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The government will “take every measure to absolutely guarantee the safety of the treated water and address misinformation,” he said, noting that the cabinet would meet again within a week to decide on the details for carrying out the plan.

Ten years later, the cleanup is far from finished at the disabled plant, which is operated by the Tokyo Electric Power Company. To keep the three damaged reactor cores from melting, cooling water is pumped through them continuously.

There are now about 1.25 million tons of wastewater stored in more than 1,000 tanks at the plant site. The water continues to accumulate at a rate of about 170 tons a day, and releasing all of it is expected to take decades.

But the Japanese government’s plan faces strong opposition from local officials and fishing crews, who say that it would add to consumer fears about the safety of Fukushima seafood.

Responding to Japan’s decision, the U.S. State Department said in a statement, “In this unique and challenging situation, Japan has weighed the options and effects, has been transparent about its decision, and appears to have adopted an approach in accordance with globally accepted nuclear safety standards.”

Still, most Japanese had come to terms with nuclear power, viewing it as an inevitable part of the energy mix for a resource-poor country that must import about 90 percent of the materials it needs to generate electricity.

“Utilities and the government and us nuclear experts kept saying, ‘Don’t worry, there won’t be a serious accident,’” said Tatsujiro Suzuki, director of the Research Center for Nuclear Weapons Abolition at Nagasaki University. Now “people think that the industry is not trustworthy and the government that is pushing the industry is not trustworthy.”

Almost 2,500 of the huge radioactive tubes are sitting in temporary facilities in Aomori and Ibaraki Prefectures, waiting to be lowered 1,000 feet beneath the earth’s surface into vast underground vaults

The central government has tried to incentivize local governments to volunteer for consideration by offering a payment of around $18 million for taking the first step, a literature review. Those that go on to the second stage — a geological study — will receive an additional $64.4 million.

The government says it would make small releases over 30 years with no impact on human health. Fishermen in Fukushima say that the plan would wreck their long journey toward recovery.

Critics of nuclear power in Japan frequently point to the decades of failure to find a solution to the waste problem as an argument against restarting the country’s existing reactors, much less building new ones.

“Every normal person in town is thinking about it,” said Toshihiko Yoshino, 61, the owner of a seafood busines

Many in the town were initially opposed, he said during an interview in his office, but the project has delivered handsome returns. The town has spent the profits from selling electricity to pay off debts. T

The plan has fiercely divided the town. Reporters have flooded in, putting the discord on national display.

In October, an angry resident threw a Molotov cocktail at Mr. Kataoka’s home. It broke a window, but he smothered it without any further damage.

The plant's operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), says that by around next summer it will run out of space to build new tanks to hold the accumulated 1.25 million tons of wastewater. Critics argue that the government could acquire more land to build storage tanks.

Another problem, Fukakusa adds, is that "TEPCO and the government said the water just contains tritium, which cannot be separated from water. But it turned out that the water contains more radioactive materials. But they didn't disclose that information before."

arious models for tackling the pandemic are now being live trialled around the world

My conversations have convinced me that the British approach is rooted in scientific logic and a careful calibration of the different risks. I’m no epidemiologist so I won’t pretend to be a qualified judge of whether they are doing the right thing. I am persuaded that they are sincerely endeavouring to do the right thing.

“Germany, one of the strongest and most successful industry nations in the world, is taking huge steps toward leaving the fossil fuel era,” Finance Minister Olaf Scholz said at a news conference in Berlin.

Environmental organizations criticized the government plan for being too slow and for not expanding renewable energy sources quickly enough. “The majority of the necessary reductions are being pushed to the end of the 2020s,” said Christoph Bals, policy director for the environmental group Germanwatch.

Renewable energy is getting cheaper. Private investors are shying away from new projects. There is far greater awareness of the deadly particulate matter pollution that comes out of coal-fired power plants.Editors’ PicksA Meticulous Account of Trump’s Tenure Reads Like a Comic Horror StoryTech Bro Uniform Meets Margaret Thatcher. Disruption Ensues.Olivia Palermo Got a Lot Out of That InternshipAdvertisementContinue reading the main storyYet coal remains ascendant in some parts of the world, in part because it has been the go-to fuel for so long, it employs millions of people globally, and because the industry often enjoys robust political backing.

