Originally a comment by Der Durchwanderer on Gluttons for punishment.

The Green Party, in any given country in the West, has more closely resembled a cult of feelings far more than it has a political organisation. In Germany, where our Greens have been part of the actual government for the last few years, the party is not only completely through the looking-glass on social issues which have absolutely nothing to do with preserving the environment (and some of which threaten the very fabric of German social cohesion), it has done far more to harm the environment than any party since the founding of the Federal Republic.

This is not hyperbolic extrapolation from the Greens’ irraitional anti-nuclearism, either, though that is bad enough. It saw them follow through on Angela Merkel’s closure of *every single nuclear plant* in the country, for example. The end of this plan coincided with Russia’s reactivation of its adventure in the Ukraine, to which Germany stopped importing Russian gas in response…gas which Germany had spent the last thirty years, thanks in large part to Merkel and to her predecessor Gerhard Schröder (himself a close personal friend of Vladimir Putin), making Germany’s industry and domestic heating apparatus almost entirely dependent upon.

No, the Greens’ commitment to the environment not only saw them dogmatically follow-through on the death of the German nuclear industry, it saw them recommit to closing German coal mines and to filling them with concrete (along with other more “environmentally friendly” materials for the mines’ “restoration”), which on the face of it sounds reasonable, or at least good-hearted (if one can ignore the folly of rendering such mines permanently inoperable even in theory).

But the realities of German energy production in 2022 up to today meant that we had a choice between activating (and building) more coal-fired power plants or facing regular blackouts and brown-outs in the depth of winter. So the German State, for the first time since the Industrial Revolution (which means for the first time in history), has had to start importing coal to keep the lights on. This coal comes mostly from Columbia, which is…not exactly known for its environmental protections or worker safety laws, nor even for banning child labour.

And now we have German electricity produced on the back of coal dug out of the Andes, some of it by children, and shipped across the ocean so that the Greens can say they delivered on their twin promises of closing nuclear power plants and coal mines. Thanks, in no small part, to the Greens’ ideological intransigence when it meets geopolitical necessity.

But wait, there’s more. Even where Green environmental policy “works”, it has untold costs which will take us generations to sort out.

We have landfills filling up with fibreglass from wind turbines made and shipped out of China, which tend to last only a few years and which themselves cannot reliably produce enough energy to offset the carbon released during their manufacture, transport, installation, and disposal; a great many of these wind turbines are set up in forests, which necessitates removing one or more trees per turbine.

we have solar panels everywhere in a country where the *sunniest* region receives less sunlight in a year than the *least sunny* regions of the continental United States and thus cannot even theoretically produce enough energy to offset the carbon it takes to make, ship, and dispose of them.

In concrete terms, the city famed for the most sunny days in Germany is called Freiburg, a quaint little university town in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg. It receives, according to its own city’s website, “almost 1,800 sunshine-hours per year”, which in addition to giving it a “Mediterrannean flair”, makes it the most ideal place in the country for solar energy.

Seattle, Washington (where I believe our humble host has deigned to erect her domicile) receives, by way of comparison, 2170 sunshine hours per year.

The wisdom of basing a significant proportion of Seattle’s electrical grid on solar energy, much less a country whose *most-sunny location* receives only 80% as much sunshine, is an exercise left to the reader.

In any case, I could never countenance voting for the Greens in this country. I care about the environment far too much to ever do such a foolish thing as that.