: Germany Can’t Rely on Russian Energy. It Doesn’t Know What to Do Instead #WorldNEWS The prospect of warmer weather is brightening spirits throughout Germany after another tough winter—and

Germany Can’t Rely on Russian Energy. It Doesn’t Know What to Do Instead #WorldNEWS
The prospect of warmer weather is brightening spirits throughout Germany after another tough winter—and nobody is more eager for spring than Olaf Scholz. Germany’s chancellor knows that prolonged cold weather means high demand for natural gas, which heats half the households and supplies a quarter of the energy needs in Europe’s biggest economy. But these days, Scholz would rather not be reminded of the source of more than half that gas: Russia.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and Western sanctions on Moscow, mean that Germany needs to find alternative sources of supply. Analysts say that could take two to three years. In the meantime, political parties are scrambling to compensate for a series of strategic missteps that have enabled Putin to have Germany in his grip—as business magazine Wirtschaftswoche puts it—like a dealer controls a junkie.
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Much of the blame must fall to former chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which oversaw the dismantling of Germany’s nuclear power apparatus in the wake of the Fukushima disaster in 2011. It also dragged its heels on renewable energy, failed to ensure that the country had strategic reserves on hand, and neglected to provide for alternative sources in the case of disruption to the Russian supply.
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“During Merkel’s chancellorship, codependency was seen as a way of ensuring geopolitical stability,” says Veronica Grimm, an energy economist at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität in Erlangen-Nürnberg. “But we’re increasingly transitioning from a rules-based to a power-based world order. We were not well prepared for this. ”
At the same time, it will be hard for Germany’s other political parties to capitalize on the CDU’s blunder, given their own exposure to the crisis. Scholz and his Social Democrat Party (SPD) have long been one of the main proponents of Nord Stream 2, the controversial pipeline that was intended to ensure an additional supply of Russian gas.
Crucially, the pipeline bypassed Ukraine, which critics saw as a way of reducing Kyiv’s leverage over Moscow. Washington also voiced fears that the project would increase Europe’s energy dependence on Russia and threatened sanctions on the company behind it in September 2020. But Scholz, as finance minister, led negotiations to save Nord Stream 2. To pacify the Biden administration, he offered up to a billion euros to construct two LNG terminals for the import of gas from the U. S. and other sources. Construction of those terminals stalled after objections from environmentalists, though Scholz recently announced plans to revive the terminals.