IIRC there was a significant decrease in late 2024.
The biggest gas distributor in Austra had a contract that basically couldn't be cancelled. However, the contract specified that the Russians deliver the gas, and the Russians did that through Uraine, on a contract that expired late in 2024. At that point the Russian exports to Austra dropped to approximately zero, and I haven't heard any complaints from Austria.
There are some other customers (more willing than the Austrians) who also got transit through Ukraine, their purchases also decreased drastically at the same time.
Replying to myself — I'd forgotten Viktor Orban's vain hope that somehow, the Ukrainians might be persuaded to provide transit. "Maybe if we buy the gas in Russia such that when it crosses Ukraine it's European gas."
"Despite?" I thought the EU payments to Russia were propping up the war.
On the other hand, hydrocarbons are a global commodity. If EU bought from somewhere else, then Russian methane would just substitute for whoever would have bought from that somewhere else. Buying from somewhere else just increases costs through use of less efficient transportation than whatever pipelines remain.
And on that same other hand, hydrocarbon extraction isn't free revenue for the Russian state. Unless Russia is willing to go the way of Venezuela and starve its golden goose, the total free revenue is probably something similar to the profit margin of an oil company[0], which is pretty volatile. If an average margin is 20%, EU's 21.9B of fuel purchases is more like 2.4B of Russian govt support compared to 18.7B to Ukraine.
This is a good point but also Russia is a nation state not a company. The 80% of the revenue spent on operating costs is just invested in their economy and creates jobs and pays taxes. For a state enterprise, the balance sheet is very different than a private company.
> The 80% of the revenue spent on operating costs is just invested in their economy and creates jobs and pays taxes.
Yes and also not the full 21.9B claimed by the article. I wonder how one could contemplate the different levels of external war that could be exerted by a country based on its external economic ties. One the one hand is going full juche with no external economic ties (which the DPRK isn't quite), and on the other is some fully external state run on banking or tourism like Liechtenstein or Maldives.
Europe's future is building more (solar and nuclear) or (gas and coal). Solar scales very quickly. Nuclear very slowly. Have both or suffer the fate that gas and coal brings. Politics does a fantastic job of messing simple ideas; it's really that simple to understand this energy crisis.
PV, yes indeed makes a difference and quickly. But I've not seen much culture war on this. (There was however a group on my street protesting, simultaneously, wind turbines and 5G…)
Heat pumps are also good, but (as far as I can tell) burdened with a high sticker price. Great option when you replace an existing heating system at the end of life or a new build (we've got one in our new build), but I wouldn't say they are a "quickly" making a difference.
You're right about them being a culture war item though. I've seen political posters around here by people upset by them.
Batteries are cheap these days, but I think we're still a way off from manufacturing at the scale needed for "quickly". The factories are going up pretty quickly, just not fast enough given the context of "can we stop giving any money to oil and gas producing countries we no longer like?"
I think the hard part of batteries isn't culture war at the moment, it's that people are still pattern matching the term to AA's and drawing false conclusions about what's possible.
That seems like a bit of a misinterpretation of what is being described in the article - there isn't any controversy about heatpumps.
According to the article the controversy is a law making it mandatory to buy something that costs €17,000 which is close enough to double the price of a reasonable alternative. The thing being heat pumps doesn't really an issue.
It is the same as the "anti-solar" push back in the day. It was pointed out at the time that Germany's initial Energiewende push was going to be a disaster and they ended up with some of the most expensive electricity in Europe for a while there. Again, that isn't an anti-solar or anti-wind observation. That is an observation that the people running the electricity grid are incompetent and verging on enemies to German prosperity. It makes a lot of sense that people like the AfD if they can consistently pitch "we're not going to just slug you for thousands of euros" but that isn't an anti-heat-pump stance.
There isn't resistance to any particular technology, if it made sense to use I'd expect general support for the idea. The controversy is the people who are insisting on driving the costs up for no reason are quite controversial, because they are morons and shouldn't be in charge of anything.
My theory is post-WWII the British did something to permanently screw up the ability of the German elite circles to function, it is quite stunning to watch them struggle to understand why people might not like expensive, scarce energy and ongoing visible money wasting projects.
