Forcing Doesn’t Work. Showing Does.
The climate panic did more damage than the climate change. Germany is exhibit A. | B1-B2 article for B1-B2 readers | ~8 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 B1-B2 version – simpler sentences, easier vocabulary.
Want more research and detail? [C1 version →]
Want the lesson post? [B1/B2/C1 three-level lesson →]
A Wednesday morning. I’m in a private 1:1 lesson with Klaus, an electrical engineer at a company outside Frankfurt. We are supposed to be working on his English. We end up talking about climate policy instead.
Klaus is married to an engineer in Hamburg. She leads a team of ten people. They are responsible for the underwater cables between offshore wind turbines. She designs the cable routes and knows the failure rates. The household is an insider in the German wind-energy industry.
Halfway through our conversation, 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 three things. Why a wind-industry insider says what most journalists don’t. Why courts from The Hague to Washington are reversing the decade of climate court cases. And what I came to believe after teaching the same topic to four groups in one week.
The opinion is mine. The evidence is everybody else’s: the carbon-leakage numbers, the German energy prices, the BGH paragraph 47, the Frankfurt grid, the offshore-wind failure rate. Honestly, this is not a balanced both-sides article. There is a place for those. 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
a denier | a person who refuses to accept established science or facts | ein Leugner / eine Leugnerin
the rollback | a return to an earlier policy or position | die Rücknahme / die Kehrtwende
carbon leakage | when CO₂-emitting industry moves from countries with strict rules to countries with weaker ones | die Verlagerung der CO₂-Emissionen
to overturn (a ruling) | to cancel an earlier court decision | (ein Urteil) aufheben
separation of powers | the principle that courts, government and parliament stay separate | die Gewaltenteilung
grid capacity | the maximum amount of electricity an electrical network can carry | die Netzkapazität
base load (Grundlast) | the constant minimum electricity a country needs, day and night | die Grundlast
The Landscape
Five different things happened in roughly two years. Most journalists never connected them.
In November 2024 the Hague Court of Appeal overturned the famous 2021 Shell ruling. The lower court had ordered Shell to cut emissions by 45% by 2030. The Court of Appeal said the legal duty was too loosely defined to stand. The court left the climate science alone. The case turned on the legal mechanism.
In March 2026 the German Bundesgerichtshof rejected the Deutsche Umwelthilfe cases against BMW and Mercedes. Paragraph 47 of the judgment is the line you will see quoted everywhere this year:
“The legislative process is the only appropriate forum for the allocation of emissions budgets among economic sectors.”
In plain English: parliament makes climate law, not courts.
In April 2026 the US Supreme Court ruled nine-to-zero in Chevron v. Plaquemines Parish. All nine justices agreed that federal courts are not the right place for state climate cases. Nine-zero. The court does not agree on much. It agreed on this.
Two other moves happened more quietly. The Swiss parliament rejected a European court ruling on climate that was supposed to be legally binding. And Germany changed its own Climate Protection Law in 2024 to remove year-by-year accountability for each economic sector.
The pattern is called the rollback. The science survives every one of these decisions. The separation of powers held in the end.
Now the data the rollback sits on top of.
Across the decade of climate court cases, global CO₂ emissions rose by about 5%, from 35.2 to 38.4 gigatons. The IEA confirms it. Carbon leakage explains a meaningful share. Industrial estimates say that for every ton “saved” by a German court ruling, roughly ten tons are added by new coal capacity in Asia. BASF opened its €10 billion factory in Zhanjiang, China, in March 2026 – on time and under budget. Which is itself almost suspicious by German industrial standards.
German industrial electricity prices in 2026 are often double US and Indian levels. The 2026 Industriestrompreis support package, capping prices for energy-intensive companies, is the most expensive admission of policy failure in recent German history.
Frankfurt’s data-centre grid capacity is gone. Connection waits average five years. The German grid queue is over 7 GW. Europe’s number-two data-centre hub has nowhere to plug in.
About base load: new offshore wind turbines reach 20–26 MW each; onshore reaches a maximum of 6–7 MW. In 2025 the global offshore fleet recorded its highest-ever failure rate – 8.2%. Building 26-megawatt turbines that fast was always going to be hard. These are the biggest spinning machines humans have ever made. To be fair, wind is still cleaner than coal. That part is settled. The question is whether the deployment pace has gone faster than the engineering can handle.
Five court 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 argument you don’t agree with | die stärkste Version eines Arguments darstellen
to concede a point | to accept that part of an opposing argument is correct | einen Punkt einräumen
the assigned position | the side you must defend in a debate, even if you don’t believe it | die zugewiesene Position
to land (figurative) | to be received successfully; to have an impact on an audience | ankommen / Wirkung erzielen
to push back respectfully | to politely disagree while staying engaged with the argument | höflich widersprechen
lived experience | knowledge from doing something yourself, not from reading about it | die Lebenserfahrung
industry insider | a person with deep first-hand knowledge of an industry | der Branchenkenner / die Branchenkennerin
an opinion bubble | a closed group where one view is repeated until it becomes the only acceptable one | die Meinungsblase
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 an IT-networking company. And the private 1:1 I opened the article with.
Each person was randomly given one of three positions to defend: Tragedy (the rollback is bad), Correction (the courts found their proper limits), or Overdue (the activist legal strategy was wrong from the start). Defend the assigned position, even if you don’t believe in it personally.
The point of the exercise is the steelman: presenting the strongest version of a view you don’t hold. The discomfort of arguing against your own opinion is where the real thinking happens.
Here is what landed.
