So, first, it’s at least a little interesting that you say nothing about EU sanctions against China in your response. That’s the one concrete point from my reply which you could have responded to.

No I’m not spreading apathy and I support the communist party of Russia

Funky. Otoh, you were basically saying that German politics is completely determined by corporates. That exact idea is spreading distrust in democratic processes and that is what I mean when talk about spreading apathy.

Please stop doing the fucking Adam Curtis monologue about how Putin is psychically poisoning society

I have no clue who Adam Curtis is. I am sure you know who that is. Rather consistently though in this thread, you seem to suggest things about me and put words in my mouth. Do you consider that good discussion style somehow?

Your country has a problem with Russia because it has nationalized its oil supply

What makes you think that?

West Germany has had a relationship with Russia and its variously nationalized or semi-nationalized oil and gas infrastructure since the early 80s. And Germany has just progressively bought more of the stuff produced there.

One of Germany’s chancellors even went straight from calling Putin a “flawless democrat” to lobbying for Gazprom. The German political system could never get its hands on enough Russian gas—even after Russia attacked a country that neighbors the EU in 2014. German politicians watched people in Poland freak out about Russia’s imperial potential for close to a decade and didn’t think anything of it. Germany literally allowed Gazprom to buy its national gas storage. That last bit is actually completely insane, even if the buyer of said storage hadn’t been an autocratic nation.

Russia only became an issue to Germany, when it launched a full-scale attack on said country neighboring the EU.

This isn’t a pissing match between countries

I believe it is a war.

this is about neocolonialism and Germany’s leadership is fighting for its place within that system

Russia is not a colony, and it never was. Post-1990, Russia was largely just left to its own devices which you can certainly criticize as being unfair but I honestly don’t know what you get out of throwing the term colonialism around in this context.

Honestly, this is such a warped view of reality. Germany is quite sure where it stands overall, as a defining part of the EU, amidst Western nations. To me, it seems post-1990 Russia never was so sure of its identity. Now the official goal appears to be filling that void with imperialist ambition. Russia being geographically large and geographically “close” to Germany does not really figure into the equation of political/economic/mental closeness though.

It’s China.

And in practice, does the EU sanction China to any relevant degree right now? Afaik, there are some tame EV sanctions, and some provisions against too much low-value shit originally destined for the US being rerouted to the EU. Not much else.

Germany cannot do any of the things you are proposing because it is not even politicians who make these decisions, it is investors

Cool cool cool. However, if German politicians actually want something, they can be remarkably effective at pushing things through. That a large number of them are apparently easily corruptible does not mean that incumbent industries deciding industrial policy is some kind of axiom here. Incidentally, and I know—you don’t like elections, while our former minister for economy from the Greens was way too centrist and clearly also did listen to lobby bullshit, since we have a gonservative minister for economy, policy has actually changed quite a bit. Or, like, right at this moment, there are completely pointless, cruel, and illegal border checks that also massively hurt industry through traffic jams at German borders—and yet, this practice is continuing.

All you’re doing then is spreading is apathy—and that tactic is remarkably in line with propaganda from the country you’re defending all the time.

We’re talking about the industrial capacity required for a green revolution, though! Aside from energy prices, that requires maintaining a stable talent pool of engineers, many different kinds of skilled workers! Just massacring the whole gas car industry isn’t even a good idea for that sake.

Germany is fucking up on that front. But, fwiw, I never said, industries should be “massacred” — though granted, at this point, they are massacring themselves. Those German car sales in China are not coming back. And the anti-EV propaganda has worked wonders on the German public.

But to a large degree that’s a result of Germany putting cart before horse: The industrial incumbents run industrial policy. And the incumbents want their existing business model to be stable until the next quarter. They also have a distinct lack of interest in science or innovation.

We had German car execs deciding that subsidies should go into diesel cars, and federal research budgets should be spent on hydrogen cars without first researching whether hydrogen cars make any sense.

We had coal people lobby to keep the already-trundling German coal industry alive, at the expense of the less well-connected solar industry that employed 5x as many people as coal.