So there's no controversy about heat pumps other than
a) opposition to regulations that aim to transition to them,
b) simplistic arguments against them based on upfront cost?
And c) then you flatly state they don't make sense.
And then finally, just as a massive and unnecessary cherry on top, you come up with a wild stabbed-in-the-back/mind-control conspiracy theory to explain why your opinion differs from the experts in Germany (and the rest of the world).
What roenxi is saying is that if heatpumps weren't being forced on people, they wouldn't be controversial. If solar panels were forced on people, they would be equally opposed.
Transition to solar/wind is temporarily costly to the individual in itself because energy prices are no longer fixed 24/7. So maintaining your energy budget means adjusting your usage to different time periods.
When the individual citizen's energy expense is further increased because they themselves have to buy equipment, then that becomes an issue of funding rather than the technology. They would not be equally opposed to large tax-funded energy systems, so it's not a criticism of the technology itself.
The AfD are very clear that they're against any action on climate change so pretending they have principled stances against the process for rolling out heat pumps is gaslighting.
Their own general stance:
> The AfD rejects any policy and tax that claims to be for alleged climate protection because humans cannot protect the climate. We also want to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement. ... The alleged scientific consensus on "man-made climate change" has always been politically constructed...The predictions of the IPCC are based on inadequate models. The warnings of the so-called "climate science" have completely shifted from the predicted ice age of the 1970s to the currently claimed "global warming". ... On the contrary, CO2 has proven to be a driver of enhanced global plant growth, thereby benefiting global food security. ... The AfD vehemently rejects this goal and the associated societal restructuring. This also includes the EU's Green Deal, which is destroying the European economy and thus our prosperity.
Which directly supports their specific heat pump policy:
> Lifting the ban on gas and oil heating systems. In a technology-neutral heating sector, inexpensive gas, preferably from pipelines or heating oil will be available again. None of the so-called renewable energies or the proposed new applications, such as heat pumps or electric mobility, can survive in the market without subsidies, while conventional energies are artificially made more expensive or banned
Which is why government will need to foot the bill as a strategic priority.
No one is saying that it is something that should interest private sector investors. Obviously on a spreadsheet it has no chance of comparing favorably against slapping up windmills.
It needs to be looked at in terms of national security.
Anti-nuclear folks I've heard about (and argued myself against) in both Spain and Sweden, but anti-solar people? Never heard anyone being against solar, what are the arguments for not having solar granted you have enough sun and besides any temporary economic arguments?
On the face of it it sounds somewhat sensible point by point, but the more you did in, the more it just boils down to finding excuses, any excuse at all, for NIMBYism, often from rich urbanites who moved to the country and want it to be an episode of Downton Abbey, and fret about their house price more then anything else in the world.
This one tries a particularly hamfisted and tendentious "but Ukraine", neglecting that the fucked domestic energy situation is heavily impacted by Ukraine right now.
I think the argument is that cheaper renewables are only cheaper because they externalize the cost of storage to either expensive batteries or tech that doesn't exist yet.
Nuclear, otoh, provides constant output (barring maintenance windows) and has the full cost of the plant, from construction to decommissioning, built into it.
We've got nuclear submarines that run just fine- the prototypal tiny reactor. Had we built more and smaller nuclear power plants decades ago, we could have averted a lot of emissions and so on and so forth.
I've heard that argument a lot but .. that's not how the electricity market is actually structured, at least in the UK.
Both wind farms and nuclear power plants end up with a "strike price", which is effectively a collar option around the spot price so that revenue is guaranteed. It can in some cases result in wind farms having to pay money back if the spot price goes up too much.
> Had we built more and smaller nuclear power plants decades ago
The "learning rate" for reactors appears to be negative: over time, they get harder to build. Possibly as people discover more ways in which things could go wrong. Hinckley Point C is over time and budget.
We build bigger nuclear reactors because they are cheaper than small ones. Similar to big wind turbines, there's fundamental physical properties of scale that make the electricity from big nuclear plants cheaper.
Small nuclear plants are (maybe) cheaper per "plant" but not cheaper per watt and likely never will be.
