German energy experiment lurches into new territory

At midnight on 15-16 of this month, Germany shut down its last nuclear power generation capacity - forever.  It was asked for one last hurrah over the winter (the Putin effect): but that's it now, despite dumb German politicians at the highest levels who seemed to think these things could just be switched on and off at will, and that actually we don't need fossil fuels or nukes at all.

Here's some dramatic irony.  For those that care about these things - and some people care a lot - the carbon intensity of the German power fleet on 15-16 April was 550 g/kWh**.  And what if Germany had maintained its nukes at the 2003 level, its peak in that country?  It would have been just 50 g/kWh, with no coal-, lignite-, gas- or oil-fired electricity required whatsoever on that day (peaking could have been provided by hydro and dispatchable biomass).  For comparison, the UK typically comes in at under 150g, having halved since 2012.  

So - as the usual suspects gear up to sue the EC for declaring nukes (and gas) to be "green", let them think on that 11-fold increase in carbon intensity which might, over-simplifying slightly, be attributed to the policy-driven closures of nukes in Germany.

Germany really is the poster-child for crass policy making across the spectrum, and it's unravelling at a rate of knots since Merkel headed off into the sunset.  I don't quite know where people get off on holding the country up as a model of rationality and consensus.  Good luck to them over the next few years, as they grapple with "new realities" for their energy, industrial, foreign and defence policies.  Not to mention the 1m+ refugees from the middle east.  Those Merkel memoirs will make for interesting reading.

ND

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** Was it perhaps a day with no wind?  No, there was a decent contribution from wind, ditto solar in the middle of the day.

Surprised in Salzburg

You'd have thought that UK politico-pundits were already skeptical enough about Chequers - not to say dismissive in some quarters - before yesterday.  But Salzburg seems to have taken them by surprise.

In the 6 O'Clock news, the Beeb were going, hmmm, that didn't go very well, did it?   By 10, they were pronouncing it a complete disaster, dead on arrival.  Though some would perhaps attribute this to a malign, purely internal pressure-cooker effect amongst people taking a while to find their nerve to stick in the knife, well, personally I'd do them the credit of assuming they'd been doing more than just jerking themselves off in the the four-hours between; and that their step-up in pronouncement was a result of hearing from more participants, and careful editorial deliberation.

It's shaken the Grauniad just as much, but with a different outcome:  an attempt to be calm and, by their own lights, sober, rational, and statesmanlike:

The danger for Europe’s leaders and those in London is that the break-up could become so much more severe than was desired by either the EU or the UK. Each must be careful not to misread the other’s intentions. Both sides must reflect on what sort of relationship they want and how they could achieve it. Let us hope that in the month ahead Downing Street and Brussels show the sort of wisdom required to ameliorate the error of Brexit without recourse to the bitter rancour that we had all thought the continent of Europe had left behind.

Why so shocked?  Well, there's many a pundit who has no practical conception of how negotiations actually work.  (Robbins will spend all this morning telling May it's just posturing ahead of the next round of talks.)  But presumably also, it wasn't just May's Cabinet who bought the line that the Chequers package had been cleared in advance by Merkel.  Perhaps May thought so herself - everything seemed to point to that.  Perhaps it was even true! - and that Merkel has been undercut, or didn't put enough effort in, or didn't read it properly. 

So - Party Conference up soon, and May looking as testy as she ever does; although she was at her 'reliable Head Girl' best last night for the cameras, under severe provocation.  Against all precedent, might she even get so pissed off (even irrationally so), she finds a bit of backbone?  One can but hope.

ND

May, Trump, Merkel

What a weird week this is!


Let's face, since the Brexit referendum thing shave been a bit weird, going back in my lifetime, things have never really calmed down since the financial crisis. The Financial Crisis seems to have pushed much of humanity into a permanent state of anxiety from which there are no signs of recovery.


This week, we have our new weakened emboldened Prime Minister meeting with her German boss, Frau Merkel, who is over in the UK to remind herself that for all her domestic troubles in Germany it could be a lot worse.


May, in her anxious state, even stopped journalists for asking Merkel about 'the deal' which May thinks she has signed off and everyone else know we don't.


After Merkel leaves we have a visit from The Donald, also here to laugh at the UK and generally troll NATO, EU and China for his kicks. Even by Trump standards, he is off the deep end currently, berating allies, starting a trade war with China and pushing that so far that it will actually dent the US economy and then going off for a love-in with Vladimir in Russia (and so ignoring all the legal investigations in the US). Wow, just wow.


There may even be an interesting sports match-up in the middle of all this over the next week.


It is certainly interesting to watch, none of it does much for my own anxiety though!

