In his closing statement at last week’s presidential debate, Donald Trump made a blink-and-you-miss-it comment that earned a pointed response from the German government.
“You believe in things like we’re not going to frack, we’re not going to take fossil fuel, we’re not going to do things that are going to make this country strong, whether you like it or not,” he said to his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. “Germany tried that and within one year they were back to building normal energy plants.”
For German audiences or anyone who has followed Germany’s decades-long push to move away from fossil fuels and nuclear power, Trump’s comments made little sense.
They also showed the peculiar place Germany holds in global energy discourse, as an example that can be used to argue for or against just about anything. Germany has had enough successes and failures that one observer can say, for…
