Contrast Germany with France, which generates three quarters of its electricity using nuclear power, and has around one fifth the emissions of Germany, despite the latter's far greater focus on climate policies. The development of nuclear in the West has been stymied by excessively burdensome regulations as politicians respond to green activism.
Even the United States has done about as well as Germany in the past 20 years due to the large-scale substitution of gas for coal, the former generating about half the CO2 per unit of energy as the latter. The author faults the European greens for their opposition to gas exploitation which would reduce their current dependance on Russia.
More generally, the tying of climate abatement to broader anti-capitalist agendas has served to ideologically polarize the debate, always an obstacle to rational deliberation.
To see why “denialism” and “manipulation by elites” fail as explanations of climate inaction, consider Germany, one of the richest and most environmentally conscious nations on the planet. German political leaders have been taking the climate crisis very seriously for more than three decades, and unlike in the US, climate denialists are marginal and have never wielded political power. Even in Germany, however, getting rid of fossil fuels has proven extremely difficult. Despite having spent 500 billion euros in its much-heralded Energiewende (energy transition), Germany is still burning massive amounts of lignite and coal, and is not even remotely on track to reach its climate targets. Even with the best of intentions and tons of political goodwill—and without denialists muddying the waters—climate progress has proven elusive. Indeed, you may be surprised to learn that the US, despite experiencing much more trouble from self-professed “climate skeptics,” has achieved similar emission reductions to Germany over the past two decades, mainly by switching from coal to gas and with some energy efficiency.
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Consider Germany’s neighbor France, which pulled off this feat without even worrying about global warming. Back in the 1970s, when France decided to switch from fossil fuels to nuclear energy, the climate problem was not even on the agenda. And yet, within about 15 years France had almost fully decarbonized its electricity sector and had electrified a lot of other stuff (such as electrical heating and high-speed trains). Countries like France and Sweden have demonstrated in real life that it is possible to eliminate fossil fuels without sacrificing economic growth and prosperity. The reason why the carbon intensity of German electricity, even after two full decades of Energiewende, is still more than five times higher than that of nuclear France is not because of mass delusion and elite manipulation about the reality of man-made global warming. Quite the contrary. It is because anti-nuclear environmentalists—the very same people who express the highest level of anxiety about climate change—have more political clout in Germany than in France and have convinced their political leaders that it’s an excellent “climate policy” to abandon atomic energy and close down all of their remaining reactors.