Over the last decade, journalists have held up Germany’s renewables energy transition, the
Energiewende, as an environmental model for the world.
But then, last year, Germany was forced to acknowledge that it had to delay its phase-out of coal, and would not meet its 2020 greenhouse gas reduction commitments. It announced plans to bulldoze an ancient church and forest in order to get at the coal underneath it.
But Germany didn’t just fall short of its climate targets. Its emissions have flat-lined since 2009.
Over the past five years alone, the
Energiewende has cost Germany €32 billion ($36 billion) annually, and opposition to renewables is growing in the German countryside.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michae...ecause-they-were-never-meant-to/#3be1a28cea2b