The UK likes to go the other way by talking up a ridiculous goal and then immediately failing it, like "Our goal is to produce zero CO2 and become the global leader in renewables by 2025” and then immediately open a new coal mine.
Still not gonna change a damn thing.
The (federal) government(s) don’t care, they are busy framing harmless protesters as potential terrorists and jailing them accordingly.
Or they simply change the law again so that they do not have to be held accountable for their missed goals (see the ministry for transport).
The goal is complete decarbonization until 2045 and a lot of sectors in Germany are already on track with that goal, energy being one of them. That with a minister of finance, that does not want to spend money and a minister of transportation, that is more a puppet of the automobile industry and does not care about decarbonization. Imagine the US without the huge subsidies into clean energy. That's what Germany is trying to do under their current minister of finance.
Even back under Merkel, elected parties had a habit of defining good goals and then rendering them impossible to hit through policy. This meant that no one could fault them for trying, and no one could fault them for not being able to hit them.
Nowadays my countrymen aren't as stupid anymore. That doesn't mean we can do anything about it, but especially since Merkel we don't believe any of these leaks anymore.
I'm much more optimistic, though I do think it will get worse before it gets better. I think we'll end up with a few mass killer enviromental events before humans start to save themselves properly. It'll never be too late as Earth is always going to better than anywhere else for us.
Quick list of things hopeful in my feeds of the top of my head.
Renewable energy is the cheapest energy.
Agrivoltaics can increase yeilds while also providing power.
Home Solar & battery pay back time is coming down all the time.
Electric cars are the cheapest over their life time and the upfront costs are tumbling.
Electrification of more and more transport types is happening to save costs.
EVs are going V2H/V2G/V2X which means you get a large home (and office?) battery to take part in energy markets.
Second life EV batteries will eventury be a source of larger, cheaper, home batteries.
RightToRepair + OpenSource is slowly spreading and will reduce life time costs and reduce e-waste. Regulators are waking up too.
Vertical farming is developing and will end up cheaper.
Lab meat or precision fermentation is a path to animal free animal protein at lower costs.
5 minute cities as an idea is spreading.
Covid has normalized WFH
Green spaces in cities to cool them and improve mental health is increasingly being talked about and pushed in some forward thinking cities.
Peak population is constantly revised down and sooner. Once population starts to fall, it's not set to stop for a long time.
There is a lot of movement. It's all about aligning economics with fighting climate change. Which is natural as using less to do the same thing is better for both.
One thing that is a very good sign is oil companies are scared. They are spending a lot of money pumping out FUD. Doom peddling to slow climate action, but economics is against them. Even without climate damage being costed in. Which governments will do when oil is less powerful.
There's also a lot of propaganda paid by fossil fuel lobbyists (and some nuclear lobbyists still going for the perceived easy target of renewables, as rediculous as it is...) with the goal to disrupt the energy transition.
And the majority here actually believes they are anti-fossil fuels while they actually parrot their propaganda (for example the "Germany stopped nuclear power to burn more coal"-fairy tale you can read a hundred times by now here - only invented for the talking point of coal being needed, when Germany is actually at a historic low in use) and thus constantly running (objectively wrong) talking points against renewable power.
On one hand I love the obvious panic of fossil fuel lobbyists getting more desperate and rediculous in their massaging by the day. On the other hand, they already brain-washed a massive amount of people that I fear are really lost and will fight tooth and nails against a reasonable green transition to pursue their fantasies of "sane" nuclear build-up (that isn't sane because nobody is actually building enough capoacities to make sense mathematically), without that "non-working" storage (that nuclear power actually needs to be economically viable) and "expensive" renewables (same, same...).
I agree ... but that attitude also encourages people, especially leaders ... and especially the billionaires that control this world ... to believe that destruction is the ultimate end and to just play along, pick up as much wealth as possible while you can and do whatever you please because the end is near.
It’s amazing how all these countries set weak goal
It's can kicking. Make a promise for something 25 years in the future. Who cares if the country can't meet it? You'll likely be out of office or retired by that point. That's the next person's problem.
Not german but I'm in the same continent and in a country that nobody really cares about and we are nearing the threshold where renewables produce more than we require to run the country.
