“[Energy forecasts] are cultural bearers, in the sense that, by defining the scope of action for political planning and decisions, they contribute to the ‘construction of reality.’”—Manfred HärterFootnote 1
Germany, the world's fourth largest economy with a substantial industrial sector, made headlines in 2015 by reducing total energy consumption while expanding its economy by 1.5 percent. This phenomenon, called “decoupling,” breaks a pattern that holds across most of the world where Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has historically grown hand-in-hand with energy use. Decoupling is a crucial but often overlooked aspect of Germany's Energiewende—the transition to a low-carbon, environmentally-friendly energy system—in which renewables like wind and solar power have captured the spotlight.Footnote 2
Decoupling stands at the end of a long chain of developments that has made Germany a global leader in energy—the “Greenest Nation,” as one scholar has tentatively argued.Footnote 3 While historians have located the roots of Germans’ interest in energy and the environment in the nineteenth century, most situate the key turning points in the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote 4 During these years the twin oil crises of 1973 and 1979 challenged the reigning postwar paradigm of economic growth based on the extensive use of inexpensive energy.Footnote 5 This was also the moment when West Germany embarked on an idiosyncratic path in comparison to other large, industrial states. Whereas the United States, Great Britain, and France all responded to the oil shocks by prioritizing the expansion of their energy supply, political leaders and experts in the Federal Republic began to think seriously about reducing energy demand, in part through the price mechanism. The United States, after pursuing limited attempts at conservation, doubled down on its quest to expand access to oil at all costs and keep energy prices low. This led to massive military and political engagement in the Middle East, as Washington “replaced energy policy with foreign policy.”Footnote 6 Great Britain benefited from discoveries of natural gas and oil in the North Sea, which it exploited during the 1980s and 1990s to become a leading producer of hydrocarbons—eighth in the world by 1999.Footnote 7 France, meanwhile, embarked on a monumental nuclear construction program in the 1970s, which its politicians pushed through against a substantial domestic protest movement. French reactors now generate three-quarters of the nation's electricity, far more than that of any other European country.Footnote 8
Initially, West Germany also pursued a supply-side response with a vast new nuclear power program. But, as this program stalled in the late 1970s, and as forecasts and assumptions about energy changed, West German leaders began turning to energy saving. Beginning in the late 1970s, new ideas spread about decoupling energy consumption from growth, and about using prices to stimulate technological change and conservation. Partly as a result, West Germany (and later reunified Germany) displayed an unusually sharp improvement in energy efficiency following the oil crises: since 1979, energy use per capita in Germany has declined by nearly 14 percent and that of the United Kingdom by just 3.5 percent, whereas France's has actually risen by 6.5 percent.Footnote 9
Scholars have explained Germany's peculiar energy trajectory since the 1970s through two narratives. The first emphasizes the role of exogenous crises driving a sea shift in attitudes toward energy and the environment, where the landmark moments were the OPEC price hikes of 1973 and 1979, the Waldsterben of the 1980s, the Chernobyl meltdown of 1986, natural gas tensions with Russia in the 2000s, and, finally, Japan's Fukushima disaster in 2011, which led Chancellor Angela Merkel to reverse course and call for a full exit from nuclear power by 2022. As J. R. McNeill has pointed out, crises have historically moved environmental and energy issues into the political limelight.Footnote 10 Germany's experience is no exception, and in this crisis narrative, the oil shocks and Chernobyl stand out as the defining events.Footnote 11
This story of crises intersects with a parallel narrative that explains Germany's attention to energy conservation through the Green movement's evolution into a political party. During the 1970s a growing interest in postmaterial values such as environmental sustainability, rising concern over the location of nuclear plants, and a disenchantment with closed-door, technocratic decision-making led to the formation of grass-roots movements across Europe and North America.Footnote 12 In contrast to France, Great Britain, and the United States, however, in West Germany the antiestablishment movement entered the political system in 1983 through a new party, the Greens, which later joined a coalition government in 1998 with the Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or SPD). As Andrei Markovitz and Joseph Klaver have argued, despite its small size, the Green party helped set Germany's political agenda during the 1980s and again after 1998, when it passed pivotal energy legislation, including an ecological tax.Footnote 13
Taken together, these twin narratives illustrate how local grievances combined with national and international crises to mobilize interest in questions of energy and the environment. But they largely avoid discussion of how new economic expertise, focused on energy issues, emerged during this same period to reshape political and public attitudes toward economic growth. Indeed, between two major crises, the 1973 oil embargo and the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown, conventional understandings that had reigned since the 1950s about the theoretical relationship between energy consumption, energy prices, economic growth, technological development, and employment, began to crack under the challenge posed by new ideas about how a nation could decouple its energy consumption from growth.
The spread of a new body of energy-economic knowledge helps us understand Germany's divergence from other large, industrialized states in responding to the challenges of the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote 14 This third explanatory framework complements the narratives about exogenous crises and the Green movement by showing how new economic expertise prodded West Germans to reconceptualize the relationship between growth and energy, enabling them to imagine a future where decoupling was possible, technologically as well as politically. For, if crises like the oil shock and Chernobyl sparked a new energy consciousness, the form this consciousness assumed was profoundly shaped by political and scholarly controversies that revolved around questions of growth, employment, forecasting, and energy pricing. And if the Green movement reshaped West German politics, adapting its environmental sensibility to fit mainstream pro-market parties was a process shaped by numerous experts, many of whom wanted to save capitalism rather than extinguish it.Footnote 15
This third “origin” story requires an understanding of, first, the new experts themselves, and second, of developments in the Social Democratic Party, which created the political space for this new knowledge to thrive. Since the 1990s Germany's two largest parties—the Christian Democratic Union (Christlich Demokratische Union, CDU) and the SPD—have partnered with the Green Party to push through energy legislation. Both parties, in other words, have taken an energy “turn”—which means that, to fully understand Germany's energy conservation policies, we need to expand our analysis beyond the Green Party. This article focuses on the SPD because its political reign from 1969 to 1982 overlapped with and facilitated the rise of new energy experts, while its fall from power caused the party to reform its energy agenda much earlier and more intensely than the CDU did. Recent histories of the SPD have, however, focused primarily on the Cold War, the Peace Movement, and the personalities of Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt. Where questions of energy have entered the literature, the emphasis has been on the geopolitics of oil and the rise of the Group of Seven (G-7) as a forum for large, developed economies to coordinate macroeconomic policy.Footnote 16
This article integrates a story of new expertise with a history of the SPD to trace the rise of new ideas about energy and growth. It begins in the early 1970s with the emergence of an energy paradox: how to sustain growth in a world of seemingly exhausted and insecure energy sources.Footnote 17 Before 1972, traditional experts from leading economic institutes had forged a symbiotic relationship with the SPD around a dominant paradigm that held that growth required ever more energy as an input, and that solving the energy paradox therefore necessitated a massive nuclear power program. Through this alliance, the SPD adopted a new style of governance that was future-oriented, reliant on outside advisers, and geared toward information analysis and prognosis.Footnote 18 This alliance fractured in the mid-1970s. New experts, who were spurred by the Green movement but also by new modeling techniques, offered different solutions to the energy paradox. When energy consumption plateaued following the first oil shock of 1973, a controversy erupted between those who thought that West Germany, after a hiccup, would continue its previous energy trend, and those who believed that this marked the beginning of a fundamental shift.
This struggle among experts was immensely important for the course of West German politics, for it overlapped with a crisis that nearly ripped the SPD apart. As energy prices soared, growth slowed, and unemployment rose, the SPD's reform agenda stalled and the party began losing voters to new leftwing movements that would eventually form Green electoral lists. A rift emerged between the traditional wing of the SPD that hoped to revive the old energy paradigm, and a new faction around Erhard Eppler, a Protestant reformer from Baden-Württemberg, that wanted to open the party to the burgeoning environmental movement—but without jettisoning growth as a priority. The dispute over nuclear power raised the stakes of this internal rift even more after 1975, as the anti-nuclear movement threatened the very existence of the SPD.Footnote 19
In 1982, the nuclear power controversy—coinciding with the vigorous domestic debate over the so-called double-track atomic weapons deployment in West Europe—toppled the SPD from power, forcing a reconfiguration of the party away from its heavy-industry, blue-collar roots. Yet, out of the ashes of 1982 arose a new symbiosis. As an oppositional party that, after 1982, experienced a leadership change from an old guard to a younger cohort, the SPD could more easily reform its energy agenda than the CDU could. New experts helped the SPD overcome its internal crisis and transform itself into a more eco-savvy and market-oriented party; in turn, the SPD took the new energy ideas mainstream. These new ideas would ultimately open the political space for West Germany, and later reunified Germany, to pursue a new political economy that aimed to conserve energy while retaining growth as a fundamental social goal.
