101–110 of 130 posts
Do you have more details? From what I gather as an American from 5 minutes of Googling is that Ford sells a van in Europe that's a re-badged VW T7, but it's not like VW is selling Ford stuff.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Green is likely sponsored by Putin as a way of keeping Europe away from Nuclear and any other viable alternatives to Russian gas. (proof: Former German chancellor on board with Russian energy companies.) Not investing enough in Nuclear and solar is Germany’s biggest mistake.
There was de facto no investment into nuclear energy across all countries since the early 80s and it's beyond tiring to see online commenters adamantly trying to blame that on a scheming cabal of Green politicians, when Green parties never got beyond 10% of the vote in the elections. Yes, Germany prohibited the ban of new reactors in the earyl 2000s, but the truth is no one wanted to build them anyway and hadn't for…
Germany had plans (before the Schroeder government laid the foundation for the whole nuclear shutdown) to build new and more nuclear reactors. After the initial buildup phase from 1970 to the late 1980s (latest in operation was Neckarwestheim 2 in 1989 not counting test reactors, only 9 years before Schroeder, not really a "long time"), most good sites had a reactor or maybe 2 or 3. The plan then was to plan for replacing the oldest ones and add a few more to existing sites, starting in the late 1990s when the first reactors start to approach an age of 30, to be replaced by their finished replacement reactor on the same site at 40 before 2010. Those plans included pebble bed reactors (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernkraftwerk_THTR-300 unsuccessful due to technical problems), fast breeder reactors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNR-300 unsucessful due to green opposition) and improved PWRs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor) co-developed with France, nowadays a few have come online).
The reason why nobody wanted to build them was green opposition. This started before Chernobyl, for example in opposing the Wackersdorf reprocessing plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wackersdorf_reprocessing_plant and blocking the refueling operations of existing plants. The green party never got past 10%, but mostly because the parties in government accepted their demands out of fear of strengthening them, because they needed them for a coalition, or because after Chernobyl saying anything positive about nuclear became political suicide. Misinformation was rampant, any German PWR was equated to a Chernobyl in waiting. Experts disagreed and were ignored by media and politicians, shouted down by the greens as industry minions wanting to poison us all.
The reactors shut down under Schroeder were quite profitable, but getting old enough that they would have been switched off soon anyways. Nuclear reactors become more and more profitable over time, because most of the cost is in the initial construction and the financing. After the building is paid off, running cost is quite low, fuel cost is negligible compared to personnel for example. But at some point, repairs, downtime and necessary improvements make it too costly after all. That's when the originally intended replacement should have started, but this was stopped by the Schroeder goverment and the Greens.
And while I don't know whether the Russian influence on and financing of green movements is true or not, it is logical. Russia never had any chance to export its nuclear technology to western countries. Western nuclear power plants were, at least since the 80s, safer and better. The only thing the west could have bought (and actually does still buy) from Russia is uranium. But that is by far a smaller export for Russia than oil and gas. And there are uranium reserves in many western countries, Canada, Australia, the US, Germany and the Czech republic do have large deposits that are only partially exploited, and many other (third-world) countries do have uranium mines and do export (which is why the west is buying there, it's just cheaper). So uranium isn't really a reliable or big business for Russia. Oil and Gas, however, are. And since oil and gas are high-volume goods, imports are far less flexible than uranium imports. Basically, if you want it cheap, you need a pipeline, which is the perfect leash for the Russians to hold. And lo and behold, Schroeder, while making plans to shut down all German nuclear power plants over time, planned to increase gas imports from Russia, which was upheld during the later Merkel years. Schroeder was, after his term, rewarded for this with a position at Russia's state gas producer Gazprom. So it would be in Russia's interest to reduce nuclear power use in Europe and get Europe dependent on their gas.
Btw. the meaning of "green" has changed. Back in the Schroeder days and before, green was largely pro-environment and anti-nuke. But CO₂ emissions and global warming weren't a huge topic. Open-pit coal mining and coal plants were opposed on grounds of landscape destruction, resettlement and pollution. But CO₂ was never the big topic that it is nowadays. Therefore, back in those days, even for the Greens, "clean" gas power plants were a viable replacement.
