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Germany set to miss net zero by 2045 target as climate efforts falter
(www.reuters.com)
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this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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What a fucking joke. It's amazing how all these countries set weak goals for themselves and then fail anyway.
We're all going to die lol
The UK likes to go the other way by talking up a ridiculous goal and then immediately failing it, like "Our goal is to produce zero CO2 and become the global leader in renewables by 2025” and then immediately open a new coal mine.
That's basically what Germany did. They recently shut down their nuclear plants and restarted their coal plants.
And yet coal power production is practically at the lowest level ever (except for corona months 03/20 and 04/20)
https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=de&c=DE&chartColumnSorting=default&year=-1&month=-1&stacking=stacked_absolute×lider=1&legendItems=000001010000000000000
It should be 0.
Germany still has a very long way to go to be carbon neutral.
Almost 79% of its primary energy consumption is fossil fuel. 17% is renewable.
For comparison in France 46% of the primary energy consumption is fossil fuel, 14% renewable and 40% nuclear.
Look at the industry's growth in France though. Renewables has been growing at the expense of nuclear. This is happening in Germany as well.
Germany is now using coal as base load. The main reason coal has not increased considerably is because all this new generation and loss of nuclear baseload along with limited ng generation has resulted in average energy prices doubling from 2017 to 2021 prices. Simply put the cost of energy is now so high that people and industry is using less. Done large industries shut down with loss of jobs. Solar and wind had been very expensive even with government subsidies. Subsidies that take money out of government coffers resulting in less services. This ignoring the increase in energy importation of which some may be from coal generation.
Shutting down nuclear simply denied millions of people a clean energy source unless they were willing to pay nearly double that of past years.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/germany-goes-all-energy-transition-with-nuclear-shutdowns-2023-04-19/#:~:text=The%20steep%20climb%20in%20electricity,hydropower%20output%20due%20to%20drought.
You know that with merit order pricing the cost of electricity only depended on the cost of the most expensive producer? So nuclear plants have close to 0 Influence on the price.
Wow... Where have I read that lie before? Oh, yeah. 20 times in this thread already, because you all get your alternative reality sppon-fed by the same lobbyists.
Actual reality:
The "massive" amount of nuclear shut down
The "coal" that replace nuclear
The actual historic low of coal use
That is just blatant misinformation. Name one single coal plant that has been restarted since nuclear power was phased out.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-reactivates-coal-fired-power-plant-to-save-gas/a-62893497
The Mehrum plant in Hohenhameln and the Heyden plant in Petershagen (whose operation has been extended).
Unless your nitpick is that these were started before the final nuclear shutdown, but I never said otherwise, only that both things happened recently.
They were extended specifically because of natural gas supply issues, caused by the war in Ukraine. Not because of nuclear shutdowns.
I understood it as coal was phased in as nuclear was phased out. The thing that astounds me still though is how recent the last 3 were shut down.
I think they were planning on natural gas, but that went down the tubes because they were planning on buying from Russia. Coal plants were restarted to fill the gap.
What the plan is now, I don't know.
The end goal was always renewables with smart net, storage and hydrogen plants to offset spikes. Gas prices are dropping again, so it will be used as a bridging solution. Energy production in Germany is actually on track of its climate goals compared to transportation.
The actual problem was stopping to fund solar, smashing a hundred thousand jobs in renewables under the pretense of "saving workers". ~20k jobs in coal heroically saved.
But they could easily do it (and get paid by fossil fuel lobbyists) because the discussion is completely twisted anyway. And most constructive discussion of the topic will be drowned in fairy tales about renewables not working, nuclear being our only savior and other bullshit.
Basically this whole thread is a perfect example. We discuss electricity production because that's the direction the nuclear social media cult is pushing every discussion into...
The actual report linked in this thread is for a German report of construction and traffic sectors not meeting their emission reduction goals... and I'm pretty sure neither coal nor nuclear is used to power cars nowadays. And the electrification bottle neck for transport is the production pace of electric cars, their still too high prize, limits on loading infra-structure etc., not actually energy per se.
Thank you for debunking this nuclear fanboy bullshit that gets repeated all the time.
Yes, but the goals in germany are written into a law, and the highest council actually blaming the government for failed goals.
