The Pirate Party, which supports a platform of copyright reform and online privacy, picked up an electoral victory of four seats in the Saarland regional parliament in elections held at the end of March. The victory gives them twice as many seats as the once strong Green Party. The ultra pro-business Free Democrats won no seats.

Steve Ketteman, a former columnist for the newspaper Berliner Zeitung and the author of “One Day at Fenway,” opines in The New York Times:

This month they face their biggest challenge, with elections in two more states, including North Rhine-Westphalia, the country’s most populous. Should the results match recent poll numbers — as high as 13 percent, making the Pirates Germany’s third-most-popular party — they will serve notice that a new electoral force has arrived and offer a compelling political lesson for parties on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Pirate Party’s niche platform of stronger protection for file sharing, opposing censorship, and even supporting voting rights for teenagers has struck a chord for German voters. But while the party appears to have embraced a niche set of policy positions, the movement’s focus on the Internet as a medium for political organization and change has resonated with young Germans. Kellerman observes:

[T]heir real goal, and the root of their success, is more meta: using the Internet to create a new structure of politics that can solve the problem of how to energize citizens — not only for the excitement of a campaign but also the often dreary realities of actual governance.

Indeed, while a two party dominated system makes it unlikely for a similar start-up party to make such a splash in the U.S., the online activist-based pushback on SOPA and the growing power of the Internet as a political medium — and a political issue area — proves that the Internet-based influence is an emerging political force in legislative and electoral politics around the world.

by Arne Jungjohann

Recently, the editorial board of the Washington Post asked if the world can fight global warming without nuclear power, looking to Germany and Japan for the answer.

Both countries are known for a nuclear shutdown path. In Japan, only one of the 54 nuclear reactors currently remains in operation. Germany has closed eights reactors following the nuclear catastrophe of Fukushima in March 2011 and the remaining nine are scheduled to be closed by 2022.

That obviously must lead to rising emissions, the Post claims. Germany’s “electricity sector emits more carbon than it must after eight reactors shut down last year.”

If you look at the most recent emissions data, however, the opposite is happening. Germany reduced its carbon emissions in 2011 by 2.1 percent despite the nuclear phase out. How can that be?

The cut in greenhouse gases was mainly reached due to an accelerated transition to renewable energies and a warm winter. In addition, the EU emissions trading system capped all emissions from the power sector. While eight nuclear power plants were shut down, solar power output increased by 60 percent. In 2011 alone, 7.5 gigawatts of solar were installed. By the end of last year, renewable energies provided more than 20 percent of overall electricity.

The Washington Post refers to critics of this transition who “reasonably predict that the country will instead rely on electricity imports from neighbors running old, reliable coal, gas and, yes, nuclear plants for years to come.”

So this means Germany would import electricity from neighboring countries, such as France, Poland, and the Czech Republic? It’s true, depending on time of day and year, that Germany imports electricity. However, even after shutting its eight oldest nuclear power plants, Germany is still a net exporter of electricity.

In 2011, Germany exported 6 TWh more than it imported, according to the industry federation German Association of Energy and Water Industries BDEW. Countries like Poland and the Czech Republic are not as concerned about providing electricity to Germany. On the contrary, they are mainly concerned about wind and solar power surges from Germany offsetting their own production of fossil and nuclear power. Additionally, German electricity exports to Europe’s nuclear power house France actually increased in 2011.

What does this tell us? The nuclear phase-out does not conflict with efforts to fight climate change. You can reduce emissions while shutting down nuclear power. And you can still supply industry and consumers with enough power.

By the end of 2011, Germany had reduced its CO2 emissions by more than 23 percent compared to 1990 levels, overshooting its Kyoto target. In addition, the country has build up a competitive renewable energy industry providing thousands of new jobs, even as competitors like China enter the game and catch up fast. In Germany, fighting climate change and phasing out nuclear power are two sides of the same coin.

Instead of repeating myths about Germany’s nuclear phase-out, the editorial board of the Washington Post would do better by looking at the facts. It would also help to expand the article’s narrow focus to include a question about whether nuclear is even the most cost-effective or safe option to fight climate change. It is not, says even the Economist.

