Germany awakens from a dream: The rude awakening came with the rolling of Russian tanks in the Ukraine. The energy crisis in Germany is increasingly reminiscent of a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm.
The story is old and has many versions. In the 200-year-old fairy tale version by the Brothers Grimm, the story revolves around a goatherd named Karl Katz from the Harz Mountains in central Germany. One night, an escaped goat leads Katz deep into a cave. Once there, he is seduced by strange men into a potion and falls into a deep sleep. When he wakes up, he finds that years, not hours, have passed. The world around him has changed.
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Many people in Germany today share the feeling of bewilderment with which Katz woke up. A few years earlier, the richest country in Europe fell into a state that, while not reminiscent of sleep, was reminiscent of sleepwalking. Lulled by its own economic and diplomatic successes, newly reunited Germany accustomed itself to the comfortable belief that its system worked almost perfectly. What was once pragmatism in government policy was soon replaced by self-deception: politicians ensnared voters with heady talk about everlasting prosperity with minimal friction and zero emissions.
Germany is finding that the sudden need for weapons and soldiers – including American ones – no longer goes hand in hand with an era of peaceful cooperation. And it turns out that German prosperity does not only come about through the fairy tale of German diligence, but also through the import of cheap energy and workers. The “nice” Vladimir Putin and his beautifully wrapped natural gas gift naturally turn out to be a wolf.
In other words, years of complacency have left Germany in a predicament. But although the state recognizes the scope of its dilemma and the immense challenge of changing course, German debates about its own situation remain strangely narrow-minded and lack any urgency. This is all the more strange in a country that prides itself on its democratic openness but offers no explanation for the current imbalance. Well-known public figures have rightly been criticized for their rosy view of Russia. However, the systematic deception by Putin, like the willful blinding of Germany, has hardly been investigated. Nobody seems to want to talk about what’s going on “in the cave”.
When the Japanese nuclear reactors in Fukushima were hit by a tsunami in 2011, the government under then Chancellor Angela Merkel reacted by halving Germany’s nuclear power capacity practically overnight. The last three power plants should be shut down in December 2022 – a goal that is only now being called into question given the impending power shortage. A compromise is now being discussed that reveals the strange lethargy in German politics. Accordingly, the Greens should give up their persistent adherence to the nuclear phase-out if their liberal coalition partners drop all objections to a speed limit on the motorways in return.
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Germany, however, scored what is probably the most serious own goal with its own natural gas industry. The Germans are less fortunate than their Dutch neighbors, whose vast Groningen field is not just a bike ride from the border but has produced €490 billion worth of natural gas since 1959 (which The Economist credited in 1977 for coining the technical term ‘Dutch Disease” inspired). Germany’s own reserves are by no means insignificant. Around the turn of the millennium, the country supplied almost a quarter of Germany’s demand with an annual production volume of 20 billion cubic meters of natural gas. Geologists assume that Germany has at least 800 billion cubic meters of recoverable gas. Instead of increasing, however, gas production has fallen to little more than 5-6 billion cubic meters – a volume of only 10% of Russian imports.
Triggers for public concerns are not far to look for. In 2008, the large US oil company Exxon proposed expanding fracking at a site in northern Germany. While environmentalists protested vehemently, the up-and-coming Green Party got involved. As did the pro-Kremlin broadcaster Russia Today, which blamed fracking for radiation, birth defects, hormonal imbalances, the release of massive amounts of methane and toxic waste, and the poisoning of fish stocks. None other than Putin himself explained before an international conference that fracking causes black slime from the tap.
The Germans seem to like fairy tales. “At some point we gave up trying to explain to people that fracking is absolutely safe,” says Hans-Joachim Kümpel, former president of the federal government’s most important advisory body for geosciences. “You can’t really blame those who don’t understand the geology of the subsurface for hearing only horror stories.”
According to German gas producers, today’s greener and safer new fracking methods have the potential to double production in just 18-24 months. Germany could still produce natural gas on this scale well into the next century. This would reduce import costs by around 12 billion euros per year. And this is not a fairy tale.
The article first appeared in The Economist under the title “Germans have been living in a dream” and was translated by Cornelia Zink.
Originally posted by The Economist, “‘Big-Minded, Complacent’: The Economist Gets Squads With Our Energy Policies.”