Forcing Doesn’t Work. Showing Does.
The climate panic did more damage than the climate change. Germany is exhibit A. | C1 article for B2 readers | ~10 min read
This is an opinion piece. I’m not telling you what to think. I’m asking you to think.
This article comes in two levels because that is what I do. You’re reading the C1 version – more research, more detail, more classroom voices.
Looking for the simpler version? [B1-B2 article →] |
Want the lesson post? [B1/B2/C1 three-level lesson →]
A Wednesday morning, the lesson before lunch. I’m in a private 1:1 with Klaus, an electrical engineer at a managed-services company outside Frankfurt. We are supposed to be working on his English. We end up talking about climate policy, because that is what was in the news that week and that is what he wanted to discuss.
Klaus is married to an engineer in Hamburg who leads a 10-person team responsible for the underwater cabling between offshore wind turbines. She designs the cable runs. She knows the failure rates. By every reasonable definition, the household is an insider in the German renewable-energy industry.
Halfway through the conversation, almost in passing, Klaus says:
“Renewables is a great way to go, but there’s too much fear in Germany about climate. We’re outsourcing – we’re pushing the industry out, we’re giving them more coal. We’re actually making the world worse by doing what we’re doing in Germany.”
He is not a denier. His wife builds the windmills.
This article is about why a renewable-industry insider says what most journalists don’t, why the courts are rolling back the climate-litigation decade from The Hague to Washington, and what I came to believe after teaching the same topic to four groups in one week.
The opinion is mine. The evidence (the carbon-leakage numbers, the German energy prices, the BGH paragraph 47, the Frankfurt grid status, the offshore-wind failure rate) is everybody else’s. Honestly, if you came expecting a balanced both-sides survey, this isn’t it. There is a place for that. This is not that place.
I’ll explain why I think that — and then why, even thinking that, I won’t tell anyone what to do about it.
Key Vocabulary — The Landscape
the rollback (noun) | the systematic reversal of a previous policy or legal trend | die Rücknahme / die Kehrtwende
carbon leakage | the transfer of CO₂-emitting activity from regulated to unregulated jurisdictions | die Verlagerung der CO₂-Emissionen
judicial overreach | the situation where courts decide matters that properly belong to parliaments | die richterliche Übergriffigkeit
separation of powers | the constitutional principle that legislative, executive and judicial powers stay distinct | die Gewaltenteilung
to overturn (a ruling) | to reverse a lower-court decision on appeal | (ein Urteil) aufheben
statutory primacy | the principle that parliament-made law outranks judge-made policy | der gesetzgeberische Vorrang
grid capacity | the maximum electrical load an electricity network can carry | die Netzkapazität
base load (Grundlast) | the constant minimum demand on an electrical grid, 24/7 | die Grundlast
deindustrialisation | the long-term decline of a country’s industrial base | die Deindustrialisierung
to outrun (something) (figurative) | to develop or grow faster than something else can keep pace with | etwas überholen / schneller voranschreiten als
The Landscape
Five separate things happened in roughly twenty-four months and most journalists never quite connected them.
In November 2024 the Hague Court of Appeal overturned the 2021 ruling that had ordered Shell to cut its emissions 45% by 2030. The case had been the flagship of European climate litigation. The reversal turned on tort doctrine: under Dutch civil law, the legal duty the lower court had invented was too loosely defined to stand. The court left the underlying climate science alone. It said the legal mechanism didn’t hold.
In March 2026 the German Bundesgerichtshof dismissed the Deutsche Umwelthilfe suits against BMW and Mercedes. Paragraph 47 of the judgment is the line you will see quoted by every German legal commentator for the rest of the year:
“The legislative process is the only appropriate forum for the allocation of emissions budgets among economic sectors.”
That single sentence is what statutory primacy sounds like in plain language. Parliament writes the law. Courts apply it. Judicial overreach, the pattern of the previous decade, gets a name and an end-date in one paragraph.
In April 2026 the US Supreme Court ruled unanimously, nine-zero, in Chevron v. Plaquemines Parish that federal courts are not the right forum for state-by-state climate tort claims. Nine-zero is the data point. The court does not agree on much. It agreed on this.