Growth, Nuclear Power, and the SPD
A new paradigm for thinking about energy and growth emerged in West Germany during the 1970s after two events stimulated people to reimagine how industrial society could survive in a world of limited resources. The first were a pair of publications—Jay Forrester's World Dynamics (1971) and the Club of Rome's report Limits to Growth (1972)—that raised awareness about the dangers that resource scarcity posed to a world with a rapidly expanding population.Footnote 20 Where forecasting in the early 1960s had been largely optimistic, World Dynamics and Limits to Growth marked the highpoint of a wave of pessimistic predictions that also reached a German audience.Footnote 21 Both publications argued that the tempo of growth Europe and North America had experienced since 1945 could not continue without leading to economic collapse.Footnote 22 Together they unleashed a heated global discussion about the future of the world economy. Limits to Growth, in particular, received heavy criticism from economists on both sides of the Atlantic, who argued that, in downplaying the price mechanism, the model vastly underestimated the potential for technological developments to solve problems of efficiency and pollution abatement. Others claimed that it was irresponsible to project an end to growth when poverty alleviation in the so-called Third World remained such a pressing issue. Many on the left, meanwhile, criticized the report for neglecting what they saw as the fundamental question, namely, social justice and wealth redistribution.Footnote 23 Limits to Growth nevertheless popularized fears of resource scarcity in West Germany, which had provided funding for the project. Christian intellectuals, futurologists, cultural critics on the left, planning elites, and even Chancellor Willy Brandt found the concerns expressed in its pages compelling enough to begin rethinking the nature and purpose of growth.Footnote 24
The second event, the OPEC oil crisis of 1973–1974, seemed to prove that such resource anxieties were well founded. While concern about rising oil prices date to the late 1960s, the year 1973 turned oil into a seller's market. Oil use had grown more rapidly in the Federal Republic than in any other European state in the 1950s and 1960s; by 1972 West Germany imported over 95 percent of its petroleum products. As a consequence, the hydrocarbon price hike hit West Germany particularly hard, since it had come to depend more than its neighbors did on imported petroleum from the Middle East and North Africa.Footnote 25
These twin events struck at the guiding principle of West German politics: the promotion of economic growth. By the 1960s and 1970s, politics in the Federal Republic had become “essentially just economic policy, in a grand style,” and the SPD was not immune to this fixation on growth.Footnote 26 A traditional working-class party that had evolved into a broader, “catch-all” party after 1959, the SPD needed growth to underwrite the wage increases and welfare state expansion that defined its agenda. After becoming the lead partner in West Germany's governing coalition in 1969 under Willy Brandt, the SPD inaugurated a wave of social reforms with the expectation that continued growth would generate the public revenue to finance these programs.Footnote 27 But growth required energy. The SPD's Bad Godesberg Program of 1959 had made this clear in its opening paragraph, which advocated nuclear power in the hope that this “could free mankind from its worries and create prosperity for all.” The industrial unions—a pillar of the party—confirmed this principle, declaring that “full employment, economic growth, and a rising living standard for a growing population require an ever stronger supply of energy.”Footnote 28
The OPEC crisis strained the SPD's reform platform. Rising oil prices overlapped with a longer-term increase in structural inflation, declining productivity, heightened competition from new industries abroad, and rising employee-employer tensions—which together precipitated West Germany's worst postwar economic recession.Footnote 29 In just two years the reform euphoria of Brandt's second electoral victory in 1972 evaporated as growth slowed, unemployment rose, and budget deficits expanded, and the SPD was forced to scale back its reform agenda after 1974 under a new chancellor, Helmut Schmidt.Footnote 30
An economic crisis became, in other words, a crisis for the SPD, as the Limits to Growth and the oil problems gave rise to a movement inside the party that demanded a new approach to political economy and energy.Footnote 31 Its leader was Erhard Eppler, a Protestant reformer and director of the SPD's regional group in Baden-Württemburg. From 1968 to 1974 Eppler served as Minister for Economic Cooperation, and, in his travels through drought-ridden West Africa, he became concerned with the connection between energy, the environment, and growth.Footnote 32 In 1972 IG Metall, West Germany's largest union, invited Eppler to speak at their annual conference, where Eppler criticized the ability of economic growth as a concept and GDP as a measure to capture the way people's lives were changing as a result of modern capitalism. As West German society was becoming better off materially, Eppler argued, Germans were coming to value things not included in GDP, like environmental protection. This was why Eppler wanted to orient policy around the more fluid concept of “quality of life” instead of around GDP.Footnote 33 With encouragement from Brandt, Eppler developed this idea in his popular book Ende oder Wende (1977), in which he argued that the 1970s marked a historical caesura: “humanity is bumping up against limits that we, at least in the previous two hundred years, were not aware of or did not want to be aware of.” To overcome this challenge, Eppler demanded nothing less than a “thought revolution from economy to ecology,” a central component of which must be energy conservation.Footnote 34
Eppler's ideas created a rift in the SPD that would last until the 1980s, pitting a younger, reform-oriented wing against a conservative, growth-oriented faction led by Helmut Schmidt and supported by the unions. To be sure, many issues contributed to this fissure—above all the debate over stationing nuclear weapons in West Germany. But questions of growth and energy were central, polarizing the party to its core.Footnote 35 Initially, however, Eppler's ideas found little purchase among the SPD leadership, in part because they were new. At a time when expert advice was crucial to policy-making, there was little theoretical or empirical work that supported his idea that reducing the energy supply would be anything less than catastrophic.
Facing a recession, the conservative wing of the party instead strove to restore the postwar consensus of growth based on extensive energy use.Footnote 36 To that end, the SPD adopted a new policy tool, the Energieprogramm der Bundesregierung (Comprehensive Energy Program), which it first unveiled on the eve of the oil crisis and subsequently revised three times between 1973 and 1981. With the Energy Program Bonn aimed to guide private investment into, and planning around, energy use by mapping out energy consumption for the future. Crucially, the program inaugurated a massive campaign to expand West Germany's nuclear power supply in the hope of freeing the country from dependence on foreign oil and from the world's looming resource scarcity. In its First Revision to the Energy Program in October 1974, leaders in Bonn announced their intention to increase West Germany's nuclear capacity from 1 percent to 15 percent of total energy consumption by 1985.Footnote 37 Coal, too, would play a major role in overcoming dependence on foreign oil. The spike in oil prices suddenly made coal competitive again, and Bonn consequently planned to construct ten new, coal-fired power plants.Footnote 38
The government's nuclear and coal agenda enjoyed support among business elites and the industrial unions, but it encountered immediate resistance at the local level from protestors who inveighed against individual power plants and the non-transparent, top-down planning apparatus that built them. Between 1974 and 1977 these demonstrations grew into the largest protest movement in West German history, surpassing in size even the demonstrations against the Vietnam War of the 1960s.Footnote 39 The government was put on the defensive and it quickly began working to convince opponents that growth required nuclear power. After some initial hesitation, Hans Matthöfer—the federal minister of Research and Technology (Bundesminister für Forschung und Technologie, BMFT) from 1974 to 1978—took the lead in defending Bonn's agenda. Matthöfer had been a union leader before joining the SPD leadership. Originally from Bochum, the heart of the ailing coal industry, he wanted to maintain coal production while still modernizing West Germany's energy infrastructure through nuclear power, and, to that end, he helped broker an alliance between coal unions and nuclear power producers.Footnote 40
When Matthöfer took over the BMFT he found it in disarray, suffering a “justification” deficit for nuclear power, which he worked to overcome by articulating a vision that would contrast with both Eppler's ideas and those of the anti-nuclear movement.Footnote 41 Pointing to the experience of Western Europe since 1945, he claimed that “economic growth has been closely coupled with energy consumption.” This coupling may not be an iron law, he admitted, but it was statistically significant and would, in all likelihood, continue into the future. West Germany would therefore need more energy to sustain the growth it had enjoyed since World War II, and Bonn should consequently strive to maintain as low a price for energy as possible.Footnote 42 Yet he also found the premises of Limits to Growth to be basically sound, namely, that the exhaustion of fossil fuels was pending.Footnote 43 Herein lay the paradox: if growth required energy, how could an economy grow over the long term in a world of finite resources.