The electrical efficiency of breaking water to hydrogen, then combusting hydrogen through a turbine to generate electricity, compares extremely disfavourably to most other forms of storage - it takes about 50kWh of electricity to produce 1kg of Hydrogen, and if you propagate that back through a turbine and make some conservative assumptions about electrolyser costs and so on and so on, you're sort of approaching 5x the cost of others forms of renewable electricity to make electricity from stored hydrogen.
Of course, if we're building enough renewable capacity that electricity is basically free when it's sunny or windy, that changes the eceonomics and maybe we should all be making hydrogen in that sort of [bumpily]-abundant future.
However, storing hydrogen is also a pain - the density is crap even as a liquid and very technically challenging, and the density is mind-bogglingly crap as a gas - you'd want to find some vast geological underground reservoir in which to store it economically.
None of these are insurmountable, it's just not an especially attractive option as things stand.
Total system cost is what matters, efficiency is only a small part of the equation. As far as I know a mixture of batteries and hydrogen in a renewable grid looks like the cheapest solution.
Storing hydrogen is trivially done in salt caverns. We already do it that way today.
They might also be able to rely on Canada ("LNG Canada" export facility starting up currently) in the near future for LNG imports. OgsyedIE's point about using exports to crowd out Russian gas is spot on, you have to drown the global LNG market in cheap gas until Russia fails.
France recently (~2 years) discovered a fossil hydrogen reserve (~46 million tons), but that will take time to develop and LNG imports are a potential bridge while also providing time for renewables and storage deployments to continue to push out gas for generation.
Maybe a dumb question, but wouldn't that have to be transported by ships rather than pipeline in that case, if it's supposed to go all the way to Europe? Sounds a lot more expensive if so.
Not a dumb question. That is what the LNG export market is: cooling fossil gas down cryogenically to liquid natural gas at an export facility, loading onto ships, and unloading at an import terminal (which can float and be repositioned geographically as demand warrants). Is it expensive? The question is: compared to what? For Europe, is it cheaper to lob military hardware at Russia or to pay a premium for gas (vs buying from Gazprom), causing the Russian economy to head towards failure? You're spending the fiat either way. Price is what you pay, optionality is potentially what you get.
> [Gazprom] Management misjudged how resolute European capitals would be, according to one of the executives, who said the thinking inside the company was that Europe would quickly be back "begging" for Russian gas supplies to resume.
Despite the economic pain of higher energy costs, the EU has not rolled back sanctions.
> "We proved to be wrong," the executive said.
> U.S. gas exporters quickly moved to replace Russian gas in Europe. The U.S. has become the biggest exporter of LNG to the continent, with supplies tripling since 2021. Europe still buys Russia's sea-borne liquefied natural gas (LNG), but mainly from Gazprom's rivals, Novatek's Yamal LNG plant.
> The European Union aims to end its use of Russian fossil fuels by 2027 and its overall gas consumption has decreased in part due to a shift to renewable energy sources.
> Is it expensive? The question is: compared to what?
I mean, compared to pipelines, as mentioned in my comment. AFAIK, we (Spain) get most of our gas from North Africa (Algeria I guess?), so there are more pipelines into Europe, not just from Russia.
So I guess I more wanted to know how the costs compared between shipping this cryogenically frozen gas and importing natural gas from say Africa.
I'd be curious what the time, effort, and cost would be to lay HVDC cable between Africa and Spain and burn the fossil gas in Africa (vs moving it to Europe over pipeline to burn). Over time, you could use storage and renewables on the Africa side to green the energy.
>EU has gas reserves that it does not want to exploit
Because of environmentalism. We want gas, but we also want it from someone willing to tear up his back yard for it, so we can cosplay as being eco-friendly.
That's a pretty cynical take. Setting up oil and gas reserves is a longterm thing, I think it's viable to not want to invest in new climate damaging infrastructure, even if moving off of exist damaging fuel isn't immediate.
A long-term thing. In the Netherlands decades ago a huge gas reserve was found. And it made us Dutch (and esp. Exxon and Shell) rich. And the region where it was discovered? The Dutch government left the people in the province of Groningen with billions of earthquake damage, destroyed homes, and a fight of a lifetime to get proper compensation. This has been a huge topic in Dutch politics for some time now, and finally the decision was to close the gas fields to spare further damages to the inhabitants living above them.
