I am a Germanophile. There is not much about Germany I do not admire. When I first lived in Germany (Berlin, 1970-75), I was young, inexperienced and busy; my goal was to have a good time. The second time I lived in Germany (Rheinland-Pfalz, 1978-82), married with children, my goals were to be a good father and officer. Those struggles no longer constrain me. I have time. My goal now is to write good novels. But truth is conditional. Great dreams distort, nicht wahr? So, Fair warning. This is a self-teaching blog.
This spring and summer in Germany I quietly assess those other times, my own and those of the landscape. I am writing two more novels (well, writing one and planning one) which are probably more ambitious than what I am capable of (sigh). These blogs are often vehicles with which I fashion small concepts, and will later somehow use as blocks to the larger edifice. I imagine my high school friends––Linda, Denise, Jim, Tom, John, Carole and Jack––looking over my shoulder. They are not unkind, but, since they are high schoolers, are judgmental, though in the kindest way they know how.
We are in Germany (what dates in Illmensee?). Germany’s long history featured brilliant and artistic people striving to create beauty, achieve solutions, and realize great dreams; Schiller, Schubert, and Beethoven (but note the PR acumen of the Viennese who claim Hitler is German, but Beethoven is Viennese). So, sublime artists and blood-drenched murderers.
In a recenr post, I described the Ehrendenkmalen dotting the German landscape. Nowadays, other monuments dot this landscape, monuments to a great German energy transition, the Energiewende, a massive undertaking and a massive gamble, a single toss of the dice, to replace fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas) with wind- and sun-sourced energy.
The Germany energy transformation is massive, expensive, hopeful, and sliding towards disaster. The cost of energy is brutal. There are woodpiles everywhere as German households seek relief from the brutal heating and lighting costs.
It brings to my mind at least two other massive 20th-century German nation gambles, where everything was played on one toss of the dice, which were WWI and WWII. Somewhere else and at some other time, we military historians can chew over that single command mistake in August 1914 and in July 1941, which, had it been played differently, would have won it for the German Army. Both times it was played wrong, and twice the German nation went up in flames. It’s not looking all that good this time.
The Energiewende displays a particular German hubris; the nation underestimates its mastery of the unknown. The storage battery does not exist. There is no way to store the surfeit of power produced when the sun shines and the winds blow. The wind and the sun are intermittent; Last January and February, Germany was overcast and still; the windmills did not turn and the solar panels were quiescent. Nuclear and coal for different reasons will not serve as the “battery”; Germany is turning off its nuclear power; The German ‘Greens’ oppose drilling for natural gas (i.e. fracking) which would be the Energiewende’s natural battery.
The Red Kite, or Rosmarin. Windmills particularly endanger raptors , thus pausing windmill construction where they concentrate.
Vladimir Putin, a Mussolini-wannabe (my friend Jeremi Suri’s writes about it here) who had invested his German gas Euros in Russian Special Forces, which are invading Ukraine while the German Army budget was ravaged to fund the Energiewende, which is collapsing. The Germans now build coal-fired plants while importing coal and wood from North America, watch CO2 emissions shoot through the roof, as the US (because of fracking) is beneficent world “climate change’ good citizen. What’s going on? (See good discussion of German solar energy plan failure here)
(See current high-level German despair over energiewende here)
(See same despair in the German language)
Knowledgeable Germans shake their heads, much, I imagine, as the prescient among their great-grandparents had after the first battle of the Somme or as had their grandparents after the December 1941 Soviet counter-attack at Moscow. Industrialists tout miracle battery solutions as earlier industrialists had touted the V-2 and the jet fighter aircraft solution, as Ludendorff touted the 1918 Spring Offensive using the 50 divisions freed up from victory on the Eastern Front. Alas, the Great Battery remains unavailable as of yet.
I am a Germanophile. I want the Energiewende to succeed, however foolish was this Great Dream. I know a great deal about Camouflage, Concealment and Deception. “What were you thinking,” I exclaim?
I have often shaken my own head at how effective CC&D is. I have been fooled often enough myself. There is a great deal of camouflage, concealment and deception in Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming. Clearly, I am skeptical. Clearly, I understand how invidious CC&D can be and how we can be deceived. However, it’s tough to explain; my intent is to use one to illuminate the other. We’ll see how it goes.