Eastern European countries, particularly Poland and the Czech Republic, still rely heavily on coal. The European Union this week created a €100 billion fund to aid their transition to cleaner fuels.

The Asia-Pacific is where coal continues to grow. China, which consumes half of the world’s coal, continues to build more coal plants at home and abroad. According to the International Energy Agency, China’s domestic coal demand is projected to keep growing for at least the next two years, before it levels off. China’s coal expansion puts its own climate targets at risk

And even as it reels from wildfires made more intense by climate change, Australia, one of the world’s biggest coal exporters, is digging for more, encouraged in part by the growing Asian market. Among the most contentious projects is a new $2 billion coal mine in the country’s northeast.

The U.S. government is lending its support to SMR development. In September, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for the first time issued a final safety evaluation report on a SMR—a critical step before a design can be approved—to NuScale

is developing its first commercial SMR for utilities in Utah and promising power by the end of the decade.

the Energy Department awarded $210 million to 10 projects to develop technologies for SMRs and beyond, as part of its Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program. The agency had already awarded $400 million to various projects since 2014 “to accelerate the development and deployment of SMRs,

. Potential buyers range from U.S. utilities trying to phase out coal-fired generators to Eastern European countries seeking energy independence.

GE’s second offering, a system now in development with nuclear startup TerraPower LLC, replaces water with molten salt, similar to what’s used in some advanced solar-power arrays. Dubbed Natrium, the system runs hotter than water-cooled reactors but at lower pressure and with passive cooling, which eliminates piping and electrical systems while improving safety, according to TerraPower CEO Chris Levesque.

“When you have a really elegant design, you can get multiple benefits working together,” Mr. Levesque says. TerraPower, established by investors including Bill Gates, received $80 million of the Energy Department funding for Natrium in October.

Greenpeace, the Union of Concerned Scientists and other advocacy groups argue that nuclear power remains a dangerous technological dead-end that causes as many problems as it solves.

Traditional reactors grew over time to achieve greater efficiencies of scale and lower cost per kilowatt-hour because power output rose faster than construction and operating costs. “There’s no reason that’s changed,” he says, dismissing SMR makers’ promises of lower costs and increased safety

Many proposed SMR expense reductions, such as less shielding, could ultimately increase their danger, while the combined use of several modules could create new safety risks like radioactive contamination that negate gains in individual modules, he says.

Mr. Ramana also says that the technological advances like 3-D printing and digital manufacturing that make SMRs possible are doing even more to improve green renewables. “It’s a kind of treadmill race, where one treadmill is going much faster.”

although SMRs have lower upfront capital cost per unit, their economic competitiveness is still to be proven.”

major upgrade of its previous commitment to reducing greenhouse gases, and necessary if the world hopes to keep a global temperature rise well below 2 degrees

Japan is the world’s fifth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases. It had previously said it would go carbon neutral “at the earliest possible date,” vowing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 205

Joseph R. Biden Jr., his challenger in the presidential election, has vowed to restore the United States’ participation in the accord.

reinforced just how much of an outlier the United States, the world’s second-largest carbon emitter

decision was most likely driven by a combination of domestic and external political pressures

As a developed nation, Mr. Kuramochi said, it would be “somewhat embarrassing for Japan to have a net zero emissions timeline later than China.”

he would harness the power of “innovation” and “regulatory reform” to transform the country’s energy production and usage

The country has made steady progress in reducing its emissions, but still generated 1.06 billion tons of the gas in the one-year period that ended in March 2019, placing it among the top 10 per capita emitters

By the early 2000s, Japan had made substantial progress in curbing carbon dioxide emissions through the use of nuclear power. But the meltdown of a nuclear power plant in Fukushima after a devastating earthquake and tsunami in 2011 led to a widespread shutdown of the country’s energy-producing reactors, which had generated roughly a third of Japan’s total power supply. Only a handful of the plants have since restarted.

