Lion Hirth comments on looming gas crisis in German and international media

Germany faces a worsening energy crisis amid speculation that Russia may shut off its gas supply via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline after scheduled maintenance work concludes this month. Lion Hirth, Professor of Energy Policy at the Centre for Sustainability, commented on the situation in many national and international news outlets, including the Financial Times, Handelsblatt, DER SPIEGEL, Der Standard, dpa, Deutschlandfunk, ZEIT ONLINE, Tagesspiegel, Tagesspiegel Background, Stern, Capital, Cicero and many more.

In a 15 July op-ed in Handelsblatt co-authored with Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research Ottmar Edenhofer, Hirth points out three areas where policy action is needed to improve energy security. According to the experts, Germany needs to 1) install a single European buyer to negotiate directly with Gazprom and strip the Russian energy supplier of its monopoly, 2) cut harmful subsidies that incentivise wasting energy and 3) protect vulnerable citizens through unconditional direct cash transfers.

In another op-ed in DER SPIEGEL from 14 July, Hirth and Centre for Sustainability PhD researcher Silvana Tiedemann write about the role of heating in the gas crisis, arguing that the government must provide both transparent communication and short-term amendments to rental law to enable homeowners, landlords and tenants to conserve energy. Most rental contracts currently indicate that tenants should for example maintain “a minimum mandatory room temperature, counteracting energy conservation policies,” they write.

Read the op-ed in DER SPIEGEL here.

Read the op-ed in Handelsblatt here.

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