Germany has rejected a complete ban on Russian gas and oil imports over Russia invading Ukraine, but voices are growing louder for Berlin to ditch its economic imperative to take a moral stand.
After the US and the UK imposed a ban on Russian oil, pressure has mounted on German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government and other G7 members to follow suit.
A group of environmentalist, academics, authors and scientists published an open letter to the German government on Wednesday demanding a complete ban on Russian energy, saying that “we are all financing this war.”
Photo: AP
In a newspaper opinion piece this week, German lawmaker and foreign policy expert Norbert Roettgen also said that the only correct course of action was to “stop Russia’s oil and gas business now.”
“Nearly a billion euros [US$1.1 billion] are being poured into [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s war chests every day, thwarting our sanctions against the Russian central bank,” and “for many Ukrainians, it will be too late if we hesitate now,” he wrote.
Scholz’s government has so far remained unmoved, saying that sanctions should not risk destabilizing the countries imposing them.
As Germany imports more than half its gas and coal and about one-third of its oil from Russia, experts say a transition period would be needed.
“If we end up in a situation where nurses and teachers are not coming to work, where we have no electricity for several days ... Putin will have won part of the battle, because he will have plunged other countries into chaos,” German Minister of Foreign Affairs Annalena Baerbock said on Tuesday.
Baerbock also said in a separate interview that German Minister of Economic Affairs and Climate Action Robert Habeck was “urgently trying to buy hard coal worldwide.”
A complete embargo would be painful, but not impossible, experts say.
In a study published this week, nine economists said that oil and coal from Russia could easily be replaced with imports from other countries, although this could be a little trickier for gas.
If Russian gas cannot be fully compensated for by other suppliers, households and businesses “would have to accept a 30 percent drop in supply,” and Germany’s total energy consumption would dip by about 8 percent, the study said.
Economists say that GDP could fall by 0.2 to 3 percent, and the sanctions could cost each German between 80 and 1,000 euros per year.
The German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina also said that temporarily stopping Russian gas supplies would be tough, but manageable for the German economy, “even if energy bottlenecks could occur in the coming winter.”
For the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, a war in Europe is an “emergency” that justifies continuing with the “whatever it takes” mentality spawned by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Germany can borrow money for this,” it said, arguing that a “rich” country like Germany “can and must afford” to step away from Russian energy.
Observers have also said that Germany has the option of delaying its nuclear exit — planned for the end of the year. German lawmaker Christoph Heusgen, a former adviser to former German chancellor Angela Merkel, told the ARD broadcaster that Germans are ready to turn down the heat to help.
“People in Germany have shown such solidarity with the Ukrainians that they wouldn’t mind if it was a bit colder in their living rooms,” he said.
According to a YouGov poll published this week, the majority of Germans would support a boycott of Russian oil and gas, with 54 percent of respondents saying they were strongly or somewhat in favor.
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