Short on energy sources, Japan decided to reinvest in coal.

Japan currently plans to reduce — but not eliminate — its dependence on coa

The country has also vowed to end contentious government subsidies for the export of coal-fired power technology to developing nations, where the use of coal for electricity continues to rise

Further efforts to decrease Japan’s domestic commitment to coal will likely meet powerful resistance from Japanese industry, which is still heavily dependent on the fuel

Japan is already considering a substantial increase in its supply of wind and solar power, and it is also looking at newer, less-established technologies, such as plants that burn ammonia or hydrogen.

Mr. Suga said that Japan would continue to develop nuclear power with “maximum priority on safety,”

Movement toward the new goal had already started on the local level, where 150 municipal governments have pledged to be carbon neutral by midcentury.

But even if Japan achieves its goal, it will not by itself be enough to halt or even slow the current trend of global warming, a goal that requires a global effort

Preventing a climate catastrophe will require “a transformation of the energy system that has underwritten modern society,”

Japan will be carbon neutral by 2050, its prime minister said on Monday

The announcement came just weeks after China, Japan’s regional rival, said it would reduce its net carbon emissions to zero by 2060.

Does Japan even want an apology?

Likely not. A secret 2009 state department cable published by Wikileaks in 2011 indicated Japan was cool to the idea and worried that it would only serve to energize anti-nuclear activists in the country.

the government’s official stance was that it would be more meaningful for the U.S. and Japan to “aim for a peaceful and safe world without nuclear weapons.”

An apology also could harden the opposition to using nuclear power in Japan, a sentiment that blossomed after the meltdown at Fukushima. The administration has made nuclear power a major part of its energy policy.

“Why doesn’t the Japanese government want Mr. Obama to apologize? Because it tears the scab off a much bigger wound that Japan wants healed,”

“If Obama apologizes at Hiroshima, it draws attention to Japanese behavior elsewhere in Asia during the ’30s and ’40s.

I think the American people should know that not only the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the firebombing of Tokyo in which thousands died, were illegal acts against humanity. They were civilian massacres.”

A 2015 opinion poll by a Russian news agency found that 60% of the Japanese public wanted an apology for the bombing.

But what the Japanese government and the public want aren’t always the same.

“If the world is to cope with climate change, policymakers will need to pull every lever at their disposal,” he writes. “Faced with this threat, to indulge in the idea that central banks, as key agencies of the state, can limit themselves to worrying about financial stability … is its own form of denial.”

In England, by contrast, Carney has convened 33 central banks to investigate how to “green the financial system.” According to Axios, every powerful central bank is working with him—except for Banco do Brasil and the Fed.

Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, in 2015, in a speech which has subsequently received massive coverage—and he is a man, after all, absolutely of the global financial establishment—coined the idea of a climate Minsky moment. [Editor’s note: A Minsky moment is when an asset’s price suddenly collapses after a long period of growth.]

We would need [fossil-fuel assets] to be on the balance sheet of actors who were under huge pressure in a fire-sale situation and who couldn’t deal with a sudden revaluation. We would need an entire network of causation to be there, which is what produced the unique crisis of 2007 to 2008.

So imagine that we stay on our current path, and we’re headed toward 3 or 4 degrees’ [Celsius] temperature change. And then imagine some of the nonlinearities kick in, which the climate scientists tell us about, and we face a Fukushima-style event.

What happens next? You then get nervous democratic politicians—and not necessarily those who are known for their populism, but just nervous democratic politicians—suddenly deciding that we have to stop doing one or another part of our carbon-based economy. It has to stop, and it has to stop immediately. And then you get big shocks. Then you get sudden revaluations.

In other words, the success of the delaying tactics of the carbon lobby create a situation in which we’re then faced with the possibility of a sudden regulatory shock

“One-third of equity and fixed income assets issued in global financial markets can be classified as belonging to the natural resource and extraction sectors, as well as carbon-intensive power utilities, chemicals, construction, and industrial goods firms.”

Whether that will, in fact, ease the formation of majorities in Congress is another question. Because, after all, it does somehow have to get through the Senate, you know.

