Man erntet, was man sät
Prominent Greens applaud themselves on the campaign trail (Photo: Raimond Spekking, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
It is often a mildly amusing irony when a political party governs at odds with its own name. These misnomers crop up everywhere, from the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan (who are, in fact, conservative authoritarians) to the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (who are, in fact, ultra-conservative hyper-authoritarians); even here in Britain, the Conservative Party has just abandoned a grotesquely chaotic six-week experimentation with neoliberalism.
Where it is perhaps most reasonable, however, to expect a party to behave consistently with its name is the arena of green politics. When German voters sent Die Grünen (The Green Party) to the Bundestag last September with a record number of seats, they were probably expecting a bright future, free of pollution and the menace of climate change.
Die Grünen joined a progressive coalition government which put global warming at the heart of its mission, further fuelling hopes of a forthcoming environmental Wende. Twelve months on and one war later, though, Germany finds itself facing a brutal winter, relying on the bonfire of its remaining fossil fuel reserves in order to avoid conditions that, in years past, would have ignited revolutions. A year after Die Grünen entered power, it seems power has exited Germany.
How did a nation famous for its pragmatic and competent governance manage to get energy policy so ruinously wrong? Probably because under the international façade, recent German administrations at both the state and federal level have been defined neither by pragmatism nor competency. Stubborn ideology and chronic myopia have destroyed the energy security of Europe’s largest economy and Die Grünen are to largely to blame.
Germans march in protest of the Neckarwestheim power station (Photo: GRÜNE Baden-Württemberg, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Germany is a country of curious idiosyncrasies. Most are endearingly weird, if harmless – be it the allergy to card payments or, stranger still, the refusal to allow Google to take Streetview images. For the most part, these quirks do not threaten their long-term prosperity and the survival of European industry.
However, thre are an abnormal number of Germans who don’t like nuclear power. Since the 1970s, Atomkraft (nuclear power) has been met with widespread distrust and, where Atomkraftwerke (nuclear power plants) are proposed, full-throated protest. It was out of this sentiment that Die Grünen were born, a vehicle for pressing Anti-nuklear Aktion on the electoral front.
The first major boon for the burgeoning Greens was the infamous Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986. It is, of course, understandable that this would perturb the people of a country with so many nuclear power plants. Radioactive clouds overhead are not exactly reassuring. As always in such moments, however, the radiation melted away all nuance.
At Chernobyl, almost everything that could possibly go wrong, went wrong – cheap materials, corrupt management, negligent maintenance and state failure conspired to cause a one-in-a-million incident. The ordinarily rational German people, in their panic, overlooked that Western Atomkraftwerke were built and run in an entirely different, and entirely safer, fashion.
12 years later, Die Grünen joined the government for the first time. They would form a part of the next two coalition administrations, and their crowning achievement from this time in office would be the German state’s first commitment to Atomausstieg, the process of phasing out nuclear power.
After Merkel became Bundeskanzlerin in 2005, it seemed this catastrophically short-sighted policy would be reversed. Indeed that was the position Mutti adopted, albeit half-heartedly, until the next one-in-a-million incident (unfortunately, the laws of probability have not been kind to nuclear power). Fukushima was terminal for German nuclear energy production – Chernobyl had placed it on probation, but 2011 sent it packing.
Again, though, anti-nuclear activists missed just a few small details. This may come as a surprise to some, but Germany doesn’t actually have tsunamis. Even if they did, of the 17 reactors active in 2011, only 3 were located on the coast. In case the message isn’t clear: Fukushima could not have happened in Germany.
An anti-nuclear protest in the aftermath of Fukushima. Some faces may be familiar. (Photo: Bündnis 90/Die Grünen Nordrhein-Westfalen, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
After Fukushima, Atomausstieg was accelerated. By the time Die Grünen came back to the Bundesregierung in 2021, only 6 reactors were still operating. Now the energy crisis has forced the party to reckon with their own raison d’être, catalysing an internal civil war as they contemplate postponing the decommission of the remaining plants.
Why was this policy so disastrous? It probably wouldn’t have been if the capacity opportunity cost of nuclear abandonment was matched with investment in renewables. Germany’s renewables strategy has been far from lacking, but if it had been as good as it could have the nation would not be in the situation it is. Instead of building and using nuclear power, which produces no greenhouse gases, Germany came to be reliant on natural gas power, which does. Add to this tragic mix the fact that most of the gas is delivered by the grubby hands of the Russian regime, and you have an energy policy a little more braun than grün.
In the first half of 2022, six months into the new government, renewable energy did indeed account for 4.6 percentage points more of German energy production than the same period in 2021. But coal also made up 3.8 percentage points more than it did a year before. This, alongside a 6 percentage point reduction in nuclear’s share means that the German Greens have actually presided over a net decline in clean energy production. And it was mostly their own fault.
Where many parties have discarded fealty to their name, it hasn’t really mattered. Their role in the political landscape was never well-described by their label anyway. Nobody cares that Russia’s Liberal Democrats are hardline nationalists; that was never the point of them in the first place. But in Britain we are punishing the governing party for their feckless recklessness precisely because the Truss fever-dream was so antithetical to their fundamental purpose. Let’s hope Germany will do the same.