Germany desperately needs a wake-up call in the form of recession. German car industry has been non-competitive for multiple years now. Instead of letting it fail, the government kept on flushing money down the toilet and prolonging the inevitable. For a business, there's no incentive anymore to choose Germany over other EU countries. Cheap energy is gone. Germany is literally collapsing under its own weight: endless…
Just let it fail? I'm reminded of this, which I read recently about rare earths:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/12/business/china-rare-earth...:
> Rare earth refineries and magnet factories all over the world have been buying Chinese equipment for the past 20 years. Many equipment vendors in North America and Europe closed when most of the world’s rare earth mining shifted to China in the late 1990s.
I'm sure that, at the time, people were saying that North American and European rare earth equipment manufacturers were "non-competitive for multiple years now."
A story from a german town: We have an 200 year old bridge, which can't be used anymore. It's a small bridge only about 100m long and 5m high i would guess. The state owned railroad wants to replace it. Everybody agrees. Local people are happy. They simple want to build the new one right next to the old one and then take the old one down. But still in spite of everybody agreeing it took 20 years!! to get the permit.…
It seems a lot of blame is put on regulation when there is also a lack of a "can do attitude" or a sense or urgency that procedures that might have been okay to take a couple of years in the past have to happen much more quickly nowadays.
The whole culture is poisoned by regulations imho.
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I'm a European with an Audi car, been looking at switching to EV and I can't lie and say BYD doesn't look like more value for the money than the Audi alternatives, so doesn't really surprise me.
And that's despite the EU tariffs on Chinese manufacturers.
But also their cars can cost too much. They're doing a lot of sharing with Ford. Take for example the T7 platform. Why pay VW prices for a Ford?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then again, Chinese car companies are price dumping on purpose to kill the competition.
Chinese cars are a lot more expensive outside of China than they are inside of China. And the difference is not just tariffs and shipping; they earn a lot more profit per car for exported cars than ones sold internally. IOW, they're not dumping, they're doing the opposite. I don't know why.
If they're doing the opposite yet end up a lot cheaper with higher quality and more features, I'm really not sure what's going on. Don't see how they could be cheaper either.
Cutting cheap Russian gas was a suicidal move for European manufacturing (and households).
Rising energy costs and green policies make European manufacturing non-competitive. Politicians ruining their countries.
> Germany could have kept the existing nuclear power in 2002 and possibly invest in new nuclear capacity. The analysis of these two alternatives shows that Germany could have reached its climate gas emission target by achieving a 73% cut in emissions on top of the achievements in 2022 and simultaneously cut the spending in half compared to Energiewende. Thus, Germany should have adopted an energy policy based on keeping and expanding nuclear power.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14786451.2024.2...
> But also their cars can cost too much. They're doing a lot of sharing with Ford. Take for example the T7 platform. Why pay VW prices for a Ford? Do you have more details? From what I gather as an American from 5 minutes of Googling is that Ford sells a van in Europe that's a re-badged VW T7, but it's not like VW is selling Ford stuff.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Ukraine a working democracy ? Straw man. Moscow is ruled by idiots. The war in Ukraine was perhaps the largest own goal of the millennium, ahead of Brexit and possibly right behind—worst case—the Iraq War. > is it feasible for a country right next to a colossal power to have independence ? Yes. Literally how alliances have worked since the Bronze Age.
> Straw man. Nope. Challenge to presuppositions. The argument would be valid only if Ukraine was a threat of a "working democracy" > Yes. Literally how alliances have worked since the Bronze Age. Since we are now past the Bronze age could you give me a contemporary example of a small country close to the US that is practically independent and is not meddled with ? > Moscow is ruled by idiots. Putin might be a power h…
So yes, he's an idiot.
Ps. Don't whataboutism power hungry Putin. There is literally no one worse.
https://disinfo.detector.media/en/post/how-russian-propagand...