The stakes of this question could not be higher. Like Chancellor Schmidt, Matthöfer feared that tensions with OPEC potentially heralded the beginning of an unprecedented global peacetime economic crisis. Inflation, the breakdown of Bretton Woods, the oil crunch—these constituted the first act in a larger drama that could lead to global distributional conflicts and a reversion to the trade bilateralism of the 1930s.Footnote 44 Matthöfer thus warned that efforts to reduce energy consumption could destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs and threaten the “overall foundation of our democratic state.”Footnote 45
Whereas Limits to Growth advocated minimal growth, Matthöfer thought West Germany's very social order depended on robust growth and therefore on energy. Matthöfer saw coal as a critical pillar for any energy program, and he estimated that West German coal reserves could last for another one hundred to three hundred years. But coal would never be enough to fuel a modern economy because of its physical limitation as a solid fuel. West Germany therefore needed a world-class nuclear program.Footnote 46 The one hitch—that nuclear power could only generate electricity—could, Matthöfer argued, be circumvented through new technologies the BMFT had begun promoting in its research programs in the 1970s.Footnote 47 The two key developments here were heat–power cogeneration and the fast breeder reactor. The former would use process heat generated by nuclear power to synthesize gas or liquid from coal, a process that would not only solidify the “coal union-nuclear power” alliance, but also open up “an entirely new application of coal that could substitute or supplement oil products and natural gas respectively, on a large scale.”Footnote 48 The latter theoretically promised to deliver sixty times more energy per uranium input than the light water reactors currently in use. Matthöfer claimed that such technologies could make the Federal Republic “independent of imported primary energies for electricity generation for several hundred years.”Footnote 49
The Old Energy Paradigm
To justify his vision, Matthöfer worked with leading scholars who, in turn, shaped the claims the government in Bonn put forth, as well as the specific projects in the BMFT's research programs. Matthöfer, in other words, had the benefit of outside expertise, whereas Eppler did not. Both sides gained from this. For the experts, the growth demanded by the politicians justified expensive nuclear programs and major forecasting projects. For the SPD, energy growth and energy planning would, it was hoped, revive the economy and their reform agenda.
Much of the energy-specific advising came from the Energiewirtschaftliches Institut (EWI) at the University of Cologne, directed by Theodor Wessels before 1970 and then by Hans Karl Schneider, both of whom served on the academic advisory board to the Economics Ministry. Wessels and Schneider maintained that overall GDP and the current state of technology determined the amount of energy consumed in the economy, not the relationship between energy prices and those of other goods. In the 1960s and early 1970s, few empirical studies had examined the price elasticity of energy, but both Wessels and Schneider inferred from aggregate data that energy had a low price elasticity, which meant that large price increases would not lead to large declines in consumption because of energy's non-substitutability, i.e., its essentialness to production.Footnote 50 For West Germany's “highly industrial economy,” in other words, they argued that it was “impossible” to substitute energy as a production input with other factors such as capital or labor. Nor would price rises stimulate technological innovation in energy production, since they believed technology in this sector was largely fixed in the medium term. The upshot was that energy should be understood as a complementary good to the production process, and that its price be kept as low as possible to reduce costs, above all for exporters competing abroad.Footnote 51 As late as 1975, Schneider argued that “a deliberate reduction of energy consumption,” the policy espoused by Eppler, “must reduce economic growth and capital investment.”Footnote 52 In his view, the state should not manipulate price relationships to encourage conservation or innovation, but instead develop a “procedural plan” that would provide “a quantitative vision of possible and—in consideration of the goals—desirable developments in the energy sector.” Wessels and Schneider hoped that this would “allow for a consistent orientation of private and public decision-makers” in the field of energy.Footnote 53
These assumptions about energy price inelasticity informed the forecasting models of the 1960s and early 1970s, when German economists began conducting long-range forecasts that looked a decade or more into the future. Their models opened new horizons for state planning.Footnote 54 In 1959 the government had commissioned a consortium of leading economic institutes to conduct West Germany's first energy forecasts: the EWI in Cologne, the Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung (DIW) in Berlin, and the Rheinisch-Westfällisches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung (RWI) in Essen. They all predicted a substantial increase in energy consumption through 1975, yet the actual course of energy usage would outpace their predictions.Footnote 55 Despite these inaccuracies, turbulence in the oil market heightened interest in predictions, and energy forecasting consequently became its own industry.Footnote 56 In 1971 the Economics Ministry tasked the EWI, DIW, and RWI with designing an energy crisis simulation model, and the following year it began working on Germany's first formal Energy Program, using forecasts by these institutes to map out future demand.Footnote 57
Using Wessels's and Schneider's assumptions, these institutes first extrapolated past trends into the future to predict very large increases in energy use.Footnote 58 The initial Energy Program estimated that total energy would rise from 354 million tons of coal equivalent (TCE) in 1972 to 610 by 1985, an annual rise of 4.3 percent that roughly paralleled the growth rate they expected for the economy as a whole.Footnote 59 Though these figures seemed convincing at first, the recession led to a slump in energy consumption by 1974, which meant that the Economics Ministry had to revise its program while the advisory institutes began exploring different forecasting methods.Footnote 60
The second revision in 1977 incorporated these new methods, though the forecasts still kept price change outside the model and continued to predict substantial increases in energy consumption.Footnote 61 As they had in 1973, the EWI, DIW, and RWI provided the calculations, though this time they used an input-output model to represent West Germany's industrial structure.Footnote 62 This provided a snapshot of the economy that allowed them to assess how twenty-two sectors used inputs. From this snapshot they projected energy demand into the future, sector by sector, to see how it would change if the economy as a whole were to grow by 4 percent annually. They assumed that little new technology facilitating energy savings would become available before the year 2000. To achieve this growth rate, they estimated that West Germany's total energy supply must expand by a third in the coming decade; nuclear energy would consequently have to expand sevenfold. Without such a nuclear expansion, Germany would suffer a “capacity gap” of 8,000 megawatts (MW) by 1985, and the “coverage of electricity shortages would be impossible.”Footnote 63 Based on their predictions, the institutes strongly supported investment in nuclear technologies, above all in the fast breeder.Footnote 64
The Economics Ministry was responsible for the Energy Programs, but it was not the only ministry commissioning forecasts. As Minister of Technology, Matthöfer worked closely with researchers at two nuclear institutes in Karlsruhe and Jülich, which predicted an even more dire energy gap. Whereas the EWI and the DIW remained largely agnostic about whether the world was running out of resources, these nuclear experts became apostles of impending disaster. They relied in their forecasting on computer simulation models developed in the United States, instead of on input-output tables, and the former had the potential for more alarming results.
Stefan Rath-Nagel, a researcher in Jülich, conducted an influential study for the BMFT in 1976 that used simulation models to predict West Germany's energy mix over the next fifty years. Rath-Nagel drew on methods that were pioneered by Jay Forrester, a professor of systems engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), to analyze nonlinear relationships in complex systems; these generated a neo-Malthusian prediction that global economic progress would come to an end because of resource constraints.Footnote 65 Rath-Nagel started from the same premises as Forrester, namely, that global population growth would persist, that the Third World would continue demanding more energy, and that fossil fuel prices would remain at their elevated 1974 levels. He assumed, furthermore, that West Germany's GDP directly determined its energy consumption—in other words, that the elasticity of energy with respect to GDP was one, and that there was little room to substitute labor or capital for energy. His model applied technological innovation only to energy production, not to energy consumption. As he argued in his conclusion, energy-saving technologies “cannot lead to a general solution to the energy problem.”Footnote 66 He claimed, for example, that energy demand among households would rise almost linearly as it had in the past, and that it would only begin to level off after having doubled.Footnote 67 Yet where Limits to Growth saw an end to growth, Rath-Nagel thought nuclear power could solve the energy paradox by “decisively chang[ing] our primary energy structure in the next ten to fifteen years.”Footnote 68 In his report to the BMFT he presented three scenarios, all of which required enormous amounts of nuclear power. Even his lowest scenario—based on 2 percent annual growth tapering to 0 percent after 2000—envisioned the Federal Republic using nuclear power for over half its needs by 2050.
