https://www.americanthinker.co..._of_going_green.html

Germany, as we well know with its Russian gas capers, is a highly industrialized society in need of a lot of energy.

Fine and dandy. But how they get it presents increasingly bad options.

They got rid of their nuclear power in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear meltdown after a big earthquake in Japan, (despite Germany not being in a quake zone), driving themselves to dependency on foreign suppliers. That's presented problems for them what with Russia filling that role, so their other recourse has been the one Joe Biden is touting for America: Green energy -- like wind and solar power.

It's costly, requiring state subsidization, given that Germany is not a big sunshine zone nor particularly windy:

But it's costlier than just the wasted cash. They are now looking at the loss of their 1,000-year-old Reinhardswald old-growth forest -- known as the "treasure house of European forests."

German authorities, completely ignoring German sentiment about forests, which is quite mystical, have decided to mow down the big one to get some wind power put in, in the name of 'going green.' Like the Central Valley of California, which has been turned brown and starved of water in the name of 'going green,' Germany is trashing its most beautiful forest in the name of 'going green.' Funny how that works.

Reinhardswald is also known as the Grimm's Fairy Tale forest. In a weird conundrum (the Germans probably have a word for this) the greenie industrial complex has morphed into the Brothers Grimm's Rumplestiltskin, spinning wind into gold for the state of Hesse's bureaucrats but demanding Germany's first child -- its forest primeval -- as payment.

Don't get us wrong: We are all for progress. But to call this 'progress' is pretty disgusting. How is it 'progress' to trash Germany's 1,000-year-old irreplaceable forest? Germany has a big population, a lot of ugly postwar urban landscapes, and yucky modern art. It has a few nice traditional places, too, but the big one for Germans is their beautiful ancient forests, the ones that eminent Germans like Goethe and Kant and Durer and Schubert likely walked through, marveled at, and drew inspiration from. Google 'Reinhardswald' at Google Images and see what this place looks like. There are also some likely practical reasons to keep the forest in reserve. In France, when the roof of the Cathedral of Notre Dame burned in 2019, what was lost were old-growth beams that could not be replaced easily at all because the old-growth forests in France apparently were gone. Germany would not have such a problem if it needed to harvest a couple of trees to save, say, the Cologne cathedral if it were, heaven forbid, to endure such a catastrophe. There are always unexpected reasons to want to conserve some unique and irreplaceable natural habitats.

P. Gosselin of WattsUpWithThat has been watching this travesty for a while and has some excellent coverage:

About a year ago we reported on disturbing plans by the government of the German state of Hesse to clear 20 million square meters of 1000-year old “fairy tale” forest in one of Germany’s most idyllic, fairy tale-like forests: the Reinhardswald located in the hilly region west of the city of Göttingen.

The Reinhardswald is known as the “treasure house of European forests” or the “Grimm’s fairy tale forest”.

A total of about 2000 hectares ( 20 million m²) of the thousand-year-old Reinhardswald was designated for destruction by the state in order to clear the way for a massive wind power plant development.

Conservatives, Greens ram project through

Tragically, that battle to stop the destructive project has been dealt a severe blow as the construction of access roads began 2 days ago. The massive resistance of the affected citizens was ignored by the Hesse state government, which ironically is governed by a coalition of the CDU conservatives and environmentalist Greens. Updates posted here.

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1062576924473665

Germans, to their credit, don't care for this one bit and are protesting across the political spectrum. The state actors who are doing this are pan-political, too, an unholy political alliance of conservatives and greens who apparently don't think they need to pay attention to the local sentiment, let alone their state's heritage. Gosselin links to a nonpartisan German group called "Stop!" or Rettet-den-Reinhardswald.de (an impressively coded site) which has some excellent visualizations of what this butt-ugly specter is going to look like as 18 to as many as 50 wind turbines go up, as well as photos of what is going on now and information on the bad impact the plan will have on birds, wildlife, and the general eco-system. So much for 'going green.'

It sounds like a money scam, with politicians and connected political business cronies planning to harvest themselves some green of the monetary kind. Germans are complaining that these characters are not paying attention to their petitions nor heeding their warnings about the impact of the destruction on the untouched old-growth forest.

This is very bad for Germany, given that such intransigence on a reasonable petition opens the door to extremism, as in eco-terrorists. At a minimum, it opens the door to 'yellow vest' or Canadian trucker-type protests, given that something deep in the German soul is at stake. We may be seeing that in the future. What we need to see now is far louder protests from the usual quarters, such as Pope Francis, who has spoken out a lot on global warming under the justification of conserving creation, and Hollywood characters like Daryl Hannah, Mia Farrow and Sting, all rainforest champs who created quite spectacles of themselves in recent decades. Hannah for one dipped her hands into Lago Agrio's oil pits over in Ecuador several years ago, falsely blaming Chevron for killing the rainforest there, when it was the state oil company of Ecuador that did the damage. Where's Hannah to holler about this far more authentic outrage?

For the rest of us, it shows what an inefficient and costly scam green energy is. It's not cost-free, it's full of corrupt and unresponsive politicians who no longer care about democracy, and it certainly doesn't make the environment better. It's a nasty juggernaut of waste, fraud, corruption, and ecological degradation - with dead birds, turbine vibration sickness, strobe dizziness, and landscape pollution. Germany could fix this in two minutes by bringing back its nuclear power, ending both the Russia issue and the forest-loss issue right then and there. One hopes that the idea will eventually occur to them. Otherwise, they lose their fairy-tale forest.

So, to get green power, you need to destroy vast areas of nature. To save the planet. And the children. And I assume, the ecological function of co2 and o2 of trees is damaging to climate control.

