Lessons From Germany's Economic Contraction

American Thinker ^ | 8 Jan, 2025 | John Klar

[MtnClimber]

Germany’s once-envied efficient economy is in freefall, and the climate change cult and European Green Deal are directly to blame. State policies subsidizing EVs and other products, shutting down coal and nuclear plants, and mandating forced conversion to untested, unimplemented “renewables” resources for energy have decimated industrial efficiency. Industries and blue-collar jobs are fleeing Germany for polluting, profitable operations in China, India, and elsewhere abroad. Will the United States follow suit?

As natural gases skyrocket during a European cold snap, and Russian gas pipelines through Ukraine are shut down for the first time since 1991, Germany has transitioned from Europe’s economic darling to its leading economic anchor. Followed closely by France and the UK, similarly weighted by economically destructive climate fantasies that are crashing to Earth like ideological meteors, the latest blow to gas supplies compounds the crisis occasioned by the mysterious sabotage of Nord Stream 1 and 2.

The results of this disastrous state-controlled economic carbon dioxide experiment continue to be as evident as explosives in a controlled demolition. Germany terminated massive EV subsidies at the end of 2023; EV sales promptly fell 69%. Despite gushing economic promises of “high-paying jobs” in the renewables industry, Germany announces more layoffs almost daily. Chinese companies, unhindered by escalating energy and regulatory costs, are leading in EV and other manufacturing technologies while spewing more chemicals into the ecosystem than German manufacturing industries.

The climate cult is pushing jobs and pollution out of Europe, amplifying both for nations like India. German icon Volkswagen has threatened to close factories for the first time in its history, and recent layoffs of 35,000 (and wage reductions for 120,000) employees are harbingers of more to follow. Consumers are burdened by high energy prices for heat and travel. Fund managers and NGOs may be profiting from renewables manufacturing

[nathanbedford]

About the only bright spot in a very dismal picture is that, unlike the US, Germany does not have an out-of-control debt.

But it has more problems not listed here: a bureaucracy so sclerotic that existing businesses cannot expand and new businesses cannot be formed; a government in disarray, indeed failing, with the leading parties unwilling to form a coalition with the AF D, thus rendering any new coalition government doomed from the start; a nation philosophically torn between abiding with the West, militarily, economically, and morally or whoring after the markets, the energy, and the minerals of Russia and China; a work culture that has become a culture of malingering by exploiting the healthcare system to avoid work.

The AFD, the communist BSW and even the effete CSU all know the remedies, they are of the sort layed out in our election by Donald Trump. The question is not knowing what to do but breaking enough rice bowls to actually do it.

[nopardons]

BTTT

[mfish13]

France derives about 70% of its electricity from nuclear energy, due to a long-standing policy based on energy security.