Merkel wants to ruin Brexit and the UK

In the long game, the real game that is what States have played with one another for hundreds if not thousands of years, German and the UK are enemies.


Whilst we have some culture in common (terrible food!), we have long been the foes who have sort to exert their power on the weaker European States. Since the defeat of France in 1940, the French have either been supplicant to Germany or nothing, despite being on the winning side overall in the war.


Now, with the French economy wrecked by their socialist fantasies, the only powers who face off across Western Europe are UK and Germany.


Merkel sees this in an antagonistic way, as any decent Ossie would, and therefore is aghast at Brexit. Brexit is partly a push after all at dismantling the German hegemony in Europe. A free UK may well show up the fallacies that lie at the heart of the EU.


I had hoped that Merkel would not stand in the German elections next year, but over the weekend she has determined that she can see off AfD and lead her party to victory. She is still very popular in Germany despite her recent political mis-steps.


A Merkel win will make Brexit much more challenging as she is the most insistent after her home policies around immigration have been so prominent for her. There will be no compromise about free market for free movement.


Still, the UK can't rely on foreign governments for favours which is why we are in this position in the first place, so let's see what 2017 brings!

Themes for a Grey Monday Morning

Damp and grey in London here today, and the news is varied: sublime, ridiculous ... and probably quite significant.  In reverse order:

Ukraine

Did anyone notice a massive event on Friday?  Putin, Merkel and Hollande convened in Paris, complete with dragoons in shiny armour, to solve Ukraine ...  except that there was no communique afterwards - search the web as you will.  That, friends, is not a trivial matter.

We are left to speculate.  Did they make so much progress that they are minded to keep schtumm and keep at it?  Did Putin come in waving his Syrian-bombing willy in the expectation M + H would immediately remove sanctions?  Prior to the meeting, the WSJ quoted Merkel thus:  “We don’t associate the question of Syria with Minsk, these questions are not linked.”  She was obviously asked about it afterwards but the French press seem to think the issue was marginal at the meeting.  What about Ukraine then, eh?  Putin must be so hoping to have sanctions lifted.

Green Grauniad

Flushed with the success of its campaign for divestment of fossil fuel stocks, the Grauniad is launching Phase II of its mighty climate-change campaign!  Keeps them occupied, I suppose.  Come December, we shall all be occupied - perhaps physically - by climate protestors, with yet another Hollande vanity-extravaganza in Paris to come in Nov-Dec, of course.  And there really will be a communique after that one! - however empty and *disappointing* it may be (and it will).  Both Hollande and Obama want it to be their legacies, Heaven help us.  Must write about that soon.

Pesto to leave Beeb!

We all remember Pesto's dominance of the airwaves and BBC website back in '08-09, when the banking crisis was in full swing.  Then, somehow, everything started to go a bit flat, and it was unkindly rumoured his scoops had dried up because a Prominent Treasury Figure was no longer briefing him in real-time.   (Here at C@W we could calibrate this: in 2008, a link from the Pesto blog was worth a massive number of hits, even more than Guido or Worstall.   Couple of years later and the effect of a Pesto-link couldn't even be detected.)

Still: Peston on the ITV ... didn't work for Morecambe & Wise, did it?

ND
  

The Madness of Merkel: Is It Because She Is An Osti?

Angela Merkel is of course a formidable politician - read this paean to her government- kraft by the Economist, which declares that Cameron might do well to emulate her.

At the same time, she tackles some of the biggest issues in the strangest ways.  The nonsensical Energiewende has long been up there with the maddest programmes of our time.  Only the most blinkered green could imagine it makes any sense to pour truly epic quantities of German electricity-users' money into a policy that delivers, on the one hand unprecedented levels of solar- and wind-power, but on the other, a grid that is seriously weakened in terms of reliability and quality of electricity output (there could be a disaster on almost any cold winter's day in the SW of the country) and, yes, rising levels of CO2 emissions for several years.

Her willingness to harness Germany to *doing whatever it takes* to keep the Euro-show on the road knows few limits.

Now it seems she proposes to hold open house in Germany for 'refugees', the potential numbers of which are for all practical purposes infinite.

Well.  You can suspend the laws of physics for a while if you are willing to throw enough money at them: and Germany can muster quite a lot of money. Doesn't make it sensible, though; so why does she do it?

Looks to me as though the answer lies in her being a grateful Osti, deeply struck by the extraordinary economic sacrifice (or should that be investment?) made by West Germany to re-unify.  I have written about the Einheit before, to the effect that the West Germans - or at least, their politically-motivated leadership - were indeed willing to do whatever it took to achieve re-unification.  They had thought about it well in advance; had stared it squarely in the eye; and took the fateful decision quickly, but in cold blood.  And, yes, it cost them plenty.  But they are up for that kind of thing.  Bold, decisive; *principled*, *honourable* ... and with outcomes by no means assured.

