I honestly don’t understand how they could decide to shut down their perfectly functioning nuclear plants in the middle of an energy crisis. I had the idea - probably a cliché but still - that Germans were more pragmatic than other people, but this degree of stupidity is beyond belief.
A small little anecdote: in Germany It is illegal for an employer to write a negative letter of recommendation about their former employee. Obviously the workaround is now in the amount of praise someone gets in their letter. Unnecessary bureaucratic ineffeciencys everywhere.
As a southern european living in northern europe I can't help but feel a mix of schadenfreude and sadness at seeing Germany's complacent decline. I can see absolutely everything that Noah mentions in the piece, my only caveat is that the situation is actually worse than he describes.
German underinvestment can be felt everywhere, but perhaps nothing is as painful and exhasperating as their train service. Recent statistics on train punctuality are staggering. Most of what counts in Germany as high speed would be considered in Spain, France or Italy a bucolic ride through the countryside. This would be almost endearing except for the fact that those trains are always late. More than 40% of trains run with delays, where the equivalent statistic for any other western european country is below 5%. Does that mean that the remaining 60% of the trains run in time? Glad you asked. Absolutely not, because the statistic does not consider delays of 10 minutes or less. (needless to say, most of those "on time" train are actually late in this sense).
I have (sadly) had to take several long distance trains through Germany this year and none of them has been remotely on time. The assumption that german travellers themselves make is that any connection with anything less than an hour in between trains is just impossible. Not only is your first train guaranteed to be delayed, it is not even guaranteed to arrive at the destination. Have a connection in Frankfort main station? Too bad, this train goes no further than Frankfort airport. Would you like your money back? No problem, file this paper form and send it via post to Deutch Bahn, where it will be processed in 4-6 months. Or maybe never. After all, the only record that you ever filed a complaint is in the hands of a train company that can't run trains. What could go wrong?
Another problem with the german economy that follows from underinvestment is that of lost capability. Three decades of underinvestment in all sectors has led to the sad state of affairs where, if something is not a solid hunk of metal and/or has a diesel engine strapped to it, the competence for providing that is simply not present in the german economy, regardless of what the government does or wants today. In this category fall minor things like IT, digitalization, governance and infrastructure.
There's another issue with German universities: very often the premier research is actually conducted in research only Max Planck Institutes/Fraunhofers/Leibniz Institutes which may have minimal ties with universities. These in turn are often built around particular research leaders, who are very very generously funded for their work. This is seen in France too, with the independent CNRS and Inserm institutes. To be fair, this is slowly starting to change in both countries (https://www.mpg.de/805003/research-groups-at-universities; https://www.cnrs.fr/en/research), but in terms of gaming university rankings that are heavily research oriented, German and French universities lose out because of this institutional bifurcation.
Loved the article. It kinda summarizes why I moved out of Germany.
We lived in Germany for two years, 2018-2020. We left precisely because the country seemed to live stuck in the past and quite happy about it. For example, you still had to fill out tons of bureaucracy and in some cases submit it by fax (!!); waiting 3 months to get a DSL line installed was deemed as totally reasonable.
We lived just outside of central Berlin, a very nice village with public transport problems, social issues like everywhere else in the world. However, at the local elections, most parties were only concerned about "saving the bees" (not making it up) or, in the case of the AfD, about kicking out refugees.
Also, in some 'karma is a bitch' way, they kinda deserve it - as a wake up call and as a reaction to the pain they unnecessarily inflicted to Greece and the EU as a whole during the Financial Crisis. And of which, to be fair, they are really, totally unaware of.
Framing their shut down of nuclear as part of a degrowth policy seems wrong. Instead, the German government have the same view of the energy transition to net zero that many others in the west have, which is that solar and wind are much better than new nuclear as the latter is slow, expensive and has all sort of safety issues including waste. The problem is that Germany acted diligently on these beliefs. They did not appreciate that much of the received wisdome about nuclear, solar, wind and storage is highly misleading. In one respect your column is correct. They trusted the many experts and opinion writers who claim that 100% renewables is entirely feasible. Too much trust.
Not closing down nuclear reactors would simply postpone the problem. We need to build new nuclear. This applies to all countries. Sadly the irrational regulatory regime on nuclear at makes this almost impossible. Unless this changes there will be no transition to net zero. No country will accept the industrialization of their landscape that replacing fossil fuels with wind, solar and storage requires, nor will they tolerate the very high electricity prices.
