The German government says the Middle East War has caused it to accelerate its plans to go 100% renewable, and phase out all fossil fuel use. All fossil fuel use to be eliminated within 20 years.
"German Environment Minister Carsten Schneider told the UN General Assembly on Wednesday that the plan "combines independence, affordability and climate protection.........It is not just extreme weather events around the world that demonstrate how urgently we need to do more to protect the climate," he said. "If the situation in the Strait of Hormuz determines whether people can still afford their daily commute to work, that is not a good state of affairs."
If there's been an upside to the Middle East War, it's that it's been a giant advertisement for renewable energy. Not just cheaper, cleaner, & better, crucially it means energy-independence, too.
Smart move by Germany. Their industrial and manufacturing base is getting clobbered by China because they stuck with the dying fossil fuel paradigm for too long. Every other EU nation has committed to ending fossil fuel use, hopefully this further accelerates their efforts, too.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-sets-out-plan-to-phase-out-fossil-fuels-by-2045/a-79404028Open linkView original on futurology.today
85 replies
Wait a second, my utility company was telling me the same thing 20 years ago. I wonder if their voluntary and toothless promises made a difference?
** checks current energy mix ** Nope, they still only allocate green energy as legally required, since they can still build (and earn rate of return on) more fossil fuel infrastructure. Surely they wouldn't lie twice?
But you can switch to a 100 % renewables utility company tho and vote with your wallet
You guys have the option to switch utility companies?...
We're a monopoly here. To change companies you have to physically move.
Yes we do. I think it's EU regulation. There is a "base company" responsible for the network in a region and they are often also a producer/supplier to consumers themselves. But then there are many (dozens per region) other suppliers you can buy your power from. And they both sell power to consumers and they build power plants. My supplier (and a few others in the region) only invest in solar, wind, water, and only in the own region. At times when they need to sell more electricity to consumers than they produce with their own plants, they of course are actually selling dirty electricity, but they will still only invest in clean renewables themselves for production so it's still the better choice.
In the US, most people have one option, a legal monopoly whose rates are set by the municipal government, and customers treat the energy company as one entity even if there is a grid operator and many electricity producers. There are exceptions (as with anything in the US) but that's the general rule.
In other news, I'm really tempted to pull the trigger on a pallet of PV panels and DIY that install, but then I remember the inverter doubles the cost.
Yes... And no. It all still comes through AEP. However, you can choose your supplier.
Paying more for the same energy mix (because you can’t filter electricity) seems a bit pointless?
Your choice of supplier influences which kinds of projects get financed more easily.
In my state, I've tried to confirm that they can't count what you voluntary choose as green energy, as also counting under their mandatory green quota.
Other states are different where you have more than one power company. My state doesn't have that, just green washing.
:(
Are they talking about the US-Israel war in the middle east?
As usual for the last 40 years
The what? Oh the Epstein Files War!
You're gonna have to be more specific.
"Just another 20 years haha guys I swear"
They provided an actual roadmap, which presumably has steps with deadlines earlier than 2045. If anyone can read German, please let me know what the roadmap says.
they have an english version of the roadmap. If you read it, can you give a tldr?
Germany's Fossil Fuel Transition Roadmap (Sept 2026):
Source: German Federal Ministry for the Environment, "Germany's Roadmap for Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels" (Sept 2026).
I'd be the first to cheer if Germany can pull this off, but I'm a bit cynical about their energy policy. Between keeping coal around for so long, shutting down their nuclear power plants without replacing them, and over-reliance on wind I'm a bit apprehensive.
Doubtful but hopeful.
if they give a tldr can you give a one sentence judgement.
They just pumped another 2,5 billion euros into making petrol at the pump cheaper for everyone... Surely a government truly commited to this energy transition would have invested those 2,5 billions elsewhere ay
It's a short term solution to help poor people who are most affected by rising fuel costs. Would it be better to invest that money in something else? Probably, but people need help, and ignoring them just punishes the wrong people.
The thing is that it also helps people who don't need it and most of all it helps the fossil fuel industry. So it really just is a subsidy for fossil fuel. They could have supported poor people with more targeted solutions.
Like what? By my math, €2.5B affords 14.5B km of travel. I guess they could buy a bunch of EVs for people? €2.5B could purchase around 47,000, but the cash infusion would raise prices so that's not terribly accurate. The one thing they could do the German government will not do is allow Chinese BEV brands in without tariffs.
Yeah but its a bad solution here aswell. Since the fossil Industry just ups their profits from it and they don't have a cap on the price. So its basically just tax money gifted, that got cut from social funding.
