But that is just one country, one source. There already are other sources, Russia supplied ca. 55% of gas used to Germany, not 100%, and less to other European countries. And in the Middle East UAE is just one of the countries Germany is in talks with, and the UAE is not even a big producer of LNG thus far. According to recent headlines it's actually the US who is supposed the most important source of LNG (German article: https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/usa-wohl-bald-wichtigster-...).

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/21/how-reliant-is...

Also, they did not buy gas alone, there also were agreements for thigs like Diesel. Then, the new approach is to have many sources instead of only some large suppliers. So, UAE is just one stop of many.

Those 137,000 m^3 are delivered this year - which is better than expected because thus far we were told we could get zero LNG from the Middle East this year because it's too soon. We are only just building the terminals too! And such things normally take decades in Germany... Great achievement to turn the positive surprise into a negative headline.

Also, German gas storage is over 90% full and still increasing. Yes, that came at great cost, and I think shutdown of some heavy industrial users.

However, given that German cities and industry had been completely bombed to ruins and came back after some disastrous war that also killed millions, not that many decades ago, having less fossil fuels available now - not "zero" as some headlines claim - for a relatively short amount of time of a year or two, so what? This little thing is supposed to be the end of German industry and lead to complete "German deindustrialization"? What a joke.

As a German, this is exactly the kind of shock this country needs to get its energy- and fossil-fuel act together. With continued stable cheap supplies nothing would have happened. And no, it's not the politicians. They just do what the majority of people want.

The goal for the future is to require much less fossil fuels, and this shock helps a lot to finally speed things along, for example, also from this very deal:

> The bilateral deal with the UAE, signed with UAE president Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, also covered other energy agreements, including a deal with Germany’s Steag and Aurubis for the supply of low-carbon ammonia to fuel hydrogen, with the aim of decarbonising industrial sectors. The first cargo arrived in Hamburg this month.

> Masdar, the UAE’s renewables vehicle, will explore offshore wind projects in the North Sea and the Baltic Sea off the German coast in an effort to generate 10GW of renewable energy output by 2030.

> Adnoc also delivered its first diesel delivery to Germany this month as part of an agreement to supply 250,000 tons of diesel a month next year to a German company.

https://www.ft.com/content/0065dfcc-4519-41b6-9883-92e7ff137...

It sounded good: if they trade with us they can't go to war with us without loosing their economy. The EU was build on this idea. And with trade there also follows prosperity and then people will demand democracy.

It's easy to say it's an excuse without considering the world today. Saudi Arabia could easily grind the entire world's economy to a halt if they so desired. China could do even worse. And Russia is already demonstrating what they can do. And these are just the well known examples. Look to essentially any field (perhaps rare Earth metals, especially those involved in electric components) and it's the same story.

The entire idea of an advanced or post-industrial economy is largely a facade. Absolutely everything we ultimately consume and use is dependent upon the most basic of skills, labor, and resources - the sort that 'advanced' economies strive to outsource as much as possible to 'developing' economies. But of course this doesn't change the fact that said skills/labor/resources are still the true backbone of your economy. Instead you've simply inverted a power relationship and become completely dependent upon those nations with said 'developing' economies.

Democracy and long-term thinking don't go well together.

People say this about shareholder owned companies with profit driven quarters but it's far more true for elected politicians who are judged myopically -- or, judged with superstition, as with nuclear energy in Germany -- on things like the current gas price. You see this manifest everywhere in politics. Why do you think federal debts are growing so much? Because voters create incentives for politicians to act myopically and kick the can down the road.

I also suspect part of it is deliberate malevolence. Stealing the upside for ourselves, while our children (federal debt) or foreigners (global warming) pay the downside.

Another part is that liberals have been sleepwalking. We bought into Fukuyama's End of History narrative. Fascism and war was a relic of the 20th century. In reality we were resting in the shade of America's unipolar hegemony. That's an American export that Europe had been free riding off. If America's relative standing weakens further, expect more conflict.

This is still arguing from hindsight and conveniently neglects the dependence of Russia on the EU: The EU was Russia's single largest customer of natural gas and an important purveyor of machines and technology. A valid reasoning at that time was that Putin would not risk this income / trade and furthermore Russia could be pacified or kept in check by ever increasing economic ties to the EU. Unfortunately Putin decided that tanking Russia's economy was totally worth it and/or speculated the EU confronted with the specter of an energy crisis would quickly falter and let him annex Ukraine without much fuss.

Furthermore Russian gas was cheap which made the development of alternatives a rather unpopular proposition. Try to explain to the people and the industry that gas will be more expensive because Russia might pose a problem and alternative sources need to be put in place. In hindsight it was stupid to not address the dependence on Russian energy but that is precisely the clarity hindsight provides. While the actions leading up to the current situations were taken, it wasn't all that clear that the problem could become very real.

We could all have continued living in an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity in Europe, but instead Putin choose a course of action in which everyone is losing big time. What a colossal waste.

Interesting observation there! What country do you live in?

America is mining 100% of the domestic oil demand, actually. You have outdated data.

The US was a net energy exporter in 2020 and 2021

It shows how immature of a world we live in that ideas become automatically discredited at the highest levels depending on who's saying those ideas out loud.

It wasn't just the German delegation but the entire press establishment as well. All because it was politically convenient at the time.

Exporting externalities is en vogue. Like when they exported old tires to Poland who in turn burned them right away and still claimed to be green...

That is so simplified that it's basically just wrong.

Nuclear power has been very unpopular in Germany since before Chernobyl. Phasing it out was a core goal of the Green party since its founding. They implemented it (on a decades-long timeline) when they first became part of a federal government in 1998. The decision was reversed by the Merkel government, which then reversed the reversal shortly after Fukushima.

And it was never in favor of coal, neither in theory not in practice. Both nuclear and coal have been replaced to a large degree by renewables, and to a lesser degree by gas.