The international press has maintained near-total silence on the escalating insanity of what is happening in Germany. Media outlets that routinely celebrate German progress towards energy transition don’t want you to know that Europe’s dominant industrial power has entered a deeply destructive political and administrative spiral from which it may never recover. The fault lies with the self-defeating and unworkable energy policies that have a death grip not merely on the Scholz Government, but on the entire administrative state. Since completing the nuclear phase-out in the midst of an ongoing energy crisis and avoiding winter catastrophe thanks only to the accident of mild weather, our rulers are now forcing devastating changes to the so-called Gebäudeenergiegesetz, or the Building Energy Act, which regulates energy consumption in residential and commercial structures.
That sounds bland and boring, but it’s not. This latest turning of the screws aims to phase out traditional gas and oil heating by mandating that all new heating systems installed after 2024 use no less than 65% renewable energy. In most cases, this can only be achieved by installing electric-powered heat pumps. Particularly in the case of many older buildings, the associated renovation costs will prove catastrophic, and unless they’re drastically revised, the rules will simply upset the housing market and destroy a great deal of personal wealth. Nor does the grid have any hope of powering these new heat sources, now or in the future.
In the midst of growing alarm and the seeming futility of all opposition, even some German establishment media have begun to voice unease. On Friday, Der Spiegel (of all magazines) published a lengthy piece on the origins, funding and rise to power of the ‘Eco Network’ currently controlling German energy policy, and I want to discuss it in detail, because it is so revealing about so many things. It pulls together many separate threads, to show how policy behemoths originate and are set in motion in modern managerial states, and how they can remain impervious and even contrary to popular opinion even in allegedly democratic systems.
The Spiegel reporting takes a close look at the careers of several key characters behind the energy transition, among them the Green politician Rainer Baake, and Robert Habeck’s scandal-riddled right-hand man Patrick Graichen, who is the policy brains driving most of the current insanity.
The rise of the environmentalists in the Ministry of Economics began a full decade ago. For a long time, the view was that the state should impose as few rules as possible on the corporate sector. … According to this logic, environmentalism and economic policy were seen as nearly mutually exclusive. It was not until 2013 that the dominance of free-market civil servants began to crumble.
At this time, Sigmar Gabriel of the SPD became Minister of Economics and appointed an unusual State-Secretary for Energy: Rainer Baake. … The move was a surprise, because Baake is not a Social Democrat, but a Green. … As State Secretary in the Ministry of the Environment … Baake helped orchestrate the first legislation on Germany’s nuclear phase-out. …
In 2012, Baake founded Agora Energiewende, probably the most influential think-tank advocating a carbon-neutral society in German politics. Patrick Graichen was at that time already Baake’s protegé. …
As the old-guard industry-friendly civil servants in the German bureaucracy began to retire, Baake filled their posts with Green technocrats wherever possible, such that when control of the Ministry passed to the centre-Right CDU in 2018, the damage was done. The institutional momentum had already shifted towards climate change and begun to gather strength under its own power. The catchword for Baake’s political vision was the so-called ‘All Electric World’, one in which a grid powered entirely by renewables drives cars (electrical vehicles), heats buildings (heat pumps) and even powers industry (though here the solutions are much vaguer).
During his five-year tenure as State Secretary, Baake appointed Graichen to head the Agora think-tank, which began churning out policy papers, sponsoring Green scientific research and gathering an ever-growing crowd of loyal advocates and technocrats. This paid off:
Whenever energy and climate were discussed in Berlin [in the years after Baake’s resignation from the Ministry of Economics in 2018], Graichen’s name came up, often peddling unwieldy terms that only experts understand. The “merit order principle”, for example, or the “locked-in effect”. The red-haired man with the sonorous voice knew his way around this specialist world like no other. …
The ability appears to have come naturally to him. His mother worked in the Ministry of Development, his father for a while in the Ministry of Transport. He himself became involved in environmental issues as a schoolboy, initially in the youth organisation of BUND. In 1993, he began studying at the University of Heidelberg. In 1996, he joined the Green Party. In 2001, he became a consultant for international climate protection… and helped draft the Kyoto Protocol.
Graichen is straight from the German political establishment, and his was the first generation that saw significant Green penetration in the years around the turn of the millennium. We are witnessing the fruition of long-term environmentalist activism, stretching back to the 1970s.
In 2020, Baake… founded the Climate Neutrality Foundation (Stiftung Klimaneutralität) and began producing studies on the energy transition. In their papers, Baake and Graichen touch on almost every climate issue. They talk about the restructuring of industry, the expansion of wind power, and the heating transition.
