In the “Stuttgart Declaration”, 20 scientists call for the decision to phase out nuclear energy to be reversed. Some of the signatories and especially the public are now being criticized: they are being accused of climate denial. What’s up with the allegations?
Even the Greens are no longer ruling out the possibility that the last three nuclear power plants still in operation could continue to operate beyond the agreed phase-out date of the end of 2022. But that doesn’t go far enough for 20 scientists: in an open letter, called the “Stuttgart Declaration”, they call for the decision to phase out nuclear energy in 2011 to be reversed. At the beginning of July, the declaration was initiated at the interdisciplinary conference “20 years of energy transition – scientists take stock” in Stuttgart. The first to sign are Harald Schwarz and André Thess.
According to the “Stuttgart Declaration”, the transformation of the energy supply in Germany is still in its infancy and endangers “competitiveness and prosperity”, according to the declaration submitted to the Petitions Committee of the German Bundestag. The one-sided focus on wind, sun and natural gas has brought the country into energy shortages. The initiators of the open letter write that sticking to the nuclear phase-out would slow down climate protection.
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Climate researchers are usually at the forefront of the energy debate. With the “Stuttgart Declaration”, on the other hand, researchers from the fields of technical thermodynamics, electrical engineering, and process and environmental engineering dealt with the topic of energy transition. Her research is therefore not devoted to modeling the global climate, but to technical feasibility.
The electrical engineer Harald Schwarz from the Brandenburg Technical University of Cottbus is one of the initiators of the Stuttgart Declaration. The professor of energy distribution has been spreading for years that the security of supply is endangered by renewable energies and that the phase-out of coal should be postponed. In 2020, Schwarz spoke before the Committee on Economics and Energy in the Bundestag. However, politicians did not listen to him.
As an electrical engineer, Schwarz describes the energy transition as ideology-driven. “With a one-sided focus on the sun, wind and natural gas, Germany was maneuvered into an energy shortage,” warns Schwarz. The nationwide power supply would not be secured without nuclear energy. He also likes to give interviews on climate change denial portals such as “eike-klima-energie.eu”. The portal advertises with the motto: “It is not the climate that is threatened, but our freedom!”
At the controversial conference in early July, not only respected scientists spoke out: the Danish author Bjørn Lomborg and the German chemist Fritz Vahrenholt have been campaigning against climate protection for decades and are often classified as climate deniers, according to Der Spiegel. According to the scientists, the contribution of humans to climate change is negligible and an energy transition and the saving of CO2 is comparatively pointless.
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A few weeks ago, in a guest article in Die Welt, Lomborg warned of a “climate obsession”. By focusing on climate protection, the West would pay too little attention to other dangers, according to Lomborg. In a post on the climatefeedback.org website, Lomborg’s op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal is heavily criticized by 12 scientists. According to the twelve scientists, he does not work scientifically because he collects exactly the facts that fit his own thesis without including facts with contrary statements.
Fritz Vahrenholt studied chemistry and was the environment senator in Hamburg in the 1990s and then worked for a number of energy companies. According to Spiegel, he has often denied scientific results of climate research in the past. For this reason, the German Wildlife Foundation separated from him as a board member in 2019: “The German Wildlife Foundation and its board Prof. Dr. Fritz Vahrenholt have agreed to end their cooperation due to different ideas about the positioning of the foundation in the current climate policy discussion.”
Vahrenholt is accused of “bashing established climate science” by science journalist Volker Mrasek. In his book The Cold Sun, Vahrenholt claims that the sun has a greater impact on current global warming than carbon dioxide emissions.
The moderator of the energy transition conference, Werner J. Patzelt, has also made headlines in the past. In 2019, the Technical University separated from the political science professor because of his closeness to the AfD and his sympathy with the Pegida movement. At the energy transition conference, the moderator ended the event by pointing out that his generation had also survived the dying forest and that every generation needs something that they can survive.
It remains questionable why these people were invited to the energy transition conference by renowned scientists. Michael Sterner from the research center for energy networks and energy storage at the East Bavarian Technical University says to the “Spiegel” that the call for the extension of the nuclear power plants is not made for objective reasons. “If there is one form of energy production that is not technically mature, then it is nuclear power,” argues Sterner. Because the question of the final storage of the fuel rods has still not been resolved: “It’s like taking off in an airplane without knowing where the runway is,” says the engineer.
One thing is clear: For the initiators of the “Stuttgart Declaration”, ideology was never the priority. The main initiator of the “Stuttgart Declaration” is André Thess, Director of the Institute for Technical Thermodynamics at the German Aerospace Center and at the same time holder of the Chair for Energy Storage at the University of Stuttgart. In an interview with FOCUS Online, Thess says that he is in favor of an energy turnaround, despite the demand for the nuclear power plant to be extended. He firmly rejects the fact that the signatories to the “Stuttgart Declaration” are opponents of the energy transition.
