German CO₂ emissions are the lowest since the 1950s. Is this a success or a failure?
Agora Energiewend reports Germany’s CO₂ Emissions Drop to Record Low. The details and results are interesting, emphasis mine.
Last year, Germany’s greenhouse gas emissions fell to 673 million tonnes of CO₂. Emissions thus fell by 46 percent compared to the reference year 1990 – their lowest level since the 1950s. At the same time, CO₂ emissions were about 49 million tonnes of CO₂ below the annual target of 722 million tonnes of CO₂ derived from the Climate Protection Act.
Two main developments were responsible for the decrease of 73 million tonnes of CO₂ compared to 2022. First, coal-fired power generation fell to its lowest level since the 1960s, saving 44 million tonnes of CO₂ alone. The reasons for this were a significant drop in electricity demand, increased electricity imports from neighbouring countries – around half of which came from renewable sources of energy – as well as a commensurate decrease in electricity exports and a slight increase in domestic green electricity generation. Second, emissions from industry fell significantly. This was largely due to the decline in production by energy-intensive companies as a result of the economic situation and international crises. While overall economic output shrank by 0.3 percent according to preliminary figures, energy-intensive production fell by 11 percent in 2023.
“2023 was a two-speed year as far as climate protection in Germany is concerned: the energy sector notched up a climate policy success with its record level of new renewable power, taking us closer to the 2030 target,” said Simon Müller, director of Agora Energiewende Germany. “However, we don’t consider the emissions reductions seen in the industrial sector to be sustainable. The drop in production due to the energy crisis weakens Germany’s industrial base. If emissions are simply shifted abroad as a result, this won’t benefit the climate. The buildings and transport sectors are also lagging as far as structural climate protection measures are concerned.”
According to Agora’s calculations, only about 15 percent of the CO₂ saved constitutes permanent emissions reductions resulting from additional renewable energy capacity, efficiency gains and the switch to fuels that produce less CO₂ or other climate friendly alternatives.
CO₂ emissions in the transport and buildings sectors stagnated again in 2023, meaning that the sectors continue to fall well short of their climate goals. Instead of the legally binding maximum of 101 million tonnes of CO₂, buildings caused 109 million tonnes of CO₂ emissions. This means that the buildings sector missed the annual target for the fourth time in a row.
According to Agora’s calculations, transportation in Germany emitted 145 million tonnes of CO₂, which corresponds to a reduction of just 11 percent compared with 1990. This means that transport emissions exceeded the legally binding limit of 133 million tonnes of CO₂ by 12 million tonnes of CO₂. The target of 15 million electric cars by 2030 remains a long way off: as in the previous year, the share of electric cars among new registrations was unchanged at just under 20 percent.
German Deindustrialization
“Good Morning from Germany, where a creeping deindustrialization is taking place. Industrial production has recently continued to fall and is now at the same level as in 2006.”
I used that Tweet in my previous post, written yesterday. Today found two interesting articles to show why that’s happening.
In Search of the Green Utopia
In the name of green utopia, political leaders are quietly killing vital energy-intensive industries.
The Wall Street Journal reports Davos Devotees Deindustrialize Europe
Political, business and security leaders gather in Davos next week under the mantra of “rebuilding trust.” Key topics include security cooperation, artificial intelligence, energy security and job growth “for a New Era.” Undoubtedly there will also be calls to phase out fossil fuels and aspirations for a hydrogen-based green economy. Amid this grand planning for the industries of 2050, leaders likely will pay little attention to how government pressure to reach this utopian vision is destroying the industries that made Europe the envy of the world.
Over the past two years, dozens of energy-intensive manufacturers of our most basic materials—chemicals, steel, ceramics, glass and fertilizers—have ceased or slowed production in Europe. As the leader of a U.S.-headquartered chemical company that once had more than 50% of its revenue and employees in Europe, I have witnessed this devolution firsthand.
According to a recent report from the think tank Agora Energiewende, German greenhouse-gas emissions dropped 20% in 2023 to their lowest levels in 75 years primarily due to a collapse in energy-intensive manufacturing. Media reports largely overlook the scale of this catastrophe, but the political ramifications are beginning to show in the polls. Agricultural protests against emission crackdowns in the Netherlands helped populist Geert Wilders win a surprise election victory, and similar demonstrations in Germany killed a green budget proposal.
