As the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra began the opening bars of the New Year's concert in Vienna, the digital edition of the Financial Times newspaper dropped a bombshell. The teacher Daniel Barenboim raised his arms to make way for Joseph Strauss and a Parisian environmentalist choked when he read on his mobile that atomic energy and gas would have a green label in Europe. This is how 2022 began, the year in which we lived dangerously again.
After about fifteen days, the European Commission confirmed the information advanced by the British newspaper. There was scandal on the left side. The governments of Spain, the Netherlands and Luxembourg protested. The German greens, who were debuting as partners of the federal government, sheepishly complained about the package with an emerald green bow that Angela Merkel had left on the table for them.
Everything pointed to a Franco-German pact to shield each other. The Germans, relentless propagandists against atomic energy by putting a closing date on their plants, were building a valuable bridge to the French nuclear industry, which needed costly maintenance work. France could breathe easy. Her energetic model was under the European umbrella. Atomic plants could continue to be built in other countries of the Union with a French license.
France, in turn, gave Germany wind-up to secure gas as a transition energy. The classification of natural gas as green energy could be understood as an insurance policy for the Nord Stream-2, the second great Russian gas highway through the Baltic Sea, then about to be inaugurated, despite the animosity of the United States. At the beginning of the year, the Americans pressed so that the second great submarine channel of the Siberian gas was put on hold. Berlin weathered the pressure as best it could, but kept to its plans, trusting that Vladimir Putin would not give the order to invade Ukraine.
One day historians will explain to us how Putin interpreted the news that came across the Vienna concert: the European decision to shield gas and nuclear energy for the next twenty-five years. Germany was holding on to gas. This could be the reading of the tsar who one day was a KGB lieutenant colonel. If he invaded Ukraine in a hit-and-run operation and managed to send the Zelensky government into exile, there would be protests and some sanctions, but Germany would not risk its umbilical cord with Russian gas. One day historians will explain to us how the invasion of Ukraine came about. One day we will know what reports, true and false, influenced that rash decision.
Ten months later, Greta Thunberg, a global symbol of the fight against climate change, calls for the nuclear power plants in Germany not to be closed. The Berlin chancellery is drawing up plans to delay that closure, while German thermal power plants burn coal in spades. Ten months later, four underwater explosions, whose authorship is still unknown, have disabled the two Nord Stream gas pipelines, and France is trying to get out of the rut caused by maintenance problems in at least twelve of its 56 nuclear reactors. Ten months later, the world is different and the governments of Paris and Berlin are angry. Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz do not quite understand each other.
Last Wednesday, a day before the summit between France, Spain and Portugal to discuss energy connections, Germany announced the postponement of the meeting of the two governments scheduled for October 26, invoking logistical and content agenda reasons.
There are several points of friction: the German refusal to cap the price of gas in Europe for fear of shortages; the generous German plan to protect its industry, an airbag that other European countries cannot afford; French reticence about German plans to promote pipelines to southern Europe and North Africa in search of safer energy; the European anti-missile shield publicized by Germany, without the participation of France, a project to which Spain has placed its profile while negotiating the energy interconnection with the French (we are talking about the military industry). Objective disagreements and nerves derived from the war in Ukraine. France is once again a social tinderbox and Germany has decided that the main priority is to protect the industry from it. France continues to rely on its powerful nuclear plant; Germany does not know what the winter of 2024 will be like. Everyone would like to end the war and no one knows how.
One day after postponing the great liturgical meeting with the Germans, Macron could not slam the door on Spain and Portugal, because he does not know what will happen to Italy either: there is the Italian enigma, with Giorgia Meloni dressed in a black shirt on the day of his oath . Macron could not slam the door against the Spanish and Portuguese and that helped to agree on the Barcelona-Marseille gas pipeline as an alternative to Midcat. Last Monday, official French sources told La Vanguardia their skepticism about the Marseille proposal. Sánchez has confessed that he went to the meeting in Brussels without knowing what the French response would be to his plan B. On Thursday, Macron could not lose friends.