Just to put things in perspective, there is still ~3 billion m3 of gas (roughly 7 years of EU consumption). And the biggest earthquake was 3.6 on Richter scale (they are pretty shallow though, ~3km). 0 dead, 0 injured.
I am pretty sure Russia had a hand in amplifying the concerns of people hit by those earthquakes.
edit: when writing about stress for Dutch people, you can also mention the stress caused by not being able to afford heating/reducing heating to 16 deg C
This kind of behavior is totally in-character for Europe though. Europeans want to have all the fruits of a high-income society, but they want to outsource all the morally dicey bits. This pattern is constant: immigration (they want the migrants to go away, but want to seem enlightened and progressive, so they pay Tunisia and Morocco a bunch of money to have the concentration camps stay out of sight and out of mind), defense (they want national defense but don't want to pay for it or look militarized, so they underspent for decades and offloaded all the costs onto America, which was a viable strategy until all of a sudden it wasn't), and so on. It's not hard to see European energy policy following exactly the same pattern.
I do care about the environment but at the moment I'm watching Britain (i.e. home, there are many like it but this one is mine) basically sacrifice itself at the alter of net zero while India proudly announces that it's extracted a _billion_ tons of coal this year.
Energy is expensive and unreliable. Why? Well, its either because we aren't doing enough net zero, or because we have an _enormous_ supply-side restriction enforced by the state. Not all of which is due to environmentalism, to be clear.
I remember having conversations with "serious" adults when I was 14 about why it was mad to bet the house on wind and solar (Nuclear was very uncool at the time). Lo and behold a decade later, we really, really, need that baseload.
There are no energy-poor rich countries.
Some are completely happy being poorer and colder but I think something will snap soon in Britain in particular. Blair will have Ed Miliband disapeared soon.
Mind you, quite a lot of the no-progress-on-anything can be blamed on Britain's NIMBYs and press. People want electricity but hate pylons; what can you do?
> Energy is expensive and unreliable. Why? Well, its either because we aren't doing enough net zero, or because we have an _enormous_ supply-side restriction enforced by the state. Not all of which is due to environmentalism, to be clear.
I work in the energy sector and there's a huge amount of misinformation/confusion around why energy is expensive (I'm gonna ignore unreliable because that's a whole other can of worms). The energy price is almost entirely set by natural gas, the UK doesn't yet have the ability to turn away natural gas as a source, meaning it basically has to pay whatever's asked.
Even if you don't care about the environment (although I think you should!) and just want cheap energy, more renewable energy and flexibility in the market is exactly what you're looking for. You can actually see this on charts super clearly. Take a look on https://grid.iamkate.com/ specically at the energy mixup and the wholesale energy cost. You'll see that the amount of gas being used is an inverted graph of the cost (i.e. when we're using gas as a nation, that's driving up the price, when we don't have to, energy is a lot cheaper, and sometimes negatively priced)
You don't have to burn anything. You can store energy and release it later with batteries and hydraulic pumps (maybe not enough to take ypu all the way just yet, but a lot further than where we currently are).
Although, if you do want to burn something, you can burn biofuel (basically wood). The UK's only company that does this, Drax, are really not great ecologically, but just focusing on cost, diversifying from gas to a mix with more biofuel would have huge benefits.
Okay, so is Trump playing the tarrif game to bring manufacturing back home, or is cynicism and bad faith only okay when it's about US conservatives? Because the hypocrisy is on full display here.
I'm fine with being fair to the EU and giving them the benefit of the doubt, but only if we're fair to everyone.
If they’re already tearing up their back yard, wouldn’t it be strictly more environmentally friendly to buy from them rather than tear up our own back yard?
No world leader honestly expects Russia (population 150M, GDP $2T (nominal)) to start a general European war. NATO's combined population is 950M and their combined GDP is $50T. Not even the Russians are that crazy.
The people scaremongering about the Russian menace are playing a cynical game designed to drum up support for the war in Ukraine. They understand that people are selfish, and are thus more likely to support the war in Ukraine if they believe that it keeps the Russian bear from their doorstep.