A vast majority of Germans have made up their minds on the need to phase out nuclear. And what happens in Germany will be a major indicator for other countries. As Paul Hockenos, an American living in Berlin, concludes in the European Energy Review: “Whatever the case, Germans aren’t the only ones waiting for a more pro-active policy. The world is watching Germany’s Energiewende.”

Let’s see where the Germans can go with their energy transition.

– Arne Jungjohann is Program Director Environment for the Heinrich-Boell Foundation.

JR: The Economist article is here. The subhed is “A year after Fukushima, the future for nuclear power is not bright—for reasons of cost as much as safety.” I believe nuclear could play a modest role of, say, perhaps 10% of the solution to averting catastrophic climate change,  but only if the industry can figure out how to build far more inexpensive plants both quickly and safely (see “How the world can stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm: The full global warming solution“).

Related Posts:

• The Nukes of Hazard: One Year After Fukushima, Nuclear Power Remains Too Costly To Be A Major Climate Solution
• Nuclear power has a negative learning curve
• Turkey’s Turkey’s only bidder for first nuclear plant offers a price of 21 cents per kilowatt-hour
• French nuclear giant “Areva has acknowledged that the cost of a new reactor today would be as much as 6 billion euros, or $8 billion, double the price offered to the Finns.” (5/09)
• Toshiba tells San Antonio its new twin $13 billion nukes will cost $4 billion more. The city balks. (10/09)

“There is a proposal from the secretary-general of the Arab League to form a joint mission for Syria in coordination with the United Nations, and it will be presented before the planned Arab foreign ministers’ meeting on Sunday in Cairo,” the Arab League’s deputy head, Ahmed Ben Helli, told reporters today.

The upcoming ministerial meeting in Cairo may also issue a statement on China and Russia’s veto of a U.N. Security Council Resolution last Saturday, reports Reuters. The resolution was based on an Arab peace plan that had the support of the rest of the Security Council but China and Russia’s veto brought criticism from both Western and Arab nations.

The ongoing artillery bombardment of Homs, a recently leaked report detailing the failures of an Arab League observer mission, and the Russian and Chinese veto have left the Arab League and the United Nations looking for new strategies to halt the bloodshed.

Arab League Secretary-General Nabil Elaraby announced this week that a new mission would need international backing, better equipment and more observers than the Arab League mission. Yesterday, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon confirmed that Elaraby had proposed a joint mission.

Consultations will be held with the Arab League and Security Council members “before fleshing out the details,” said the U.N. chief. But Western powers offered a lukewarm response to the proposal. Agence France-Presse reports that France said there would have to be “guarantees” for the mission and Germany called it a “very serious” idea but emphasized that conditions would have to be met before such an effort could be launched.

While diplomats discuss what steps to take next, Human Rights Watch (HRW) urged the Syrian government to stop shelling residential areas of Homs. “Those responsible for such horrific attacks will have to answer for them,” HRW’s Anna Neistat in a statement earlier today.

Rights groups estimate that more than 6,000 people have died since protests began eleven months ago.

Theo Zwanziger

The outgoing president of the German soccer federation, Theo Zwanziger, called on gay players today “to have the courage to declare themselves” by coming out. The captain of Germany’s team, Philipp Lahm, responded by doubling down on comments he made in August discouraging players from making such disclosures:

LAHM: Football is like being the gladiators in the old times. The politicians can come out these days, for sure, but they don’t have to play in front of 60,000 people every week. I don’t think that the society is that far ahead that it can accept homosexual players as something normal as in other areas.

By humoring the perceived homophobia, Lahm is reinforcing the very stigma that might make it difficult for players to come out in the first place. Much as the U.S. military policy of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell required gay troops to lie to keep this jobs, Lahm’s negative message is a strain on the trust and teamwork he should be promoting as captain. If he is the team’s leader, he should take the initiative of promoting a more welcoming lockerroom instead of catering to the homophobic status quo.

