Preliminary figures show that Germany’s CO2 emissions for 2012 increased 1.5% – due to a cold winter and higher consumption of coal for producing electricity, writes Germany’s FOCUS magazine here.
Environment Minister Peter Altmaier says Germany’s CO2 emissions are rising, and his country’s renewable energy transition will cost 1 trillion euros by 2039. Photo credit: Peter Altmaier, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
The final figures are still not in, and FOCUS writes that they may be as high as 2% more CO2. German Federal Environment Minister Peter Altmaier commented, “We must not be indifferent about this because it puts the fulfilment of our climate targets at risk.“ Germany has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 27% since 1990. But it is rarely mentioned that most of those reductions resulted from the shutdown of dilapidated, filthy, communist East German industry after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The jump of 2012 will surely make reaching the 40% reduction target by 2020 more difficult, if not all but impossible. Currently the EU is seriously contemplating an intervention in the CO2 permit trading to increase the price and thus produce an incentive for companies to save energy (or to move offshore).
Worst, Peter Altmaier is quoted in the flagship daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung here saying that Germany’s transition to renewable energy may end up costing a stunningly spectacular one trillion euros by 2039. The FAZ writes:
For the first time Environment Minister Peter Altmaier speaks publicly about the total costs of the transition to renewable energy: 1000 billion euros. That’s reason enough for the CDU party politician to pull the ‘electric power brake’.”
But as Altmaier admits, “pulling the brakes” is only going to reduce the bill by a fraction. Altmaier tells the FAZ:
That would mean that we would save 200 billion in feed-in subsidies over 20 years.”
Altmaier expects an additional 100 billion euros in savings from reduced energy back-up systems. So instead of costing 1000 billion euros, Germans are going to end up paying 700 billion euros. For what? Answer: Read here! (That is, of course, if the AGW theory is correct. So far the climate has been cooling, meaning Germany’s foray into green energy will be it’s latest super folly to follow WWI and WWII).
As was the case in last century’s kook-driven movements, there are powerful kook-forces behind Germany’s current green revolution, and Altmaier’s attempts to rein it all in faces fierce opposition. Once again it looks as if another historical, violent cardiac arrest is in the works for the heart of Europe.
Here is their choice:
Restart and build more nuclear plants, OR
Accept a lower standard of living and rising deaths from cold-related illness.
There are no other choices.
Nuclear power in Germany is like holy water to the devil. Forget new nuclear power plants in Germany..at least not for another 100 or 200 years.
Then it’s choice number 2 until they look like Bulgaria, or Greece, or Zimbabwe, with cold. It will not take hundred years for them to change their minds. I give them five.
Maybe earlier if everyone is freezing and sitting in the dark.
We can wait for the first rolling black out in an European country and to make it worse in a cold winter.
The UK Mail Online in 2011: Wind farms don’t work in the cold
“Britain’s wind farms almost ground to a halt during the coldest spells in December, it has emerged.”
I pulled out the data of an Irish provider of wind energy.
December 2012 varied from 12MW to 1230MW and the average was 294MW.
There is a period of 8 days where the output is well below 400 MW from the installed wind energy of over 1500MW.
How much redundancy is required to cover the worst case scenario?
Be afraid be very afraid.
“Die Zeit” wonders where Altmaier got his trillion from. Last year 20bn EUR in subsidies were paid, the year before that 16bn. So a trillion til 2039 sounds rather reasonable; as we still have exponential growth – which will go into saturation somewhere along the way.
Here’s Die Zeit. For them, the subsidies in the form of the FIT tariff are simply non-existent. Really.
http://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2013-02/altmaier-kosten-energiewende
(Now one could say subsidies are just money going from a ratepayer to the owner of a PV panel. But the owner of the PV panel will make a profit only after about 12 years. Most of the money he gets pays for his renewable energy contraption – ergo cost.)
Zeit’s Uken asks what’s the cost of doing nothing. Her stupidity and gullibility remind of something Churcill once said about appeasing, and getting war anyway.
With climate change we have the following choice: 1) We can do nothing, save a trillion, and get climate change. Or: 2) we can piss away a trillion, and get climate change anyway: http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/germany-s-sunshine-daydream
Personally I’ve been waiting 15 years for climate change. Where is it?
Oh. Lomborg at Soros. The guy knows no shame.
High energy prices in Germany, high taxes in France and UK, high debt in Italy and Spain, the governments of Europe’s big economies are creating more problems than solutions. AGW is a global project though in cahoots with the UN, Al Gore, WWF, etc. As Vaclav Klaus said, the goal is global ecological central planning, and the high priests of AGW are the central planners. And many poorer countries in Asia like the Philippines are still following the AGW religion and the renewable energy subsidies like what you have in Germany.
Where does Germany get this special form of carbon dioxide that’s supposed to warm? All I can deduce with valid physics is that all the carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere reduces the surface temperature at radiative equilibrium by about 0.1 degree.
I still find amazing, that trillions are planned to be spent without any measurable effect. Except of dubious high moral ground and “we have to decrease” meme, there is nothing else. Well, good business for some part of industries (mainly chinese nowadays) and increased power for the politicians planning “common good”.
Through meticulous usage of their brains, conservative Die Welt has found out what social-democrat (and Bilderberger) Die Zeit would not believe: Altmaier’s trillion Euros are plausible.
http://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/energie/article113852984/Peter-Altmaiers-1-000-000-000-000-Euro-Schock.html
The article has a nice list of whom you can’t trust – Jürgen Trittin (Grüne), SPD, DIW (“German Institute for Economy” – they are arch-green), for instance.
[…] since 2006, the largest drop among major industrial states on the planet. German emissions were up at least 1.5% last year, and probably more like 2%. Mention this to a German “Green,” and […]