Every society is a social experiment that we can learn from. – Jarrod Diamond
The bigger they are, the mightier they fall. Germany is an industrial power house and the dominant player as Europe tries to lead the world towards a sustainable future. However, for the moment, that bright light is fading. Angela Merkel, the former German Chancellor, made what looks like a fatal mistake by ditching nuclear power and hitching Germany’s future onto the cheap Russian gas bandwagon. An even greater disaster has unfolded in Sri Lanka as it tried to move to sustainably based, organic agriculture. What can we in Canada learn from these mistakes?
Nuclear Power? No thanks!
First, let’s not blame this mistake on stupid politicians. Merkel, a very smart cookie, has a doctorate in quantum chemistry. She started her quest to get Germany reliant on a renewable energy path by relying on nuclear power, which was a smart move [in hindsight] but very politically unpopular – but she did it anyway and got away with it because of her high popularity. Her nickname? Mutti Merkel, which means Mummy Merkel. Yes, she was very smart, very popular and thus able to do unpopular, but intelligent, policies. So what went wrong? Fukushima, the destroyed nuclear power plant in Japan, is what went wrong. When the tidal wave destroyed it, she did an about face on nuclear. She began the process of shutting down Germany’s 17 reactors which in 2011 had supplied 25% of German electricity. Why this about face? Fear, and the constant pressure from the Green party and its voters to shut down all nuclear reactors. This pressure from the Greens, who are currently part of the coalition government, has been unrelenting and many Green politicians, even those in cabinet, still want the last 3 reactors shut down – in spite of the catastrophic energy shortage looming this winter which risks severely curtailing industrial production. So, why are the Greens, and millions of Germans, so anti nuclear power?
Before I can answer this let’s explore the second reason for the energy disaster in Germany: a feeling of powerlessness caused by the American occupation after WWII. The Germans felt guilt for what the Nazis had done and allowed the Americans to basically do as they pleased to “protect them” from the Soviet Union….until short and medium range nuclear missiles were placed in Germany. This became mixed up with the anti nuclear power movement. At the same time, in the idealistic Germany of the 1980s, the Green party was born. Its main focus was peace was peace, which was linked to getting back control of their own country, ie. Good bye American military, with a strong focus on not having nuclear missiles…which was then linked to nuclear power: which came to mean all things nuclear are bad. Period. Forget rationality – welcome emotions and politics. I was in Germany often at that time and a mood of idealism and fighting for what was right was in the air. It was infectious. I joined the green party. I wore Birkenstocks. I became a Waldorf teacher. [an alternative school system created in Germany] It brought me to trained in System Dynamics at MIT and the Club of Rome. I understand the power of the emotion of that age. The next paragraph gives you a sense of what forces Merkel was contending with and why it was so easy for her to pivot from nuclear power to Russian gas.
The years preceding the fall of the wall on November 9, 1989, were politically charged in a way that the world has not seen ever since. Young people organized major demonstrations in former East Germany, which then used to be called the German Democratic Republic (GDR), under the banner “Wir sind das Volk!” (translation: “we are the people”), campaigning for a peaceful and democratic new order. Meanwhile in the former West Germany, people joined peace marches and human chains across the country in the early 1980s, protesting against the escalating arms race of the world’s superpowers. Many also took part in demonstrations against the construction of nuclear power plants, with a now-iconic a yellow sticker attached to their jeans or leather jackets depicting the sun with a broad smile and featuring the words: “Nuclear power? No, thank you.” In October 1983, 150,000 people took to the streets protesting NATO plans to station nuclear weapons in Western Europe and West Germany – among them the notorious Pershing II ballistic missiles. Despite the peace movement gaining considerable momentum and being actively backed by certain political heavyweights, including former German Chancellor Willy Brandt, the rockets still ended up being stationed in West Germany. It wasn’t before 1987 that the governments of the US and the then-Soviet Union agreed on a step-by-step disarmament process which saw the eventual departure of the Pershing II missiles from German soil.
So what does this all mean for you and me? To many it looks like Germany’s attempts to make renewable energy their main energy source looks like a failure. Think about it: decades of investments in wind and solar are not producing near enough power to replace nuclear or Russian gas. Now old coal fired plants are being restarted. The European parliament has now defined nuclear and natural gas as clean, renewable energies! What a joke! To many who do not want change and see renewables as impractical it seems that their ideas are confirmed: only fossil fuels can allow modern civilization to survive. And here’s the problem: they are right. IF we want to operate at the current energy demand we do need fossil fuels. What these critics do not see is that we can operate with far less power because of smart redesign of how we design cities, transport systems and new agricultural methods that all require less power to operate. What Germany’s failures have done is give credence to those who do not want to change, who do not embrace the electrification of [almost] everything.
