That "just" is really doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Economics is what makes this country work. If converting to renewables makes more money, that's what will happen and the people making the money will find a way to justify it politically.
Economics only make the country work when societal costs are not externalised by those that cause them. Which they have been, always, by fossil fuel companies.
Because cheap fossil fuels's benefits will dissipate in two decades if we can move to green energy while the downsides project into whatever time remains of organized human civilization.
The benefits of fossil fuels will also be felt for centuries as well. It's what moved us into the comfortable lives we all enjoy today and lifted billions out of poverty.
The point isn't that they're wonderful, it's that they're treated as this thing that only a few have benefited from, when it's exactly the opposite.
This can't be denied but the reality is that the fossil fuel industry has done everything in its power to delay the transition to other forms of energy for the past 50 years with great success and to their benefit. What could have been a successful transition to nuclear and solar would have implied maybe up to 30% of the emissions we have created thus far, which would have drastically changed the panorama of climate change where we wouldn't be in the position where we are today.
It's literally just a couple of decades of effort what separates the scenarios between mild climate change and the accelerated extinction of most of humanity and biomes. All so that Saudi Aramco and Chevron could get a bit more profit.
From the perspective of our evolutionary fitness function the most critical thing is to eliminate existential risk, and from the dawn of the industrial revolution to now all we've done is create them. Fossil Fuels allow us to keep 8 billion people alive at the same time temporarily, which is a reckless and irresponsible thing to do. If it isn't sustainable it's a joke.
Which makes it all the more remarkable given the century+ headstart fossil fuels had in entrenching itself in our political process and power structures.
Texas is doing something right, that’s for sure. But it’s not so clear what that thing is that the topic can be considered settled without debate.
You are ignoring the fact that the Trump administration has taken proactive steps to interfere with economics and prevent people and companies from building cheaper clean energy. They have tried to ban offshore windfarms and when that didn’t work they straight up paid Total $1billion to build fossil fuel plants instead. They spend millions to tear out already installed chargers from federal property. They illegally clawed back funding states and companies were already spending on clean energy. They eliminated tax benefits for electric cars, causing car companies to spend several billion dollars to completely reverse their production strategies.
In an ideal world where the market is perfect, maybe.
But in reality entrenched market players have access to political influence that lets them stay entrenched. They’ve spent a lot of money since the Industrial Revolution to make sure we need them.
It’s not a perfect free market. There’s no such thing. Politics has a huge influence in economics and vis versa. They’re intertwined.
It’s not a hypothesis. It’s an observation of reality. The current administration canceled massive renewable projects and has incentivized reopening coal plants, subsidized fossil fuels, and opened government land to oil drilling.
China is doing it the right way : use fossils but pouring that money into renewables. Use economic forces to cut the dependency . Everything else is just pipe dream building never happened utopian communism 2.0 .
It's funny that environmentalists would rather see the world burn than solve all emissions problems with nuclear.
Climate change is Schroedingers extinction event. It's only bad when you can solve it with solar panels and wind. It's nothing to worry about when you can solve it with fission and eventually fusion.
Ah yes, the famously environmentalist CDU. Obviously the center-right conservative party consists 100% of environmentalists, that's why they fight so hard to push back the ICE ban, prop up the oil & gas industry (just look up Katharina Reiche if you want to feel sick for a bit), and why they run smear campaigns against the Greens.
The current Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy Katharina Reiche is continuing the powerplant strategy of the previous Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy Robert Habeck.
The 2024 plans under Green minister Robert Habeck called for 25 GW of capacity of new gas power plants (which should be in future fueled with green hydrogen. But until enough hydrogen is available at good price, the new gas powerplants will burn natural gas. Some skeptics say that the cost of green hydrogen will be higher than natural gas for a very long time). The estimated construction costs for the new gas powerplants was in 2024 around 40 billion EUR. Most of this costs will be covered by the German state.
