I happened across this AP story today, and a few things jumped right out at me. First, the story is
here. (well, actually it's all over the internet, but I found it there first).
Things like this:
And experts say Germany's phase-out provides a good map that countries such as the United States, which use a similar amount of nuclear power, could follow.
Uh-huh. Who might these "experts" be? Two sentences later, we find out. It's "Felix Matthes of Germany's renowned Institute for Applied Ecology". With a name like that, I suspected the group would be a bunch of environmentalists. Their website more than reaffirms my suspicions. (I also suspected the reporter may have been spiking the story by using the term "renowned", but that's
de rigueur for journalists today).
Then there's this:
The president of Germany's Renewable Energy Association, Dietmar Schuetz, said the government should create a more favorable regulatory environment to help in bringing forward some euro150 billion investment in alternative energy sources this decade by businesses and homeowners.
I wonder: how much does the good Mr. Schuetz stand to gain from these "investments"? More pointedly, is it the taxpayers making the "investments" and Mr. Schuetz and his cronies reaping the rewards?
Then comes the call for "renewable energies". Only three paragraphs later does the good Vice Chancellor admit that the public is going to be socked with higher costs.
Vice Chancellor Guido Westerwelle said Wednesday "we must learn from Japan" and check the safety of the country's reactors but also make sure viable alternatives are in place.
"It would be the wrong consequence if we turn off the safest atomic reactors in the world, and then buy electricity from less-safe reactors in foreign countries," he told the Passauer Neue Presse newspaper.
But Schuetz insists that "we can replace nuclear energy even before 2020 with renewable energies, producing affordable and ecologically sound electricity."
But someone will have to foot the bill.
"Consumers must be prepared for significantly higher electricity prices in the future," said Wolfgang Franz, head of the government's independent economic advisory body. Merkel last week also warned that tougher safety rules for the remaining nuclear power plants "would certainly mean that electricity gets more expensive."
The article goes on to reveal the the super-green energy sources being used now are being--ta da!--subsidized by the taxpayers.
I guess journalists and politicians are just as slimy on the other side of the pond.
