Germany’s Vice Chancellor Starts To Get It…Gravely Warns Germany, Europe “Threatened By High Energy Costs”

GabrielA miracle may be taking place in Germany! A wave of sanity actually seems to rolling across the land!

Yesterday I wrote how ZDF German television had produced a blistering parody of the country’s renewable energy project – dubbed the Energiewende. Well it seems that message may be even getting through to the country’s top politicians after all. It may be sinking in, really!

At Facebook Germany’s Sigmar Gabriel, Chairman of the socialist SPD Party and Vice Chancellor of Angela Merkel’s CDU/CSU-SPD grand coalition government, issued a statement at Facebook announcing that Europe’s industrial competitiveness is indeed in jeopardy because of Germany’s and Europe’s sky high energy prices.

At Facebook he writes (original text above, right):

Germany and all of Europe are facing a huge challenge. The price of electricity in Germany is twice as high as it is in the USA. If we fail to at least provide some relief to our industry, then we are threatened with deindustrialization. This isn’t just crude propaganda from business, but rather it is bitter reality. Indeed here in Europe we have to think about how to reduce the state-induced burdens. I know how difficult this is.

However what a few years ago were high wage and social costs are today the rising energy and raw materials costs. They threaten the competitiveness of the German and European industry. And if we don’t maintain this basis for our economy, then we will neither be able to keep renewable energies nor our social and cultural standard in our country.”

This is a stunningly direct and sober statement for a politician of Gabriel’s caliber. Vice Chancellor Gabriel also serves as the economics minster in Angela Merkel’s government. His latest statement signals that the emergency brakes are about to be pulled on renewable energies. They are simply no longer affordable and are putting the country’s economic backbone at risk.

As economics minister, we suspect he has been getting an earful from industry bosses and from Hannelore Kraft, the SPD minister president of Germany’s heavily populated industrial heartland, North Rhine Westphalia.

This is an impressive turnaround for a person who in 2007, as the country’s environment minister, was so impressed by Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth that his Ministry snapped up 6000 copies and had them distributed to the nation’s upper secondary schools so that Gore’s shockumentary would be viewed by the nation’s future academics.

My how things can change.

 

20 responses to “Germany’s Vice Chancellor Starts To Get It…Gravely Warns Germany, Europe “Threatened By High Energy Costs””

  1. DirkH

    As I predicted. Criticism in ZDF means Energiewende is fair game. Planned from the top.

    Data:
    Wind produces 4% of current German primary energy consumption;
    Solar produces 2.4%.
    Biofuel might even be the most useful of the renewables as it at least delivers liquid fuel instead of an intermittent electricity supply.

    Project Energiewende gets jettisoned under pressure from
    a) Euro (the currency) crisis – meaning the collapse of the PIIGS
    b) EU (lack of) democracy crisis (coughLisbonTreatycough)
    c) NATO+CIA caused crisis in Ukraine (Gene Sharp, OTPOR a.k.a. CANVAS, Color revolution; NATO Putsch against a democratically elected president – cleptocrat or not)

    Now, Merkel+Gabriel, make my day and send Schellnhuber and Rahmstorff to break rocks in a quarry…

    All of this is of course timed for the (mostly meaningless) EU parliament election.

  2. oebele bruinsma

    I see, the start of another “Energiewende”?

  3. Stephen Richards

    Dirk you are more cynical than I. You don’t know how remarkable that is. :))

    1. DirkH

      There is a strong connection between oil price shocks since 1973, biofuel initiatives to build up fuel security, (at least for crisis alleviation) and the Global Warming hoax is the facade to sell it to the public.
      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqCJKpJevZ4&feature=player_embedded

  4. Stephen Richards

    I have to say that I didn’t think the ZDF article was anything exceptional because the MSM everywhere is more than capable of wiggling past any problems such as that but this note from the SPD of all people is remarkable.

  5. Graeme No.3

    I am reminded of a frightened squid which shoots backwards leaving a cloud of black ink to obscure its change of direction. But I cannot see any cloud here, but have they moved too quickly for the public perception?

  6. John F. Hultquist

    There is a phrase “It’s a little late to shut the door after the horse has left the barn.”

    From here, it appears that Germans will be suffering a long time for the Energiewende.

    It is sad but this mess was predicted. However, the US government is still on the belief part of the curve so the next president and congress can deal with these issues.

  7. Ove E. Lilljequist

    Why do I get a reply from your provider that your website is closed down?

    Ove E. Lilljequist

  8. Pointman

    My, how times change. It all looked a bit bleak around the time of Copenhagen.

    Pointman

  9. G. Watkins

    You must be proud, Pierre, to have played a part in lifting the veil from some political eyes. Well done and keep going, there is still a very long road ahead although Vlad. may be the best friend of the energy realists if he switches of the gas.

    1. Jimbo

      Is this the beginning of the end? This was always inevitable. Reality is like that.

  10. Stephen Richards

    Ove E. Lilljequist 14. März 2014 at 09:18 | Permalink | Reply Why do I get a reply from your provider that your website is closed down?

    Ove E. Lilljequist –

    Ove, I had the same problem with IE. I reset the internet options and it righted itself. Pierre’s was the only site affected so I do not understand the reason but it worked.

  11. Bernd Felsche

    Perhaps this is just part of political posturing with in the coalition, with the SPD finding a foothold in its traditional territory and finally responding to the need for workers to have productive jobs.

    1. DirkH

      Don’t kid yourself. SPD is dying; proletarians extinct; their strategy is to become the party of the migrants.

  12. thebiggreenlie

    Well, that didn’t take long……………what?……..ten years?…………..

    1. DirkH

      15 years. FIT law was created 1999. Took a while to grow to really damaging proportions; exponentials are like that.

  13. Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup | Watts Up With That?

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