Germany’s Catastrophic Russia Problem

this video was made possible by curiosity stream and nebula watch another brand new full-length companion video to this one in my ongoing modern conflict series that covers the initial phase of Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine along with 17 other full-length episodes with six hours worth of combined content covering more than a dozen other major 21st century conflicts all of which you can access by signing up for the Curiosity stream nebula bundle deal for less than 15 a year at curiositystream.com real life lore it's been more than seven months now since the Russian army first invaded Ukraine and unleashed the biggest war seen in Europe since 1945. suffice to say the war hasn't exactly been going in the Russian's favor the United States estimates that the Russians have currently suffered around 80 000 casualties since the invasion first began more in just seven months of fighting than the Soviets suffered throughout nearly a decade of war in Afghanistan across the 1980s in September a Ukrainian counter-offensive reclaimed around 6 000 square kilometers of occupied land in a matter of days an area roughly equivalent to the state of Palestine in size over the seven months since this War began the world has changed forever in nearly countless ways but few places outside of Ukraine and Russia have been affected by the war's direct consequences as severely and as negatively as Germany this is because before the War Began back in February of 2022 2. Germany found itself in a position where it was critically over dependent on Russia for their Imports of oil and especially of natural gas resources that are absolutely vital to powering the modern industrial German economy during 2021 a whopping 34 of their oil imports and 55 of all their natural gas Imports were coming in from Russia alone through this complex series of pipelines but it was the gas that was the most critical and the most difficult to replace cheap natural gas imported through pipelines primarily from Russia Norway and the Netherlands was powering roughly a quarter of Germany's entire supply of energy and that meant that the Russian natural gas flowing in from their pipes was powering more than 13 of Germany's entire energy consumption Germany relied heavily on this cheap and plentiful Russian gas to power their manufacturing-based economy and Industry while the Russians relied on selling this be asked to fund their government and were this flow of gas from Russia ever to be slowed down or halted it would spell an economic catastrophe for both Moscow and Berlin but little to the Germans realize just how willing the Russians were to actually sacrifice their own end of this business relationship and torch their own economy just to spite them after the Russians invaded and began pillaging Ukraine back in February the Germans quickly joined in on the enormous Financial sanctions that the rest of the Western World passed against the Russian regime and agreed with the rest of Europe to begin steadily reducing their Russian oil and gas Imports down to zero within a few years but the Germans couldn't just immediately remove themselves from buying Russia's gas because doing so would have literally crippled their economy and energy Supply and thrown them into a recession and the Russians knew it having 13 of your energy Supply suddenly vanish overnight without many good alternate devs inevitably contains negative consequences so instead even though by June the Germans had already managed to reduce their gas Imports coming in from Russia to just 35 percent a lot lower than the previous 55 percent the Germans have still been effectively forced into buying some amount of gas from the Russians every single day since their army crossed the border into Ukraine within just the first two months of the invasion the Germans had already paid 8.3 billion euros to Moscow for these gas deliveries as of August those first two months of payments alone are roughly seven times more money than the German government has provided to Ukraine in the form of weapons and supplies Russia has been using this cash earned from selling gas to the Germans to help prop up their currency and to help buy up millions of rockets artillery shells and bullets from fellow Pariah States like North Korea and Iran that are enabling them to continue waging their war in Ukraine and now the Russians ourselves are artificially cutting their own supplies of gas to the Germans in order to increase their price while simultaneously applying further economic pressure and blackmail this single pipeline called Nordstrom delivered roughly 38 percent of all Russia's natural gas deliveries to Germany prior to the outbreak of the war meaning that this one pipeline was delivering about a fifth of Germany's entire supply of natural gas and powering roughly five percent of Germany's total energy consumption in response to the financial sanctions imposed by Berlin the Russians slashed their own deliveries of gas through this pipeline to Germany by 80 percent back in June and then in early September they announced that all gas exports through this pipeline would be closed indefinitely until Berlin fully withdrew from their sanctions on the one hand this tactic is temporarily depriving Moscow of hundreds of millions if not billions of euros worth of revenue from gas sales but on the other hand it is greatly decreased facing the supply of gas inside of Germany leading up to the winter and causing gas prices to Skyrocket temporarily increasing Russia's revenues on The Limited amounts of gas that they're continuing to sell before the European Union is able to abandon them entirely while simultaneously pushing German households and German manufacturers into paying dramatically higher costs to keep their homes warm and to continue powering their factories The Hope inside of Moscow is that the Germans won't be able to find easy replacements