The Most Expensive Science Lesson in European History

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by Tyler Durden

Saturday, Mar 14, 2026 - 08:30 AM

Authored by James Hickman via SchiffSovereign.com,

On March 11, 2011, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck off the coast of Japan and triggered a massive tsunami that slammed into the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Three of the plant’s six reactors melted down, and it became the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.

On the other side of the world, German Chancellor Angela Merkel panicked.

Her government had extended the operating lives of Germany’s 17 nuclear reactors just five months earlier. But, because of the earthquake in Japan, Merkel reversed course overnight and mothballed eight German reactors.

But Merkel’s decision wasn’t really about natural disasters. It was political.

Merkel was terrified of Germany’s Green Party— which was literally founded on anti-nuclear activism in 1980 and had been gaining ground. A critical regional election was just two weeks away, and Merkel was hoping that she might pull out a victory if she killed the reactors.

Her gambit didn’t work, and the Greens won anyway.

But at that point the fate of nuclear had already been set in motion. Within three months, the German government decided to phase out EVERY nuclear reactor in the country.

Bear in mind that Germany’s 17 reactors were generating over a third of the country’s electricity… with zero carbon emissions. That’s a pretty good thing for a country obsessed with climate change.

Yet Germany’s Green party had inexplicably spent decades campaigning to close them, i.e. to shutter the cleanest, most carbon-free source of baseload energy known to man.

Germany committed to replacing its nuclear plants with solar panels. Naturally this meant that, in a country where the sun barely shines, Germany became increasingly dependent on natural gas— most of which is piped in from Russia.

The true extent of this idiocy didn’t reveal itself until February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine: Germany joined Western sanctions against Russia. Russia retaliated by throttling gas supplies. And Germany had no fallback.

So Germany— the country that had lectured the entire world on carbon emissions— frantically restarted more than 20 coal-fired power plants. Then they imported 42 million metric tons of coal, including a surge from southern Africa. They even bulldozed the village of Lützerath to expand a lignite mine, dragging away protesters.

more:

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/most-expensive-science-lesson-european-history