Still not gonna change a damn thing. The (federal) government(s) don’t care, they are busy framing harmless protesters as potential terrorists and jailing them accordingly. Or they simply change the law again so that they do not have to be held accountable for their missed goals (see the ministry for transport).
The kind of law where people go to jail or the kind of law people have long televised meetings and write op eds?
The government has more interest in pursuing the global power ambitions of the Standort Deutschland rather than accomplishing environmental goals, even in spite of one of the parties being named Die Grünen (which is basically just good PR for them and nothing of substance) - and the goals that are being pursued anyway are all to the slogan of Cem Özdemir "Zwischen Wirtschaft und Umwelt gehört kein oder". Environmentalism as long as it remains profitable, even at costs of +2, +2,5, +3 or more °C
The next elections are sure to be won by Merz, with or without the AfD, and very likely to have the FDP in influential ministries, so nothing will change - or perhaps even for the worse.
That's what happens when the main goal of production is not the goal of creating socially necessary goods, but to insert money into the labor process and end up with more than you had at the beginning.
Sure... the once-again-below-5%-party will get influential ministries. And the Greens totally did not manage to meet their climate goals in agricultur and industry, both huge causes for emmisions. Oh, wait. They by far surpassed them. Soemthing you cannot say about traffic (FDP) or construction (SPD).
But yeah, I know. Brain-damage doesn't allow you to not parrot the popular fairy tales of the German right wing media, we get dwoned in on adaily basis for nearly two years now, just once.
Let me guess... you also totally believe the popular fantasy of the Greens losing voters in droves (actual ~0-0,1% since the election) because that's the narratives spoon-fed to you with weeks of rediculous talk about the Green's reaching a new low constantly... while their coalition partners actually lost 33-40% of their respective voters since the election.
The goal is complete decarbonization until 2045 and a lot of sectors in Germany are already on track with that goal, energy being one of them. That with a minister of finance, that does not want to spend money and a minister of transportation, that is more a puppet of the automobile industry and does not care about decarbonization. Imagine the US without the huge subsidies into clean energy. That's what Germany is trying to do under their current minister of finance.
Energy or electricity? Those are two very different things.
Sorry, that was imprecise. The correct German term would be Energiewirtschaft, that can be translated to energy industry. That's not only electricity, but also production of biogas, district heating, refining of fossil fuels and so on. The struggling departments from worst to slightly struggling are: -transportation: widespread use of fossil fuels -building: heating with fossil fuels and emissions from concrete -industry: high use of energy and no alternative to fossil fuels in some cases
Great that the plan is for the entire economy. Cheap and reliable clean electricity is possibly the most important and straightforward(ish) issue to solve with steel and concrete sitting at the opposite end of the spectrum.
It's can kicking. Make a promise for something 25 years in the future. Who cares if the country can't meet it? You'll likely be out of office or retired by that point. That's the next person's problem.
it is until people start getting organized and seeking justice on those responsible
German here.
Even back under Merkel, elected parties had a habit of defining good goals and then rendering them impossible to hit through policy. This meant that no one could fault them for trying, and no one could fault them for not being able to hit them.
Nowadays my countrymen aren't as stupid anymore. That doesn't mean we can do anything about it, but especially since Merkel we don't believe any of these leaks anymore.
Good ol CDU turning almost everything they touched into steaming horseshit
I'm much more optimistic, though I do think it will get worse before it gets better. I think we'll end up with a few mass killer enviromental events before humans start to save themselves properly. It'll never be too late as Earth is always going to better than anywhere else for us.
Quick list of things hopeful in my feeds of the top of my head.
There is a lot of movement. It's all about aligning economics with fighting climate change. Which is natural as using less to do the same thing is better for both.
One thing that is a very good sign is oil companies are scared. They are spending a lot of money pumping out FUD. Doom peddling to slow climate action, but economics is against them. Even without climate damage being costed in. Which governments will do when oil is less powerful.
Fight the doom!
Some of the things you listed are indeed good, but we're not going to avert climate catastrophe unless we reject the idea that we can only do good things if they're less expensive than the bad thing alternative.