Germany is far, far more exposed. A huge slice of their economy is basically all about internal combustion engines, and so that number includes all of those stocks, for sure.

If we saw a huge shock to, say, European equity [exchange-traded funds], which were heavily in German automotive, that’s the sort of trigger that we might be looking at.

This is not simply a zero-sum game; this is a structural transformation that has many very attractive properties. There’s loads of excellent jobs that could be created in this kind of transition.There’s no reason why, even by conventional GDP-type metrics, it need even be associated with the kind of feel-bad factor of slow GDP growth. Then [you could] also link it to a revival of social democracy for the United States. From a progressive political point of view, that’s obviously extremely attractive.

there’s also a deeper view: that climate change is the situation within which all other politics will happen for the next several generations, at least.

ever since the 1990s that’s been the logjam on any serious American commitment.

When you look at a third of securities tied up in the carbon economy and the evidence for decoupling GDP growth from carbon emissions maybe not being as strong as we’d like, do you think the change that needs to happen is realistic?

Tooze: Realistic? No. I mean, depends what you mean by realism. The scale of the challenge requires a boldness of action for which there is no precedent. That’s the only good purpose that the war analogies serve

Meyer: In your piece, you write: “Those in the United States who call for a Green New Deal or a Green Marshall Plan are, if anything, understating the scale of what is needed.”

Do you think climate action needs to be larger than, say, the U.S. mobilization for World War II?

Tooze: Well, less large in absolute terms. Because even the U.S. was spending almost 40 percent of GDP on World War II. And if you’re the Soviet Union, you’re spending 55 to 60 percent in 1940. We don’t need to do anything like that. It needs to be much bigger than the New Deal, which in fiscal-policy terms was really quite trivial.

Crucially, what makes it totally unlike the war is that there’s no happy end. There’s no moment where you win and then everything goes back to the way it was before, but just better. That’s a misunderstanding

This isn’t crash dieting; this is a permanent change in lifestyle, and we need to love that and we need to live it and we need to own it and we need to reconcile ourselves to the fact that this is for us and for all subsequent generations of humans.

It isn’t just the oil and gas majors, because they wouldn’t get you to 30 percent. Exxon isn’t big enough to get you to that kind of percentage. It’s Exxon, and [the major automakers] Daimler and BMW, and the entire carbon-exposed complex.

all the really hard choices need to be made by people like China and India and Pakistan and Bangladesh and Indonesia

You don’t have that very much in Germany. There isn’t anyone in Germany saying, “Which bit of mid-20th-century history is this most like?,” mercifully. The one analogy that has popped up in Germany is reunification, which I actually think is quite a good one, because that’s still an ongoing problem

in the American case, it would be civil rights and Reconstruction, which isn’t a particularly optimistic comparison to draw. It’s an ongoing problem, it’s a deep historic problem, it only happened once, we still haven’t fixed it, and we’re not at peace.

Meyer: There’s a kind of shallow view of climate change: that it is something we need to avert or stop. And that’s somewhat true

furthermore—and much more fundamentally than any of those things—this isn’t really about America. I mean, America can be an obstacle and get in the way, but none of the really hard choices needs to be made by Americ

like Reconstruction or the civil-rights movement, it needs to be something that people take on like a moral commitment, in the same way they take on genocide prevention as a moral commitment

problems that we thought we’d fixed, like the Green Revolution and the feeding of the world population, for instance—totally not obvious that those fixes cope with the next 20 years of what’s ahead of us. The food problem that was such an oppressive issue globally in the 1970s may resurge in an absolutely dramatic way.

Meyer: Given all that, if Jerome Powell decided that he wanted to intervene on the side of climate action, what could he do? What could the Fed do?

Tooze: What I think the Fed should announce is that it enthusiastically supports the idea of a bipartisan infrastructure push focused on the American electrical network, first and foremost, so that we can actually hook up the renewable-generating capacity—which is now eminently, you know, realistic in economic terms. Setting a backstop to a a fiscal-side-led investment push is the obvious thing.

