European natural gas imports and storage reserves (opens in new tab)

> What diplomatic off ramp does Russia need?

One that saves face, to at least some degree.

> There is a simple first step towards redemption and that is get out of Ukraine right now. Better yesterday.

Simple for you, because you're not the one losing face For example, here's another "simple first step" for Europe "towards redemption" (in the eyes of the Russians): withdraw all military and financial support for Ukraine, and refuse to allow transit for weapons sent to it. How does that one make you feel? Do you think Europe will take it? It's probably only a little less likely than Russia taking your option.

Redemption? Even if Putin is toppled, some of his potential replacements are either ultra nationalists (basically Russian nazis) or the commies (Zuganov) who are now both blaming him for not ordering general mobilization. The Russians who do not support the war are a minority. The good thing is that their army is exhaused, ill equipped and their military capacity has diminished. Putin has lost all his credibity with the West, it can't be redeemed. At home he did not deliver a victory. He will be replaced if he doesn't and it's currently not looking good for him. His replacement is probably going to be another rational actor from the FSB, who will be forced to negotiate some kind of ceasefire arragement to ease the sanctions and keep the gas, oil and the money flowing.

There were a bunch of people making a deal about how we'd gone out and done piracy to Russian yachts, legal questions be damned. If there are any options people are not looking for them. There'll be something.

> Western Europe just learned a painful lesson that you can't trust Russia.

Do you recall what happened to people who trusted the British? A lot of them died. And they were almost the nice Europeans. Trusting the Americans is foolish, trusting the Chinese is insane. The Indians will turn out to be perfidious in time.

Everyone is untrustworthy. There should be more serious grappling with why the Russians did this (and Crimea in 2014) than "Putin bad". The last time a president started trying to calm the situation down he was hounded for it - the whole strategy here is mad and stupid. If the West can deal on good terms with China and the Middle East then we can be friends with Russia too.

We need serious attempts and ongoing discussion about how to stop military escalation.

There is no redemption for Russia, this is by now probably etched into their brains after Yugoslavia, two NATO expansions, Georgia and Ukraine.

The sanctions are also here to stay, so claiming that “getting out of Ukraine now” would make any sense or bring them any benefits is wishful thinking.

As far as lessons go, Europe didn’t really learn anything or drew the wrong conclusions based on their approach to China. Instead of staying on its own continent and minding its own business, the EU is playing wannabe-US.

Finally, we have Eastern Europe. Which have hammered the point so hard into the brains of Western Europe that they must have forgotten themselves what the point was. Or at least that would be the case given the dependency they have on Russia, sometimes carefully disguised by moralwashing the gas through another country.

"Western Europe just learned a painful lesson that you can't trust Russia. "

Russia learnt that it cannot trust West when NATO started expanding into Eastern Europe and ex-USSR not too long after Warsaw pact and the USSR dissolved.

Quite strange to say that West 'trusted' Russia after it betrayed Russia.

To add: They are idling b.c. 1) some are old and under disrepair and 2) it's so hot right now, that there is not enough cooling to run them at full load.

55% of French electricity as of right now: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/FR?solar=false&remote=t...

>> where are the nuclear reactors?

> In France. Mostly idling.

Isn't the problem natural gas and not electricity? If there was a reactor on every corner wouldn't Germany and the other countries still be in the same boat? They can't convert all that natural gas infrastructure over to electricity in a couple months..

Somehow this does not seem to be an issue for most nuclear power plants built in the past in Europe or most built elsewhere today. Here in Belgium the reactors were built and gridconnected in 4-6 years and China still seems to pull similar with it's French or more modern designs.

Because the west was too greedy, and thus to cautious about sanctions when this war started in 2014. For russia war actually looked more profitable that the status quo, and i can see why.

>What you're describing is basically why Kissinger et al lobbied to kick out Taiwan from the UN

As much as I hate Kissinger, this is not what happened at all. This wasn't about "kicking Taiwan out", it was about acknowledging the fact that KMT no longer ruled China, Beijing did. Also, it was the seventies; at that time Taiwan was ruled by a fascist regime - those were the folks who had to flee continental China because they were even worse than Mao.

In fairness, there are many who got it wrong on China. Not just Kissinger. Many made a lot of money off of China as an emerging market. Trying to calm the situation down in Ukraine is to his credit. Few seem to be calling for a ceasefire. On the contrary, they seem to doing all they can to scuttle any kind of agreement.

>What you're describing is basically why Kissinger et al lobbied to kick out Taiwan from the UN, lobbied to shut down Taiwan's nuclear weapons program at the UN and worked so hard to intertwine US and Chinese economies.

Which turned out to be worst of possible policies.

1) in the short term Europe is not cutting gas from Russia, it's the other way round

2) in the long term, Europe is trying to get independent from Russian gas so that 1) will not happen again

Europe is trying to get away from being dependent from Russian gas for strategic, not humanistic reasons.

Yemen isn't in Europe's backyard, and it isn't culturally European.

If it was, you'd probably get a similar reaction.

I'd heard that Qatar withdrew in 2017 and was perhaps supporting the Houthis now, could you point me to some sources about the situation in 2022 so I could get up to date? I thought it was Saudi Arabia and UAE who were actively waging war.

And what's wrong with stop-gap measures to prevent an energy crisis?

And Azerbaijan...

The Wikipedia article seems pretty good on this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany . You're right, gas has remained pretty steady at about 10 to 15% of electricity generation since the early 2000s. But electricity isn't the only type of energy the country needs, and in the case of gas a much more important use is for space heating. In my opinion, Germany would be in a much better position today if they had increased renewables as they have, but also maintained their nuclear generation, and instead reduced natural gas use for electricity. Then they would have freed up a huge amount of gas to heat buildings, up to 50 TWh-hr per year according to that article, and have lower emissions than they do at present. I think with hindsight, phasing out nuclear power was a big mistake.

Germany never moved away from coal, in fact we just had a new coal plant online without a valid construction permit and illegaly removed protetswrs to kind of illegaly cut down a forest to get the coal for that plant.

Nuclear plant run times have been extended as well, by those mean green anti-nuclear environmentalists that are in the new government by the way.

This really begs the question on whether there was some outside influence on german energy decisions. It's not a given that Russia hasn't been using non-standard negotiation methods for making Germany more dependent on Russian gas by drumming up fear on everything else.

Why LNG specifically? There are other sources of pipeline gas that aren’t coming from Russia.