I think it's the way to ease the masses in. You also missing that the other end is to make the bad stuff expensive. Bring environmental cost on to the balance sheet. Criminalize and enforce those laws, environmental crimes. Carrot and stick.
There's also a lot of propaganda paid by fossil fuel lobbyists (and some nuclear lobbyists still going for the perceived easy target of renewables, as rediculous as it is...) with the goal to disrupt the energy transition.
And the majority here actually believes they are anti-fossil fuels while they actually parrot their propaganda (for example the "Germany stopped nuclear power to burn more coal"-fairy tale you can read a hundred times by now here - only invented for the talking point of coal being needed, when Germany is actually at a historic low in use) and thus constantly running (objectively wrong) talking points against renewable power.
On one hand I love the obvious panic of fossil fuel lobbyists getting more desperate and rediculous in their massaging by the day. On the other hand, they already brain-washed a massive amount of people that I fear are really lost and will fight tooth and nails against a reasonable green transition to pursue their fantasies of "sane" nuclear build-up (that isn't sane because nobody is actually building enough capoacities to make sense mathematically), without that "non-working" storage (that nuclear power actually needs to be economically viable) and "expensive" renewables (same, same...).
You get it. But at the end of the day, the fossil fuel companies will lose because of economics. Renewable energy and electrification is cheaper and better and planet saving. There will be economic feedback loops kicking in as less fuel is used, taking up the price.
But "in the end" isn't fast enough for my taste... or for the taste of people losing their homes or base of life to floods, draughts, forest fires and so on.
And it won't even get better but just worse even if we stopped co2 emission completely today. We would have need that feedback loop a decade ago. Instead the same lobbyists now sabotaging it got a lot of renewables killed the moment they were too cheap to compete.
If you draw a curve of deployed solar and wind power, the last decade is a hole that basically threw us back more than the missed time even.
And even if renewables take over for economicla reasons now, they will just change tactic and instead sabotage storage and infrastructure to keep fossil fuels relevant.
Germany had a very coal heavy power prodcution originally and massively build up renewables... and the lobbyists were already ahead... they blocked grid extensions to create pockets depending on coal no matter how much cheap green electricity is available. They blocked grid extensions to make diversification less effective. They -also for that reason- pushed antiwind sentiments in one part of the country and anti-solar in another. They made storage commercially unviable by massive double taxation (once as an end consumer while loading, then as a producer while unloading).
And they did all that basically without anyone taking much notice because they also -and much more visible- blocked wind and solar power in general (ffs... they killed a 100k people industry and sold it off to China just because solar was getting too cheap).
Yes, renewables are extremely cheap. So cheap in fact that people fight for their chance to build solar and wind in designated areas instead of wanting subsidies like for other power production. But if we don't take a very close and constant look, we will be surprised in a decade how all those renewables did not actually help reduce co2 much as the 10-year-infrastructure plans for storage and grid are suddenly about lagging 9 years behind. Just look at such basic projects like the north-south grid connection in Germany. The 10-year plan to build SüdLink is scheduled to be done in ~6 years now... after 12 years. 100% sponsored by conservative local politicians and conservative nimbys cosplaying as environmentalists.
Never give up hope. That's what fossil fuels companies want.
In 2005 me and my now wife watched "Who Killed the electric car" and it felt hopeless. Now we both drive EVs and you see more and more of them on the road. Home solar used to be a pipe dream, but now I know more people with it and hope to set it up myself. My electricity provider claims 100% renewables. We plan to remove gas use from the house.
Germany will hurt itself by not looking forwards, and as that becomes more and apparent, it will be harder to maintain. Fossil fuel money will start to reduce and with that, it's corruption of politics and information. At some point, I hope some jail time is handed out to those who knowing slowly climate against for money. Now, climate action and money are more and more lined up. Always have been long term, but now short term too. Aligned on energy and thus everything down stream of energy. Which a lot of stuff!
Australia's Teals movement shows common sense can win out.
I agree ... but that attitude also encourages people, especially leaders ... and especially the billionaires that control this world ... to believe that destruction is the ultimate end and to just play along, pick up as much wealth as possible while you can and do whatever you please because the end is near.
As if billionaires needed more reasons to pick up as much wealth as possible while they can lol