"Russia's decision to halt gas supplies via Europe's key supply route in the wake of the Ukraine conflict has increased the chances of power shortages."
Europe's decision, Germany especially, to be reliant on Russia for energy when they could have not shut down nuclear plants and built more.
This place started to think in memes I feel. Every issue comes with the automated arguments, the same ones every time. If the topic is energy someone must write the "they shouldn't have closed those Nuclear power plants, silly environmentalist".
Anyway, France is full blown nuclear state and they are having energy issues too, because as it turns out nuclear power plants require long regular maintenance periods.
Maybe there's no simple answer for energy issues and countries don't simply build or close down power plants over single issue? Maybe it wasn't done just to please some tree huggers?
Maybe someone in Germany could have had crunched the numbers too and see the risks? Maybe some politicians were too close to fossil fuel money? Maybe it was considered as a way to keep the relationship with Russia profitable for Russia and encourage Russia to build good relationships with their primary customer? Maybe EU wanted to have Russia as a reliable petrostate as an alternative to the USA so they can do their thing without USA? Maybe they wanted to reduce their footing in Africa by not relying for them in Uranium production? Maybe it make more economical sense to use the non-nuclear solutions?
Just maybe it wasn't a single issue decision even if it didn't play out as hoped? Europe is acutely aware of its tight energy situation, that's why they have been regulating the efficiency since decades, it's not coincidence that in Europe everything is very energy efficient. They squeezed it to the point where faster water heaters and more powerful vacuums were presented as Brexit benefits.
The people are fed up with dangerously incompetent leadership, who literally laughed when warned to not be dependent on Russia for energy. It's not a meaningless culture war. The loss of energy means lower standard of living at best and mass death and famine at worst.
The solution is not obvious, it's obvious only to zealots. It's kind of obvious that the solution is in PHV and wind energy but you can fight it to death with people who would claim that it's obvious that the solution is Nuclear energy.
This is not a good discussion, this is fanatics fighting. Anytime someone suggest simple solution to a big problem %99.9 of the time they don't actually have a simple and obvious solution.
The problem of relying on Russia for energy was obvious. There isn't a singular "the solution" because there were many possible solutions, nuclear energy being just one. In addition to investing in wind/solar, there are other solutions besides nuclear. Particularly, fracing and coal mining. Both of these are unpopular for obvious reasons (which is the reason everybody talks about nuclear instead), but I think both are better than the political autonomy of an entire subcontinent being threatened by a belligerent foe.
Put together, 6.5% of gross available energy in the EU was from Russian gas.
It's not so obvious that that is a problematic level of reliance threatening the political autonomy of an entire subcontinent.
If it meant that 6.5% of the population will be left without any energy, that would be quite terrible. If it meant a 6.5% drop in GDP per capita PPP, it would be worse than the drop from 2019 to 2020, but still only throw the EU economy back to 2013 levels.
That doesn't mean it isn't worth planning ahead for the consequences of reduced energy availability, but maybe we don't need to panic, either.
I can see why someone might hear that number and shrug. But given what’s happening to the energy prices, I think those 6.5% are more significant than “1/16th” feels like it ought to be.
Yes, the price increase is larger than the reduction in supply. Nobody wants to reduce their energy use by 6.5%, so everyone is trying to snatch up as much of the shrunk energy pie as possible, bidding up the prices in the process.
But there's a limit to the price war. At some point, a factory making widgets is going to look at price increases that make the cost of producing a widget greater than its expected sale price, at which point they'll probably stop their production lines, unless they feel like setting money on fire to keep them running. Those factory closures then provide for the necessary reduction in energy use. But everyone else still needs to pay the higher prices.
Fortunately, higher energy prices also incentivize increasing supply from alternative sources, so the EU probably won't have to reduce energy use by the full 6.5%. And as long as people setting money on fire are sufficiently rare, it will be energy-intensive, low-profitabilty users who give up first, so the economy likely won't shrink by 6.5% either. But a larger fraction will be captured by energy suppliers as profit.
People laugh at Preppers and call them crazy for taking prudent preparedness steps as insurance against future risks. It's a very human thing to do.
During the early days of COVID, some people started coming around to preppers being not-so-crazy-after-all, which lasted for precisely a few months before the toilet paper returned and preparedness being an acceptable idea left mainstream thought.
Expediency and lifestyle will always trump prudence in the human mind. It's the primary reason we will eventually exterminate ourselves, regardless of the specific existential risk we succumb to. The Great Filter is no great mystery.
> People laugh at Preppers and call them crazy for taking prudent preparedness steps as insurance against future risks. It's a very human thing to do.
I think most of the time people are laughing at preppers on TV. Having an emergency radio, a gun, extra water storage, a back-up generator, etc. - I haven't experience many people who laugh at that, though certainly I imagine someone exists who does. The government publishes info on emergency disaster preparedness kits and other things too.
Due to Earthquakes, California asks that you have at least 3 days of supplies on hand at all times, with 7 days of supplies being prefered and 14 days of supplies being the best. Same thing from my county and city. They all know that when "The Big One" hits, your average citizen is going to be on their own for at least a couple of days.
If everyone waits with getting their supplies until they expect to need them, then there won't be enough in stock to supply everyone with their 7-days of supplies.
Where did you get that idea from? Without looking it up, I suspect Germany, as a NATO country, helped Ukraine as other NATO allies did. And supported the orange revolution, as the other EU nations did before 2014.
Some quick numbers: 2020/21 exports of weapons from EU cointries to Russia were aroind 100 million (or thereabouts, might even include icebreakers, good luck using those for conquering Mariupol). Since February 2022 EU countries committed to send 2.5 billion of military gear to the Ukrainian forces.
Unless said facility was build after 2014 I don't see the problem here. Not that the training was very successful as far as all that invasion business goes, was it?
Under contracts signed before 2014. Seems like a detail worth mentioning.
EDIT: Which is bad reason, but at least an understandable when it comes to foreign policy. And it is not that arms exports are actually hindered by morals, all the exports to Saudi, UAE, Mexico and every other crisis region show otherwise. Personally, I think the West shouldn't export to those countries or conflict zones. The West also needs the industrial base to maintain reasonably strong militaries so, and with defense spending being a less than popular thing after the Cold War ended, exports are necessary for that. This could change so, and already did in Germany with additional military spending.
Europe's gas problem is entirely theoretical and goes away if any part of Russia exists and wants to be part of society at the end of the winter, or if 2 in 3 Europeans can follow simple directions to not be selfish and dead.
I find it tiring that any country that plays chicken with the superpowers gets all these warnings and abuse while the superpowers themselves do not give a crap who does what to undo their progress to Armageddon.
Germany was right to give Russia an option not to suck, the idea that Russia would not already suck worse by now and yet still be a military superpower if Germany didn't try to keep a vague semblance of balance in economics is a fantasy.
Is it seriously believable that Russia would have done nothing with violence by now to force changes in the economics if the west was shunning its natural resources for strategic reasons since the 1990's?
Pumped hydro is very limited and most resources are already exploited. Wind energy is not a solution because sometimes it just doesn't appear when you need it.
Nuclear actually is a solution, in the sense that if you implement it, the problem will go away. Renewables are not a solution in the sense that even if you over-implement to an absurd degree, with present technology the problem will sometimes remain.
The people pointing this out are not zealots, they're people with a basic understanding of how electricity works. It's the people who insist against basic physics that renewables can power 100% of the grid that are the zealots, and now we all will pay the price for accommodating their extremism :(
Variable renewable sources can’t power 100% of the grid, but they can easily power 80% of it without any of the normal whatabout problems. Renewables could also power 120% of the grid without problems, interesting variable loads to take up the extra very cheap energy would manifest soon enough.
Claiming exactly 100% is full of problems is true, pedantic, and nowhere close to any reality which would happen.
Of course there will be a mixture of power sources, relax. You can develop a lot of variable renewables before the issues come up.
Europe needs to develop every power source at the same time, distributing resources compromising for risk, several time frames, and cost. This involves a solar/wind heavy mix along with longer term nuclear developments and large scale energy imports from North America.
Although I think Smartgrids and all technology close-by including usage counters would really make a difference. No matter if you're for renewables or even Nuclear. Considering how much energy goes to waste because of inefficient usage. Every 60W laptop has an elaborate power management but multi kW homes aren't even close.
But one part of Smart grids is just measuring everything. Another part is decentralization which actually increases resiliency. In a positive light it's probably a bit like Internet vs. telephone network. Higher complexity but the tools are there to make it work
There were legitimate reasons to be wary of becoming dependent on Russian energy supplies. There were also legitimate reasons to pursue tighter economic integration, which when it comes down it, is the entire raison d'etre for the EU. There were also legitimate reasons to pursue cheap, reliable natural gas.
Trying to now pretend, ex post facto, that this was strikingly obvious and the result of incompetent leadership is profoundly narrow-sighted.
I agree, none of this was blatantly obvious and a lot of aspects need to be taken into account. The world isn't black and white even though it would be nice if it was at times.
many people in usa laughed at trump, called him a racist for wanting to block china trades and having some of the 20's policy of america 1st. turns out biden pushed those by an extent trump wouldn't dream of and everyone is fine with it now. leadership is corrupt and just want power even if it means bringing our nations to their knees.
> The people are fed up with dangerously incompetent leadership
When thinking of politicians, Intelligence is not an attribute which comes naturally to my mind.
Yet the absence of intelligence in karge swaths of green politicians is striking. Im specifically talking about the German green movement, not generalising.
Like being inteligent enough to prolong nuclear reactor runtimes, signing LNG deals with the UAE, fillong up gas reservoirs faster than anticipated, pushing for military aide for Ukraine, figuring out fallback plans for potential gas shortages?
Yeah, absolutely stupid things to do in the current situation.
We also have to remember Europe had the absolute disaster of a vaccine purchase program which was totally down to its incompetent leadership which for some reason the US media fawns over. The delay in getting vaccines to citizens probably cost 10's of thousands of lives.
While the arguments are repetitive this isn’t a culture war. The EU made its bed (or more likely, imported it) and now has to sleep in it. Deindustrialization has been ongoing.
In California, I get physical mail pamphlets that help me prepare for power outages and what I should do to reduce quality of life. It’s not from PG&E, but our city.
They will likely keep some coal plants online longer than was originally planned, so that is definitely a thing. They even restarted some plants to reduce their current dependency on Russian gas.
There have been logistics issues getting coal to the plants. It feels like energy production followed the manufacturing motto of "just in time" instead of stockpiling the input coal. This lack of resilience was unnecessary.
I am not aware cial, usually shipped in bulk and very easily stored, was ever delivered JIT. But whatever, JIT was already the reason why the chip supply from Asia to overseas car factories was disrupted, at least according to certain people without the slightest clue of how JIT works. Or supply chains in general...
It is an ad hoc solution to the current situation so I'm not surprised it's not exactly smooth sailing. It doesn't help that they recently shut down some of their reactors, they could have at least kept them open until the situation stabilized.
I have thoroughly enjoyed the acrobatics required for Europeans that try to blame all of this on the US because they need a scapegoat so as to avoid personal responsibility.
A former Polish Minister of Defense posted "Thankyou USA" to Twitter after the attack. Various US officials have made public statements since the start of 2022 stating the US wouldn't allow Nord Stream to go forward. The whole reason the pipelines were built was for Russia to cut out the Ukrainian/Polish middlemen (transit fees) involved in selling gas to Germany, so the Russians don't have any incentive to blow up their own pipeline.
While the USA obviously has the means and more than zero motivation, I don’t see this type of infrastructure damage so close to allies as likely. Especially given the EU was already in the process of permanently ending the purchase of all Russian gas, not just these pipelines.
Russia, however, is looking at one never-opened pipeline and one already-offline pipeline, which is going to a bloc that has announced that it won’t pay as much as Russia is asking for its gas, won’t pay in the currency Russia is demanding, and wants to rapidly move away from Russian gas entirely, and which is currently sanctioning against Russia. Russia appears to believe that cutting off gas to Europe will end European support for Ukraine, and therefore has an obvious incentive to cut it off. Russia has incentives to make this look like it isn’t Russia’s fault, for the same reason anyone who might have done this would have had an incentive to hide their own identity.
>>>Russia appears to believe that cutting off gas to Europe will end European support for Ukraine, and therefore has an obvious incentive to cut it off. Russia has incentives to make this look like it isn’t Russia’s fault
Russia had already done the former by basically "turning off the tap", and already argued it wasn't their fault because they were willing to supply gas to Europe as long as Europe paid in Russian rubles. They were also using the gas supply for political leverage:
"release our frozen assets and we'll turn the gas back on"
"pay in rubles and we'll turn the gas back on"
"stop sending weapons to Ukraine and we'll turn the gas back on"
Now they physically CAN'T do any of those things, so this is a massive blow to what little bargaining power they hoped to retain through the winter. If there is any nation that is harmed by the physical destruction of these pipes, it's Russia.
also a lot of analysts have been predicting social discontent in germany during winter due to the gas situation. russia, i immagine, would have been hoping that societal pressures would force the german government to reconsider its position on nord stream ii. turning on the nord stream ii pipeline was a practical solution to a freezing problem in germany. after blowing up the pipeline this solution no longer exists (at least not in its simple form of "turn on the tap") thus also taking away a key possible demand for any potential protests
One possible explanation is that Putin wants to prevent a possible rival from winning over oligarchs by promising to make agreement with the eu. Many oligarchs are losing a lot of money on this war and it is likely that a coup that replaces him with a more friendly leader could ease up the sanctions. Without the gas leverage this option is less likely. There are clear signs that Putin is very paranoid of being replaced in the near future.
Several of the Russians I talk to think Igor Sechin is the one maneuvering for a palace coup. There's been a lot of "close Putin allies" who have died since the war started. Sechin runs Rosneft, so if anyone is positioned to "turn the gas back on" it might be him. If he was shopping around the idea "let's get rid of Putin, turn the gas on, and get back to printing money again"....Putin blowing up the pipeline as a necessary evil to kneecap Sechin......that sounds possible.
Radek Sikorski, MEP who previously served as Marshall of the Sejm and Minister of Foregin Affairs, thanked America in response to Nordstream being sabatoged.
I doubt the USA cares very much about just Germany (and I live in Berlin), but whoever did this pissed off basically all the EU, and I think the USA does care about not pissing off the EU collectivity.