Their work was financed in the background by two men: Bernhard Lorentz, who as head of the Mercator Foundation helped to bring the Agora think-tank to life. And Hal Harvey, an American lobbyist who has funded environmentalist and climate organisations around the world for almost three decades, helped among other things by the philanthropic billions of families like the Hewletts.
This is not the first time we’ve found unlikely American activists and philanthropists behind European – and specifically German – climate activism. Spiegel explains, ominously, that “Harvey sees Europe as the key to preparing a climate-neutral future” and that for this reason “he directs millions… to support the likes of Baake and Graichen”. This man, who hardly appears in Anglophone media and doesn’t even have an English-language Wikipedia page, has been christened by Die Zeit as “the most powerful Green politician in the world“.
Harvey relies particularly upon think tanks to develop policy and warehouse political candidates when they’re out of power, and his immensely well-funded lobbying efforts can easily overwhelm the political discourse in smaller countries, which is probably one reason he’s so interested in Europe.
German think tanks such as Agora… or the Climate Neutrality Foundation… recruit researchers with the millions donated by their sponsors and steadily build expert influence. They shape the way politics and society think about environmental and climate protection – and fill their studies with legal proposals which include their favoured solutions. …
The influence of the Green support organisations is undisputed. They have given the party a great knowledge advantage in matters of climate protection. And with this knowledge, the party’s attractiveness as a problem-solver for one of the greatest crises of our time grew. … Other parties have neglected this area for a long time.
‘Knowledge’ is of course the wrong term to use here. ‘Policy prescriptions’ is much better, and if Der Spiegel weren’t so addled by its own ideological preconceptions, it could write about this more clearly. It’s a three-step process. 1) Activists and regime-approved scientists identify and make noise about looming problems, and then 2) think tanks write pages and pages of legislative and regulatory solutions for them. All of this happens largely out of sight, until 3) politicians respond to the demand stirred up by the activist arm, and having no real expertise or understanding of anything themselves, they have no choice but to enact the proposals that people like Graichen feed them.
Here, then, is the explanation for Robert Habeck’s stubborn idiocy since last Fall. As soon as the Greens entered Government, he made Graichen his State Secretary for Energy, and it is Graichen and the army of technocrats he commands who have been behind every political disaster since. The farcical response to the energy crisis, where these people were actually forced to work contrary to their principles and buy enormous quantities of coal (from Russia no less); the botched but nevertheless completed nuclear phase-out; and, finally, the catastrophic changes to the Building Energy Act, which will immiserate millions of Germans and do absolutely nothing to change the temperature of Earth.
Graichen’s failures have made him many enemies, which is one reason he’s currently mired in a nepotism scandal. Yet all the negative headlines are powerless to change any of the insanity that is coming for us, for the simple reason that there are no other policies to implement and no other scientific or technocratic solution to turn to. Graichen and his wealthy backers have spent 10 years filling all the political and intellectual pipelines with their preferred problems and their preferred solutions.
This is how you implement an agenda from the top down, and it is a key point on which Corona can be differentiated from the climate change farce. Over many years, the climate brigade have worked to fill academia and the bureaucracy with their ideas and their supporters. They took advantage of generational change and retirements to position their people, and they waited for an election to bring the right politicians to power and complete the circuit. The pandemicists of course followed the same path, but their mild mostly self-serving solutions were abandoned at the last moment in favour of much harsher, vastly more dangerous mass containment measures. The zeal for the novel response originated not with philanthropic lunatics and think-tanks over decades, but from within the bureaucracy itself. This lent the Corona coup much more power in the moment, but without any broader institutional or ideological support the worst aspects of the virus suppression regime crumbled just as quickly and are now quietly repudiated everywhere.
The Green fanatics never had that level of insane messianic enthusiasm, but for the same reason, they’re going to prove much, much harder to drive out.
This article originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.
Stop Press: Joe Biden has seen the devastation wreaked by green energy polices in German and said, “Hold my beer.” Politico has more.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Very thought provoking.
What will be interesting to see is how this all plays out, now that wokeness is bleeding over from academia to the general population through its adoption by corporations.
It’s not completely obvious to me whether the high-low coalition will be as effective in the general population where you might expect the views of “ordinary people” to have more weight. I’m assuming the proportions of high and low in the general population are less than in universities.
Perhaps that will be the key. If the general population rejects wokeness, then you’d expect that to be the end of it. If there is one thing I assume that the high and lows in universities is any sort of courage, the sort of courage that would require them to take on an opposing majority.
I remember seeing her in Juno and Flatliners, amongst other things. Beautiful young woman, she’s turned from Ellen into Elliot.
Well, as long as ‘he’s’ happy I guess…
https://twitter.com/egoofsigma/status/1662944515802447872
Cannot get over her transformation. But when I’ve seen ‘Elliot’ on a talk show he looks and sounds like a 12 year old boy because Ellen was very petite.
