27/07/22, 11:31 Germans have been living in a dream | The Economist
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Europe | Charlemagne
Germans have been living in a dream
Their energy policy has been a fantasy
Jul 21st 2022 Share
T he story is old and takes many forms. A fairy-tale version, recorded two centuries ago by the
Brothers Grimm, tells of a certain Karl Katz, a goatherd in the Harz Mountains of central Germany.
One night a straying goat leads Katz deep into a cave. Tempted by strange men, he drinks a potion and
falls asleep. On waking he finds that not hours, but years have passed. The world around him has
changed.
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The bewilderment felt by Katz is now shared by many Germans. Some years ago Europe’s richest country
slipped into a state not quite of slumber, but of sleep-walking. Newly reunited and lulled by their own
economic and diplomatic success, Germans settled into a comfortable belief that their system was
working near-perfectly. Governmental policies came to be guided less by pragmatism than by self-
deception, as leaders plied voters with intoxicating talk of perpetual prosperity with minimal friction
and, of course, zero emissions.
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The awakening, to the sound of Russian tanks grinding into nearby Ukraine, has been rude. In some ways
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27/07/22, 11:31 Germans have been living in a dream | The Economist
Germany finds itself not, like Katz, years in the future, but decades in the past. Instead of cruising on an
Autobahn towards liberal democracy, much of the wider world has skidded into ugly kinds of populism
that Germans recall all too well. Rather than enjoying an era of peaceful co-operation, Germany is finding
that guns and soldiers—including American ones—are suddenly back in demand. German prosperity
turns out to rely not solely on the industriousness of its people, as in the cheering fairy-tale version, but
also on cheap imported energy and manpower. And of course that nice Vladimir Putin, who gift-wrapped
whole pipelines full of natural gas, turns out to be a wolf.
Put simply, years of complacency have landed Germany in a pickle. Yet even as the establishment comes
to terms with the scale of its dilemma, and with the immense challenge of changing course, Germany’s
conversation with itself remains strangely parochial and lacking in urgency. Even more odd, in a country
that prides itself on the openness of its democracy, is the failure to account for what went awry. Yes, some
public figures have rightly been scolded for looking at Russia through rose-tinted lenses. But the systemic
nature of Mr Putin’s deceptions and of Germany’s wilful blindness have hardly been explored. No one
seems to want to talk about what happened “in the cave”.
Consider Germany’s woeful dependence on Russian fuels. This came about not only because Mr Putin
seduced businesses and politicians with low prices, so boosting Russia’s share of Germany’s natural-gas
consumption from 30% two decades ago to a 55% chokehold. Decisions were also taken to shrink the
supply of energy from other sources. Among numerous examples of such foolishness, the best-known
concerns nuclear power. When a tsunami hit the Japanese nuclear reactors at Fukushima in 2011, the
government of then-chancellor Angela Merkel flippte aus, shutting down half of Germany’s nuclear
generation capacity virtually overnight. It set a closing date for the last three plants of December 2022, a
target that is only now being questioned, as crippling power shortages loom. Reflecting the peculiar
absence of urgency in German politics, one mooted compromise calls on the Greens to drop their
insistence on closing the reactors in exchange for their liberal coalition partners dropping objections to
speed limits on the Autobahn.
Yet perhaps Germany’s biggest own goal was scored against its own natural-gas industry. Germans lack
the luck of the neighbouring Dutch, whose giant Groningen field, a mere bicycle-ride from the border,
has gushed out some $500bn worth of gas since 1959 (allowing this newspaper in 1977 to coin the term
“Dutch Disease”). But neither are Germany’s own reserves puny. At the turn of the millennium Germany
was pumping out some 20bn cubic metres (bcm) of natural gas a year, enough to meet close to a quarter
of national demand. But although geologists think that Germany holds at least 800bcm of exploitable gas,
production has not grown but rather collapsed, to a mere 5-6bcm, equivalent to just 10% of imports from
Russia.
Fear of fracking
The reason is simple. Geology dictates that nearly all Germany’s gas can only be extracted using hydraulic
fracturing, but the German public holds an irrational fear of fracking. Not just a fear: in 2017 Ms Merkel’s
government passed a law that essentially bans commercial fracking, even though German firms have
been using the technique in the country since the 1950s, with not a single reported incident of serious
environmental damage.
The causes of the public’s fear are not hard to find. In 2008 Exxon, a big American oil firm, proposed
expanding the use of fracking at a site in northern Germany. As environmentalists piled in to protest, the
increasingly influential Green party joined the fray. So did Russia Today, a pro-Kremlin channel, blaring
warnings that fracking causes radiation, birth defects, hormone imbalances, the release of immense
volumes of methane and toxic waste, and the poisoning of fish stocks. No less an expert than Mr Putin
himself declared, before an international conference, that fracking makes black goop spew out of kitchen
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d lik f i l ll
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27/07/22, 11:31 Germans have been living in a dream | The Economist
Germans do seem to like fairy tales. “Eventually we gave up trying to explain that fracking is absolutely
safe,” sighs Hans-Joachim Kümpel, a former head of the main government advisory body on geoscience.
”I can’t really blame people who have no understanding of subsurface geology, if all they hear is horror
stories.”
German gas producers say that given a chance, with today’s even cleaner and safer new fracking methods
they could double their output in as little as 18-24 months. At that level Germany could be pumping gas
well into the next century. That would trim imports by some $15bn a year. And that is no fairy tale. 7
Read more from Charlemagne, our columnist on European politics:
Down with long school summer breaks (Jul 16th)
Travel chaos in Europe is a glimpse of a future with few spare workers (Jul 9th)
Poland is being given an opportunity to matter in Europe (Jul 2nd)
This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline "Let the sleeper awaken"
Europe
July 23rd 2022
→ Mario Draghi, Italy’s reformist prime minister, resigns
→ Odessa’s port may soon be reopened
→ Why a regiment of Belarusian dissidents is fighting for Ukraine
→ A sleepy Greek port has become vital to the war in Ukraine
→ Germans have been living in a dream
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