In applying the newest modeling techniques from the United States, Rath-Nagel joined a group of “scientific entrepreneurs” advising the BMFT that was epitomized by Wolf Häfele, a student of the physicist–philosopher Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker.Footnote 69 Häfele became director of West Germany's fast breeder program and became known as a “reckless promoter” of this new technology.Footnote 70 He later moved to Laxenburg, Austria, where he led the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in creating a global energy model unprecedented in its complexity.Footnote 71 Häfele was as extreme in his dire predictions as he was in his utopian vision for nuclear technology: he predicted that current growth patterns would lead to a twenty-five-fold rise in global energy demand by 2050, and that Middle Eastern oil reserves would be exhausted within decades.Footnote 72
Like Rath-Nagel, Häfele believed “the necessary technology” to solve the world's energy problems was “already here,” namely, the fast breeder, which was still a high-risk concept in the 1970s.Footnote 73 Yet, despite a series of technical setbacks, Häfele believed that it would achieve commercial operation by the 1980s.Footnote 74 As he argued on countless occasions, the breeder was “not only an electricity producer but also a nuclear fuel factory,” because running it generated the plutonium necessary to kick-start new fast breeder capacity. By making its own fuel, the breeder differed qualitatively from other energy sources—even light water reactors—since it promised to make the price of fuel irrelevant to the cost of energy production. Pushing this logic to its fullest, Häfele argued that the breeder would decouple energy from resource supplies and make West Germany totally energy independent.Footnote 75
The breeder was only the start of Häfele's grand vision. West Germany would replace oil by deploying heat produced by nuclear reactors in order to synthesize gas from coal and generate entirely new industrial processes. Chemical plants would use nuclear heat to split water molecules into hydrogen, creating an unlimited source of fluid fuel to replace petroleum. Process heat would be transported through natural gas pipelines across Europe, allowing nuclear plants to be located in energy parks floating in the ocean and to “play the role of a natural gas field far away from applications.” All told, he claimed that it would take just sixty years for Europe to transition to an all-nuclear system.Footnote 76 To critics who raised the issue of nuclear safety, Häfele cavalierly responded that the potential benefits of unlimited energy demanded that society accept certain risks.Footnote 77
Häfele brought this optimism to the BMFT when he joined its advisory committee for Energy Research and Technology, which the government had created in 1975 to coordinate the government's research programs. Staffed with nuclear advocates like Häfele and industrial representatives, the committee became a “link between the federal government's energy program, on the one hand, and developments in industry, on the other hand.” It set the agenda for energy research and, in so doing, prioritized the development of “large-scale technologies.”Footnote 78 Here Häfele persuaded Matthöfer to accelerate funding for the high temperature reactors, as well as for the experimental breeder located in the town of Kalkar.Footnote 79
The 1977 Energy Debates
During the first half of the 1970s, experts worked with SPD leaders to justify an expansive nuclear energy policy by making specific assumptions about population growth, global resources, oil prices, and innovation. This regime spearheaded the two major policy developments of 1977: the BMFT's Second Energy Research Program and the Economic Ministry's Second Revision to the Energy Program. Whereas the former pushed the breeder and high temperature reactors, the latter—the initial draft of which appeared in March 1977—promoted nuclear power in order to underwrite the growth deemed necessary to avoid unemployment and finance social reforms.Footnote 80
During the mid-1970s this alliance came under intense criticism—first from the nascent Green movement, then later from within the SPD itself. The spark for this was the atomic power controversy. What began as local citizens’ initiatives protesting nuclear plants in 1974 had, by 1977, evolved into a national movement that successfully worked through the courts to impose a moratorium on all new and planned reactors.Footnote 81 From the standpoint of the SPD, this movement represented an alternative on the Left—and consequently a political threat, for this reason and for a variety of others. Since 1973 stalled social reforms had left many inside the SPD disgruntled. At the same time, members of the student movements of the late 1960s, never well integrated into the SPD in the first place, increasingly turned to the practical issues of nuclear power and ecology to try building a broader protest coalition.Footnote 82 More generally, new political fault lines were replacing the old owner-worker cleavages as young, educated, middle-class voters became increasingly interested in “nonmaterial” issues such as the environment.Footnote 83 The anti-nuclear protests wove these diverse groups into a new, national, and predominantly leftwing movement. In 1977 and 1978 the first Green electoral lists were put forth in local elections. By 1979 an estimated fifty thousand citizens’ initiative groups had formed. The following year these voting blocs merged into the Green Party, a new political force that challenged the “axiomatic link between the Left and the workers’ movement,” while demanding that Germans base their society on a low-growth, non-nuclear, conservationist economy.Footnote 84
The Green movement turned the SPD's rift over issues of growth and energy into an existential problem that was “closely tied to their future as a large popular party.”Footnote 85 Helmut Schmidt refused to accommodate the protest movement; he thought the passion for ecology was, at best, a “whim of bored, middle-class women”—at worst a danger for distracting attention from the pressing topic of unemployment.Footnote 86 Willy Brandt, by contrast, wanted to turn the SPD into a popular party that contained different viewpoints. In his view, the anti-nuclear protesters were the “SPD's lost children,” and he began warning as early as 1977 that this movement might coalesce into a new party. Like Eppler, he urged the SPD to “become a green party itself, to some extent.”Footnote 87 Thus, by 1977 the SPD had to address the nuclear issue head on, and it devoted major plenums to the question of energy throughout the year. Meanwhile, the Economics Ministry delayed the formal publication of its Second Revision—previously planned for the spring of 1977—until the SPD had resolved its internal divisions.Footnote 88
Matthöfer entered these party debates hoping to broker a compromise. In advance of its Energy Forum in Cologne that April, the SPD leadership had tasked Matthöfer with writing “guidelines” to serve as the starting point for discussion. He drew directly on the data and diagrams constructed by Häfele, Rath-Nagel, the EWI, and the DIW to argue that Germany's energy needs would be “hardly conceivable” without fast breeder or high-temperature reactors. Many of the figures generated by Rath-Nagel and Häfele appeared in the SPD's guidelines, which Matthöfer used to depict the looming exhaustion of global fossil fuels and the need for nuclear power. Alternative solutions such as energy savings would cost too much or need decades to mature technologically. Using data produced by the DIW, he concluded that, if a nuclear moratorium persisted, West Germany would face an “energy gap” of nearly 60 percent of its total needs.Footnote 89
The guidelines nevertheless encountered major resistance within the SPD, coming from some unexpected quarters. Three weeks before the forum in Cologne, the union leadership publicly declared its disagreement with the government over building more nuclear plants. Whereas Bonn wanted to push through new construction—after the Federal Reactor Security Commission and the Federal Radiation Commission had approved merely the technical feasibility of nuclear fuel disposal—the unions declared that they would only give their support after the courts had fully authorized building a fuel disposal and reprocessing site. To a certain extent, concerns about reactor safety motivated this call for more stringent building criteria. The union leadership was more concerned about employment, however, fearing that nuclear plant construction might not generate as many jobs as the construction of more coal plants.Footnote 90 Horst-Ludwig Riemer, the economics minister of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), West Germany's largest state, expressed a similar sentiment in March, when he used the logic of job creation to demand a radical prioritization of coal over nuclear power.Footnote 91 Thus, in early 1977, a traditional wing of the SPD rejected Matthöfer's guildlines and gave limited approval for “only as much nuclear power as is absolutely necessary for the security of our energy supply.”Footnote 92
If employment emerged as a leading issue in Cologne, the other main criticism was the revival of Eppler's quality-of-life argument. Eppler wanted to change the government's logic, according to which a certain level of employment required “X percent economic growth and therefore Y percent rise in energy consumption.” Instead, the SPD should, he argued, cultivate “technological advances that could both save energy and create new jobs.”Footnote 93 Here Eppler stumbled onto a recipe that could potentially unify the party: thinking of energy not as a complement to labor and capital but rather as a substitute. If saving energy could produce jobs instead of destroy them, as the conventional wisdom maintained, the SPD could promote energy savings to its working-class constituency.