(For scale, I doubt any nation other than the USA itself cares about pissing off the state of Florida, while almost every nation cares about not pissing off the USA collectivity).
u mean like when ukrained was trained by us operative, its leadership selected by us operative and using us weapons . the only country that used nuclear are the usa. i wouldnt trust them not to push for a nuclear attack again
Culture is preference. Democracy is voting preference. Authoritarians get fed up with competing preferences and squash other preferences/opinions but risk making the wrong decisions.
> as it turns out nuclear power plants require long regular maintenance periods.
That's because everyone has been operating their PWRs/BWRs way beyond the design lifespan, which would be fine if we didn't just stop building new ones in the past 20-40 years (depending on country) to prevent too many of them needing regular maintenance at once.
This is something I never understand about the anti-nuclear crowd. There are plenty of good arguments against nuclear but most often the ones used are not that great.[0] I mean we could talk about the expense of them and that they require long-term investments, making them not attractive to bureaucrats and political leaders, which led to the situation of extending lifetimes, losing knowledge, and increasing maintenance periods. Which let's be real, that's a critical flaw if it requires humans to act in ways that aren't what humans typically do. But maybe that's why we always fight. I mean the pro nuclear camp isn't that much better as there are plenty of people arguing for it that don't know the difference between a beta+ and beta- particle.
Then again, the parent says all these things and goes to the culture war. Feels a bit all over the place to me. Though it does seem that a lot of these issues are all caused by us trying to act more intelligent than we are and social signaling. But I don't think that's what the parent was saying.
[0] You could also easily make the argument that we wouldn't be in this mess if Germany didn't shut down their nuclear plants early because doing so increased their dependence on France and Russia for power. But this also isn't that great of an argument.
> There are plenty of good arguments against nuclear but most often the ones used are not that great.
I suspect that the cost-based anti-nuclear arguments aren't really meant for the crowd that understands budgeting or long term planning, since the arguments tend to highlight numbers out of context. It's really meant to create short, stand-alone soundbites that could be repeated in social media posts and news articles.
I mean the cost issues are pretty complex themselves. We've seen that estimates are unreliable because every time we build a new reactor we have to rebuild the entire tooling and supply chain. Westinghouse filed bankruptcy over exactly this issue. So are we discussing building one reactor? A few? Or a hundred? But are we also discussing rolling out a hundred and then not building many again for decades? There's also bureaucratic issues that prevent newer and cheaper reactors from being built. Some of those issues have merit and others don't. I think it is easy to oversimplify the issues here, especially when we mostly get social media soundbites and explanations from news articles that don't consult various experts. I just think it is hard to garner a strong opinion without also having deep knowledge.
Nuclear power should be subsidized as necessary for the exact same reason healthcare is: energy security is a critical matter.
A nation like Germany for example could easily afford to have many more nuclear power plants and be pushing that much more energy over the borders to the rest of the EU in exports. They could do a lot to further the EU's energy security, given their fiscal and engineering capabilities. Their main reason for not doing it (fear) is heavy in emotionalism, irrationality.
> Nuclear power should be subsidized as necessary for the exact same reason healthcare is: energy security is a critical matter.
Not that I disagree, but money is not an infinite resource. So yeah, it does matter. Maybe I'm interpreting your comment as more dismissive than it actually is.
Money is not infinite, at least for practical purposes, but it is socially constructed, and consequently not a hard constraint. If a nation has the means to obtain the necessary resources and labour, it will be able to build and run nuclear power plants.
This seems a bit naive. While money is a social construct it is also a proxy for resources. Also, to be clear, just because things are socially constructed doesn't mean they aren't useful. Most things are social constructs.
Money is a useful proxy when used to allocate resources to individual economic agents, but is not useful when analysing and coordinating an entire economy. In fact, the loss of fine-grained information and introduction of social subjectivity is often highly counter-productive.
I think I understand what you're saying? That money isn't a good proxy for issues of things like shared resources. A la tragedy of the commons types of issues? If that's what you're saying then I fully agree. Money has been a great tool for proxying local economic effects and facilitating trade but it is not nuanced enough to capture more long range phenomena like ToC. But I do feel like this is where governments are supposed to step in. While I'm pretty critical of authority I do see this aspect as part of the need for strong governments and limitations to pure democracies, as we have yet to find a structure where large swaths of the population can either be accurately informed or where we can have sufficient reliance upon experts. Obviously too much in the other direction (authoritarianism) comes with its own slew of problems (ones I think are worse).
(I do think a wide distribution of ideas that we can sample from, with a fairly normal-ish looking distribution, creates a powerful framework to build democracies. You do need anarchists, nationalists, and extremists, but not in large potions. When the mean shifts to any of these I think the system becomes unstable. But neither should we truncate the distribution.)
To briefly summarise my point, economic reality is determined by material factors, such as available physical resources and labour time, and money is a construct which controls access to those resources according to the society's power structures.
>don't know the difference between a beta+ and beta- particle.
I don't know the difference between a beta+ and beta- particle so please tell me, why would my, positive to some degree, views on nuclear energy be more valid if I did ?
So it is basically an example of basic knowledge. Something you'd learn in Chapter 1 of an introductory textbook. If you do not know this knowledge it is impossible for you to also know much about nuclear theory. A litmus test if you will.
Now what does this specific test have to do with nuclear energy? I'll be honest that the specific example only has a little, and that's to do with waste. These particles are common forms of radiation and knowing how they interact is important in understanding safety and longevity of waste. (our decay typically comes in the form of alpha, beta, neutron, and gamma)
I do want to be clear though, that this doesn't -- and shouldn't -- stop you from having an opinion. But it should note how strong those opinions should be, as it is naive to have strong opinions on topics you also do not care to learn about the details. This is more what I'm getting at. Strong opinions matched with weak knowledge is a dangerous situation. The key part being the strength of the opinion, not existence.
I also don't think this disqualifies other types of opinions that you can have about nuclear (or other topics). An economist could not have any working nuclear theory knowledge but also be well qualified discussing the cost. But they may also not be well qualified to discuss the cost of decommission or waste without the support/collaboration of someone with working nuclear theory. At least we can recognize that without the combined effort that the opinion is limited in accuracy. (this is also true in the reverse direction fwiw)
So for some signals that may help you navigate this space (these are not absolute, mind you, but there is a tendency).
Pro-nuclear armchair experts tend to hype up thorium, ignore costs, claiming nuclear's issue is only fear, and dismissing the waste issue completely.
Anti-nuclear armchair experts tend to exaggerate the waste issue, ignore developments over the last half century, and pit nuclear against renewables (a position no scientist actually has. Our opinion is that nuclear is a zero carbon energy source and should be _on the table_. Which isn't a strong stance btw).
But mainly I think the issue is that in a world of ever increasing complexity we are also gaining access to large amounts of high level knowledge and internalizing that as expertise. I do think this is a recipe for disaster and we're already seeing the effects of it. We see this commonly in climate discussions. Where even the pro-green people are not always aligned with the scientists albeit substantially closer in alignment than the anti-climate people. But climate is one of the most (if not them most) complex issues humanity has ever faced. Unfortunately complex issues require substantial amounts of nuance and require complex solutions. Which ironically includes political support which is hard to garner without these same high level explanations. I'm not sure there's a good solution to all this tbh.
Hmm? Could you be more coy and less direct in your replies, please?
Did Russia transform from a cosmopolitan, Western European-loving, tolerant nation with fantastic relations to the EU overnight into a savage brute in Feb 2022? Or was it always at least a little bit backwards, clearly not democratic, sphere of influence-envious, and had already arguably been at indirect war with Ukraine since 2014?
To claim that Germany/EU wanted closer relations with the Russian Empire contra the American Empire is clearly asinine if you look at the actions of Germany/EU.
Since Europe has not enough natural resources to be self reliant, and the US only has enough oil gas due to fracking, there is no alternative other than dealing with oppressive, human rights ignoring regimes. Iran is under sanctions, the UAE and Saudi are by no means better the Putin at his worst days (we in the West just don't give a damn about the war in Sudan and Yemen). And yes, closer relationships to Russia are, well have been, a good thing.
Russia decided to throw all that away in a failed bid to keep NATO away from their borders. Or rather Putin did.
What? Russia better than Saudi Arabia? The Saudis are neither stupid enough to attack something like Ukraine nor do they have the backbone to even think about it. They're not as caught up in cold wars or bemoaning their version of what Gorbachev did. Human rights aside wouldn't most petrol customers prefer SA over Russia? Granted, Europe and Germany esp. didn't but then again trade was supposed to mute the stupidity of the Russian government and that didn't ultimately work.
No, what is sent to Seversk is not just the spent fuel, but also radioactive material that was used during the treatment of the spent fuel.
No, the fuel cycle doesn't depend on Seversk, the contract from EDF was signed in 2018 (and EDF says that nothing was sent yet)
No, this is not even the fuel cycle, Orano signed a contract with Rosatom so that they could send spent URT and Rosatom uses it for their own reactors. Literally selling spent fuel (instead of burying it)
No, you are lying once again. The uranium deposits are not worth exploiting because it is currently cheaper to get mines in say, Niger, but Europe still has large potential mining sites, and extracting it from lignite is easy.
So, no, your sources are Greenpeace and are lying.
>> No, the fuel cycle doesn't depend on Seversk + "Literally selling spent fuel" (instead of burying it)
well, if you put it that way, then the fuel cycle doesn't even exist at all, france just imports fresh uranium from Russia, Nigeria, Kazhakstan and Australia and sells spent fuel to Russia.
> and EDF says that nothing was sent yet
under that new contract maybe, here is an article from 2009 in which EDF "told news agency AFP that it is only “recyclable uranium from fuel processing at EDF nuclear power stations that is transported to Russia to be enriched.” - rfi.fr/actuen/articles/118/article_5481.asp
> No, you are lying once again. The uranium deposits are not worth exploiting
that is literally what i said. They are not worth exploiting
> So, no, your sources are Greenpeace and are lying.
that is just low effort insults, here have an IAEA uranium deposit database: https://infcis.iaea.org/UDEPO/ France largest "reserves" are the trace amounts in the rocks around a mine they closed 21 years ago. Even if the price rises to a point where exploitation of those trace amounts becomes worthwhile again, there are no large reserves in europa, we are talking a demand in the thousands of tons per year.
The nuclear industry in europa depends on imports, stop peddling some makebelieve about large untapped reserves with which europa could theoretically become energy independent if they would just use them. It is nonsensical
quite hard to find good numbers, but the size "thousands of tons" seems to fit. The thread starter proposed that Europa, not only France, should build more nuclear power plants, so we may even be in the tens of thousands of tons per year for the whole continent.
> Maybe there's no simple answer for energy issues and countries don't simply build or close down power plants over single issue?
Well, two things. One, pretty sure the push to shut down Germany’s nuclear plants was a response to a single issue, Fukushima.
Two, one simple answer to this particular situation is to assess your energy independence before sanctioning the country you rely on for natural gas. Germany is getting raked over the coals with the same talking points precisely because they walked into a situation they weren’t well-equipped to handle.
Safety concerns are definitely an issue that can nudge you to prefer alternative sources but this doesn't make it single issue. It's simply one of the things you consider.
I think this is mostly due to the fact that the advantage of nuclear is long term and humans -- and especially politicians and bureaucrats -- aren't good at long term planning. Globally we basically rolled out a bunch of nuclear plants and went "welp, that'll hold us off for the next 50-60 years." It's like exercising and eating right for a year and expecting this to keep you healthy for decades as you eat poorly with little to no exercise. Maintenance and continual production is key to cost reduction and advancement but this is something nuclear never got. I really do think nuclear's biggest flaw is its lifespan. Just allows people to get lazy.
> President Donald Trump repeated a highly misleading claim on Friday that Germany will soon depend on Russia for 50 percent to 70 percent of its energy needs.
Then the article spends significant time pointing out that Russian natural gas plays only a small part in Germany's total demands in energy, citing numbers like 20% & 13% and thus Trump's claim is am exaggeration.
And then goes on to say:
> To be sure, Russia also accounted for about 40 percent of Germany's crude oil imports and 30 percent of its foreign coal supplies in 2016, according to IEA. But that hardly makes it an outlier in Europe.
How is that glossed over? Is it just me or - I hate to say it - Trump actually had a point?
He has been shown to have been correct on this. I think he was also correct to ask Europe to fund NATO on their own. As USA taxpayer, I don't want to pay for it. Europeans know where they live and their history.
This is a bit tricky and I don't think many consider it. One of the leading theories for peace in Europe is the lack of militarization in Europe. Countries with standing armies are more likely to go to war with one another. So we got the rise of superpowers and where better to place that superpower than across an ocean and in an area with few contested borders and not thousands of years of history of fighting? I mean it seems the other approach is akin to what China did. Just be successful in conquering the region.
Obviously this point is _highly_ debatable but it is worth consideration. And it is not like the US hasn't benefited from the military industrial complex. Though I do think the funding structure could be reworked or we at least acknowledge that this is what is happening.
we dont want nato it was pushed on us. no one ever voted for being a tool in the us armada. you know the usa that would definitly go crazy if russia or china had weapons in mexico but see no problem of doing the same. one day u will understand that american people live well because their number one investment is their army and nato
I tend to think that Trump is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Now thinking about people/politicians that laugh him off when they were warned about energy dependence on Russia... they must be dumb AF or bribed by Putin or both.
EU/Germany energy politics were/are a trainwreck and that was obvious for at least a decade. Instead of recognizing the obvious warning in 2014, most of the continent doubled down on Russia energy dependency.
As a citizen of EU county - this is depressing. Most of our political elite should be locked up somewhere and keys tossed away. They are directly responsible for the clusterf*ck that follows.
> Is it just me or - I hate to say it - Trump actually had a point?
I'm not sure why people are afraid to say this. He has literally said everything under the sun. You throw enough darts and you're bound to eventually hit the board. Supporters just focus on the hits and don't pay attention to the misses, but this isn't different from any populist (I mean look at Musk. If you keep predicting that autopilot is a year away you'll eventually be right and that's all we'll ever remember)
>Maybe EU wanted to have Russia as a reliable petrostate as an alternative to the USA so they can do their thing without USA?
