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this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2025
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Notice how you count the percentage of natural gas which the US provides, but not the half of Germany's natural gas that it was getting from Russia. Russia doesn't have any hand in you destroying your entire industrial capacity because the US told you to. Yes, in this situation losing even 6% of your energy will be crushing because you haven't yet diversified your energy sources by lowering costs significantly (again industry, which is dependent on labor and energy prices). Cutting out nuclear has made this all even more devastating
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 Another is producing outdated overpriced crap like fossil-powered luxury cars and then hoping people in other countries are stupid enough to import those glossy turds.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.
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. We're working from completely different premises. You're just fitting anything to this Russia bad narrative you possibly can and you have zero interest in the structure of the neocolonial financial system that keeps the German ruling class in sync with the US in the first place. I should come back with a more serious post that lays out the parameters of this whole discussion instead of having you recite every conspiracy theory you can concoct, this is probably the fifth essay I've given an IOU for so at this point though so no promises.
You can't decry a recession caused by evil Russian spies and then turn around and say the things which are contributing to that recession are good. Using your measure of recession is fraudulent anyways since western economists count everything from rent increases to stocks to legal fees to German hookers as GDP and it isn't a realistic figure for industry or the livelihoods of actual workers
Germany is fucking up on that front. But, fwiw, I never said, industries should be "massacred" โ 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.
Japan essentially committed economic suicide so that its ruling class could continue to benefit from financialization. Lot of theorists predicted that European and Japanese industry would cause issues for the US because they misunderstood how the sovereignty of bourgeois democracies is tied to neocolonial relationships now. Instead it's China upending the whole system. The infrastructure and social services they provide, the well-structured overall and increasingly industrialized agriculture, the energy autarky you mentioned, this all keeps the costs of its industry highly competitive, but it's the land reform, management of capital, industry competition, and sustainment of the talent pool through employment, education, and childcare that makes all this possible. Best I can say about Germany is there is a better effort to sustain the talent pool with education and childcare. The rest of the stuff is mandatory and business + political leaders can't take any deep lessons because admitting that rent seeking is fundamentally fucking up everything is impossible because rent seeking is the whole point of the system they uphold. This problem is as deep as the philosophy, history, economics, poli sci departments in all of these countries, you can't just push back against economic dogma designed to enable capitalists with wicked policy logic these people are all evil lawyers abiding by the rules, which simply describe what rich people want to do.
That's really my whole point, I'm not just starting a pissing match here, although it can be funny. Without understanding where the US first world allied countries fit into global trade, capital & debt flows, we're just comparing different policies as if we can just select them in a video game research tree arbitrarily.
I'm sorry but you can't go behead all of the oligarchs in Russia until you take care of your own. They're just distracting you. "You can't have any pudding if you don't eat your meat."