plan to replace nuclear power with renewables. So strong was the groupthink in Germany that sceptics of Merkel’s plan were often isolated and ridiculed. Nuclear engineers saw no future in Germany, university departments for nuclear sciences began to close down, and many of Germany’s best engineers went to Canada or the US. …
The key question of course is why? Why is the Government abandoning a cheap, clean and reliable source of energy? And why is it instead betting on unreliable renewable energy, which will make Germany dependent on favourable weather conditions and will raise energy prices even further?
The answer lies in the power of Germany’s green movement, which gave birth to the Green Party, currently the junior coalition partner in Olaf Scholz’s Government. The decades-long fight against nuclear power is driven largely by its anti-growth ideology – an ideology that has spread to the establishment more broadly. For his part, Scholz has only one interest – keeping his weak coalition together. He has sacrificed a once formidable industry to green ideology and party politics.
The price of this fiasco will inevitably be paid by the German people. A backlash to the green dogma that brought us here is long overdue.
Worth reading in full.
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Green zealotry will bring untold hardship to the door of any country that falls under its spell. UK is right up there at the head of the queue.
The UK Government need to act on this now. We got through the winter in part thanks to electricity supplied via the interconnectors to the continent. Next winter Germany will also be competing for that electricity pushing up the market price even further.
The UK governments have already “acted”. They decided in 2008 we need a “Climate Change Act” (Miliband Labour) whereby we forced ourselves in law to reduce emissions, and then more recently with NET ZERO that was passed through parliament with not one single question asked as to cost/benefit. We have no idea how this absurdity could ever be achieved and the cost is estimated in the trillions, all for very little benefit to the planet as we only emit 1% of global emissions of CO2. In other words our own politicians have conspired to take away the affordable energy that brought us prosperity and are replacing it unaffordable unreliable electricity and leaving us all much worse of, with millions entering into energy poverty, but we are all supposed to have a nice warm glow inside because we are “saving the planet”.
Unilateral Economic Disamament.
The elites of course will have their ground source heat pumps or subsidised biomass boilers. It’s everyone else that will suffer for this.
Aren’t we all paying a heavy price for this political driven lunacy?
A German friend of mine, from a fairly wealthy part of (what was previously West) Berlin, is very happy with windmills and solar panels. This may have something to do with his father having spent most of his professional career jetting around the world to tell people to stop jetting around the world.
Funny old world.
I think the anti nuclear power movement has long been strong in Germany. On the other hand, the adoption of direct renewable power has become an established industry. In my house (in the UK), I’ve got two items of equipment that were both manufactured there – one of which is a solar thermal control unit, the other being a dc – ac inverter. I’m not against the operation of nuclear stations, but the installation of the local kit at my place has been a useful investment.
It seems that the market for domestic, and other “micro power station” equipment developed more rapidly in Germany than here – hence the source of manufacture for some of it (the roof mounted PV panels were made in China).
The irony in Germany is that a lot of electrical power is still dependent on coal – not least lignite (brown coal). Alright, a fair chunk of that was normal in East Germany, but there is still a lot of surface mining for it.
‘… but the installation of the local kit at my place has been a useful investment.’
Extortion rackets often are profitable.
The return on your investment is from theft of money extorted from other electricity users who subsidise your feed-in tariffs, by Government edict, and the taxpayer who subsidised ‘the local kit at my place’.
‘Ordinary Germans Will Pay a Heavy Price for the Anti-Nuclear “Lunacy” of Their Elites’
GOOD!
Its not only their elites, it’s the whole lot of them and their Green obsession – they’ve been worshipping the forests and gods of animal and river since God was a schoolboy.
And since the EU is run by Germany they have been able, via that monster, to inflicted their mental disease on the rest of us.
Here’s a German joke as another message of the real world into your strange universe where – 78 years after an independent state of Germany was abolished by military force, you still believe the people who claim that German enemies are responsible for most of what you believe to be your problems.
The writing on the T-Shirt is
[Logo of the Green Party]
I’m voting Green and I’m proud of it!
The text below says
An aquaintance of mine is participating in a challenge where he has to wear this t-shirt for a week in a row.
On the first day, people spat into his face, he was beaten unconscious twice, his head was forced into a flushing toilet and someone even tried to set him alight.
He’s now very eager to find out what’s going to happen tomorrow when he plans to go out the house with it for the first time.
Merkel used the Fukushima tidal wave as an excuse. Who needs these idiot politicians?
Merkel was the Ossi Manchurian Candidate
This is more proof that it is cheap reliable energy that is the real target, not CO2. That is just a proxy being used to impoverish the masses.
I wish they would Just Stop Disrupting world snooker tournaments.
All over the western world common sense has been chucked into the bin and replaced with ideology. That ideology masquerades as a crusade to save the planet, but as someone once pointed out—–“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false face for the urge to rule it”. ———-Green ideology far from saving humanity and the planet is all about ruling humanity and the planet. We always here about the risks of using this or that energy source. We hear Fossil fuels are destroying the climate and Nuclear is NOT safe. But there is one risk we NEVER hear about, and that is NOT using those fuels.——————– Since 80% of the worlds energy comes from fossil fuels and 10% from Nuclear that risk is enormous. A billion people on earth still do not have electricity. They are being told they should leave their coal oil and gas in the ground and we fob them off with some money for solar panels and wind turbines, but all that is telling them is that they won’t be having much in the way of electricity anytime soon and that is just tough because the planet has to be saved. But this idea… Read more »