The decision to rely on Russia was made when USA was a net energy importer, with some dependence on natural gas from Canada, and terrible dependence on oil from whoever could offer any.
To add to that, nuclear was phased out to a large degree because it gets in the way of renewables, as it's impossible to regulate. Nuclear reactor is pretty much an on/off thing and can't safely operate on power levels much under 100% continuously, and if it's off, it can only be restarted in a day, or even a few days. It makes balancing the grid including a lot of intermittent renewables, a huge headache.
Renewables already provide more electricity in EU than nuclear ever did, and they cost a lot less to build, and almost all of them were built in less time than it takes to build a single nuclear reactor.
Speaking of the future, all of this discussion is meaningless again, because of time. If we start today, electricity will be 100% solved by renewables everywhere in EU before any new nuclear can be commissioned.
Yeah 100%, given we need to keep our nuclears now on to mainly support France's rotten ones and neglecting the lobbying and corruption that happened and didn't get us much further away from fossil+nuclear (we are shedding wind and bio gas right now again) is the actual depressing thing..
france nuclear was fine until macron five years ago pushed for decommissioning 15 reactors (the 15 he wants to open after 5 years...) and obviously by sending the signal that it was not the industry for the future of france investments into its future stopped just liked the CEO of EDF said "we didnt hire people to build reactor or even maintain those we focused on hiring people to decomission reactors" and guess what they arent many people in this field. its not IT. people who know are either retired or dead.
You provide such a wonderful list of factors that may/may-not have contributed to a this crisis that I went cross-eyed and drooled a little at the depth of the complexity. But isn't it a little ironic that you end by blaming the culture war? We're literally a part of it, and it is an enormous obstacle to enacting policies in a rational way. It's not something we can bail-out on, like people fleeing to Canada when they don't get their way in US politics, instead it is something that has to be embraced and worked within as a medium, for better or for worse. I'm reading a book about early humanists in 15th century Italy and the issues are exactly the same. Culture wars are wars of rhetoric and polemic, and will always be with us. Best to master them, no?
I'm not anti-nuclear and I don't have a problem discussing it as an option. I have a problem with repetitive arguments that push an agenda though. The "Only if they hadn't closed those few plants everything would have been perfect" argument is not only false but is pushing an agenda that is part of the culture war.
Notice the OP doesn't even mention the environmentalists etc. but the comment is instantly recognisable. It's the same talking point that needs to be repeated every single time.
They also proactively chose in the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq to avoid importing more natural from the US. Schroeder and co wanted to reconnect Western Europe to Russia and avoid any dependence on the U.S. I think we now all see who the more reliable partner for Western Europe has been.
[edit] if you’re going to disagree, I’d be interested to hear your specific objections. The shift away from US natural gas is well documented.
Hindsight is 20/20. There were plenty of reasons to be skeptical that russia would turn off the tap. There's always counterparty risk when importing things, the US could also decide to cut europe off from LNG if they wanted.
Russia has only turned off the tap after Europe had already turned off every possible economical tap flowing in the direction of Russia, so in a sense, Europe did it all by itself. Sure, it's the right thing to do for Europe as no one want to help Russia sponsor the war on Ukraine... but that doesn't change the fact that Russia wouldn't just turn off the tap without Europe turning highly hostile to it and basically leaving Russia no option (it's costing much more to Russia than to Europe).
That pipeline runs through Ukraine to an old & dying oil field- Russia was fighting with Ukraine about transit costs and graft and wanted to turn on Nordstream II next. It wasn't about sticking it to the Germans for no reason.
At this point it is obvious that their occupation of Ukraine outweighs the $11 billion cost of the new pipeline. That's just the total cost by the way, not who paid what exactly.
The US has been a stable ally since the end of WWII and really prior for countries other than Germany. It’s also quite hard for a president to just unilaterally suspend trade. US sanctions require acts of congress, and it would be hard to get an anti European majority in the senate. So no, there was never any risk of the US suspending trade.
Meanwhile Russian has almost always been hostile to or at least in competition with Western Europe. Moreover Russia’s Duma follows Putin’s lead.
It is easy to say that now. Serious criticism of Putin/modern Russia in the West really only began after the invasion of Georgia and was not even remotely mainstream until the early 2010s. America literally banned the export of crude oil from 1970-2015 so their energy worries were not entirely unfounded. Also, nowadays most sanctions are done unilaterally by the executive branch.
LNG is expensive because you have to outbid the global market to get it. It would have been expensive and damaged the German industry 5 years ago as well. Maybe it would have been better to do it at their pace, but it's not like sacrificing cheap energy and natural resources is an easy step to take.
> LNG is more expensive than Russian gas so it makes or made economic sense to do that.
It only made sense if one pretends that Russia is not Russia.
To get there you'd have to forget to take into account all of the factors, namely that Russia's culture will always bring it back to trying to conquer its smaller/weaker neighbors.
Risk is a factor when considering economic security. Whether something makes economic sense must include that factor or it's a garbage calculation. The EU widely ignored this obvious risk regarding Russia. It has been obvious what Putin was for at least 15-20 years. And anybody that missed it after 2014 is an outright fool. I remember reading about his moves to strip the Russians of human rights in the early days of his reign and it was quite clear what he was doing and what direction he was going (standard Russian authoritarian), all of this is the natural culmination. I don't believe the EU was taken by surprise by Putin's choices, they merely wanted their cake and wanted to eat it too (for as long as possible), which is pretty typical behavior. Now they get to pay for that willful mistake.
Sadly I’m on my phone and some stuff I want is locked up in Jstor , but look into the France-Germany-Russia troika in the run up to the 2003 invasion. Schroeder was pushing a bigger gas deal with Russia at the time and selling it on the basis of European independence.
The difference is that when the US invaded Iraq, Germany complained a bit but didn't do much else, but when Russia invaded the Ukraine, Germany decided to cut Russia off economically. The reason why the US is a "reliable partner" is that German politics is willing to accept American wars. And before we hear any cries of, "Iraq was different," recall that it was an illegal war of aggression that caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, led to large scale torture, and generally caused a monumental societal collapse in Iraq.
>And before we hear any cries of, "Iraq was different," recall that it was an illegal war of aggression that caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, led to large scale torture, and generally caused a monumental societal collapse in Iraq.
I've been trying to come to terms with this since the invasion of Ukraine. Yes, the details on the ground are significantly different. But it doesn't change the legal reality of what occurred. I've come to the same conclusion about Iraq recently.
I was an 18 year old US Army infantryman getting ready to deploy to Iraq in 2007. I made the decision back then to not go, because ultimately something just felt completely wrong about it during training. The guilt around that had haunted me ever since. It wasn't until this year that I understood clearly what I did was the right decision, and felt vindicated. The entire last 20 years, our country has been engaged in global terrorism led by the neo-con hawks like Rove, Rumsfeld, and Bolton. It's sickening to truly realize and accept the horrible things we did, but I am forever grateful for having refused to take part.
You’d definitely made the right decision for yourself, and possibly in the general case.
I’d add that while the bursts of hawkishness in US foreign policy are awful, they pale in comparison to the barbarism of other past powers or modern regional powers. That isn’t meant to excuse anything, but look at the Russian invasion and the intentional atrocities being committed. Compare that to the invasion of Iraq and I think any honest reading will reflect governments and societies with very different values.
I cannot see how one can claim that the US invasion of Iraq was less barbaric than the Russian invasion of the Ukraine.
First of all, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died. The US practiced torture, as we all found out when the pictures of Abu Ghraib came out. The US worked with Shiite militias that conducted ethnic cleansing and torture on a massive scale. The US put down uprisings in places like Sadr City, Najaf and Fallujah with full urban ground invasions. As a result of the invasion, Baghdad turned into a warzone for years, and the city's religiously mixed neighborhoods were ethnically cleansed (or however you refer to its religious equivalent). Iraq became a byword for failed state.
Finally, I would tell anyone who talks about "values" to take a look at the "Collateral Murder" video, in which helicopter pilots crack jokes while shooting explosive rounds into the windshield of a van full of children.[0] Only two people have gone to jail for that: the soldier who leaked the video (Manning) and the guy who published it (Assange).
The collateral murder video was a national scandal, people were appalled and it was fairly unique among a trove of videos and documents. Ukraine is unearthing mass graves on a daily basis full of mutilated civilians. The laundry list of confirmed war crimes including video is overwhelming. There’s loads of evidence of people all the way up the Russian chain of command encouraging atrocities. Moreover the conflict is less than a year old. For fuck’s sake the Russians intentionally bombarded a maternity hospital.
The US worked with militias, such as the Wolf Brigade, that were notorious for conducting torture (in particular, it has come out that US forces passed on detainees to the Wolf Brigade for torture).[5] At the height of the war, bodies were being dumped in the open every day in Baghdad with gruesome signs of torture.
> I cannot see how one can claim that the US invasion of Iraq was less barbaric than the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. First of all, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died.
>> Estimates of the total number of Iraqi war-related deaths are highly disputed. According to Keith Krause of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland, "the consensus seems to be that around 150,000 people died violently as a result of the fighting between 2003 and 2006."[1]
I am in no way attempting to justify or defend the Iraq War, which I and many believe was both illegal and a Republican political gambit to stay in power by heartlessly leveraging outrage from the 9/11 attacks. I think one can make the argument that both the wars in Iraq and Ukraine were invalidly justified using manufactured and outright false intelligence. But while yours and other comments above are searing, astute and poignant, in essence both it and previous opposing and supporting comments are tu quoque arguments.
Estimates of total deaths in Iraq due to the war generally come up with a figure of several hundred thousand. You can look at the page you linked to for examples of these studies.
Iraq Body Count tracked 120k individually verifiable civilian deaths in Iraq through 2011 (a figure that has increased significantly since, due to the rise of ISIS, which was a side-effect of the Iraq War). But in a war zone, many (maybe even most) deaths go unrecorded. If you use survey methods (going random homes to ask for death certificates) to try to get a statistical estimate of the number of deaths, you find a number that is a factor of a few higher, as several studies in Iraq have shown.
While most estimates are between 150K to 250K, with at least one published estimate as high as 1.2M, the point of the quote was not to argue about causality numbers, but to demonstrate that numbers are "highly disputed," with an example of a lower estimate and claim of consensus.
IBC project in particular has issues, including accusations of internal anti-war bias and biased sources. IBC has been accused of both undercounting and overcounting. In any regard, due to so much criticism from all sides, other studies are probably more reliable, but even these do not agree.
My larger point was using the Iraq War in comparison to the Russo-Ukraine War to argue the US is no better than Russia, or vice versa, is tu quoque fallacy.
Most scientific estimates are in the range of half a million to a million, with the one outlier being the study conducted by the Iraqi Health Ministry itself. One possible explanation for that is that people might have been afraid to speak to representatives of the ministry, given that it was controlled by a Shiite politician who had connections to militias.
> Most scientific estimates are in the range of half a million to a million, with the one outlier being the study conducted by the Iraqi Health Ministry itself.
I'm not sure what studies were not scientific and which were, but I don't get that at all from the wiki section on total Iraqi causalities.[1] Ignoring lower US military estimates accused of undercounting, about half of estimates are below 200K and about half above 250K. And again, all of the studies are disputed with those in the higher range taking the most criticism towards methods and bias, such as IBC and the Lancet studies. The lower estimates, which seem to be missing deaths that were not immediate, are by Swiss Developmental Studies, Iraqiyun, Iraqi Heath Minister, IFHS, and the higher estimates with a large range variance between 250K-1M+ are by IBC, Lancet, ORB, and PLOS Medicine, which seem to be including homicides, suicides and car accidents. I don't really understand why any group would intentionally underestimate or intentionally inflate casualty estimates, but some, most or all obviously did. Some studies, like D3, seem to suggest fully half the Iraqi population was injured or killed. This all seems bizarre, that estimates are so widely varied and criticized, considering at the time it was the most covered war by journalists in history. The surreal feeling at the time was that it was all televised. It seems unlikely most if any were infiltrated by US covert intelligence white washers, but I can't fathom any overarching reason for such wide variance.
The scientific studies are the ones based on survey methods, which were published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
The Iraqiyun estimate was not published and didn't explain its methodology. The Iraq Body Count isn't a scientific survey - it keeps track of deaths that are reported in the media. It's highly unlikely that every (or even most) deaths that occur in a war in a country like Iraq (recall how dangerous Iraq was at the height of the war) will be recorded in the media.
That leaves the ILCS, the two Lancet studies, the PLOS study, and the Iraqi Health Ministry's estimate.
The ILCS was carried out only a year into the war, before the height of the violence (which was 2006). It was not focused on determining deaths - the question about deaths was only one of many questions asked. Nevertheless, this study found a far higher death toll than IBC.
The Iraqi Health Ministry was run by one of the parties to the civil war, so it's questionable whether people would have felt are liberty to speak freely to the Ministry's workers, especially about something as sensitive (and potentially incriminating) as deaths in the family.
The first Lancet study was also carried out relatively early in the war, but found a much higher death toll than IBC. The 2nd Lancet study was carried out in 2006, after violence had exploded, and found a number of several hundred thousand, but with large error bars. The later PLOS study was much larger and had smaller error bars, and found a number around half a million.
> the most covered war by journalists in history. The surreal feeling at the time was that it was all televised. It seems unlikely most if any were infiltrated by US covert intelligence white washers, but I can't fathom any overarching reason for such wide variance.
I don't know how Iraq compares to other wars in terms of coverage, but most of the country was not well covered. Western journalists were heavily concentrated in the fortified Green Zone in Baghdad, or embedded in US military units. During the height of the violence, it was extremely dangerous to wander around Iraq as a foreigner. Every study (even the one by the Iraqi Health Ministry) found death tolls far in excess of what IBC documented from media reports.