Giesskanne is the dumbest way possible to do this. Yes, some people need support now, I agree. Certain professions, certain kinds of cars. But the way they do this now I am de facto financing the gassing up of many very inefficient cars owned by people do not care about climate and do not need the discount because they have/earn plenty anyway. It would be a perfect time to introduces tempolimit on autobahn, that would save a large amount of petrol (and many other positive side effects) and as we know a lower demand lowers the price of scarce products. What they do now is quite the opposite of trying to reach 100 % renewable in 20 years... It is a very bad policy decision in every single way imaginable, for climate, for tax payers and the health of the public budget, for the future of the economy: on every single level this is a bad policy.
What’s a tempo limit? A limit on how many beats per minute a song can have?
Speed limit
Can’t the people who need it the most take the bus?
It's not only about transport of themselves, food prices are increasing, and have been since covid.
The people who are affacted most by food prices are also the people living in low cost of living areas, where the salaries are also the lowest, and you're not going to find a lot of busses in the countryside.
Go find a bus when you must clock in at 5am.
A country could easily become carbon neutral by killing all of its citizens.
But you wouldn't advocate for that, because while it would succeed in the semantics it would fail in the pragmatics.
The citizens have to be able to survive the transition, bro.
The citizens aren't going to survive either way at this rate
No one is dying and the 17 cent discount per litre is making no one who is dying, survive. There are not less cars on the roads, people are not driving less kilometres now than when fuel was 1,55 € per litre instead of 2,5 € now. Apparently many many people with valid alternatives like e-bikes still choose cars despite the price increase. One could for example support industries like agriculture or heavy transport where transitioning is harder and higher prices mean bankruptcy. They didn't, they chose populist catch all at the pumps and the reason is not impending starvation of people or economic sense, the reason is Merz not wanting to give up power, Reiche being a gas industry employee and afd threatening them in regional elections.
When people actually were literally dying during the unprecedented climate change induced heatwaves, they were all quiet and no-one got a single cent to buy airco
It's been long apparent to anyone not in a oil/car executive's pay that building your national infrastructure around imported oil is a huge national security danger. Not just a risk, but a known event that you're ensuring will take out that nation once the gas stops flowing.
I feel the CDU is full of shit in many things, but if they could finally get behind moving to rewables across the board by rightfully positioning it as the national defense strategy it is, then get moving.
Meanwhile in Canada.... .MOAR PIPELINES!
To whom? Aquaman?
He's too busy buying houses.
I don't understand your comment.
I'm referring to Mark Carney, Canada's prime minister, and his plans to increase oil production and plans to build pipelines across the country to deliver oil to Asia and Europe when everybody's already planning their transition away from fossil fuels. Canada and the U.S. are way behind and China is way ahead of the curve. Europe is somewhere in the middle. It's only a matter of time.
Canada should be investing in green energy alternatives, but we got this MAGAt of a premier in Alberta who wants her province to become the 51st state so she can go eat the shit out of Donny's diaper-wearing ass.
Europe is accelerating it's fossil fuel exodus. Asia has already trailblazed alternatives.
By the time these pipelines, and terminals, and refineries are completed how much of a fossil fuel economy will be left?
Sure. But that's not the problem I'm seeing with this plan.
That's what I'm saying. It's pointless. Injecting money into these projets will ruin Canada's economy essentially.
Internet is a series of tubes, just use the existing cable to the EU for oil as well as Internet
I mean, you joke but...
Sending power and communication concurrently is more an engineering problem with cost issues than an impossibility.
"Yes Mom I'll clean my room, but first let me trash it for another 20 years, then I'll hire a crew with your money to rebuild the house."
Me: *checks watch* . . . Uh, yeah, now is . . . now is good. I mean. Yeah.
"Now"? No no no, we can't do "now", please be patient and wait another 20 years
CDU energy minister, and with CDU head of state, have campaigned/said they are going the other way. Is Schneider speaking for a unified government here? Backed up by rest of cabinet?
Donald Trump the Climate Stalinist
lol, set it far enough in the future that it's a worthless promise aka kick the can down the road.
if they'd said by 2030, then i'd pay attention.
yeah, sure. German energy strategy is basically as sound as a shaggy dog story. they just want that sweet russian gas back.
Bullllshit.
2000 2010 2020 20302045Actual renewables or "biofuels"?
As far as i have seen: "no biofuels". But i would not bet on it.
Who could have predicted such a war? Or the climate collapse? Or the invasion of Ukraine?
They all just came out of nowhere.
The war against Iran did not come out of nowhere. The USA has been overt about wanting "regime change" for Iran since 2001, and since Trump's last term especially. Meanwhile Iran has been very open about how they would respond in case they were attacked by the USA: punish all US-aligned countries in the region, close the Strait of Hormuz, close Bab al-Mandab, and target Israel directly and indirectly.
So this was very predictable and that's why lots of people have been talking about it since 2017.
My tinfoil hat theory is also that the US currently do not have the enough energy to supply all the expanding data centers, so we're starting our imperialism again for oil.
