eugyppius on the transition: Part 1

On nuclear, narrative transformation and climate activism

eugyppius is one of the biggest stars on Substack. In itself, this means little in this day and age but in his case the reputation is genuinely well deserved. In a cacophony of mis-and dis-information, runaway emotions, and eagerly nurtured mental problems, eugyppius is a rare voice of sanity and reason, not only on energy topics. Yet because of my regrettable fixation on energy topics, it was these that I asked him about. Enjoy.

You can also find him on X here.

1. Germany shut down its last three nuclear power plants amid an energy crunch and against the will of over 50% of Germans. The sane part of the world wants to know why. Seriously, why?

The short answer is that the Greens are in government, and they are an anti-nuclear party even more than they are an anti-emissions party. Robert Habeck, the Green Economics Minister, responded to the energy crisis by reactivating coal plants, running around the world signing LNG contracts, and generally doing things to keep the lights on, which also of course angered the irrational Green base.

He and the rest of the party needed to deliver their constituents something, and following through with the final stage of the nuclear phase-out set in motion under Angela Merkel was that something.

Phobia of nuclear power is a cultural phenomenon in Germany that extends well beyond Green voters, with origins in Chernobyl. Massively influential at a cultural level, because it is a routine element of school curricula, is a 1987 novel by Gudrun Pausewang called Die Wolke ('The Cloud').

It's a histrionic story about a Chernobyl-like disaster in West Germany, and every last German has been made to read it at some point in his life. This and associated propaganda, via media and the educational system, have shaped the opinions of a whole generation of Germans, and the resulting sentiments are a big reason that Greens are so strong here. Like many naive, quasi-religious, childish beliefs, these are remarkably resistant to practical concerns and I don't see much prospect of changing them. 

2. Wind and solar are being hailed as a perfectly good replacement for oil and gas (and coal), and yet RWE recently started dismantling a wind farm to expand a coal mine. Russian pipeline gas is being replaced with LNG (including from Russia) in spite of loud assurances gas is on its way out because there’s wind and solar. How do you explain this cognitive dissonance?

Well, it is the same story we see everywhere: You can build out renewables to a certain point; it's easy at first. Then you hit a ceiling, where various problems – above all grid-management issues arising from intermittency – make further expansion very hard. Germany had long been approaching that point, but the energy crisis forced the government to face it more directly and immediately than they had hoped to.

Many press articles hail our substantial increases to installed onshore wind capacity this year, while also noting we're nowhere near on-track for our 2030 150,000 MW goal. If you look at installed renewable capacity over time, it looks very much like we're approaching a ceiling.  

The ideology of the climateers appears to have been formed in the early stages of the transition process, when renewable energy posed relatively soluble problems. We're now watching as this naive vision is confronted with the hard reality of its own limitations and the sudden absence of fossil fuels, which the Greens – if their vision had any substance – should have welcomed.

I have to say, I feel vindicated, as some of my critics insisted the Greens were merely self-destructive lunatics who wanted to burn Germany to the ground. In fact, when they faced the brink of political destruction (which is what unmanaged blackouts would've meant for them), they resorted to a minimally rational energy policy.

Yes, they still wanted to sink nuclear, and they succeeded in that, but they also forgot their phobia of fossil fuels insofar as it was necessary to ensure their political survival. 

The energy transition crew consists of entire institutions which exist entirely to advocate, lobby on behalf of, and publish bullshit science to promote renewable energy, so they can't simply withdraw. I suspect we'll continue to see a widening cleavage between the party orthodoxy and actual energy policy, until something breaks. 

If the Greens are capable of rational thought for the sake of survival could that cleavage you mention gradually lead to a reversal of current policies, impossible as it may seem right now? Could we see a scenario where in a few years they go "Who, us? We never wanted 100% wind and solar"?

The future is very hard to predict, but we already see at least one hint of what might happen. At the last minute, Germany (and some Eastern European countries) negotiated an exception to the EU ban on internal combustion engines in 2035, for cars which can run on synthetic fuels.

There is also the fact that these deadlines are deliberately placed just far enough into the future, that they a) take effect after most currently serving MEPs will no longer be in office, and b) allow present technocrats to gesture to the pervasive parareligious beliefs in technological progress to stand in for solutions to impossible problems. The vision is therefore already outfitted not only with mythological rationalisations, but also with practical and personal escapes.

If you look at the broader history of climate activism, you see it has already progressed through several eras and is actually quite malleable. Early concerns about over-population following the baby boom from the later 1960s gave way to various ecological concerns, with CO2 emissions only becoming the dominant anxiety after the Cold War had ended.

I suspect the ideology will experience further transformations, and may ultimately abandon CO2 in favour of some other metric, like atmospheric methane levels. The early 'population bomb' anxieties succumbed to the increasing third-worldism of many philanthropic enterprises.

Overmuch anxiety about African birth rates reeks of racism and in the coming decades CO2 emissions will increasingly be a product of third-world population, so they may become politically unpalatable for that reason alone. But, as I said, the future is very hard to predict. An alternative scenario is that the political influence of the Greens slowly fades, which would allow them to maintain their carbon radicalism. 

4. Climate activism: Germany looks, from where I stand, which is Eastern Europe, like a hotbed for climate radicals, including in government. Why is that? How did it happen?

I wrote two posts on this matter a while ago:

A vast foreign-funded climate cabal with a death grip on policy is currently fighting hard to crash the Federal Republic of Germany with no survivors, and there is nothing anybody can do about it

More on the Green climate cabal that is currently at war with German industry and society

While there are probably cultural explanations for the predisposition of Germans towards radical environmentalism, the present political insanity arises from specific trends that took root in the long Merkel era.

Specifically, since the early 2010s, a small group of well-funded activists erected an entire "Eco Network" of NGOs, philanthropic organisations, and lobbying outfits in the Federal Republic for the specific purpose of directing policy towards emissions restrictions.

A significant actor in this was the American environmentalist Hal Harvey, who established key operations with funds from the Hewlett Foundation. The specific focus of these efforts was to get Green ideologues into key institutional positions, and they've succeeded in replacing the older guard of market liberals in the civil service.

This new breed of bureaucrats and politicians now have nearly unfettered freedom to write energy policy, and they rotate constantly in and out of private-sector think tanks and lobbying organisations, forming a united front with the Green-friendly state media and street activists like Letzte Generation (who are also, intriguingly, funded in part by the Americans). 

Many conspiracy theories are possible here, but I think the simplest is the most likely: Climate ideologues in the United States want to establish a kind of vanguard of climate policy in Europe, so they can then leverage what remains of Continental cultural prestige in the US to enhance the credibility of these policies at home. Germany, as the dominant industrial power of the EU, was an obvious target, and Germany has acted in turn to spread these policies to its neighbours.