Not a full on war maybe buy low level attacks and attempts to subvert the political system to put in pro Russian permanent leaders like Orban, and their attempt to do likewise in Romania. If they did take over Ukraine I'm sure they'd start making opportunistic threats over the Baltics.
This isn't nearly as bad as it sounds. Ukraine gas transit has ended so this year, the numbers will go down again to new historic low.
Vast majority of what's left is LNG, which is rather hard to shut off because it's easy to conceal it's origin, but for the same reason, it's not a source of any danger to Europe: Putin can't shut it off from his side, either - because the stream is managed by international traders so there is no way he could say "no selling it to Europeans". Goal of getting rid of Russian energy was to limit political influence/blackmail potential and LNG imports are safe from that.
Apart from LNG, there is Turkstream. It provides little and will be shut down by 2027. There is very little friction about it.
Yes, instead of cheaper gas via pipelines, we now pay more for more expensive LNG, originating from the same source. The alternative is what... even more expensive american LNG?
Amount of Russian LNG that enters the system is insignificant, don't exaggerate it. It's 15% of overall LNG imports at most.
Price for all LNG is the same because it circulates on the same, global market.
Pipeline gas comes with political liabilities.
And the real alternative is of course, deep cuts in gas consumption. Which is what RepowerEU is trying to achieve.
By the way, 2024 Russian gas imports show a slight increase only because 2023 decrease went ahead of plan. 2023 plan was 68 bcm and only 45 bcm were imported, even 2024 went ahead of reduction plan and 2025 is certain to be ahead of plan, too.
Given that Russia had troubles supplying gas via pipeline (remember the five NS1 pumps that failed and the sixth pump that had to be shut down?) and given that Baltic infrastructure is constantly being damaged, the more expensive LNG should be considered a risk premium. It's harder to attack and can be diverted in times of need, one of the reasons Europe got so unscathed through the gas crisis.
And if pipeline gas is cheaper is also up for debate, because gas is gas to the markets and the long-running supply contracts (which turned out to be worthless because Russia was suffering a conveniently-timed force majeure) had indexed prices.
Why does this post from a university read like a political hit job? I would expect such a low effort post from a media entity looking for clicks not Yale.
It does provide a critical piece of information that they are using shadow vessels to hide the purchase.
However, they don't go into historic numbers and if they really are trying to build any alternatives to Russian gas or not. Building something to replace as critical an asset as gas takes time. It would have benefitted everyone (the readers) if they dug into that a bit more
The sanctions regime was remarked on as poorly-thought out as early as Q3 2022 IIRC. Even though it's a Doomberg talking point, it remains true that the only way to really crush Russian market share in the European energy mix is to crowd them out with greater output volumes of competition from other gas exporters.
The same leadership that at the start of the sanctions regime claimed Russia's economy was about to collapse is still in power, mostly uncontested. I remember Mario Draghi's condescending and moralizing rhetoric: "Do you want peace or air conditioning?" Turns out we got no peace and the bills still increased by two times.
Notice how those who urge citizens to sacrifice for a higher cause never have to sacrifice anything themselves.
I know the EU council appoints a commissioner. Sorry if I don't go on and explain every aspect of how the EU works everytime I write about it.
The point is that we have 2 levels of indirection before we get to the commissioners: national elections in EU usually determine the composition of the parlament, then parlament makes a government (first level). The head of government then appoints a commissioner (second level).
The decision citizens take at national elections is determined by a variety of factors, first of all at the national level.
Given this context, to claim that citizens have any influence on who's part of the EU commission is delusional. If they did, we certainly wouldn't have Von Der Leyen in power, since she enjoys a measly ~34% approval among EU citizens.
I wonder what do you think is the solution to this?
For example I think EU citizens are not able (as in not willing to put the time and effort) to understand and discuss what EU is and what kind of MPs we want there and what they can really do.
I even consider somehow that is a mistake to even vote for those if the discussion is not about the EU and the direction we want the EU to go but about how can we protect their own country where country = ANY of the members.
> I wonder what do you think is the solution to this?
Hard to tell, to be honest. Maybe the solution is a presidential republic with a federal government like the USA. Maybe it's to give more control to the EU parlament.
