Germany: It’s Not So Easy Being Green
By Michael Moran, Skytop Contributor / August 19th, 2022
Michael Moran is a geo-strategy and sustainability expert whose books and documentaries have won awards and influenced the global debate for decades. He currently serves as Chief Markets, Risk & Sustainability Officer at Microshare, a global leader in Smart Building and ESG data technologies, and is a Lecturer in Political Risk at the Josef Korbel School of International Affairs at the University of Denver.
Moran is a former Principal and Chief US/Macro Analyst at Control Risks and led digital content strategy at the Council on Foreign Relations, winning three Emmy Awards for documentary work while there. He also has launched successful editorial offerings for Roubini Global Economics, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and other clients and was a member of the launch team at MSNBC.com, where he served as a columnist and international editor for over a decade.
He is author of several books, including The Reckoning: Debt, Democracy and the Future of American Power, of which Ian Bremmer of Eurasia Group wrote: “Moran is a sharp thinker and fine storyteller, and The Reckoning is a terrifically engaging read.” Moran is co-author with economist Charles Robertson of The Fastest Billion: The Story Behind Africa’s Economic Revolution and a novel, The Fall (2015). His analysis of political risk and international affairs has appeared regularly on CNN, CNBC and other major broadcast outlets and in the pages of The New York Times, the Financial Times, Forbes, Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy magazines and many other journals.
Germany’s Worst Energy Crisis
The containment dome at the Isar I powerplant in Essenbach, Germany, about 50 miles north of Munich, is being dismantled, and while its larger sister Isar II will produce power for the rest of 2022, the end is nigh. Germany’s Bundestag (lower house) confirmed that in a vote on June 30, and Chancellor Olaf Sholz affirmed a week later. And then, in the face of an energy crisis of a generation, he reversed himself.
“In Germany we are in complete agreement that nuclear energy is not green,” he told German broadcaster ZDF. Nonetheless, he conceded in early August that it “might make sense” to let the remaining plants run past their date of execution – subject to the results of a stress test of Germany’s electrical grid expected in early September.
Whatever stresses German utility engineers detect in the grid, they’re unlikely to equal the pain being inflicted on the country by Russia’s war in Ukraine, which has exposed the naivete behind Germany’s decision to rely on Moscow’s natural gas supplies for a great majority of its energy needs. The German government expects the economy to lose $265 billion in value over the next few quarters as the worst energy crisis in German history bites hard.
Phasing Out Nuclear Plants
As the leader of a three-party coalition that includes the Green Party and the free market Liberals (LDP) and his own Social Democrats (SDP), Sholz is fending off questions from international allies about the wisdom of sticking with a decision made by his predecessors to phase out the country’s six remaining nuclear plants by the end of this year. Three plants have already shut down; three more, including Isar 2, will soon join them.
The decision to retire nuclear power entirely, originally taken in 2000 by the first SPD-Green coalition government led by Gerhard Schroeder, was reaffirmed in 2011 by conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster in Japan. The idea was always controversial in global environmental circles as the urgency of curbing carbon emissions began to eclipse the zero sum anti-nuclear mantra that helped found the Greens in the 1970s. Now, rather than extend the life of the three remaining nuclear plants in Germany – plants that generate six percent of the country’s electricity – the coalition instead has authorized firing up long mothballed coal-burning generation stations that will pour carbon into the atmosphere.
Reality Check
For Germany, this is a bracing comeuppance. For years a leading voice in the Net Zero moment and something of a chide at global climate conferences, the country trumped its Energiewende (energy transition) as a model for others. Now it finds itself eating those words.
Previous German governments, including Merkel’s and that of her SPD predecessor, Gerhard Schroeder, chose to ignore warnings from Washington and from eastern NATO allies about Russia’s unreliability as an energy source. It was never that Russian supply wasn’t there, of course, but rather a question of political risk. Merkel, along with other gas dependent EU states, held their nose and soldiered on after the annexation of Ukraine and initial attacks on Donbass in 2014.
