2023-11-19 20:00:25
Abandoning nuclear power would be a fiasco that Berlin would stubbornly want to impose on us. The reform of European energy markets in October once again brought to the fore the Franco-German opposition, described by some as a real “war”. But we are wrong about the facts. Worse, we have the wrong enemy, thus playing into the hands of China and the United States.
At the start of 2023, Germany closed its last three nuclear reactors. At the same time, it restarted several coal-fired power stations. Was this not proof that our neighbors were compensating controllable (and carbon-free) energy with another (more polluting) one?
However, it should have been remembered that for ten years, in silence, around twenty thermal power stations had been closed across the Rhine. Since then, the share of fossil fuels in the German mix has only fallen, as have CO2 emissions – notwithstanding the small rebound in 2022 which we owe to the energy crisis and which we observe everywhere else.
Germany: 212 billion euros to accelerate the transition
Certainly, decarbonization would have been much faster if Germany had kept its nuclear power plants, but it is a democracy whose people oppose the atom for cultural reasons. Whatever one thinks, Germany has therefore pursued an ambitious policy, with real effects, by restructuring its entire energy system in the space of just one generation.
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Today the country is not threatened by a shortage (it is even a net exporter), even if electricity consumption must increase significantly. Certainly, the Germans are slightly behind on their objective of reducing carbon emissions by 95% between 1990 and 2050, but this was the most ambitious of all the major industrialized countries.
Berlin is also working hard, announcing in August an investment of 212 billion euros to accelerate the transition. It’s a fact: the Germans defend their vision of a nuclear-free ecology, particularly among their closest neighbors. They also lobbied for the closure of the Fessenheim power plant – and we can understand this: France had the indelicacy to build these reactors on the border of the two countries… However, Germany’s critics often fall into paranoia .
France: lack of resources and absence of strategy
This is evidenced, for example, by the title of the recent publication from the School of Economic Warfare, a private “economic intelligence” school: “Alert report, interference by German political foundations and sabotage of the French nuclear industry », (June 2023). Very few elements are placed in the file. The report focuses its attacks on two Germanic, left-oriented foundations, whose “maneuvers” are essentially limited to publishing reports. In terms of conspiracy, we have known more deceitfulness.
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