But it’s not only in an advanced country like Germany that the energy transition is in trouble. There is an even greater disaster happening in Sri Lanka. Most of us have read about the economic meltdown and political upheavals there. What has not been as well reported is the fact that the ousted President banned the importing of fertilizers and pesticides in an attempt to have “sustainable organic agriculture” in Sri Lanka. Clearly, this is a shift that would, if successful, take decades to implement. It would require massive amounts of training and support systems. Well, that did not happen – the farmers were forced to go organic cold turkey. The result was that harvest of rice, the main food source, and tea, the main export item, fell 30-40%. The government had to import 500$ million worth of rice to prevent starvation. They lost a huge chunk of export revenues as there was less tea. Simultaneously the COVID epidemic hit and tourism revenues dried up. The country went bankrupt quickly.
Protesters swimming in Presidential Palace pool
And why does matter you and I? Once again, lack of realistic planning on becoming environmentally sustainable only resulted in proving to the nay-sayers that we must have fertilizer and pesticides [all fossil fuel based] to allow modern life to exist. It is the wrong take away. But, as this quote highlights, the path to a necessary environmentally based ethic is fraught with danger.
Man-Made—and Demonstrates the Danger of Faux Environmentalism
At the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa gave a speech bragging about his country’s move toward sustainable agriculture. Less than a year later, thousands of Sri Lankans face starvation, and President Rajapaksa is in exile in Singapore — all a result of his disastrous agricultural and environmental policies. In early July, thousands of protesters toppled the government of Sri Lanka, in part out of anger at the dramatic fall in nationwide food production. This crisis was not unavoidable. The shortage was due to the systematic destruction of Sri Lankan agriculture by a regime so focused on appearing environmentally conscious that it blinded itself to the humanitarian disaster it was creating. American policymakers would do well to learn the lessons of Sri Lanka.
Things weren’t always so bad in Sri Lanka though. Up until 2019, the country had a thriving agricultural sector—producing enough rice to feed itself and enough tea to make up 70 percent of its exports. Coming out of the food shortages of the 1970s, widespread use of modern agricultural techniques, especially chemical fertilizers, had made Sri Lanka the “granary of the east” for the last 40 years. President Rajapaksa reversed this progress. Against the advice of the nation’s agronomists, he banned chemical fertilizer and pesticides. His administration argued that the use of chemical fertilizers created unsafe levels of greenhouse gas emissions and destabilized local ecosystems. As an island nation, Sri Lanka is particularly vulnerable to climate change, which added a sense of urgency to his ban. In the ban’s first six months alone, rice yields fell 20 percent, while tea yields fell 18 percent. The government scrambled to respond to the crisis by importing nearly half a billion dollars worth of rice and partially lifting the ban for export crops, but the crisis only compounded. Ninety percent of Sri Lankans started skipping meals to save money. Meanwhile, the loss of their chief exports, alongside the money spent bailing out farmers and importing rice, caused a financial crisis. Inflation reached 54 percent, and, in May 2022, Sri Lanka defaulted on its debts.
So, what can Canada learn from the problems in Germany in Sri Lanka? It is HARD and DIFFICULT to make the transition to an environmentally sound and sustainable future with a sound industrial and agricultural systems. It is EASY to be hasty and make mistakes and allow politically correct “faux” environmentalism to dictate policies that usually result in only making things worse and give firepower to those social forces that want to maintain the status quo. It means that if Canada wants to, for example, shut down the Tar Sands [which it must!] it must do slowly, methodically, recognize the economic and political implications and execute this necessary step based upon reality and not some utopian pipe dream. Right now you can be sure that oil executives in Calgary are wringing their hands in glee that Germany is recognized the “essential” nature of natural gas. This is, I repeat, the wrong lesson to learn – the shut down of their nuclear plants was the mistake. Another mistake was not recognizing how long it takes and how much money it takes to have a solar/wind/renewable energy based economy. In Sri Lanka the lessons are harsher and more stark. Partly because of the rushed attempt to go “organic” people have suffered, the economy and government have collapsed – all because of a misguided desire to be “environmental” – but unrealistic. We must take the right lessons from these two mistakes. Here are those lessons, again, repeated, as all good teachers do:
- The transition to a sustainable energy and agricultural future is difficult and complex and thus needs time and many resources to be a success
- You cannot rely on another, unfriendly country [eg. Russia] in your transition plans
- Do not get stuck in politically and emotionally charged biases like “all things nuclear are always bad”.
- You need courage, a smart vision AND a population who wants this vision for their countries future – any choice based on FEAR is sure to lead to a dead end; any simplistic “silver bullet” solution is wrong. [ie. If we all had electric cars our transportation problems would be solved]
That’s it for now. Let’s learn from the mistakes of others so we do not repeat them.
“We learn from history that we do not learn from history.” ― Georg Hegel
References
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