Europe is Finally Waking Up to the Fact That China Has No Intention of Letting Climate Action Harm its Industries
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe,” said German Chancellor Friedrich Merz on his return from China. No, wait, that was the ‘replicant’ android Roy Batty played by Rutger Hauer in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. In no less a tragic scene, however, Merz might just as well have been recounting his experience of galactic travel. He hadn’t seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, but he had seen a synchronised robot combat-dance and the eastern industrial rival’s advanced manufacturing capabilities. “We are no longer productive enough,” he told other European policymakers ahead of his trip. “If you come from China, ladies and gentlemen, then you have an even clearer feeling that with work-life balance and a four-day week, prosperity in our country cannot be maintained in the long-run.” In another universe, and not one governed by implausible sci-fi premisses, it could now be Germany hosting impressive displays of robotic prowess.
The Energiewende – high-tech industries powered by Gaia’s Providence – was the less plausible science fiction plotline Germany chose for itself. It turns out that you can’t have nice things if making nice things becomes too expensive a process, and other makers of nice things have lower costs, such as labour and energy. And it turns out that if you don’t make nice things, then you can’t do nice things, such as maintain “work-life balance” and fund public services. For too long, and across Europe, the concepts of values and principles have been estranged from all that has made them possible. Armies of numpty wonks in London, Brussels, Paris, Berlin, Rome and beyond, never stopped to wonder, ‘What is the relationship between those cooling towers and our social-democratic, progressive, liberal outlook?’ Instead, they claimed that the next stage in human development required blowing them up.
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Great article despite it being so sad that the populace have allowed this to happen, thanks.
The populace has zero influence on this. The German voting system is designed such that governments which aren’t coalition governments are virtually impossible. Policy in Germany is decided by the coalition cartel, that is, the set of parties willing to form coalitions with each other. As all of the member parties are in a coalition with all other member parties somewhere in the 16 state governments and the federal government, only policies agreeable to all parties forming the coalition cartel are possible and this means Germans can either vote for a party with no chance of governing because it’s excluded from coalition cartel, most prominent example, the AfD, and hence, have no influence on politics at all. Or they can vote for a party supporting Net Zero, which all cartel parties do. German voters have a very limited influence¹ on which people end up in government posts and no influence on policy whatsoever. ¹ The voting system is basically: Each party compiles a list of candidates ordered from most preferred to least preferred. Voters can select on these lists as their list. If at least 5% of the people who voted voted for a certain list, the corresponding party is… Read more »
I can see things ending up like that in the U.K. – Cartel vs AdF = Uniparty vs Reform.
The voting system makes a big difference. Using a simple contrived example: Let’s assume that there’s an election in Germany and the parties are CDU, SPD, AfD and Greens. The outcome is AfD 49.9%, CDU 18%, SPD 16.3% and Greens 15.8%. Conventionally, the AfD would be said to have won the election and the next head of whatever the government was should be an AfD politician. At least, that was considered to be the democratic norm prior to the AfD. But since no other party would enter into a coalition with it, the next government woud be a CDU/SPD/Greens coalition which would have a majority of 50.1% in parliament. Another interesting property is loser persistency: At least one of the new coalition parties will usually already have been part of the previous coaliton. That is, in Germany, a party can lose an election (like the SPD did during the federal elections which caused the change from the Scholz cabinet to the present Merz cabinet) but remain in government as junior partner of the election winner (as is the case with the SPD in the current CDU – SPD federal government). Consequently, the politics of the current federal coalition are much… Read more »
Indeed
However highly organised tactical voting of the kind we’ve read a bit about on this site may bring us to a similar point
And we do end up with coalition governments here, sometimes
The War in Iran is about to lay bare the weakness forced upon us by Labour and formerly the Conservatives, we rely heavily for our energy on Oil and Gas imports because Starmer and Milliband will not allow us to use our own rich resources. The Middle east cannot now get enough of the stuff out of the countries to fulfil our needs, plus the prices are rocketing, so not only are we rationed we will pay even more for our fuel, that should finally close down our Industries which no doubt will please Labour. Then there is the depletion of our military, less Soldiers than would fill a football stadium, no bullets, no artillery, and no way of making them, because Labour and co have shut down the Industries in persuit of Net zero. Where and how and what with will we buy weaponry? We import bast amounts of Food, once again because of the Labour and Conservative wars on our Farmers, turning land into useless solar farms, killing off the family farm, strangling the Farmer in taxes and red tape. A country that allows millions of young fighting men with very different views on the world into our… Read more »
So we need to ask ourselves where does all of this Climate Change stuff emanate from. The answer is the UN and WEF.——— It pretends to be about science but is actually modelling, and models full of assumptions and guesses are NOT science, and NOT evidence of anything. Yet Public Policy all over Europe, the UK, Australia, Canada etc etc is all based on the output from un-vaidated speculative models, not on observations of what the climate is actually doing. Because in the non modelling real world there is no increase in the frequency or intensity of any type of weather event. What started out as genuine concern for the environment has morphed into a global control system where every activity has to be viewed through this CO2 prism for its supposed impact on climate, based on what models full of assumptions project. This climate change messaging works because it cloaks itself in the language of goodness and morality. It promises to save us all. It makes us feel guilt and to challenge any of it is to be evil and to condemn future generations to a climate apocalypse for which no empirical evidence exists. —–It has become a pseudo… Read more »
“We are no longer productive enough,” but the net zero madness must continue anyway.
In the eyes of our tyrannical leaders the whole idea of net zero is to save the planet by producing less, and to enrich themselves in the process. The elephant in the room has always been China. They have not surprisingly plowed on regardless, soon to become the world’s biggest superpower. It’s a monster that the west created and now relies on. We have been lead by donkeys who have sown the seeds of their own destruction. Now they’ve finally seen the bleeding obvious and they are scrambling around to change tack. It’s far too little, far too late. We don’t need a change of direction, we need a complete change of leadership.
That Germans are just too lazy, work to little and retire to early is pretty much Merz’s only message for Germans. Which basically means just don’t pay enough taxes to support all the government spending on good causes at home and elsewhere, eg, the about 50% of German welfare spending which goes to more-or-less recently immigrated foreigners.
The budgets of German cities are struggling to cope with the costs of the immigrant scum, just like our councils are.
I don’t know what it is like in Germany but virtually everything I buy seems to have been made in China. I thought it was a new low when my Colgate toothpaste was made there but if you create an anti production environment it is no surprise that production disappears. Reduce production costs and, as Donald has done, apply tariffs to China and you can rebuild.
First two paragraphs incomprehensible. Merz, pals of starmer and macron, not exactly the three most dynamic world leaders. All three countries falling behind rest of world due to immigration and “green energy”. Nothing will change until illegal immigration is stopped and the North Sea is opened for drilling.
Time to send Miliband to China as our ambassador over there. At least it would get him out of our hair; at best, it might open his eyes to the realities of the world rather than the fantasy one he lives in at the moment.