Maddening. Rant is about all I can do with this. A small goon mob of GoP operatives dressed in blazers intimidating Florida election officials in Nov. of 2000 stops the vote recount leading to a genuine stolen Presidential election, which leads to exceptional political shenanigans to leverage pain and anguish with false intelligence and lies to justify a war killing hundreds of thousands for the sole purposes of remaining in power in order to keep the richest or the rich the richest of the rich. The Republican Party should be banned, and if everyone would just vote in their personal economic interests and stop being distracted by irrelevant issues, we'd never see anything like this or Trump again. Nearly everyone, excepting the uber rich, the multi-hundred millionaires and billionaires, would be economically better off with a long-sustained liberal government, and the uber rich certainly wouldn't be slumming it. Anyone voting Republican without an income of at least $350K/yr is sinking their own tiny boat and taking everyone down with them, except, of course, the uber rich. They should put a cap on wealth of $150M and appropriate all wealth gains above that for even distribution. Who has a problem with this? How many are going to bitch about only being able to have $150M? Seriously, billionaires and half-billionaires really, legitimately and provably, are the source of all problems, which fundamentally are economic problems, that inevitably make their way down to everyone else. End rant... and fallacious but, I think, still somewhat compelling argument.
There is no evidence that the Russian invasion is more barbaric than the US invasion of Iraq.
In fact they seem to show (to a certain extent) some restraint with regard to civilian infrastructure, while America bombed everything from the sky for 1 month before invading.
In terms of intentional atrocities every army has its bad apples, and I'm sure there is a Russian equivalent of Abu Graib. But there is no evidence there is a deliberate policy by the Russian military to commit war crimes.
The French sent an elite unit of the scientific police to investigate Bucha. They came back months ago with not a single press conference, audition, report. Nothing, nada. Why? Why aren't they telling the world about the alleged Russian war crimes they witnessed there?
> I was an 18 year old US Army infantryman getting ready to deploy to Iraq in 2007. I made the decision back then to not go, because ultimately something just felt completely wrong about it during training.
So you went AWOL? I’m a little confused on how an 11B E-2 can “decide“ he’s not deploying.
> So you went AWOL? I’m a little confused on how an 11B E-2 can “decide“ he’s not deploying.
E-3 actually. I was an Eagle Scout, Civil Air Patrol cadet, three years of high school JROTC - the full nine yards. Completely brainwashed. But yes, I ultimately went AWOL.
A week before our deployment, I hitchhiked out to the desert and lived in a tent for a month. Turned myself in right before the 30 day desertion mark, took my article 15 and got busted to E-1. I was able to secure an honorable discharge with the help of a few sympathetic commanding officers after explaining everything, but they put me out pretty quickly “in the best interest of the Army”.
This was the height of the surge in '07, where we were losing over a hundred guys a month. My mom's best friend had already seen her son come home in a casket. The guys I served with came back as shattered husks. I have zero regrets choosing life over death.
I’m honestly surprised you were able to secure an honorable discharge, especially at that time. I was an 11A later in the wars and the guy in my platoon who went AWOL to avoid deploying was sent to RCF before being allowed to exit the Army.
My point is that Germany chose further reliance on Russian gas as a response to the Iraq war, they didn’t just complain. Making that choice looks pretty naïve in hindsight.
I’m not here to justify the Iraq war, and no good faith reading of my post would suggest that.
Germany imported Russian gas because it was cheap.
It had nothing to do with the Iraq War. If you look at a graph of German natural gas imports from Russia by year, you will not see any major changes after 2003. Imports from Russia (back then, the USSR) reached 50% of total imports in the 1980s, and flatlined after that.[0]
Don't confuse the meme of Germany's "dependence" on Russian gas being "the root" of yhe current "evil inflation" with facts. Not to mention that regardless of all other sanctions, following a war Russia started, the EU, and the West in general, excluded energy. This left a door open for Russia, it also allowed to mitigate the energy markets problems we currently see. Heck, both sides did their best to prevent damage to the gas pipelines in Ukraine. It was Russia, more precisely Putin, that closed that door and caused the clusterfuck on energy markets.
I say energy markets, because global availability of gas doesn't seem to be an issue, prices are. Gas shortages have nothing to do with crazy electricity prices lately. And even then there were no shortages or blackouts anywhere in Europe so far. Energy prices did hurt industry and drove inlfatuon, sure, but this is a global issue not sole caused by the war in Ukraine, COVID, Chinese lockdows and the chip shortage all played a role in that. As did the constant injection of money into the global economy since 2008.
I'd add to the list: indirectly creating ISIS, enabling an enormous amounts of ethnic cleaning/genocide of minorities, allowing a takeover of the country by Iran and related militias, and hosing down the place with depleted uranium:
https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2019/09/21/new-study-do...
It’s a matter of public record that France and Germany were aligning towards Russia and away from the US geopolitically. They referred to it as “the troika”.
Past tense, I still don't see why this was wrong back the day. Also, I never said Europe didn't form closer ties with Russia. I still think thisbis a, generally, good idea. One that is just impossible in the current situation and under the current Russian leadership. Long term so, it is still a viable strategy. Isolating Russia for good is a bad option, IMHO.
That being said, Russia has to end the war in Ukraine, retreat from the occupied territories. And the West has to do some soul searching once this happened, our track record when it comes to invasions and occupations isn't that great in the last 20 odd years.
That's somewhat of an exaggeration. There were "troika" meetings in the late 1990s and in 2003, but France and Germany remained in the US' orbit.
The Iraq War was probably the time of maximum German/French political autonomy, when they publicly opposed the US on a major issue, but there's very little of that spirit left. France and Germany have hitched themselves even more strongly to the US now, to the point that the German foreign minister is talking about decoupling from China (a policy that makes no rational sense for Germany, but which signals that Germany sides with the US in the geopolitical rivalry).
As far as their attitude towards Russia goes, Germany and France have had terrible relations with Russia since 2014, at the latest. Germany tried not to sever all economic ties with Russia, and it tried to negotiate a settlement to the war in the Donbas, but that doesn't mean that relations were friendly.
It’s worse than you think. Germany blocked or was against a large number of alternative pipelines and was preparing to actively block nuclear at an eu level.
> Since 2011 Green Planet Energy has been selling the proWindgas product which was initially 100% imported fossil gas, and the company promised a gradual increase in the proportion of hydrogen generated from excess renewable energy.[5] As of 2020 the share of hydrogen mostly oscillated below 1%.[6] > Sales of 99% fossil gas presented as “eco-gas” have been criticized as contradictory[7][8] as well as "greenwashing" of Russian gas.
Question: could Russian disinformation have played a role in germanys policy here? Perhaps they were pushing anti nuclear viewpoints for a decade leading up to this?
To be clear, I have zero evidence either way, I’m just curious how large an effect these campaigns have had on public policy across the world
I wouldn’t use that word. Germany made choices, and believed in a way that Russia could be pulled westward. Russia intended to use this belief to its own advantage at Western Europe’s expense. People pointed this out, but German politicians shouted that down as cold war thinking.
I think you're right. The anti-nuclear activists of the 20th century focused as much on nuclear weapons as nuclear energy, frequently conflating the two. Furthermore these activists were almost always left wing and had obvious affinity for their idealized vision of what the Soviet Union was. I think the Soviets fomented anti-nuclear sentiment in the west during the Cold War to give themselves an edge in the nuclear arms buildup.
Of course, everyone is a booster for their own cause.
The angles of attack range from the top-down to the grass roots. There are tactics for each (e.g. corrupting state leaders vs controlling mass media narratives).
> Question: could Russian disinformation have played a role in germanys policy here?
As a German, no, that was quite voluntary. People like me completely agreed. I only woke up on 24 February. I'm from East Germany, speak some Russian, and have been to Russia a few times, and to Ukraine too, for months actually. I did not care about the Krim annexation either. I think because it was peaceful, and because I did not see Ukraine and its government in any better light than the Russian one. The corruption problem was (is? no idea now) real, and some really bad and shady stuff happened in Ukraine.
The reason I turned is all because of the behavior and the atrocities of Russia. My opinion does not require a "good" Ukraine, so arguments like "but... corruption" (for Ukraine) don't matter any more. To me, having seen the incredible modernization of Russia - supported almost completely by the West and a little bit from Asia, not self-made, and then Putin's declarations about "war with the West" was one of the things that turned me. You owe the "evil West" BIG TIME! I actually have friends who have done business in Russia since the 1990s, so I've followed along the stories passively and still do.
No, you cannot blame Russia for what we Germans thought and did before this war. I was for Nord Stream 2, I was outraged about US interference when they pressured us to stop the project, I was outraged when Trump made his comments. This was not because of any "propaganda", that was my own 100% self-made opinion. I only read some mainstream news portal headlines to begin with, so I'm not exposed to anything like those people in some Telegram channels, or Stammtisch discussions in some places in East Germany (I moved out of East Germany - and in the end to the US for a long time - not long after reunification).
You need to understand a lot of Germans, especially East Germans of course, did not fear Russia but saw them as a true partner. Putin spoke in the Bundestag in a "historic speech"! They were mostly interesting to do business with. They needed so much from us (and got it), and we had good use for their oil and gas and metals and other things. Business was really good, for both sides! We ignored Russian aggressive moves with mostly just some eye-rolling - "that's just how they are" but did not think much of it.
Now, I see that Russian society as a whole has a big problem. It's very far from only Putin being responsible. If they don't lose very hard they may develop like Germany after WWI, thinking they only lost because of "Dolchstoßlegende" (stab in the back myth - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stab-in-the-back_myth). I want us to ignore the nuclear threats and to sent Leopard tanks and Marders. Biden too seems a bit afraid, e.g. limiting
rockets for HIMARs to the shortest range "to not provoke Putin".
I find this strange, if the West wants Ukraine to win Putin will be very "provoked". What kind of conflict is this when the enemy gets to decide which weapons out side is allowed to use? Essentially, Putin now has veto power over what weapons the West sends. I hope there is more going on underneath the surface, because this does not make sense.
Maybe they want Putin to invest more and more and grind Russia down slowly? Losing too quickly would leave Russia with too much left? Of course, the cost of such a strategy would be borne by the Ukrainians, who pay in blood. They may agree though, I don't know, because only a big loos for Russia would give them real peace instead of just a pause. Just my speculations about why we hear (tome) flimsy excuses instead of seeing more done to let Ukraine win more quickly.
Ok so you explained your love affair with Russia. Thank you for that, very insightful and courageous.
But why the hate of nuclear? Was there a lot of propaganda in the media how dangerous it is? I really don’t understand it. It gives clean energy independence almost for free!
The Chernobyl disaster was a big part of it. I wasn't old enough back then, but my parents told me how people were told to not play outside with the children, not to drink milk, eat things and so on. No one really knew what was going on. That fear has always been a big part of the anti-nuclear movement here in Germany.
Germans particularly have a lot of good reason to dislike nuclear weapons. If the Soviet Union had ever sent tanks through the Fulda Gap, NATO would have dropped a lot of tactical nukes on Germany to stop it. They had plans for it all drawn up, weapon systems invented specifically for this, etc. NATO and the Soviets were both planning to actually continue fighting through a nuclear war. Those in power viewed a nuclear WW3 as a salvageable situation from which one side might emerge victorious, not the utter end of the world. Germans who called the planned nuclear battlefield their home obviously weren't enamored with this idea.
But I think Cold War era anti-nuclear activists exploited this rational fear of nuclear weapons to vilify nuclear power as well, to weaken the capitalist West which they almost universally opposed.
There were a ton of nuclear weapons in Germany, that didn't belong to Germany, and I think those nukes ultimately dissuaded the feared war. It's easy to see in hindsight that there was no war, but at the time the situation seemed very dangerous.
Thanks for the perspective from east side of the wall.
It was not voted on directly. Like removal of Deutschmark under Köhl, it was done by those governing without direct vote. The people didn't react, so you get what you tolerate.
If you are talking about reunification, we, the East Germans, definitely overwhelmingly wanted it. There was no need for a referendum, I will make that claim.
Remaining blocked off by not having any real money (GDR money was useless! Exchange rates, if you could exchange at all, were astronomical when you add the fact that East Germans had very little of even our own money to begin with), after we finally got the wall down and saw in brief visits to the West, getting Begrüßungsgeld (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begr%C3%BC%C3%9Fungsgeld), now we should stay isolated in East Germany?
Without reunification everybody who could would have moved to the West. Even so that movement existed even after reunification, but it was a lot less than it would have been without reunification.
>Maybe they want Putin to invest more and more and grind Russia down slowly? Losing too quickly would leave Russia with too much left? Of course, the cost of such a strategy would be borne by the Ukrainians, who pay in blood.
I think this has been the conventional wisdom for a while.
One thing I ask people who are vociferous in their support of Ukraine (and our paying for that support) is, how is this going to end?
Russia quietly bleeds out and overthrows Putin? Is that realistic?
If Putin is a madman dictator, do you really think he'll just whimper and disappear?
It seems necessary that a negotiation take place at some point, and that negotiation result in lost territory for Ukraine. It's not a question of justice, but practicality.
Russia has a history of throwing out leaders after failed wars. On one hand Putin appears to have a fairly tight grip on power right now, but it doesn't take much to actually execute a coup. A small group of of participants to capture or kill him, and maybe one or two handshake agreements with one of the many security or military forces might be enough. There is a reason Putin has been spending most of this war in his bunker after all. It is certainly not because he fears attacks from Ukraine. He know this war has greatly eroded his leverage over the oligarchs and as such he is acting accordingly.
Of course it is hard to even put a probability on something like this happening, but I think most folks are underestimating the odds. It is one of those things that feels very unlikely to happen, until it actually happens.
However, I do think that the highest probability outcome is Ukraine and Russia end up roughly where they were before the invasion, perhaps with slightly different boundaries. If you were not aware Russia and Ukraine have been at war for 8 years. For most of the years, it was effectively a stalemate, with a handful skirmishes to remind each other of the others presence. And the rest of the world for the most part carried on with business as usual. If feel like this is the most likely scenario, and if this is where we end up, I think it was 100% worth the cost as it means Ukraine maintains self-determination and Russia likely learns a really hard lesson regarding its Imperialistic ambitions.
The result will not be just "lost territory" it's hundred thousands people left in Russian bondage. And that will not be the end of it - Putin will be back for more in a year or two. There can be no peace as long as his regime is in power and as long as russians cling to a fantasy of living in an empire. I don't know how realistic is to bleed Russia, but fighting it now is only viable option, there is nothing else.
I am Brazillian but been following a lot of the events in Europe for a while.
Something a lot people miss, is why Russia is doing what they are doing, many assume they just want to conquer Ukraine "just because", or that it is a purely cultural issue, or that it is Putin personal design.
