Germans and Coal

Last night, if you were watching public-run channel one (ARD) news....you got a fairly big dose of negative talk on German energy, brown-coal, and the terrible woes of pollution.  Between a three-minute spot at the 8PM slot and later a ten-minute spot for the late evening news....you couldn't help but notice the tangled web that the media was encountering.

Throughout the 1980s....Germans were leaning awful far out on nuclear energy.  The Greens made it a big deal.....nuke energy had to end, period.  For about thirty years.....the Greens kept up the message, while the SPD and CDU crowd mostly just let the system work itself out.

Recyclable energy became a big deal in the 1990s, and most everyone felt.....given a couple of decades.....that this might catch on and be able to provide half the power in the country.

Well....the Japanese nuke issue from two years ago kinda changed things.  The current plan is to take down the nuke industry in record fashion, and climb back onto coal usage for the time being.

Folks profiting from this angle?  Yeah.  There's no doubt that several major players in the coal industry are getting rich off the deal, while nuke energy will shut down over the next decade.

Naturally, this upsets the Greens to a great extent.  Here they were....preaching on the end of nuke energy as part of their big platform of the 1980s, and they've gotten exactly what they desired.  Sadly, they really didn't see the backside of this.....you have to fill a void.

Today's Green message?  Well....they kinda want alternate and recyclable energy to suddenly 'take-off'.  The mere suggestion that more brown-coal is going to be burned.....to make up for this lousy shortfall that everyone agreed was a good idea....just isn't agreeable to the Greens.

Somehow, you'd suspect that several folks figured out the green sales concept, bought quickly into using the Japanese nuke incident as a bad deal, and then turned the whole anti-nuclear power concept into a positive message.

The news media?  Well....they'd like to slam the government for the brown-coal stuff.....but then they'd have to accept nuke power as the alternate, and they just can't do it.  It's a comical message that they attempt to get across.  And nowhere in the message....do they talk of the one certain variable....every year....Germans use more power, and extend their requirements up another notch. Electrical cars on the horizon?  You can figure another forty percent in power requirements within the next four decades, and it's all positive technology stuff that the Greens wanted in the 1990s.