alt Hacker News>Germany is home of the biggest chemical companies in the world
Some of them are worth keeping but also some of them actually should go. Close to where I used to live in Düsseldorf there was a plastic bottle factory that employed 500 some people and it only continued to be open because it was apparently impossible to let anyone go, the entire thing was long uneconomic.
Mind you even here in Germany our economy is 70% services, the bulk of the employment happens in the Mittelstand. The number of highly energy intensive companies is quite small. Reducing energy prices is good for consumers but more important are structural reforms. We have to good an education and too high a wage level to keep people working in plastic bottle factories. It actually made sense that some of those jobs left the US 30 years ago.
The number of big companies in that energy hungry sector is big compared to other countries. And it’s good that Germany managed to keep this industry going. Also those big companies fuel much of what the Mittelstand does. Please lookup biggest chemical companies in the world and you will see that Germany is well represented. It’s just unnecessary to let that industry “go”. If it dies in Germany and flourishes in let’s say China the climate has not won anything but Germany lost an entire industry. This mix (big industrial companies, lots of smaller mittelstand companies paired with a big services sector) is what makes Germany so uniquely resilient. This is the biggest potential problem for Germany. Reducing resilience, giving up stability