Yes I'm German though I wouldn't say my opinion can be seen as a majority opinion - I would orient myself within a green-socialist-democratic non dogmatic but pragmatic spectrum so I might be biased towards but not uncritical towards green leftwing policies. I detest any kind of cancel culture or dogmatism. That being said.
The most likely outcome of the next election will be a conservative + green party coalition under conservative leadership. So I think it's safe to say there is a shift towards a greener policy going on. Many see this most likely outcome as another progress blockade as we had the last 16 years - I count myself among them. I'll give some data charts but won't translate them to save space. You might have to google translate them.
- Germany has planned to shut down all of their existing nuclear plants, however thusfar while a good portion of it has been replaced with a fair amount of wind power, the other roughly half of the deficit is imported from France (so still nuclear power) along with, most unfortunately, some additional increases from brown coal production. My specific knowledge on this is at least a year to 18 months old now, so is this still basically the case, or has the landscape changed more since then?
Renewable energy sources actually surpassed 50% of the net production for the first time at the beginning of this year. Roughly 12.5% of produced Energy is still nuclear.
Total production was 488.7 TWh in 2020
Imports were 48 TWh . That's a little less than 10% mostly to cover for indeed still inefficient storage technology. Production would be sufficient, we can't yet preserve enough energy to compensate for production fluctuations in renewables to match the demand at all times:
This shows the shift from conventional towards renewable energy over the years, coal and brown coal has been declining:
The current government is often critized by the green party to slow down the trend by providing false incentives. I.e. they claim the policy of the last decade let to more jobs lost in windenergy than preserved in coal. Conservative initiatives indeed let to cuts in windenergy subsidies while oil is still actively subsidied for home heating. Social Democrats have a strong active coal lobby, conservatives still like nuclear energy, oil and gas. Go figure. ;)
Edit: it might be important to notice this developement mostly has been set in motion law wise by a social democratic + green coaltion in the beginning of the 2000s + later on the event of Fukushima Meltdown (conservatives prolonged nuclear plant lifetime first thing they came to power and suddenly rolled back their changes after fukushima which let to billions of losses for the taxpayer as energy companies successfully filed for compensation). The last 16 years we were allways governed by Ms. Merkel and we're stagnating and are getting set backs in many areas since then.
- Sweden is basically the role-model nation for power generation, where they have the luxury of getting almost half of their power from hydroelectric, the other half from nuclear, and they are/have been for many years effectively a carbon-neutral nation at least in terms of grid production, AND they even export a bunch of excess power. Pretty cool, but what I DON'T know is what their waste storage plan looks like in detail; I'll need to research this at some point. So how is Sweden in the eyes of other Europeans? Celebrated for being a carbon-neutral model, or criticized for their nuclear waste production and management? Obviously I hope the former, but I really don't know.
I don't know much about Sweden and wouldn't know how to read their official statistics and charts. Sorry can't help you here much. In general many consider large parts of Scandinavia (not only Sweden) advanced in many areas compared to Germany. They are better with energy, digitalization, are considered to have better laws and loans. Unfortunatly that doesn't generate much interest in German media. I regret that. Denmark is an oddball atm regarding migration policies. And Swedish poeple seem to hate Danish. That's my extent of knowledge :D
- The last point I think is also valid, insofar as we as a society allow more weight to be given to what people who are completely nuts say. I don't think there's actually that many MORE crazies in the world though, just that we actually allow ourselves to listen to their rants now, especially on social media and so on, where we used to previously take much less heed of such verbal diarrhea. I guess you can argue that's free speech, but frankly I don't see that it serves the advancement of society all that much.
Won't object too much here. Just social media certainly is an amplifier and we should be watchful. Not everyone who voted for Trump is ah QAnon idiot I'm sure. Many might be just cynical or have particular interests. Also Cynicism isn't a monopoly of conservatives. That's a vast topic...
www.newscientist.com
www.sciencedirect.com
theconversation.com
www.eenews.net
www.chemistryworld.com