The major point of contention here is that USA and allies (including NATO and the non-NATO members of Five Eyes) have proven themselves to be very aggressive, there are repeated claims that NATO is defensive, yet a lot of the wars in the past 25 years were started by USA or allies in first place.
So first thing is, yes, Russia has reason to fear USA.
The other problem here is strategic and geographic: Russia border is enormous and in the middle of plains, driving across the border with tanks and reaching Moscow and other major population centers right now is something trivial to do, Russia still didn't recovered properly from WW2 and don't have the manpower to defend such huge border from a land invasion.
When Putin says he is defending Russia survival, he is speaking that literally, Russia border is a major vulnerability.
There are basically three "good" solutions for this problem:
1. Have NATO disbanded or made much smaller. Or join NATO in first place. It is obvious this won't happen and Russia doesn't have the means to make it happen.
2. Conquer surrounding countries until they reach the mountains, that are easier to defend. This of course would result in massive negative repercussions, also a lot of countries that Russia would need to conquer for this joined NATO.
3. Convince somehow the countries between Russia and the mountains, to be neutral and not accept NATO inside them. This way if NATO decided to invade Russia by land, there would be time to mount defenses.
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Russia was basically attempting to do the solution 3 using diplomacy. USA did their best to prevent that, because it would be a victory for Russia and a clear loss from USA point of view. Russia then decided that the option left was force option 3. Attack Ukraine and force them to be neutral.
It ALMOST worked, but the peace talks in march ended being cancelled by the Ukranian side.
So plan became a mix of 2 and 3, conquer some parts of Ukraine and keep trying to convince some "Neutrality" peace.
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The problem now of trying to help Ukraine win, for example by giving them tanks as you suggested, is that option 3 would be gone, and Russia would see themselves forced to use option 2. Russia not declaring war and using "special operation" is meaningful, they are STILL trying to do things semi-diplomatically, but as soon it becomes clear this is impossible, things will be very ugly.
Also Russia has a time limit here, their population is still declining for various reasons (including a cycle where each generation that is descendants of WW2 adults are smaller than the others, Russia demography graph look "wavy" because of this). They must solve the problem of the massive hard to defend border with NATO "now", thus they will get more and more desperate, the next generations will be too small population-wise to defend that border effectively.
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If NATO never had expanded right up the border with Russia, all this would probably been avoided. Yes I know people in the countries that border Russia that joined NATO are happy with NATO and wanted to join, but this doesn't change the fact that NATO members been attacking other countries left and right, and Russia thus has all the right to be terrified of NATO on their giant flat plains border.
Still, NATO did. So what is left now? Ideally NATO should pull back with the condition Russia pull back too, but I think the chance of this happening is close to zero.
What will most likely happen is Russia will keep trying to secure their border by any mean necessary. For NATO this is in a sense a golden opportunity, it means they can keep Russia busy there and grinding themselves to dust as they try to get defensible borders.
But for me that is in Brazil, and I am not pro-Russia, neither pro-USA, I think this is extremely dangerous, because eventually there might be a situation, where the only way for Russia to be safe, is if they turn the the area between their border and the mountains into a wasteland hard to cross, and decide to bomb the shit out of the people there until all that is left is craters and rubble that can be used for defensive purposes.
I see Ukranians having only these paths:
1. Somehow, winning the war without getting bombed to oblivion. (I think the chance of this working is minuscle and not worth attempting for real).
2. Fighting to win and get utterly annihilated eventually, with Russia making sure the country becomes a barrier between NATO and Moscow (unless Russia conquers all of Ukraine first).
3. Cutting their losses, giving Russia some territory that moves the border away from Moscow, and pledging to not help NATO invade Russia in the future.
EDIT: forgot option 4 here, because it is unthinkable, but could happen: Ukraine attempts to win the war because it convinced other countries to actually help them beat Russia, for example with actual boots on the ground... but this would turn into WW3, in this scenario everyone loses.
> So first thing is, yes, Russia has reason to fear USA.
> The other problem here is strategic and geographic: Russia border is enormous and in the middle of plains, driving across the border with tanks and reaching Moscow and other major population centers right now is something trivial to do, Russia still didn't recovered properly from WW2 and don't have the manpower to defend such huge border from a land invasion.
If every country in the world besides Russia joined NATO surrounding it completely, we would still never invade Russia because they have 1500 thermonuclear warheads! We are literally too afraid to even put our troops in Ukraine because of the threat that we all end up dead in nuclear war. Please give me 1 good reason for invading Russia that is worth the risk of all of us dying in the nuclear relation.
> It ALMOST worked, but the peace talks in march ended being cancelled by the Ukrainian side.
This is a Russian talking point that has been getting spread around the internet lately. Those talks failed because Putin refused to negotiate on a few key items, and it quickly became apparent that he was trying to use those talks to buy time to regroup his forces after the initial invasion. But lately, right wing leaning news sources are now taking a quote from Boris Johnson out of context to try and frame the failure of those talks as some Western conspiracy to prolong the war.
Fascinating how a large portion of germans were enamoured with a murderous corrupt dictator yet they speak with disgust about peaceful east european allies and look down on them and sanction their economies at first signs of dissent. Truly one for science books. Is it because of the age old “dream” of sharing east europe with russia? If so, east europe shouldnt sit idle. It should respond in kin.
> they speak with disgust about peaceful east european allies and look down on them and sanction their economies at first signs of dissent
Wow this is such a bad comment. I will even be so bold and call it outright lies.
You seem to be talking about Hungary. A country that I actually really like, I was there in my (East German) youth three times, once on vacation with my parents, twice in youth camps, an East German group among Hungarian kids.
Hungary even then was very much oriented towards the West and very modern. Even the ice cream selection was an order of magnitude better than in East Germany, never mind that one could buy Western music and magazines. I loved the country. I loved the food. Well, maybe not some parts of the rooster in my soup.
The problem with Hungary's government now is that they are going down a path of "removing" any opposition and have moved towards autocracy. If they remained a democracy they could have whatever opinion they want. The problem is not their stance towards sanctions, for example, but that they are no longer a democracy.
Yeah, probably. The moment Germans started on EU level to push natural gas (which burns into co2) as green and push zero emission nuclear as not green, I stopped believing they are more than Russian puppets or useful idiots.
No, gas is only green if it used to as a stepping stone for wind or solar.
There is nothing prohibiting investing in nuclear energy, but you shouldn't be able to label that investment as green.
You can argue all day if nuclear is green or not, but most people on the street will not think of nuclear if I ask them what a green, safe and sustainable energy source is.
At least in Germany, which of course represents the interest of their people.
So if you include nuclear in that label, for most people it will become meaningless and will fail to draw more investment.
Exactly. My point is that the problem is systemic, caused by decades of media brainwashing. Hopefully the present situation is a “shock” that wakes people up.
> they suggest the alternative Wind+Solar, not gas.
Storage technology to support an industrialized nation with pure Wind+Solar does not exist, necessitating gas. Advocating for Wind+Solar but not gas is like advocating for building with lumber but not cutting down trees. One inescapably implies the other.
You don't need to build new gas or increase production to beat nuclear in cost whilst reducing total emissions to netnzero levels, so you are still lying. Additionally nuclear necessarily demands gas in exactly the same way because it is cost/capacity limited so a 100% nuclear grid would cost 300-500€/MWh.
That was my first comment in this discussion thread, you have evidently confused me with the other. Read the usernames if you're going to throw around shade like that. And "build more gas" is a claim you introduced to this discussion, not me. Solar+Wind necessitates gas, that is a fact. Whether it's building new gas turbines or using existing ones, Germany needs those gas turbines either way. Germany cannot run off solar and wind alone.
There is this thing called storage in the form of batteries, hydro, and electrolysers. Stop pretending it does not exist, that it is not dropping in price (and use of scarce minerals) so fast it will be a complete replacement before a single new reactor would be finished and that renewables must work without it. Stop pretending that replacing 20% of the gas with nuclear is as useful as replacing 80% of it with pure renewables.
If our bar is 90€/MWh or wherever you want to set it, then it is far closer to true that the technology to replace coal and gas with nuclear does not exist.
Here is a model using no fossil fuels, no batteries and fairly pessimistic costings of real existing currently being built technology
See how it is about 10% less than the energy from falamville 3 even when including much more generous discount rates?
Additionally with the lower initial capital you could replace it when it wears out with something that is a quarter of the price rather than locking in 110€/MWh for energy that won't start being produced for 10-20 years and you won't get all of for 50-70 years. Energy from a nuclear reactor still needs backup for the 10% of the time it is off (or 30% in France's case) and overprovision or peaking (which will either drive the cost up to 200€/MWh or require gas)
In fact, in the 1970s, the German Green Party proposed replacing nuclear with more coal power plants.
They were anti-nuclear first, the whole CO2 thing only ever started to get traction with them when they won their first Atomausstieg and needed a new topic to terrorise children into next-generation voters with.
What was a bigger issue in 70s, 80s and 90s? Nuclear power, Chernobyl just happened as did the Pershing deployment, the Ozone layer or climate change? To answer the question, climate cjange only recently got the traction it deserves. Assuming you believe global warming is an actual problem, and not just something evil Greens and environmentalists are scaring our youth with.
Oh, I believe both. Things can both be a real problem to be tackled and the basis for ultimately useless fear-mongering. Usually, the evil Greens focus on the latter.
There is a penn and teller episode where they argued that globalization was creating world peace. Basically, when everyone’s economies are so entangled, they said, nobody would want to go to war because of how expensive it would be.
Their model, I think, only works for democracies. When a dictator controls a country, and their quality of life remains unchanged and revolves mostly around delusions of grandeur (like an impetuous monarch centuries ago), that dynamic isn’t enough of a deterrent. It only works when the leadership is sensitive to the well being of the country and it’s people
> Their model, I think, only works for democracies.
Completely agree but I suspect democracy is not enough. When a leader manages to assume a power that can be kept by other means like nationalistic rhetoric or cultural issues they can too engage in economically irrational politics.
People often rally behind ideas about god, identity or ideology. In fact this is very natural and expected because otherwise people could have accepted offers like "if you let me exterminate this group of people I will give you gas at discount".
Even for dictators, economic costs are a real barrier. You can’t loot from a broken economy in the future or build vanity projects if there’s no money. Economic interdependence constrains authoritarians as well, just a bit less.
I think it is all a game of perception. If you think you can muscle your way through, either quickly enough so that no harm is done to your economy/population until your goal is reached or if you perceive a weakness in the opposition, a fear of taking action against you, then you see the move as possible.
I think the line of thought that economic (co-)dependence makes conflict impossible or leads to a more harmonious relationship is probably the gravest error in german foreign strategy. I think it's a reason behind both our relationship with russia and china. But it assumes a rational actor who's concern is the well-being of its people. Putin doesn't care for his people, he cares for power. He want's to increase his power, the stability of his regime etc. He might have employed the same flawed thinking to come to the conclusion that europe won't help ukraine if it's dependent on russian energy.
In reality, economic costs only become apparent after the harm is done. The greatest strategy crumbles if it is build on flawed assumptions.
I don’t think that’s the strongest version of the argument. I would boil it down to something along the lines of economic relatedness building roadblocks and off-ramps on the way to conflict. Trade gives some opportunities for low risk retaliation that can be hashed out and deescalated prior to any shooting happening. It presents resistance that can slow things down. It obviously can’t prevent a determined large nation from barreling through, but it’s a layer of defense.
> Their model, I think, only works for democracies.
I think it's simplistic to rely on that dichotomy when unaccountable power dwells within countries and bodies like the EU that are ostensibly democratic, and nearly every government that is called authoritarian holds elections of some sort and is subject to regime change irregardless.
Democracies have often gone to war. The usual formulation is that no two democracies have ever gone to war with each other but this is specious reasoning - it asserts causality without even bothering to speculate as to an actual underlying cause, probably because there isn't one and any attempts to argue otherwise would immediately fall apart. Democracies have been invading, overthrowing and subjugating other countries for a long time.
> There is a penn and teller episode where they argued that globalization was creating world peace.
This is something that worries me about covid supply chain onshoring.
> Their model, I think, only works for democracies.
It's kept China in-line, but it's also made North Korea a pariah state.
The other lesson we recently got in world peace is countries with nukes can do what they want to countries without nukes. Could be the US and Iraq or Russia and Ukraine.
Tragedy of the commons: to save the world, we need to get rid of all the nukes. But unless you have nukes, you are helpless against everyone around you, so everyone has to get nukes (or a trustworthy ally who has them)
Dictators benefit from economic prosperity just as Democratic leaders do: the propensity benefits those who keep them in power. In a dictatorship, economic prosperity rarely benefits the average citizen, but that's because the average citizen isn't important to secure the dictators power.
You can see Putin paying a price for the continued economic hardships. He is absolutely risking an end to his reign, but apparently the possibility of glory is more important to him.
> Their model, I think, only works for democracies
I no longer believe that most "democracies" are actually democratic in the sense that people are actually represented. One keystone to a functioning democracy is transparency and an informed populace. That population also needs to be capable of shared coherent goals. Culture is programming for the masses, and was once something established through blood. Now, culture is established by media, and control by control of information.
Dictators are just as beholden to culture as a tool for control as are democratically elected leaders. If culture can be manipulated in short order, consent can be manufactured, then there's really not that much difference the authoritarian by declaration versus the authoritarian by "consent".
As long as people have there very most basic needs met, and they are sufficiently convinced that there is no other possibly better state of existence for them- they will live and they will die to the benefit of the leaders subsisting from their labor.
The real, current example of this would be the USA- we've been in conflicts for the entire duration of my life, it hasn't been cheap, but the expenses have been neatly placed on the shoulders of people that will probably never even realize the origin of the burden they bear.
In the meantime, the expenses of war need to be paid to someone, and with a democracy supplanted by lobbyists, we are saddled with a parasitical class of elected officials that do not answer to votes.
tldr - Even in a global economy, wars will happen, because all wars are just wars against the lower classes. War won't stop until the standard of living of the elites are threatened, regardless of the political system.
Russia and Germany have been at war for centuries. The last few decades when their economies became co-dependent was a blissful peace. Beware the long term consequences of buiding a new wall between them.
It's too late... the scene is already set up for the next big war.
We're in a situation where the hate between both sides is very close to the surface, no one is trying to hide it anymore.
