GER politics thread

[Rockstar]

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

Fully agree but the 'etc' part meant other weapons such as artillery, apc's and ammunition etc. (oops. there I go again).

Well the way I see it is as Skybird pointed out on so many occasions that the military readiness of the German armed forces simply sucks. They don’t have much to give away that is operationally ready to begin with and if the feces hits the rotating oscillator they’ll need what they do have for themselves and NATO

[Jimbuna]

At least a few of the NATO members (Germany included) are too reliant on assistance from the US imho.

[Skybird]

The German "Energiewende" (ewnergy transformation) was a still birth drom all beginning on. Now the cadaver already stinks from rotting, but they still refuse to finally bury it, and so the cadaveric poison started to poison the ground around and make it unusable as well in the future.

Renewable energies are becoming the only cheap source of electricity. For some companies, this is the last chance to cover their costs. A Hamburg steel mill, for example, now only starts its furnaces according to the weather forecast. Wind has become an uncontrollable economic factor.

It wasn't long ago that professional weather forecasts were something for sailors and farmers. One look at the app and the fisherman headed for the sheltering harbor, the farmer watched to make sure he got his hay in the dry. In other industries, it didn't matter. That has changed. With the energy transition, weather data became a key planning variable in the energy industry. And now, gas shortages and skyrocketing energy prices mean that even for companies with large electricity requirements, wind and sun are suddenly having a decisive influence on operational cost accounting.

Can this really work in a high tech environment like the German industry claims to be? I see no chance for that. In fact what I see is that cascade effects have already started to work their way through the whole eocnomic netqwork, on all levels. What I see is that all what has held it alltogether, now has become so loose and untight that the whole has started to fall apart. They deny it, they ignore it, they try to gloss over it, but for me the signs are clear. Its a cascade of effects that reaches from one subordinate level to the next higher one, and on every new level the cataclysmic effects reinforce themselves over-proportionally. To me the perception of it is as clear and obvious like differentiant between a red and a green traffic light.

The minister for wonder, magic and supertalk Robert Habeck now finally had to accept to leave the two Bavarian nuclear powerplants on the grid - but sitll limting their lifeitme until end of March. The thir durnning reactor in the Emsöland he still wa nts to switch off. No new fuels beign ordered. Three more reacvtors that could be reatcivated, still no word on these. The greens still put their ideolgiocakl worldwview "nuke is evil" before the needs of the people and the necessities of this nations eocnomic fundament. They claim that "every Watt saved counts",, but they waste GWh ewn masse this way, and they od not accept the link betwene hiogh prices of electrocty and the short supply of it, that supply and price do interacxt. They just do not get it, these retards.

At the last elections, 60 million were elegible to vote, the total population now is 84 million (justz newly counted, due to the huge migration influx). The Greens got 14,8% of the vote that saw a participation of 76%. Doing some math means that around 6.6 million people of 84 million gave them their vote, that makes them a minority of less than 10% of the total population. Of these, many - especially younger - followers have changed their stand on nuclear power and see the need to leave the reactors on, maybe even stay with nuclear energy, at the last count, there was almost a 45-50% parity between those Green voters objecitng to and accepting nuclear power. So lets halve the group here, which means they are a tiny minority of around 3-4 million Green people only who enforce economic disaster and anti-nuclear policy on a huge and overwhelming majority . Inside the Greens, it is interesting to see who is for and against it. Its a generation thing. The old ideolgical hardliners from the 80s are strictly against it, the young ones are way more pragmatic and see the needs realistically, less ideologically.

FOCUS writes on wonderboy Habeck (and mind you, I have said from all beginning on that Habeck is nothing more than a rhetorically gifted but factually incompetent and ideologically hardlining "Blender": a phony and imposter):
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As recently as August, Robert Habeck was the superstar of German politics. But that has since thoroughly changed. 6 reasons that explain the Economics Minister's fall from grace, which he brought on himself.

"Some of the hut is already on fire," says Robert Habeck. He means the German economy. But he could justifiably say the same about the ministry he leads.

Since he took office, the former home of German regulatory policy - which produced great personalities such as Ludwig Erhard, Karl Schiller, Otto Graf Lambsdorff, Hans Friderichs and Wolfgang Clement - has mainly been producing glittering verbal tinsel, contradictions by the dozen and, as its latest premium product, obvious nonsense. In this highest product category, Robert Habeck currently has quite a bit to offer:

Habeck's idea of a gas levy was confused and arbitrary

Nonsense 1: His idea of a gas levy was confused and arbitrary from the beginning. Why, in times of inflation and energy price explosion, the state should act as a spender of energy and thus as an inflation driver, Habeck could not explain conclusively.