It is indeed a highly appropriate response to an environment of extremely low interest rates, and [former Treasury Secretary] Larry Summers & Co. would argue that it might help, as it were, to suck us out of the state of secular stagnation that we’re in.

another avenue to go down—for the Fed to take a role in helping develop a classification of green bonds, of green financing, with a view also to rolling out comprehensive demands for disclosure on the part of American firms, for climate risks to be fully declared on balance sheets, and for due recognition to be given to firms that are in the business of proactively preparing themselves for decarbonization.

You could, for instance, declare that the Fed views with disfavor the role of several large American banks in continuing to fund coal investment. Some of the carbon-tracking NGOs have done very good work showing and exposing the way in which some of the largest, the most reputable American banks are still in the business of lending to Big Coal. Banking regulation could be tweaked in a way that would produce a tilt against that.

the classic role of the Fed is to support government-issued debt. Insofar as the Green New Deal is a government-issued business, the Fed has just an absolutely historical warrant for supporting fiscal action.

with regards to the broader economy, the entire federal-government apparatus essentially stood behind the spread of home ownership in the United States and the promotion of suburbanization through the credit system. And kind of what we need is a Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for the energy transition.

if the question is, Is there historical warrant for the financial agencies of government in the United States biasing the property structure in the economy in a certain way?, the answer is emphatically yes—all the way down to the grotesque role of the New Deal financial apparatus in enshrining the racial segregation of the American urban space, with massive effects from the 1930s onward.

The idea of neutrality should not even be allowed in the room in this argument. It’s a question of where we want to be biased. If you look at QE, especially in the U.K. and the EU, it was effectively fossil-biased.

monetary policy is not neutral with regards to the environment. There’s no safe space here. The only question is whether you’re going to lead in the right way

Meyer: Last question. With any of this, is there a role for interested Americans to play if they are not particularly tied to the financial- or monetary-policy elite?

Tooze: Support your congressperson in doing exactly what AOC did in the hearings with Powell a couple of weeks ago

[Editor’s Note: Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked Powell whether inflation and unemployment are still closely connected, as the Fed has long argued.]

Applaud, follow with interest, raise questions. That’s exactly what needs to be happening. The politicization of monetary policy is a fact.

If we don’t raise these questions, the de facto politics is, more often than not, conservative and status quo–oriented. So this, like any other area, is one where citizens—whether they’re educated and informed or not—need to wise up, get involved, and follow the arguments and develop positions.

So applaud your congresspeople when they do exactly what AOC was doing in that situation. In many ways, I thought it was one of the most hopeful scenes I’ve seen in that kind of hearing in a long time.

Now investors, workers, and taxpayers are counting their losses from the green energy disaster.  E.on’s and RWE’s stocks  have lost 80 percent of their value from the old time highs, as the two companies have had to adjust their business model to the green policies. Workers have been losing their jobs, and taxpayers are in for billions of euros to cover the write off of nuclear plants—E.on and RWE have won lawsuits against government. As of German consumers, they pay one of the highest electricity rates in the developed world.

The public sector has failed to invest adequately or wisely, falling behind its peers in building infrastructure, especially the digital sort.

Penny-pinching is hard-wired into the state. In 2009, on Mrs Merkel’s watch, Germany hobbled itself with a constitutional amendment that makes it illegal to run more than a minute deficit. With interest rates so low, sensible governments ought to have been borrowing for investment, not fainting at the first spot of red ink.

Germany’s most severe domestic problem is a failure to reform its pension system. Germans are ageing fast, and the baby-boomers will place an even heavier burden on the budget later this decade as they retire

Germany has also been sluggish, and still emits more carbon per head than any other big EU country, not helped by Mrs Merkel’s shutdown of Germany’s nuclear industry after the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011.

The EU has not grappled sufficiently with the weakness of its indebted southern members. Only during the pandemic did it create a financial instrument that lets the EU issue jointly guaranteed debt, and dispense some of the cash as grants, rather than yet more loans.

Worse, the “stability” rules that will force countries back into austerity to shrink their stocks of debt are ready to revive, unless amended.

China is an increasingly challenging economic and strategic rival, Russia an unpredictable threat and America a distracted and uncertain ally.

