All of our countries are crazy in various ways, but when it comes to energy policy Germany is an undisputed champion of crazy.

In 2011, a tsunami caused the Fukushima nuclear disaster. If you check a map, you’ll notice that Fukushima is in a country called Japan, which it turns out is a different country from Germany. The Fukushima disaster had zero to do with the Federal Republic, but then-Chancellor Angela Merkel felt the need to solve the problem of Fukushima by phasing out nuclear power in Germany, even though tsunamis and earthquakes are not a problem in Germany, because Germany is a country in Central Europe and not an island nation in Asia.

...it gets much crazier. Months before announcing the nuclear phase-out, Merkel’s Government had passed energy transition legislation to secure Germany’s path towards a zero-emissions future...to ditch our most significant source of emissions-free power, in other words, just months after resolving an energy transition to emissions-free power...These insane choices had the near-term consequence of increasing our dependence on Russian natural gas. Otherwise, they ensured that power generation in Germany would be vastly more expensive than necessary and also vastly more carbon intensive than necessary.

In 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, and Germany under Merkel’s successor, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, decided along with the rest of the liberal West that Russia was bad, bad, bad and that evil Putin had to be punished with self-immolating sanctions, sanctions, sanctions. This new spasm of high-minded moralising further attenuated our energy situation, ushering in an entirely self-made energy crisis. The Greens, now in government, were determined to proceed with the last stages of the nuclear phase-out, even with our natural gas supplies in doubt.

The Greens fought ruthless bureaucratic battles to shut off the last remaining nuclear power plants, and in the years since they have fought ruthless legal battles to keep the records of all this under seal lest their idiocies ever see the light of day...because their contents were so discrediting that they would make the policy impossible to justify at home and defend abroad.

Happily, journalists for the excellent news magazine Cicero won their court battle and succeeded in forcing the release of the deeply embarrassing nuclear memos. Today Daniel Gräber has published his long-awaited analysis of these records, and what it reveals is really and truly abysmal...high civil servants literally falsifying expert reports...withholding information from their boss, Economics Minister Robert Habeck, lest he inconveniently arrive at the right conclusions.

In the end, the Green bureaucrats lost the battle but they won the war. All the fake, invented reasons why the nuclear plants could not be left running into the spring melted away as the energy crisis deepened and the Government found themselves toeing the brink of political annihilation. The plants did go offline, however, if a little later than Graichen, Tidow and Niehaus had hoped.

Particularly loved this description of one of the players: "looks like what would happen if you blended a shark with an accountant." He said he couldn't find a photo of another key player "so for the purposes of this post I invite you to imagine an unpleasant male visage of your choosing" and then posted an image of Jabba the Hutt.