All that's needed now is one excuse... as it happened so many times before, for centuries... one small thing - an important figure murder, a bomb that lands on the wrong side of the border (accidentally?)... the destruction of NordStream, which I thought would be enough to start a full scale conflict with Russia, but for some reason hasn't yet (though it remains to be seen). It's very clear that what we're seeing today looks exactly like what we saw just before other large wars: a mostly regional conflict that serves as a proxy conflict between the bigger players causes the hostile rethoric on both sides to grow more and more, until the population not only supports a conflict, but demands it. Whether or not the news are telling the truth (which anyone who was there in previous situations like this, including Iraq not so long ago, knows is full of lies and uncontested half-truths from both sides) doesn't even matter anymore. It's a matter of time, you can be sure of that.
Sorry but from the perspective of Central Europe, the times when Russian and Germany are friendly, have been the most dreadful. We barely avoided it this time.
Germany and the USSR (there was no independent Russia at that time) were not friendly in 1939. The Soviets signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact because they knew Germany planned to invade the USSR at some point, and they wanted to buy time.
It was a scurrilous, unprincipled deal (much like Poland's deal with Germany to divide up Czechoslovakia a year earlier), but the Soviets didn't make it because they were friends with Germany. They had actually preferred to sign an alliance with France, in order to protect Czechoslovakia, but that had failed due to a lack of willingness from France and a refusal by Poland to allow Soviet troops to cross Poland to reach Czechoslovakia (for some reasons that were understandable, given that the USSR and Poland had recently fought a war, and also because Poland itself wanted a piece of Czechoslovakia).
But times when Germany/predecessors and Russia hand been allied haven't exactly been peaceful either. History is the worst foreign policy advisor of them all.
The last time nowadays Russia and nowadays Germany were allies was at the end of the Napoleanic Wars and during Bismarcks, IMHO ingenious, coalition policy between the large European powers. Back then we talk about actual Emperors. After Bismarck, things deteriorated to WW1, followed by WW2, in between both, the USSR ans Nazi-Germany were short term allies for military build up and at the end to split Poland. After that, both sides were totally not allies. And after that we had the Cold War, which had Eastern Europe under Communist rule but without any active wars. Those were fought in Korea and Vietnam, withkut German participation.
It's upsetting that so many here want to take a genuine (and very scary) international crisis and use it to flog their own personal peeves.
Needless to say, "German energy policy of the last two decades" and "Let's Invade Ukraine and Blackmail Europe!" are different decisions, and subject to different analysis. You can have reasonable opinions about both, but if your opposition to Russian adventurism and brinksmanship[1] is grounded only on your support for the German nuclear industry, I think you're not helping the discourse.
[1] It's looking increasingly likely that they blew up Nordstream, which is dangerously close to an act of war against other nuclear powers.
There is of course nuance required, but it's already acknowledged inside and out of Germany that the dependency on Russian gas / nordstream had an effect in bankrolling the aggression against Ukraine. Zelenskyy himself addressed the Bundestag and said as much.
> Why is this possible? When we told you that Nord Stream was a weapon and a preparation for a great war, we heard in response that it was an economy after all. Economy. Economy. But it was cement for a new wall. [1]
> "German energy policy of the last two decades" and "Let's Invade Ukraine and Blackmail Europe!"
There is a good argument that those two are related. Energy is a weapon of war for russia, and it works best when there is a dependency on it. A lot of money flows towards increasing that dependency, including towards advocacy groups with irrational stance against nuclear.
I think they have special "camps" and unfortunate mundane accidents such as inopportune tripping hazards next to open 10th floor windows and landlubbers swimming in open ocean for that.
Show everybody that you can to it on other pipelines while doing it only on a currently useless one (I answer the question by giving one possible advantage, I have no opinion on the real cause at the moment)
There is little value in crazy showing crazy can do crazy things. We know crazy can do crazy. It like Kim, jung-un --it does not have to show us it is willing to lob a nuke, we know it would lob one if if needed to for self-preservation. These are rational actors, their reasoning might be foreign to us and operate differently, but they act within their own rational frameworks.
Exactly. Except for Intelligence agencies, we do not know who did it. However, the media consensus is that the enemy did self sabotage to show us they can do bad things? We know they very well can do bad things. They do not have to prove it.
Hell, GWBush was an inch away from approving tactical nuke use in Afghanistan but ultimately talked out of it and opted for the MOAB, but now a cornered rat thinking about it is now crazy? Does that mean GWB was crazy too?
To me it's completely obvious - Poland and its 50 million citizens depend on the Norway->Poland gas pipeline for having any gas this winter at all. Blowing up Nordstream is clearly a signal from Russia that if we don't stop pushing back on Ukraine, then that pipeline is next to go. That's how I read it anyway.
Classic scare tactic. Station your troops on someone else’s border and suicide them. That sends the message that friendly fire can become invasion fire.
I mean, those pipes were clearly not going to be used anytime soon. It's not like they blew up anything that was actively making them any money, nor did they sacrefice their own troops to do this like you compare to. It's a good target because it sends a message but it's pretty useless otherwise.
Compare it to blowing up a ghost town near Finland, then.
No one would be scared of a military managing to destroy something on their own soil.
In fact, a better theory for you would be to claim that Russia did it in order to make it look like sabotage from the EU/America. Just a propaganda exercise since the pipeline is “useless” to them right now in any case. But you are clearly so desperate that you just go for the first cartoonish theory that you can come up with.
>> But you are clearly so desperate that you just go for the first cartoonish theory that you can come up with.
That is very uncalled for. I really feel like this is a direct threat to Poland, but obviously I'm talking about it from a perspective of a Pole. Maybe if you live elsewhere you just don't feel that way - but I don't see any reason to describe this theory as "cartoonish".
>>No one would be scared of a military managing to destroy something on their own soil.
Yeah, except that pipeline wasn't destroyed on Russia's own soil, was it?
To me, it's completely obvious the truth is the exact opposite. I feel like only someone who is no longer thinking rationally can claim that Russia would blow up their own pipeline and make it impossible, even after hostilities cease (yes, they will cease one day, they always do... or are you still hostile to Germany?), to get billions and billions of easy Euro flowing down on its coffers.
If you know history you should understand that a "small" even like this, in a highly volatile situation like we have now, could easily trigger an irrational war no one can win to start. I would think that Putin knows that very well, so it's not imaginable to me that he would risk.
Could someone who feels so strongly against Russia, given all the news we're being fed daily in the West, actually want NATO to enter this conflict directly to finally "destroy" the enemy (which seems to be the only thing that will make Putin give up on Ukraine's East)?? I feel like, given responses like yours, that's exactly what's going on. You believe Putin is so murderous that he would just blow up one of his country's main sources of income, which he supported (against American strong opposition) for so many years, just "to send a signal" he will blow up Poland's main source of energy if the West doesn't back off... I can totally see someone who believes that also believes the only acceptable thing to do right now is to start a full scale war against Russia.... which would be so disastrous to humanity that, once we look back before that happened, we will wish we had just had the balls to freaking sit down with the Devil himself and have a talk and resolve our issues if that would've prevented Armagedon.
I mean, the problem here is that you basically assumed what my position is and then argued against it, but it isn't based on anything that I have said so far.
The only point I want to address is that I really don't believe Putin is acting rationally in this war. Nothing he has done has been rational. If he cared about the billions of euro flowing through those pipes, he simply wouldn't have attacked Ukraine in the first place. Judging him by what he's done in the past is pointless - he has congratulated and praised Zelensky when he was elected, now suddenly the guy is a fascist neo-nazi? Putin has military objectives and he won't stop until he achieves them. I wouldn't support an all our NATO Vs Russia war, but I do think that Putin shouldn't be allowed to annex parts of Ukraine just because he wants to - because yes, as a Polish man that triggers a very deep response, response that tells me that at some point, maybe not now but at some point, he will come and just declare that portions of Poland are now Russian. The comparison to Germany isn't really relevant here because Germany isn't attacking its neighbours currently like Russia is - but if it was I'd feel the same for very similar reasons.
If you claim that Putin isn’t rational then you can claim that he is liable to do anything and everything since his actions don’t make sense. Hence the obvious question: why would one theory be more likely than any other?
You yourself haven’t given any rational reasons for your original theory.
Trying to scare EU/NATO to back off or a country of 50 million people will go without gas this winter isn't a rational theory? Seems like a very clear thing to threaten in this situation.
>>Hence the obvious question: why would one theory be more likely than any other?
Well, I mean, some theories are obviously more likely than others - it's more likely that Russia blew it up than that Japan blew it up, right?
No, it isn’t a rational theory. Because the only elaboration you have given is that you are a worried Polish person.
Putin has already given quite brazen warnings like “remember that we have nukes”. And yet he would covertly sabotage Russia’s own pipeline? What kind of a limp-wristed warning is that?
> Well, I mean, some theories are obviously more likely than others - it's more likely that Russia blew it up than that Japan blew it up, right?
Yes, a country on the other side of the planet probably had nothing to do with this. Well said! Probably not Fiji either.
Any more brilliant counters?
Alternatively there are countries that are closer to the Baltic Sea which are both not Russia and Japan… as well as countries that have geopolitical interests in that general area.
Reminding about nukes doesn't work. The only outcome is being reminded by US that Russia will not survive consequences of using them. Nobody takes that as a serious treat.
Now pipes being blown up in a somewhat deniable way is treat, because that's something that can realistically happen without Moscow being nuked in the process.
Russia being a culprit here is so unthinkable for you probably because you vastly overestimate value of pipelines being affected. NS2 was never going to deliver gas, NS1 was turned off, likely forever. And hey, Yamal is still there, unaffected, if Russia actually will want to sell anything to Europe instead of China.
You misunderstood the threat (probably because news are always distorting things and people tend to believe uncritically in times of war). Putin's threat is very clear: he will use tactical nukes ("small" scale ones) to defend "Russia" against aggression... by annexing part of Ukraine, he gets the excuse he needed to use them against Ukrainian forces... that's why the Kremlin keeps pointing out to their "nuclear doctrine" which states that Russia may use nukes in self-defense. The annexation makes total sense when you understand that.
People claiming the threats are directed at western Europe countries are misinformed or trying to generate panic intentionally. If that was the actual threat, you would be right, it wouldn't be a serious one... but the one he actually meant is very close to becoming a reality... just wait a few weeks and you'll see it... specially in case Ukraine continues imparting serious losses on Russian forces. There's approximately zero chance Russia will just go away from the territories it occupies now.
> Reminding about nukes doesn't work. The only outcome is being reminded by US that Russia will not survive consequences of using them. Nobody takes that as a serious treat.
The world would not survive the consequences of a full-scale nuclear war. It is still rational to fear nuclear war because hasty decisions could still bring it about.
> Russia being a culprit here is so unthinkable for you probably because you vastly overestimate value of pipelines being affected. NS2 was never going to deliver gas, NS1 was turned off, likely forever. And hey, Yamal is still there, unaffected, if Russia actually will want to sell anything to Europe instead of China.
So it is unthinkable to me because I overestimate the value of the affected pipelines. So Putin wanted to send a strong message by sabotaging useless infrastructure.
A light bulb has gone off and I can see things clearly...?
Again, I don't really see why. What's so irrational about threatening enormous economical and societal consequences in a situation like this? Surely it's a credible threat? Is it just the fact that I'm Polish that bothers you about it, because you maybe think I can't keep a straight head about it?
>>What kind of a limp-wristed warning is that?|
The same one as poisoning your critics with unique poison that only Russia could have and then denying any responsibility, I guess? Sends a message, which is the main point.
>>Any more brilliant counters?
Do you think we can have this discussion without you being sarcastic?
> If you know history you should understand that a "small" even like this, in a highly volatile situation like we have now, could easily trigger an irrational war no one can win to start. I would think that Putin knows that very well
Isn't the very existence of a ground war in Ukraine clear evidence that Putin does not "know that very well"? Your point seems to be "Putin clearly won't escalate because he already escalated". That seems poorly grounded.
And in any case the logic seems generic anyway; you can make that argument about literally any theory about "Who Blew Up Nordstream?". If you think Putin is risk-averse, why do you think western governments aren't? You really think Biden is going rogue over this but you... trust Putin to be a steady hand at the tiller?
Russia made it clear since the 1990's that if Ukraine ever tried to go the NATO way, they would intervene... this war was a long time coming.
Now, you can't compare invading Ukraine, right on Russia's backyard, with invading or attacking a NATO country (or its supplies in this case, which has the same effect).
My argument was not the Biden did it :D is that really what you read from what I wrote?? My argument is that someone in the West (or just on Ukraine's side), not thinking rationally anymore, may have been responsible. That's the only thing that fits with all we know so far - lots of people in the West see Putin as the new Hitler... would you do everything in your power to stop Hitler if you were in a position you believed you could?
If you believe only a Government has the capability to do such thing... then it's not so difficult to find one that would be "desperate" enough. Ukraine itself seems to be the one who would most benefit from NATO entering the war, right? But would they really risk getting caught and losing the trust of NATO? I don't know, but when your country is half in ruins you may not think straight anymore.
I would say Ukraine destroyed it. They are, at this moment, the only ones with a benefit in having Europe unable to received Russian gas any more. It's either Ukraine or the US which has popcorn in the microwave at this war by proxy which bleeds Russia of resources down to nothing. My 2c
If we're going with that speculation then we could also speculate there is a small likelihood someone doesn't want someone else get cold feet and Kapitulieren in the middle of a bitter cold winter.
The way the article reads it's not clear if the US sabotaged software that was ultimately stolen by the Russians and used on pipelines or if the US intentionally and covertly transferred the flawed technology through more legitimate channels.
I recall it as USA found out from a spy the shopping list, and created sabotaged items that would be stolen. Supposedly the explosion shockwaves were expected by a few USA insiders. I have yet to read the referenced book, though it looks like a fascinating (though white-washed) read.
> Now, this is the internet, so surely there will be plenty of people in this topic willing to disbelieve their governments.
Can you even imagine? Degenerates who don’t trust their own governments? Verräter.
Being mildly skeptical of one government is... fine... but two who are allies? Eight who are allies? The official Nato position? Surely, at some point they all become infallible.
You don't have to believe that every government in the West is lying about it. You just have to believe that one government (the one who did it) is lying, and the rest don't know because they weren't told.