The social injustice that only gas customers should bear the risks of the energy war between Germany and Russia cried out to heaven. Especially since these 21 million gas customers are not responsible for the misery and have no alternative strategy for escaping their gas supplier.

The polluter pays principle was upside down, which is why Habeck now had to take the back seat. The chancellor, the finance minister and, most recently, his party friends have made it clear to him: That levy, for which the minister was still freaking out in the Bundestag the other day, has to go.

Habeck's enegier trips to Qatar and Canada were for the cat

Nonsense 2: With their heroic trips to Qatar, Canada and Saudi Arabia, Economics Minister and Chancellor Habeck suggest that the state is now closing the energy gap with an iron hand that the energy industry cannot close. The truth is: The videos that Habeck sent from there ("I launched a new energy partnership in Qatar") look like a contribution to Jan Böhmermann's ZDF-Magazin Royale.

This is because Habeck's successes are hardly measurable. In 2020, the Federal Republic imported about 56 billion cubic meters of natural gas from Russia. The 137,000 cubic meters of LNG imported from Qatar correspond to about 82 million cubic meters of gaseous natural gas. That's about 0.2 percent of Russia's previous annual supply via pipelines - in other words, a joke. Meanwhile, in Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stressed that his country would play no role in the supply of liquefied natural gas in the short term.

This means that the trips by Scholz and Habeck have brought nothing except new CO2 emissions from the government's engines for the coming winter.

Conclusion: If one could heat with hot air from the power plant of party politics, it would be cozy warm in the coming winter.

Habeck lacks a compass for debt and inflation

Nonsense 3: The minister demands further subsidies almost daily, which he wants the finance minister to pay for with new debts. Apparently, the minister has no compass for the connection between debt policy, money overhang and inflation; he demands things that will be paid for in the present with currency devaluation and loss of prosperity and by the next generation with the limitation of its possibilities.

The Federal Audit Office is already talking about a "fossilized budget" because there is hardly anything left for future investments. Intergenerational justice, rightly called for by the Greens in their election program, is first ignored and then sabotaged by Habeck. This is no way to serve his young voters.

Minister on the outside, Robin Hood on the inside: How Habeck denounces higher earners

Nonsense 4: The minister actively fought the relief of the middle class through the elimination of cold progression and denounced this project as a discreet enrichment program of high earners. He said, "I do not see how we can represent in this situation that those who need less support are absolutely relieved more. "

He was of the opinion that "Rich households and people with lower incomes pay the same high energy prices. The only thing is that rich people can take it. "

The truth is: no one would be better off by shifting the tax rate; only the negative effects of inflation on income taxpayers would be muted. The reform was not neoliberal, but overdue.

The bottom line: for the first time in history, there is a minister of the economy at work here who does not love and caress his core target group, but reaches into its wallet. Outside: Minister. Inside: Robin Hood.

How SPD and FDP had to get Habeck on track with nuclear policy

Nonsense 5: Nuclear policy. With his about-face yesterday - as things stand, the Isar 2 and Neckarwestheim 2 nuclear power plants will have to run beyond the end of the year - Habeck admitted that he had fooled German citizens for weeks with false statements like "we have a gas problem, but no electricity problem." Only political pressure from the SPD and FDP made him relent. What was impossible yesterday is now suddenly "necessary," he said. From the beginning, his attempt - first the party, then the country - was a cautionary tale for a party that demands: follow the science on the climate issue.

Habeck complains about conditions that he himself has brought about

Nonsense 6: When Habeck now complains about the weak capital cushion of the German economy, he is lamenting conditions that he himself helped to bring about. The energy price explosion was the igniter for the drop in profits in Germany's small and medium-sized businesses, but the Greens brought the match beforehand with ever new bureaucratic requirements.

The profitability of German companies is historically low. The burden of bureaucracy is historically high. Robert Habeck is not solely responsible for this, but he and his political friends are a major driver of this bureaucratic mill and grind movement that threatens to pulverize the middle class. In a recession, it will push those already weakened over the cliff first.

Conclusion: Robert Habeck no longer needs media disenchantment. He is disenchanting himself. Even his journalistic foot soldiers are already showing signs of fatigue. The Robert Habeck fan club is about to disband. Alan Posener penned the requiem for a superstar retiree in Die Zeit:

"So far, none of the traffic light parties is making a bella figura. Least of all the man who would be most likely to jump over his own shadow, Robert Habeck. Too bad. "
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Habeck originally is an author of children books - not without even ideolgically charging up the smallest of the young ones with Green gender and sexualization ideology in his books. Why do the masses always fall for the lousiest impostors? To look at the election results and what kind of people get spilled to the top of the power herarchy time and again is the best argument against generla elections, I sometimes think. It seems our political system makes sure we get governed always by the worst of the worst. My trust for it is excatly 0.000, since many, many, many years.

