The people are fed up with dangerously incompetent leadership, who literally laughed when warned to not be dependent on Russia for energy. It's not a meaningless culture war. The loss of energy means lower standard of living at best and mass death and famine at worst.
The solution is not obvious, it's obvious only to zealots. It's kind of obvious that the solution is in PHV and wind energy but you can fight it to death with people who would claim that it's obvious that the solution is Nuclear energy.
This is not a good discussion, this is fanatics fighting. Anytime someone suggest simple solution to a big problem %99.9 of the time they don't actually have a simple and obvious solution.
The problem of relying on Russia for energy was obvious. There isn't a singular "the solution" because there were many possible solutions, nuclear energy being just one. In addition to investing in wind/solar, there are other solutions besides nuclear. Particularly, fracing and coal mining. Both of these are unpopular for obvious reasons (which is the reason everybody talks about nuclear instead), but I think both are better than the political autonomy of an entire subcontinent being threatened by a belligerent foe.
Put together, 6.5% of gross available energy in the EU was from Russian gas.
It's not so obvious that that is a problematic level of reliance threatening the political autonomy of an entire subcontinent.
If it meant that 6.5% of the population will be left without any energy, that would be quite terrible. If it meant a 6.5% drop in GDP per capita PPP, it would be worse than the drop from 2019 to 2020, but still only throw the EU economy back to 2013 levels.
That doesn't mean it isn't worth planning ahead for the consequences of reduced energy availability, but maybe we don't need to panic, either.
I can see why someone might hear that number and shrug. But given what’s happening to the energy prices, I think those 6.5% are more significant than “1/16th” feels like it ought to be.
Yes, the price increase is larger than the reduction in supply. Nobody wants to reduce their energy use by 6.5%, so everyone is trying to snatch up as much of the shrunk energy pie as possible, bidding up the prices in the process.
But there's a limit to the price war. At some point, a factory making widgets is going to look at price increases that make the cost of producing a widget greater than its expected sale price, at which point they'll probably stop their production lines, unless they feel like setting money on fire to keep them running. Those factory closures then provide for the necessary reduction in energy use. But everyone else still needs to pay the higher prices.
Fortunately, higher energy prices also incentivize increasing supply from alternative sources, so the EU probably won't have to reduce energy use by the full 6.5%. And as long as people setting money on fire are sufficiently rare, it will be energy-intensive, low-profitabilty users who give up first, so the economy likely won't shrink by 6.5% either. But a larger fraction will be captured by energy suppliers as profit.
People laugh at Preppers and call them crazy for taking prudent preparedness steps as insurance against future risks. It's a very human thing to do.
During the early days of COVID, some people started coming around to preppers being not-so-crazy-after-all, which lasted for precisely a few months before the toilet paper returned and preparedness being an acceptable idea left mainstream thought.
Expediency and lifestyle will always trump prudence in the human mind. It's the primary reason we will eventually exterminate ourselves, regardless of the specific existential risk we succumb to. The Great Filter is no great mystery.
> People laugh at Preppers and call them crazy for taking prudent preparedness steps as insurance against future risks. It's a very human thing to do.
I think most of the time people are laughing at preppers on TV. Having an emergency radio, a gun, extra water storage, a back-up generator, etc. - I haven't experience many people who laugh at that, though certainly I imagine someone exists who does. The government publishes info on emergency disaster preparedness kits and other things too.
Due to Earthquakes, California asks that you have at least 3 days of supplies on hand at all times, with 7 days of supplies being prefered and 14 days of supplies being the best. Same thing from my county and city. They all know that when "The Big One" hits, your average citizen is going to be on their own for at least a couple of days.
If everyone waits with getting their supplies until they expect to need them, then there won't be enough in stock to supply everyone with their 7-days of supplies.
Where did you get that idea from? Without looking it up, I suspect Germany, as a NATO country, helped Ukraine as other NATO allies did. And supported the orange revolution, as the other EU nations did before 2014.
Some quick numbers: 2020/21 exports of weapons from EU cointries to Russia were aroind 100 million (or thereabouts, might even include icebreakers, good luck using those for conquering Mariupol). Since February 2022 EU countries committed to send 2.5 billion of military gear to the Ukrainian forces.
Unless said facility was build after 2014 I don't see the problem here. Not that the training was very successful as far as all that invasion business goes, was it?