Zwanziger, however, believes that Lahm is tolerant, saying, “If that’s how he sees the situation, I am not going to be the one to criticize him.”

Even with changes to the feed-in tariff that have reduced solar photovoltaic installations compared with previous boom years, the sector was still the fastest growing among all other renewable energy sectors in 2011, according to preliminary figures.

This follows data released last week showing that renewable energy accounted for 19.9 percent of electricity production in the country in 2011, growing 16.4 percent over 2010. Meanwhile, overall energy use in the country fell 4.8% due to warmer temperatures and increasing efficiency efforts, further boosting the value of solar generation.

Related Posts:

• Germany’s Phase-Out of Nuclear Power Will Speed Up the Low-Carbon Economy
• Stunner: New Nuclear Costs as Much as German Solar Power Today — and Up to $0.34/kWh in 2018

[Note: the headline and stats were tweaked after publishing to more accurately reflect the distinction between electricity and overall energy. I originally wrote that renewables made up 20% of all energy, not electricity.]

According to new figures released from Germany’s energy working group, AGEB, energy consumption in the country dropped 4.8% in 2011 from 2010.

German consumption of oil fell 3%, gas by 10.2%, lignite coal by 0.7% (although hard coal rose 3.7%), and nuclear by 22.9%. At the same time, use of renewable energy climbed by 4.1% and represented about 20% of the country’s electricity and 10.8% of total energy in 2011.

An increase in residential and industrial efficiency combined with milder temperatures in 2011 provided the conditions for the decrease in consumption.

So is that increase in renewable energy and efficiency killing the German economy? Analysts expect German GDP growth to be around 3% in 2011, about the same projected for the U.S.

A state in Germany’s industrial heartland is moving quickly to replace nuclear power with renewable energy, a transition that supporters say could be applied in the United States to reduce our reliance on coal.

The state of Baden-Württemberg, home to Mercedes-Benz and a strong manufacturing sector, faces abrupt changes to its energy systems as Germany strives to close its 17 nuclear power plants over the next 12 years. About half of the state’s electricity derives from nuclear generation, or double the national average.

Officials aim to lean heavily on renewable energy sources like solar, wind, hydro and biomass, which are expected to provide at least 80 percent of the state’s electricity by 2050. Germany is already moving in that direction, with about 20 percent of its power currently coming from renewable sources.

So Climatewire (subs. req’d) reports today.

At the same time, NPR reports the pro-pollution extremists running the House say American’s aren’t up to the task:

Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL), who chairs an energy and commerce subcommittee on oversight and investigations, originally supported the program when Congress created it….

“We can’t compete with China to make solar panels and wind turbines,” Stearns says.

Seriously.  We invented the modern solar cell, but after that, the GOP says, Americans can’t compete.

UPDATE:  CAP’s Kate Gordon explains at the end why the GOP’s stunning willingness to conceding the clean-energy race to other countries is un-American.

How can Germany do what the GOP says Americans can’t?  They have a bipartisan consensus and no climate denial machine, according to a leading German politician:

“The state government of Baden-Württemberg is extremely committed to the transition towards a low-carbon economy,” Franz Untersteller, state minister for the environment, climate and energy, said yesterday at the Center for American Progress. “We aim at decarbonizing our economy by midcentury.”

The state, the capital of which is the industrial hub of Stuttgart, is already complying with a national renewable energy standard and European initiatives that reduce greenhouse gases and increase energy efficiency. But it’s pursuing its own goals, too, including one state initiative requiring homeowners to use renewable energy for residential heating….

“The great advantage we have in Germany at the moment is we really have the broad consensus in society that corresponds to the size of the task we face,” said Ulrich Luscher, who represents the CDU, the conservative party, on energy issues. “I definitely agree … that we have enormous possibilities for the economy in that [clean energy] sector.”

There’s also agreement about the impacts of fossil fuels on the environment.

“The other thing is we believe in climate change,” said Frithjof Staiß, managing director of the Center for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research, which develops clean energy technologies with funding from the government, industry and research groups.