> [...] Katharina Reiche is continuing the powerplant strategy of the previous Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy Robert Habeck
I'm honestly flabbergasted at this propaganda attempt, because you happen to have left out (just a tiny excerpt):
- Reiche's previous employer being one of Germany's biggest energy firms (Eon), and almost every decision she has made happens to be according to Eons interests
- Reiche is literally and explicitly asking the fossil industry to supply reasons her ministry can use for swerving investments from renewable towards non-renewable energy (and these requests were not documented as required, before investigative journalism found them): https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/katherina-reiches-minister...
- Reiche keeps lying to the population about the costs of renewables, and many other related numbers: https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/katherina-reiche-... (heading "Entweder sie weiß es nicht – oder sie lügt"; there are older issues where she lied, easy to look up)
- Reiche is trying to push back the ICE ban, which is not only incredibly dangerous from a climate change perspective, but which is going to kill the German car industry because they'd rather stick with ICEs than actually invest into building EVs, when the EV market is growing rapidly! https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2026-07/co2-flotteng...
This is just a tiny excerpt from the last few months. Since the current government came into power, Reiche has been relentlessly acting in the interests of the fossil lobby while deliberately putting the breaks on anything renewable, all while lying and acting as a mouthpiece for fossil propaganda (again, explicitly proven!).
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Seriously, I'd love to know - why do you deliberately spread propaganda for the fossil industry, like you did here?
I was only comparing the fact, that because of nuclear phase-out and the future coal phase-out both the previous and current Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy agreed that a large expansion of gas power plants is necessary, this was known already in 2024.
If we are now criticizing persons, please remember that German Economy Minister Robert Habeck famously stated in July 2022 during the energy crisis that "we do not have an electricity problem, we have a gas problem"
During the energy crisis debates, government-commissioned or environmental institute estimates (such as from the Öko-Institut) argued that procuring new fuel rods required 18 months to two years, which was cited as a physical constraint preventing longer life extensions for Germany's final reactors before they shut down in April 2023. But Westinghouse Electric Germany told a parliamentary committee of inquiry that federal ministries never asked if the standard production time for nuclear fuel elements could be shortened.
Now please explain: why are you painting environmentalists as responsible for the phaseout, when the vast majority of nuclear plants were shut down under the conservative CDU? And when the Greens were simply following the laws established by the CDU following Fukushima?
The Greens, by the way, extended the lifetime of the existing plants beyond what the CDU had planned. Why are you failing to mention that?
If you were honest about your critique, I can't see how you can possibly make environmentalists responsible for Germany's course - during the last 20 years, they were the 2nd largest of 3 coalition partners during 1 governing period, compared to the CDU being the largest partner during 4 governing periods. From every angle, they deserve the majority of the blame.
It's not correct attach the same amount of blame for the nuclear phase out in Germany to both Greens and CDU. I would recommend to read little bit on the history nuclear power in Germany.
In 2002, under the Red-Green government of Gerhard Schröder, the "Act on the structured phase-out of the utilization of nuclear energy for the commercial generation of electricity" took effect, following a drawn-out political debate and lengthy negotiations with nuclear power plant operators. The act legislated for the shut-down of all German nuclear plants by 2021.
So when the Greens first came to power in the Schröder administration of 1998 they achieved their major political goal for which they had fought for 20 years: abandoning nuclear energy in Germany.
The Greens wanted swift abandoning of nuclear energy in Germany already in the 2000s, but the government would have to compensate the nuclear power plant owners for the costs of building the nuclear power plants (multiple bilion DM in the 2000s, most of the nuclear power plants were still new and the costs of construction were still not payed by the electricity). Therefor the Government negotiated with each electric utility company a rest quota of nuclear produced electricity and as a result nuclear electricity production would continue until 2021 (with a planned decrease in production every year).
In 2007 amid fears that Russian energy supplies to western Europe might not be reliable, conservative politicians, including Chancellor Angela Merkel and Economics Minister Michael Glos, continue to question the decision to phase out nuclear power in Germany.
