German energy: Unsustainable eco-suicide

The renewable energy bandwagon looks increasingly likely to deliver the German economy all the way back to the dark ages.

Amongst the more ludicrous acts of lazy journalism political pundits practice, is the conceit that Angela Merkel is somehow akin to Margaret Thatcher. Aside from being women, it is challenging to compare the Iron Lady with the dismally spineless stasis monger of Berlin. Whereas Thatcher combined vision, strategy and a strong belief, Merkel bends with the wind - or even without it. Thus her energy policy has become such a fiasco as to risk undermining the entire German economy.

Despite being a trained scientist, Merkel has repeatedly demonstrated spineless cowardice at the faintest whiff of a difficult energy decision. The German chancellor has fallen victim to the metropolitan mania of our times: liberal city hipsters have abandoned religion, becoming blind devotees to the bizarre reactionary cult of eco-lunacy.

In her aim to stay true to her one political policy, aka maintaining herself as chancellor, Merkel has undermined Germany’s energy security to the point where I am minded to wonder if she wasn’t a sleeper agent for the old Soviet bloc. When the ill winds of Fukushima created the horrible nuclear disaster in Japan, Merkel was a veritable tsunami of reaction, accelerating the closure of Germany’s nuclear industry and leaving a huge black hole in the nation’s power supplies.

The resulting void has been filled by… well anything that might give a bit of heat as it burns, really. Therefore Germany burnt more Lignite last year than it did in 1990, back when the ‘Ossis’ were emerging from their 50-year economic slumber as citizens of the DDR.

However, just as East Germany emerged from a 50-year nightmare in 1989 to discover the world beyond the Iron curtain had moved on, so too the reunited Germany is waking up from a soporific zombie state, blindly advocating unsustainable, er, ‘sustainable energy’. The deluded Energiewende doctrine represents a few syllables of shorthand, manifesting the usual delusion of blighting the landscape with bird killing devices which once in a blue moon might power a few light bulbs in the erratic flickering fashion akin to the more dangerous rooms in a Boris Karloff movie. Nor is this cynicism restricted to the usual lateral thinking types who evaluate government dogma with an open mind. Rather, even Professor Fritz Vahrenholt, the ‘godfather of green’ has turned his back on his previous beliefs, after a period of revelation reviewing IPPC reports which were, to put it mildly, a touch laissez-faire with the facts. Then again when it comes to the IPCC he is not alone.

Professor Richard Tol recently complained that when he tried independently to edit the latest IPCC report, he was forced to recant his pragmatism by a bevy of government officials intent on ‘sexing up’ the dossier to better make it fit the crazed scaremongering dogma of governments’ new corporate socialist racket: the Green energy industry. Harvard Professor Robert Stavins has also expressed misgivings about IPCC editing by civil servants. A weird coalition of government and corporate interests are at once religiously diffident while advocating an irrational form of cargo cult in reverse (i.e. instead of dropping riches from the sky, they prefer to remove economic growth through applying a hair shirt policy for energy provision, lowering living standards while willfully manifesting deliberate energy shortages).

Back in Germany, the nation which has long promoted unproven global warming panic, taxpayers are waking up to the fact that their money is being squandered on daft energy policies - where actually burning smoky lignite looks more logical than green government approaches. Deploying a mix of solar (in a not-overly-sunny nation such as Germany) has proven a recipe for disaster, while the haste with which even less reliable wind turbines have been allowed to litter the countryside has only added insult to taxpayers’ injury.

Every German man, woman and child, is now paying no less than 240 euro per head annually to indulge the renewable energy Ponzi scheme which generations of deluded German politicians have advocated. Merkel’s political cowardice has helped Germany spend almost $140 billion on green energy since 2005, only to see national carbon emissions increase! A recent study noted that last year, German citizens paid 21.8 billion euro for renewable power which had a market value of just 2 billion euro. One German television program described this succinctly: “That’s sick.”

Certainly wasting 20 billion a year on energy subsidies sounds richly unsustainable.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.