Germany’s Green Dream, America’s Industrial Gain
Natural gas now costs roughly 10 times as much in Europe as in the United States. While consumers and small businesses grow increasingly anxious, Audi’s chief executive allows himself to be celebrated at a Trump rally for a multibillion-dollar investment in the United States. The political stirrup-holders of climate madness are abandoning the sinking ship.
Few things are more humiliating for a politician than the public embrace of domestic business leaders by the country’s political archenemy.
The chancellor is being disciplined and publicly humiliated by German industry.
Only days after the German government and industry jointly swore allegiance to Germany as an investment location — a fleeting declaration of loyalty — Audi CEO Gernot Döllner apparently decided that the moment had come to remind Chancellor Friedrich Merz of his historic irrelevance. A highly public appearance at a campaign rally held by U.S. President Donald Trump made clear that the hour has struck: The chancellor is being disciplined and publicly humiliated by German industry. In Georgia, before thousands of enthusiastic MAGA supporters, Döllner presented his company’s plans to invest a further $4.5 billion at its site in Macon. (RELATED: Germany’s Cheap Gas Band-Aid Will Not Rescue Them From the Global Energy War)
Döllner savored his moment of triumph, the exuberant applause on stage alongside the U.S. president. At that moment, the homeland — with its mourning chancellor and a society trapped in an artificially induced climate-shock paralysis — seemed very far away.
Like so many others in recent months, Audi is attempting a flight forward: It is circumventing U.S. tariff pressure through production relocation and, almost incidentally, shaking off the energy and climate policy defended so stubbornly by the “climate chancellor” and his green troops. Politicians should learn quickly: Under the current conditions, time is running out in Germany for industrial production, high value creation and prosperity.
Merz’s favorite project, the military-state economy, likewise depends on cheap and, above all, reliably flowing energy. For that reason, too, this political homunculus will soon lie in ruins.
Now, therefore, the hour of the traitors, the climate apostates and political collaborators has arrived — those who, faced with catastrophe, are now trying to save their own skins. Their safe harbor: Donald Trump’s America, of all places. (RELATED: Welcome to the Far Right)
It was not least the auto executives, the functionary cadres of German industry, who rubbed their hands at the prospect of climate plans and regulation — regulation that, on the one hand, eliminated troublesome competition from the Mittelstand with the stroke of a pen and, on the other, promised generous subsidies. (RELATED: Germany’s Family Businesses Survived Everything — Until Net Zero)
Shabby opportunism, unbearable collusion with politics: German business submitted to the green-socialist establishment without a single word of criticism. Germany’s elite cultivated political bowing and servitude, offering itself as the stirrup-holder of power, and is now no longer capable of confronting this madness through concerted action from within its own ranks. No one stood in the way of the charlatans of the green transformation when they began building the largest politically legitimized act of plunder since the Second World War.
They let it happen. They allowed political dilettantes and ideologues to do their work, and today they face a broken business model: permanent war with Russia, trade conflicts with Washington, and energy prices beyond all reason. The last illusion — that Germany as a business location could still be defended — is being strangled in the cradle.
The European gas market has been decoupled from American reality for years. The Dutch TTF price, Europe’s benchmark, recently stood at around €94 per megawatt-hour, while Henry Hub gas in the United States cost only about €8. This is the stuff of which economic nightmares are made. Gas in Europe is thus more than 11 times as expensive as in the United States. A year ago, the factor was still four, and the gap has never been as wide as it is today.
Nothing and no one will permanently close this price gap unless Europeans radically turn their energy policy upside down. Yet even Marine Le Pen, the French right-wing politician, apparently plans to preserve this gigantic redistribution scheme and make the Germans pay for it. Europe has become entangled in its intellectual wretchedness, political megalomania and economic opportunism.
Too many companies, employees, pensioners, welfare recipients, politicians, functionaries and nonentities in NGOs, or state propagandists at the public broadcasters, cling to the redistribution state and fill their coffers through the most varied channels of the transformation economy.
For energy-intensive industry in Germany and at other European industrial locations, the end of the road has been reached. Imagine a gas-intensive operation, such as a fertilizer plant, and compare the situation in Europe with that in the United States: Here, you pay more than $30 per million BTU; in the United States, less than $3. Investment flows to where energy is cheap, where economic policy is deregulated and where the bureaucratic burden is not so high. German companies spend 7 percent of their revenue, according to the Bundesbank, merely performing the drudgery of the state bureaucracy. That is grotesque. That is economic madness.
One may almost have grown accustomed to the cost of bureaucracy. But the fact that gas has become an industrial-political kill switch hits the chemical industry above all. Glass production is just as impossible as competitive steel or fertilizer production at this location. For all of them, gas is not a minor cost item. Gas is the raw material, the process energy, and a crucial competitive factor all at once.
It is understandable that German chemical production has fallen by 20 percent from its best year. This location can no longer be sustained.
Audi is by no means an isolated case: Capital is fleeing Germany and the EU across the Atlantic to America. In April, Mercedes-Benz announced that it would invest $4 billion in its plant in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, by 2030 alone. In total, investments in its U.S. business amount to more than $7 billion. Production of the GLC will be shifted from Germany to Alabama.
BMW, meanwhile, has completed its largest U.S. investment program to date: $1.7 billion has flowed into its plants in South Carolina, $1 billion into the modernization of Spartanburg, and $700 million into the new battery factory in Woodruff. At the same time, the company announced in July that it would cut up to 8,000 jobs in Germany. Audi is switching from “Made in Germany” to “Made in the USA.”
Of course, this does not affect only energy-intensive industry. The wallet of the average consumer has long been overstretched. Not a few families are likely to face problems heating their homes adequately this winter. What a disgrace; what an admission of failure and intellectual decline in a country that once prided itself on its rationality, engineering prowess and political superiority.
This should be the moment of reversal, the moment of krisis — krisis means turning point in ancient Greek — and this reversal is long overdue: the development of domestic gas reserves in the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, domestic fracking, a rapid return to nuclear power and an expansion of coal mining. That would be what Angela Merkel once called “alternative-less” — at least if one genuinely cares about the well-being of the German population, its economy, its Mittelstand, its retailers and its small businesses.
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