Bracken Hendricks, a scholar with the Center for American Progress, says the German model shows that renewable energy can be ramped up quickly without large electricity price spikes. It can also create jobs, he adds, not decimate the workforce, as Republicans often claim.

“The costs turn out to be grossly exaggerated and the benefits are understated in our political debate,” Hendricks said.

There’s another element at play in the United States that the Germans found unusual. That’s the amount of skepticism around climate change and the industrial forces at play to promote scientific doubt.

“We don’t have the situation like you have in the U.S., where you have this Koch brothers,” Untersteller said, referring to the billionaire heirs of Koch Industries.

And that may be Germany’s biggest competitive advantage.

UPDATE:  TP Green has a post by Kate Gordon, Vice President of Energy Policy at the Center for American Progress, responding to the GOP’s apparent surrender on clean energy:

The statement by Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL) that we can’t compete with China on clean energy manufacturing is not only untrue, it’s frankly un-American. Lest we forget, the U.S. is a major manufacturer, with 12 percent of our GDP coming from the manufacturing sector. To put that in perspective, when we recently lost less than 4 percent of GDP after the housing bubble burst, we called it a “Great Recession.” Twelve percent is a lot. And in the clean economy, including renewable energy, efficiency, clean transit, and transportation, more than a quarter of all jobs are in manufacturing.So maybe Mr. Stearns didn’t get the memo, but we’re already competing with China on clean energy manufacturing in general, and in solar and wind manufacturing in particular. We actually export solar panel components to China, which – along with Germany – is actually the leading destination for most of those exports. And in the wind sector, there are over 400 manufacturing firms across America making the component parts of our domestic wind turbines, and we not only make about 50 percent of all the wind components we use here in the U.S., but we also export parts to Canada, Mexico, Chile, and other countries.

Sure, China may sometimes out-compete us when it comes to mass manufacturing of mature technologies, using lower labor costs and strong subsidies. But where America excels has always been in more advanced manufacturing of new and emerging technologies, where our high-skill workers, proximity to inventors and engineers, and strong university and lab support make us a leader.

The big question facing the U.S. is not whether we’re capable of competing with China to manufacture the clean energy future. The question is whether political leaders like Mr. Stearns will develop the courage and vision to embrace that future. Right now there are millions of Americans with jobs in clean energy innovation, manufacturing, installation, operations, and maintenance. But if Congress can’t get it together to pass the policies and programs we need to ensure a stable market for clean energy technologies, our existing clean energy companies may just start looking elsewhere for a better deal. And then China really will win.

Indeed, in this case, the U.S. will end up third, behind China and German.

For example, note that hyperinflation was actually tamed by the mid-1920s, and by 1928, Weimar elections were dominated by mainstream democratic parties. Then came the Great Depression. At this point, it’s clear that memory of the hyperinflation in the recent past does a lot to explain why the Weimar monetary authorities were so leery of engaging in unorthodox policy to combat mass unemployment. But it’s clearly mass unemployment rather than inflation (which was non-existent at the time) which explains the parallel growing vote shares of the Nazi and Communist parties and the collapse of German liberalism and social democracy. Then when the Nazis took over, they undertook a successful program of monetary expansion. Then, obviously, came a war and German defeat.

So while Germany has experience with unduly inflationary monetary policy they also have experience with the harm of unduly tight money and experience with the ability of monetary stimulus. The question is why is this one particular episode so influential in German political consciousness rather than some other ones.

by Arne Jungjohann via Grist

Germany set another record with renewable energy. A new report by the German Association of Energy and Water Industries (BDEW) highlights, in the first half of 2011, renewables accounted for fully 20.8 percent of power production, as Der Spiegel reports.

Throughout the past decade, Germany has fundamentally transformed the way it produces electricity. The country increased its share of renewable electricity from 5 percent in 2000 to 18 percent in 2010. Over time, Germany has consistently met its legislated targets ahead of schedule, and appears poised to outdo itself again in the next years. The goal by the current center-right government of Chancellor Angela Merkel is to draw at least 35 percent of production from renewables by 2020. The opposition parties claim that 40 percent or even more is realistic.

