energies
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In Europe’s largest economy, dependent on Russia for its gas and oil, government and companies are seeking to accelerate the ecological transition while preparing for a disaster scenario.
How to get the Germans out of a trap into which they have gotten themselves? The Ecologist Minister for the Economy and the Climate, Robert Habeck, is sparing no effort to free Europe’s leading economy from its cruel dependence on Russian gas. But it is mission impossible: the Vice-Chancellor of the Scholz government only had a few weeks to correct the strategic errors of the last twenty years, committed successively by Gerhard Schröder and Angela Merkel. They had bet everything on this (still) cheap energy, forgetting to take into account its geopolitical aspect.
With more than half of the supply coming from Russia, the return to independence cannot take place before 2024. The situation was considered serious enough for the minister to trigger, on Wednesday, the first level (out of three) of the “supply alert” plan with the creation of a crisis unit at the ministry with experts and business leaders.
The announcement of compulsory payment in rubles did not trigger panic. According to the chancellery, bills will continue to be paid in euros to Gazprom-Bank, an institute spared from sanctions. For the head of the Energy Department at the Berlin Institute for Economic Research, Claudia Kemfert, Russia cannot give up…