Eppler found an ally in Cologne in Klaus Michael Meyer-Abich. After studying physics and philosophy under Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Meyer-Abich organized an interdisciplinary group on Environment, Society, and Energy at the University of Essen. Here he drew on the work of American scholars, above all that of Amory B. Lovins, to argue that energy demand was not demand for energy in itself, but rather demand for the services provided by energy. As he memorably remarked in Cologne, no one “demands oil. Oil stinks, oil is flammable and dangerous; no one actually wants oil”: what people want are the heated rooms or the moving cars made possible by oil. Instead of trying to produce more energy, West Germany should use its existing supply more efficiently.Footnote 94
Over the coming months, these criticisms snowballed, Eppler's wing gained momentum, and the SPD rejected Matthöfer's guidelines and demanded a moratorium on new nuclear plants. In June and September 1977, the governing FDP and SPD endorsed the stricter criteria for expanding nuclear power suggested by the unions.Footnote 95 Though he personally thought this would lead to higher unemployment, Matthöfer grudgingly accepted the SPD's change of course.Footnote 96 In the meantime, however, pro-nuclear groups began organizing a massive campaign that doubled down on the notion of an energy gap and on fears of unemployment to convince the government to continue its nuclear program. Since 1976 Kraftwerk-Union (KWU)—West Germany's largest nuclear firm—had been warning that a moratorium would lead to profit losses, layoffs, and energy shortfalls. They estimated that the construction of a single nuclear plant—ten of which were currently on order—directly employed 6,500 skilled workers, a figure reinforced by a DIW study claiming that the employment effects of a new coal and new nuclear plant were roughly equivalent.Footnote 97 In 1977 KWU sent a pro-nuclear petition signed by 135,000 people to Chancellor Schmidt. They followed with a widely circulated memorandum warning that the moratorium would destroy at least 170,000 jobs.Footnote 98 Buttressing these claims was an announcement that October, weeks before the SPD party congress, by West Germany's second largest nuclear firm, Brown, Boveri, and CIE AG, that the moratorium had forced it to make major layoffs. The climax came on November 10 when Adolf Schmidt—the leader of West Germany's Mining and Energy Union—organized pro-nuclear demonstrations in Dortmund.Footnote 99
This lobbying struck a chord. In early November the unions and the political leaders of NRW reversed course, accepting the government's lenient criteria for building reactors. Their highest priority was jobs. They accepted the arguments of KWU, as well as the government's forecast of a looming energy gap.Footnote 100 As the national union leadership argued in defense of its about-face, West Germany must maintain its “technical and scientific standard” in nuclear power because any setback would have “direct and irreparable effects on employment in the energy sector, as well as on the employment situation in general.”Footnote 101 At its party congress that November, the SPD leadership announced a similar turnaround, at least officially, conceding that Bonn should push ahead with nuclear construction.Footnote 102
On the surface, then, the 1977 debates seemed to reinforce the SPD's formal position that growth required nuclear power. Eppler's wing had failed to sway the party leadership: in part because it lacked the requisite expertise to show how energy-saving technology might generate more jobs than it destroyed, in part because it lacked forecasts articulating how West Germany could grow without more energy. Yet, in other ways, the year 1977 marked a turning point, revealing widespread discomfort by many within the SPD about the party's stance on energy and giving traction to Eppler's and Meyer-Abich's ideas. In retrospect, the SPD recognized this year as the moment when they “first changed course” on energy.Footnote 103 For one, the debates had forced the government to modify its Second Revision to the Energy Program, which it published that December: for the first time ever, the program did not set a specific target for nuclear power, instead leaving this open and conceding that atomic energy should only cover the “residual energy demand” that coal could not meet.Footnote 104
Just as important, the Second Revision conceded that West Germany must balance its energy needs not only by expanding supply but also by reducing demand, which it now elevated to an equal priority. Mounting calls within the SPD for energy savings contributed to this policy change. But so, too, did the failure of Bonn's previous two programs to change the structure of West Germany's energy supply: oil still accounted for 52 percent of total primary energy use in 1977, compared to 53 percent in 1970. In October 1977 the Council of Economic Experts suggested that Bonn pursue conservation by taxing energy to deter consumption—or, put differently, that Bonn raise the price of energy relative to other goods to reflect its scarcity more accurately. The theory supporting such tax and price manipulation was still in gestation, however. The government thought, moreover, that other states would not follow suit with a similar tax, and that such a policy would burden German exporters.Footnote 105
Given the weak economy, in other words, Bonn chose not to levy a general tax on energy in 1977. Instead it pursued conservation through subsidies, regulations, and specific taxes. It expanded the Energy Conservation and Residential Modernization Act of 1976 so that the state could not only enforce thermal efficiency standards for new buildings, but also encourage retrofitting in old ones as well; it devoted 4.35 billion deutschmarks (DM) to that end. It also subsidized 7.5 percent of the cost of new investments in heat-electricity cogeneration in power plants and 25 percent of the cost of new district heating infrastructure. It gave an additional 700 million DM in subsidies for reducing waste in electricity generation, and funded grants for the research and development of energy-saving technology totaling 465 million DM. And, for the first time ever, the revised program included concrete guidelines for shaping the energy consumption patterns of West Germans through a variety of information programs. The government secured commitments from appliance manufacturers to label the amount of energy used in their products, and from automobile producers to improve fuel economy. Finally, after some delay, it raised the tax on both heating oil and gasoline.Footnote 106
Partly as a result of these policies, the Federal Republic gradually began diverging after 1977 from the policies of other large, industrial countries by elevating energy conservation as a main priority. In the late 1970s the Federal Republic began receiving high marks from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) for its conservation policies.Footnote 107 To be sure, the United States had reduced energy consumption in the transportation sector by tightening automobile fuel standards and by imposing a fifty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit. But President Jimmy Carter's push for a comprehensive energy savings program in 1977 stalled in the face of opposition from Congress, as well as from labor and consumer groups, while his call for energy taxation was watered down beyond recognition. Meanwhile, the price controls on oil—introduced by Richard Nixon in 1971 and maintained until 1979—worked against conservation by reducing energy costs below their market value. Ronald Reagan subsequently dismantled most conservation policies after 1981.Footnote 108 France, for its part, put some effort into conservation in the late 1970s, but this was counteracted by lax tax and pricing policy on energy at the consumer level. The British government produced a White Paper on energy saving in 1977, but this restricted its recommendations to setting standards and encouraging research. More generally, British political leaders, particularly under Margaret Thatcher's lead, displayed a healthy skepticism about the effectiveness of energy conservation, while the rapid privatization of energy firms after 1986 undergirded a state policy that aimed to keep energy prices as low as possible.Footnote 109
New Experts, New Ideas
The debates of 1977 also spurred the SPD-led government to initiate a new research agenda. As Matthöfer noted that summer, “In determining our new energy policy, we must more closely and methodically investigate the relationship between economic growth, energy demand, and jobs.”Footnote 110 After 1977 the BMFT commissioned a series of studies dedicated to these very questions. In doing so, it nurtured the new experts who would eventually undermine the conventional understanding of growth and energy.