IMO the EU has expanded too much for its weak government model, and has now too many conflicting interests within it. It can't work without a strong central government, and since we can't find an agreement between all members on what that government should look like, we might as well split into multiple smaller unions where members interests converge.
> I even consider somehow that is a mistake to even vote for those if the discussion is not about the EU and the direction we want the EU to go but about how can we protect their own country where country = ANY of the members.
I agree, that's why it doesn't make sense to go through national elections to pick a commissioner, that will also skew the vote in nationalist terms. We have the EU elections to take decisions about the EU, but it turns out the EU parlament is pretty much powerless.
No wonder, seeing how conservative and right-leaning parties are doing everything in their power to delay renewables wherever they can. In Germany new power distribution infrastructure keeps being delayed despite desperate need (at times most wind turbines and solar farms are shut down remotely because the power cannot be transported to consumers) and they managed to slow down deployment of heat pumps to bring down gas usage used for heating.
I'm reminded of "insulate Britain", a protest group advocating for government-subsidized energy efficiency. People absolutely hated them because of their traffic-stopping tactics.
How much of this is intrinsic to nuclear versus due to regulatory requirements (various taxes including subsidies for certain renewables, early decommissioning)? My sense always was that this was about the latter rather than the former, but I’m happy to be educated.
The implied myth here is incredibly annoying to read. It takes 10 seconds to verify why nuclear power was not deployed more readily, and it's not what you're implying.
To be totally honest, greens are blocking nuclear and conservatives are blocking renewables so here we are, with the worst of both worlds, breathing smokes and fumes.
The more renewables on the grid the more gas you need. Gas is required to balance out solar and wind until battery technology matures. Renewable eliminate the need for costly coal and nuclear but they need gas to deal with times of low solar and wind.
So if you have a demand for say 100Twh a year and generation 1Twh from renewable, you need very little gas. On the other hand if you generate 60Twh renewable, you need more gas?
They are saying that if 50% of your generating capacity drops to 1% of you need a lot of gas powered plants to make up that difference. If your renewables represent 1% of the generating capacity you need very little gas to make up that difference.
If your example you've reduced generation from fossil fuels from 70% to 40% so still a win.
I assume you're still going on about nuclear. The problem with nuclear is that it doesn't make financial sense even if it can run at 100% of capacity for 100% of the time, it certainly can't cope with variable load - you can't scale nuclear to provide your peak amount, so you need to be able to top up with gas or battery, just like renewables need top up
This is a lie that has been disproven repeatedly and is part of the disinformation that is spread all over the internet. What _is_ required is flexible power distribution and storage infrastructure
How ever you do it you need to time shift. Either though batteries or usage or ideally both. The interim solution is gas. Because solar is so cheap it makes sense to take other more expensive and slow power sources offline but that does increase how much gas you use even if the total fossil fuel consumption goes down.
It only takes one dictator, then the wishes of the people become irrelevant. Or propagandized; I'm sure the war is quite popular in Russia still despite horrific casualties.
As I understand it, Russia hasn't been able to actually call it a "war" domestically, they did burn through prisoners rather than trained forces until they ran out of people willing to believe the chances of surviving to enjoy early release, and Russian forces have been only partially rather than fully mobilised with their conscripts mostly kept back from the front line for a while now due to domestic concerns.
So it's not really that they had "only 2-3 years", they had more then a decade to sever ties and strengthen their military. But they did they opposite.
At the same time, the realpolitik take is this all not too inconvenient for Europe. Give Ukranians some loans, send a few tanks, hug and kiss Zelensky in photo-ops when he visits. Let them keep Russian busy and grinding them down. It's not their soldiers after all, it's Ukrainians. If Ukranians lose they can go "oh well, too bad" and then keep buying Russian gas and oil.
There should have been a much stronger response to Russia shooting down an airliner full of Dutch nationals! And for using chemical weapons in a UK city! And yet everyone wanted to keep the gas and money flowing.
Another angle to keep an eye on is shipments from Germany, especially of advanced machine tools. There's lots of stuff that's very difficult to substitute from anywhere else, and should be much more thoroughly embargoed.
