How Bad Europe’s Energy Crisis Is
The framing of these stories is so misleading.<p><i>&quot;The gas problem is largely due to Russia’s war in Ukraine, which has disrupted exports of Russian gas to Europe and raised prices everywhere else.&quot;</i><p>Europe&#x2F;Germany&#x27;s refusal to actually pay for the gas is what&#x27;s caused the flows to stop. There is a whole gas pipeline that doesn&#x27;t go anywhere near Ukraine ready and waiting to go (Nord Stream 2), but Germany refuses to license it. Instead they continue to only allow the aging Nord Stream 1 pipeline that has had several turbines offline for repairs, such that they begged the Canadians to let Siemens violate their own Canadian sanctions to return a turbine they&#x27;d seized back to the Russians after repairing it. But that wasn&#x27;t the only turbine with problems which is why (the Kremlin claims) the flow is currently reduced (and indeed Putin was talking about multiple turbines being offline due to technical problems since before the maintenance in the summer so this isn&#x27;t something newly made up).<p>Want to figure out who&#x27;s lying right now? Turn on Nord Stream 2 and call the Russian&#x27;s bluff. They claim they&#x27;re willing to sell gas to Europe, but are limited by the pipeline problems. Right now we can&#x27;t tell if that&#x27;s true or not because there&#x27;s so much obfuscation on the European side. Issue a license for Nord Stream 2 - all brand new equipment - and see what happens.<p>Germany&#x27;s government won&#x27;t do this of course, because with the media&#x27;s help they are currently successfully pushing the line that the need for repairs is fake and it&#x27;s all a great game by Russia, who for some reason are OK with pumping <i>some</i> gas, but not all of it, whilst simultaneously lying about the reasons why. This blew up in the media&#x27;s faces earlier in the year when the pipeline went down for annual maintenance and they ran tons of stories claiming it wouldn&#x27;t come back, which it then did - not what you&#x27;d expect if Russia was sanctioning Europe rather than the other way around.<p>---<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.yahoo.com&#x2F;putin-warns-eu-gas-supplies-221428003.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.yahoo.com&#x2F;putin-warns-eu-gas-supplies-221428003...</a><p><i>&quot;Russia&#x27;s Gazprom state-controlled natural gas giant reduced gas deliveries through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline to Germany by 60% last month, citing technical problems after a turbine that Siemens sent to Canada for overhaul couldn’t be returned because of sanctions. Canada and Germany made a deal to return the turbine, but Putin said Tuesday that Gazprom still hasn&#x27;t received the relevant documents.<p>The Russian leader said that Gazprom was to shut another turbine for repairs in late July, and if the one that was sent to Canada isn&#x27;t returned by that time the flow of gas will ebb even more.<p>He also pointed out at Ukraine closing a branch of a transit pipeline carrying the Russian gas to the West that comes via the territory controlled by Moscow-backed separatists as another reason behind the dwindling Russian gas flow to Europe.&quot;</i><p>---<p>Back to the article:<p><i>&quot;But it’s not just the war: Alternative supplies of gas are expensive, climate change has drained rivers so much that many of Europe’s nuclear plants are offline&quot;</i><p>French nuclear is offline due to a mix of (again) broken equipment and the fact that the rivers were warm, such that heating them more from the nuclear plants would make the rivers too warm for some wildlife. So environmental protection but not climate change, not because the rivers have literally dried up. I think some were given exemptions and came back online.<p>But this whole line is not really &quot;allowed&quot; anyway because you aren&#x27;t meant to assign specific weather events to climate change. Climate change is all about long term averages. You can&#x27;t say it was hot this summer so it&#x27;s climate change, or it was rainy and cold last summer so that&#x27;s also climate change. You can only talk about the climate <i>changing</i> if you&#x27;re talking about long term trends. All climate change so far is only meant to be about 1 degree C over the past 100 years, which isn&#x27;t anywhere near enough to shut down nuclear reactors.