The German "Energiewende" is probably the most significant contributor. Shutting off and destroying CO₂-free energy production that was already paid for and replacing it with intermittent renewables and coal is utter madness.
Energy costs are now back to levels seen before the Russian war against Ukraine, so it is unclear why the Energiewende should be at fault.
The German malaise is more likely tied to the shift to EV, the weakness of Germany's car industry and a general slump in China which are all hitting at the same time.
An aging population and an increase in social benefits are likely also part of the issue.
> Energy costs are now back to levels seen before the Russian war
They are not. Electricity is around 30% more expensive. More like 50% if you add back the EEG subsidy that is now paid via taxes rather than via your electricity bill. (Exercise for the reader: form the intersection between "Tax payer" and "Electricity consumer")
And we haven't turned off the coal power plants yet (meaning very little has been accomplished for the climate). There is no real plan of how that should work, and all the inklings of a plan come at huge expense.
The effects of BYD have BARELY been felt by Germany.
It will cause huge problems, but it has barely scratched the surface.
Everything else has been going on for decades - aside from the electricity prices which have sky-rocketed, mostly due to Germany's harebrained idea to shut down all of its perfectly working nuclear reactors for no reason other than politics.
What comes around goes around, and that decision will kill the party that made it, thankfully.
It is an insult to German ingenuity for those idiot politicians to have shut down reactors that generated almost $12B of CLEAN electricity per year.
This is true. In addition, the "good German bureaucracy" is a farce, run by paper (and fax!), with opaque, antiquated rules, expressed in impenetrable _Beamtendeutsch_ -- which expats need to hire professional help to navigate. Add to this that the house rental market in Berlin is now worse than London, and that German universities continue their decades-long slide towards oblivion.
The UK is certainly not free of problems, but I count my lucky stars that I applied for the EU settlement scheme back in 2019 -- I'm now back in the UK, because better jobs, better healthcare, better social services, better restaurants, better transport system, better airports, better _everything_.
And I say this as a transgender woman living in what trans people call "TERF island". I'm at pains to remind my English sisters that TERFs abound in Germany, too.
That hasn’t been my experience at all:
Yes, bureaucracy is more prevalent, but it's manageable—at least as a German citizen.
Better jobs? Overwork, fewer holidays, less social security, and after years in the workforce, you’re left with a paltry state pension of £800–900 per month at best.
Better healthcare? Only if you compare private healthcare in the UK to public healthcare in Germany. My NHS experience involved endless waiting times, no personal doctor, no choice in doctors, and mostly brief 10-minute telephone appointments.
Better social services? Don't rely on them but childcare is prohibitively expensive.
Out of work? You get 70% of your last salary in Germany for 1-2 years and after that the gov is paying your electricity, water bill and rent + a couple of hundred € to sweeten the deal.
Better restaurants? I agree.
Better transport services? Slightly more punctual, but the trains are in terrible condition, as is public transport in London. Strikes are frequent, and the costs are outrageous compared to Germany.
Traffic? Ever took a bus through London. You might as well walk.
Better airports? They’re all the same to me. At the end of the day, you’re just passing through to another country. I fly regularly (1–2 flights a month), but I only spend 2–4 hours per month in an airport, so I’m not sure why this is considered a major factor.
And on a more personal note:
Crime in London is out of control.
I’ve seen multiple people have their phones snatched—there’s not much you can do when the thieves are armed with hammers.
Just outside my flat, three people were recently stabbed, one fatally.
Where I play tennis, people have been robbed at "knifepoint".
Nearby, drug use is rampant in a park — in the summer laughing gas canisters litter the ground right next to a playground...
I’ve never experienced any of these issues in Germany. Admittedly, We all have different life experiences and priorities, but claiming that life in the UK is better than in Germany—and justifying it with these points—seems wild to me. Especially since I already live in London and not in the "North" were some things are even rougher.
You’re forgetting the cornerstone of their idiotic energy policy which recently came crashing down after their benefactor started a large scale invasion
The coal power plants are the reason for high prices and huge profits for the energy companies.
The „botched“ exit from the exit from the nuclear exit brought them additional billions in compensation.
People like Söder, who now want nuclear energy back, threatened to resign if the shutdown is delayed.
Of course, they don't want nuclear waste anywhere near them, nor do they want wind turbines or power lines.
And they were in power for 16 years.
They then left the problems to their successors, who are now being blamed for it.
>Nuclear waste is both solved and largely a non-problem
Is that burying it deep underground?
Safety? Three-mile island? Chernobyl? The one in Japan? Ok, earthquake zone so not a good idea anyway. I heard the French nuclear program has a 100% safety record. But that could be false to keep the public in board with it.
Wouldn't wind and solar be the way to go? U don't need a big centralised for profit energy source.
The point is simple: it's time to accept that's there is no "west", there are USA interests, UK interests, EU interests and they diverge.