[Skybird]

FOCUS writes:
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What no one in the Green Party dares to say: What Germany will look like after the energy transition

With no political project is the number of errors as great as with the energy transition. A thought leader of the Green Party now speaks the truth: Those who rely entirely on wind and sun want the irreversible deindustrialization of the country.


What will Germany look like after the final energy turnaround? A paradise, if you can believe the brochures of the Greens. Cows graze peacefully on lush meadows, while the wind turbine turns gently on the horizon. The German family sits happily united at the dining table - black and white, old and young, grandma in the middle - listening spellbound as Annalena Baerbock reports on the latest victories of feminist foreign policy on "Tagesthemen." The union of modernity and Biedermeier: Transformation can be this beautiful.

There is also another, less promotional view. It is represented by Ulrike Herrmann, economics editor at the "taz" and thus the paper that feels more committed to the eco-movement than any other in Germany. With regard to the energy transition, Herrmann speaks of green shrinkage. If you think that this is another polemical dig at the Greens, you are far from it. Ms. Herrmann means it in a positive way. When she talks about shrinking, she thinks it is something worth striving for.

Utopia of an ecological planned economy

She has written an entire book on the subject. It's called "The End of Capitalism." In it, she develops the utopia of an ecological planned economy, in which a committee of climate wise men works to dismantle the system that generated growth and prosperity for many years. Better get ready in time for bananas from Costa Rica or grapes from the Cape to be a thing of the past!

This is what the green future looks like: People use only regional and seasonal products because air travel has largely ceased. The next vacation trip is not to Sardinia, but at best to Rügen. Of course, you can still meet friends, but they all speak German again now. São Paulo, Bali or Mumbai are as far away as they were in Marco Polo's day.

Necessary repairs? You have to do them yourself. A new jacket or dress? Only if you know how to operate a sewing machine. Most commodities are shared with neighbors anyway: lawn mowers, drills, toys, books.

The good news is: washing machines, computers and the Internet are here to stay. "Nobody has to fear that we'll end up back in the Stone Age and living in caves when capitalism ends," Ms. Herrmann reassures her readers. There is just less of everything, respectively: If you're lucky enough to have a computer, it's a device from the time when people still believed in growth.

Only green shrinkage remains

Why the turn to less? Quite simply, no industrialized country can be kept running on sun and wind alone. Energy is available in abundance, and that's not the problem. The sun sends 5000 times more energy to the earth than the eight billion people would need, even if they all lived like Europeans. "However, solar panels and wind turbines only provide electricity when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing," Ms. Herrmann writes. "To provide for lulls and darkness, energy must be stored - either in batteries or as green hydrogen. This intermediate step is so costly that green power will remain scarce and expensive."

Ergo: If green energy is to be enough for everyone, green shrinking is the only option. I rarely agree with people who work at the "taz." But I think Ulrike Herrmann is right. Capitalist growth philosophy and green revolution do not go together. I'm glad someone is saying it so clearly. Most people who are on the road for the Greens act as if everything can be reconciled: the Volvo at the door - and climate rescue on the go.

I'm not sure everyone realizes what it means to say goodbye to fossil fuels, as the climate movement demands. You can be happy with less. The happiest people supposedly live in Bangladesh, according to an older happiness comparison study I took. Others see the Finns in the lead when it comes to well-being.

We will not be able to maintain living standards

Be that as it may, things will change once the coalition agreement of the German government has finally been worked through. It's hard to imagine, for example, that we'll be able to maintain the medical standards to which we've become accustomed. One reassuring piece of information during the pandemic was that no country would have as many intensive care beds per inhabitant as the Federal Republic. Does anyone seriously believe that it will stay that way once we have phased out nuclear power and coal?

As I said, you can get by with less. Ulrike Herrmann recommends the 1970s as a reference decade. People didn't live badly back then either, she says: "It was the year Argentina became soccer world champion and the first part of 'Star Wars' was shown in theaters."

Agreed. You just shouldn't have the misfortune of getting liver cancer or a degenerative muscle condition. There is a reason why life expectancy today is 81 years on average. On the other hand, 72 is also a nice age to retire. From the point of view of climate protection, every year of life is one too many anyway.