Today, wind and biomass are the pillars of Germany’s renewable sector. The main driver of the 2011 development, however, has been photovoltaic — in a country that is as sunny as the state of Alaska. Reports Der Spiegel:

The real change came in the photovoltaic sector, where output almost doubled — up more than 76 percent since 2010. “Because of the volume of new photovoltaic installations and the amount of sun during the spring, solar energy knocked hydroelectric from third place for the first time,” the BDEW said in a statement. The BDEW saw two reasons for the boost in new installations: Equipment prices have plummeted by 50 percent since 2006, reflecting more competition, and the federal government decided against a planned cut in subsidies for private solar-power generation.

The reason for all of this? Germany’s Renewable Energy Act provides certainty that manufacturers and investors are looking for. As feed-in tariff guru Paul Gipe explains here, the center-right government just increased incentives for the deployment of wind, biomass, and geothermal yet again. Just recently, Deutsche Bank, a largely German bank, gave German renewable energy and climate policy high marks [PDF], and rates Germany’s feed-in tariffs as “best in class.”

As discussed before, Germany accelerated the transition towards a renewable energy economy in the aftermath of the nuclear catastrophe of Fukushima. The rapid growth of the renewable sector demonstrates that Germany will likely succeed in phasing out nuclear power completely by 2022.

– Arne Jungjohann is the program director for Environment and Global Dialogue with the Heinrich Boll Foundation in Washington, D.C.

Related Post:

• Stunner: New Nuclear Costs as Much as German Solar Power Today — and Up to $0.34/kWh in 2018
• No nukes, No problem. Germany is proving a rapid transition to renewable energy is possible

The rhetoric over raising the debt ceiling has become increasingly harsh as Democratic and Republican congressional leaders trade barbs back and forth. But as the U.S. inches closer to defaulting on its debts for the first time in history, criticism of Congress is starting to come from beyond our own borders. From France and Germany to China and India, countries around the world are angry that American politicians play with the possibility of a U.S. default like a yo-yo with little regard for the international economic system that depends on American solvency.

Despite China’s traditional preference of staying out of the domestic affairs of other nations, senior Chinese officials’ frustrations are growing louder and louder. Stephen Roach, the non-executive chairman of Morgan Staley Asia, said senior Chinese officials told him the debt ceiling debte in the U.S. is “truly shocking.” “We understand the politics,” a Chinise official said, “but your government’s continued recklessness is astonishing.” And newspapers around the world are voicing discontent with Congress’s handling of the debt ceiling:

Conservative German Die Welt: “[T]here are few signs of self-doubt or self-awareness in the U.S. … [The Tea Party movement] sees the other side as their enemy. Negotiations with the Democrats, whether it’s about appointing a judge or the insolvency of the United States, are only successful if the enemy is defeated. Compromise, they feel, is a sign of weakness and cowardice.”

The German mass-circulation Bild: “What America is currently exhibiting is the worst kind of absurd theatrics and the whole world is being held hostage… Most importantly, the Republicans have turned a dispute over a technicality into a religious war, which no longer has any relation to a reasonable dispute between the elected government and the opposition.”

French newspaper Le Monde:”The American politicians supposed to lead the most powerful nation in the world are becoming a laughing stock.”

Chinese state-owned newspaper Xinhua: “Given the United States’ status as the world’s largest economy and the issuer of the dominant international reserve currency, such political brinksmanship in Washington is dangerously irresponsible.”

The founding documents of many nations around the world take their inspiration from and quote the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution. But now, foreigners don’t seem to be too inspired watching the intransigent wing of one political party that controls one house of one branch of the federal government hold the entire U.S. hostage. American soft power has taken a self-inflicted hit as a result of the debt ceiling debate.

Even if Congress manages to forge a deal against the wishes of the Tea Party and deliver a bill to President Obama’s desk raising the debt ceiling before default, the damage to our international standing has already been done. Other nations won’t forget how some members of Congress were so careless to allow the international economy fall into another financial disaster in order to score a few political points.

by Arne Jungjohann, Heinrich Boell Foundation

Germany’s plans to phase-out nuclear power seemed to catch many around the world by surprise and create a fair amount of skepticism. Some painted it as a “panicked overreaction” and even “environmental vandalism” to the nuclear meltdown in Japan.