Shortly after the Venezuela insurgency where we stole their oil, Trump rambled on about how he met the CEO of Nvidia, and he bragged about securing oil for him, I wish I could dig up that clip again.
I'm sure Iran was also for stealing their oil for our data centers. Israel probably convinced us that we would win a joint operation, and everything else was convenient excuses to justify an invasion.
I think you're right, but my read is a bit broader. I think that they've been planning a confrontation with China for the past decade, and that Venezuela, Cuba and Iran are just part of the "sequencing" of that war. They see these countries as chess pieces and they need to move those around before going in for the main objective.
But I think two things didn't pan out the way that they had planned. First, China is moving away from oil much faster than they had anticipated, and second, the AI race turned out to be much closer than they had hoped.
The USA's position is basically that whoever "wins" the AI race is going to control the planet for the upcoming decades, because it will provide such massive advantages for industry and warfare. And the USA is used to being a decade ahead of everyone else technologically - but in this instance they're neck-and-neck, because China is producing good chips despite not having the best fabs, and China is producing good LLMs despite throwing way less compute at their models. At the same time, I think everyone was a little surprised at how good LLMs actually are (I know that's a controversial thing to say on Lemmy, but that's what they believe).
So I think this sped up the timeline for the war on China by a lot. Suddenly they felt the need to act immediately, going down their sequence of conquest which was supposed to put them in a much better bargaining position against China.
AI was also a big part of the supposed diversification of the Gulf State economies, where UAE/KSA was supposed to get data centers in exchange for alignment with Israel. They'd fuel the data centers with fossil fuels, cool it with who-knows-what, and get a small part of the slice. Hence why Iran has targeted those data centers.
The article is mostly about petrol for cars, it briefly mentions reliance on gas (for electricity). Do germans have gas connections to heat their house and cook?
Yes
Though I assume that this is also being phased out?
They already phased out their gas showers, so i would say progress is being made.
That is kind of a secondary,natural effect, I guess. Basically most of the new heating systems installed are heat pumps, because those make more sense economically. So the gas delivery network will get more expensive with dwindling users, making gas prices rise even quicker than the resource price itself.
Leaving people who can't afford it behind
Partly just through economics. As solar generation becomes more democratised, running things off a power source you can't generate yourself becomes less attractive.
When another oil pipe was bombed somewhere in September and the prices hiked, I saw people commenting that it's ‘your rulers [oligarchs] doing that to push EV [electric vehicles] on us’ which seems like the most misdirected rage I've seen (yet) and maybe most uninformed. I wonder if the comment came from the US
Always planning in the far future so politics can change...and someone else can be blamed for it not happening. Sheesh, we are so screwed. I never thought in my wildest dreams that we as a species would be cheering on climate change. Even this is too little too late.
Yeah, 20 years seems like the magic 'far away' number that makes promises worthless.
Trump the environmentalist
I mean, Genghis Khan did something similar.
We should've given Genghis Khan some FIFA prize, too
Well they could figure out ways to source energy for the combustion engine differently. I do think pulling it out of the ground isn't the best move but you can make diesel out of so many different things. And plastics just aren't going to go away but you can also make plastics out of different things.
Small modular reactors cannot be widely proliferated soon enough. Solar, Tidal, and Wind being able to provide for the majority of energy needs still feels like a dream.
Wake up, it's a reality. China alone has 1000GW of installed solar, and globally it already out produces all coal and oil power plants combined.
That's awesome, Germany is only at 23.8% renewables for overall energy consumption. Nit even to a quarter yet.
Actually renewables have accounted for 58% of Germany's electric usage so far in 2026. That's five times what it was twenty years ago.
Edit: source
Sure is. how do they heat their homes? How much natural gas do they burn through a year as a country? Way to cherry pick only electrical consumption. We both showed valid statistics.
Electrification is the key to replacing natural gas for heat. But there's no point in doing that until the grid is renewable. Burning natural gas in a home is about twice as efficient as using a power plant and then powering a heater.
So yes, the grid isn't the full picture, and I shouldn't have put the two statistics together like they contradict one another, but Germany is making very rapid progress in the places they need to.
Should've used UNLIMITED POWER (nuclear)
The ironing is delicious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_phase-out#Germany
And I thought the NUCLEAR trollbots couldn’t get any dumber. I was wrong
Nuclear is a great option. But we're too stupid as a species to just do it. We've also proven that we will bomb nuclear power plants to bits, which is such an idiotic thing to do.
Yeah, it’s the absolute best option!!!1!! We just need to store the waste safely for longer than our species exists - but that absolutely no problem!!!1! Just chant “NUCLEAR NUCLEAR!!” and tear down the bird killing windmills before they cause cancer in you.
/s ffs
You clearly don't know anything about how nuclear works. You could power everything in your life until the day you die for waste the size of a coke can.
And I didn't say anything about wind power. You specifically mentioned nuclear, so that's what I'm talking about.