Melanie Arndt, energy historian at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, discusses the troubled and often paradoxical relationship of the Germans to energy.
With the war in Ukraine, Germany temporarily restarted its polluting coal plants, but refused to extend nuclear power plants beyond April 2023. What explains this difficulty in going without coal? ?
It is indeed a paradox when one thinks of greenhouse gas emissions. It should be understood that coal has long had a very strong cultural and emotional dimension in Germany. It is associated with the image of the miner, a very positive figure in the collective imagination: the one who has an honest job, who works hard, who agrees to do dirty work and put his life in danger to fetch with his hands the precious energy. Politicians, unions and lobbies have long fueled this imaginary, so the move away from coal has been extremely slow, even though it has been clear for decades that its extraction is unprofitable without subsidies. and no longer leads to as many jobs as it used to. In the east, attachment to coal holds an important place in the nostalgia for the German Democratic Republic felt by a certain generation. All this makes it difficult to get this energy out, even though it is clear to everyone that it is very polluting.
Why have the environmental movements fought more against nuclear than against coal?
Nuclear power developed in Germany in the 1950s, but it never occupied the symbolic place that coal had. Nuclear was the energy of experts, of white collar workers. In the 1970s, new social movements, ecological, pacifist and anti-nuclear, developed and influenced each other. They anchored in the debate the fear of the atom, of cancer, of radioactive waste, of nuclear war. CO emissions2 played a secondary role in the discussion. The Chernobyl accident in 1986 reinforced many of these anxieties, so that the energy debate went far beyond expert circles. The idea that there could be alternative sources of energy took hold very early on. Many of the ecologists and social democrats now in power cut their political teeth in the fight against nuclear power or, at least, grew up in this environment.
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