Wall Street Journal Calls Merkel’s Energiewende “A Meltdown” Involving “Astronomical Costs”

The truth is that the lion’s share of the country’s greenhouse gas reductions happened right after 1990 when free market principles were implemented to revamp totally run-down Communist East Germany. Yet since the mass state intervention that is the Energiewende, Germany’s reductions have ground to a halt. In reality the country — under Merkel’s leadership — has not seen its emissions of greenhouse gases fall since the end of the last decade, 2009! Read here.

“Astronomical costs”

By any measure this is an astonishing failure of Communist dimensions. The WSJ editorial board writes of “astronomical costs” in return for nothing.

By one estimate, businesses and households paid an extra €125 billion in increased electricity bills between 2000 and 2015 to subsidize renewables, on top of billions more in other handouts.

Zero impact

One the WSJ does not mention is that the latest estimates project the Energiewende to cost Germans more than 1.5 trillion euros by 2050. The aimed greenhouse gas reductions would translate into maybe a theoretical 2 hundredths of a degree Celsius of less global warning. And here it may surprise some that many experts believe the global warming theory is recklessly hyped. The reduced warming achieved may even be as puny as just a few thousandths of a degree.

This is hardly “saving the planet”.

Merkel flirts with the Greens

The WSJ correctly notes that “Germans join Danes in paying the highest household electricity rates in Europe, and German companies pay near the top among industrial users“. Moreover Germans are seeing their idyllic landscapes permanently scarred and ruined by industrial turbines protruding from forested hilltops nationwide.

And now as Merkel and her party wrangle to form a new coalition government with the Greens, the German chancellor is again flirting with even more disaster as she contemplates giving in to some of the Greens’ drastic demands, among them the rapid shutdown of Germany’s coal power plants and the banning of the registration of fossil fuel automobiles by 2030.

Barely scratching the surface

And although Germany’s wind and solar energy capacity could provide 30% of electricity needs, the lack of sun and the frequent windless days mean far less gets produced, and for now wind and solar are only able to provide a very tiny fraction of the country’s total primary energy needs. This means that despite all the investment, Germany is still only barely scratching the surface when it comes to going all green.

“”Voters in revolt”

The WSJ editorial board writes: “No wonder voters are in revolt” and: “A new study from the RWI Leibniz Institute for Economic Research finds that 61% of Germans wouldn’t want to pay even one eurocent more per kilowatt-hour of electricity to fund more renewables.”