We are now hearing that we are in trouble because the energy turnaround has not been pushed forward decisively enough. But you can also see things the other way around. No other country in Europe has spent as much money on the expansion of renewable energies as Germany. Even before the invasion of Ukraine, we had the highest electricity prices in the EU. According to green logic, we should be in a much better position today than our neighbors, but the opposite is the case.

The road to energy transition is paved with false assumptions

The truth is: the backbone of Germany's energy transition has always been Russian gas and French nuclear power. Robert Habeck involuntarily admitted it when he prepared his supporters that the nuclear phase-out would have to be postponed for a few months. Because we can no longer rely on Russia and France, nuclear power from Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg will now have to fill the gap - at least until April.

After that, heat pumps are to do the trick, according to the coalition agreement. 500,000 heat pumps are to be installed in German households every year. I'm curious to see how that will work out. The road to the energy transition is paved with false assumptions. Do you remember Jürgen Trittin, the father of the can deposit, promising Germans that the energy transition would cost them no more than a scoop of ice cream [and former environment minister, years ago, and a green Maoist, Skybird]? That has become a very expensive scoop of ice cream.

Civil engineer Lamia Messari-Becker, long a member of the German Council of Environmental Experts, assessed the plans in an interview in Der Spiegel. Habeck should end this aberration, she said. Most houses in Germany are not suitable for the use of heat pumps, she said. Those who try it anyway will incur horrendous electricity bills, she added. There are not even enough appliances or craftsmen who could install the pumps.

Trittin's ice cream scoop bet was a highly serious matter

The responsible state secretary in the Ministry of Economics, Patrick Graichen, was recently asked where the 60,000 fitters would come from who would be needed to put the ambitious plans into practice. Well, he said lightly, then a few less tilers will have to lay tiles. I'm afraid that against Robert Habeck's heat pump plan, Trittin's ice cream scoop bet was a highly serious matter.

Ulrike Herrmann's book about the end of capitalism made it to number one on the bestseller list. The audience that can appreciate the return to the seventies is larger than I thought.

After all, the music was definitely better back then. I'm getting the old discs out again now. If rewinding progress, then at least to the sound of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. As Janis Joplin sang: Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose.
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[Skybird]

FOCUS writes:
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Putin, Putin, Putin: Although Angela Merkel only wanted to make "feel-good" appointments in her political retirement, the former chancellor never misses an opportunity to talk about Russia and the Kremlin tsar. There are good reasons for this.

At the beginning of June, six months after leaving the chancellery, Angela Merkel made her first public appearance as former chancellor at the presentation of a small anthology of her speeches. There she cautiously approached her new role. She was "not a completely normal citizen" and therefore had to continue to be careful about expressing herself. "It's not my job to comment from the sidelines," she stressed: "I'm still looking for my way."

Now, it is a well-known fact that good intentions are not always long-lasting. Merkel does make comments on current politics, especially on Putin and Russia. For she is undoubtedly not pleased that Germany's extreme dependence on Russian gas - with all the unforeseeable consequences for the population and the economy - is attributed not least to her policies.

In any case, it was not to be expected that Merkel would be completely politically abstinent. Like all former heads of government, she is probably concerned with her own image in the history books. The CDU politician, who is emphatically unpretentious, would never say that. But her announcement that she and her long-time office manager Beate Baumann are writing a book about her life in the GDR and her chancellorship speaks precisely to this.

It is also noticeable that Merkel, who once described the internet as uncharted territory, obviously feels comfortable on the net. At any rate, she has had her own homepage there since the beginning of July: www.buero-bundeskanzlerin-ad.de . Anyone who wants to know which interviews the former chancellor has given, which speeches she has delivered, which statements she has made, will find what they are looking for here. It is a digital chronicle of the ex-chancellor's activities.

One thing is clear from Merkel's public statements to date: at present, the main concern here is to present her policy towards Vladimir Putin and Russia as if it had been - to use her favourite vocabulary - without alternative. She would "not apologise" for this policy, she had already declared at her first public appearance. Nor did she ever believe "that Putin would be changed by trade". She had known how he thought and had always tried to prevent an escalation.

The ex-chancellor avoids any verbal sharpness when talking about Putin. Putin, Putin, Putin: The former Chancellor never misses an opportunity to talk about Russia and the Kremlin tsar, while avoiding any verbal sharpness. This could be observed twice last week, when Merkel spoke at the first event of the newly founded "Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl Foundation" in Berlin and at the "1,100-year town anniversary" in Goslar.