for these drops and gas supplies and will be plunged into a recession and break during the winter and come to the negotiating table before the Russians break and run out of money so far the Germans have refused to cooperate or fall to this tactic but in doing so they are paying a very heavy price that should not be going underestimated Germany's economy is currently buckling under the pressure of rapidly Rising gas prices that are already 10 times pricier than they've been on on average over the past decade in Europe and this is all before the winner when the demand for gas will naturally Peak and Spike even higher with winter Now quickly approaching and gas already this expensive the Germans and the Europeans are in for a very difficult few months that will truly test their people's overall resolve in Ukraine like nothing before has they are quite literally staring down the barrel of a massive energy supply-induced recession that is putting their entire economy into Jeopardy and they could theoretically avoid it all entirely by simply making a deal with the devil in Moscow and Moscow knows the option of that choice will ferment unrest across Germany and Europe this winter between those who want to accept it and avoid the pain even if it means leaving Ukraine out to dry and those who want to continue supporting Ukraine regardless of the price that will be paid now in order to understand how Germany even found itself in the is unbelievably precarious position today you have to understand a bit about the poor realities and decisions faced and made by the German government over much of the past several decades that led us here to begin with Germany is a nation with few viable energy resources of its own the only fossil fuel that it has plenty of within its own borders is coal and to be sure Germany has and has always had a lot of coal in the early 20th century prior to the first world war the German Empire was the second largest producer of coal in the world and even today in the 21st century Germany contains the seventh largest coal reserves in the world Germany's enormous domestic coal reserves is part of how Germany was able to so rapidly industrialize across the late 19th century and even today Cole Still Remains the number one largest source of German electricity at around 30 percent of the total as of 2021 and since three fourths of Germany's coal consumption is still mined domestically within the borders of Germany itself German coal Powers roughly 22 percent of German electricity coal has always been a stable resource that Germany can rely upon without getting involved in complicated trade relationships with the outside world but the 21st century has not been kind to Cole and for good reason coal is among the dirtiest of fuel sources and produces a lot of the CO2 emissions that are warming the planet and contributing to climate change as a result the German government came to an agreement three years ago back in 2019 to gradually shut down all 84 coal plants remaining in operation at that time by 2038 an abandoned coal as an energy resource completely by then with the intention to replace all of that lost energy at first with cleaner natural gas and eventually with totally clean renewable energy but renewable energy is difficult in Germany because the country is neither particularly windy nor particularly Sunny which makes wind and solar power hour difficult to harvest the windiest parts of Germany aren't even really in Germany but offshore in the North Sea within the German bite and the Baltic which are naturally where the majority of Germany's modern wind farms are concentrated in Wind primarily from these offshore Farms makes up around 10 percent of Germany's total energy Supply as of today and it's a solid source of renewable power for the nation but it cannot easily replace fossil fuels in their entirety and neither can solar Europe in general outside of the Iberian Peninsula isn't a very sunny continent and Germany in particular isn't a very sunny country and so solar cannot possibly have a very strong impact on the German energy Supply unless it is harvested from elsewhere where it's sunnier and imported or until solar technology improves and becomes more efficient as a result solar still only accounts for around four percent of Germany's total energy Supply and other renewable sources like Hydro are even less in total non-u nuclear Renewables still only make up around 20 percent of Germany's entire energy consumption profile that largely leaves oil and gas but Germany effectively has zero of either within its own borders and so they've been forced to import nearly their entire supply of each forever oil is easy though because it can effectively be imported from anywhere in the world to Germany for cheap because it's naturally a liquid and it can just be placed in a barrels or on tankers and transported cheaply by non-specialized ships rail or truck but natural gas is of course a gas and transporting it is far more complicated and expensive than oil is the cheapest way to transport natural gas is through pipelines directly from sources that aren't too far away and somewhat luckily for Germany there's a lot of Rich natural gas deposits just beyond their borders like the Groningen field in the Netherlands the 10th largest discovered gas field in the world and numerous other Rich Fields across the North Sea controlled by Norway and the United Kingdom as as a result the Netherlands and Norway are the third and second largest sources of natural gas provided to Germany under normal circumstances providing 13 and 30 percent of Germany's gas Imports respectively through a series of their own pipelines directly from their sources but everyone knows that the days of the netherlands's gas supply the largest source of gas within the European Union itself and Germany's third largest source is coming to an end the drilling for gas within the Groningen field ended up causing