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a40011366/elliot-page-umbrella-academy-euphoria/
If you look at the face of this chirugical concoction, you’ll notice that it’s a badly damaged woman. Even the rent boys this creation of a mad doctor resembles most closely are decidedly male compared to this. That’s a bit of a sad story: You used to be a beautiful woman. Now, you’re an ugly hag in body which has been chirugically mutilated beyond any hope of recovery. That you now – at 36 – look like a woman of 55 with a history of depression and loneliness hasn’t turned you into a man.
Why do you never just say the English, “surgery”?
I find it interesting that you write an entire post in English but never this word. The German is the same as the Dutch “chirurgie” I see.
I just didn’t know that, at least not as word in my active vocabulary. Thanks for telling me.
https://www.technocracy.news/john-kerry-farm-confiscations-not-off-the-table/
Sadly The Netherlands features prominently in this article. I don’t suppose Billy’s hundreds of thousands of acres are at risk though.
https://reclaimthenet.org/who-restrict-individual-civil-liberties
A disturbing read which states there is another “pandemic” on the way – no shit Sherlock – and liberties will be expropriated with a vengeance.
Cheers hux. Read it. Saw the clip of that guy talking the other day on Twitter. They’re all so confident there’ll be another scamdemic. It’s almost as if they know something we don’t….
This is all very nicely said but it has one important deficiency: It’s historically completely wrong. Or rather, it may be true somewhere, but it’s certainly not true for the one historical phenomenon I know a little about, namely, Prussia/ Germany from about the 30 years war until today. Originally, the markgrave of Brandenburg was one of the seven electors of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. After the territory had been all but ruined because of its defenselessness during the 30 years war, the electors started to maintain standing armies so that they wouldn’t become other people’s punching balls again but could defend their territory and fight for their own causes as partner in coalition wars. For this, the electors needed money beyond the revenue from their property and hence, they subdued both the landed gentry and the citizens of the towns with a mixture of intrigue, force and by aligning themselves with the right foreign (ie, not from Brandenburg) potentates in order to introduce taxation to pay for the military. There was no high – low alliance to get of of an (aristocratic) middle layer.
As this progressed, the landed gentry became agents of the state while retaining most of their power over their dependent subjects (serfdom wasn’t abolished until the early 19th century) because only members of the gentry could become officers in the army and they were considered duty bound to serve as such whenever the king called for them.
After the shock of the French revolution, absolutism was reinstated and continued until the German revolution of 1848. While that ultimatively failed, it caused Prussia (and the other German states) to transition from absolutist to constitutional monarchies/ principalities. This culminated in the German empire, a federal super-state composed of the dynastic states of Germany minus the part of it ruled by the Habsburgs (Austria). There was no new political rhetoric and a new ideology of freedom, rights, and the popular will, just the socialists party (SPD) seeking to abolish the monarchy in order to erect communism which was one of the parties in the parliament supposed to represent the people of the empire and interacting with its government on their behalf.
My assumption is that eventually “wokeness” and associated ills will lead to the decline and fall of Western civilisation.
In 1925, a guy named Hendrik Willem Van Loon published a book titled Tolerance. One of the ideas in there was that the abject barbarianism of the first world war and especially, of the way it was ended, had caused civilisation to break down and that it would probably take about 300 years for it to catch up with the world again. That makes another 202 years. Meanwhile, there are some hopeful signs which weren’t there 30 years ago and the rapidly increasing madness of the counterculture project is one of them. But we still have a long way to go and won’t see the end of it.
Yes I think it could go either way and we’ll be long gone before it is played out
Any chance of eliminating any discussion of “woke”. Because it really isn’t awake, it is draconian.
Sorry not clear if you think the topic should not be discussed (if so, why?) or whether you think we should find another term because “woke” is misleading (agree).
Finally a post on Daily Sceptic about wokism that exhibits some understanding of the problem, even if the emphasis on “high-low alliances” requires at least a more robust definition of “high” and “low”.
The suggestion that “low” refers to “…the lower classes in modern society, driven by mass immigration and rapid economic change…” doesn’t seem to be borne out by a lot of anecdotal evidence that suggests that middle class youth are often the foot soldiers of the revolution.
And there is more than just ‘utility’ in “…understanding the arguments and the intellectual heritage of the Woke…“. Without some understanding of neo-Marxism, the philosophy of Rousseau & Hegel, more recently Mao, Marcuse and so on, we have no real idea of what we’re dealing with.
Ultimately this is a vicious religious power struggle, nothing to do with ‘social justice’.
Generally people don’t pay attention to things like this until it affects them.