The Swiss parliament had already rejected the European Court of Human Rights KlimaSeniorinnen judgment outright – a national parliament refusing to comply with a binding European court ruling. The institutional novelty is hard to overstate, and the German press has barely covered it.
And inside Germany, quietly, the 2024 KSG reform stripped year-by-year sector accountability out of the Climate Protection Law – the same law the 2021 Bundesverfassungsgericht Klimabeschluss had been built around.
The phrase the rollback is now standard in German legal commentary. The science survives every one of these rulings. What the courts said in four different jurisdictions was the same thing: the courts had gone too far, the legal architecture had overreached, the separation of powers held in the end.
Then there is the data the rollback is happening on top of.
Across the activist-litigation decade, global energy-related CO₂ emissions rose from 35.2 to 38.4 gigatons – roughly 5%. The IEA’s Global Energy Review confirms it. Carbon leakage explains a meaningful share. The industrial estimate (and this is an industrial estimate, not peer-reviewed research on carbon leakage) is that for every ton “saved” by a German court ruling, roughly ten tons are added by new Indo-Pacific coal capacity. BASF Ludwigshafen to Zhanjiang is the canonical example. The company calls its €10 billion investment in Zhanjiang the largest in its history, and inaugurated it in March 2026 on time and under budget – which is itself almost suspicious by German industrial standards.
German industrial electricity prices have risen from around 12 ct/kWh in 2010 to 25–30 ct/kWh in 2026, frequently double current US and Indian levels. The 2026 Industriestrompreis relief package, capping wholesale prices at €50/MWh for energy-intensive firms, is the most expensive admission of policy failure in recent German history. The word deindustrialisation used to be partisan. It has become bookkeeping.
Frankfurt’s data-centre grid capacity is gone. Connection lead times average five years. The German grid queue exceeds 7 GW. The Federal Network Agency has scrapped first-come-first-served allocations in favour of maturity-based auctions. What German AI hyperscalers actually do next is the conversation everybody in the industry is having and almost nobody is publishing.
About that base load: offshore wind demonstrators have reached 20–26 MW per turbine. Onshore tops out at 6–7 MW. The 2025 global offshore fleet recorded a failure rate of 8.2%, the highest in the technology’s history. Twenty-six megawatt turbines failing at that rate is what happens when you try to build the largest spinning things in the history of the world in a hurry. New regulatory classifications under ECHA now flag microplastics and Bisphenol-A leaching from blade Leading Edge Erosion. To be fair, wind beats coal on lifecycle carbon. That part is settled. The question is whether the deployment pace has outrun the engineering.
Five legal reversals. Five data points. One pattern.
Key Vocabulary — What Happened in the Classroom
to steelman (a position) | to present the strongest possible version of an opposing argument | die stärkste Version eines Arguments darstellen
to concede a point | to accept that part of an opposing argument is valid | einen Punkt einräumen
the appropriate forum | the institution properly empowered to decide an issue | das geeignete Gremium / der zuständige Ort
tort doctrine | the body of civil-law rules governing claims for non-contractual harm | die deliktrechtliche Doktrin
limitation period | the legal deadline within which a claim must be brought | die Verjährungsfrist
opinion-bubble (in the legal press) | a feedback loop where contrarian views get piled-on until consensus calcifies | die Meinungsblase
the assigned position | the side a participant must defend in a debate, regardless of personal belief | die zugewiesene Position
to push back respectfully | to disagree politely while staying engaged with the argument | höflich widersprechen
lived experience | knowledge derived from first-hand observation rather than study | die Lebenserfahrung
industry insider | a person with privileged inside knowledge of a sector | der Branchenkenner / die Branchenkennerin
Idioms & Phrases — What Happened in the Classroom
to feel (something) in your bones | to know something instinctively, deep down | etwas instinktiv spüren / im Blut haben
the bench (metonymy) | the courts, judges, the judiciary as an institution | die Richterbank / die Justiz
What Happened in the Classroom
This was an assigned-position debate. I taught it across four groups in one week – three sessions at a legal-tech firm, two at a managed-network operator, and the private 1:1 I opened with. Each participant was randomly assigned one of three positions: Tragedy (the rollback is political capture), Correction (the courts found their proper limits), Overdue (the activist legal strategy was disproportionate from the start). Defend the assignment, regardless of personal belief.
