Environ-mentalism

Don't let's be beastly to the Germans

In 2020, the author and commentator John Kampfner published his book “Why the Germans do it better: Notes from a Grown Up Country”. Amazon tells me it was rated as book of the year in the Guardian, New Statesman and Economist, and longlisted for the Orwell Prize. At that time, Germany was obtaining 24% of its electricity from coal, but 15% from nuclear. Since then, the coal share has actually gone up, while nuclear has dropped to zero. As coal is pretty much the dirtiest way to obtain electricity there is and nuclear is one of the cleanest, this doesn’t seem very grown up to me.

Just to bear this out with a few charts from the indispensible Our World in Data:

1. Coal is much worse than nuclear, both in terms of carbon emissions and in terms of deaths (even taking into account Fukushima and Chernobyl)

   

2. The phasing out of nuclear has led to an increase in the coal share in Germany, and coal has always been ahead of the greener natural gas.

   

3. In contrast, the UK has seen a huge drop in coal over the same period, with wind picking up a lot of the slack and a consistently greater reliance on gas.

And yet, there’s far too little coverage of this in the media, and so people in the UK allow ourselves to believe that we’re some kind of uniquely terrible environmental pariah, rather than one of the leading lights of decarbonising the grid.

Some of this is just a branding issue, I think. While not all the coverage is on the level of cultural cringe displayed by Kampfner, it feels like there’s a general theme. Germany is all high-tech engineering and David Bowie writing Heroes. Britain (or rather England) is inward-facing, gammon and Brexit. Ignore the fact that the Mercedes F1 team (like most of the rest of that high-precision engineering sector) works out of the English Midlands. Nobody mention the AfD’s polling numbers or the international university rankings.

This imbalance is not helped by the far-too-common scientific ignorance displayed by journalists either. Take for example this Reuters report which tells us that:

The smoking towers of Isar II, Emsland and Neckarwestheim II reactors were to shut forever by midnight on Saturday as Berlin enacts its plan for fully-renewable electricity generation by 2035.

The fact that article has been up for over a year, and nobody’s bothered to notice that the “smoke” is actually steam doesn’t bode well for even a GCSE level of science knowledge from the people writing, editing and reading the article.

But closing the nuclear plants is one thing. Now Germany has gone even further, by blowing up their cooling towers. As an act of salting the earth, it bakes in bad policy decisions for many more years into the future. I can’t help but be reminded of the Kuwaiti oil fires, except this is an act of self-sabotage caused and celebrated by smug Green politicians pretending to be environmentalists.

I’ve had very public doubts about whether Labour’s plans to decarbonise the grid by 2030 are feasible. But whatever the doubts about the future rate of travel, Britons should all be proud of our efforts in halving emissions per unit of electricity from 2010 to 2017, and (with the current 2024 average being 120g/kWh) of being on course to have halved them again since 2017.

Certainly, compared with our neighbours, the UK has a lot to be proud of in this respect. I can’t think of a better comparison that the sight of Germany blowing up nuclear cooling towers, while our last coal-fired station will close next month.

Update on a few things: you’ll be unsurprised to hear that I’ve not had any response from ISAGE about the mathematical errors I believe I identified in their work. The fears in my piece about the potentially bad effect of Twitter paying money to the people with most strident opinions were confirmed by reports that convicted rioters were being paid £1,400/month by Elon Musk. There was a nice Substack article by

Ben Ansell

about the Republican campaign being far too online, so I was pleased I spotted this trend back in February.

I hope everything is good with all of you, have a nice weekend.