In UE we need a POLITICAL union, WIPING OUT the kleptocracy, and a strong EU+EAEU partnership, us with the best tech, them with natural resources and space. USA need central Asia and South America and they probably can't get both, China need both as well, UK need a world war to justify the deep impoverishment of their subject to avoid a civil war. Different needs by different bodies.
Not really strictly an economic problem. If it weren’t for widespread dissatisfaction with open borders and pseudo-asylum, millions of AfD voters would be voting for center right or center left parties of the mainstream coalition. The coalition has immolated itself on a pyre of fake compassion for migrants—actually a quest for cheap labor.
The coalition did not have any more compassion than any other government before it. The reality is that fortress Europe can't stop 10m people when a country such as Syria descends into Chaos as it did in 2015.
Don't the asylum laws date back to when Jewish refugees were refused entry fleeing just before WW2? They changed them after that. And the legitimacy of economic refugees? Well, hey we need cheap labour, er um, we have population decline. Yeah that's it, we gotta fix the demographic problem.
Yes, it’s a cultural problem. Europe has had stagnant economies before—indeed, that was the norm for a lot of the 20th century. What’s disrupting everything is immigrants.
I understand the point of your comment—why do Germans who see few migrants care about it more than Germans who see many migrants?
The answer is that parts of the country that have enjoyed homogeneity the longest are the most upset about having that homogeneity violated. If one lives in Berlin, which has been heteregenous for a long time, the introduction of mass migration was less upsetting. If one lives in a village or small city that was 100% German for a long time, and now has the pleasure of “welcoming” strangers with a higher crime rate, alien social customs, and different appearance—your response is different.
The German "Energiewende" is probably the most significant contributor. Shutting off and destroying CO₂-free energy production that was already paid for and replacing it with intermittent renewables and coal is utter madness.
Energy costs are now back to levels seen before the Russian war against Ukraine, so it is unclear why the Energiewende should be at fault.
The German malaise is more likely tied to the shift to EV, the weakness of Germany's car industry and a general slump in China which are all hitting at the same time.
An aging population and an increase in social benefits are likely also part of the issue.
> Energy costs are now back to levels seen before the Russian war
They are not. Electricity is around 30% more expensive. More like 50% if you add back the EEG subsidy that is now paid via taxes rather than via your electricity bill. (Exercise for the reader: form the intersection between "Tax payer" and "Electricity consumer")
https://www.verivox.de/strom/strompreise/
And we haven't turned off the coal power plants yet (meaning very little has been accomplished for the climate). There is no real plan of how that should work, and all the inklings of a plan come at huge expense.
No. German wealth has come decades from exporting German cars and machinery.
Nowadays you can get those cheaper from China in not much worse quality.
Additionally all internet profits go to tax avoiding companies originated in the US (Germany is not alone on that, it's the same all over Europe).
None of them has to do anything with electricity.
The effects of BYD have BARELY been felt by Germany.
It will cause huge problems, but it has barely scratched the surface.
Everything else has been going on for decades - aside from the electricity prices which have sky-rocketed, mostly due to Germany's harebrained idea to shut down all of its perfectly working nuclear reactors for no reason other than politics.
What comes around goes around, and that decision will kill the party that made it, thankfully.
It is an insult to German ingenuity for those idiot politicians to have shut down reactors that generated almost $12B of CLEAN electricity per year.
This is true. In addition, the "good German bureaucracy" is a farce, run by paper (and fax!), with opaque, antiquated rules, expressed in impenetrable _Beamtendeutsch_ -- which expats need to hire professional help to navigate. Add to this that the house rental market in Berlin is now worse than London, and that German universities continue their decades-long slide towards oblivion.
The UK is certainly not free of problems, but I count my lucky stars that I applied for the EU settlement scheme back in 2019 -- I'm now back in the UK, because better jobs, better healthcare, better social services, better restaurants, better transport system, better airports, better _everything_.
And I say this as a transgender woman living in what trans people call "TERF island". I'm at pains to remind my English sisters that TERFs abound in Germany, too.
That hasn’t been my experience at all: Yes, bureaucracy is more prevalent, but it's manageable—at least as a German citizen.
Better jobs? Overwork, fewer holidays, less social security, and after years in the workforce, you’re left with a paltry state pension of £800–900 per month at best.
Better healthcare? Only if you compare private healthcare in the UK to public healthcare in Germany. My NHS experience involved endless waiting times, no personal doctor, no choice in doctors, and mostly brief 10-minute telephone appointments.
Better social services? Don't rely on them but childcare is prohibitively expensive. Out of work? You get 70% of your last salary in Germany for 1-2 years and after that the gov is paying your electricity, water bill and rent + a couple of hundred € to sweeten the deal.
Better restaurants? I agree.
Better transport services? Slightly more punctual, but the trains are in terrible condition, as is public transport in London. Strikes are frequent, and the costs are outrageous compared to Germany. Traffic? Ever took a bus through London. You might as well walk.
Better airports? They’re all the same to me. At the end of the day, you’re just passing through to another country. I fly regularly (1–2 flights a month), but I only spend 2–4 hours per month in an airport, so I’m not sure why this is considered a major factor.