Complaining about NIMBYism is unfair. It is rational to object to actual environmental damage. Trying to motivate people to accept this by hugely exaggerating the current impact of climate change is deeply dishonest.
I lived in Germany for almost two years - allbeit this was over ten years ago. I feel that the business culture is little understood in Anglo countries. My experience of working in a company in both Germany and the UK was that there was a much stronger sense of togetherness within the organisation in Germany amongst the staff. Work in Germany is much less of a transactional endeavour and people expect to be cared for by the organisation a lot more than in Anglo countries - hence why things more super slowly. I saw an underperforming employee get moved around five different departments and spend a couple of months in each before he was finally let go - it's really hard to do this. So what I'm saying is that in Germany things take a long time, sometimes too long. There might need to be some big event like the AFD nearly winning power or something like that for things to really drastically change as they need to, as it's just not their culture to do anything at anything like the pace we would expect.
Noah, watching the greens in Germany (and Europe) over the last year is part of why I just can't get on your green energy bandwagon. These people aren't serious. They aren't interested in human flourishing. They aren't interested in economic success. They just hate energy. I know you believe in solar and wind and renewables, but your regular trumpeting of the benefits of these things over fossil fuels is just helping to prop up a green movement that is increasingly and obviously anti-human.
Your distinction between the greens and the "de-growthers" is getting pretty hard to see.
This well-written piece was an eye-opener for me: I thought Germans were outrageously efficient in every way at every thing, a belief I probably got from Hollywood war movies. Plus, they were the big dog economically in Europe; Americans love, love, love their automobiles. I buy their bulletproof electric shavers and electric toothbrushes.
But, nope, they've got a trainload of dumbass going on over there. Who knew? I didn't.
I did think, though, that shutting down their nuke was a terrible idea, for all the known reasons.
And their naivete? My belief was that in Europe, you had to be sophisticated, because dummies die off quickly in its fast lanes of living. And surely Germany learned many, many painful lessons from WWI and II, right?
Intelligence, wise actions, and keeping up with the nonstop changes are requirements for progress and equipping a nation, or person, to live a good life, which necessitates a sound economy. Apparently, Germany has dropped the ball repeatedly and is beginning to pay for its egregious mistakes, now even plainer to see in hindsight as new data arrives. Scary, yet, overall, good to know: We all must stay on our toes, every day in every way. (Hard to do, though: The mind and body want and need breaks. Running as fast as you can all the time is beyond our ability, although theoretically attractive: Be the ubermensch.)
I'm wondering if the nuclear phaseout may be overrated as the cause of German industry's woes, even though I'm strongly pro-nuclear personally (and think the phaseout's original architect Gerhard Schröder should be charged with treason).
Nuclear power (like wind and solar) is currently only useful for generating electrical power, and IIRC Germany was using more natural gas for chemical feedstock or industrial process heat than for electrical power generation.
Another great post. Just to pile on, much of Germany’s export success was due to the adoption of the Euro, granting Germany with an underpriced currency that allowed the country to export unemployment to less efficient, mostly south European countries. Prior to adoption of the Euro, countries like Italy had currencies that regularly devalued relative to the Deutschmark, making their pro cuts cheaper to export to Germany. But the adoption of the Euro created a new dynamic. Countries could no longer devalue their currencies but had to adopt strategies like internal austerity like lowering wages to maintain a semblance of competitiveness. Thus, part of the success of the German model after the adoption of the Euro was a result of a more or less permanently undervalued currency.
In my view, Germany is also a pretty bad bank regulator, who likes to chide other country’s European regulators. They have two very inefficient global banks. Deutsche Bank is a constantly being fines for various regulatory failures, accumulating 96 fines for almost $20 billion. The Landesbanken system had a disastrous finically crisis, but Germany never really admitted it. (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-banking-germany-landesbanken-idUSBRE98G06720130917).
Send Herr Trump in. He’ll take on the swamp, take on China , and cut a deal with Saudi for oil and solar . ‘Make Germany functional again ‘. By the way, the Germans ditched solar after the Japan nuclear debacle.
On the nuclear power plants my understanding is that the Green Party was born out of opposition to nuclear power and I would not be surprised if part of the coalition agreement was shutting them down and if Scholz backtracked they would leave the coalition
Still doesn’t mean they shouldn’t do it but not many country’s leaders knowingly give up power (political) if they don’t have too
I honestly don’t understand how they could decide to shut down their perfectly functioning nuclear plants in the middle of an energy crisis. I had the idea - probably a cliché but still - that Germans were more pragmatic than other people, but this degree of stupidity is beyond belief.