sustenance the shrinking of the topsoil Above This has resulted in low-intensity earthquakes across the region that has caused minor damage to building foundations and unrest among the local residents so as a result the Dutch government began imposing serious restrictions on gas production within the field and in 2014 it was decided to gradually phase the field out of production completely as of last year in 2021 the plan is to end gas production completely within the field between 2025 and 2028 removing the European Union's largest source of domestic gas for good but even with that field the gas reserves of both the Netherlands and Norway pale in comparison to the ocean of gas that can be found just to the east of Germany within Russia across Western Siberia the Caucasus and the Far East the Russians control nearly 60 times the amount of known gas reserves as the Netherlands and nearly 22 times the amount of Norway at least according to OPEC Russia controls the largest known reserves of natural gas in the world and doesn't really have much of a manufacturing or industrial base to use it for themselves meanwhile with a very energy hungry industrialized economy centered upon manufacturing that has been wanting to reduce their emissions by ditching coal Germany has always had one of the world's greatest demands for natural gas and continues to be the third largest importer of gas in the world remaining only behind Japan can in China when factoring out political or ideological differences a purely business relationship between Germany and Russia based upon natural gas was almost inevitable based simply on economics and geography as Germany could import vast amounts of gas from Russia for less money than anywhere else in the world simply because there was just so much of it and it could be shipped so cheaply through pipelines directly from the sources in Siberia rather than expensively on tankers across the oceans Germany needed gas for their industry while Russia needed cash for their government but long before the Russians invaded Ukraine in 2022 there have always been debates within Germany Europe and the United States over the degree of influence the Russians were gaining inside of Germany through these energy supplies at the time of the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991 all of the Russian pipelines that exported gas from Siberia to Europe and Germany happened to run through Ukraine when these Pipelines have been built throughout the Soviet era Ukraine and Russia were both part of the same country and so their route to the German Market mattered very little but now the Ukraine was suddenly an independent nation Ukraine controlled all the routes for the gas between Germany and Russia and so the Russians began seeking to circumvent them the First new pipeline that did this was yamo Europe constructed through the 1990s and early 2000s that routed directly from the gas fields in Western Siberia through Belarus and Poland towards Germany and completely bypassed Ukraine in the following years the Russians also constructed blue stream and Turk stream beneath the Black Sea directly to Turkey but all of these projects paled in comparison to what was about to come next Gerhard Schroeder was the second Chancellor to serve a unified Germany following the end of the Cold War during his time in office he was a very strong advocate for a new kind of natural gas pipeline coming from Russia that would transport gas directly from the fields in Siberia to Germany money without any third-party Transit States involved like every previous pipeline before then had this new direct pipeline was being called nordstream and it would run for more than 700 miles beneath the Baltic Sea directly connecting the Russian Port of vyborg with the German port of Lumin and it was capable of dramatically increasing Russia's gas supply to Germany in 2005 within days of being voted out of office by the German electorate Schroeder hastily signed the deal with Russia that put the Nordstrom pipeline into motion a new company within Germany would be established to oversee the pipeline's construction nordstream AG with a Russian state-owned gas company gaspram being the majority shareholder shortly after stepping down as Germany's chancellor and after signing the deal Schroeder accepted gasprom's offer to become the head of nordstream AG's shareholder committee more than a decade after that in 2017 Schroeder would subsequently be nominated to serve as the independent director of the board for The Rush Russian state-owned oil company rosnyeft and then in 2022 he was nominated to the board of directors of gazprom itself the Russian state-owned natural gas company it has been estimated that Schroeder has been earning approximately 1 million dollars a year in compensation from Russia for his positions within all these state-owned oil and gas companies at any rate Nordstrom's construction continued on after Schroeder left office under the Merkel Administration once it was finished in 2011 the 10 billion dollar Nordstrom pipeline alone began supplying Germany with 20 percent of their entire natural gas supply directly from Russia its completion was celebrated by Merkel during a ceremony in which she said the following this project we show also in the presence of so many representatives from European countries that we feel sure of a secure and resilient partnership with Russia in the future and I believe that this project is a perfect example of this at that very same ceremony the then President of Russia Dimitri had comments to make of his own as well I think we've been waiting for for a long time the operational commencement of the first stage of the north stream pipeline opening a new chapter in The partnership of Russia with the European Union at around the same time as Nordstrom was finishing construction and supplying Germany with a huge supply of gas there were two other tight Panic shifts taking place within