Years of poor energy policy has left Germany dependent on a steady supply of gas, oil, and coal from foreign countries, especially Russia. Now, the country’s leaders are scrambling to divest from Russian fossil fuels, lest they continue to finance Putin’s fascist regime or leave Germany vulnerable to Russia’s control of a large portion of their energy supply. The pressure to enact an energy embargo against Russian energy grew over the past weekend as reports emerged of gruesome atrocities committed by Russian forces against Ukrainian civilians in the city of Bucha.

Even before the start of Russia’s war on Ukraine, German leaders were already in a tight spot when it came to energy sourcing, since most of its domestic fossil fuel resources are largely depleted or are too expensive to extract. It is, therefore, heavily dependent on fuel imports.

The country’s long-awaited energy transition, the so-called energiewende, calls for Germany’s remaining nuclear power plants to go offline this year, and for its coal power plants to be phased out by 2030. But the country hasn’t yet ramped up alternative sources of energy enough to make up for the gap that will be left once nuclear and coal plants shut down.

Now, as Germany’s newly-elected government tries to come up with a plan to replace its Russian energy supply, climate advocates and fossil fuel lobbyists are vying for influence over the decision-makers.

So far, Berlin has balked at declaring a complete ban on Russian energy imports due to concerns about the impact it would have on the economy. Entirely cutting off supplies from Russia tomorrow would mean losing a large amount of Germany’s total gas and energy supply. In recent years, Germany has depended on Russia for about 35 percent of its petroleum needs, 55 percent of its natural gas imports, and about 50 percent of its coal imports.

The country’s heavy reliance on Russia’s resources developed over decades.

“Germany’s dependence on Russian gas really increased in 2004 when Russia and Germany agreed to build the Nord Stream 1 pipeline,” said Prof. Claudia Kemfert, head of the Energy, Transport and Environment department at the German Institute for Economic Research. Though the pipeline didn’t go online until 2011, Kemfert says that initial agreement marked a turning point in Germany’s dependence on Russian fuels.

The 759-mile pipeline, which runs from north-western Russia to Germany traversing under the Gulf of Finland and the Baltic Sea, is the longest subsea pipeline in the world. It has a total annual capacity of transporting some 1.9 trillion cubic feet of Russian gas to be sold in Germany and other European Union nations. Before the direct connection with Russia, Germany received its liquified natural gas (LNG) over pipelines running through Belarus and Ukraine.

Since Nord Stream 1 came online, dependence on Russian natural gas has become the norm for Germany. The Nord Stream 2 pipeline was completed last September, and would have doubled the annual capacity of Russian gas flowing into Germany to 3.9 trillion cubic feet. However, after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, German leaders refused to certify the pipeline, effectively killing Germany’s most expensive energy project to date.

“We didn’t need it, it was expensive, and it contradicted our climate and energy goals,” Kemfert said about Nord Stream 2, noting that Germany would have been better off diversifying its gas supply, and building LNG shipping terminals.

“There has been a very strong dependency by German politicians on the gas lobby and it has not changed in recent years, it has just become stronger and more aggressive in the years leading up to this war,” Kemfert said.

It appears the country is now making quick progress toward divesting itself from fossil fuel supplies from Russia.

In late March, Robert Habeck, the minister of economic affairs and Green Party member, announced that the amount of imported Russian natural gas has already gone down from 55 to 40 percent since the Russian invasion. “By the summer of 2024, we can make ourselves independent of Russian gas,” he estimated. Simultaneously, Russian coal imports went down to 25 percent and oil imports to 25 percent of Germany’s total imports. “Companies are letting contracts with Russian suppliers expire, not renewing them and switching to other suppliers,” Habeck told reporters.

However, while German leaders are finally making moves to import less fossil fuels from Russia, the country and the European Union’s dependence on Russian energy has prevented EU and NATO leaders from enacting sanctions on fossil fuels, which would have the most direct impact on Russia’s economy. Until present, European powers have been paying Russian energy suppliers nearly one billion euros per day for fossil fuels.

“I am sharply critical that fossil fuels are excluded from the sanctions,” said Sebastian Rötters, who works on energy and coal campaigns for Urgewald, an organization that campaigns against investors and financiers of fossil fuel projects. “Right now, we continue to buy gas and coal from Russia.”

Rather than simply replacing Russia’s fossil fuels with imports from other countries (including those with troubling human rights records), climate advocates like Rötters are pushing for Germany to speed up the process of weaning itself off fossil fuels entirely.

“In Russia, we financed a fascist dictatorship,” Rötters said. “If we rely so much on gas, we always have the problem of the producer countries.”

