The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2016

by Amy Stewart

  From Fell’s garden, on a clear day, you used to be able to see the white steam plumes of the nuclear reactor at Grafenrheinfeld. His father, the conservative mayor of Hammelburg, supported nuclear power and the local military base. Young Fell demonstrated at Grafenrheinfeld and went to court to refuse military service. Years later, after his father had retired, Fell was elected to the Hammelburg city council.

  It was 1990, the year Germany was officially reunified—and while the country was preoccupied with that monumental task, a bill boosting the Energiewende made its way through the Bundestag without much public notice. Just two pages long, it enshrined a crucial principle: producers of renewable electricity had the right to feed into the grid, and utilities had to pay them a “feed-in tariff.” Wind turbines began to sprout in the windy north.

  But Fell, who was installing PV panels on his roof in Hammelburg, realized that the new law would never lead to a countrywide boom: it paid people to produce energy, but not enough. In 1993 he got the city council to pass an ordinance obliging the municipal utility to guarantee any renewable-energy producer a price that more than covered costs. Fell promptly organized an association of local investors to build a 15-kilowatt solar power plant—tiny by today’s standards, but the association was one of the first of its kind. Now there are hundreds in Germany.

  In 1998 Fell rode a Green wave and his success in Hammelburg into the Bundestag. The Greens formed a governing coalition with the SPD. Fell teamed up with Hermann Scheer, a prominent SPD advocate of solar energy, to craft a law that in 2000 took the Hammelburg experiment nationwide and has since been imitated around the world. Its feed-in tariffs were guaranteed for 20 years, and they paid well.

  “My basic principle,” Fell said, “was the payment had to be so high that investors could make a profit. We live in a market economy, after all. It’s logical.”

  Fell was about the only German I met who claimed not to have been surprised at the boom his logic unleashed. “That it would be possible to this extent—I didn’t believe that then,” said dairy farmer Wendelin Einsiedler. Outside his sunroom, which overlooks the Alps, nine wind turbines turned lazily on the ridge behind the cow pen. The smell of manure drifted in. Einsiedler had started his personal Energiewende in the 1990s with a single turbine and a methane-producing manure fermenter. He and his brother Ignaz, also a dairy farmer, burned the methane in a 28-kilowatt cogenerator, generating heat and electricity for their farms. “There was no question of making money,” Einsiedler said. “It was idealism.”

  But after the renewable-energy law took effect in 2000, the Einsiedlers expanded. Today they have five fermenters, which process corn silage as well as manure from eight dairy farms, and they pipe the resulting biogas three miles to the village of Wildpoldsried. There it’s burned in cogenerators to heat all the public buildings, an industrial park, and 130 homes. “It’s a wonderful principle, and it saves an unbelievable amount of CO2,” said Mayor Arno Zengerle.

  The biogas, the solar panels that cover many roofs, and especially the wind turbines allow Wildpoldsried to produce nearly five times as much electricity as it consumes. Einsiedler manages the turbines, and he’s had little trouble recruiting investors. Thirty people invested in the first one; 94 jumped on the next. “These are their wind turbines,” Einsiedler said. Wind turbines are a dramatic and sometimes controversial addition to the German landscape—“asparagification,” opponents call it—but when people have a financial stake in the asparagus, Einsiedler said, their attitude changes.

  It wasn’t hard to persuade farmers and homeowners to put solar panels on their roofs; the feed-in tariff, which paid them 50 cents a kilowatt-hour when it started in 2000, was a good deal. At the peak of the boom, in 2012, 7.6 gigawatts of PV panels were installed in Germany in a single year—the equivalent, when the sun is shining, of seven nuclear plants. A German solar-panel industry blossomed, until it was undercut by lower-cost manufacturers in China—which took the boom worldwide.

  Fell’s law, then, helped drive down the cost of solar and wind, making them competitive in many regions with fossil fuels. One sign of that: Germany’s tariff for large new solar facilities has fallen from 50 euro cents a kilowatt-hour to less than 10. “We’ve created a completely new situation in 15 years—that’s the huge success of the renewable-energy law,” Fell said.

