this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
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Europe

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[โ€“] [email protected] 103 points 11 months ago (22 children)

Basicly 16 years of stoping all green projects and then being hit by a fossil fuel crisis. The fact of the matter is that Germany had the lowest industrial electricity prices for decades, by moving the cost to households, which got some of the highest prices in Europe due to that. Gas was cheap and nearly not taxed at all. All of that in a system with clear caps on emissions and well something has to give.

Even worse a massive unwillingness to pay for infrastructure using debt. Germany is in good shape financially and it would be relativly easy to just pay for a lot of infrastrucuture. That is partly happening, but obviously there are also labour, material and time problems making this take years to finish.

Then there is a massive problem with consumption. Wages have not kept up with inflation, while there are worker shortages. Welcome to a perfectly working labour market. Anyway that obviously means less consumption in Germany, which hurts the economy.

However there is no reason that some good governance could not solve it and it is a fossil fuel crisis, which destroys industries based on processes we do not want to use due to climate change. It could be an extremly healthy crisis if managed well.

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