Germany's overall energy Doctrine the first was Germany's so-called energy vendor or energy transformation that involved Germany's push towards more renewable energy sources and decarbonization enormous subsidies were being given out by the government to solar and wind manufacturers and ambitious targets were being set to slice emissions by 65 percent by 2030 when compared to 1990 levels followed by an 88 reduction by 2040 and a completely Net Zero emissions-free economy by 2045. these goals necessitated the reduction in the use of coal and oil and the temporary shift towards natural gas which while still releasing emissions are 50 to 60 percent less than coal and about 30 percent less than oil it was determined at the time that Russia was a trustworthy and reliable partner to supply the majority of this gas to keep Germany's economy running smoothly before a complete transition towards Renewables could be made at some point in the future by 2019 roughly a third of Germany's electricity was coming from non-nuclear renewable resources but they were still only supplying less than a fifth of Germany's overall energy consumption profile but around the same time as these changes were happening in the renewable sector disaster struck on the other side of the world in 2011. the most powerful earthquake ever measured in Japanese history struck off of the east coast of Honshu and generated a Biblical tsunami that impacted the Fukushima nuclear power plant and sent it into a meltdown causing the worst nuclear accident that world had seen since the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine back in 1986 the shock induced from the Fukushima accident gave fresh air to the large anti-nuclear movement within Germany and merkel's government was quick to react despite the fact that nuclear energy had been Germany's largest source of emissions-free power and generated nearly a third of Germany's total electricity all on its own at that point the Merkel government announced the nuclear power would be completely phased out across Germany over the next decade with the final reactors planned to go offline in 2022 with the resulting drop in power from nuclear and the push towards Renewables and cleaner emissions from the energy vendor the Germans were left with little other choice than to import further amounts of cleaner natural gas from their Partners abroad like Russia to make up the difference in power in Just a decade between 2011 and 2021 nuclear power's share of electricity in Germany had fallen from a third to just 13 percent generated by just six remaining plans three of those plants were shut down at the end of 2021 mere months before the Russian invasion of Ukraine while the final three were scheduled to go offline by the end of 2022. just a month ago at the beginning of September the German government announced that it will keep two of those final three nuclear plants running just a little bit longer in a 2023 to help the country cope with the current crisis induced by Russia but much of the damage had already been done and around the same time beginning in 2014 the Netherlands were announcing their eventual closure of their massive groningon gas field Germany was being left with fewer and fewer choices for where to get their energy and their gas from and much to the Delight of Moscow they continued turning towards the Russians forever more gas since they were simply the cheapest provider that is why four years later after the completion of Nordstrom Germany and Russia began jointly surveying and mapping out a proposal for a second one nordstream 2 which would effectively double Russia's direct gas exports to Germany from vyborg to lamin and even further circumvent Ukraine but this time they faced a lot more resistance and pushback than they saw with the original nordstream primarily because of what had all happened in the four years between 2011 and 2015. the Russians had invaded parts of Ukraine seized and annexed the Crimean peninsula in complete disregard for international law started a war in the Don bass region of Ukraine by supporting pro-russian separatists and contributed to the shooting down of a civilian airliner over Ukraine that murdered more than 200 European Union citizens Russia had become a much more glaring and obvious threat to European security and many Europeans were beginning to fear that their over-reliance on Russian energy was a major liability until 2014 the lithuanians had also been almost completely dependent upon Russia for their natural gas supplies but in that year they finished construction on a liquefy natural gas or LNG importing facility that they rather on the nose called Independence enabling them to import LNG from Ships coming from any exporting country in the world the next year in 2015 Poland constructed an even larger LNG importing facility as well to further diversify their gas supplies away from the Russians but conversely the Germans doubled down on their gas imports from Russia by aggressively pushing ahead for nordstream 2 and refusing to construct even a single LNG importing terminal the reason why again was simply because Russian gas ship directly through Russian pipelines was always going to be cheaper for German businesses than LNG that didn't stop notable criticism of nordstream 2 from within the European Union outside of Germany especially from the Baltic states in Poland who felt the most vulnerable to Russia alongside individual critics like Donald tusk the then president of the European Union Council and Maro sefkovich the then European Union vice president nonetheless the German government itself felt confident that Nordstrom 2 did not pose any geopolitical risk to Europe as evidenced in this clip with a then German defense minister and current president of the European commission Ursula vanderleen in July of 2018. we talk about this pipeline though there are serious concerns other EU member states have raised them in