  Germans paid for this success not through taxes but through a renewable-energy surcharge on their electricity bills. This year the surcharge is 6.17 euro cents per kilowatt-hour, which for the average customer amounts to about 18 euros a month—a hardship for some, Rosenkranz told me, but not for the average German worker. The German economy as a whole devotes about as much of its gross national product to electricity as it did in 1991.

  In the 2013 elections Fell lost his seat in the Bundestag, a victim of internal Green Party politics. He’s back in Hammelburg now, but he doesn’t have to look at the steam plumes from Grafenrheinfeld: last June the reactor became the latest to be switched off. No one, not even the industry, thinks nuclear is coming back in Germany. Coal is another story.

  Germany got 44 percent of its electricity from coal last year—18 percent from hard coal, which is mostly imported, and about 26 percent from lignite, or brown coal. The use of hard coal has declined substantially over the past two decades, but not the use of lignite. That’s a major reason Germany isn’t on track to meet its own greenhouse gas emissions target for 2020.

  Germany is the world’s leading producer of lignite. It emits even more CO2 than hard coal, but it’s the cheapest fossil fuel—cheaper than hard coal, which is cheaper than natural gas. Ideally, to reduce emissions, Germany should replace lignite with gas. But as renewables have flooded the grid, something else has happened: on the wholesale market where contracts to deliver electricity are bought and sold, the price of electricity has plummeted, such that gas-fired power plants and sometimes even plants burning hard coal are priced out of the market. Old lignite-fired power plants are rattling along at full steam, 24-7, while modern gas-fired plants with half the emissions are standing idle.

  “Of course we have to find a track to get rid of our coal—it’s very obvious,” said Jochen Flasbarth, state secretary in the environment ministry. “But it’s quite difficult. We are not a very resource-rich country, and the one resource we have is lignite.”

  Curtailing its use is made harder by the fact that Germany’s big utilities have been losing money lately—because of the Energiewende, they say; because of their failure to adapt to the Energiewende, say their critics. E.ON, the largest utility, which owns Grafenrheinfeld and many other plants, declared a loss of more than 3 billion euros last year.

  “The utilities in Germany had one strategy,” Flasbarth said, “and that was to defend their track—nuclear plus fossil. They didn’t have a strategy B.” Having missed the Energiewende train as it left the station, they’re now chasing it. E.ON is splitting into two companies, one devoted to coal, gas, and nuclear, the other to renewables. The CEO, once a critic of the Energiewende, is going with the renewables.

  Vattenfall, a Swedish state-owned company that’s another one of Germany’s four big utilities, is attempting a similar evolution. “We’re a role model for the Energiewende,” spokesperson Lutz Wiese said cheerfully as he greeted me at Welzow-Süd—an open-pit mine on the Polish border that produces 22 million tons of lignite a year. In a trench that covers 11 square miles and is more than 300 feet deep, 13 gargantuan digging machines work in synchrony—moving the trench through the landscape, exposing and removing the lignite seam, and dumping the overburden behind them so the land can be replanted. In one recultivated area there’s a small experimental vineyard. On the same rebuilt hill stands a memorial to Wolkenberg, a village consumed by the mine in the 1990s. Boulders mark the spots where the church and other buildings once stood.

  It was a gorgeous spring day; from Wolkenberg, the only cloud we could see was the lazily billowing steam plume from the 1.6-gigawatt power plant at Schwarz
e Pumpe, which burns most of the lignite mined at Welzow-Süd. In a conference room, Olaf Adermann, asset manager for Vattenfall’s lignite operations, explained that Vattenfall and other utilities had never expected renewables to take off so fast. Even with the looming shutdown of more nuclear reactors, Germany has too much generating capacity.

  “We have to face some kind of a market cleaning,” Adermann said. But lignite shouldn’t be the one to go, he insisted: it’s the “reliable and flexible partner” when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing. Adermann, who’s from the region and worked for its lignite mines before they belonged to Vattenfall, sees them continuing to 2050—and maybe beyond.

  Vattenfall, however, plans to sell its lignite business, if it can find a buyer, so it can focus on renewables. It’s investing billions of euros in two new offshore wind parks in the North Sea—because there’s more wind offshore than on and because a large corporation needs a large project to pay its overhead. “We can’t do onshore in Germany,” Wiese said. “It’s too small.”

