In his closing statement at last week’s presidential debate, Donald Trump made a blink-and-you-miss-it comment that earned a pointed response from the German government. “You believe in things like we’re not going to frack, we’re not going to take fossil fuel, we’re not going to do things that are going to make this country strong, whether you like it or not,” he said to his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. “Germany tried that and within one year they were back to building normal energy plants.” For German audiences or anyone who has followed Germany’s decades-long push to move away from fossil fuels and nuclear power, Trump’s comments made little sense. They also showed the peculiar place Germany holds in global energy discourse, as an example that can be used to argue for or against just about anything. Germany has had enough successes and failures that one observer can say, for example, that the country has been a model for deploying renewable energy, while someone else could focus on how some of the same policies have provoked public backlash. Explore the latest news about what’s at stake for the climate during this election season. Germany’s Federal Foreign Office issued a statement responding to Trump on Sept. 11. “Like it or not: Germany’s energy system is fully operational, with more than 50% renewables,” the office said on X. “And we are shutting down - not building - coal & nuclear plants. Coal will be off the grid by 2038 at the latest. PS: We also don’t eat cats and dogs.” (That last part was a winking reference to Trump’s unfounded comments about Springfield, Ohio, residents.) I’ll note that the office’s post has an error. While it refers to the energy system, the statistics it cites are for the electricity system, which is a subset of the energy system. Richard Grenell, the U.S. ambassador to Germany during Trump’s presidency, responded to the office’s comments with an apparent... |