Despite recent increases, it spends too little on defence. It cosies up to Beijing in the hope of better trading terms. It is giving Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, a chokehold over European energy supplies by backing the new Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline which, as it happens, makes landfall in Mrs Merkel’s own constituency.

Comfortable, cautious Germans seem uninterested in serious debate about the future. Crisis-management has become a substitute for initiative. Candidates have no incentive to highlight their country’s looming problems.

One is a coalition headed by Mrs Merkel’s party, the Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister-party (the CDU/CSU), led by Armin Laschet. The other is a coalition led by Olaf Scholz, of the Social Democrats (SPD), who is Germany’s finance minister. In either case, the coalition would be joined by the Greens and by the pro-business Free Democrats.

Sixteen years in power has been enough. The party has run out of ideas and drive, as its decision to choose the gaffe-prone and uninspiring Mr Laschet for chancellor makes clear. An affable lightweight, he has run a dismal campaign, and is predicted to lead his team to its worst result since the second world war. The polls say that Mr Scholz is preferred by twice as many voters.

The problem is that although he belongs to the business-friendly wing of his party, the SPD is stuffed with left-wingers.

They may try to drag him further in their direction than the Free Democrats will wear and enterprise can comfortably bear.

Of the EU’s 27 countries, only 13 produce nuclear power. Some ban it. France and Germany, the two countries that dominate EU policymaking, find themselves directly opposed

France generates over 70% of its power from nuclear reactors

How the EU is managing the decision reveals a lot about the club.

Franco-German engine sputtering on nuclear policy, unlikely alliances have formed. France and the likes of Poland and the Czech Republic are usually sparring partners.

Countries in eastern Europe see the French as protectionists who suck up to Russia

when it comes to nuclear power the two are firm pals. It is tempting to carve the EU into simple blocs,

Nuclear policy is a reminder that fates in the EU are bound together, whether the topic is energy, the environment or the economy

Germany has pledged to close all its nuclear power plants by 2022

Countries from Belgium to Bulgaria followed

scrapping plans to build nuclear power stations and pledging to switch others off

Nuclear power is another debate in which Paris gets its way.

the EU is a dealmaking machine, with consensus forged via a mix of bribery, blackmail and back-scratching.

Gas power is undergoing the same kinds of debate as nuclear power. While gas generates carbon emissions, it is cleaner than coal, argue its supporters.

If the politics are linked, so are the policy consequences

A likely compromise is that while stiff rules could remain for day-to-day spending, countries could be able to spend more freely in the name of the green transition. If nuclear power is labelled green in the private sector, it becomes harder to avoid a similar designation when it comes to public money

On paper the European Commission, which makes the initial decision on how to treat nuclear power, is full of civil servants who offer technocratic answers. In practice, they know the question of nuclear power is political. They also know that life will be easier if they answer it quickly, preferably before a new German government containing a virulently anti-nuclear Green party is formed

Germany is likely to be on the losing side. It gave up on nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster in 2011, when an earthquake and tsunami caused a meltdown in Japan

those countries that pride themselves on only using the cleanest energy will benefit from those that rely on more debatable sources.

The EU is an increasingly homogenous beast, with fewer carve-outs for those who want to do things differently. Collective decisions have collective outcomes. “To approach our atomic future separately…would have been insane,” wrote Monnet. The EU will approach its atomic future together, whether some countries like it or no

Merkel’s successive governments also squeezed defense budgets while boosting welfare spending. Lt. Gen. Alfons Mais, commander of the army, posted an emotional article on his LinkedIn profile on the day of the invasion, lamenting that Germany’s once-mighty military had been hollowed out to such an extent that it would be all but unable to protect the country in the event of a Russian attack.

her refusal to stop buying energy from Putin after he seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014—she instead worked to double gas imports from Russia—emboldened him to finish the job eight years later.

Joachim Gauck, who was president of Germany when Putin first invaded Ukraine in 2014, said Merkel’s decision to boost energy imports from Russia in the wake of Putin’s aggression was clearly a mistake. “Some people recognize their mistakes earlier, and some later,” he said.