Government forecasts and their underlying assumptions came under attack first. In September 1977 Robert Dickler, an American scholar at the University of Bremen, publicly questioned in Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, a leading policy journal, the methods used by the government's advisors. An economic historian, Dickler had trained at the University of Pennsylvania and helped bring American economic theory across the Atlantic.Footnote 111 In early 1977 the BMFT invited him to coorganize a conference on energy, at which new experts began criticizing the models used by Rath-Nagel, Häfele, and the DIW for massively exaggerating future energy consumption.Footnote 112 Dickler pointed out how the analysis pioneered by Forrester—the technique that had inspired Rath-Nagel—had come under criticism in America for disregarding processes that could affect a system's development over time. As William Nordhaus, an economist at Yale University, argued, models like those used in Limits to Growth allowed for “no technical progress, no new discovery of resources, no way of inventing substitute materials, no price system to induce the system to substitute plentiful resources for scarce resources.”Footnote 113 Rath-Nagel's simulations, for instance, did not incorporate price or technological change. This appeared most glaringly in his discussion of household heating. In fact, new insulation technologies were already coming into use and household living spaces were already leveling off. By Dickler's reckoning, Rath-Nagel had overestimated household energy demand by at least 15 percent.Footnote 114
Dickler likewise demonstrated how the DIW's input-output method was incapable of dealing with changes in prices or technology. Input-output tables are static, giving a snapshot of goods flowing through the economy at a particular moment. In these snapshots, the ratio of inputs used by a given sector remain fixed. By assuming a static and proportional relationship between, for example, overall demand for steel products and the oil used as an input by the steel industry, such models did not account for the possibility that steel producers might substitute coal for oil if the price of the latter increased. The DIW's input-output model did not, in other words, capture how the mixture of energy inputs might change as prices changed. Yet such changes were already underway and would accelerate in the future. The DIW, for example, had based its 1977 forecasts on an input-output model from 1972, the ratios of which had shifted after the OPEC oil price hike.Footnote 115 Scholars in the United States were developing methods to add price and technological dynamism to systems analyses and input-output tables, but such methods had yet to find resonance in West Germany.Footnote 116 As a result, Bonn's energy forecasts had an inbuilt bias to overshoot the mark. Dickler concluded that West Germany suffered less from an energy gap than from a “research gap,” a point with which Matthöfer eventually concurred.Footnote 117
Second, prevailing assumptions about energy inelasticity also came under criticism. Before the 1970s scholars had used aggregate trends from the 1950s and 1960s to conclude that the elasticity of energy with respect to GDP was basically one. Yet new studies showed that, if one looked at individual years, the elasticity of energy with respect to GDP had fluctuated a great deal since 1945, falling as low as 0.44 in the late 1950s and rising as high as 2.1 during the 1960s.Footnote 118 This variation was even greater when examining particular industries instead of the economy as a whole. Furthermore, when looking at the elasticity of energy with respect to price—instead of to GDP—it became increasingly clear that firms were actually substituting other inputs for energy, and that energy was thus quite elastic in this sense. In response to the oil price hikes of 1973, for example, the iron, steel, nonferrous metals, cement, and glass sectors had all substantially decreased the amount of petroleum and energy they used, replacing this with more capital in the form of machinery.Footnote 119
Third, the new research questioned the notion that energy savings was inherently in conflict with employment.Footnote 120 In its various Energy Programs, the Economics Ministry had assumed that energy use generated employment—i.e., that energy complemented labor—and that regulations to encourage energy saving would reduce jobs.Footnote 121 Yet between 1977 and 1980, numerous studies illustrated how energy and labor could act as substitutes. Sectors that were the most energy intensive, for example, tended to employ the fewest number of people.Footnote 122 Other studies suggested that the act of applying energy saving technologies—retrofitting houses with better insulation, for instance—would itself generate new, local jobs, and that energy savings could be a viable employment strategy.Footnote 123
As a result of these new findings, a wave of scholarly and popular works began arguing that decoupling was possible by using price as a guiding instrument.Footnote 124 They suggested that the government should sustain a high energy price to nudge firms and households to apply technologies that would conserve energy. This strategy emerged from the theory of price-induced innovation, a concept first proposed in 1932 by John Hicks, who argued that “a change in the relative prices of the factors of production is itself a spur to invention, and to invention of a particular kind—directed to economizing the use of a factor which has become relatively expensive.”Footnote 125 Though this theory flourished in the 1960s, it was difficult to integrate into neoclassical growth models, which meant that attention moved in other directions in the field of Anglo-American economics. But interest in induced innovation persisted among German-language scholars, spurred by the work of Carl Christian von Weizsäcker and later by the Swiss economist Hans Christoph Binswanger, who helped integrate these ideas into the debate on qualitative growth.Footnote 126 In response to charges that higher energy prices would hurt the economy, Meyer-Abich's group argued that price increases would have to be extraordinarily large to harm overall output or employment since, on average, energy consumption amounted to just 4–6 percent of firms’ total costs. In his groundbreaking study from 1979—Energieeinsparung als neue Energiequelle—Meyer-Abich concluded that, through the diffusion of existing technologies and best practices, and through tax strategies that raised the price of energy, West Germany could reduce total energy use by 13 percent by 1985 without slowing the economy.Footnote 127
Over time, this new research began to sway some of the older experts, the most important of whom was Hans Karl Schneider. Schneider participated in numerous conferences where the new research had shown how different combinations of energy, labor, and capital could provide the same level of energy services.Footnote 128 Schneider thought that implementing energy saving at any price was “not a politically acceptable solution,” but by 1980 he came out in favor of moderately increasing energy prices through taxation.Footnote 129 As he noted at the time, the “recent oil and energy price hikes have already unleashed a powerful innovative potential.” Augmenting this price trend through energy taxes would not only encourage firms to substitute other inputs for energy, but would also “likely give impulse to technological innovation in energy utilization, energy conversion, and energy production.”Footnote 130
To give a name to their new paradigm, the new experts adopted a framing technique first developed by scholars in the United States: the “hard” versus “soft” energy dichotomy. Amory B. Lovins, a physicist and representative of the Friends of the Earth in the United States, had coined the hard-soft energy distinction in 1976, and his ideas found fertile ground in West Germany.Footnote 131 In studies commissioned by the BMFT, begun in the late 1970s and published between 1981 and 1986, Meyer-Abich collaborated with economists and legal scholars to apply Lovins's dichotomy to the German context.Footnote 132 They traced two potential scenarios: a “hard” path based on extensive energy use and nuclear power, and a “soft” path based on energy savings and solar technologies. Both, they claimed, could provide the same level of energy services in terms of houses heated and GDP produced. Yet over time, the two paths would diverge radically in their form. They likened the former to a revolution that would pass a point of no return and create a new economic style dependent on closed-door, top-down planning that would entrench a corporatist alliance among government, big labor, and big business. Investment would go to large energy firms, which would, in turn, lead to new heights of concentration in the economy. The soft path, by contrast, relied on technology with a low barrier to entry, which households and small firms could use to achieve the same end energy services. Investment would be decentralized, going to the Mittelstand (the theory was that the low barrier to entry would allow middle-class individuals and firms to adopt these technologies, not just big firms with huge amounts of capital). As a consequence, the soft path would perpetuate a more competitive economy that would avoid extreme concentrations of economic and political power.Footnote 133 Meyer-Abich concluded that the soft path represented the more “socially compatible” system—or Sozialverträglichkeit, a term he developed in 1976 to describe the extent to which a given technology fit or conflicted with society's existing “values, general principles, and needs.”Footnote 134
The soft path was a highly stylized rendition of West Germany's potential future, and, in many ways, as utopian as the visions of Häfele. Yet its importance lay less in charting an accurate future than in providing the language to discuss a different relationship among growth, energy, and society. In bringing new evidence, new arguments, and new categories of analysis such as “social compatibility” to the debate, this research made it possible to imagine how West Germany could go off nuclear power without descending into the employment and energy catastrophes prophesied by the government's more traditional advisors.
