alt Hacker News‘We were all wrong’: how Germany got hooked on Russian energy - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/02/germany-depend... - June 2nd, 2022
> An arrangement that began as a peacetime opening to a former foe has turned into an instrument of aggression. Germany is now funding Russia’s war. In the first two months after the start of Russia’s assault on Ukraine, Germany is estimated to have paid nearly €8.3bn for Russian energy – money used by Moscow to prop up the rouble and buy the artillery shells firing at Ukrainian positions in Donetsk. In that time, EU countries are estimated to have paid a total of €39bn for Russian energy, more than double the sum they have given to help Ukraine defend itself. The irony is painful. “For thirty years, Germans lectured Ukrainians about fascism,” the historian Timothy Snyder wrote recently. “When fascism actually arrived, Germans funded it, and Ukrainians died fighting it.”
> When Putin invaded Ukraine in February, Germany faced a particular problem. Its rejection of nuclear power and its transition away from coal meant that Germany had very few alternatives to Russian gas. Berlin has been forced to accept that it was a cataclysmic error to have made itself so dependent on Russian energy – whatever the motives behind it. The foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, says Germany failed to listen to the warnings from countries that had once suffered under Russia’s occupation, such as Poland and the Baltic states. For Norbert Röttgen, a former environment minister and member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat Union (CDU), the German government bowed to industry forces pressing for cheap gas “all too easily”, while “completely ignoring the geopolitical risks”.
> In February this year, German Green economic affairs and climate action minister Robert Habeck said that gas storage facilities owned by Gazprom in Germany had been “systematically emptied” over the winter, to drive up prices and exert political pressure. It was a staggering admission of Russia’s power to disrupt energy supplies.
> “I was wrong,” the former German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, says, simply. “We were all wrong.”
We win or we learn.
Replies
>> “I was wrong,” the former German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, says, simply. “We were all wrong.”
So when are they retroactively giving back their salaries and pensions for having fucked up the livelihoods of their taxpayers?
Politicians have no incentive to ever make good decisions for the future of their country without any skin in the game from which their personal riches are derived.
>We win or we learn.
Jensen Huang said that failure is learning but sometimes failure is just failure and you should know when to cut your losses before the failure goes from learning to bankruptcy. And Germany did far more failure than actually learning.
A self inflicted wound. Europe keeps entering into spot gas supply contracts and paying through the nose instead of signing longer-term contracts for lower prices. The Russians have always been reliable suppliers even after sanctions took place, and calls from some hotheads to use gas as leverage was never seriously followed through by the real decision makers. And Habeck is an idiot. Lately Germany has not been buying enough summer gas to keep the storage full, and of course the storage gets emptied during the winter - people need to keep warm. To imply that Gazprom is somehow stealing gas from these facilities to exert political pressure is ludicrous, expecially since Gazprom has not even owned these facilities since 2022.
See also: Gazprom, Gerhard Schröder (”Putin’s man in Germany” according to NYT) and the German nuclear power shutdown.
https://atomicinsights.com/gazprom-profiting-mightily-from-g...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/world/europe/schroder-ger...