I held trainer neutrality. The point of the exercise is the steelman – to present the strongest version of an argument you don’t personally hold. The assigned position is the forcing function. The discomfort of arguing against your own beliefs is where the real argumentation lives.
Here is what landed.
Position B (Correction) won by gravitational pull. Across all four groups, participants kept drifting toward it. The lawyers at the legal-tech firm got there through legal doctrine – the appropriate forum for emissions budgets is parliament, not the bench. Aylin, a working lawyer in the room and assigned position B, summarised it quietly: “Courts are not the right place to decide how emissions should be shared between different sectors. This kind of decision should be made by Parliament.” The IT-networking professionals got there through democratic accountability. Stefan, a network engineer assigned position B, said in his own words: “The courts shouldn’t have more power than the government that is elected by the people.” Two completely different industries. Same conclusion.
Position C, my position and the editorial spine of this article, landed as personal conviction in exactly one voice across all four groups. Heike, an industry insider at the IT-networking firm with twenty years of industrial experience, drew on her own work history rather than the reading. She said: “We saw the last twenty years that the old plants from Germany were transported to China and are working there now with no regulatory for emissions [sic].” That is the carbon-leakage argument made by somebody who watched it happen in real time. She conceded the point that China has a long-term cleanup vision when I pushed back. She did not concede the underlying observation. That was her lived experience speaking.
The most generous reading of Position C across all four groups came from somebody who had been assigned Position A. Lena, defending the “rollback is a tragedy” line, gave a textbook steelman of the view she was arguing against: “Position C is interesting because this is the hard truth. Global warming is real, but the legal and policy responses were excessive. Critical scientists and economists have often been labelled as deniers, even though they do not reject climate science. They question the scale and proportionality of the measures.” The exercise working: a Position A defender articulating C without converting. I quote her at length because the room went quiet.
The single most-quoted number across the week was the carbon-leakage ratio. Esra read the 1:10 figure aloud and you could feel the room shift. Katja anchored on the same number forty-eight hours later in a different group. Heike confirmed it from the factory floor, one factory at a time.
Then there is tort doctrine. Andreas, a working lawyer in the smaller legal-tech session, unpacked § 823 of the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch live – paragraph number recalled from memory, with the kind of quiet pride that working lawyers have for the specific paragraph that locks an argument into place. He walked us through the 30-year limitation period for physical-harm claims versus three years for ordinary civil ones, and the etymology of tort back to French wrong / twisted, cognate with torture. That five-minute detour explained why the Hague Court of Appeal could overturn the 2021 Shell ruling without touching the climate science: the legal duty was procedurally insufficiently defined under tort doctrine.
Aylin (same group) brought something nobody else did. She had noticed that the major German lawyer magazines (the Neue Juristische Wochenschrift family) operate as opinion-bubbles: a contrarian point gets piled-on by the orthodoxy until consensus calcifies. “It’s like in this one with the Klimabeschluss. So they keep turning around the topic until there is a big bubble of people who agree with the opinion [sic].” That is article-grade meta-observation about how Position B’s intellectual ground was laid in German legal media – and it came from a working lawyer pushing back respectfully at her own profession.
I should also be honest about what didn’t work. The random-assignment mechanism ran cleanly in only one of the four groups. One legal-tech session collapsed into the tort-law detour and never reached the second task. One IT-networking group ran out of time before the assigned debate even started. And in the B1-leaning group, the mental work of defending an unwanted position in a foreign language exceeded what one participant could do without falling back to German and AI translation. I won’t pretend the lesson landed perfectly. Saying so is part of the credibility of the report.
Here is the summary from the room: across four groups defending three positions, B was the position the room kept arriving at, A was the moral-urgency line that anyone with kids feels in their bones, and C, my position, landed as personal conviction in one voice. I am writing an article that runs C anyway — and acknowledging the minority of that view is part of the argument.
The most powerful Position C voice of the week never reached a lesson room. It was Klaus, on Wednesday morning, in a 1:1 slot, with his wife as the technical source. Industry insiders don’t always show up in the formal debate. Sometimes they show up over coffee.