If only some USPresident had warned them about being completely reliant on Russian gas. Nah, they'd just laugh him off ....
A small little anecdote: in Germany It is illegal for an employer to write a negative letter of recommendation about their former employee. Obviously the workaround is now in the amount of praise someone gets in their letter. Unnecessary bureaucratic ineffeciencys everywhere.
As a southern european living in northern europe I can't help but feel a mix of schadenfreude and sadness at seeing Germany's complacent decline. I can see absolutely everything that Noah mentions in the piece, my only caveat is that the situation is actually worse than he describes.
German underinvestment can be felt everywhere, but perhaps nothing is as painful and exhasperating as their train service. Recent statistics on train punctuality are staggering. Most of what counts in Germany as high speed would be considered in Spain, France or Italy a bucolic ride through the countryside. This would be almost endearing except for the fact that those trains are always late. More than 40% of trains run with delays, where the equivalent statistic for any other western european country is below 5%. Does that mean that the remaining 60% of the trains run in time? Glad you asked. Absolutely not, because the statistic does not consider delays of 10 minutes or less. (needless to say, most of those "on time" train are actually late in this sense).
I have (sadly) had to take several long distance trains through Germany this year and none of them has been remotely on time. The assumption that german travellers themselves make is that any connection with anything less than an hour in between trains is just impossible. Not only is your first train guaranteed to be delayed, it is not even guaranteed to arrive at the destination. Have a connection in Frankfort main station? Too bad, this train goes no further than Frankfort airport. Would you like your money back? No problem, file this paper form and send it via post to Deutch Bahn, where it will be processed in 4-6 months. Or maybe never. After all, the only record that you ever filed a complaint is in the hands of a train company that can't run trains. What could go wrong?
Another problem with the german economy that follows from underinvestment is that of lost capability. Three decades of underinvestment in all sectors has led to the sad state of affairs where, if something is not a solid hunk of metal and/or has a diesel engine strapped to it, the competence for providing that is simply not present in the german economy, regardless of what the government does or wants today. In this category fall minor things like IT, digitalization, governance and infrastructure.
There's another issue with German universities: very often the premier research is actually conducted in research only Max Planck Institutes/Fraunhofers/Leibniz Institutes which may have minimal ties with universities. These in turn are often built around particular research leaders, who are very very generously funded for their work. This is seen in France too, with the independent CNRS and Inserm institutes. To be fair, this is slowly starting to change in both countries (https://www.mpg.de/805003/research-groups-at-universities; https://www.cnrs.fr/en/research), but in terms of gaming university rankings that are heavily research oriented, German and French universities lose out because of this institutional bifurcation.
Loved the article. It kinda summarizes why I moved out of Germany.
We lived in Germany for two years, 2018-2020. We left precisely because the country seemed to live stuck in the past and quite happy about it. For example, you still had to fill out tons of bureaucracy and in some cases submit it by fax (!!); waiting 3 months to get a DSL line installed was deemed as totally reasonable.
We lived just outside of central Berlin, a very nice village with public transport problems, social issues like everywhere else in the world. However, at the local elections, most parties were only concerned about "saving the bees" (not making it up) or, in the case of the AfD, about kicking out refugees.
Also, in some 'karma is a bitch' way, they kinda deserve it - as a wake up call and as a reaction to the pain they unnecessarily inflicted to Greece and the EU as a whole during the Financial Crisis. And of which, to be fair, they are really, totally unaware of.
Was it trust?
Or just greed?
Isn’t the latter a simpler and more believable explanation for everything?
Framing their shut down of nuclear as part of a degrowth policy seems wrong. Instead, the German government have the same view of the energy transition to net zero that many others in the west have, which is that solar and wind are much better than new nuclear as the latter is slow, expensive and has all sort of safety issues including waste. The problem is that Germany acted diligently on these beliefs. They did not appreciate that much of the received wisdome about nuclear, solar, wind and storage is highly misleading. In one respect your column is correct. They trusted the many experts and opinion writers who claim that 100% renewables is entirely feasible. Too much trust.
Not closing down nuclear reactors would simply postpone the problem. We need to build new nuclear. This applies to all countries. Sadly the irrational regulatory regime on nuclear at makes this almost impossible. Unless this changes there will be no transition to net zero. No country will accept the industrialization of their landscape that replacing fossil fuels with wind, solar and storage requires, nor will they tolerate the very high electricity prices.
