The greener the country, the less emissions-intensive its electricity generation. Energy transition pioneer Germany is looking pretty brown, but at least we don’t have any more nuclear power plants like France.

All is not right with the German Green Party. Their politicians often say very weird things. The Israel Lobby and U... Walt, Stephen M. Best Price: $10.70 Buy New $11.89 (as of 02:21 UTC - Details)

Back in December, for example, the erstwhile leftist thug and former Green Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer demanded the rearmament of Europe in response to the “imperial ideology of Putin.” Specifically, he insisted that the European Union requires its own “nuclear deterrent.” These statements were so remarkable that his interviewer could hardly believe it:

ZEIT ONLINE: You of all people are calling for that? The founding of the Green Party is closely linked to the resistance against nuclear armament in the early 1980s.

Fischer: The world has changed, and Putin relies on nuclear blackmail. I hope that America and Europe will remain united. But what will happen if Donald Trump is re-elected? In view of this scenario, too, Europe must think seriously about this question.

Needless to say, Fischer has a long history of deploring the dangers of nuclear power, and his party was of course responsible for shutting down the last German nuclear plants in April of last year. In the world of Fischer, 1) nuclear power plants are too dangerous to countenance, and 2) it was fine to demand disarmament during the Cold War, but 3) now “the world has changed” and Europe needs nuclear weapons. It is so hard to reconcile these positions with each other, that I can’t believe Fischer is arguing in good faith.

Germany is basically alone in the world in its simultaneous insistence on Net Zero goals and its phobia of nuclear energy. At the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Dubai, over 20 countries launched a Declaration to Triple Nuclear Energy; Germany was notably missing from the 16 European signatories. Adding to the mystery, our politicians will not speak plainly about the purpose of phasing out nuclear power beyond vague references to its grave risks, and policy-making in this area is shrouded in silence and secrecy. A lot of conspiracy theories are possible here.

Notice that there exists a curious chronological interplay between anti-nuclear policies in Germany and the construction of the Nord Stream pipelines. The original scheme to phase out German nuclear energy came in 2000, after the Greens had entered government for the first time. This was also just a few years after planning had begun for Nord Stream 1 in the last year of Helmut Kohl’s chancellorship. When Kohl protegée Angela Merkel came into office, the phase-out was quietly set aside, and she even extended the operating licenses of 21 nuclear plants in October 2010. After the Fukushima disaster in March 2011, however, Merkel changed course, abruptly announcing that we’d phase out nuclear power after all. Importantly, this was exactly as construction on the first Nord Stream 1 pipe was nearing completion. The reason for Merkel’s reversal has never been fully explained. The conventional theory is that she was trying to deprive the Greens of a central campaign issue in the Baden-Württemberg state elections. If that was the goal, it didn’t work; the Greens took 36 of 138 seats in the Landtag, formed a coalition with the SPD and installed their first-ever Green Minister President, Winfried Kretschmann. Spiritual Guidance on ... of Rostov, St. Dimitry Buy New $16.00 (as of 01:36 UTC - Details)

I can’t find official statements or rationalisations about any of this, but there seems to be an implicit policy at work just beneath the surface of this brief history: Nuclear phase-out under Schröder and Merkel was thematised in direct parallel to the prospect of increased Russian gas supply via the Baltic. This makes sense; if you have enough gas, you don’t need nuclear power as much. Perhaps we are even permitted to wonder whether Schröder and Merkel instrumentalised the insane demands of the anti-nuclear Greens for the purpose of tightening trade relationships with Russia. Schröder’s recent career, distinguished by close and lucrative relationships with Russian energy companies, lends some weight to this speculation.

It’s worth following the history of the gas pipelines a little further. In 2016, nuclear phase-out was well underway, gas was flowing through Nord Stream 1, planning for Nord Stream 2 had entered advanced stages, and the Greens had high hopes of entering government in the upcoming elections. At the Green Party convention, somebody asked Robert Habeck a silly question about what he’d say to Vladimir Putin if he chanced to meet him “on the way to the toilet.” His answer?

I would say: Mr Putin, you don’t know me, but that’s no big deal. I’ve just become the leading candidate for my party, so give us two or three months and we’ll be governing this republic. And then the following will change: Firstly, we will not build Nord Stream and we will gradually dismantle the gas trade relationship with Russia, because we are an energy-transition country.

Habeck went on to list other grievances, but it’s quite remarkable that his greatest concern back then was Nord Stream. The United States was at that very moment pushing hard to stop the second pipeline project, so you can see where the conspiracy theories that the Greens are controlled in some way by the US State Department come from. As it happened, the Greens did not make it into government in 2017. They had to wait another four years until the 2021 elections, by which time Nord Stream 2 was complete and there was no construction left to stop. Instead, as political pressure to open Nord Stream 2 grew during the energy crisis, the United States or another NATO ally sabotaged the pipeline and Habeck got his wish after all. Big think emoji.

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