Funny thing is, private citizens are doing more for that effort alone than government in real terms because saving money is high on the priorities list here and free, renewable energy is a good thing, even more if you can produce it yourself.
Meanwhile, we've been fighting the government to cancel the authorization to log nearly 2000 old growth cork oaks for installing a solar panel farm when we have a lot of room to plant off shore wind farms.
I mean, they have only really started since the corrupt right-wing shitheads are not in office anymore. Now we only have to deal with a minister of transport who just refuses to work and claims policies the greens pushed for are his achievement lol
The council said assumptions made by the transport ministry on the effectiveness of the planned and already implemented measures, such as a discounted national rail ticket, a CO2 surcharge on truck tolls and increased working from home, were also optimistic.
"Private vehicle individual transport is not addressed, so to speak. And that is ultimately a gap in the transport programme," Brigitte Knopf, deputy chairwoman of the council, told a news conference presenting the report findings on Tuesday
The plan for transportation emissions, 2/3 of the target to be cut, is WFH. Yikes!
@[email protected] You are misinformed there. The energy sector reaches its goal and offshore wind farms and solar panels are actually over-performing, meaning more are built than was planned for this year. The sectors largely missing their goals are the transport and the building sector.
If all the subsidiaries that went into nuclear power the last few decades went to renewables instead Germany would have no issues at all, but hey... giving tax payer money to some very few giant energy companies is more important than creating a Europe leading renewables energy sector that does not rely on russian fossils or nuclear material.
You should know that nuclear power is very expensive while renewables are absurd crazy cheap. I've been to a German Endlager and it takes years and BILLIONS of Euros just to seal this thing off. Guess who is paying? Mostly tax payers.
There's be no company in Germany which would be willing to run a nuclear power plant if they were responsible for the permanent disposal of their waste on their own instead of letting the tax payer pay (most of) for it.
That's all well and good in the energy sector. What about transportation? If I understand correctly, transportation makes up the majority of the emissions Germany aims to cut
How about you guys stop this bullshit about the nuclear plants stuff? They were scheduled to be shut down for a VERY long time, the biggest mistake was selling out nearly all the renewable energy manufacturing to China.
Nuclear power is only making a profit, if it's subsidized like crazy.
Not only that - A LOT of Germans are actively against putting up more wind power, let alone photovoltaics. Which is what over 50% voted "against" as well. Those that didn't go voting, have lost all say in it, so yeah. That's not a political issue, we Germans are the issue.
So why not modernize or replace the nuclear plants? Battery storage isn't anywhere close to being able to store baseline energy for a full renewable grid.
I agree it's a perception issue, but that doesn't mean nothing can be done about it.
If only there was some means of replacing all that coal with a non-carbon intensive source of energy that isn't dependant on the weather...
Has anyone heard of such a technology?
Sarcasm aside, that Germany shut down their last two nuclear reactors so recently and carried through is astounding. The excuses are mind-boggling. They're old? Refurbishing is cheaper and faster than new built. They need re-certification? Then do it.
Also a big factor noone seems to care about: staff. The people who worked there have other jobs now. You can't just plop a reactor plant somewhere and expect it to make electricity you need highly specialised staff for that. We also did not invest into training new staff because why would we, with the stop for nuclear power being decided 10 years ago.
Funny, because the energy sector was the only on track to fulfill the targets. Last year it even overshot its targets and is expected to again save more CO2 as planned in 2023.
Maybe, just maybe, its more relevant that other sectors are managed by the FDP (market liberals) and SPD (social democrats), while energy is managed by die Grünen (greens).
No matter the platform worldnews comments contain mainly ignorant, overconfident bullshit. Glad to know that there are some things in life one can depend upon.
Wow what a surprise, guess brown coal isn’t good for the climate. Bunch of idiots those German politicians. They even tried to weaken that EU bill that bans the sale of new fossil fuel cars.
BERLIN, Aug 22 (Reuters) - German goals to cut greenhouse emissions by 65% by 2030 are likely to be missed, meaning a longer-term net zero by a 2045 target is also in doubt, reports by government climate advisers and the Federal Environment Agency (UBA) show.
"According to the current status, Germany would still emit 229 million tonnes of climate-damaging greenhouse gas emissions in the target year 2045," the UBA report found.