Merkel knows all this intimately - how could she not ?  Once in power, she seems to have adopted it, not just as a matter of principle, but as a working principle.  But how many of these mighty throws-of-the-dice can Germany afford in any quarter-century?  

And how many of her gambles can we afford?

ND

Does Madame Merkel Give Happy Endings?

- or is she just slicing Tsipras' salami?

Happy endings when I say so

Some years ago I found myself in mortal conflict with my employer: a big company so, an unequal contest, it might be thought.  But no.  They devoted a small percentage of the time of one bored HR director (and an even smaller % of a lawyer) to the fray; whereas I was on it 24/7, with 110% motivation.  Everything worked out just nicely.  That's the way some things go.

Other times, though, the big guys are implacable - and patient.

Amid calls for "happy endings", it seems our champion has taken up the can-kicking challenge once more, and given the Greeks another toe-poke along the road.  The next bit of wedge in return for the first of the big reforms: a simple formula.

Painful

And since the Greeks' calendar of repayment dates is a lot longer than the list of reforms, we can see where this one might be going.

That's the trouble with the EC types: they just don't go away, and they reckon history is on their side.  They may be as wrong about that as the Soviets were: but Tsipras won't be able to hold his breath long enough to find out.

 
Happy ending?  We may have to wait a bit to find out.  Ah, but can she kick the can out beyond 2017 ..?

ND

Angela Merkel, Queen of Can-Kicking

Frau Merkel, we learn, has made herself the hero of the greens by getting the G7 to agree to "decarbonise the global economy in the course of this century".  That's Angela Merkel, who has presided over a national energy policy which has seen German CO2 emissions rise (sic) for three straight years, haha.  And her with a doctorate in quantum chemistry too.

85 years - that's quite a kick she's given that can.  Sounds about the right timeframe to move the whole thing into science fiction territory.   I have always reckoned that fifty years from now the issue will have gone away anyhow: a combination of natural population-peaking and the kind of unforseeable technology-breakthrough that can't be predicted exactly, but always happens.  Given, of course, that there is absolutely no shortage of energy on the planet.  Solar PV is an obvious candidate, but maybe electricity storage, or both, who knows?  (Thorium-heads to the comments column, please form an orderly queue.)  There's no shortage of people working on these things, night and day: as they say in academia: if you come up with a viable means of bulk electricity storage, you can name your university after yourself.

In principle, the G7 country most upset by the Merkel manifesto should be China but hey, words are cheap and what do they care?   CO2 is irrelevant to them: they are going to choke themselves to death long before the GW gets them.  Canada and Japan are said to be the countries looking uncomfortably at their feet, but then again, 85 years ...   Oh well, on to Paris for the can-kicking world championship.

Meanwhile: let's see her give that pesky Greek can a hoof.  Big boots needed, though, to avoid a painfully stubbed toe.

ND

Kow Tow Time For Merkel

Long-time readers of C@W (Sid & Doris Bankers) will know I reckon that one day someone will simply sell the farm to China in return for a short-term boon.

Perhaps it's to be this week !

Don't do it, Frau Merkel.

ND

Forza Italia?

 

Firstly an unlikely, yet impressive, victory over Germany in the Euro 2012 Semi-Final followed up with the Euro meetings. And an amazing second victory for Monti and his colleagues  in terms of getting a second Germany cave in. 

Of course, it still needs to be ratified in Germany -  bit its a big victory, Using the ESM to buy bank debt driect means that in effect Germany is recapitalising the Southern European states. 

Long-term this may still not save the Euro given its structural issues - but this is a big step for Germany as it changes the terms of the game.

A better day at last, except if your German perhaps...

Eurofudge part 96

So here we are, another day and another Euro.

David Cameron comes back from Europe having not signed anything and is being accused of "selling us down the River" according to no lesser authority than Ed Milliband.

meanwhile in the real world, the next President of France, Francois Hollande, has said he will re-negotiate the treaty anyway..

But what is this treaty - a final fix to the debt crisis, a burst of liquidity and debt forgiveness to restore some vitality to the PIGS? No, nothing of the sort, it is a treaty to stop Countries from borrowing too much in the future (Europe had one of these before, called the Stability Pact, which worked so well in the 2000's that we are where we are today).

The real deal will have to wait as this one is to help Angela Merkel persuade the Germans that they can put more money up to save the Euro. Safe in the knowledge that they will get it back again in the future.

I can't really see any progress since March 2010 when the problems in Greece first emerged and showed signs of being terminal. That makes the crisis nearly 2 years old and with nothing but hot air created to try and fix it.

Amazing to watch such inept people in action.