> You just have to believe that one government (the one who did it) is lying, and the rest don't know because they weren't told.
Or the rest figure it out and independently conclude that siding with NATO is still their best choice, so they better keep up the lie and avoid the drama of calling out their ally.
Quite honestly, if a bank robber goes into a bank and shoots himself into his foot, saying: 'now imagine what I could do to you' - I'd be pretty impressed!
That quote also mischaracterizes the decision. Cutting gas supplies was retaliation for sanctions. It wasn't really "Russia's decision" as much as it was western Europe's decision to back Ukraine.
No they were not. Their geolocation and battery technology means it wasn't feasible regardless. It was sabotaged to begin with. No other efforts needed.
Location? Germany has huge amounts of wind, especially in offshore. Your own map even shows this.
We also have plenty of solar, enough that the conservatives introduced a solar installation LIMIT to keep fossil fuel and nuclear competitive.
As for storage, with large enough over-capacity it's really easy to retrofit old coal plants to work off head capacitors, and we have plenty of those.
It's just no good if there is no political will to do it.
And the "nuclear narrative" is one of the whataboutisms together with "breakthrough hydrogen tech" to distract from the solutions that are cheaply implementable today.
The idea that this is just a matter of political will is nonsensical in the extreme, it's impossible to understand how anyone can believe this except via massive propaganda. Here's a graph of German solar/wind power production:
Notice how it frequently drops to near zero. For example the morning of the 22nd where total wind+solar production in Germany was just 1.34 GW. Peak load in Germany often reaches 65-70 GW.
The people saying renewables cannot work and power must come from coal, gas or nuclear aren't evil conservatives, they are rational people who understand what renewables can and cannot do. The fact that the left systematically refuses to accept this reality is now not only destroying the European economy but flat out endangering lives. How long must the rest of us put up with this sort of rampant irrationality?
You accuse other of irrationality, yet you prop up a straw-man that's been debunked over and over again.
Nobody argues that renewables deliver peak power all of the time. The goal is to have enough capacity and intermediary storage to be able to deliver constant peak power with both combined.
The current economic situation would be much better had we spend all our money on renewables and storage instead of nuclear and gas, which ultimately end up fueling the very regimes that give us trouble e.g. saudi arabia, iran, russia, instead conservatives implemented arbitrary constraints like the solar cap and maximum wind farm distance.
Solar is already the cheapest form of energy per watt produced, investing into any other technology than the cheapest and most sustainable one is what's irrational.
"The goal is to have enough capacity and intermediary storage to be able to deliver constant peak power with both combined."
But this is an irrational goal because there is no way to do that intermediary storage on the scale that is required, and as I just pointed out, wind and solar are frequently yielding nearly zero power even when summed together. In your other comments you're talking about pressurized air caverns and other things that are sci-fi projects right now but the crisis Germany is causing with its policies is here today.
This is why greenism is irrational. We're not talking about theoretically perfect power grids here, we're talking about what technologies exist today, to deliver the kind of stability required for a trans-national grid. Renewables aren't even close to this and there's no sign of that changing on the horizon. The refusal to accept that is now more than just annoying, it's becoming flat out dangerous.
All of the tech I mentioned is either operating in pilot studies or full scale systems. Both combined as in renewables + storage, not wind + solar.
You got way too much set phrases and trite political cliches going on for any meaningful discussion.
Solar, wind and storage are here today, they are cheaper than coal, nuclear and gas, even WITHOUT externalised costs of climate change, and long term storage.
The people that are dangerous are the ones that want to make energy politics a political game, and those that want to make as much personal profit from it as possible.
there is no storage capability that would allow europe to work on renewable it doesnt scale just look at how your storage batteries are made! look ar how lithium is harvested please…
Insulated thermal for example is extremely cheap and can be retrofitted to existing power plants. All you need is a insulated steel vessel filled with something inert when heated, e.g. sand.
If you want to go real fancy you could use quicklime, that could be used both as a bulk heat store and additonally releases more energy in it's hydration bonds than lithium ion batteries.
You can actually run a surprising amount of existing coal plants on iron dust, which when burned becomes iron oxide, which can then be recycled to metalic iron.
Northern germany has many salt caverns which can be used as pressurised air storage.
Southern germany also has huge pumped hydro storage potentials.
Batteries are one storage technology, there are plenty others, far cheaper if you just want bulk and dont't care about space.
Not trying to argue with you, just trying to understand as someone from a neighboring country — could you elaborate a bit more about what happened with the Conservative Party undermining the green energy effort? And how close would Germany realistically have been to being completely self-sufficient by now if that didn’t happen?
* Blocked Biogas by imposing a limit on installed capacity
* blocked solar by imposing a limit on yearly added installed capacity (1GW)
* introduced the so called EEG-Umlage that made storage technologies unprofitable when used to store renewable energy
* introduced a shitshow of bureaucracy to prevent new solar and wind projects from coming online
* introduced another shitshow of bureaucracy to prevent new solar and wind projects from coming online on top of the existing shitshow
* undermine EU law by just not implementing it, for example regarding neighbours giving energy to each other
* introduced redicoulus "Abstandsregeln"/distance regulations, so for example open pit mines that use demolitions have an allowed min distance of 300m and windfarms 1000m
* When China poured billions into the companies forming China's solar industry, while German's companies had no help with their investments and funding
Realistically: not close at all. But significantly less close: in the last few years, German renewable buildup per capita effectively collapsed. Expressed in the most German units imaginable, buildup dropped from "world champion" to "failed to qualify for the tournament". Part of it is certainly caused by running out of low-hanging fruits, but yay can't be the only explanation.
Blocking wind power and grid efforts everywhere, stopping planned storage efforts, man we even shut down pump storages etc over the last decades that would be so necessary to have any chance to support and realize base load with renewables. Right now we are shedding cheap bio gas and wind power production again (and that given we build up much too little as we could have) while the power stock exchanges have fun gambling.
On top this constant nuclear narrative, which is not even much significant for current power production, this is all beyond any funny.
I've been in South Africa for the last month, which has had an energy crisis since around 2007 and somehow they manage to keep mobile networks up during load shedding. There are 2:30 hour (sometimes 4:30 hour) blackouts daily and yet everything seems to keep chugging along.
Mobile towers are probably have some of the highest electricity:benefit ratios out there, it would be silly to not prioritize them.
To be fair, if you experience blackouts that often your infrastructure is probably prepared for it.
Most of Europe basically never has blackouts, so why spend money on backup batteries when they will be deprecated before they'll even be used once?
Canada/US learnt that lesson back in 2003 with the Northeast Blackout. Generators on cell towers where not fueled and some data centre’s caught fire when the cooling went down but the systems didn’t. Lessons where learned. Cell infra is strategic and should not be allowed to go down, everything uses it and people will die if it goes down.
> Cell infra is strategic and should not be allowed to go down, everything uses it and people will die if it goes down.
> Lessons were learned.
That's why our emergency services use Rogers as the main, and Telus as a backup - but only after the multi-day Rogers outage that took out payment processors and emergency services this year.
Lessons will have been learned instead of parroted when we have a crown corporation as the main, and a private corporation as the backup. We need cell service to be reliable and rock-solid, even if it's not always cost-competitive to be so. Same reason hospitals, fire, and police services are public: turning a profit is less important than availability.
I'm in a Seattle suburb and we had a two-day blackout a few years back. Cell reception worked fine for 12 hours but then went to 1 bar. Presumably the closest cell site ran out of gas on the backup generator and my phone switched to a site outside the blackout zone.
What is wild was that this was entirely localized! A single substation affecting maybe 20,000 people. How many cell sites were affected, a dozen? And still T-Mobile couldn't manage refueling. In a country-wide crisis we would be totally boned.
Indeed! In Toronto, the cooling for 151 Front Street West was grid-powered electric pumps pulling cold water from deep in Lake Ontario... so despite all the fuel they had ready to run the systems, they couldn't use it and had to shut the building down.
Yes: this is the same as when an inch of snow shuts down a warm city and people from cold cities say "we handle worse storms several times a month". People engineer for likely conditions, and those aren't the same everywhere.
Yup. And in most cases it simply doesn't make sense to spend the capital on the preparations.
Ex: Atlanta gets roughly 2 inches of snow a year (usually one or two minor snowfalls) and it's far cheaper to simply shut down for a day when it happens than it is to have the infrastructure in place to handle staying open.
Every 10 years or so we'll get a big snow, and be down for a week (ex: 2014) and people will freak out - but on the whole, still much cheaper to have that downtime than to be exorbitantly over-prepared for situations that are rare and not disastrous.
I suspect this will be the case for the mobile outage here - on the whole, the circumstances causing the outage (lack of power) is likely not recurring, and the costs of weathering this outage with existing infra is much more favorable than being over-prepared for blackout conditions which are rare.
As someone who lived there for awhile, was going to mention Atlanta too. And I'd assume similar latitude cities like Birmingham, Charlotte, and Dallas?
Cities operate with limited budgets. It does not make financial sense to prepare for some relatively rare events, versus allocating that money to better prepare for likely events.
If Atlanta had a fleet of snowplows, they'd be unused 75% of winters and used for only a couple days in 20%. Bad investment.
Hot weather too - runways were melting in the UK this year in what would be regular summer temperatures in Arizona. The engineers weren't feckless - few people plan for conditions that literally haven't happened once in 200 years of records.
My wife is from SA. There, every supermarket and even smaller stores have generators because blackouts are frequent.
A few years ago, we had a bigger 6h or so power outage, all the stores had to throw tons of products away because there was literally no redundant power supply at all. It was my 2nd power outage in Germany in over 30 years.
It's unfortunately not that simple. I'm South African. We have load shedding "stages", where each stage sheds 1GW from the grid.
We were just at stage 6 recently, and this means there are days with 1x2.5hr outages and 2x4.5hr outages, with maybe 2-3hrs between these stages to recharge batteries. In my experience the cellphone towers do not always have sufficient time to recharge their batteries.
I live on an estate with a cellphone tower owned by the largest network operator, and this is still an issue. SMS-based MFA becomes a problem when this happens.
Interestingly, I have never once had a fibre outage through years of load shedding. (I have battery backup for my fibre CPE.) I can easily get 200mbps to a local DC while people relying on 4G or 5G are completely cut off.
In Sweden we haven’t separated their power supply from anything else, so rolling blackouts will kill them as well. And the blackouts are probably coming sooner than a fix can be in place
I actually had a problem with Swedens approach a few years ago.
The Swedish power grid is a single grid and the idea is: all eggs in one basket, but pay close attention to the basket.
Unfortunately when it comes to datacenter designations, two independent power feeds is required for tier 2 and above. Excluding all datacenters in Sweden.
At least some portions of Canada are also excluded because they have rules that say that only hospitals are allowed to have two independent power feeds. So Ubisofts Montreal Datacenter is in the same building as a hospital...
If you mean fed by two different substations it’s not a problem in Sweden at all. Most(every station I’ve ever worked in) medium/high voltage substations in Sweden are fed by at least two separate lines.
Same as any other country I’ve built substations.
Just curious what you mean by independent power feed. If you mean fed by two separate power plants, you are right, but I don’t see how that would be possible in any country.
My next work assignment literally starting in a week is building a high voltage substation for a data center(customer is well known on HN) so that’s why I’m curious
The "two separate flow" refers not the national/regional grids but instead to the specific substations, the idea being that if a substation was tripped (due to chance or for maintenance) you can still get electricity from the alternate route.
You can connect to separate energy providers - such that if one provider or their transmission infrastructure goes down, you're still connected to and online with the other provider.
There are different generations/eras of "towers". The ones dating from NMT and the cold war have their own little shrapnel-protected bunkers and most likely UPS:s.
The latest ones which hang on every roof in cities might be turned off, but it just means phones scan until they find 2G/3G signals.
"Surplus power" is not accurate. It's more accurate to say that the transfer cables are mostly at full load because the European demand is so large. In effect, this means European prices in Scandinavia.
If everything is tied to the "same grid" you may not be able to shut off only specific classes of customers.
If the grid is designed for unreliability, you probably have the ability to order load sheds of various levels, so you can cut power to houses without cutting streetlights and cell towers.
Alternatively, you could have it built into smart meters.
A typical cell tower uses 4kW to 5kW, sometimes less (at least in the states). That's reasonably close to a standard home's central air conditioner, or a home's electric stove/oven/range.
I'd be highly surprised if, of all possible things, this is where they want to cut to lower electricity usage.
I think it's more about the cell towers being cut at the same time as their local area.
Where it's easy to anticipate that hospitals/police stations/fire birgades will need a special connection to the grid, it probably was harder 20 years ago to realise the numerous new cell towers also needed to be put on a separate connection.
So they'll get cut at the same time as the companies and the houses in the local area.
In France, the talks about the rolling blackouts were acompanied by assurances that private homes wouldn't be affected, only industries.
So they should have some kind of ability to target at least a kind of user. I don't know if cell towers qualify as industry or their own, separate kind.
There's also the fact that there has been a massive rollout of connected meters, so, at least in theory, they could target individual homes for the blackouts (I'm not saying that would be useful in any way).
I don't know if other kinds of endpoints have similar kinds of meters, but they could.
> So they should have some kind of ability to target at least a kind of user.
Industrial power is easier to separate because it is almost always a separate grid region. There aren’t many houses built up against your local steel mill or refinery.
Cell towers are collocated with residential areas because that’s where the users are. The power for homes and cell towers comes from the same source.
Just to give some perspective, that figure is less than 2 times what a single Antminer S19 Pro Bitcoin mining appliance draws (found by searching "most used bitcoin mining hardware"). Mining farms contain from hundreds to thousands of these devices (search "antminer farm") kept on 24/7. Also, that model is far from being the most power hungry. And no, they're not only operating in poor countries where energy is cheap: all it takes for whoever operates them is being able to profit more than the cost of energy plus maintenance, no matter where.
Rationing power for cell towers would be pure idiocy that would give nothing in return, while there are well known places where lots of energy is wasted 24/7.
Wouldn't it be more about the power simply is gone as in that portion of the grid is out? I don't think they run custom circuits just for cell towers as that would be quite expensive, 5G sucks a lot of power and I don't think the backup batteries can last for days on end of a severe power outage.
