Germany is a mess, but it still has some amazing old-growth forests. Or does it? Having scuttled its nuclear energy capacity after Fukushima! – probably at the encouragement of Greens – it is trying to replace some of that capacity with wind, to the frustration and anger of Greens.
I guess Kermit the Frog had it right all those years ago. It isn’t easy being green.
The Reinhardswald is known as the “treasure house of European forests” or the “Grimm’s fairy tale forest.”
A total of about 2000 hectares ( 20 million m²) of the thousand-year-old Reinhardswald was designated for destruction by the state in order to clear the way for a massive wind power plant development.
They began building construction roads two days ago, so efforts to stop the project appear to have failed.
What if they renamed it the Amazon?
In 2015, for example, Merkel considered it (The Amazon) to be “the key to all goals related to the climate.” In 2018 she said, “the Amazon’s wildfires were an ‘acute emergency’ which belonged on the G7 agenda.”
That one is a real Lorax, except when it comes to her trees. We won’t be clear-cutting old-growth forests in some backwater like Brazil, but Germany needs power. Screw the trees and their benefits to the global climate narrative.
Clearing 20 million square meters of fairy woods is the first of many prices Germany (and the world) must pay in the name of progress.
Modern Wind power is, of course, a nasty dirty, inefficient method of generating electricity with dire consequences for wildlife that try to live in what’s left after construction. It is carbon-intensive front and back and ill-suited to modern demands in between. They try to compensate by installing more of them, but that makes a bigger mess on both ends, and it didn’t work for Denmark.
[Merkel] praised Brazil’s work to halt what was once runaway forest clearance for new agricultural lands in the Amazon rainforest, even if the rate of destruction has picked up again this year, according to NGOs that monitor the Amazon.
Were they making space to install German-made wind farms, perhaps?
Environmentalists, meanwhile, are losing their minds.
The area is the largest contiguous forest area in Hessen in a virtually uninhabited, undisturbed and therefore in itself an extremely valuable natural area. It’s beauty serves as a recreational area of outstanding importance [1] in the midst of a landscape that is partly classified as cultural-historical and of the highest value. Even according to Hessian Environment Minister Priska Hinz (Greens), it is one of the most scenic regions in Germany [2],
And Macron was right there with Merkel babbling about the Amazon, but France gets 70% of its power from nuclear reactors, many of which are close to 50 years old. Their plan. Fix and upgrade to keep them working while they work on new ones.
In October 2021 French grid operator RTE plans for construction of six new EPR reactors so that by 2050 France maintains 50 GW in low-carbon nuclear power. This has been described as the fastest and most certain path to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050
Do you know who builds those? Électricité de France in France, and Siemens in Germany (Siemens also makes wind turbines).
The French are also exploring small modular reactors and green hydrogen while Germany clears old-growth forests to erect wind turbines.
So, could France “conquer” Germany in a few decades simply by controlling all the electricity generating capacity of any actual value.
Probably not, but Germany is going in the wrong direction as quickly as possible. Something, at some point, has to give.