Since leaving office, Merkel has defended the pipeline project as a purely commercial decision. She had to choose, she said, between importing cheap Russian gas or liquefied natural gas, which she said was a third more expensive.

After Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, then NATO secretary general, warned her against making Germany more dependent on a rogue Putin, who had just occupied and annexed part of a European nation. For Putin, he said, the pipeline “had nothing to do with business or the economy—it was a geopolitical weapon.”

Officials who served under Merkel, including Schäuble and Frank-Walter Steinmeier (her former foreign minister and now Germany’s federal president), have apologized or expressed regret for their roles in these decisions. They believe that Merkel’s policies empowered Putin without setting boundaries to his imperial ambitions.

At an event last year, Merkel recalled that after annexing Crimea, Putin had told her that he wanted to destroy the European Union. But she still forged ahead with plans to build the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, linking Germany directly to Siberia’s natural gas fields, in the face of protests from the U.S. Merkel’s government also approved the sale of Germany’s largest gas storage facilities to Russia’s state-controlled gas giant Gazprom.

That mistake had its roots in another decision by Merkel: Her move to greatly accelerate Germany’s planned phasing out of nuclear energy in 2011, in response to the Fukushima disaster in Japan. The gap in energy supply created by this dramatic shift meant that Germany had to import more energy, and it had to do so as cheaply as possible.

Merkel’s role in shaping NATO policy toward Ukraine goes back to 2008, when she vetoed a push by the Bush administration to admit Ukraine and Georgia into the alliance, said Fiona Hill, a former National Security Council official and presidential adviser on Russia.

Merkel instead helped to broker NATO’s open but noncommittal invitation to Ukraine and Georgia, an outcome that Hill said was the “worst of all worlds” because it enraged Putin without giving the two countries any protection. Putin invaded Georgia in 2008 before marching into Ukraine.

After Putin first attacked Ukraine, Merkel led the effort to negotiate a quick settlement that disappointed Kyiv and imposed no substantial punishment on Russia for occupying its neighbor, Hill added. “No red lines were drawn for Putin,” she said. “Merkel took a calculated risk. It was a gambit, but ultimately it failed.”

Merkel still has supporters, and as Germany begins to grapple with her complicated legacy, many still hold a more nuanced view of her role in laying the groundwork for today’s crises

Kaeser, who now chairs the supervisory board of Siemens Energy, a listed subsidiary, agrees that Germany’s dependence on Russian natural gas grew under Merkel, but he says that there was—and is—no alternative for powering Europe’s industrial engine at a viable price.

“We didn’t expect that there would be war in Europe with the methods of the 20th century. This never featured in our thinking,” said Kaeser, who himself met Putin several times. He believes that Merkel’s Russia policy was justified. Even Germany’s new government has not found a sustainable and affordable replacement for Russian energy exports, he said, which could lead to deindustrialization.

Many defenders of Merkel say that she merely articulated a consensus. Making her country dependent on Washington for security, on Moscow for energy and on Beijing for trade (China became Germany’s biggest trade partner under her chancellorship) was what all of Germany’s political parties wanted at the time, said Constanze Stelzenmüller of the Brookings Institution.

“Without backing from the U.S.A., which was very restrained at the time, any tougher German reaction to the annexation of Crimea could hardly have been possible,” said Jürgen Osterhammer, a historian whose work on globalization and China has been cited by Merkel as an influence on her thinking.

In retirement, Merkel told the German news magazine Der Spiegel, she has watched “Munich,” a Netflix movie about Prime Minister Neville’s Chamberlain’s infamous negotiations with Hitler in the run-up to World War II. Though Chamberlain’s name has become synonymous with the delusions of appeasement, the film offers a more nuanced picture of the British leader as a realist statesman working to postpone the inevitable conflict. That reinterpretation appealed to Merkel, the magazine reported.

In April, Merkel was again asked on stage at a book fair whether she would not reconsider her refusal to admit having made some mistakes. “Frankly,” she responded, “I don’t know whether there would be satisfaction if I were to say something that I simply don’t think merely for the sake of admitting error.”