the past that this might compromise security when it comes to Germany or to NATO allies generally how do you respond we have the same interest so we we defend and protect the same security issues that is our democracies our economies the rule of law the human rights so it's in our German interest to work closely together with our allies we have to tackle that issue there is an issue without any question but we should not forget that there is more on the NATO table and you don't believe that this pipeline would compromise security no uh we in our own German interest we have to make sure that this is not the case and I'm very confident what that is concerned we are deep talks about that topic but um as I said there are many other things to worry about what security is concerned talk about Russia in itself and Its Behavior malign Behavior talk about China talk about cyber attacks isil Terror just to name a few topics we have to debate here outside of the European Union the biggest opponent to Nordstrom too and the increasing Russian influence on Germany's energy Supply was Donald Trump the newly elected president of the United States in July of 2018 Trump met with representatives from Germany and NATO and had the following statements to say to them well I have to say I think it's very said when Germany makes a massive oil and gas deal with Russia where you're supposed to be guarding against Russia and Germany goes out and pays billions and billions of dollars a year to Russia so we're protecting Germany we're protecting France we're protecting all of these countries and then numerous of the countries go out and make a pipeline deal with Russia where they're paying billions of dollars into the coffers of Russia so we're supposed to protect you against Russia but they're paying billions of dollars to Russia and I think that's very inappropriate and the former chancellor of Germany is the head of the pipeline company that's supplying the gas ultimately Germany will have almost 70 percent of their country controlled by Russia with natural gas so you tell me is that appropriate I mean we might be complaining about this from the time I got in it should have never been allowed to have happened but Germany is totally controlled by Russia because they were getting from 60 to 70 percent of their energy from Russia and a new Pipeline and you tell me if that's appropriate because I think it's not and I think Germany is a captive of Russia this is Yen stoltenberg the former prime minister of Norway and the current Secretary General of NATO you know Nathan is the Lawrence of 29 Nations and there are sometimes the differences and the different views and also some disagreements on there and gas python from Russia to Germany is one issue where allies disagree but the strength on NATO is that at this point these differences we have always been able to unite around ours to protect and defend each other because in the sign that we are stronger together than apart I think that two World Wars on the Cold War thought was that we are stronger together Atlanta Forge but how can you be together when a country is getting its energy from the person you want protection against or from the group that you want to take because you understand that when we stand together also when dealing with Russia we are stronger I think what we have seen is that we're just making Russia richer shortly after Trump's comments on Glenn Miracle the longtime chancellor of Germany shot back with her own remarks foreign a little more than a year after all these comments were made in December of 2019 the 11 billion dollar nordstream 2 pipeline was only weeks away from being completely finished and certified and ready to double Germany's direct Imports of gas coming in from Russia then on December 17th the Trump Administration slapped a series of sanctions on it in an attempt to prevent its completion though the pipeline ended up being completed anyway the Germans themselves ended up delaying it certification required to begin use and by early 2022 as Russian troops began massing on the border with Ukraine Germany announced that they would scrap Nordstrom 2 entirely were Ukraine's sovereignty to be violated this was largely the situation that Germany and Europe found itself in in on the eve of the war back in February of course after the Russians invaded the Germans did follow through with their threats and indefinitely suspended the certification of Nordstrom too meaning that the 11 billion dollar pipeline has sat unused at the bottom of the Baltic Sea now for years Germany further announced that they would immediately reduce their intakes of gas coming in from Russia and that they would steadily reduce their Imports of Russian gas to Zero by 2024 while they rapidly sought to find alternative suppliers who could take their place in response the Russians retaliated by predictably weaponizing what remained of their gas market in Germany before the Germans could find those Alternatives with Germany's closure of nordstream 2 and Russia's effective closure of nordstream 1 and reduced supplies coming in through all their other pipelines the Russians are deliberately throttling Germany's energy Supply Berlin is currently operating under the assumption that by the winner Russian gas deliveries through their pipeline network will be effectively zero and so the race has been on to secure enough alternative supplies to get them through the winter without them but the big problem facing the Germans right now is that since they've removed so many different kinds of energy inputs over the past decade finding those Alternatives has been very difficult they completely self-gutted their entire nuclear energy sector that could be providing all of the electricity missing from the Russian gas right now had they not they declined to diversify sources of natural gas away from pipelines with LNG facilities until it was largely too late after the invasion had