Key Vocabulary — My Take
proportionality | the principle that a response should match the size of the problem it addresses | die Verhältnismäßigkeit
the hypocrisy inventory | a personal audit of your own behaviour before demanding behavioural change from others | die Heuchelei-Bestandsaufnahme
enforced consensus | a state in which professional or social cost is imposed on those who question the prevailing view | der erzwungene Konsens
the urgency narrative | the rhetorical framing of climate as an immediate, existential threat justifying extraordinary measures | das Dringlichkeits-Narrativ
manufactured panic | fear that is institutionally produced rather than warranted by the underlying evidence | die erzeugte Panik
to reroute (emissions) | to move CO₂-producing activity from one jurisdiction to another rather than reduce it | (Emissionen) umleiten
to scapegoat (legitimate dissent) | to label honest disagreement as something morally suspect | (berechtigten Widerspruch) zum Sündenbock machen
credentialled insider | a senior figure inside an institution who holds dissenting views with full subject-matter authority | der einschlägig qualifizierte Insider
to force vs. to show | the central verb-pair of the article – imposing change vs. modelling it | zwingen vs. vorleben
cheap reliable energy | affordable energy with consistent base-load availability | bezahlbare zuverlässige Energie
Idioms & Phrases — My Take
awkward questions | uncomfortable questions that challenge the official line | unbequeme Fragen
a tell (noun) | a small sign that gives away what somebody really thinks | ein verräterisches Zeichen
on the merits | judged on actual substance, not on form, status or politics | nach dem sachlichen Inhalt
to kick (an idea) around | to discuss something informally, without aiming for a final answer | etwas durchspielen / unverbindlich erörtern
to land on (an answer/verdict) | to arrive at a conclusion after thinking it through | zu einer Entscheidung kommen / sich festlegen
to stress-test (an idea) | to deliberately challenge an idea to see if it holds up | einem Belastungstest unterziehen
My Take – Forcing Doesn’t Work. Showing Does.
Real science is testing. Continuous testing – of the data, of the method, of the people doing the testing. The day a question is treated as settled, the day scientists pay a professional price for asking awkward questions about it, you have left science and entered enforced consensus.
People who hold this view about the climate debate get called deniers. The label is lazy. What they are actually saying is something quieter and harder to argue with: the same dataset can be shaped to support either side of the argument, and the fact that it can should make everybody more humble about what they think they know.
If your worldview cannot survive a serious counter-argument, the worldview is the problem.
So let me name the credentialled insiders who hold the Position C voice in 2026.
Bjørn Lomborg, whose Copenhagen Consensus priority ranking asks not “is climate change real” but “of the threats facing humanity, where should resources go first?” Steven Koonin, who served as Under Secretary for Science at the US Department of Energy under Obama from May 2009 to November 2011 – a Caltech provost and a senior theoretical physicist with deep US national-laboratory credentials, who published Unsettled in 2021. Fritz Vahrenholt, a former state environment minister and the chief executive of a major German wind operator before his Position C turn. All three accept the climate science. Their question is about proportionality: whether the policy response actually fits the threat. To scapegoat legitimate dissent as denial is itself a tell: it shows the urgency narrative has lost the ability to engage its strongest critics on the merits.
A word on the threat hierarchy itself. The foundational 2004 UN High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change (document A/59/565, A More Secure World) defined six clusters of global threats: economic and social threats (where climate sits as a sub-cluster, alongside poverty and infectious disease), inter-state conflict, internal conflict, nuclear and biological weapons, terrorism, organised crime. Climate is not one of the six standalone clusters. The strongest counter-evidence is real and worth naming – the WHO 2019 list placed climate at the top of health threats, and the WEF Global Risks Report 2026 ranks extreme weather number one on a ten-year horizon. Both are legitimate. Neither overturns the basic UN security-architecture point: climate is one threat among many. The activist legal strategy treated it as the only one.
Then to the substantive evidence. Global emissions rose 5% across the litigation decade. Carbon leakage rerouted emissions from regulated jurisdictions to unregulated ones. For every ton “saved” by a German court ruling, roughly ten tons added by new Indo-Pacific coal capacity. The total kept rising. That is manufactured panic colliding with industrial-economics arithmetic. The arithmetic does not care about the panic.