Just as important, these ideas would prove immensely appealing to SPD leaders, offering a way to bridge the gap between Eppler's ecological wing and the pro-growth, pro-employment unions. By arguing that labor and capital could substitute for energy, the new research suggested that exiting nuclear power and a focus on energy savings need not cost jobs but might, in fact, create them. They also provided a way for the SPD to differentiate itself from the Greens by solving the energy paradox through the market: for while the Greens employed similar terminology as that used by the new energy experts, the thrust of their own argument was much different. Experts like Meyer-Abich wanted to save capitalism from its own ecological and energy problems, much like John Maynard Keynes had wanted to rescue capitalism from its own financial crises. By contrast, the dominant wing of the Green Party in 1980—radical-ecologists and eco-socialists—thought that “ecological crisis will bring about the end of capitalism.”Footnote 135 While one faction of the Greens advocated qualitative growth similar to that espoused by Eppler, others favored radical austerity and self-limitation to reduce humanity's ecological footprint. For the most radical among them, such as East German émigré Rudolf Bahro, the workers of the global north were actually the problem, “the worst exploiting class in history” for the sheer quantity of energy they consumed.Footnote 136 In the estimation of Bahro and others, private ownership and profit blocked meaningful economic change; solving West Germany's energy and ecological dilemmas required nothing less than a total “renovation” of society.Footnote 137 In 1980 the Green electoral program called for dismantling large firms, breaking apart megacities, and ending assembly line production: only dramatic change would end the “dictatorship of the energy socket.”Footnote 138
New Ideas Spread
The ideas of Meyer-Abich and his allies made only limited headway before 1982. In 1979 the SPD reaffirmed its commitment to nuclear power, though just barely.Footnote 139 The government continued to use planning and the traditional forecasters, publishing its Third Revision to the Energy Program in 1981. Moreover, after the second OPEC crisis of 1979, Bonn pushed forward with nuclear construction and streamlined power plant licensing procedures, while in 1982 the courts approved new nuclear plants for the first time in four years.Footnote 140
The new ideas encountered resistance from advocates of the older paradigm at the nuclear research institutes in Jülich and Karlsruhe, as well as from a variety of political leaders, government officials, and interest groups. The former criticized the soft path as a “left-wing utopia” or “dictator of Puritanism” that would lead to higher labor costs, excessive demands on the capital market, greater vulnerability to energy crises, and unwarranted intervention in personal freedom.Footnote 141 The latter, which included the oil industry, the Bundesbank, export sectors, and most of the CDU, were concerned that such a path might harm West Germany's global competitiveness. The oil industry continued to claim that energy was inelastic, and, consequently, that the price mechanism was “not an adequate inducement for effective savings.” The Bundesbank argued that no one could predict what the optimal price level should be going forward, and that price manipulation would thus lead to a “misallocation of resources.”Footnote 142 But it was above all the chemistry industry, the biggest energy consumer in West Germany and also one of the nation's largest export sectors, that pushed back most energetically against the new research, with support from the CDU and also from Chancellor Schmidt. In his presentation of the Third Revision, Schmidt clung to the old paradigm, maintaining that, “if energy costs in the Federal Republic rise over the long term more rapidly than those of our rivals on the global market, then our competitiveness, stability, growth, employment, and living standard will be adversely affected.”Footnote 143
Two events helped spread the new energy ideas, however. First, the circle of experts around Meyer-Abich published their work at the very moment when West Germany's energy consumption was reaching an inflection point and leveling off. By the early 1980s, it was increasingly clear that what some thought was just a temporary stagnation in energy use was, in fact, turning into a structural plateau. New data revealed just how much the government had overestimated energy consumption in the 1970s, thus reinforcing the accuracy of the new ideas about decoupling.Footnote 144 In addition, the new regulatory framework and the growing complexity of nuclear plants dramatically raised the cost of electricity generated by atomic power. These cost increases affected the fast breeder project, just as one of the reasons for developing the breeder in the first place—the high price of uranium—had evaporated following the collapse of the market for fissile materials.Footnote 145 To the benefit of the new energy elite, it became apparent to all, by the middle of the 1980s, that the forecasts of Häfele did not reflect real developments in the economy.
Second, the new experts gained momentum from the first parliamentary inquiry (Enquete) into nuclear power, published in June 1980. In response to the 1977 debates, the government had called for an investigation into the fast breeder, subsequently expanding the investigation to include the effect of energy technology on society in general.Footnote 146 Both the composition of the Enquete's advisory group and the questions it posed accelerated the rise of the new experts. The advisers included not only those whom the government conventionally consulted but also new ones like Meyer-Abich. Moreover, the Enquete's questions drew directly on the new paradigm, thus giving the latter a new legitimacy. The Enquete, for example, was to give a recommendation not only about the breeder but also about the effects that different energy technologies had on social life. And the criteria used to judge Germany's options included Meyer-Abich's concept of social compatibility alongside economic viability, compatibility with international norms, and environmental sustainability.Footnote 147
The Enquete presented four potential pathways, each predicated on different assumptions about growth, structural change, and energy savings. The key point was how the committee itself interpreted these scenarios. Its members ruled out the first and fourth scenarios as politically or socially infeasible. The former mapped out a future where the breeder and high-temperature reactors were used, and where energy-saving technology remained largely unutilized. In the committee's estimation, this path simply consumed too much energy. The latter, which charted the effects of a total exit from nuclear power and which represented policies advocated by the Green movement, demanded too radical a social change.Footnote 148 What is remarkable, and what illustrated most the broad change of opinion underway, were the common assumptions informing the two middle paths eventually recommended by the commission. Both envisioned significant energy savings. The major difference was the use of nuclear power, which reflected a division in the advisory group. The Enquete consequently recommended that Bonn delay any formal decision on nuclear power until 1990 and instead, “in the 1980s, pursue a policy that applies a fair and rational mediation between the two paths and that can therefore be supported by advocates of both paths.”Footnote 149
The Enquete had major consequences for West German energy policy and for the SPD in particular. For the first time ever, a government-sanctioned forecast flatly contradicted the predictions of the 1970s and claimed that an alternative to nuclear power was within reach. The Enquete legitimized the calculations and concepts of government critics by formally presenting their ideas as scenarios. Finally, it undermined arguments about energy supply inherently needing to grow to meet West Germany's economic needs.Footnote 150
The Enquete's findings came out just as the rift within the SPD was reaching its greatest extent. The raging debate in 1981 over stationing medium-range nuclear weapons in the Federal Republic sharpened the divide between the followers of Chancellor Schmidt and the supporters of Eppler—a division that reinforced the existing disagreements over energy, growth, and ecology. In October 1981 Brandt openly questioned the party's working-class identity, arguing that it needed to integrate the ecological movement into the SPD—or otherwise risk losing the youth vote. When large numbers of protestors marched through Bonn the following month, Brandt's fears seemed vindicated.Footnote 151
The ensuing debate played out against the backdrop of West Germany's highest unemployment rate since 1950. Brandt and Eppler nevertheless saw in the dire employment figures a window of opportunity to unite the party around an ecological agenda. As the price of oil fell, eventually to very low levels, it killed the technological vision that had bound together the “coal union-atomic alliance” of the late 1970s. Eppler hoped that this would convince the unions to drop their support for nuclear power.Footnote 152 The party could only save itself, he argued, when it “realizes that choosing growth based on an ecological standpoint is in the interest of the working class.”Footnote 153 Energy savings, he argued at the SPD's Berlin party congress in 1982, would be a lynchpin, for “it is simpler, cheaper, less dangerous, less intricate, above all more environmentally friendly, and it creates more jobs to curtail energy consumption rather than exploiting new sources of energy. It is as simple as that.”Footnote 154
In making his case, Eppler collaborated with a younger SPD leader, Volker Hauff, who had taken over the BMFT from Matthöfer in 1978 and, in 1981, become Minister for Transportation and, with Eppler, co-chair of the SPD's new Ecological Committee.Footnote 155 Hauff agreed with Eppler that the SPD's central problem revolved around “implementing policies on the basis of social democratic goals that bring existing social stability into harmony with the ecological needs of the future.”Footnote 156 As Minister for Technology, Hauff had sponsored numerous energy conferences where he found the new ideas useful insofar as they could further this political harmonization. Following the Three-Mile Island nuclear accident in Pennsylvania in 1979, Hauff moved away from atomic energy and adopted the language of Meyer-Abich, arguing that “energy savings will be the most important energy source of the future and the main political task for the next two decades.”Footnote 157 He also moved away from his previous interest in planning and “forced energy savings,” instead proposing that the government use pricing and taxation to provide an incentive for consumers to reduce energy use and to stimulate firms to adopt savings technologies.Footnote 158 As he outlined in negotiations with the FDP in 1982, “through taxes on individual energy types, we can accelerate the necessary structural change in the energy economy and promote processes of substitution.”Footnote 159 Finally, the new research allowed Hauff to argue against nuclear power on the basis of jobs and growth: according to his figures, the ecology and energy savings sectors had generated a quarter million new jobs since 1971. Fearing that West Germany was suffering an “innovation gap,” as its traditional export sectors faced increasing competition from developing nations, Hauff proclaimed energy savings and environmental protection technologies to be the “new growth sectors” for German exporters—“a market for billions [of deutschmarks].”Footnote 160