Incidentally, Japan went the same route. Some dude at Toyota apparently decided that Japan should ignore its leadership in Li-ion laptop batteries because surely hydrogen made from imported Australian coal is the future of transportation !!

China went the opposite route: They listened to scientists, they prioritized energy autarky and increasing the size of the middle class. And then the state set industrial policy based on that.

I read a pop science article about heat pumps

How solipsistic bro

So, another fake quote and a snarky comment. That’s not much of an argument, or is it? What are you trying to say?

you can’t then sanction the main manufacturer of green tech

So Russia is the biggest producer of clean tech? I did not know that. /s

I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me in the first paragraph, sorry. Sure, fossil energy prices went up since Russia started a war. They did go down again too, though, but perhaps not to 2019 levels.

And sure, there are things that may be in Russia’s best interest. But are we really hoping that the weirdo who is in charge there will pursue them? Especially now, post-Covid isolation which apparently increased his imperial ambition. And no, I don’t want to be in a Russian-dominated economic zone between “Lisbon and Vladivostok”; that sounds like societal regression.

Destroying “your[sic] entire industrial capacity” is complete bogus, and you know that. The German economy has been in a recession for the most part, i.e. production was stable, rather than shrinking, that’s only changed lately. And there are multiple reasons for that recession too; being overly dependent on Russian fossil gas is one of those. Another is producing outdated overpriced crap like fossil-powered luxury cars and then hoping people in other countries are stupid enough to import those glossy turds.

But of course Russia has a massive hand in the recession. Before Nord Stream was blown up, Gazprom already progressively reduced deliveries. Gazprom even already reduced supply before the war began, to be able to later pressure Germany into supporting its Russia’s war.

And then, about those 6%: We just need to install heat pumps to massively cut primary energy usage. Over 50% of German gas usage is just heating. Those 50+% can be cut down easily with heat pumps.

Lol of course you think it’s Russian infiltration

Yeah, lol of course I think that. I watched as Russia tried to pressure Germany with fossil gas, first by running Gazprom Germania’s gas storage low in the winter of 2021/2022, then by progressively cutting off gas flow in the Nord Stream pipelines over the first half of 2022. These pipelines being blown up finally put a hard stop on these tactics, thankfully.

And yeah, lol of course I think that, knowing that various high-ranking CDU/SPD politicians like Kretschmer spend a lot of time trying to popularize the idea of a reopening of Nord Stream while they provably get a lot of mail from Gazprom somehow; knowing that SPD politician Ralf Stegner met ominous Russian fossil executives; knowing that Afd provably gets money from Russia and various Afd politicians give interviews to Russian propaganda outlets; knowing that Afd and Bsw somehow use the same regional bank whose director is known for his friendliness to the Russian regime.

And no, Germany is not mortally dependent on US LNG. LNG as a whole is just the last 10% or so of fossil gas imports in Germany. If our absurdist new government wasn’t quite as irrationally focused on increasing our dependence on fossil gas, we could easily wean ourselves off that in the near future; we already reduced fossil gas usage by 20% in the past three years. The countries we’re now actually dependent on in terms of gas imports are Norway and the Netherlands.

None of that is to say that there’s no influence from US private actors. KKR (an investor in Germany’s largest right-wing publishing house) and Black Rock (former employer of the new chancellor) certainly are major factors. There are also internal strictly domestic factors, such as BASF and Bayer who really like fossil stuff too. In other words, there certainly are colluding fossip interests here; but that doesn’t let Russia off the hook.

The cheapest, most scalable sources of energy are solar and wind. So the European push has been in two directions, more expensive gas and oil but also, to offset the price issue, more electrification. Granted, it would be great if the right-wing could come to terms with that development rather than trying to block it, either because it sounds vaguely green and different from the past or because they’re actually paid off by Russia to stall any positive development in their home countries.

I find it a wild take to think that the 5% (or fewer?) “special” people will be enough to sustain a completely new, separate refueling network. If anything, these people may switch from gas/diesel to EVs a little later.