Indeed, to ensure Germany’s gas supply as Russian imports are cut, Habeck recently went to Qatar, a country with a record of human rights violations, to announce a “great” long term energy partnership between Germany and world’s second-biggest natural gas exporter.

Just six months prior, Habeck’s former Green Party co-leader Annalena Baerbock called for canceling the 2022 soccer world cup in Qatar because of its terrible record of migrant worker deaths.

Habeck also visited Saudi Arabia, which in March executed 81 people on a single day.

Government leaders have moved slowly to ramp up an energy savings program or more comprehensive renewable energy transition plans, but they have quickly responded to the spike in gas prices for consumers. Immediate economic relief measures include a one-time payment to working German citizens, reducing gasoline taxes to the European minimum level (thereby decreasing gasoline prices by 30 cents per liter and diesel by 14 cents), and the introduction of a discounted monthly public transport ticket, costing only nine Euros, which will be available for the next three months.

Additional support is coming from the United States, which has announced a deal with the EU to import 15 billion cubic meters of LNG into Europe. However, critics point out the irony that Germany succeeded in preventing fracking for gas within its own borders, but now will likely end up accepting fracked gas from the US.

There is talk about ramping up other domestic fuel sources to offset some gas power, including increasing output from its highly-polluting and ecologically destructive brown coal mines that climate activists fiercely oppose.

According to a recent press statement from RWE, one of Germany’s most important energy suppliers, the country needs “short term solutions to ensure the stability of the energy supply next winter and the years thereafter.” The energy giant now aims to take coal power plants which have already been scheduled for decommission, and instead put them on stand-by. “It is up to the federal government to decide to what extent these units should be used to reduce gas consumption,” the statement says. RWE still pledges to hold up Germany’s goal to exit coal by 2030.

Climate advocates are skeptical of RWE’s intentions.

“RWE said in their press conference last week that they have contracts for 12 million tons [of hard coal imports] until 2025 from Russia,” Rötters said. He is all too familiar with RWE, as he has been actively campaigning against RWE coal power in Germany for years.

Beside coal power, there are some energy analysts who advocate for continuing the use of nuclear power in Germany, including a couple dozen energy and climate experts who signed an open letter in 2021, months before the war began. The letter urges German leaders to extend nuclear power rather than potentially missing 2030 climate goals.

However, extending the life of Germany’s last three operating nuclear power plants would not be an easy task. Plant operators have already made preparations to shut down and currently lack the staff and the fuel to keep the plants online past the end of this year.

Even if coal or nuclear power use is extended, these two energy sources can do little to replace the gas that is needed to heat homes. About half of German houses currently use gas-powered heaters.

Saving energy happens to be among the biggest talking points of climate advocates. In Kemfert’s view, the smart path forward is obvious, and she has the data to back it up.

“Let’s assume Russia does not provide gas anymore, we would survive over the summer and the next winter,” Kemfert said. “In the meantime we could reduce our demand particularly in heating households, and start campaigns to save energy. We’ve been doing research on this for 15 years,” she said. “We’ve assessed that we really can do a lot in the next few years, and in ten years we could be done.”

However, transitioning Germany to energy independence in that time span would require some more ambitious measures implemented quickly. Kemfert suggests immediately banning gas heating systems in new buildings. These systems are currently installed at a rate of about 600,000 per year, according to a report by Deutsche Umwelthilfe. Using heat pumps instead could maximize heating efficiency and reduce fuel demand, Kemfert said.

Additionally, she suggests that better insulating buildings would significantly reduce gas demand in the short term. In the longer term, heating systems need to be combined with renewable energy systems such as solar, wind, and geothermal power.

Beyond these broader changes to Germany’s energy system, Kemfert also endorses the widespread use of energy savings that would depend on smaller, individual actions. For example, Kemfert’s research suggests that implementing a speed limit on the autobahn could reduce gas demand by about five percent, and encouraging people to lower the heat in their homes by one degree celsius could reduce gas use by another five to ten percent.

“Car free Sundays are also a good option,” said Kemfert, referring to a measure which prohibited people from driving their cars on certain Sundays to reduce fuel use. It was implemented in Germany during the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s. “We can reduce our fuel demand from Russia by five percent if we do this. So in the end, we are looking at a 15 to 20 percent reduction of demand for Russian gas with these simple savings measures,” Kemfert said.

But climate advocates say that despite the ongoing energy crisis providing a window of opportunity, the German government isn’t acting boldly and quickly enough to reduce its dependence on dirty energy.

“What we really need is a man to the moon mission for energy savings and renewable production,” said Rötters. “We are more than a month into this war, and I haven’t heard of any concrete plans.”