The deindustrializing politics of Europe essentially seek to reverse all this by organizing the economy around limiting byproduct waste from the products that enable the world to sustain itself. Low-cost, abundant energy is the lifeblood of profitable industrial manufacturing. The production of virtually everything requires it. Every time an industrial facility closes, high-paying jobs disappear and the middle class shrinks.
If Europe won’t make what the world needs, then production will go elsewhere. It is environmentally and economically irresponsible for Europe to outsource its energy-intensive industry to countries with weaker regulation, employment laws and safety standards. To believe differently is naive, dangerous, and detrimental to the environment. Serious people understand this reality and must speak out. Voters already are.
Taxing the World
Europe and the US are hell bent on creating a “green utopia”. It does not exist and never will.
In Germany and the EU, the search for utopia is leading to deindustrialization. In the US, Biden’s efforts are leading the US to become the high-cost producer.
Carbon Leakage
To prevent “carbon leakage” the European Parliament Reached a Deal on a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, CBAM for short.
I wrote about CBAM on December 19, 2022 in EU Imposes the World’s Largest Carbon Tax Scheme
“The only effect CBAM would have is a resource shift whereby clean energy capacity in already under-resourced countries will be shifted for export production while industry aimed at local consumption and energy access will depend on dirty fuels.”
Is that not what’s happening?
World Class Irony
We don’t use roof solar panels because they cost to much. They cost too much because we insist they be produced here.
We demand EV policies that require more minerals and mines, but we won’t allow more mines in the US.
We want more EVs but we insist on union manufacturing driving up price.
Holding the whole damn mess together is a policy of higher tariffs.
All Hail France
Amusingly, France is leading the way to a solution that actually makes sense.
In a proposal in French parliament that has a good chance of passing, a bill weakens France’s climate objectives. The objective would no longer be to “reduce” but to tend towards a reduction in “our greenhouse gas emissions.
For discussion, please see French Legislation Weakens Clean Energy Commitments and Favors Nuclear
The legislation defines nuclear as sustainable. And so here we are. France is actually making sense while the US and most of the EU is in green utopia la-la land.
Rebuilding Trust. Um. Yeah
Going to be hard to rebuild trust when your goal is to kill humanity and end civilization
I don’t mind going back to the dark ages. I have plenty of ammunition. What the rest of you are going to do without cell phones or the Internet is your problem.
You have quite a bit of company in rural America….
“We don’t use roof solar panels because they cost to much. They cost too much because we insist they be produced here.”
No, the right way of thinking about the problem is that they cost too much because they do cost too much. Shifting production somewhere else doesn’t really make them cheaper in terms of the energy, raw materials, skills and industrial capacity that they require to be made. Other places may be a little better at producing solar panels, but probably not by that much.
But the way that world trade has been operating, currency markets have created all sorts of imaginary “cheapness” that doesn’t reflect at all the actual difficulties in manufacturing anything. All these imbalances will eventually resolve themselves somehow, hopefully not WWIII, but historically, wars have been a way of resolving impossible economic tensions.
I work in the printing and packaging business. We have our marketing and HR people constantly promoting a sustainable and green agenda (women of course).
One day I mentioned to one of them that “our earnings depend on us and our customers using a lot of electricity, natural gas, petroleum for shipping and manufacturing film, PAPER and ink. The more that is used, the more money we make.”
“Do you realize that you are promoting yourself out of a job?”
All I received back in response was silence.
Because people are too stupid to think about what they are being told, they are slowly killing themselves…. Slowly at first, then suddenly. Dead Brzezinski is thinking, “How convenient.”
Does ANYONE think that the Davos agenda is actually what they are discussing? OF COURSE NOT.
Here is my imagined Agenda:
Dutch farmer protests are not about CO² or climate, but are about ammonia (reactive nitrogen compounds) and biodiversity. In much of the EU, the opinion about nuclear is shifting markedly.