In September 2010, German government policy shifted back toward nuclear energy and the government wanted to extend the use of nuclear energy in Germany.
After the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, the conservative German government reversed it's nuclear position and returned back the original 2002 Red-Green nuclear phase-out time table.
The current conservative German government under Merz again reversed it's nuclear position towards a more pro-nuclear stance, but decided that it's too expensive to revive the nuclear industry.
I would not say that the current German Green party are environmentalists, currently they are mostly renewable industry lobbyists. CDU has connections to German heavy industry. SPD had strong connection to coal mining regions and coal unions. FDP connections to German car manufacturing.
Also lets not forget the friendly neo-nazi party AfD, friendly with both Russia Putin regime and US MAGA movement. Its interesting to see how the Russia gas/oil oligarchs have the same interests as US oil/gas tycoons.
That does not matter at all regarding your initial statement, which is simply wrong. You didn't argue that the environmentalists would have done so, you're spreading the false rumor that environmentalists were responsible for closing down all the nuclear plants.
> They had enough power to close down all the nuclear power plants in Germany.
But the CDU were the ones who closed down almost all the nuclear power plants in Germany, and as I've shown the CDU are anything but environmentalists, so this is simply wrong.
My "wall of text" is to prove that the CDU are not behaving in the interests of environmentalists, rather nobody here can believe how deeply they've sold their souls to oil & gas.
As I already wrote, it was German Red-Green goverment in 2002 which put nuclear phase out in to law in 2002. CDU has always oscilated with positive and negative views on nuclear.
Germany had enough power to close down all nuclear power plants, because older coal power plants when taken offline have been carefully mothballed (preserved for later restart, when necessary).
In contrast the 2002 German nuclear law (deutsche Atomgesetz (AtG)) requires that nuclear power plants have to be started to be dismantled immidiately after shutting down. There are no technical reasons why nuclear power plant after shutting down, taking out nuclear fuel and decontamination (as is done regularly during maintanance) could not be preserved for 10, 20 or 50 year (you have to mostly periodicaly repair the roof, repair the paint and guard the buildings, e.g. it can be done without large costs).
Could you please explain how you arrived at this response? I genuinely cannot imagine what your thought process was unless you're a troll, and I hope that's not the case.
Over a 60% reduction in emissions from the electrical sector.
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Compare that to the US, where environmentalists haven't been allowed anywhere near any influence in the federal government... And you'll very quickly see that they are just a convenient boogieman, and not the actual problem.
I'm observing that a country with an actual environmentalist political presence achieved a greater overall reduction than one without. Maybe they aren't the problem, as popular as they may be to bitch at on this forum.
Even if one of their policy points is counterproductive, the rest more than made up for it.
Yeah, France is doing great. Germany is heading to the stone age. Which I suppose is an environmental policy of sorts. Who would have thought the Morgenthau plan would be so popular in 21st century Germany.
Environmentalists have no power whatsoever and most of the people in the younger generation do not have the same antipathy towards nuclear power because we grew up in a post-SALT world and haven't lived through the spectre of reactors being used for nuclear proliferation and weapons production.
Regardless, governments do not typically care about public sentiment when making strategic moves for long-term time horizons. It's why we have a strong military and why despite so much whining about its cost, the F-35 exists and is being fielded by as many squadrons as can get their hands on it. If they wanted to build out nuclear power in a civilian capacity, they would. We already do it for subs and ships.
Until the incoming administration declares that safely storing nuclear waste is woke and allows their close friends or maybe even their own companies to just dump it in a desert at a premium because the bible never mentions the associated hazards.
Or it says facility inspections cause autism and transgenderism so they have to deregulate for their pals.
Or that nuclear safety itself is a symptom of low testosterone and turns the frogs gay.
Hmmm, a radioactive desert vs an entire polluted atmosphere, I wonder which is worse...
No, storing a few cans of solid waste is decidedly NOT a real problem. However, undoing the damage we've done to the global ecosystem instead, now that's gonna be fun.
