Greenland tensions harden Europe's push for energy independence

https://www.ft.com/content/e9c90df9-ee03-4c51-bbd3-dad45e212961

by JumpCrisscross • 6 months ago

61 82 6 months ago

ndr42• 6 months ago

seydor• 6 months ago

I am led to believe that a large number of europeans hangs out around here(especially in morning hours when US is asleep) that wants to discuss european (geo)political issues and i wonder why this is not happening in other forums.

CalRobert• 6 months ago

I’m one of them. But what fora are you thinking of?

chaostheory• 6 months ago

Is that a bad thing? I’d rather not HN become an echo chamber even if I don’t agree with all the posts

snowpid2• 6 months ago

1.) r/europe discussed this news as well 2.) There is lack of European social media to discuss it there :P 3.) Actually this meeting mentioned in the article was big on German news. Every news outlet mentioned it, long articles etc. so it was discussed at least in Germany

tokai• 6 months ago

I don't know, Europe related things get a lot of US comments here. All the classics about lacking freedoms, tech sector, ease of founding, etc.

SideburnsOfDoom• 6 months ago

hacker news is an coder / sysadmin / tech worker/ IT person's forum.

You are correct that such people exist in the EU and UK and indeed, other parts of the world too, and that they frequent this forum. At the appropriate local times of day.

And when they are here, they discuss a range of issues inside and outside of tech. Including geo-political issues.

The more motivated will also find more narrowly focused forums, but general forums remain popular. In general.

pjc504• 6 months ago

Ironically, HN gets political discussion because the moderation is good enough that it's not a complete waste of time. Most subreddits have been assigned one side or the other by their moderators, for example.

inglor_cz9• 6 months ago

Yes, moderation here is better than elsewhere and the usual bad actors cannot do more than "drive-by downvotes", which are annoying, but nowhere near as disruptive.

groestl2• 6 months ago

I also discuss on a local newspaper forum as well, which is pretty popular, but the crowd here tends to be more insightful :)

bee_rider• 6 months ago

It is hard to completely separate out technical from political content in some contexts. Power generation, military hardware, tech company regulation… these have sort of obvious technical and political aspects.

adrianN5• 6 months ago

Decarbonization needs to happen anyway and is pretty much automatic energy independence. If the current US administration provides an extra motivation that’s gerast news for the climate.

trollbridge• 6 months ago

And decarbonisation means nuclearisation. Which Europe has been moving in the opposite direction on, and instead got drunk on Russian gas.

adrianN5• 6 months ago

That’s one way to do it, but not the only one.

snowpid2• 6 months ago

" And decarbonisation means nuclearisation. Which Europe has been moving in the opposite direction on " source? And I mean, more than "Germany phase out nuclear stations."

groestl2• 6 months ago

We might be able to bring back some nuclear reactors, but building new one's: that's not on a feasible timeline.

insane_dreamer• 6 months ago

That's Germany, not Europe (and most certainly not France)

inglor_cz9• 6 months ago

"is pretty much automatic energy independence"

Not if most of the necessary resources are mined elsewhere and most of the actual devices (such as solar panels) are manufactured elsewhere too.

The best you can say is that in such situation, no one can cause you a problem overnight, but on a longer time horizon, they absolutely can.

joe_mamba3• 6 months ago

That reasoning from your parent was like the child logic of "we don't need to kill animals for food, we can just buy chicken at the supermarket".

collinmcnulty2• 6 months ago

That’s majorly moving the goalposts. Other than Saudi Arabia, I can’t think of any country in the world today that has more energy independence that you would get if you ran on renewables + battery + nuclear. You’d have years and years of buffer, compared to the US strategic oil reserve which has maybe a few months of buffer.

amanaplanacanal• 6 months ago

Isn't that always the case though? No country is ever completely independent.

okokwhatever• 6 months ago

Try moving a tank on batteries

inglor_cz9• 6 months ago

Looking at the Russo-Ukrainian war, battery-powered drones seem to be more important than tanks right now. Russia, famously, had a lot of tanks; now, Oryx has a lot of their metal carcasses. Gone are the days of mass T-34 attacks that decided entire wars.

I will concede your point on heavier aircraft, though.

adrianN5• 6 months ago

Just run the tank on E-fuel.

pjc504• 6 months ago

Valid-sounding argument, but ultimately irrelevant in the medium term. In fact, converting civilian traffic to EVs makes it a lot easier to ration fuel for military uses in emergencies.

It's been an issue since WW2 that there's very little oil on the European continent. That's why Germany planned to seize Azerbaijan in the first place.

loudmax• 6 months ago

This M1E3 Abrams tank prototype is a hybrid: https://insideevs.com/news/784805/abrams-m1e3-hybrid-tank-vi...

It turns out that if you aren't deluded by culture war superficialities, energy efficiency is an advantage on the battlefield. Presumably this Prius on treads is confusing to chickenhawks who conflate "Likes" on Facebook and Instagram with military supremacy.

joe_mamba3• 6 months ago

Yeah, but if you deindustrialize by the time you decarbonize, because your industry left or went bust from expensive energy and environmental regulations, you now have an even bigger problem.

jonplackett2• 6 months ago

How is renewable in any way independent if we don’t mine the necessary things nor manufacture the things.

consumer451• 6 months ago

My understanding is that wind turbine + PV + battery storage has a cycle where you buy once every twenty years, or more. So you buy once, and have twenty years to figure out the next buy cycle, geopolitical cycles and all.