I wouldn't worry about powering the cell tower itself, but more about the backhaul infrastructure that it relies on. In cities it relies on fiber that's often leased from various providers and terminates at datacenters where it shares switching equipment with a lot of other customers of the provider & datacenter, so power can't effectively be segregated. If that datacenter can't be kept powered (and that will require a lot of power), it doesn't matter whether the tower itself remains powered.
I see a lot of confusion in the comments about why cell towers would be impacted. Load shedding in the grid occurs across regions of the grid. The power companies don’t choose which specific sites to cut off. If cellular infrastructure is in part of the grid that gets disconnected, it will go down too (after exhausting its backup supply).
The top priority for keeping power on goes to grid segments with life-sustaining equipment. If you live within a grid segment that also powers a hospital you will likely not be subject to load shedding.
The critical detail is that the batteries are configured for standby service, not cycling service, which means that they don't recharge quickly when power comes back on. They're set to a float voltage which maximizes battery service life (years), at the expense of cycle time (hours).
The first time power cuts, you might have 8-10 hours to run on battery. But if it comes back on and then goes off again just a few hours later, the batteries might've only recovered 3 hours of charge. Increasing the recharge rate wouldn't be technically complicated (just adjust the rectifier output), but it would have a logistical cost: These rectifiers aren't designed to be fiddled with so it would take a bit of skill, and someone with that skill would have to visit every site.
Worse, by boosting the rectifier voltage, the batteries would then fail faster, as commensurate with cycling rather than standby service. A site that normally gets 10 years on its battery plant might need new batteries every 3 years, for instance. That's a bad deal.
(And no, the rectifiers simply are not set up to do multi-stage charging. That would add a bunch of coordination and complexity that's just not needed in standby service where they can output a simple float voltage and be done with it. Changing that would be a forklift upgrade, replacing the simple rectifiers with complex chargers.)
It's reasonable that new sites may be installed with lithium batteries someday instead of lead-acid, and that may already be occurring in some places, and that would solve the problem quite simply because lithium just has such higher charge acceptance rates. You can float-charge a lithium and still use it in cycling service because it absorbs charge much more readily even on float. Lead-acids charge incredibly slowly on float, which is fine in a standby application, but it might be the Achilles' heel here.
You missed a critical point that by increasing the charge rate of the battery you've also increased the load on the grid, exacerbating the original problem.
In Pakistan we have had daily blackouts for almost 15 years, though things were better in urban areas recently. Basically, everyone in the middle class has a UPS, with battery to power lights and fans for several hours. Except these are maybe 70-80% efficient. So, yes, the grid has had to deal with, in a very real way, with the increased power demand of millions of households.
> "It [Enedis] said it was able to isolate sections of the network to supply priority customers, such as hospitals, key industrial installations and the military and that it was up to local authorities to add telecoms operators infrastructure to the list of priority customers."
This is also a good argument for mesh-networks between cell phones independent of cell towers, although those don't scale for large numbers connected phones and large numbers of users. Texting could be supported via such mesh-nets easily I imagine, but not video.
Indeed, a large part of cell towers are hosted on the rooftop of residential buildings and mostly connected to the same electrical network.
In France, most homes have a smartmeter (called "Linky") and these could be used to have very precise load shedding (they communicate with PLC) but I believe this feature is not available or developed (yet?).
So it's not turning off mobile networks in particular, it's just a general power shortage, a consequence of which might be some cell service being interrupted. They made it sound like they were going to shut off mobile networks specifically to save power, which doesn't make sense for a couple of reasons.
Starting to feel like Reuters isn't worth my time anymore. Too many clickbaity titles like this lately.
I was reading the other day that they've made dramatic cuts in most of their local offices, and their material is now largely produced in a central hub in a low-cost Eastern European country. It shows.
I strongly strongly doubt that critical emergency call infrastructure will be blacked out before literally anything else.
Even when massive ice buildup took down a whole region's power grid in my home EU country, mobile cell towers were the first to be kept up and brought online to allow emergency services and citizens to communicate.
This feels like a nothing burger from Reuters (which is publishing some seriously dubious news these days).
Indeed, they will just black out together with everything else. They are generally not on separate distribution circuits. They do have some limited backup power though.
The ones I was helping deploy usually had generators as backup because the requirements from the government was that emergency call infrastructure works when power goes out.
I can see smaller network operators save money on backups, but major monopolies usually don't have a choice in this manner.
The general vibe of quotes from governments/operators in the article is they intend to find ways to keep essential services running in the event outages last longer than a couple of hours.
I'm a former field engineer for a US Cellular carrier.
I don't understand how a two hour outage is a panic event, both Cellular CO's and Cell Sites should have at least 3-4 hours of holdover time. Thats just the standard of design.
Like, what happens if I storm blows thru, knocks down the infrastructure, if you have heat related infrastructure failures, or some other just normal failure - power outages happen, for those sites in the states where long power outages are common they'll have a permanent generator on site.
> Europe has nearly half a million telecom towers and most of them have battery backups that last around 30 minutes to run the mobile antennas.
Which seems bonkers to me. Perhaps they deploy incredibly small batteries because they're engineered for a different outage profile than the US? Or perhaps the reporter is quoting something inappropriately -- traditional large sites with many hours, and many new small sites with no backup at all, might well average out to 30 minutes.
I think there's real work to be done on improving bring-up time when power returns, though. I worked on the EVDO rollout and rebooting a site after work would take 20-30 minutes because it's something that's only expected to happen once in a blue moon. I believe if they relaxed GPS timing tolerances a bit and optimized a few other things, this could be shortened to 5-ish minutes without a whole lot of work.
Just for some perspective: In my entire life in Germany, I experienced two power outages, both more than 20 years ago. The grid is rock-solid here; this might not warrant for huge battery capacity in general (even though 30 minutes does seem quite small).
The grid in the states is rock solid here, in general - certain cases not withstanding. Power distribution in the states is largely arial, which means deeply effected by large weather events, so while the power might be on - on the transmission side - it doesnt mean that the distribution side is in any condition to deliver any to you at that moment. I cant say my overall experiences with power are different than yours, I dont think I've ever had an outage longer than one hour, and I've only had four power loss events, each less than a half an hour in duration over the last 20 years.
The US has many extreme weather events - Hurricanes, Blizzards, Floods, Wind Storms, Ice Storms, Tornados, Wildfires (yes, thats sorta weather), Heavy Rain events, etc - that will often bring down trees onto distribution circuits. I may be wrong, but I have the belief (based on news reporting) that weather events which in the states are considered 'normal' would be 'extreme' in Europe.
The Samsung gear I worked on would take about 10 min to come back up, give or take. I know because I dropped a handful of sites when I did power testing - visual inspection was not always enough to verify if the power was wired correctly. Most of them came back up in 10 min.. well, except once there was one site that didn't come back because the Microwave didn't like the power hit, lol - that required another tower crew to revisit and hang a new RRU.
I just can't imagine power design is that different, I'm used to these cabinets even in urban areas having 4 strings of batteries in them, are they only building sites with a single string in europe?
In Mexico power cuts are so frequent that most (probably all) cell towers have batteries that last for an hour or two.
It's rare that power cuts last so long, usually it's like 10-15 mins, but I've experienced 3-4 hours cuts a couple of times over the years. When I lived in Cancún these were more frequent though, because AC consuming so much power during summer.
Vodafone Portugal suffered an extremely successful cyber attack in February 2022, taking down:
- 4G
- 5G
- Fixed voice
- Digital TV
- SMS
- voice
It took _several_ days to bring everything back online. [0]
No Ransomware requests issued, most likely a state actor.
Many people speculate the attack was a training ground for Russian cyberwarfare.
I find this a much more likely failure mode for communications (including emergency services) than network operators not managing uptime because of blackouts.
They already are. The article is just sensationalist. And from all providers, they picked Deutsche Telekom, which is like the provider with the worst reputation in terms of reliability and service. Of course the german internet is in shambles if you ask DTAG... because theirs is.
Lots of people here seem to echo the idea that there is a way to prioritize cellular towers. That's up to whoever runs then. The power goes off for everyone in the area. They need to have enough batteries and generator capacity. Many sites have no generators and battery capacity will vary. Some carriers try to have a week or two of battery capacity but that isn't practical at small sites. When power starts going off, the towers will be prioritized through alternate power sources maintained by the carriers or their contractors.
Not as far, I know here in Europe. Why should they. For sure, they have batterys for one hour or so. But there is no second electric connection, to a diffrent electric grid. Something like that does not really exist, because our electric grid was not planed in mind for a such situation.
I can understand why that'd happen. Where I live, in France atm, there's one cell tower around. And when it's down, it's down. I know because in June there have been one hour of electrical blackout about once a week and, well, our smartphones weren't working anymore. I don't even bother with an UPS or a 4G router for my network: when there's no electricity, nothing is working anymore anyway.
Stuff that keeps working for a few hours: the Kindle, tablet and local files on the laptops. So there's that.
Seeing `&` on a page like Reuters is quite a throwback to the 1990s. There's actually something soothing about the imperfect exposing the "stroke" of the underlying media. :-)
This headline is awful. There's nothing specific to "mobile networks" in this news at all. They're saying that there's a potential energy crisis and that it might impact phones.
...which is also just plain ridiculous! Phone service is a critical piece of infrastructure and in almost all markets subject to special treatment and provided with redundant power mechanisms.
Lots of things may break this winter. Phones won't be one of them.
This is extremely irresponsible, how are you supposed to make a call if you have an emergency? People are going to die.
The EU needs to recognise the situation: this is not working, 15% of Ukraine is now part of Russia despite all the NATO help.
Meanwhile the US is laughing as the dollar is rising above everything and the media is un-ironically saying that it could have been the US who blew up the pipelines in the Baltic Sea.
Imagine using easily expendable and non-renewable resources, subjecting the very processes our civilization is sustained by to a great risk of failure while having an almost inexhaustible source of energy that was invented more than 50 years ago.
Surely that would be a madness and no reasonable organization would do this, right?
According to IAEA data, there is considerably more minable coal than uranium on earth (by extractible energy). Current nuclear reactors are not scalable to global energy requirements.
Mobile networks are considered essential. They will be the last thing to be turned off. I would expect trains to stop running first and businesses having their power cut before any cell tower would be affected.
I would also like the point out that network operators have mobile cell towers they can deploy and do deploy during large crowd events. These run for hours on diesel.
This is sensationalist journalism trying to sell papers. Every paper will be reprinting this in their language as they do for many reuters articles. Irresponsible IMO just like the weekly nuclear holocaust headlines because of that reactor in Ukraine. How about we educate the public instead of printing garbage headlines?
My serious question: Is this a way for the EU nations to quell public uprisings from fuel shortages by limiting network communications while not taking the blame for it?
No. They are talking about limited disruptions to limited areas due to planned load shedding. If your power and phone are out for 4-6 hours - is that going to suppress your ability to protest?
I know I'm not supposed to do this, but is this "concern trolling"? I can't see how you could get from A->B unless you're trying to rabble rouse?
It is not a fault, but a virtue to be suspicious of governments during times of protest. Does a 4 hour black out slow down protests? Probably not, but it does not stop countries like India from constantly doing so:
You can surely argue that it's not worth the cost in good faith, but there's no way you can describe an invasion and demands of territorial annexation as "reasonable" and still be taken seriously.
Of course Ukraine is an independent, sovereign state. Russia wasn't making that demand of Ukraine, per se (AFAICT). The demand was largely on existing NATO / EU member states to actively deny any request from Ukraine to join.
And, of course Russia would likely not acquiesce if such a demand were placed on them.
I think whether that demand is reasonable or not depends on one's perception. If one is a NATO ally or dependent, then anything that limits or reduces NATO power is a bad thing. If one is not, then demanding a buffer state between the sides seems like a middle-ground compromise from their point of view.
I'm only replying to these comments here to illustrate the importance of looking at a scenario from your opponent's point of view. Using the word "reasonable" requires context and perception. No matter how much one might disagree with the opponent, and how morally-right your side is, it's still important to do. It helps one understand their opponent's motivations and anticipated outcomes.
Well, as a citizen of one of the former buffer states, I really don't think there's a single bit of reason in that demand. I have the context and perception of living under Russian rule. Russians don't just have buffer states - they plunder them. Tens of millions of people in Ukraine have done nothing to deserve this fate and now that I'm also considered "the West" I won't let them fall into it if I can help it.
Every single nation that ever had something to do with them and was fortunate enough to leave their sphere of influence is trying its hardest to join NATO, isn't that a little telling? Perhaps Russia is not only looking for buffer, but wants more?
Apples and oranges. US is not and never was plundering Cuba, unlike Russians who plunder every single state in their sphere of influence until nothing is left. This is not about some nukes on Cuba, this is about living like a normal person and not in a corrupt, fascist despotism where you die decades prematurely and nobody cares.
The comparison makes complete sense when we speak about the roles of buffer states, which is the conversation that the parent post started.
Your off-topic complaint that distracted from that point, is that eastern imperialism was worse than western imperialism. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not [1], but it's not relevant to the subthread.
[1] It's difficult to have a meaningful conversation on this subject, because every empire of note has a long history of being smeared in shit, and spends a lot of effort indoctrinating its subjects that its brand of imperialism is way better than all the other ones.
It's not off topic at all. If somebody abuses their buffer states this much they can't have them. Perhaps there wouldn't be such opposition to the claims of reasonability of their request if the Russians treated their buffer states nicely (or at least not so badly).
Look up what the Russians did in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Hungary etc. That's my definition. What the US did is nowhere near that. My grandmother said she preferred the Nazis to the Russians.
But one thing is to have your own problems, and entirely another thing is to be forced to have Russian problems and to have every hope for change destroyed by Russia because it's threatening their position that they built on sponsoring the corrupt people.
Consider that it was revealed that FSB has/had a massive corruption campaign in Ukraine funded with billions of US dollars per year. Let's wait with judging Ukraine until we can judge fairly.
I meant his demands that the LPR and DPR hold recognised referendums for independence, that Crimea be officially transferred back to Russia (after being arbitrarily granted to Ukraine by a Communist dictator), and Ukraine to remain neutral.
Fighting against those isn't worth hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives. The first two will continue to be problematic even if Ukraine wins.
Europe's decision, Germany especially, to be reliant on Russia for energy when they could have not shut down nuclear plants and built more.