This article is missing the point. If the price of energy is below the cost for Russia, the sanctions are working. The sanctions is that they will not pay market price for that energy.
That misses the fairly obvious point that Russia uses Roubles, which it issues.
If Russian Gas is sold for any foreign currency amount at all, then that is foreign currency it can use elsewhere. Russia can maintain the operational plant with its own money.
Market price is irrelevant. Gas is swapped for items Russia can't make itself. Russia isn't interested in foreign tokens. It's interested in foreign made stuff.
I can't think of a single example of "minting money to pay for war" ever went poorly for any nation. Nope, not a one. It has certainly never once destroyed a leader or his entire nation.
Are they below the cost or below the market price? If they're below the cost, it would mean that Russia is just spending money to provide Europe with gas, which does not make any sense. But if it's simply below market price it means that Russia is still turning a profit on the gas, just not as much as it could have otherwise.
To be fair, as a Europoor, I like having electricity.
Europe really should have invested in fracking and nuclear power so this would never have been needed, but the Putin-funded "environmentalists" and degrowthers put a stop to that.
European legal systems have a huge obstacle to fracking that the US doesn't: mineral rights are almost always severed from property rights in every European country. In the majority of the USA, if you own your home you own the oil one-point-four miles underneath it and can get royalties.
In almost every part of Europe, you don't have any right to subsurface assets and have to eat the rare (but significant when they do occur) groundwater and seismic harms without recompense. The legal systems incentivise rational people to adopt NIMBYism.
Any evidence for that? I think a lot of people would not like fracking in their back yards, regardless of being "Putin-funded". Just regular garden variety NIMBY-ism
Not the OP, but this was a theme in the European Parliament in 2022 [1][2] and it was the object of a document that Greenpeace made [3] showing how pervasive the Russian lobby was over climate policies.
I personally do not believe that Russia does it in Germany via the Green Party but more so over other parties, such as AfD and BSW.
You can use the green party simply by donating sums to or amplifying extreme voices.
You do not need to control the whole of a ideology driven organisation , when you can nudge the extremists and usefools to undo their own organisation .
The party leadership forwards public transport, the oil lobby finances damaging cars, glueing to streets and other activities. The fanatics of your own site, are the worst enemy .
Considering the harm fracking does to the local environment, that's pretty justified NIMBYism, no? Europe isn't like America with vast expanses of empty land, fracking would ruin the lives of many people, not to mention the landscape, in order to get hold of a very unpopular resource.
Given that the Green Party leaders in the last government were the staunchest supporters of shutting down the nord stream pipelines and supporting weapon deliveries to Ukraine even before the elections, this plan seems to have worked out extraordinarily well.
Then again, maybe you mistyped. The decision to shut down the nuclear plants was taken by a conservative government. (Angela Merkel, right after Fukushima).
Admittedly, the greens have been campaigning to shut down nuclear plants, but they also have always campaigned to replace them with Wind and Solar power.
It's really ironic how the Greens contributed to global warming. Good intentions aren't enough, you also need to be informed and willing to take small steps towards the perfect future.
The Germans. Hmm. So this was about the Green Party, not about the Germans. But still, I’ll bite.
The Green Party is anti-nuclear and it’s debatable whether that’s positive or not. But they also are staunchly anti-coal and other carbon based energy sources. The greens have pushed constantly for renewables, both to achieve strategic energy autonomy and lowering greenhouse gas emissions.
The Germans have introduced the first legislation to subsidize renewables, in 1990, in 2000 under a red/geeen coalition renewed as EEG (Erneuerbare Energien Gesetz) that taxed fossil electricity and guaranteed a fixed above market price for producers of renewable electricity. This is widely regarded as a major boost for both solar and wind energy. We did, however, drop the ball a little when the conservatives came back to power. We still do range in the midfield when it comes to pet capita carbon emissions.
We certainly could do better and I wish we did, but blaming it on nuclear power is fairly simplistic. If you look at https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/daten/energie/energieverbrauc... for example, then you’ll notice that our love for ICE cars is a major factor - cars are one of our major sources of carbon dioxide emissions, far more than nuclear plants replaced with gas plants.
Contributed what? Their nuclear exit caused two nuclear power plants to shut down, which were the oldest and smallest in Germany. They had a combined capacity of a just 1 GW - utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of things.