  Vattenfall isn’t alone: the renewables boom has moved into the North and Baltic Seas and, increasingly, into the hands of the utilities. Merkel’s government has encouraged the shift, capping construction of solar and onshore wind and changing the rules in ways that shut out citizens’ associations. Last year the amount of new solar fell to around 1.9 gigawatts, a quarter of the 2012 peak. Critics say the government is helping big utilities at the expense of the citizens’ movement that launched the Energiewende.

  At the end of April, Vattenfall formally inaugurated its first German North Sea wind park, an 80-turbine project called DanTysk that lies some 50 miles offshore. The ceremony in a Hamburg ballroom was a happy occasion for the city of Munich too. Its municipal utility, Stadtwerke München, owns 49 percent of the project. As a result Munich now produces enough renewable electricity to supply its households, subway, and tram lines. By 2025 it plans to meet all of its demand with renewables.

  In part because it has retained a lot of heavy industry, Germany has some of the highest per capita carbon emissions in western Europe. (They’re a bit more than half of U.S. emissions.) Its goal for 2020 is to cut them by 40 percent from 1990 levels. As of last year, it had achieved 27 percent. The European carbon-trading system, in which governments issue tradable emissions permits to polluters, hasn’t been much help so far. There are too many permits in circulation, and they’re so cheap that industry has little incentive to cut emissions.

  Though Germany isn’t on track to meet its own goal for 2020, it’s ahead of the European Union’s schedule. It could have left things there—and many in Merkel’s CDU wanted her to do just that. Instead, she and Economic Affairs Minister Sigmar Gabriel, head of the SPD, reaffirmed their 40 percent commitment last fall.

  They haven’t proved they can meet it, however. Last spring Gabriel proposed a special emissions levy on old, inefficient coal plants; he soon had 15,000 miners and power plant workers, encouraged by their employers, demonstrating outside his ministry. In July the government backed down. Instead of taxing the utilities, it said it would pay them to shut down a few coal plants—achieving only half the planned emissions savings. For the Energiewende to succeed, Germany will have to do much more.

  It will have to get off gasoline and diesel too. The transportation sector produces about 17 percent of Germany’s emissions. Like the utilities, its famous carmakers—Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Volkswagen, and Audi—were late to the Energiewende. But today they’re offering more than two dozen models of electric cars. The government’s goal is to have a million electric cars on the road by 2020; so far there are about 40,000. The basic problem is that the cars are still too expensive for most Germans, and the government hasn’t offered serious incentives to buy them—it hasn’t done for transportation what Fell’s law did for electricity.

  Much the same is true of buildings, whose heating systems emit 30 percent of Germany’s greenhouse gases. Rolf Disch in Freiburg is one of many architects who have built houses and buildings that consume almost no net energy or produce a surplus. But Germany is not putting up many new buildings. “The strategy has always been to modernize old buildings in such a way that they use almost no energy and cover what they do use with renewables,” said Matthias Sandrock, a researcher at the Hamburg Institute. “That’s the strategy, but it’s not working. A lot is being done, but not enough.”

  All over Germany, old buildings are being wrapped in six inches of foam insulation and refitted with modern windows. Low-interest loans from the bank that helped rebuild the war-torn west with Marshall Plan funds pay for many projects. Just 1 percent of the stock is being renovated every year, though. For all buildings to be nearly climate-neutral by 2050—the official goal—the rate would need to double at least. Once, Sandrock said, the government floated the idea of requiring homeowners to renovate. The public outcry shot that trial balloon down.

  “After Fukushima, for a short time there was Aufbruchstimmung—for about half a year there was a real euphoria,” said Gerd Rosenkranz. Aufbruchstimmung means something like “the joy of departure”; it’s what a German feels when he’s setting out on a long hike, say, in the company of friends. With all the parties in Germany in agreement, Rosenkranz said, the Energiewende felt like that. But the feeling hasn’t lasted. Economic interests are clashing now. Some Germans say it might take another catastrophe like Fukushima to catalyze a fresh burst of progress. “The mood is bad,” Rosenkranz said.