Germany. The country that built the Energiewende as a moral example to the world has, by every measurable industrial metric, made things worse. Nuclear shutdown. Coal pivot. Industrial electricity at roughly twice the levels of the United States and India. The Frankfurt grid at capacity. The offshore-wind reliability crisis. The 2024 KSG reform. The blade-erosion classifications. The €10 billion BASF flagship inaugurated in Zhanjiang while the Ludwigshafen Verbund site fights for survival. Everything rushed. Everything panicked. Everything now failing on the metrics the activist strategy claimed it would improve.
This brings me back to Klaus on Wednesday morning. “We have two infrastructures. Renewables and the others – gas, coal, nuclear. The duplication is the cost. It must be expensive [sic].” That sentence is Vahrenholt’s argument made by an electrical engineer at the kitchen table. His wife’s specific numbers, from her cable-planning work: offshore turbines hit 20 MW per unit, onshore 6–7 MW. Offshore wins on base load because the wind blows on the sea every day. In 25 years, she says, every offshore turbine standing today will have to come down and be rebuilt. There is no plan for what replaces it. Klaus and I spent a while kicking the AI-data-centre question around – small modular reactors that Germany would probably never permit, long-haul direct lines to French nuclear plants, or simply building the data centres somewhere else. We didn’t land on an answer. Two people working through the options on a Wednesday morning. He did land on one verdict out loud: “We have to be destroying all our nuclear power plants. That was the stupidest thing you could ever do [sic].”
A short note on Verhältnismäßigkeit – the keyword on this whole topic. I have been wrestling that word for nearly twenty years and I still get the gender wrong roughly half the time. It is what the rest of us, in plainer language, call being adults about it. Same struggle, opposite direction – you are wrestling English, I am wrestling a 23-letter noun. Proportionality is the question Position C was always asking. The activist legal strategy is the answer that pretended the question didn’t exist.
Now, before anyone tells anyone else to change their behaviour – and this is the part I have to think about every time I get on a plane – there is the hypocrisy inventory. Where do your shoes come from? How often do you fly? What car do you drive? Do you use AI? Do you know how much energy a single ChatGPT query costs? The data centres that run the AI: do you know which power source they are pulling from? I am asking because I genuinely do not know all the answers for myself either. Right? The whole world is set on using more energy, and prosperity has always required cheap reliable energy. Germany cannot credibly tell other countries to “force” behavioural change when its own forced approach produced the most expensive industrial electricity in Europe.
Which is why the verb pair to force vs. to show matters more than any other in this whole debate. Forcing assumes you have the moral and operational authority. Germany doesn’t. Not anymore. Showing means: build the better example, be honest about what didn’t work, support other countries in accessing cleaner and cheaper energy – yes, including nuclear; yes, including SMRs; yes, including the French-nuclear-direct-line model the AI hyperscalers are already quietly negotiating. Forcing is the verb of a country that thinks it has the answer. Showing is the verb of a country that knows it doesn’t.
And to the younger readers – your fear is real, and I take it seriously. The fear itself was manufactured for you, by media and institutional framing, more than it was earned by the science itself. The most respectful thing I can do is decline to dismiss it. The second most respectful thing is to ask you to read the other side. Read Koonin. Read Lomborg. Read Vahrenholt. Then come back to your own view and stress-test it against the people you had been told were deniers. LISTEN. That is the one-word version of everything in this article.
If the activist legal strategy raised global emissions, weakened German industry, and made energy unaffordable for the people we said we were saving – who, exactly, does it serve?
Your Move
Here is the practical move, and it doubles as English practice.
Pick the position in this article you disagree with most. Steelman it – out loud, in English, with somebody whose first language is English. Argue it as if you believe it. Concede points. Build the strongest version of the opposing view. The discomfort of arguing against yourself is where the real thinking happens.
Look, this is the same exercise I run with German professionals every week. Defend the assigned position. Use the concessive structures – although, even though, despite, while. Hedge respectfully. Build the steelman. Then take a breath and decide what you actually think.
That is the lesson post for this week – three CEFR levels, vocabulary boxes, comprehension questions, and the full assigned-position debate cycle. [Three-level lesson →]
That’s the position I’m taking, anyway. Yours is yours.
Cheers,
Daniel
P.S. If this article made you uncomfortable, share it with somebody you suspect will agree with you. Then have the conversation. In English, ideally.