Even when the conservatives pulled the plug on nuclear power plants in 2011, Germany just stopped decreasing emissions of its electricity production for a year or two. And this was at a time of higher gas prices, so it's even up for debate how much the nuclear exit contributed to that short stagnation.
As a continent, I think Europe was reduced to zero when the US;
- Dragged you into its proxy war with your largest energy supplier,
- Blew up the largest pipeline supplying said energy just so you couldn't turn it on again even if you wanted to,
- stole all your businesses that fled to the US because of high energy costs,
- Forced you to buy expensive American oil and gas
Amusingly, the thing that will convince me that Europe is looking out for its own interests again, is if they try to restore relations with Russia, their most natural supplier of materials and energy. But they're too lost in their own infantile hubris to see it.
Second Russia started it, not the US, not the EU, not Ukraine
Russia and Putin
Third and most importantly defeating Russia and restoring peace is of vital importance to both EU and UK. Far more important then it is to the US even though obviously making sure Ukraine wins is important to the US as well (not that Trump understands or cares that it's in America's interests). Restoring relationship with Russia before Russia chose to end this idiotic war would make them even stupider then Putin was for starting it. It would be incredibly harmful to their interests. If Putin was willing to end the war and give up on conquering Ukraine then restoring relationship would be a useful carrot
Really? Minsk agreements I, II, Istanbul... All Russian attempts to reach a compromise have failed, both in 2014-15 with the Western sabotage of the agreements reached in Minsk. As well as Istanbul peace negotiations.
This is absolutely 100% backwards. Minsk 2 agreement was needed because Minsk 1 fell apart because Russia violated it. They also violated Minsk 2 agreement. Russia also had the audacity to claim the agreements didn't apply to them but to their warlord puppet states in part of Luhansk and Donestk.
More recent negotiations fell apart largely because Russia would not agree to reasonable measures and could not be trusted to even the measures they claimed they might agree to.
Oh, I’m really glad you brought that up actually. Yeah that Memorandum became a roll of toilet paper when the US sanctioned Belarus in 2007 and again in 2013 because they were unhappy with election outcomes and lack of “Le democracy”.
Want to know how the US responded? It was essentially “uh we were only sanctioning specific individuals and companies who we were unhappy with, not the entire nation so lol”, and their second argument was that the Memorandum “IS NOT LEGALLY BINDING”. Yes, the US said that.
Just as a refresher, the third clause of the full Memorandum reads that signatories will:
‘Refrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by Ukraine, the Republic of Belarus, and Kazakhstan of the rights inherent in its sovereignty and thus to secure advantages of any kind.’
So the US had already violated this by 2007.
And the memorandum was again disregarded in 2014 when the Ukrainian constitution was also used as toilet paper, since it fundamentally altered the nature of Ukrainian sovereignty.
So again, remind us why Russia should feel compelled to follow this mythical Budapest memorandum (non-binding btw) when the other parties were clearly violating the terms or acting in bad faith?
If you can’t explain why, I’ll just assume that you don’t have a valid response.
I mean Belarus isn't a democracy and doesn't uphold human rights. None of that is particularly controversial. Not about outcomes, but about Dictatorship.
> the recognition of the inviolability of existing borders, and respect for territorial integrity and mutual commitment not to use its territory to harm the security of each other.
Russia has never felt compeled to follow anything. As you note one party has consistently acted in bad faith, but that party is Russia. The question is not why Russia should trust the West with regards to a fantasy of NATO invasion, it's how West or Ukraine can trust it to abide by any deals when it repeatedly violated them and started this war for no reason other then seeking to conquer or dominate Ukraine
It's not a surprise. There are certain players in the gas market. Don't forget that governments work for corporations, not for people. Corporations want the cheapest of the cheapest for their profits, and politicians want more cuts. Whoever offers the cheapest good (gas in this case) will eventually get sold. Even though they tell people that the EU is putting sanctions on Russia, their puppet (Greece) carries Russian gas to the EU. This is how the world works.
Imports from Russia dropped from just over €60bn in 2022 to around €10bn in 2023, but decreased very little since then.