  But here’s the thing about the Germans: they knew the Energiewende was never going to be a walk in the forest, and yet they set out on it. What can we learn from them? We can’t transplant their desire to reject nuclear power. We can’t appropriate their experience of two great nation-changing projects—rebuilding their country when it seemed impossible, 70 years ago, and reunifying their country when it seemed forever divided, 25 years ago. But we can be inspired to think that the Energiewende might be possible for other countries too.

  In a recent essay William Nordhaus, a Yale economist who has spent decades studying the problem of addressing climate change, identified what he considers its essence: free riders. Because it’s a global problem, and doing something is costly, every country has an incentive to do nothing and hope that others will act. While most countries have been free riders, Germany has behaved differently: it has ridden out ahead. And in so doing, it has made the journey easier for the rest of us.

  AMY LEACH

  The Modern Moose

  FROM Ecotone

  RECENTLY, SOME MODERN ANIMALS have been reconsidering their attachment to the Earth. She was a lot of fun in her honeyed youth, but she’s getting sick and seedy now, temperamental and pockmarked and tired. They find her decline kind of depressing, kind of repulsive. Before she is totally moribund they are looking around for other options, redirecting their attentions to places like the Kuiper Belt and the Large Magellanic Cloud, which contain untapped riches of rare materials and are unaffected by banana blight. In fact, such moderns have a hoof or two in heaven already: if they say yes to the Earth it’s an equivocal yes, easy to disavow as soon as they can blast off to a better where.

  But as ravishing as the Cloud/Belt may be, not all modern animals seem so eager to leave the Earth. Some are still entangled with seas and trees and Russian tundra; others seem entirely indifferent to the idea of space settlement. Take the modern moose, for example. Has he sent scouts to the moon? Has he shown any interest in starships? Has he ever practiced grooming himself in an antigravity gyroscopic device? No, no, and egads, no. Nevertheless the moose is as modern as Mugellini and should be coequally respected. In his survey of everything, Modern History; or, The Present State of All Nations, Thomas Salmon duly notes the concerns of the modern moose: he likes to chew on young shrubs, “but mostly, and with greatest delight, on water-plants, especially a sort of wild Colts-foot and Lilly that abound in our ponds, and by the sides of the rivers, and for which the Moose will wade far and deep.”

  W
ith the magnitude of his antlers, it’s not like the moose could ever be flighty anyway. The first time bone starts coming out of his brow, the young moose might think it will turn into something moderate and flattering, something like a pillbox hat. Maybe his horns will be trinket horns, party horns, flirty horns like the giraffe’s, or sleek Armani antlers like the pronghorn’s. But the bumps grow into spikes, and the spikes spread and branch and keep growing, past trinket, past flirty, past flattering, and far past moderate. (Moderate horns are for moderate species; moderate species get very excited about moderate horns.) Finally they grow past preposterous: on his head the moose carries branching antlers so absurdly heavy he mustn’t lower his head down to the ground, for fear he’ll never raise it up again.

  Seventy pounds of antler seems like an affirmation somehow, an exaggerated weight implacably attaching the moose to the Earth, saying, “Yes without a question, yes with all my heart. Yes if it pitches me face-first into the mud, yes if the rest of me withers, yes if my yes gets splintered, or broken, or deformed: yes and yes and yes again.” When you have wings your hope can be elsewhere—up the hill, up the sky. But wings of solid bone scorn the idea of flight: your hope must be here.

  Of course the moose did not choose his yes any more than Respighi chose his. It is his hap to be born—to come out of the mama onto the Earth—his hap to be rejected by the mama once a littler moose comes out, his hap to bear a staggering affirmation on his brow. A real yes weighs you down, like a woe, like those lunatic vows of lovers, to be kept even if one finds a better who. I, Alces alces, take you Earth to be my planet, to have and to hold, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish; from this day forward until death do us part. Yes to the pond where the water-plants thrive, yes to the pond where the water-plants fail, yes to the pock where the pond used to be. Yes to you healthy, yes to you sick, yes to you blooming, and yes to you stricken. Though you have seen better days, though you no longer delight me with Colts-foot and Lillies, yes to the Earth, my Earth, for I do not hope to find a better where.