Tag Archives: Germany

Germany says, “Global Warming is Good!”

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Garzweiler surface lignite mine. Photo by Martin Falbisoner.

 

 

In the 1987 film Wall Street the odious financier Gordon Gekko baldly proclaims, “Greed is good.” This New Years 2022, the German government has updated Gekko’s missive to “Global Warming is Good.”

As of January 2022 the Germans are completing their plan to shut down six low-carbon nuclear power plants. Facilities that are superbly run, indeed, are acknowledged as among the best in the world. Each of them could operate for decades more. They provide 8.4 gigawatts of power to the German grid and produce virtually no CO2. But they are being shut down for purely ideological reasons. “Nuclear power is bad, we don’t care about global warming” is the depth of the policy from the German Green Party and the German government.

And what will replace the power from these plants? High carbon emissions from German coal plants. These are particularly bad because many of them burn lignite or brown coal, which is a worse polluter than standard hard coal. And the Germans strip mine this lignite so voraciously that whole towns have been wiped off the map to get at it. 

Maybe the coal plants should be turned off too. According to the German government they will be, but not for another ten years or so!

So the plan is to shut down the non-carbon producing plants now but let the carbon monsters keep spewing their emissions for another decade. 

It’s Germany’s tip of the hat to Mr. Gekko. 

U.S. Bombs Germany Again

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World War II ended a long time ago. Even before 8-track cartridges and The Beatles. But on Tuesday night a U.S. Army Air Force 550-pound bomb exploded in downtown Munich. The bomb, of course, was only doing what it was built to do — albeit a few decades late. It was a type of bomb that used a chemically-based trigger and that trigger didn’t work when the bomb hurtled earthward in 1943 or ’44.

So 500 pounds of bomb sat there, perhaps a bit embarrassed at all the fuss and expense required to make it and then transport it across the Atlantic, then load it into a B-17 bomb bay and fly it all the way to Munich. Eventually the war ended and the area was rebuilt and the bomb lived an incognito existence. The 500 pounder was underneath a nightclub that was reportedly beloved by the Rolling Stones in the 1970s. Perhaps the soulful sounds of the Stones helped keep the bomb relaxed and in one piece. The bomb didn’t explode, but there was no reason it couldn’t do so, given the right circumstances.

After the bomb was uncovered by construction work, German bomb experts huddled, then tried to defuse it. The bomb, perhaps deciding that its fuse had always been the thing that kept it around, apparently didn’t want to be defused. So the German authorities detonated it. In a busy section of a major German city.

A fireball, smashed windows, a few small roof fires on surrounding buildings. Generally speaking, small time damage. But the Anglo-American bombing campaign against Germany in 1940-’45 left behind thousands of unexploded bombs that have yet to be found. Munich authorities estimate their city alone could hold as many as 2,500 unexploded bombs.

The Anglo-American WWII bombing campaign is the gift that keeps on giving. Here, more than 68 years later the bombs are still exploding. They just don’t build bombs like they used to.