In Berlin, she could have left it at paying tribute to Kohl's services to unity. In Goslar, on the other hand, the eventful history of Goslar, the founding of the CDU in 1950 in this former mining town, and her relationship with her former Vice-Chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, an honorary citizen of Goslar, provided enough material. But in both speeches, the Ukraine war and its consequences played a major role.

In Berlin, Merkel tried to defend her Russia policy - citing Kohl. Her thesis: in all measures against the aggressor Putin, Kohl would always make sure to return to "business as usual" after the end of the war with Russia.
Merkel is no longer in office - but far from gone

In Goslar, she pleaded for "working on a pan-European security architecture involving Russia within the framework of the principles of international law", even if this would require "a very long breath". Merkel's "bitter realisation of 24 February": "As long as we have not achieved this (...) the Cold War is not really over either; worse still, it has become a real war for the people in Ukraine."

But after the invasion of Ukraine, her policy towards Russia - also with regard to natural gas supplies - appears in a different light. Although the former German Chancellor had announced that in her political retirement she would only attend "feel-good" appointments: She also takes on the unwieldy topic of Putin and works hard to ensure that her policies are interpreted positively in retrospect.

The conclusion: the former chancellor is no longer in office - but she is far from gone.
---------------------------------
Unfortunately.
A real huge fly swatter may come handy.

[Catfish]

"Die ich rief, die Geister .. "
then standing there and being so completely innocent.

Apart from Schroeder she is the the one who made Germany dependent on russian oil and gas, due to her good relationship to Putin.
She should shut up or publicly take a stance against Putin now. Disgusting.

[Skybird]

^ Now she can feel further encouraged in her delusion. The UN is giving her a UN Refugee Award.

If I received such a prize or a similar one for whatever, I would feel insulted.

[Skybird]

The leaders of numerous municipalities and communities are warning the population in newspaper reports of blackouts lasting 72 hours or more. Officials complain about the lack of resilience of the Germans and their innocence.

[Skybird]

My opinion of the German state propaganda TV stations ARD and ZDF already was very low before, they arte dispicable and and stuck ina series of scandals anyway. This news now does not help to heal their reputation. But it is representative for the perverse and lefty Zeitgeist in general over here: I only say "Dokumenta".

FOCUS writes:
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For his statements in the ARD documentary "Death and Games," a Palestinian terrorist from the 1972 Olympics received an exclusive fee of $2,000. The bereaved families of the murdered athletes are stunned and speak of a "media scandal".

A fugitive Palestinian terrorist who was involved in the murder of eleven athletes of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich in 1972 has collected an exclusive fee of 2000 US dollars for the description of the massacre in the ARD. This was confirmed by a spokeswoman for ARD to the news magazine FOCUS.

Mohammed Safady (69) boasted in the four-part ARD documentary "Death and Games," broadcast in September, about the attack on the Israeli team and the killing of the eleven athletes and a Bavarian policeman. The act was heroic and for the first time made the world aware of the fate of the Palestinian people, Safady said in the documentary. He has no regrets. Any time, the former member of the Fatah terrorist group said, he would take on a new assignment to murder Jews.

It had been agreed in advance with the broadcasters SWR, rbb and BR involved in the documentary that no fees would be paid to Palestinian hostage-takers who were still alive, the spokeswoman for the Berlin-Brandenburg (rbb) broadcaster, Stefanie Tannert, told FOCUS. However, it later emerged that the producer responsible for the documentary had paid an exclusive fee of $2,000, she said.

Relatives of the murdered Israeli athletes reacted with horror to the news of the fee for a murderer. The spokeswoman for the victims' families, Ankie Spitzer, whose husband André was tied up in the helicopter and presumably shot by Mohamed Safady, told FOCUS: "For me, it's a media scandal on the part of ARD that killers are paid money for their inhuman statements."

[Skybird]

FOCUS writes:
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Panic is spreading in parts of the German economy due to the rapid rise in gas and electricity prices. In view of the further round of price increases expected by the beginning of next year, both companies and their industry associations fear that production in Germany could become permanently unprofitable. The Munich-based Ifo Institute expects that the development of energy prices will lead to increased investment abroad.

"At first glance, the cost share for energy is not that high," says Ifo economist Oliver Falck. The share of energy costs in gross production value is 0.5 percent in the automotive sector, 0.8 percent in mechanical engineering and 3.1 percent in chemicals.

"Nevertheless, a sharp rise in energy prices can affect the competitiveness of those industries in particular that face tough international competition and already realize relatively low sales margins due to competition." Falck expects "temporary production stoppages and the relocation of particularly energy-intensive production steps abroad."

