Amid 'green energy' collapse, Germany now reconsidering decision to shut down zero-emission nuclear power plants
Most everyone on the planet wants to breathe clean air and drink clean water, but the far-left's embrace of so-called "green energy" has been nothing short of lunacy.
It's true that fossil fuels produce carbons and pollutants, but with today's technology -- especially for American- and Western-made automobiles -- the amount of harmful emissions leased into the air and water are incredibly low by historical standards. And yet, the 'greenies' in the West insist that windmills and solar panel farms can produce enough "clean" energy to power modern economies, despite a couple of decades' worth of proof that demonstrates otherwise.
As such, the leaders of modern Western nations like Germany, overly influenced by the lunatics in the green movement, over-invested in such technologies and have discovered the hard way that they made a mistake.
Germany still uses fossil fuels, but the country ended its self-sufficiency in those industries long ago, choosing instead to rely on NATO nemesis Russia for Berlin's oil and gas imports. After Russia invaded Ukraine and the West imposed sanctions, Germany (and every other European country too reliant on Moscow for energy) found out that Donald Trump was right when he insisted they should rebuild their own energy industries.
Now, German leaders have been forced to rethink previous decisions to cut their energy production from traditional sources including nuclear power, which generates
no emissions whatsoever.
According to DW.com in March, shortly after Russia's invasion:
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has raised the possibility of lengthening the life of the country's nuclear power stations. Berlin's decision to get rid of the plants has come under question amid energy security concerns.
Germany famously decided to stop using atomic energy in 2011, and the last remaining plants were set to close at the end of this year.
That said, several German politicians are now pushing to once again extend the life of the nuclear plants because Russia has become overtly hostile and the world is shifting from a unipolar one under the U.S. to a multipolar planet with power divided between the U.S. and the West and the Russian and Chinese economies.
During a visit to a factory in western Germany where an important gas turbine is being stored, Scholz said that the amount of power generated by the country's existing nuclear plants is small. "Nevertheless, that can make sense" to keep the plants in operation, he said.
Germany's government has said that the objective is to move to completely renewable energy alternatives and that will be key to solving its needs. But Scholz said last week that transition was not occurring fast enough in many parts of the country, such as Bavaria.
"The expansion of power line capacities, of the transmission grid in the south, has not progressed as quickly as was planned," the chancellor said.
"We will act for the whole of Germany, we will support all regions of Germany in the best possible way so that the energy supply for all citizens and all companies can be guaranteed as best as possible," he continued.
The country has planned to end any existing reliance on nuclear power for more than a decade. For example, Germany's Social Democrat government, under Merkel's predecessor Gerhard Schröder, announced that the country would quit nuclear power by 2022. His successor, Angela Merkel, herself a former physicist, sought to extend nuclear power use until 2037, calling it a "bridging technology" until clear alternatives could be found and, more importantly, built and implemented.
However, after the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011, Merkel decided to stick to the original phaseout plan. Of Germany's six nuclear plants, which provided 13.3 percent of the country's energy, three were closed last year, with the remaining three at Emsland, Isar and Neckarwestheim planned for closure by year's end.
But wind and solar only make up 40 percent of the country's energy needs at present, so
it seems like national suicide to get rid of a reliable and clean source of energy in the meantime.
The technology is simply not here at present to replace, cheap, affordable and
fairly clean-burning fossil fuels. But that doesn't matter: The left-wing loonies pushing this transition are winning the argument. And modern nations like Germany are going to suffer.
Sources include:
DW.com
NaturalNews.com