On Shellenberger's "Anti-Nuke Greens Menace Europe"

Michael Shellenberger has a new post up at his Substack entitled "Anti-Nuke Greens Menace Europe" regarding Germany's energy problems. It's typically well-reasoned and well-sourced, and I'm in no way disagreeing with him. Rather, I'm adding a few observations.

The first: Shellenberger argues that the misguided German move to renewables is rooted in some sort of national quest for redemption. He says "the underlying motivation among Greens for the anti-nuclear, pro-renewables crusade, known as the Energiewende, has been to get over their guilt for the Holocaust, according to some Germany experts. 'Germans would then at last feel that they have gone from being world-destroyers in the 20th century to world-saviors in the 21st,' noted a German reporter." That may well be; I certainly wouldn't know what the German people think. However, I can't help notice that the urge to seek redemption from past sins is hardly unique to the Germans. Here in the U.S. the same sort of credentialed experts that have destroyed German energy security continue to harrangue us for our sins: systemic racism, ableism, mysogyny, global warming, insufficient devotion to masking, and so on. My impression is that this is endemic to the present-day west as a whole; it is hardly unique to the Germans, it is just that the bill for these delusions has happened to come due for the Germans first.

The second: he (Shellenberger) references the author Sieferle, quoting him thusly: "'If Germany belonged to the most progressive, civilized, cultivated countries,' wrote Sieferle, 'then Auschwitz means that, at any moment, the human ‘progress’ of modernity can go into reverse.'" Well, yes. That goes for all of us, not just the Germans. Our progressive, civilized, cultivated cultures are the result of millenia worth of striving and even now is only a thin veneer over our baser instincts. How typical that an intellectual is bewildered by that which most of us know through our common sense.

I am reminded of Michael Crichton's remarks to the Commonwealth Club back in 2003 in which he argued that religious belief is "hard-wired" into our psyches, and that if we deny it in one way it will inevitably surface in another. In particular, he notes the parallels between environmentalism & Christianity: the belief in a mythical "Garden of Eden" before the fall (the pre-industrial age, for environmentalists), redemption through good works (buying a Prius or a Tesla) and the chosen & the damned (you can guess who is who). I think Crichton would be pleased to see us now selling indulgences through carbon credits (he passed in 2008).

The third: the German elite were warned about the likely consequences of their dependency on Vladimir Putin for energy. "Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course. Here in the Western Hemisphere, we are committed to maintaining our independence from the encroachment of expansionist foreign powers." These words seem prophetic today, but at the time they were met with derision & mockery. "German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas could be seen smirking alongside his colleagues" said the Washington Post. "Out of President Trump’s speech at the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, it probably won’t be the script that will be remembered by diplomats but, rather, world leaders' laughter, caught on camera and shared in viral videos."

Except, Donald Trump was right, and the "world leaders" were wrong. For all the posters of "viral videos" that so amuse our laptop class & Twitterati, the German public is now facing energy rationing and I suspect they will not like it. You see, although the warning was delivered by a man with bad hair who talked differently than the credentialed-but-not-educated diplomats with whom German leadership was used to dealing, there's this thing called reality, and it cares nothing for our delusions.