Under contracts signed before 2014. Seems like a detail worth mentioning.
EDIT: Which is bad reason, but at least an understandable when it comes to foreign policy. And it is not that arms exports are actually hindered by morals, all the exports to Saudi, UAE, Mexico and every other crisis region show otherwise. Personally, I think the West shouldn't export to those countries or conflict zones. The West also needs the industrial base to maintain reasonably strong militaries so, and with defense spending being a less than popular thing after the Cold War ended, exports are necessary for that. This could change so, and already did in Germany with additional military spending.
Europe's gas problem is entirely theoretical and goes away if any part of Russia exists and wants to be part of society at the end of the winter, or if 2 in 3 Europeans can follow simple directions to not be selfish and dead.
I find it tiring that any country that plays chicken with the superpowers gets all these warnings and abuse while the superpowers themselves do not give a crap who does what to undo their progress to Armageddon.
Germany was right to give Russia an option not to suck, the idea that Russia would not already suck worse by now and yet still be a military superpower if Germany didn't try to keep a vague semblance of balance in economics is a fantasy.
Is it seriously believable that Russia would have done nothing with violence by now to force changes in the economics if the west was shunning its natural resources for strategic reasons since the 1990's?
Pumped hydro is very limited and most resources are already exploited. Wind energy is not a solution because sometimes it just doesn't appear when you need it.
Nuclear actually is a solution, in the sense that if you implement it, the problem will go away. Renewables are not a solution in the sense that even if you over-implement to an absurd degree, with present technology the problem will sometimes remain.
The people pointing this out are not zealots, they're people with a basic understanding of how electricity works. It's the people who insist against basic physics that renewables can power 100% of the grid that are the zealots, and now we all will pay the price for accommodating their extremism :(
Variable renewable sources can’t power 100% of the grid, but they can easily power 80% of it without any of the normal whatabout problems. Renewables could also power 120% of the grid without problems, interesting variable loads to take up the extra very cheap energy would manifest soon enough.
Claiming exactly 100% is full of problems is true, pedantic, and nowhere close to any reality which would happen.
Of course there will be a mixture of power sources, relax. You can develop a lot of variable renewables before the issues come up.
Europe needs to develop every power source at the same time, distributing resources compromising for risk, several time frames, and cost. This involves a solar/wind heavy mix along with longer term nuclear developments and large scale energy imports from North America.
Although I think Smartgrids and all technology close-by including usage counters would really make a difference. No matter if you're for renewables or even Nuclear. Considering how much energy goes to waste because of inefficient usage. Every 60W laptop has an elaborate power management but multi kW homes aren't even close.
But one part of Smart grids is just measuring everything. Another part is decentralization which actually increases resiliency. In a positive light it's probably a bit like Internet vs. telephone network. Higher complexity but the tools are there to make it work
There were legitimate reasons to be wary of becoming dependent on Russian energy supplies. There were also legitimate reasons to pursue tighter economic integration, which when it comes down it, is the entire raison d'etre for the EU. There were also legitimate reasons to pursue cheap, reliable natural gas.
Trying to now pretend, ex post facto, that this was strikingly obvious and the result of incompetent leadership is profoundly narrow-sighted.
I agree, none of this was blatantly obvious and a lot of aspects need to be taken into account. The world isn't black and white even though it would be nice if it was at times.
many people in usa laughed at trump, called him a racist for wanting to block china trades and having some of the 20's policy of america 1st. turns out biden pushed those by an extent trump wouldn't dream of and everyone is fine with it now. leadership is corrupt and just want power even if it means bringing our nations to their knees.
> The people are fed up with dangerously incompetent leadership
When thinking of politicians, Intelligence is not an attribute which comes naturally to my mind.
Yet the absence of intelligence in karge swaths of green politicians is striking. Im specifically talking about the German green movement, not generalising.
Like being inteligent enough to prolong nuclear reactor runtimes, signing LNG deals with the UAE, fillong up gas reservoirs faster than anticipated, pushing for military aide for Ukraine, figuring out fallback plans for potential gas shortages?
Yeah, absolutely stupid things to do in the current situation.
We also have to remember Europe had the absolute disaster of a vaccine purchase program which was totally down to its incompetent leadership which for some reason the US media fawns over. The delay in getting vaccines to citizens probably cost 10's of thousands of lives.