One of the reasons CO² emissions have been going down is nat gas displacing coal, as well as more efficient motors. However, more efficient energy obviously leads to using more of it. The EU has more cars, dishwashers, clothes dryers, and computers than ever … all of them largely new ways to consume (more) energy.
The idea that people wish to keep living is only an assumption. With growth in suicides and suicidal ideation, how broadly does that assumption apply? Add on voluntary extinction and collapsing birth rates and what remains? There was a shocking attack on advocating breastfeeding by the pediatric community (Zerohedge).
I’m not sure that reason and a drive towards self preservation completely apply anymore. Welcome to the Calhoun mouse experiment.
Germany’s current situation provides an opportunity to reflect, comparing this with 1945 when Germany was defeated and the US was considering the Morganthau Plan for postwar Germany’s future. The relevant part of that here was the proposal to deindustrialize Germany and reduce it to a 100% agricultural (subsistence) economy. (Pres. Truman asked Herbert Hoover to look at it and give his opinion. Hoover did, and reported that implementing the Morganthau plan would result in several million more German deaths. Or phrased another way, it could work if Germany’s population were reduced by several million people. (Given sentiments at the time, amazing that they didn’t try to implement it and cause a reduction in Germany’s population.) The Allies did make some effort to implement the plan in the second half of 1945.)
The sane world led by France. There’s some irony for ya.
“The sane world led by France. There’s some irony for ya”
Why?
Is not France the only country in the world–the *only* country–to protest same-sex “marriage”? Millions–literally millions–of Frenchmen took to the streets for many months to try, unsuccessfully in the end, to prevent the imposition of “la loi Taubira” (the Taubira law), named for the African Minister of “Justice” in France’s last Socialist gov’t? And the Socialist Party in France is no longer an important part of the French political scene. They just haven’t gotten votes or won elections since the Taubira outrage. There is even a political party now, today, whose only goal is to rescind la loi Taubira.
Nor were the protests restricted only to Metropolitan France. Frenchmen in the overseas departments–ALL overseas departments–also took to the streets for many months–from Reunion to St-Pierre et Miquelon to New Caledonia and Tahiti.
Naturally, the will of the vast majority–yes, the VAST majority–of Frenchmen was set at naught, and the law was adopted by fiat of Mme Taubira, without the National Assembly.
Did not Frenchmen rise up against precisely this “green” nonsense in the form of the Yellow Vest protests?
Americans have no understanding of France, which is a shame because without France, the US would not have won independence, at least not when it did, and would perhaps be today a British “dominion.”
The US has fought two wars against Germany; two against Austria; two against Italy; one against Spain; one against Turkey (1917 – 1918); and a cold war against the Warsaw Pact countries. But never a war against France.
There is a true conservative tradition in France–unlike the US outside the South–and there is a conservative streak a mile wide in the French character. And no, the 1789 “French Revolution” is not at all what Americans–and most Frenchmen–think it was.
What country has any sort of political organization that is staunchly anti-immigration besides France? The US? Britain? Spain? Germany? Sweden? What country other than France has such parties (two of them now)?
Is not France the only Western country to have actually taken action at the time of the Arab Oil Embargo in the 1970s, so that she has generated around 70% of her electricity from nuclear power for nearly 50 years?
There is no irony in the current common-sensical approach that the French are now taking to this “green” foolishness. No irony at all.
Who’s trust? These people are trying to censor the truth for their benefit. No reason to trust them.
GOOD 👍. I love seeing communists and the truly deranged cut their own noses off to get the temporary smudge cleaned off. F em
Hi Mike, When I click the link from your email to open this article, the website behaves really weird and continuously reloads. I have to close the tab and visit mishtalk.com directly and then look at the article.
I wish Mike was wrong.
Too bad he’s not.
The only CO2 level that counts is in the air over Germany. Hope they can count which molecules are domestically produced or “imported”.
Those aircraft carriers we sent to the eastern Med have 800 corvette engines turning their propellers, NOT! They have neigborhood size nuclear reactors. Nukes might finally be the answer.
The fact that the French are pushing Nuclear is because they have the most Nuclear powered Economy in Europe with some 58 plants . . . They derive nearly 75% of their electricity needs from Nuclear and manage to export electricity to other European countries. Now that was some good forward thinking . . . The Germans on the other hand blew it . . . and are now paying the price . . .
