from Hacker News

Not Even a Recession: The Great German Gas Debate in Retrospect [pdf]

by cribbles on 5/23/23, 8:58 PM with 70 comments

• by H8crilA on 5/23/23, 10:47 PM

  The winter was exceptionally warm, and no one could really predict that.

  But putting that aside, this whole episode was making me uneasy. To this day so many people in Europe cannot engage in strategic thinking. I think they simply do not believe that bombs can ever land on their own roofs. The understanding of foreign governments and their real intentions is often at a comical level, even when applied to actors that pretty much lay out their own plans in public then execute on them, decade after decade.

  Effective international policy requires tools, but before that it requires an even basic understanding of the situation and courage/resolve. That means sacrificing something small (like a gas shortage) for something valuable (no major war in Europe).

• by Barrin92 on 5/23/23, 11:18 PM

  The entire debate here in Germany is also just heavily driven by industry interest to a comical extent. Not only has the gas price already fallen to pre-war levels after decades of everyone arguing that these kinds of changes aren't possible, and there is no economic crisis, energy prices are also really only very critical for a rather small amount of products in particular niches of industry.

  While that's not unimportant because industry is a substantial factor, the economy is also very diversified and just like with the car industry I'm kind of tired of the cronyism and giving in to every small industry bluff and demand for subsidies on the back of a crisis.

  As a side note it would help though if our American friends across the pond would not fall for similar demands and push through enormous subsidy packages. Just let companies compete. There's a lot of bad industrial policy being revived opportunistically.

• by rossdavidh on 5/24/23, 2:25 AM

  While I agree that the worst envisioned outcomes did not come to pass, and certainly I do not think they would have been a moral (or even practical) justification for appeasement of military expansionism in any case, I am reminded somewhat of the Y2K debate. Was it never the threat it was imagined to be? Or was the great alarm in advance the reason why sufficient measures were taken to avoid catastrophe? Probably somewhere in between.

• by tuukkah on 5/23/23, 11:19 PM

  The German goverment went as far as nationalising Uniper, the big gas and energy company. Now, Russia has made an even more destructive move and seized Uniper's and Fortum's Russian subsidiaries. (Fortum lost billions in both cases.)

• by Guthur on 5/24/23, 12:45 AM

  Germany is buying Russian gas just at extortion rates via middle men.

• by cyberlurker on 5/23/23, 10:47 PM

  I have not read the entire article, but one factor that helped was the moderate winter.