And on a more personal note: Crime in London is out of control.
I’ve seen multiple people have their phones snatched—there’s not much you can do when the thieves are armed with hammers.
Just outside my flat, three people were recently stabbed, one fatally.
Where I play tennis, people have been robbed at "knifepoint".
Nearby, drug use is rampant in a park — in the summer laughing gas canisters litter the ground right next to a playground...
I’ve never experienced any of these issues in Germany. Admittedly, We all have different life experiences and priorities, but claiming that life in the UK is better than in Germany—and justifying it with these points—seems wild to me. Especially since I already live in London and not in the "North" were some things are even rougher.
Utter madness is ok in the age of idiots and monsters.
You’re forgetting the cornerstone of their idiotic energy policy which recently came crashing down after their benefactor started a large scale invasion
I doubt it was idiotic but simple corruption.
The coal power plants are the reason for high prices and huge profits for the energy companies.
The „botched“ exit from the exit from the nuclear exit brought them additional billions in compensation.
People like Söder, who now want nuclear energy back, threatened to resign if the shutdown is delayed. Of course, they don't want nuclear waste anywhere near them, nor do they want wind turbines or power lines.
And they were in power for 16 years.
They then left the problems to their successors, who are now being blamed for it.
It's at least partly true of the SPD
> I doubt it was idiotic but simple corruption.
Why not both?
Certainly Schröder, or Gazprom-Gerd as I call him, got his.
For the Greens it's more idiotic ideology.
The debt brake fetish of FDP is much more of a ideology than the plans of the Green Party.
Especially Habeck is more driven by necessity, Baerbock not so much.
> People like Söder, who now want nuclear energy back, threatened to resign if the shutdown is delayed.
Hardly anybody would have considered Söder's resignment to be a threat. :-D Many Germans rather would have been happy if he had resigned.
Söder is a silly populist. Take him seriously at your own risk. :-D
Nuclear energy isn’t CO2 free and there is still no solution for the nuclear waste.
And don’t forget that the plant operating companies themselves didn’t want to keep the plants.
Nuclear waste in one sense is not a big problem, because it's so compact.
If you think of wind, you need to cover vast areas of a country to generate meaningful amounts of energy.
The material consumption for either wind or solar is around an order of magnitude more than for nuclear.
>Nuclear waste in one sense is not a big problem, because it's so compact.
Neither was the exhaust from the first cars.
Nuclear energy has a lower CO₂ footprint than wind or solar.
Nuclear waste is both solved and largely a non-problem, which is why politicians can use it to score publicity points.
>Nuclear waste is both solved and largely a non-problem
Is that burying it deep underground?
Safety? Three-mile island? Chernobyl? The one in Japan? Ok, earthquake zone so not a good idea anyway. I heard the French nuclear program has a 100% safety record. But that could be false to keep the public in board with it.
Wouldn't wind and solar be the way to go? U don't need a big centralised for profit energy source.
Let’s do coal then!
https://archive.ph/hZBad
The point is simple: it's time to accept that's there is no "west", there are USA interests, UK interests, EU interests and they diverge.
In UE we need a POLITICAL union, WIPING OUT the kleptocracy, and a strong EU+EAEU partnership, us with the best tech, them with natural resources and space. USA need central Asia and South America and they probably can't get both, China need both as well, UK need a world war to justify the deep impoverishment of their subject to avoid a civil war. Different needs by different bodies.
Not really strictly an economic problem. If it weren’t for widespread dissatisfaction with open borders and pseudo-asylum, millions of AfD voters would be voting for center right or center left parties of the mainstream coalition. The coalition has immolated itself on a pyre of fake compassion for migrants—actually a quest for cheap labor.
I don't think they care about cheap labor.
They thought they could win elections calling everyone a racist who disagreed.
That strategy didn't work.
The coalition did not have any more compassion than any other government before it. The reality is that fortress Europe can't stop 10m people when a country such as Syria descends into Chaos as it did in 2015.
Don't the asylum laws date back to when Jewish refugees were refused entry fleeing just before WW2? They changed them after that. And the legitimacy of economic refugees? Well, hey we need cheap labour, er um, we have population decline. Yeah that's it, we gotta fix the demographic problem.
Yes, it’s a cultural problem. Europe has had stagnant economies before—indeed, that was the norm for a lot of the 20th century. What’s disrupting everything is immigrants.
What open borders and pseudo asylum?
The problems with immigrants are largely exaggerated.
The regions that see the biggest problem in immigration have the fewest immigrants.
Just ask german hospitals what would happen without Syrian personnel.
I understand the point of your comment—why do Germans who see few migrants care about it more than Germans who see many migrants?
The answer is that parts of the country that have enjoyed homogeneity the longest are the most upset about having that homogeneity violated. If one lives in Berlin, which has been heteregenous for a long time, the introduction of mass migration was less upsetting. If one lives in a village or small city that was 100% German for a long time, and now has the pleasure of “welcoming” strangers with a higher crime rate, alien social customs, and different appearance—your response is different.