On the fossil fuel side, you need to buy many times per year, every year. Each one of those buy events is an opportunity for an external party for stop your economy.

The renewable buy cycle is harder for an external party to interrupt.

edit: This is vastly over-simplified, but I hope my understanding reflects reality at least somewhat.

adrianN5• 6 months ago

There is only degrees of independence in the global economy. No country can be completely self sufficient. Having an energy infrastructure that runs for a decade or two before it starts crumpling without trade is a lot better than having an energy infrastructure that is in dire straits after a few weeks or months of embargo.

_fizz_buzz_• 6 months ago

Ideally one also manufactures them. But when you buy solar panels, one get's 30+ years of lifetime out of it. So once installed. It's tricky for China (or whoever makes time) to use them as leverage. If you cut off oil or gas there is only a few months of reserves.

balozi• 6 months ago

Decarbonization needs to happen anyway - that statement is issued as if its fact. A realist would would posit that energy independence, or energy security and its underlying national security implications should be arrived at by any means necessary, carbon or non-carbon based.

adrianN5• 6 months ago

Sure, but there are really great reasons to get rid of fossil fuels and energy independence is a nice bonus. Countries tend to have multiple goals at the same time. It's nice if multiple problems have the same solution.

nickserv• 6 months ago

Europe has little hydrocarbon reserves, so decarbonization is required for energy independence.

tapoxi• 6 months ago

Carbon based energy contributes to what amounts to be a multi-trillion dollar disaster and may even contribute to the destruction of a nation using it.

Not to mention that such an investment is wasted capital. Change is accelerating and that energy infrastructure would need to be realistically dismantled in fairly short order.

martythemaniak• 6 months ago

A lot of Trump supporters (and here I include everyone who does not vigorously oppose him in this group) have a very deep belief in America's exceptionalism. To them, it does not matter that the country is run by incompetent people, it does not matter that the rulers are deeply corrupt, immoral, lawless, or abusive. America's economy will run despite all this, America's qualify of life will not suffer because of this, America's position in the world will not suffer for it, because America is unique, exceptional and the centre of the world.

And in the short term they will seem to be right - after all "Liberation Day" tariffs were supposed to destroy the economy and everything is fine! It was just a bunch of boys crying wolf. But the reality is that it took decades to get to this level of integration and it's hard and slow to turn the ship of state around. But people outside the US are very motivated and getting increasingly motivated to turn things around and it'll be essentially a generation-long project to disengage from the US. At some point the US will try to squeeze someone and find out they simply don't have what they once had.

cf100clunk2• 6 months ago

At some point the US will try to squeeze someone and find out they simply don't have what they once had.

In the aftermath of the Carney speech in Davos and similar talk around the world, there seems to be a corresponding desire to bring China to the same realization. These are generational hopes, mind you, not knee-jerk, rapidly invoked changes being planned.

energy123• 6 months ago

Trump supporters believe that the status quo was intolerable, and interpret Trump's bad qualities as further evidence that he has what it takes to smash that status quo. He's the bully on your side. In an intolerable situation, the nastier and more volatile that bully is, the better. It took me a long time to understand this.

Different Trump supports will have different parts of the status quo that they personally despise. The abstraction is universally true, however.

Throaway19852322• 6 months ago

Trump was change. It was so long ago now that we forget just how different he was from the candidates like Bush. But people have demanded change for decades now. Trump was smart enough to give them his version of change.

Throaway19852322• 6 months ago

Trump is like the guy who breaks his own tv because he can’t beat a video game.

clarionbell• 6 months ago

Trade group WindEurope said more European countries were now moving towards offering revenue guarantees to offshore wind developers as standard, after Denmark and Germany held subsidy-free auctions, which failed to attract any bids.

In other words, new wind farms will need subsidies, an those will have to be payed for by the populace. This isn't necessarily something specific to wind power, nuclear needs subsidies as well.

joe_mamba3• 6 months ago

an those will have to be payed for by the populace

As always, "subsidize the losses, privatize the profits".

Moldoteck6• 6 months ago

Everything will need them due to power cannibalization.

testing22321• 6 months ago

“Tensions”, meaning “threat of invasion from a nuclear superpower”.

About as big as tensions get.

cf100clunk2• 6 months ago

Indigneous peoples of the Arctic have seen this disregard for them play out, over and over:

  Particularly concerning was the focus on Greenland’s efforts to extract mineral
  wealth or create defence positions, said Obed. “That’s the scariest part of the
  rhetoric that has been circulating,” he said. “I did believe we were beyond this
  central premise that if Indigenous peoples do not improve our land based on the
  criteria of imperialist actors, that somehow we do not have self-determination.
  The decisions that are made about our land and what we want for it are ours
  alone.”

-- Natan Obed, President of Canada’s national Inuit organisation, Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/02/indigenous-vie...

rayiner• 6 months ago

Norwegians are the closest thing to the “indigenous people” of Greenland. The only people older than them died out a thousand years ago. The Intuit people who live there now arrived hundreds of years after the Norsemen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland (“The Thule people are the ancestors of the current Greenlandic population. No genes from the Palaeo-Inuit Dorset culture have been found in the present population of Greenland.[61] The Thule culture migrated eastward from what is now known as Alaska around 1000 AD, reaching Greenland around 1300.”).

Moldoteck6• 6 months ago

So EU is going to onshore most ren manufacturing and EDF will fix their disastrous project management? Right?

Greenland tensions harden Europe's push for energy independence

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