Go Germany. Someday, perhaps the people will have a voice rather than just the idiots in gov.

What a shame. I hope they can get this stopped before they lose too much.

I have heard several times over the past few years of Germany choosing to rid themselves of nuclear power. They would not possibly have had the time necessary to actually dismantle the plants. I have to wonder if the fuel rods have even been removed yet.

So it would seem they could probably spiff them up and have them fired back up within a year or so.

Hopefully, they will.

'Green Energy' my ASS!

Ecological Travesty is more accurate. That 1000 YO 'Old Growth' forest is irreplaceable!

AKA, we got to kill it to save it...

^^^ Exactly! It's bullshit!

When it comes to "green" nothing surprises me but my God how can they do this?
I posted in another thread about Drax (electric supplier in UK) stopping the burning of coal (which they have well over 100 years of) and changing to burning wood from cutting down forests then, transporting the "green fuel across the ocean. Insane...
https://www.nrdc.org/experts/e...oss-canadian-forests

Krauts been making some pretty awful fucking decisions for the last 15 years … need to wake the hell up.

Should a country with a history of terrible decision after terrible decision & an apparent cultural commitment to destabilizing Europe even exist?

Logging cut about 100 acres of beautiful hardwood trees several years back, near me in Virginia....to build a solar panel farm.

As if there isn't enough open land.

This travesty in Germany needs to be stopped...like similar cases here in the US.

What kind of demented morons could even think of such a plan? How could anyone sanction such an atrocity? It pains me to no end to even think about it. Old growth forests are such a treasure; there is nothing in the "civilized", mechanized world that is worth trading for them. What short-sighted fools, and how sad for the people who have to live with the results of their folly.

quote:

Originally posted by amals:
What kind of demented morons could even think of such a plan?

quote:

What kind of demented morons could even think of such a plan?

Germans.

quote:

Originally posted by SevenPlusOne:

quote:

What kind of demented morons could even think of such a plan?

Germans.

Gonna have to agree with you and stickman above …

You know why the Germans are sucking up to Russia? German guilt!

I searched this and they are claiming that the forest is dying due to a huge infestation of Bark Beetles. They say they are killing the trees?

The main effort is to disconnect the German from his heritage and leave them dependent on "modern" society, rather than some incongruous affection that borders on religion.

Can't have religion, nope, only the State, and the State is highly jealous of when they are not the source of all fulfillment - ie Power. Both politically and what they can control, to control the citizen.

They could have kept nukes but putting people into a dependant relationship with the iffy proposition of "green" power just binds them to the State further. The State can give you electricity, but the State can turn it off.

They have also outlawed wood stoves and require an annual inspection to see if anything has been burned in them, with huge fines on discovery. The trend is obvious. They want the keys to the grid, they will give you power if you deserve it, and you will like it.

They have to destroy the forest to save it. Now do we see how some of our own have the road map to controlling us? Shut down the pipelines but keep putting up non recyclable wind turbines that can't make a return on expense in twenty years, which then requires our tax dollars supporting the few dominant grid operators who are more than cooperative with their end goals - putting coal and petroleum out of business.

Did we not just read of the national goal to go electric vehicle ONLY after 2035? Germany is just five years ahead on the agenda, all we have to do is look.

Nice to know there are cutting down the very thing that produces oxygen.

I know we need to cut down trees for lumber but this is just making a "feel good" situation.

Go back to burning coal. With the technology we have now we can make it clean.

Heh, it's damn funny when you learn of a local issue from your old neighborhood from foreign media. I grew up in the Göttingen area, and that forest is just beyond the Hesse stateline from there. When we were kids, our parents often took us to the animal park at the Sababurg castle which shows up in the map on the citizens' initiative website the article mentions.



Of course as activist are wont to, they're dramatizing quite a bit. The blue areas have been designated as available for building wind parks, but that doesn't mean they'll be summarily razed. I found the official decision authorizing construction of the 18 masts mentioned, and the area to be cut for those and servicing roads is about 13.5 hectares. As the site claims there might eventually be "50 or more" of them, we may be talking of a total of 40 ha, or about 0.2 rather than ten percent of the entire forest as they warn.

The issue is a fairly typical example of conflict between conservationists and environmentalists here, which are rather different kettles of fish despite their supposedly common interest in Mother Nature; the former typically have a local vs. a global focus. Wind energy is a frequent flash point because conservationist complain the masts are messing up the view, are a hazard to birds, even to insects, and cause noise pollution; there's often a definitive NIMBY element. Environmentalists OTOH won't settle for anything less than saving the planet, even if it's a nuisance to humanity.

Sometimes both align, as in the 2020 battle over the Hambach Forest where more than 100 of a total 500 ha were to be cut for extending brown coal strip mining next door. Unlike the issue here, that one was covered extensively and widely debated due to activists occupying the area with a treehouse camp, where one if them fell to his death when police cleared them out. I guess that was of no interest to the OP source since it couldn't be used for a dig against environmentalism.

Of course the article adds a whole new layer of drama by suggesting in its headline that the entire forest will be erased, and applies contemporary American hyperpoliticizing where nobody settles for less than predicting the downfall of the nation and Western civilization. Far from the implied hope for a popular insurrection, I suspect though that if I as a former local boy hadn't heard about this before, 95 percent of Germans have neither, and probably wouldn't give a damn if they had. Kudos to the activists for promoting it to an international level however, even just a fringe audience.

Paris needs a metric shit ton of 1,000 year old wood to rebuild Cathédrale Norte Dame.