> Germany is doing a lot to reduce CO_2 emissions. At least you have the impression when listening to politicians and reading newspapers. E.g. a few months ago it was announced that Germany is on track with the goals posed by the government (e.g. see https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/deutschland-klimaziele-erfu...).

For one thing, it's not absolutely obvious that germany will reach its CO2 reduction goals, from they own saying [1], but they might not shoot too far: [2]. (It's not very far from them in many sectors, but energy got a bad 2022.) However, I don't know how "ambitious" those objectives are.

> Also in many statistics you can see that already around 50% of the electricity consumed in Germany is from renewable sources. How comes that on electricitymaps.com Germany is on the higher side of carbon intensity? Is it because the German industry and population is much bigger?

The problem is, basically, that the other 50% is _very_ CO2 heavy , and it only got worse in 2022-2023 because the last nuclear plants closed, and gas got more expensive so more coal got used. [3]

This explains the vast difference between Germany and France on the electricity map: France hardly gets 20% of its electricity from solar panels and wind farms, but the other 80% are from atoms and water drops instead of lignite, which just makes a huuuge difference.

Also, remember that electricity-maps only looks at, well, electricity - which only accounts for roughly 1/4th of the emissions [4]. Germany still has a large industry, and it's building... petroleum cars. (I was surprised to read that as far as "Industry" emissions are concerned, Germany and France are actually rather close, at ~25Mt/y. But I suppose the cars go in to the "Manufactoring" category, where Germany is clearly on top....)

All in all, the per-capita CO2 emission of France ends up being almost twice as low as Germany. Which is maybe why it's easier to reach reduction goal: "all" Germany has to do to get a massive reduction is to clean-up its grid. The country kinda-sovereignly decided to make it harder by ditching nuclear, but it's actually the "easy" part (in the sense that it's transparent for most people when they switch on their TV if the electricity is" clean" or not. The only consideration is whether it is "cheap" or not.)

France is at the stage where it has to reduce the other not-low-hanging-at-all fruit: transport emissions. (Because the current technology forces people to trade relatively cheap, comfortable and versatile gas-powered cars for EVs that are none of those three things - at the moment - and they'll understandably kick and scream to avoid that.)

In a different world, Germany would have invested in R&D to build small and affordable electric cars, while France would have invested in R&D to build smaller and safer nuclear reactors.

Instead, Germany paid software engineers to make car cheat tests [6], and France paid consultants to make the electricity market undecipharable while 1970's nuclear plants where rotting in place [7] ... and then 2022 happened !

---

[1] https://phys.org/news/2023-06-germany-climate-narrow-fully-c...

[2] https://www.dw.com/en/germany-greenhouse-gas-emissions-progr...

[3] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...

[4] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/germany

[5] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/france

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Messme...