But the “special military operation” in Ukraine this year proved Germany’s critics correct. Russian gas, as a long-term solution to Germany’s energy transition, has moved beyond the pale. Interestingly, Schroeder, who brokered the initial gas deal with Moscow and sat on the board of the Russian energy companies that built and supplied Nord Stream 1 and the now canceled Nord Stream 2, is facing charges from Germany’s public prosecutor for complicity in crimes against humanity for his close ties to Putin.
Et Tu, Brussels?
What’s more, its ideologically inflexible position on nuclear power, an energy source that produces relatively little greenhouse gas once plants are up and running, has Germany swimming against the environmental tide. Around the globe, the debate has moved far beyond 1970s sloganeering. Last month, the European parliament joined in, voting to designate nuclear and natural gas as sustainable energy sources for the purposes of financial regulations.
This brought howls of protests from some in Germany, particularly the so-called “fundis” in the Green Party, who cite not just Fukushima but also Three Mile Island and Chernobyl as evidence that nuclear power is just too dangerous. Chernobyl, in particular, is remembered for sending a radioactive cloud over areas of continental Europe in 1986. Germans of a certain age remember the recalled milk and other dairy products being removed from shelves and aquifers being tested.
The EU parliament’s action certainly reflects the pressure the continent is under to respond to the threat of a Russian gas shutdown. But the schism over nuclear power in the global movement has a long history, dating back to the dawn of the nuclear era. Significant voices in the movement – James Hansen, the NASA scientist credited with first making the case for climate change, Sierra Club co-founder David Brower, a co-founder of the Sierra Club, just to name a few – challenged conventional anti-nuclear wisdom and took great criticism as a result.
More recently, nuclear power advocates cite the reliability of standardized plants in nations like France and South Korea, where common designs tend to wring out flaws and operational errors. And they tend to characterize what happened in Fukushima, as an outlier, a tragedy caused not by design flaws or human operator error per se, but rather by insufficient risk management, as a 2012 report from the Carnegie Council for International Peace concluded.
Atomic Politics
In many ways, though, the debate over safety has taken a back seat to emissions. The Union of Concerned Scientists, in a 2018 report, noted that if the US nuclear plants currently scheduled to close by 2028 go ahead, it would add 4 to 6 percent to US power sector emissions. Such statistics have spurred governments to reverse previous policies. South Korea, the UK, the Czech Republic, Poland and the Netherlands all have announced new plans to build nuclear plants and even Japan has reversed itself and restarted plants shuttered after the Fukushima disaster.
None of this has been enough to move the needle in Germany. Last month, a senior member of the German cabinet, Finance Minister Christian Linder the FDP, objected to the decision to go ahead with the shutdowns, but to no avail.
It is good to remember that Germany was never the environmental paragon its carefully curated global image suggested. A leading manufacturer of carbon-belching machinery, from the super cars of Mercedes and BMW to the turbines, pharmaceuticals and machinery giants like Siemens, Bayer and Bosch, the image of a green leader always had more than a bit of rust clinging to it. Germany is a middling adopter of Electric Vehicles (EVs) in the EU, and not a leader in their manufacture, either. Meanwhile, coal, even before the War in Ukraine, had a strong foothold in Germany’s energy mix, and Germany’s cultural love for the automobile gives America a run for its money.
Nonetheless, the new pain evident in Germany’s energy transition has not been enough to shatter the taboo surrounding nuclear energy. The Chernobyl memory certainly matters, as does the fact that anti-nuclear credentials are at the heart of one of the parties now governing. But there’s also the fact that Germany was a potential nuclear combat zone for much of the late 20th century, Pershing nuclear missile debates of the 1970s and 1980s, and what some view as a naïve belief – akin to what many Americans were until recently saying about engaging China – that opening to Russian gas would encourage Moscow toward reform and the rule of law. Such policies now look foolish – Sholz himself has said as much.