Voilà !
To counter their decline the EU offers legal citizenship to investors who buy RE, stocks or employ ten people and without debt. People protest about the rising cost of RE and rent.
If Germany is in decline, then the EU is in decline, and Germany will take the whole lot down with it. France and Italy have their piles of gold to live off, if their bloated corrupt bureaucracies and immigrants don’t decimate it all. US, EU, China, Japan, UK, Canada, Australia, Korea… all in trouble… some more than others, but the EU’s situation is particuarly dire, with the layers of unnecessary bureaucracy canniballising the zombified corpse of EU economies. Those who predict dedollarisation, take note.
The future is going to be difficult and expensive no matter what is done. The cost of more ice launching off from Antarctica that can put the most useful port cities into higher water and damaged or entirely out of commission will be not only infinitely expensive but also a calamity of massive consequence. The acidification of oceans from more Co2 makes bone and shell formation take more energy and that has some not so obvious serious consequences for humans. I am a geologist. Mish you might do better to stick with your exceptional abilities with math and statistics for non geophysical economics topics that I find to be excellent without parallel. Truly you are a kind of genius in some areas but not this one. Help people to prepare with assets for the difficult times ahead as you often do and skip the prescriptions that imply that you have some sort of expertise in geophysical data.
Are you not understanding? We were far better at producing goods at a far cleaner “price” but ivory tower condescending elitist central planning knowitall folks like you refused to factor in the common sense that says we need ever more goods …so the easily movable nature of capital and production capacity moved to areas that are willing to produce it with dirtier fuels…to avoid your rules or the cost required to meet impossible-to-afford strict standards. The article is saying that you cheer the success of reducing co2 in places like germany or the u.s. while ignoring it shifted to places of worse stewardship, and at a economic and national security cost to the adherers. This isnt difficult. You see the numbers in germany or u.s. but fail to account for the real problem…china and india, pretending you could just kill the co2 with acknowledging the demand still needs to be met. SMH
You are right but some people cannot make the connection between higher Co2 levels and higher costs. Unfortunately it’s already too late to stop, the 500ppm of Co2 guarantees a difficult future, so why bother. Finally, Mish’s math and statistics abilities are far from exceptional as he routinely fails to understand basic concepts, so that is not his strength at all.
Good night and good luck.
Look up the Eddy Grand Solar Minimum. The earth is COOLING and will be cooling for 50-odd years. And do you not understand that Co2 levels have been much higher in the (distant) past? Or that ALL plant life on the planet depends on CO2? Don’t talk such superstitious nonsense!
Rubbish! We are well into a cyclical Grand Solar Minimum–the Eddy GSM. The earth is COOLING.
Unfortunately in the United States we have no political leadership that will actually deal with the truth. We are the largest oil producers right now, heating your home or building with natural gas is economical. Yet the political market is trying to destroy natural gas as an option. When you look at the amount of infrastructure costs in the ground and in buildings it is insane to end natural gas. I live in montana and ev cars at minus 30 makeno sense at all.
I hope some sane leadership appears. As far as.i am concerned there is no one to vote for president they both are hell bent on destroying the country in different ways.
EVs start more reliably in cold weather than gas cars.
No, they don’t. Batteries work using a chemical reaction which slows substantially at low temperatures. At low temps like -25 F lithium ion batteries will barely run an EV for just a several miles, and trying to run the heat pump and other electric power consumption would add to the problems. EVs are a disaster in cold climates and in weather situations like we will see this week, with temps well below zero in many places.
How come they (seemingly) work well in Norway?
Norway is not as cold as you think, it is warmed by the last of the Gulf Stream.
EV cost evaluations do not include the cost of keeping the car plugged in to keep the battery warm over a winter night. The lower limit for a LiFe PO battery in -5 C. To work in colder temperatures you need the cobalt ones and they cost more.
PS. It’s currently 12 F in Oslo, it’s 2 F here even though Oslo is further north.
I want natural gas when it’s cold, especially if the power goes out I can light the fireplace.
Being comfortable is rasis.
Enjoying life is prejudis.