Behind closed doors in the actual workings of the EU things are different.
But there is an universal law that you can always dress unpopular but neccessary EU decisions or compromises as "Germany made us do it" at home and can always get bonus points if you tell the story how you bravely fought Germany to push through a popular EU decision.
Basically the same propaganda for domestic a audience in slightly modified form that Orban has made an art form in Hungary.
Germany actually has a stricter domestic law already than what the EU is doing here.
But reality of course never matters. As long as Europeans can tell themselves the fairy tale of how they successfully fought those bad Germans for every slightly positive achievement, they are happy. Even if it's actually too little or meaningless or just virtue-signaling. Or several of those things combined...
And I mean, of course they do... that's the definition of "conservative"
That was the definition a long time ago. Nowadays it's not about resisting progress or conserving anything. They actually fight hard now for progression... into the wrong direction.
Talking about 'Gotland' and a 'maritime shadow war' might provide some clues to what might happen to Russian ships trying to attack that island. *cough*
Just the the usual Russian posturing bullshit...
One of the flattest and lowest countries in the world voting to help rising sea levels among other things because right-wing populists cried "blame the evil foreigners" as usual.
If humanity should die out, we at least know it was justified...
I don't know. But maybe it should be word of the week, month, year or decade given that the concept seems to not have been stressed enough in education and people constantly miss the issues created by monocultures, wether it's soil damage, higher need for fertilizers, susceptibility to diseases or parasites (reqiring again more chemicals) or the simple fact that plants for monocultures are rarely chosen based on perfect climatic conditions (so even more at risk with changing climate). Ffs... regarding trees in particular the ones planted are often just picked for their straight trunks, so the wood is easier to sell later...
I doesn't need to convert CO2 when it helps to produce less CO2 in the first place.
When an absolute majority of black Americans can't even tell what is done to combat climate change while people outside the US only reading a few very general international reports about the US can, they have a far bigger problem than what can be solved with addressing the topic differently on the campaign trail...
There are a lot of "forests" that are actually stupid monoculture wood farms. So even alleged forest protection can be purely about the money...
"Recently there has been a concerted effort to make a kind of a vibe shift about how we talk about climate."
Yet no concerted effort can beat the money poured into desinformation, propaganda and also defeatism by the people making a fortune by destroying our planet. If we don't address that any talk about "changing how we speak about climate change" is just another diversion. Have we really not learned anything from the ecological footprint fairy tale?
In most countries we are NOT at the point to able to spend excess electricity.
That's wrong. There are enough countries that already have problems getting rid of excess electricity several hours a day in most of the summer half. And this will increase constantly over the next years. Oh... and we are actually paying for that electricity to be discarded already. Which is exactly why the slow buildup of power-to-gas as well as short-term storage needs to start now. Or do you believe the increase in excess electricity will just go on for a decade without a way to use it and then we snap our fingers an the power-to-gas production and infrastucture magically appears out of nowwhere?
Gas & oil companies do not care what you put into your cars, machines
Of course they care. They already know that 10 years from now no ICE-based car will be produced anymore. And they are panicking enough to spend a lot of money on bullshit propaganda to revert legislation that bans co2-emitting cars in the near-future. and if that doesn't work we they hope to confuse enough people to cling to their oil and gas longer than is good for them (and their wallets).
Bonus: All planned ‘green hydrogen’ facilities worldwide until 2035 will cover about 10% of Germany’s demand
Speakling of bullshit... that's eFuels, not hydrogen. And what you call "demand" are the numbers if we follow some insane "it will not work and is all a scam"-fairy tale (or the "oh, you don't need to change anything. Just stick with your combution engine"-alternmative), do nothing and then suddenly need gasoline for millions of cars. Which will not happen. There is no future for combustion engines. Producers have stopped development years ago. The latest generation of car engines burning gasoline to be build is already on our streets today.
So of course eFuels are not a solution. Because it's a scam to foul people into clinging to a technological dead-end and so people can tell those fairy tales about how our energy transition will fail and we should really just give up. In reality eFuels are a niche topic exclusively for long-range ship and air traffic at best and for a few specific industries (like chemical production nowadays using natural gas as a raw material instead of energy).
Seriously... how often will people parrot the same bullshit again and again? It's always the same moronic arguments simplifying facts ad absurdum and then repeating them again and again knowing that explaininmg why it's wrong will take much more time:
But batteries do not work because we can't build that much for storage!!!! And now I need to explain people that long-term storage and short-term storage are two completely separate things and how they actually work. Also how solar and wind are actually complementary and the amount of short-term storage needed is so much smaller... not even half a day to get a stable day/night cycle but even less (~3 hours to shift production peak -mid day- to demand peak -early evening).
But lithium!!!!!! No, grid storage is not a hand-held that needs maximised energy-density. Quite the opposite actually with lithium-ion batteries being exceptionally bad for big fixed installations because of their heat issues. Cheap and thermally stable are the main requirements for grid storage. No one cares if that warehouse-sized installation is 20% bigger and 40% heavier... (Speaking of different requirements: lithium batteries are used for some of that storage today... used lithium batteries to be specific, because those cheap batteries bought slightly over their recycling value because they too used up to run a car anymore fits the specifications well already...)
But there is no long-term storage!!!!! Yes, there is. Countries nowadays already store enough gas to bridge several months if necessary. We can do the same with hydrogen.
But hydrogen is so inefficient and will be far too expensive!!! No... burning it isn't more inefficient that burning natural gas. Producing it isn't more inefficient that producing natural gas either if you start including the actual production costs and transport (often over vast distances) today. And regarding the price. The EU just had the first auctions for member's first national green hydrogen production projects just last week... and before any scaling and with our electricity production just starting to generate overproduction in limited time frames the auctioned costs are already on par with natural gas.
And I could go on like this for hours. The whole "argument" of how the planned energy transition will not work is basically a giant Gish gallop... only with the exact same chain of non-issues brought up again and again simply hoping that the majority will fall for it because the actual facts are more complex to explain and can not be brought down to just two sentences filled with buzzwords.
Nobody ever needed an SUV to be safe. But companies need to stop selling reasonable sized cars if favor of SUVs to maximize they gains..