Position B (Correction) won quietly across all four groups. The lawyers got there through legal logic. Aylin, a working lawyer assigned position B, said it cleanly: “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 professionals got there through democratic logic. Stefan said: “The courts shouldn’t have more power than the government that is elected by the people.” Two different industries. The same conclusion.
Position C – my position – landed as personal conviction in only one voice across all four groups. Heike, an industry insider with twenty years of experience, drew on her own work rather than the reading: “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 someone who watched it happen. She conceded the point that China has a long-term cleanup plan when I pushed back. She did not concede the underlying observation. That was her lived experience speaking.
The most generous reading of Position C came from somebody defending Position A. Lena 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 room went quiet.
The most-quoted number across the week was the carbon-leakage 1:10 ratio. Esra read it aloud in one group. Katja focused on the same number two days later in another group. Heike confirmed it from the factory floor.
Andreas, another working lawyer, explained the legal point: the Hague court could overturn the Shell ruling without denying the science. Aylin (same group) added something separate. German lawyer magazines, she said, create opinion bubbles. A different or opposing view gets piled on by the majority until the majority becomes the only acceptable position. She was pushing back respectfully at her own profession.
I should be honest about what didn’t work. The random-assignment system ran cleanly in only one of the four groups. The others ran out of time, got lost in legal detail, or could not defend an unwanted position in English. I won’t pretend the lesson landed perfectly. Saying so is part of the credibility of the report.
The most powerful Position C voice of the week never reached a lesson room. It was Klaus, on Wednesday morning, in a 1:1. 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 the response should match the size of the problem | die Verhältnismäßigkeit
the hypocrisy inventory | a personal check of your own behaviour before asking others to change theirs | die Heuchelei-Bestandsaufnahme
enforced consensus | a situation where scientists are punished for asking critical or difficult questions | der erzwungene Konsens
the urgency narrative | the story that climate change is an immediate emergency requiring extraordinary measures | das Dringlichkeits-Narrativ
manufactured panic | fear created by media and institutions, more than by the actual evidence | die erzeugte Panik
to scapegoat (someone) | to wrongly blame someone for a problem, especially an honest critic | jemanden zum Sündenbock machen
credentialled (adj.) | having recognised qualifications, training or professional standing | einschlägig qualifiziert
to force vs. to show | the central choice of this article – imposing change vs. modelling it | zwingen vs. vorleben
cheap reliable energy | affordable energy that is available 24 hours a day | bezahlbare zuverlässige Energie
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. When a question is treated as settled, and 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 quieter and harder to argue with: the same data can be used to support either side of the debate. That fact alone should make everybody more humble about what they think they know.
If your worldview cannot survive a strong counter-argument, the worldview is the problem.
So let me name the credentialled people who hold the Position C voice in 2026.
Bjørn Lomborg asks not “is climate change real” but “of all the problems facing humanity, where should resources go first?” Steven Koonin served as Under Secretary for Science at the US Department of Energy under Obama, from May 2009 to November 2011. He published Unsettled in 2021. Fritz Vahrenholt was once the head of a major German wind company. All three accept the climate science. Their question is about proportionality: does the policy response actually fit the threat? To scapegoat legitimate critics as deniers is a sign that the urgency narrative has stopped engaging with the actual arguments.
A quick word on the UN’s own list of global threats. The key 2004 UN security report identified six clusters of threats: economic and social (where climate sits, alongside poverty and disease), inter-state conflict, internal conflict, weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and organised crime. Climate is on the list. It is one of many threats. The activist legal strategy treated it as if it was the only one.
Now the actual evidence. Carbon leakage moved emissions from countries with strict rules to countries with weaker ones. For every ton “saved” by a German court ruling, roughly ten tons were added by new coal in Asia. The total kept rising. That is manufactured panic meeting 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 industrial measure, made things worse. Nuclear shutdown. Coal pivot. Industrial electricity at roughly twice US and Indian levels. The Frankfurt grid full. The offshore-wind reliability crisis. Everything rushed. Everything panicked. Everything now failing.
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 is an electrical engineer saying out loud what the activist position has refused to consider.
Klaus and I spent half an hour talking about how German AI data centres get their power. Small modular reactors that Germany will probably never permit. Long-distance contracts with French nuclear plants. Or simply building the data centres somewhere else. We didn’t reach an answer. Two people working through it on a Wednesday morning. He did say one thing clearly: “We have to be destroying all our nuclear power plants. That was the stupidest thing you could ever do [sic].”
A short word on Verhältnismäßigkeit. I have been wrestling that word for nearly twenty years and I still get the gender wrong half the time. In plainer English, it just means being adults about it. Same struggle, opposite direction – you wrestle English, I wrestle a 23-letter noun. Proportionality is the question Position C was always asking.
Before anyone tells anyone else to change their behaviour, there is the hypocrisy inventory. This is the part I have to think about every time I get on a plane. Where do your shoes come from? How often do you fly? What car do you drive? Do you use AI? I am asking because I genuinely don’t know the answers for myself either. Right?
The whole world is set on using more energy, not less. Prosperity has always needed cheap reliable energy. Germany has no right to tell other countries to change their behaviour after producing the most expensive industrial electricity in Europe.
Which is why to force vs. to show matters more than any other choice in this 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, help other countries find cleaner and cheaper energy – including nuclear and SMRs. 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. But the fear itself was manufactured for you – by media and by institutions, more than by the science itself. The most respectful thing I can do is not 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 view and test it against the people you were 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. It also 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 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. Then take a breath and decide what you actually think.
That is the lesson post for this week – three CEFR levels, vocabulary, comprehension questions, and the full 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.