already happened they're currently trying to quickly build five offshore floating LNG facilities to begin taking in imports from places like the United States or Qatar and they expect to have some of them completed by the middle of this coming winter but we'll have to see with other recent major German construction projects like the New Berlin airport and the New Hamburg Concert Hall running years behind schedule under far better economic conditions than today faith in German construction projects meaning their deadlines says all almost never been lower and even once they do have them up and running it'll be very expensive and very challenging for them to actually even get any LNG even before the war started LNG was already the most expensive way to ship gas from one part of the world to another because you need a complicated Refrigeration plant on site where the gas comes from in order to cool it down into a liquid then the liquid gas needs to be loaded up into a specialty refrigerated tanker that can keep those cool temperatures for days or weeks or months at a time while it gets shipped across the ocean with a whole crew then once it arrives at its destination the liquid gas needs to be warmed back into a gas before finally being pumped into the receiving country's pipeline Network it's all very pricey which is why the Germans avoided it until now but when you also factor in that LNG is a global product it gets even worse from Berlin's perspective right now there's only so many producers and sellers of LNG in the world and there are a lot of buyers the largest market for LNG is in East Asia where developed economies like China Japan South Korea and Taiwan buy and import enormous volumes of it from producers especially during the winter when their demands also Peak the Germans are having to suddenly enter into this brand new market for them with the demand that is similar to Japan's the world's second largest importer of LNG competition for The Limited supplies of LNG will therefore be high as will prices and to make matters even worse for Germany their own self-imposed energy policies and restrictions are continuing to hobble them even further since the business of LNG trading is so prohibitively expensive to get set up and running most suppliers don't want to run the risk of paying a lot of money to get started just to end up with no market and no way to return on their investment so they generally demand lengthy 20-year long contracts where the receiving country promises to continue buying supplies for 20 years and keep the market going cutter the second largest exporter of LNG in the world and in an otherwise reasonable supplier for Germany to choose from is still insisting on one of these 20-year contracts before beginning deliveries but doing that would force the Germans into continuing to buy Qatari LNG until at least 2043 just two years before their current Target of zero emissions and carbon neutrality by 2045 and thus accepting it would be a major compromise on the energy vendor as a result the Germans are firing up many of their previously mothballed coal plants with higher emissions in order to make up the present energy difference for now instead because Germany's access to Coal is largely domestic and doesn't require the same kinds of long-term commitments that they're running into with LNG the gamble here is that while their emissions may be higher in the present with a partial return back to Coal they will be lower over the next few decades since they can just abandon coal but wouldn't be able to abandon gas and now their largest source of pipe natural gas that was supposed to help place all of these lost inputs coming from Russia is effectively die Germany is quite literally facing its most serious energy crisis in Generations since the 1970s Arab oil embargoes with no other choice left but to pay eye-watering prices to fill up their gas storage reserves ahead of the winter the Germans have paid more than 50 billion euros to do it 10 times more expensive than their historical average cost to fill up their tanks resulting in the dramatically higher prices for gas that German households and businesses are currently experiencing and that will continue to get worse soon it's been estimated that a complete shutdown of Russia's gas supply will shave off at least two percent of the German GDP this year and result in more than half a million losses in jobs according to a study from prugel a brussels-based economic Think Tank a total shutdown in Russian gas deliveries would force Germany into reducing their national gas consumption by an unbelievable achievable 29 percent since gas represents around 25 percent of Germany's total energy consumption that is a more than seven percent reduction in overall German energy usage that's on the table right now most vulnerable of all to this is the German manufacturing sector and especially Germany's chemicals industry as a single example the largest chemicals company in the world BASF operates the world's largest chemicals production complex with 39 000 employees here in the city of Ludwig's Haven this single energy hungry facility consumes a whole four percent of Germany's entire natural gas demand and with the reduction in natural gas supplies from Russia and the rapidly Rising prices of gas this facility and its thousands of employees may end up being forced to temporarily shut down due to costs and this is true across nearly every manufacturing business across Germany right now and Manufacturing makes up a fifth of the entire German GDP since chemical companies like BASF exist at the beginning of most Industrial Supply chains their closure could generate a cascading effect of closures across the whole German industrial sector and at a time when inflation is already at a 40-year high and economic growth is stagnating the result could end up becoming an apocalyptic recession in Germany with reverberations felt across the world in