One can argue that Germans are more risk-averse than other cultures. The accident of Chernobyl in 1986 resulted in a radioactive cloud over large parts of Europe for several weeks. It was a smart precaution to stay out of the rain and skip eating vegetables to avoid contamination. After experiencing this physical threat to personal health, Germans are more concerned about the risks of nuclear power than others might be.

The Fukushima accident not only confirmed this skepticism. It demonstrated the need for a new risk assessment: If a high-tech nation like Japan is not able to cope with a nuclear meltdown, why should Germany be? And why let a few corporations make all the profits when taxpayers are asked to pay billions for an accident in the end? With 80 million people and half the size of Texas, Germany is so densely populated that a nuclear disaster would turn into an economic catastrophe beyond imagination.

A decade ago, Germany started transitioning towards a low carbon economy. The share of renewable power has tripled. Wind farms, solar modules, biogas, and hydro power provide 18 percent of Germany’s power supply. Today, renewables are a reliable and indispensable pillar of Germany’s power supply that keep trains running and factories humming. The sector is fast growing and provides 370,000 good-paying jobs – much more than the 22,000 jobs in Germany’s lignite coal industry. Many of these jobs are within traditional industries, such as steel workers, farmers and the ceramic and glass industries.

Critics argue that Germany will hurt its economy by raising energy costs, replacing nuclear power with imports from France, and building more coal plants, thus increasing carbon emissions. The facts do not bear this out.

First, Germany is able to supply its power needs on its own without nuclear. The country has been mostly a net exporter of power over the last decade. Depending on time of day and year, households and industry consume power from 40,000 to 80,000 Megawatts. Even if all 17 nuclear power stations were shut down at once, coal, gas, and renewables still provide a capacity of 81,000 Megawatts.

Power is imported not out of a lack of supply, but as an economic decision to shop where prices are lowest. Though Germany is often importing electricity from France during the spring and fall, the relationship is reciprocal: in summer and winter, France is importing power from Germany. When temperatures rise and the water levels drop, river-cooled nuclear reactors have to reduce output or be shut down.

Second, the nuclear phase-out does not jeopardize Germany’s ambitious climate action efforts: reducing carbon emissions by 40 percent by 2020 and by at least 80 percent by 2050. By rules of the EU carbon market, emissions from the energy sector are capped. Even if coal were to replace nuclear capacity, emissions will have to be reduced within the entire sector, either by shifting to natural gas or by replacing old coal plants with more efficient ones.

Third, a shift to a renewable energy powered economy comes with costs. However, this price tag is modest in comparison to the heavy burden that nuclear brings. Over the last 40 years, the German nuclear industry has been pampered with more than 200 billion Euros in subsidies.  In comparison, renewable energy technologies have been incentivized by about 4.8 billion Euros in 2010. By replacing fossil fuel imports and avoiding health costs, renewables already pay off today.

When the German Parliament passes the nuclear phase-out legislation in early July, it will be accompanied by seven other laws to accelerate investments in renewables and retrofitting of houses, to increase energy efficiency, to develop new storage technologies, and to improve the energy grid infrastructure. By 2020, Germany aims to supply its economy with at least 35 percent of renewable power, by mid-century with at least 80 percent.

Politics, too, played a role in the recent decision. Chancellor Angela Merkel used to be a strong proponent of nuclear. Her governing coalition has paid a high price for this. The Green Party has won one election after another. In the most recent state election, Merkel’s Conservative Party came in third behind the Greens. Her reversal on nuclear policy after Fukushima was driven by the understanding that most Germans across the political spectrum favor a phase-out as soon as possible.

Germany’s gradual nuclear phase out is neither unique – Japan, Switzerland and Italy are following suit – nor a hysterical overreaction. It is yet another cornerstone in a comprehensive, long term strategy of industrial modernization that turns the energy challenge into an economic opportunity. Saying “Auf Wiedersehen” to nuclear will accelerate the transition towards a low-carbon economy.