Under pressure from the pro-business FDP party, the ruling coalition in June agreed to dilute a bill to phase out oil and gas heating systems from 2024.
Building minister Klara Geywitz said the sector was making progress but needs improvements in some areas to close the emissions gap, adding that climate protection measures should be practical and doable to avoid overtaxing people.
The council said assumptions made by the transport ministry on the effectiveness of the planned and already implemented measures, such as a discounted national rail ticket, a CO2 surcharge on truck tolls and increased working from home, were also optimistic.
And that is ultimately a gap in the transport programme," Brigitte Knopf, deputy chairwoman of the council, told a news conference presenting the report findings on Tuesday.
The original article contains 679 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 71%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Well duh? Are they nationalizing all carbon emitting industries to begin a managed decline of the industry or are they hoping economic magic and wishful thinking will work?
Nothing in general. Well the build times are rediculous in Europe and planning right not to build nuclear soon is too late already for any agreed upon climate goal. But that's another matter...
The problem is the brain-washed nuclear cult on social media briganding everything. In the last year on Reddit you couldn't even post any report about any new opening of wind or solar power without it degenerating into always the same story: "bUt ReNeWaBlEs DoN't WoRk! StOrAgE DoEs'Nt ExIsT! tHeY aRe A sCaM tO bUrN mOrE FoSsIl FuElS! gErMaNy KiLlEd ThEir NuClEaR To BuRn MoRe CoAl BeCaUsE ThEy ArE InSanE!!"
Mentioning the fact that Germany in reality shut down reactors not even contributing 5% of their electricity production that were scheduled for shutdown for 30 years and in a state you would expect with that plan and already more than replaced by renewables got you donwvoted into oblivion every single time.
Poor track record with safety (not talking about the big issues such as meltdowns, but smaller issues such as minor leaks, and workplace incidents). Nobody's interested in building them unless they've got profit guarantees and subsidies from the government. Nobody's interested in insuring them in full (unless it's the government). Nobody's interested in the eventual decommissioning process, which can take a century, and again, still costs. Renewables will be up and running, and profitable, long before nuclear is constructed.
It scares people into making them plan and pay for everything up front. If you did the same with literally any other fuel source it wouldn't even get built. Coal would be DoA if they had the same limits on radioactive emissions as a nuclear plant.
Except that never happened. Gas is mostly used for heating in Germany, not for electricity like nuclear power. I don't know where this rumour started (probably somewhere on reddit) but it's just not true.
Edit: Just to be clear, I'm not saying that relying so much on Russian gas was a good move or that we couldn't (and shouldn't) have done a lot more to move away from coal. But that particular argument is misinformation.
Germany doesn't get all of its electrical power by renewable meness by a long shot. Nuclear plants were prematurely shut down before their end of life while at the same time germanies reliance on fossil fuels went up. This is what everyone is talking about.
It's more interesting to ask where the fuel could come from, given a few years of planning. The energy density is so much higher than gas, that geographical locality doesn't really matter.
The usual fantasizing about nuclear and failing any actual plan, very popular right now. Because nuclear lobbyists pay well.
Or more precise: They want to build more nuclear power. But of course all their planned and their existing nuclear combined will not even be remotely enough to cover just the minimal required base load in a few decades. Because changing most of our primary energy demand (industry, heating, transport in varying shares) to electricity (that is often only making up 20%+ in a lot of countries) will massively increase the demand.
If you are not building (or planning to start the build-up very, very soon) enough nuclear capacity to cover 80% or more of today's electricity demand then you will not have the minimal base load required in 2-3 decades, because there will be an increase by at least a factor of 2,5 in demand.
But that's not something you tell people as nobody has a clue how to pay for building even more nuclear (where "even more" means the actual needed amount)...
(A few exceptions with massive hydro potential aside -as they have access to that cheaper base load- there is exactly one country with a plan that works mathematically: France. And even their government is lying to their people when they talk about 6 new reactors with another 8 optional. Because the full set of 14 is the required minimum they will need in 2050 and onward (their old ones are not in a state to run mcuh longer than that).
But hey. Even the most pro-nuclear country and the one with a domestic indutry actually doing a lot of the nuclear build up for other countries can't tell their population the trutz about costs and minimla requirements. If you want to know just onme thing about the state of nuclear, that this should be it.