Angst mounts over Germany’s green transition

Surprisingly no. As far as they're concerned, fossil oil/gas is the fundamental building block of German economy and the economy is the single defining feature of Germany.

The actual far right here (i.e. the AfD) is quite literally part-financed by Russia. The left party (Linke) is also massively influenced by Russia. The center-right/liberal parties (CDU/CSU/FDP) tend to have financial ties to legacy industrial companies like BASF which is also a significant importer of fossil gas. The social democrats (SPD) likewise have industry connections, though maybe not quite as strong. The most relevant right-wing newspaper publisher, Axel Springer, is part-owned by KKR, an investor with significant fossil-fuel ties.

(Also, note that I didn't just say "far right". It's the entire right wing.)

Making something the economic decision by adding incentives is far easier to sell than enforcing something by law.

But also more expensive. Anyway, there actually are incentives, but I'm not sure to which degree those can effectively be extended. Right now there's simply a shortage in terms of qualified people who can put those things on a rooftop. I.e. if you want to become a roofer in Germany, now's the time.

The sectors were Germany fails their climate goals horribly are the transportation and the building sector. This would have happened with or without nuclear power plants.

So, basically, the rollout of heat pumps and electric cars (I know it's more complicated than that, but those are the main factors that are missing). There is one thing that countries with a higher market penetration of those have: Cheap electricity. And I can tell you one thing: Germany did not have exceptionally high consumer electricity prices in the past decades due to nuclear power plants. It was because we heavily subsidized renewable energies that were still expensive as hell and put the price tag almost exclusively on consumer electricity prices (this was Merkel, of course), also we tax electricity in an effort to improve efficiency.

Technologies that rely on electricity, such as heat pumps and electric cars, would have a much easier time to gain market share if electricity was actually cheap. That is the main problem I have with the debate about this in Germany. All of our legislation still treats electricity as if it was produced exclusively with fossil fuels, which actually hampers all efforts to replace fossil fuels with electric solutions. Forcing people to buy those instead of creating circumstances that makes them want to buy them is not a good idea. It creates exactly the kind of opposition we are seeing now.

To get back to the original point: Having nuclear plants with negligible marginal costs run for longer could definitely have helped those sectors, because it would have lowered the price of electricity. Especially so if the CO2 budget saved by that had been used to stretch the early rollout of renewables that was extremely expensive. 50 cents/kWh and more for solar in the 2000s, still 20-30 cents/kWh in 2011 when solar peaked. Thankfully wind was a lot cheaper, but still way above the marginal costs of nuclear.

Unfortunately we cannot go back to the past, so this whole debate is kind of useless, but the German nuclear exit was definitely a mistake with regards to climate protection, and the rollout of renewables was done in a horribly inefficient and unnecessarily expensive way that still hurts us today (although it is hidden in taxes now thanks to Habeck's decision to move the EEG costs to the federal budget). And it was done this way mostly because of the nuclear exit. Which, apart from less anxiety about nuclear power plants, does not provide a lot of benefits. We still have to deal with our nuclear waste, we still had to pay fully for the construction of the reactors, all the necessary research and deconstructing them.

In essence, we wasted years of a significant amount of low-carbon electricity that was already >90% paid for and replaced it with extremely expensive not yet ready for market (in the 2000s and early 2010s, which we are still paying for now) renewables.

First off: The running power plants were quite old and it was never planned to use them this long.

The ones that continued running after 2011 weren't that old and also quite safe. Keeping them running until we phased out coal wouldn't have been much of an issue and it would definitely have helped. Of course it wouldn't been a deciding factor, but given that the yearly death toll from German coal plants may very match the total of the Chernobyl disaster it clearly was the wrong priority.

Edit: The issues with building and transportation are linked to the cost of electricity. So nuclear might have helped there a bit as well. But for the most part the issue with pricing is about making the grid viable for renewables and running natural gas plants as to stabilize the grid. That would have been necessary either way.

You could go even further back, the decision to not build any new reactors was made in 1986 by the conservatives. Not building new reactors means phasing them out in the long term.

how dare the Germans know more about German politics they witnessed for 20 years than some foreigners, who never read more than a few opinion pieces?

My comment might have had quite some negative reactions, but the discussions were good. And I got the wrath of feddit, as expected!