Yeah. To be honest most liberal and social democrat governments are playing right into the hands of the right wing too.
Too afraid to crack down on the far right, but still too conservative to commit to large public spending on housing and sustainable infrastructure. Or in Germany’s case, nuclear energy.
I have hope for those organzing outside of electoralism, those organzing within it in the West are in for another rude wake up call soon. They keep ignoring them.
Westerners are not more tolerant or intolerant then any other people on earth, we generally just have higher standards of living as a result of economic and military hegemony. As that continues to decline for more and more previously " wealthy " people the fascist radiclization will get worse in the West.
We need new ways of living and bold ideas. The far right nor neoliberals can offer that to people. Liberals will tolerate dissidents but they will never take meaningful action on the issiues of class, the military industrial complex or encomcis for the most part. It needs to change from the outside in.
Or in Germany’s case, nuclear energy.
You know that not even the former operators of the German nuclear power plants are in favour of going back to nuclear? Even if we decide NOW to invest in nuclear power again on a grand scale - which makes no sense at all economically - it won’t help the energy transition, because planning and construction takes decades and is irrational in terms of costs. However, I agree with you that it was a strategic mistake on the part of the former Merkel government not to shut down coal-fired power plants first but to shut nuclear - but this does not change the current path dependencies of the German energy sector at all!
For decades German politicians have used the excuse that it takes many years to build nuclear. If they had started decades ago, Germany would have a dozen plants now and have no energy woes. Instead we now see a huge proportion of Germany’s energy generated by coal and lignite. Get off the anti-science train and join us in the 21st century. Nuclear is safe, plentiful, and green.
This doesn’t mean they shouldn’t invest in other forms of energy too. Energy grids require diversification, and concurrent leaders have been asleep at the wheel.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not a fundamental opponent of nuclear power, but I would like to point out that at this point in time I think we can achieve our goal of an emission-free energy sector faster and more cost-efficiently if we focus our political, regulatory and economic efforts entirely on the development and scale up of renewable energy and storage technologies - not to mention the fact that the supply chain for uranium (Russia, Niger, China, Kazakhstan, etc) and the security of supply with sufficient cooling water are by no means secure at present and in times of worsening climate change…
Apart from that, nuclear power plants cannot be shut down fast enough and are therefore not realy compatible with an energy mix that is largely based on renewables…
