It does because 1. they're both fighting for now-expensive imported natural gas 2. rates go up for everybody to pay for the malinvestment in solar

> Fertilizer prices would still have risen. Grain supplies would still be affected.

I meant "for Germany". Those are a problem for others.

That doesn't solve your problems in the slightest. You get less than half the return on investment for PV that most other countries in the world get, and does nothing for when your peak energy load is. Every dollar spent on PV requires another dollar on natural gas for the winter and locks you into fossil fuel dependency. Spend the money on something which gives you winter power!

> the main issue is distance to settlements because of noise/shadow concerns.

That's exactly what I mean. Where can you actually build it? And is that enough? And why spend a dime on solar until you've maximized wind?

> If we could i.e. half the cost of energy but have to live with drastically reducing energy consumption every few years for a couple of weeks in winter, would that be worth it?

See, exactly, that's the kind of national conversation you (and here in the USA) should be having. But we don't do that kind of thing any more. The politicians make money lying about the costs of things -- Gerhard Schröder being, I guess, a Russian stooge at best, a great example of downplaying the full costs.

Every member should be able to bring some number of proposals to full vote and all members should be forced to make a vote. Make every GOPer put a No vote on the "release DJT rape transcripts" bill, instead of burying them in committee. Make every pretend liberal vote No on "Medicare 4 All".

And if you had invested in Drake Landing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Community solar setup instead of PV, then neither the Russian invasion of Ukraine nor Hormuz blockade would have been a huge deal. The cost of energy is destroying your industrial base.

> Also, Germany will (and does) a large share of it energy requirement ... from wind

15TWh in January 2025. Again, you burned about 230 TWh of fossil fuels. Nearly every heating system is over 80%, electricity closer to 50%, so lets say 150TWh. Do you have an order of magnitude more land and water you're able to put wind generation on? And are you willing to base your life and economy on not having Dunkelflaute?

First, it wasn't this topic alone; whaling too. You also don't need 100% of people to listen. You just need to shift from 45% to 55%. If people were already skeptical about nuclear because they conflate nuclear weapons and nuclear power, then they only need to shift ~10% on the issue. And money gets their message out much stronger.

> That had the double benefit of keeping their hands clean while discrediting future environmentalists.

Washington State had I-732, which would make taxes less regressive and efficiently tax carbon. Both issues liberals pretend to care about. Most state environmentalist groups fought against this! It got defeated because of that opposition, then those groups put up a different carbon tax initiative which would funnel the money to them to spend as they want. Also shot down with a shift of who voted for and against. Environmentalists are sometimes the villains.

(also US whaling is nearly banned by the US and most countries, and we're not going to go to war with Japan over it)

In January 2025, Germany burned about 236 TWh of fossil fuels.

You cannot even mostly replace fossil fuels with solar.

The Salem witch trials.

McCarthyism

And "Universities" are the mouthpieces of corporations? The people keep electing politicians who are anti-worker-protection laws. They're purposely choosing corporation-owner-friendly legislators. This is not the fault of universities.

Of course it's a complicated issue, but it's not my University friends doing public outreach for kids that's to blame for not doing enough. It's the authoritarian public school system, it's that we allow people to be shitty parents and pass on generational trauma/poverty, it's that the foundational mythos is you can do everything yourself (even though 99.999% of people don't live somewhere nor have the skills to be self-sufficient) because the government and rich owners like keeping people divided.

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/india

USA is at 80%, which isn't much better, but at least trending down:

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-states

China is also at 80%, but trending down far steeper:

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china

They are, all the time, doing outreach. It's just as Isaac Asimov said:

Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'

The origin story the government brainwashes everyone through public schools is partly to blame. There are people challenging it, but mostly they end up pushing for a different form of anti-intellectualism :(.