According to Falck, energy-intensive production is also very capital-intensive - in other words, expensive. Relocations are not readily possible, he said. "However, we will probably see relocations abroad in new investments." At the VDMA mechanical engineering association, a spokesman says, "Companies won't make such an important decision solely because of energy prices, but sharply rising energy prices can of course tip the scales in individual cases."

Because of high energy prices, the president of the Association of German Chambers of Industry and Commerce, Peter Adrian, also warns of numerous insolvencies in the coming months. "If energy prices do not drop significantly, the lights will go out in tens of thousands of companies in this country in six months at the latest," he told the "Rheinische Post" (Friday). This would threaten a loss of prosperity of incomprehensible proportions. In addition, gas prices in Germany are about ten times as high as in the USA.

How immense the energy demand of the most energy-intensive companies is can be seen from the data of the Federal Statistical Office. The city of Ludwigshafen, with a population of just 171,000, has the highest gas consumption in all of Germany. This is because the city on the Rhine is home to BASF's main plant.

BASF does not provide figures for Ludwigshafen alone, but energy costs for the European sites combined were €800 million higher in the second quarter than a year earlier, according to the chemical company. Compared with the second quarter of 2020, the additional costs of energy supply thus amounted to one billion euros.

A consequential damage of the high energy prices: Domestic supply chains have long since been disrupted, and supply problems are no longer confined to Chinese imports. "We have received numerous responses from member associations reporting production cutbacks by member companies due to the massive rise in energy prices," says Bertram Brossardt, the CEO of the Bavarian Business Association (vbw).

BASF has greatly reduced its ammonia production, and the production of acetylene, a basic material for many plastics, textiles or even solvents, is also not running at full capacity. According to a BASF spokesman, demand has declined because some acetylene downstream products cannot be produced competitively at present.

"The cost of electricity, oil and gas accounts for about 12 percent of production costs in the chemical industry," said Wolfgang Große Entrup, chief executive of the industry association VCI. "In basic chemicals, the share is even higher at around 16 percent. For individual chemicals, for example ammonia or chlorine, the share is even more than 70 percent."

Chemical products are needed to manufacture almost all industrial products. "In the third quarter, energy costs in the chemical industry were almost 150 percent above the previous year's level," says Große Entrup. Within two years, the industry's energy costs have more than quadrupled, he said. Prices for many precursors have also risen by triple digits since 2020, he said.

Distressed entrepreneurs see the situation even more dramatically than economists. The biggest cost problem for many industrial SMEs is not natural gas, but electricity. For years, some companies bought electricity on the spot market because prices there were cheaper than long-term supply contracts.

Spot prices have multiplied, but many companies with long-term supply contracts are now also facing immense electricity price increases. At the end of the year, contracts will expire in many places. Many companies used to pay less than ten cents per kilowatt hour, but now they are facing prices of around 40 cents, according to Andrea Thoma-Böck, managing director of the family-owned company Thoma Metallveredelung in Heimertingen.

"Very few companies will still be in the fortunate position of being covered in 2023," says the entrepreneur. "The rest are waking up to this new pricing world that no company can handle." Some companies can't find anyone else willing to sell them electricity. "To make matters worse, many companies are being denied an electricity contract," Thoma-Böck says.

The automotive industry association VDA surveyed 103 suppliers as well as bus, trailer and body manufacturers in September; ten percent reported restrictions on production. Once the high electricity prices take full effect, vbw CEO Brossardt expects production to become unprofitable in many companies. "The companies won't be able to hold out for long. This doesn't just affect energy-intensive businesses, but the breadth of the economy." Companies are also plagued by uncertainty as to how the gas price cap will be structured.

A more or less creeping exodus of German industry was already taking place before the Corona crisis. According to the Federal Statistical Office, the share of "goods of foreign origin" in German exports has risen steadily, from just under 10 percent in 1990 to 24.5 percent last year. This indirectly shows how massively German industry invested in foreign production.
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Oly the Greens will be happy. They wanted this since their founding days in the early 80s. Because they have until today not understood that without economic production there will be no wealth anymore to plunder that they can redistribute to their clients and that of the left parties. All world shall become a Hobbit village! Well, utopia is near. Rejoice!

[mapuc]

The German rail operator blamed cable sabotage for a major train disruption and said security authorities had taken over the investigation. It had earlier reported that the "technical fault" had been repaired.

https://www.dw.com/en/sabotage-cause...ays/a-63377385

Markus

[Skybird]

The wirecutting demanded technical insider knowledge. Two sabotage attacks in two places, hundreds of kilometers apart. Train traffic was down across all Northern Germany, and still is affected.