—Arne Jungjohann, Director for the Environment Program of the Heinrich Böll Foundation

Further Reading:

• Stunner: New Nuclear Costs as Much as German Solar Power Today
  

Via the Glenn Greenwald Twitter feed, a fascinating article about the criticism Angela Merkel is taking for some very mild comments she made celebrating the death of Osama bin Laden:

A vice president of German parliament, Katrin Göring-Eckhardt, told the daily newspaper Berliner Zeitung: “As a Christian, I can only say that it is not a reason to celebrate, when someone is killed in a targeted way.” Göring-Eckhardt, a member of the Greens, said Bin Laden should have been arrested and put on trial.

Criticism was also lobbed from members of Merkel’s own party. Siegfried Kauder, of the CDU, and the chairman of the legal committee of the Bundestag, told the newspaper Passauer Neue Presse: “I would not have formulated it in that way. Those are thoughts of revenge that one should not harbor. That is from the Middle Ages.” [...]

Ingrid Fischbach, a vice-chairwoman of the CDU in the Bundestag, who is also on central committee of German Catholics, spoke with reservation about Merkel’s response. “From a Christian point of view, it is surely not appropriate to express pleasure with the targeted killing of a person,” she told the German news agency Deutsche Presse Agentur.

Religious figures also came out against Merkel’s statement in German newspapers Wednesday. Franz-Josef Overbeck, a Catholic military bishop, told the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, “One cannot as a person, and especially not as a Christian, be glad about the death of another person. That also applies when that person was a violent criminal.”

I’m not someone who had a strong emotional response to the bin Laden news, but I don’t really have a problem with the celebratory response. Then again, I’m not a Christian and I’ve always thought of the odd Christian teachings on this point (“love they enemy…”) to be pretty weird. But what’s strange about this is that the United States is such a loudly, insistently, professedly Christian country and yet these kind of Christian sentiments are so absent from our political culture. I can’t imagine an American politician expressing the Fischbach view here. But there are lots of Americans who say that Christianity is a very important part of their worldview. I don’t doubt their sincerity, exactly, but it’s mighty odd that the politicians who like to talk the most about Christianity also tend to be the ones most eager to deploy violence as a policy tool.

A double dose of big political news out of the German state of Baden-Württemberg where, as Judy Dempsey explains, the German right has lost control for the first time since 1953.

But beyond that element, it also looks like this will mark the first time in Germany history that a coalition government will be led by the Greens, who’ve only previously participated in government as a junior partner. When I was in Berlin in December it was clear that Social Democratic Party leaders were at least a little bit worried that Green popularity might get out of control like this and you can only imagine that they’ve got some mixed feelings about this particular win for the center-left. But as some of my colleagues have been emphasizing for a while now the only viable path forward for European progressives is in cooperation between these different strands of progressive politics.

Many jobs require such degrees in Germany, where, as is not the case in America, calling oneself doctor for having completed a thesis in, say, political science or art history, is not embarrassing but normal, even when filling out Lufthansa’s online booking forms. (The airline generously provides three levels of academic achievement for its overachieving countrymen: doctor, professor and professor doctor, skipping the extremely rare but not unheard-of German mouthful Herr Professor Doctor Doctor).

I keep hoping universities will start handing out degrees in blogging so I can get myself a cushy professoring gig.

After all, if the German industrial dynamo was really firing as robustly as sometimes people say you’d expect to see factories expanding operations and hiring workers away from the German service sector. Then unemployment Spaniards and Irishmen would migrate to work German service jobs. It’s true that Europe’s labor markets are imperfectly integrated, but they’re not that unintegrated either. If there was a true boom in Germany, people would make there way over there.

Quentin Peel has an excellent report in the FT on a recent Bundestag debate that shows the shifting sands inside the German political elite:

German unwillingness to bolster the size of the 440bn eurozone stabilisation fund, or contemplate the issue of jointly-guaranteed eurozone bonds, was in danger of turning the European Central Bank into a “bad bank”, said Frank-Walter Steinmeier, parliamentary leader of the Social Democratic party, and former vice-chancellor.

