Germany Finally Says the F-Word: ‘Fracking’

Germany’s energy crisis is a crisis of choice, or rather a crisis of two choices, the second following directly from the first. The choice most German politicians seem to want to talk about is the second of the two, the choice to source so much of the country’s energy imports and especially natural gas from a single, unsympathetic vendor, Russia.

A solution to this problem is achievable without an excess of policy imagination or political skill. If importing gas from Russia no longer is an option, the gas will be imported from somewhere else. Pledges to accelerate construction of terminals to accept liquefied natural gas from the U.S. and Middle East have lent Economy and Climate Minister

Robert Habeck

of the Green Party an image of vigorous activity in pursuit of Germany’s voracious energy needs.

But Germany is as dependent as it is on foreign fuel only because of the first decision Berlin made: not to tap the country’s substantial domestic gas reserves, which by some estimates could satisfy much of Germany’s gas demands for the next two decades.

The manifestation of this choice was hostility to the hydraulic fracture, or fracking, technology that could tap Germany’s shale-bound gas reserves. Berlin in 2017 all but banned, on dubious safety grounds, the fracking techniques that could reach most of Germany’s gas.

Now some politicians are asking whether the country can afford to leave that gas in the ground. A split has opened within the unwieldy governing coalition of Chancellor

Olaf Scholz.

Two of the coalition’s three parties are staunchly…