EV charging infrastructure has a big potential to become a lot more flexible than whatever refueling infrastructure would allow, e.g. inductive charging, maybe even on the road, is likely to become a thing; battery swapping will become a thing at least within standardized fleets; on-car solar panels may start producing enough energy to allow typical daily commutes; … Over time, all that will ease pressure on the grid. Add in the requisite grid upgrades and Job’s your juncle.

Economics is usually the all-overriding factor. Green hydrogen has a built-in price multiplier in comparison to electricity because it’s based on electricity but adds a bunch of extra inefficiencies in both production and in usage. And the cars are more expensive and much more intricate too. Apparently, in regular use-type situations like buses, current fuel cell designs even need to be replaced every 3 or so years.

Toyota can’t make all of the inefficiencies go away. Even less so if Japan continues to produce its hydrogen from Australian coal. Toyota has had a couple of failed bets (H2, solid-state batteries), to the degree that they’re now so incapable in future tech, they need BYD to help produce models for the Chinese market. In RoW, they needed to go all-in on a 20-year-old technology that has extremely questionable decarbonization potential (gas hybrids).

Other Japanese car manufacturers are also seeing their market share eroded in China and iirc, Mitsubishi even left the market outright. Meanwhile, German companies with their expensive and lackluster but workable EVs are at least doing ok-ish there.

You’re right. For further illustration, go do a web search for “kei car”. The shape of these things is entirely driven by Japanese regulation that gives cars with limited size/weight/motorization certain tax/usage advantages. There are very few of these cars on Japanese roads that are not space-maximizing boxy microvans.

You’re actually putting words in my mouth. Interesting. I said your line of argumentation legitimizes racism. I.e., it portrays this anti-immigrant push as something rational which it really isn’t. It’s based in humans being flawed in their pattern recognition, they easily identify people with the wrong kind of beard but they have a very hard time finding out who systematically takes away their rights.

Some of this article’s wording seems rather manipulative:

manufactured with machine tools from the Swiss company GF. […] When contacted, the Schaffhausen manufacturer claims to have delivered them before 2018, well before the invasion of Ukraine. “No sanctions or other export control regulations have been violated in this context,” it said.

SRF has analyzed Russian customs data for the first time and found that since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, more than one hundred machine tools from Swiss manufacturers have found their way to Russia, despite sanctions.

So they didn’t disprove GF’s claims regarding the Kalashnikov production machinery being sold before 2018. Then they found 100 other manufacturers who are producing machines that may or may not be used in war-related production.

Admittedly, claiming innocence selling into Russia post-2014 is horseshit but it’s the kind of horseshit that flies, since everyone did that.

deleted by creator

Right, I shortened the description of the things within DMs, that went over a line to some degree. The rest of your complaints is noted.

Nah, fuck us. The EU managed to not get to this point in over two years of war. Pre-Trump, a complete embargo on all Russian fuels (oil, gas, uranium, maybe even wood) would have been welcomed by the US government and Trump would have had a much harder time trying to roll back sanctions. Now that we fucked the dog on that issue, everything is much harder because the more fickle among EU government leaders will have two influential voices in their ears trying to avert further sanctions. I also think this war could have been over already if Europe had given more weaponry much sooner, sanctioned fuel imports much harder, and done anything at all to protect its societies from the influence of Russian propaganda (even RT is still easily accessible, just not at the same web address).

It’s only a 3-day ban. Besides, there was other behavior in DMs. They seem rather angry, and I am not particularly mad if they stay away for good.

Oooor … Perhaps Italy simply isn’t quite as far along in the playbook, and crucially, Meloni supports Ukraine — which, as it affects the security of the EU as a whole, to EU leaders is much more important than national policy.

I find it a bit curious. You’re choosing to believe one guy who scrolled Reddit a bit too long and whose Tedx talk to a large actually consists of reading aloud r/nofap comments over actual scientists who research this stuff with some rigor.

That’s not to say porn doesn’t have negative effects. But confidently basing theories on anecdotal evidence is not getting us much closer to truth, is it?