At first the reform efforts of Eppler and Hauff failed to make headway in the SPD. The party was rocked to its core in late 1982 when the debate over nuclear missiles split its coalition with the FDP, which joined the CDU in a constructive vote of no confidence that forced Chancellor Schmidt to resign. This was a massive defeat for a party that had governed West Germany for only thirteen of the nation's thirty-three-year history. The SPD's dire status only worsened when the Greens achieved a major electoral surprise in early 1983, winning enough votes to enter the Bundestag for the first time. The formerly triumphant, left-wing, working-class, reformist party of the 1960s and 1970s now seemed to be heading for redundancy as the Greens claimed their own vision for the Left.Footnote 161
Political defeat nevertheless led to an intense period of internal reform, during which Hauff's and Eppler's views spread through the party. This reform paralleled a broadening of the national debate about ecology during the early 1980s, a period marked by rising anxiety about environmental disasters and pollution. During the first half of the decade, an ecological sensibility spread beyond the groups that had advocated environmental protection in the 1970s, as forest blight, the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy in India, and eventually climate change gripped the public's attention. In 1986 Ulrich Beck captured these concerns with the publication of his widely ready Risikogesellschaft (Risk Society), which argued that West Germany was entering a new era characterized less by questions of wealth allocation than by the problem of managing the risks generated by industrial society.Footnote 162
As the main oppositional party after 1982, the SPD was better situated than the CDU to make such ecological concerns central to their platform. To be sure, coal remained a pillar of their energy agenda. With the collapse of the coal-nuclear alliance, the immediate fix for questions of energy independence could only come through the construction of more coal-fired power plants, which the SPD supported for the sake of jobs in the Ruhr region—and which West Germany continued to build.Footnote 163 In its long-term vision, however, the SPD changed course on energy. As older party leaders like Schmidt lost influence and a younger generation assumed key positions, the SPD admitted that it had overestimated the amount of energy needed for growth.Footnote 164 Already by 1982 a majority of delegates favored a full exit from nuclear power.Footnote 165 But more changes soon followed. Here Hauff played a pivotal role, teaming up with the economist Hans Christoph Binswanger to show how economic development and ecological preservation should be seen not as opposites but as complements. Hauff and Binswanger designed plans for a general tax on energy to stimulate savings and innovation, and to fund investments that would lower the cost of labor and create new, ecologically oriented jobs.Footnote 166 Under Hauff's initiative, the SPD would accept the “soft” pathway by the middle of the 1980s. In its Program for the Ecological Modernization of the Economy, which Hauff first presented to the party in June 1985, and which was adopted the following year, the SPD gave “unconditional priority to energy savings” and demanded the “creation of an energy-economic infrastructure that mixed centralized, large plants (read: coal power) with decentralized, small plants,” as well as a “socially and environmentally compatible energy supply without atomic power.”Footnote 167 At the party's Dortmund Congress in 1985, this framework received the seal of approval when West Germany's two largest unions—IG Metall and IG Chemie—signed on.Footnote 168 As the party declared in its new framework, “the old thesis, that economic growth can only go hand-in-hand with high energy consumption, lost its validity a long time ago.”Footnote 169
Conclusion
On April 26, 1986, the nuclear reactor in Chernobyl suffered a meltdown that sent a radioactive cloud across Europe. Panic spread through West Germany and the public condemned the government in Bonn for downplaying the extent of the disaster. As SPD chairman Hans-Jochen Vogel remarked after the crisis, “nothing is as it was before.”Footnote 170 Historians have largely accepted this statement, seeing Chernobyl as a caesura that fundamentally changed West Germany's approach to nuclear power and energy.
To some extent this holds true. Yet a more important turning point had already happened: Chernobyl only galvanized public and political opinion to pivot to a new energy paradigm that had already been erected over the previous decade. In a fourteen-year period that began with one energy crisis and ended with another, a new set of ideas rose to predominance suggesting that West Germany could decouple growth from energy consumption through pricing policies that stimulated conservation. A group of new experts undermined confidence in long-range energy planning, challenged the need for nuclear power, and claimed that West Germany could revamp its energy system through market policies.Footnote 171
This paradigm did not take hold in the United States, Great Britain, or France with anything near the intensity it did in the Federal Republic. These large countries all responded to the energy challenges of the 1970s by prioritizing growth of their energy supply. In the United States, expanding supply became a “central theme in US politics” that crossed party lines, while the government “never demanded that Americans pay a price that reflects the full costs of the energy they consume.”Footnote 172 Great Britain and France likewise responded to the oil shocks by focusing on supply, though following the rise of climate change as an international issue in the 1990s and 2000s, they have turned more aggressively toward energy conservation.Footnote 173 In pursuing two responses to the developments of the 1970s—nuclear power and energy savings—Germany was not abnormal, but it was unusual that the latter option won out. This divergence first appeared in the conservationist policies of the Second Revision in 1977 and in West Germany's energy forecasts in the 1980s, which fell more than those of any other OECD nation, as low or stagnant energy growth became the new normal prediction.Footnote 174 Over time it moved from the realm of forecasts to reality: after the depth of the second oil crisis had passed, total primary energy consumption declined in the Federal Republic by 4 percent between 1982 and 2000, while it increased by 14 percent in both Great Britain and France, and 35 percent in the United States.Footnote 175 Indeed, while the United States, Great Britain, and France all saw energy consumption rise to new heights during the 2000s, the Federal Republic never again came even close to its peak year of consumption in 1979.Footnote 176
That West Germans began rethinking the relationship between energy and growth during a period of crisis illustrates a larger point, namely, that moving from one economic paradigm to another requires a conjuncture of events and is highly dependent on political power constellations.Footnote 177 Over the course of the twentieth century, experts have become more involved in policy-making because of their ability to help decision-makers manage uncertainty by constructing understandable narratives, about social or physical processes. On the one hand, when crises disrupt established narratives, they make traditional experts more valued for their ability to offer a causal interpretation of events. On the other hand, crises create openings for new experts to enter the field and potentially redefine policy alternatives—an act one scholar has called “the supreme instrument of power.”Footnote 178 Yet, the mere existence of different expertise is not enough to legitimize new policies; politicians or social groups must also find use in them, for, in many cases, the new ideas generate resistance. Thus, while the effectiveness of a theory in explaining processes can certainly affect its political success, the adoption of a new paradigm depends intensely on power relations as well.Footnote 179
Party politics explains how and why the new energy ideas spread in West Germany. Indeed, they only gained traction there because they served a clear political purpose: enabling the SPD to respond to the Green movement. The new energy paradigm helped the party complete the transformation it had begun in 1959 from a Marxian socialist party into one that was market-oriented and that reached beyond the traditional industrial working classes. When Chernobyl struck, in other words, the SPD adopted ideas that could harness the population's growing desire for ecological and energy reform, while still sustaining economic growth. Volker Hauff led the charge, publishing his popular book Energie-Wende immediately after the catastrophe in an effort to claim for his party the mantle of energy leadership.Footnote 180 Drawing on the ideas of Meyer-Abich, Hans Christoph Binswanger, and the reformed Hans Karl Schneider, SPD leaders rooted the party's new energy strategy in the market after 1986.Footnote 181 Price, they argued, was “the most effective instrument to further advance the decoupling of economic growth and energy consumption.”Footnote 182 Energy prices should be raised to create “an incentive for environmental concern, energy savings, and rational energy use.” The main tool to do this should be an energy tax, which would not only “achieve a more environmentally and energy conscious behavior among consumers,” but also nudge firms to substitute labor for energy. The SPD intended, moreover, to use tax proceeds to “implement a further reduction of the wage and income tax,” thereby lowering the cost of labor to employers and stimulating them toward substitution.Footnote 183
The SPD took the new ideas about decoupling mainstream, for before Chernobyl the Green Party had yet to lose its low-growth sensibility. But by the end of the 1980s, most of West Germany's political establishment had gravitated toward these views, and decoupling became the ultimate, if still far-off, goal pursued by all parties. The Green Party underwent its own transformation after 1986, as the radical ecologists and the eco-socialists lost influence and the party jettisoned its revolutionary solution to the energy paradox.Footnote 184 Even the CDU came to see decoupling and energy savings as a long-term goal, though for different reasons.Footnote 185 The spread of these ideas culminated in the ecological tax of 1999–2000—an often overlooked but crucial component of Germany's current energy policy—whereby the SPD-Green coalition intended higher energy prices to shape consumer behavior and provide an impulse to innovation.Footnote 186 The coalition used the tax revenues on energy to lower pension contributions from employees and employers, and thus the cost of labor. In doing so, it made energy taxes the third largest income source for the Federal Republic and gave Germans some of the most expensive electricity and gasoline in the world.Footnote 187 Small northern European countries like Finland and Denmark had already implemented such taxes in the 1990s, but in the year 2000, Germany became the world's first large industrial economy to pass a general energy tax.Footnote 188
As the new energy paradigm gained momentum, West Germany's era of atomic expansion came to a close: the last light water reactor was commissioned in 1982; the last one built on West German territory was finished in 1987. For the public and the political elite, nuclear power had become a transitional energy source at best, an anathema at worst. By the late 1980s no political party espoused the construction of new nuclear plants as a solution to Germany's energy paradox.Footnote 189 That technology had lost its place in the German imagination as the wave of the future, to be replaced by the vision—perhaps also a utopia—of decoupling and energy conservation.