And a huge fire in a subway station in Cologne the same day.

Makes you think.

[Jimbuna]

Originally Posted by Skybird

The wirecutting demanded technical insider knowledge. Two sabotage attacks in two places, hundreds of kilometers apart. Train traffic was down across all Northern Germany, and still is affected.

And a huge fire in a subway station in Cologne the same day.

Makes you think.

Gets me to thinking about all those underwater cables the West is so reliant on

[Skybird]

The AdG writes on the indulstrial implosion of Germany:
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The de-industrialization continues. RWE is providing election campaign support for the Greens and at the same time is leaving the German countryside. The next domino to possibly fall is the chemical industry in eastern Germany.

The deviation of global temperature from the 30-year average of satellite-based measurements by the University of Alabama (UAH) fell slightly in September 2022 compared to August, from 0.28 degrees to 0.24 degrees Celsius. The average temperature increase per decade since 1979 has been about 0.13 degrees Celsius, a trend of little concern.

Minister Habeck does not care about the real modest temperature development. He began his press conference on the early coal phase-out in the Rhenish coalfield on Oct. 4, 2022 with the dramatic words : "The structural crisis of our time - that is without question global warming, driven by the burning of fossil fuels."

At a time when politicians are asking people to prepare for power cuts lasting longer than 72 hours, at a time when rows and rows of businesses are shutting down production because of excessively high electricity prices, at a time when electricity and gas bills are becoming unaffordable for many families, the Minister of Economics is wielding the big club of fear over a climate development that is not covered by reality (see linked chart above). But he needs the backdrop of fear because he now realizes that his energy policy of a double phase-out of nuclear energy and coal is a fire hazard for the country and its people. And so he has to reluctantly "green" the temporary return to coal-fired power generation with the promise: to return to coal by March 2024 and then to exit coal again all the more quickly.

12 coal plants with 7 GW are to be brought out of reserve or not shut down to compensate for the closure of the last 3 nuclear plants (4.5 GW) and to replace gas plants to a small extent. These coal-fired power plants are to continue running until March 2024. And what comes then ?

In order to help the ailing Economics Minister with regard to the associated additional CO2 emissions, RWE boss Markus Krebber and the CDU/Green state government of North Rhine-Westphalia jumped to his side. They had agreed to bring forward the lignite phase-out, which was planned for 2038, by 8 years to 2030 and to shut down 3000 MW of lignite-fired power plants as early as 2030. Krebber's campaign support for the Greens, whose approval ratings are in a tailspin ahead of the Lower Saxony elections on October 9, is being carried out on the backs of the 5,500 miners in the Rhineland coalfield whose jobs will be cut in 2030.

Krebber treats the workers as a plaything: first, hundreds are called out of early retirement to continue operating the Neurath and D and E lignite-fired power plants until 2024, after which thousands of jobs will be lost. This doesn't even include those jobs that get into trouble as suppliers for the power plants or buyers of cheap lignite-based electricity. This is because the abandonment of lignite will have to be replaced by more expensive power plants, which, however, would first have to be built. And every energy expert wonders how the lost electricity will be replaced.

Here, too, the helpful RWE CEO Krebber distributes politically oriented tranquilizer pills: gas-fired power plants are to be built, which can be converted to hydrogen as quickly as possible. Krebber himself realizes that this is completely uneconomical : "It seems strange to plan new gas power plants in the middle of the biggest gas crisis". But he knows the counter deal of the federal government for its well-meaning chairman of the board. He says the federal government will "create a framework to enable investment in these plants," in other words, to support RWE with permanent subsidies from tax revenues. Krebber:" RWE will participate in this tender. I assume that a large part, if not all, will be provided by RWE."

RWE is getting out of the way : 5.9 GW of lignite will be closed in the Rhenish coalfield by 2030. As possible compensation, investments in 1 GW of unreliable renewables and 3 GW of taxpayer-subsidized gas-fired power plants are announced. The latter are to be fed 50 percent by hydrogen from 2030 and completely by hydrogen from 2035.

But it is completely illusory to provide these quantities of hydrogen for hydrogen-ready gas-fired power plants by 2030. The steel industry alone needs 2 million t of hydrogen to convert 25 million t of pig iron production in the blast furnace with hydrogen. To produce just this amount of hydrogen, about 110 TWh of renewable electricity is needed. This is equivalent to today's entire onshore wind power production, not to mention the power for e-mobility, heat pumps, the chemical industry, air and truck traffic. Krebber's promise turns out to be the same cloud pushing we know from Economics Minister Habeck.