every other country that relies heavily on German Manufacturing in industry for their own economies the German government is therefore going to be left with a stark series of decisions to make this winner how to best allocate The Limited amounts of energy resources they will have available between households and businesses while delicately balancing domestic unrest caused by household energy bills and recession and unemployment caused by business energy bills but even with this ferocious Ukrainian counter-offensive the largest of its kind ever seen since the second world war there's no telling for how much longer this conflict is going to last for nor for how much longer it will affect the rest of the world when The Invasion began back in February the Russians claimed that their objectives were limited to only the Don bass area the Eastern Ukrainian territories of luhansk and Donetsk but then a few months later in June after their failed attempt to capture the Ukrainian Capital Kiev and after a stronger Western response than they were likely anticipating the Russian government announced that the scope of their Invasion had expanded beyond their initial objectives to include the province's of saparizia and curse on as well in addition to luhansken Donetsk with Russian and Ukrainian fighting over all four of these territories still ongoing even after the counter-offensive we just don't know for how much longer this is all going to last for but it's already becoming clear that the war is becoming divided into phases phase one seemed to be the initial Russian invasion and their attempted Blitzkrieg across the entire country and the attack on Kiev all of which phase two appears to be the subsequent Russian effort to refocus their attacks on the dawn bass area and stabilize their lines of occupation while phase 3 is what's currently underway as the ukrainians are dramatically punching through the Russian defenses and reclaiming huge swaths of occupied territory I don't know how many phases the biggest war in Europe since World War II is going to end up seeing and unfortunately if I made a series of dedicated videos covering each of these phases here on YouTube their disturbing violent and controversial realities while discussing an ongoing military conflict would cause them to immediately become age-restricted and demonetized which I completely understand but it also means that YouTube's algorithm wouldn't promote the videos to you and there's simply no way that you'd ever see them here that's why instead I created yet another full-length companion video to this one in my ongoing modern conflict series that's about the exact same length as this video was covering the entire first phase of the Russian invasion of Ukraine from the moment the Russian troops first crossed the border to the incredible Ukrainian victory at pushing them away from Kiev and uploaded it directly to nebula as you've probably heard by now nebula is home to tons of exclusive ad-free content like my entire modern conflict series with 16 other full-length videos containing around six hours worth of additional combined content that you can go and watch right now covering recent major Wars and conflicts that'll help you stay up to date on what's going on in our world and why from this video covering the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia this one covering the Russian military intervention in Syria or this one covering the Chinese genocide of the uyghur people in xinjiang and many more with new episodes releasing every month of course the reason why all of these videos are only available on nebula is because they just wouldn't ever work here on YouTube and would never be able to be viewed here because of the way this site Works in relation to highly controversial and sensitive current events but on the other hand nebula is a totally different platform without an algorithm and without any ads it's just a platform about great and unique content made by great and independent educational creators with plenty of other unique exclusive bonus projects from other creators you probably already know like real engineering's Incredible World War II documentary series and polymatter's China series that explores how modern China actually works the best way to get access to nebula and all of this incredible exclusive content is definitely through the truly amazing curiosity stream nebula bundle deal and with its current sales price it's less than 15 a year to get full access to both sites and curiosity stream has some pretty awesome and relevant stuff that you'll definitely enjoy watching as well like Putin and the oligarchs a 43 minute documentary explaining an incredible depth where Vladimir Putin's regime in Russia came from and how it actually continues to operate and wage war in Ukraine which will give you a huge amount of context behind everything that's going on right now I really can't recommend it enough and I genuinely don't know about a better deal that exists anywhere in streaming you get two streaming sites both with content you'll actually watch and all for less than fifteen dollars a year at the current sales price but what's even more signing up will actually help countless independent educational creators Beyond just real life lore so please make sure to do so right now by clicking the button that's here on your screen which will take you directly to curiositystream.com real life Laura to sign up or by following the link Down Below in the description and as always thank you so much for watching

Channel: RealLifeLore

Views: 2,292,313

Keywords: real life lore, real life lore maps, real life lore geography, real life maps, world map, world map is wrong, world map with countries, world map real size, map of the world, world geography, geography, geography (field of study), facts you didn’t know

Id: Xi74gPrn24Y

Length: 41min 32sec (2492 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 30 2022