Jürgen Trittin, co-leader of the Green party in the German Bundestag, said the chancellor was regarded throughout the eurozone as a “Teutonic savings-monster” whose actions had aggravated the crisis. He accused her of “disorientation”, and being driven by fear of the popular press. [...]

[Steinmeier] spelt out his three-point programme, outlined in an opinion article for the Financial Times on Wednesday, calling for a debt-restructuring for Greece, Ireland and Portugal, combined with a debt guarantee for the rest of the eurozone, and increased funds for the EFSF. He also backed the idea of issuing eurozone bonds in the medium term, combined with much closer political and fiscal co-ordination amongst the member states.

The price of integrating Europe in an unbalanced way that ran so far ahead of public consciousness has been criminally high. But I do think we see here that the basic calculation that forging ahead with a single currency would drive deeper integration is happening. Leaving aside the policy ideas here, what you’re seeing is a European policy debate. It’s not Germany versus some other country. And it’s not a simplistic “Europhiles versus Europhobes” debate either. It’s a real disagreement about the best way for Europe to proceed, like how Democrats and Republicans argue in Ohio about national policy.

Among other things, you see here another illustration of the point that there’s something very simplistic about the “Germany has high net exports because we make good cars” theory of global trade flows. BMW made good cars in the 1990s, too, but Germany ran modest trade deficits at that point. And if Germans (and Dutch, Austrian, Swedish, etc.) households started buying more consumer goods (or, equivalently, taking more vacations) the growth outlook for neighboring countries would be better. But this wouldn’t just be a favor to the people of Spain, Germans would actually have more stuff. The Schröder government undertook a lot of politically difficult reforms in order to boost German productive capacity. But presumably the point of this was to actually reap more rapid increases in living standards and not just to try to win some kind of global exports championship.

Somewhat relatedly, I wonder what the economic cost of Germany’s rather draconian Sunday store closure laws is? I have a sneaking suspicion that this is actually dramatically worse policy than people realize.

This whole line of thought seems to me to be largely based around confusing exports with net exports. If you just look at aggregate exports then Germany and the United States are very closely packed. There’s only slightly more German-made stuff being purchased by non-Germans than there is American-made stuff being purchased by non-Americans. And if you look at adjacent countries, the combined GDP of Poland + Czech Republic + Austria + Switzerland + France + Belgium + Netherlands + Luxembourg + Denmark is wildly higher than Mexico + Canada. Indeed, France alone has a bigger economy than Canada and Mexico combined. Or to look at it in the most clear-cut way, the per capita output of the American economy is higher than the per capita output of Germany, whether measured at market exchange rates or with PPP adjustments.

This discussion then tends to loop around into the idea that they have more manufacturing in Germany (which is true) but output of agricultural commodities, software, movies, TV shows, music, etc. all counts as real output and the German economy is only about 27 percent manufacturing anyway.

Long story short, the issue here really and truly is one of German households engaging in a very high rate of savings and not one of Germany firms being somehow extra awesome at making desirable products. German firms are great, the German people make a lot of stuff, and on a per hour basis the German workforce is incredibly productive. And good for them! But they’re not actually not outproducing the United States of America, they’re buying less stuff. Which would be fine if when the world turned around to look at what’s happening with these savings we saw the world’s finest banking system financing highly productive investments all ’round the world. But is that actually what we see? I see German banks financing bum real estate developments in Ireland, Nevada, Spain, Florida, etc. It seems to me that people all around the world—but not least in Germany—would be better-off if German households owned more XBoxes, MacBooks, jamon iberico, and feta cheese and fewer indirect claims on mortgage-backed securities.

The issue of the questionable prudence of the savers is a real one here. If I heard more people saying with a straight face “Matt, the reason our households save so much is our banks are uniquely skilled at channeling savings into profitable investments” I’d feel much happier about the whole thing. Referencing the virtues of mittelstand industrialists doesn’t really grapple with the full scope of the issue.