I picked up this comment from a HN user in another thread but it got no traction, seeing Germany drag it's feet on sending arms and Zelensky's recent comments about blood money I think it's especially relevant... "seeing as we're heading into spring, seeing Germany has quite a wealthy economy and QOL, that many if not most workers get 5 weeks of holiday, the chip shortage is leading to slowdowns in the automotive industry etc... why doesn't the government just go cold turkey, give people a month or 2 free holidays while drastically reducing public lighting, telling businesses to stop heating their premises at night etc etc... I mean we had a dress rehearsal 2 years ago with the onset of Covid, this would be better ,for a good cause, probably give a boost to domestic spending and send a f...U to the rest of the world saying we too can think outside of the box :-)"
I know it may seem naive, but how so?
The best part around the comments, that they are written by people not involved or linked to Germany at all.<p>I as a German, ask you to go cold on your heating and kill your industry - but don't tell people what to do -> at all -<<p>Why Germany? Why not the Austrians?
32% of their gas power comes from Russian gas. Covids economic shock would be nothing by comparison. French nukes running 24/7 could not make up the shortfall, there would be more than a small% contraction in the economy. Probably, technically a recession would follow. Aside from electricity manufacturing is a direct consumer, gas is feedstock for fertiliser, powers kilns and bakeries and heaps of industry directly.<p>They could. Some argue they should. But they won't. I'm thousands of km away, I wish they would but I don't have to suffer the consequences in terms of unemployment, economic damage, and loss of life and livelihood.
Two days ago on MR: “ That’s why the six nuclear reactors that were operating in Germany in 2021 generated 80% as much power as all the gas power plants…”<p><a href="https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/04/germany-facts-of-the-day.html" rel="nofollow">https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/04/ge...</a>
They have to balance the certainty of russian blackmail over supply with the short and medium-term cost.<p>Only 20% of electricity generation in germany is from gas, even though russia supplies around half that, it's not going to be armageddon. Gas from other sources will take up the slack in the medium term. In the short term gas-specific consumers will have some problems.
When all is over it is only fair that Germans will be the ones who will rebuild Ukraine. This shall put things into perspective about the costs, consequences and responsibilities. It's not that they should enjoy the pleasures of cheap oil for free.
The vast majority of power usage comes from Industry, not people in their homes, or office lighting left on overnight<p>Cold turkey would be a literal disaster.
They can't because Merkel and co led them down this path of increased dependency on Russian natural gas to replace nuclear and coal. They have massively beefed up intermittent / renewable sources, but that cannot replace the nuclear and coal. For that, you need natural gas.<p>Germany already has very high energy prices to pay for this transition. They would have to increase prices even more to back out of this failed bet on Putin.<p>They just turned off 3 nukes in Dec, which could be turned back on. That plus the 3 they will turn off this year constitute 13% of their base load power. To make up for this with gas, they will need a 30% increase in gas capacity from Putin.<p>It's not like they weren't warned that this was a bad bet years ago.<p>In fact, when it became known that Merkel was hell bent on turning off the nukes and depending on Putin, the US offered to put together a different deal to get natural gas from elsewhere (Mediterranean, S America, US), but Merkel turned it down in favor of Putin.
At this point 'cold turkey' would be like quitting cigarettes because you have stage 4 lung cancer.<p>Germany is not special. Every Western country is addicted to fossil fuels, because our economic system is built on unsustainable consumption. We have known for (at least) a generation that we must stop burning fossil fuels to prevent catastrophic climate change. If the system can't manage that, then I am not surprised that it can't turn off Russian gas to prevent genocide.<p>We could easily reduce our energy requirements (enough to defund Russia, but it's too late on the climate front!) by simply doing less non-essential stuff. Invest in local food security, health care, sustainable housing, and renewable energy ... and starve everything else.<p>... but since responsible, managed economic degrowth is capitalist heresy, here we are, paying Russia to holocaust* their neighbours while we burn their gas and seal our fate.<p>(*I first heard 'holocaust' used as a verb by Vitali Klitschko. This guy Englishes.)