There will be no hydrogen for power plants and it will be unaffordable. We don't yet know how it will be transported or how it will be stored. The first small experimental turbine from Kawasaki is to be tested in 2024. But the reason given today is that RWE is on track to meet the 1.5 degree target of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In reality one wants to conceal one thing: RWE is looking the other way. RWE is no longer interested in what happens to Germany as a business location. Instead of fighting for green coal-fired power plants with CO2 capture in Germany, it wants to make two-thirds of its investments by 2030, about 25 billion euros abroad. Parallel to the press conference with Minister Habeck, it was announced that RWE is acquiring the U.S. solar and wind power company Con Edison Clean Energy Businesses for $6.8 billion.

If the miners in the opencast mines had hoped that their union would fight for a future for lignite, for example through further development into green lignite with CO2 capture, they were disabused. IGBCE Chairman Michael Vassiliadis merely pointed out that there must be no deviation from the promised state adjustment payments and early retirement pensions. In any case, no more resistance was to be expected from the SPD in North Rhine-Westphalia. The state party has long had nothing to do with industrial jobs in the Rhine region. That's why it is losing the support of skilled workers, engineers, workers in the trades and in industry.

Only the eastern state premiers did not allow themselves to be infected by the exit orgy from the only significant domestic energy source in the middle of the deepest energy crisis Germany has ever experienced. According to Minister President Reiner Haseloff, a phase-out before 2038 would "permanently weaken" Germany as an industrial location. "There will be an energy gap that we will not be able to close." The Minister President of Brandenburg, Dietmar Woidke, also reacted negatively: "The security of energy supply is now paramount. Our Lusatian lignite makes an indispensable contribution here."

Neither state premier was impressed by the impertinent, anti-employee and anti-industry slogans of Michael Kellner, State Secretary in the Ministry of Economics. Kellner, who was the federal political director of the Greens from 2013 to 2021, had demanded: "Now it's time to aim for the 2030 phase-out target in eastern Germany as well. It would be fatal if economic future opportunities were squandered in eastern Germany because the state premiers of the SPD and CDU want to hold on to dirty coal."

But Kellner is an ideological politruk who puts the party line ahead of the country's interests. He could have read up on worldwide efforts to capture CO2 from combustion processes, as the Schwarze Pumpe coal-fired power plant in Lusatia developed 10 years ago. It is not the next stage of technical development of the CO2-free coal-fired power plant that counts, but the stupid prejudice of "dirty coal" cultivated at party conferences. CO2 capture, as it is now practiced in Norway, the USA and Canada, would reduce CO2 emissions faster and more cost-effectively than Habeck's and Krebber's phantoms of hydrogen power plants.

In the East, the danger associated with the lignite phase-out is being felt. The consequences of the oil boycott of the Druzhba pipeline are already being felt there. At the Leuna chemical park, production has been cut in half. In Schwedt, people fear for their future. The German Economics Minister's hope of having crude oil delivered via the port of Gdansk has not yet been realized because the Polish government is opposed to supplying the refinery as long as Russia's Rosneft has a stake in the refinery. It is not enough for the Polish government to place the refinery under the trusteeship of the Federal Network Agency. It is demanding expropriation.

When Schwedt and Leuna shut down, the entire East German chemical processing industry topples over, with domino effects from electrical engineering to mechanical engineering. The construction industry is also hit.100 percent of bitumen and asphalt in eastern Germany comes from Schwedt.

In a situation where industrial jobs are threatened by scarce and overly expensive energy sources such as gas, oil and electricity, further shutdowns must not be allowed to take place; instead, the energy supply must be expanded. This means producing our own natural gas, CO2-reduced lignite and nuclear energy. Instead, the German government is trying to buffer prices with ever new bailouts via government debt. That won't work for long.

https://www.achgut.com/artikel/rwe_w...nd_nix_wie_weg
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Its no longer just bored discussion to kill time, or grim joking, but reality materialising all around me. I see it everywhere now in my everyday life experience how this country is abolishing itself, destroys its economic and financial space and freedom to act - but all the time making bigger and bigger words and claimign to serve as an exmaple for the world.


Yes, an exmaple. For how, at no cost, not to run a country as long as you do not wish to see it committing suicide.



This is a journey down the spiral from which there is no more escape possible. Germany's fate is sealed.

[Skybird]

Google Webpage Translator does not work for me, possibly due to some tight browswer settings of mine or security addons activated, I dont know. But maybe the link works for others.

ENG:
https://www-focus-de.translate.goog/..._x_tr_pto=wapp

GER:
https://www.focus.de/finanzen/news/g...161645829.html