Complaining about NIMBYism is unfair. It is rational to object to actual environmental damage. Trying to motivate people to accept this by hugely exaggerating the current impact of climate change is deeply dishonest.
I lived in Germany for almost two years - allbeit this was over ten years ago. I feel that the business culture is little understood in Anglo countries. My experience of working in a company in both Germany and the UK was that there was a much stronger sense of togetherness within the organisation in Germany amongst the staff. Work in Germany is much less of a transactional endeavour and people expect to be cared for by the organisation a lot more than in Anglo countries - hence why things more super slowly. I saw an underperforming employee get moved around five different departments and spend a couple of months in each before he was finally let go - it's really hard to do this. So what I'm saying is that in Germany things take a long time, sometimes too long. There might need to be some big event like the AFD nearly winning power or something like that for things to really drastically change as they need to, as it's just not their culture to do anything at anything like the pace we would expect.
Noah, watching the greens in Germany (and Europe) over the last year is part of why I just can't get on your green energy bandwagon. These people aren't serious. They aren't interested in human flourishing. They aren't interested in economic success. They just hate energy. I know you believe in solar and wind and renewables, but your regular trumpeting of the benefits of these things over fossil fuels is just helping to prop up a green movement that is increasingly and obviously anti-human.
Your distinction between the greens and the "de-growthers" is getting pretty hard to see.
Now do the other G7 members please.
This well-written piece was an eye-opener for me: I thought Germans were outrageously efficient in every way at every thing, a belief I probably got from Hollywood war movies. Plus, they were the big dog economically in Europe; Americans love, love, love their automobiles. I buy their bulletproof electric shavers and electric toothbrushes.
But, nope, they've got a trainload of dumbass going on over there. Who knew? I didn't.
I did think, though, that shutting down their nuke was a terrible idea, for all the known reasons.
And their naivete? My belief was that in Europe, you had to be sophisticated, because dummies die off quickly in its fast lanes of living. And surely Germany learned many, many painful lessons from WWI and II, right?
Intelligence, wise actions, and keeping up with the nonstop changes are requirements for progress and equipping a nation, or person, to live a good life, which necessitates a sound economy. Apparently, Germany has dropped the ball repeatedly and is beginning to pay for its egregious mistakes, now even plainer to see in hindsight as new data arrives. Scary, yet, overall, good to know: We all must stay on our toes, every day in every way. (Hard to do, though: The mind and body want and need breaks. Running as fast as you can all the time is beyond our ability, although theoretically attractive: Be the ubermensch.)
I'm wondering if the nuclear phaseout may be overrated as the cause of German industry's woes, even though I'm strongly pro-nuclear personally (and think the phaseout's original architect Gerhard Schröder should be charged with treason).
Nuclear power (like wind and solar) is currently only useful for generating electrical power, and IIRC Germany was using more natural gas for chemical feedstock or industrial process heat than for electrical power generation.
Another great post. Just to pile on, much of Germany’s export success was due to the adoption of the Euro, granting Germany with an underpriced currency that allowed the country to export unemployment to less efficient, mostly south European countries. Prior to adoption of the Euro, countries like Italy had currencies that regularly devalued relative to the Deutschmark, making their pro cuts cheaper to export to Germany. But the adoption of the Euro created a new dynamic. Countries could no longer devalue their currencies but had to adopt strategies like internal austerity like lowering wages to maintain a semblance of competitiveness. Thus, part of the success of the German model after the adoption of the Euro was a result of a more or less permanently undervalued currency.
In my view, Germany is also a pretty bad bank regulator, who likes to chide other country’s European regulators. They have two very inefficient global banks. Deutsche Bank is a constantly being fines for various regulatory failures, accumulating 96 fines for almost $20 billion. The Landesbanken system had a disastrous finically crisis, but Germany never really admitted it. (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-banking-germany-landesbanken-idUSBRE98G06720130917).
Send Herr Trump in. He’ll take on the swamp, take on China , and cut a deal with Saudi for oil and solar . ‘Make Germany functional again ‘. By the way, the Germans ditched solar after the Japan nuclear debacle.
On the nuclear power plants my understanding is that the Green Party was born out of opposition to nuclear power and I would not be surprised if part of the coalition agreement was shutting them down and if Scholz backtracked they would leave the coalition
Still doesn’t mean they shouldn’t do it but not many country’s leaders knowingly give up power (political) if they don’t have too