Climate crazies in Europe have been told to focus on harassing Germany by the EU Parliament’s President due to the state opposing a ban on Russian gas.
President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, has told a group of climate crazy protesters to target Germany with their harassing in the hopes of ending the country’s opposition to a bloc-wide ban on Russian gas.
While the central European state has been extremely vocal in its opposition to Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, officials from Germany have consistently resisted a Russian gas ban, largely due to the fact that their nation is now cripplingly addicted to foreign energy imports sourced from the invading nation.
In an attempt to seemingly change that however, President Metsola has set the climate crazies on Germany, with POLITICO reporting the newly elected head of the EU parliament as singling out Germany as a nation to a group of environmentalists.
“Germany is number one,” Metsola said when asked by the protesters which nations they should be targeting, while also telling them that they needed “to be louder”.
While the idea that a senior EU official would single out an individual nation-state for climate activists to harass with protests appears a little farfetched, from POLITICO’s reporting, it does not appear that the activists were all too surprised by the President’s choice of target.
“It did not surprise me to hear that it is the German government that she pointed to,” said one of the activists, before claiming that “since the beginning of our campaign toward the full energy embargo it was clear that German government has been highly influenced by the industry’s lobbyists and got really stuck in the technocratic, money-focused debate instead of prioritizing saving people’s lives.”
Regardless of whether this statement is true or not, what is clear is that Germany’s addiction to imported Russian gas has massively backfired for the European nation, with the nation now risking a record-breaking economic downturn should they suddenly have their supply cut.
While the issue has only really come to the fore within the last couple of months, the country had long been warned that being so reliant on Moscow for its power was a recipe for disaster, with former US President Donald Trump denouncing the problematic dependence back in 2018.
Officials in the country have since recognised the wisdom of this warning, with some even expressing disbelief as to how their predecessors allowed the situation to get this bad.
“Energy policy is always power policy, is always interest policy, is therefore always security policy. And if you look back, you almost can’t understand how we could be so blind to overlook that,” remarked Robert Habeck, the country’s current Economy Minister, Robert Habeck, remarked.
“We knew, or we could have known, that it was not only stupid to place all our security policy cards on just one country, but that it also wasn’t a smart idea to put them on that particular country,” he continued. “We have to acknowledge that we acted wrongly in the past.”
However, it is perhaps the case that further lessons still need to be learnt the hard way, as Germany continues to shut down nuclear and coal-fired power plants in the name of fighting climate change, despite the fact that the country’s significant lack of energy security.