It is not comfortable but inside houses you do not freeze to death like that. Sleep in your clothes, buy an electric heater next to your bed, get an electric blanket etc. I slept for quite a long time like that in the Netherlands because my mates squat building had no heat. That was during one of the coldest winters where all canals in Amsterdam were frozen enough to skate on. So yeah, not comfortable but freezing to death is not happening if you just take some care.

Living can be intolerable real fast. It does not have to be death. I think the OP was not saying literally.

Also, if the majority of the population is losing heating and need to do your suggested preparation, I wouldn't bet my luck on successfully getting a heater and a electric blanket. There was a freaking toilet paper shortage in covid because of panic buying. These and whatnot will be gone in minutes.

How's the electric heater and the electric blanket work without power?

The issue isn't electricity, it's the fact that German municipal heat plants run on natural gas. Replacing all of that with electrically-powered equipment (centralized or at the endpoints) takes time.

Also, heating energy consumption is among the top usages. So switching from gas would require large increase in electric generating capacity.

It's not clear that the majority of Germans are willing to do that, especially since it wouldn't just end the war right away. I've also heard a politician on German news quote the estimated "few percent GDP decline" as a result of banning gas imports from Russia, which apparantly implies that it's "not possible" ("nicht machbar"). They make it sound like it's on par with breaking the laws of physics and our of their hands...

"if you just take some care". Now there's the problem. Some people are unable to suddenly migrate to igloo living.

How to set up Germans for a bloody revolution and make them pro-Russian in three easy steps.

1) Make fuel extremely expensive. 2) Quickly massively lower standard of living, e.g. by turning off heating in winter/early spring 3) Purposefully crash the economy, leading to mass unemployment.

Setting up a tent inside will work in a pinch.

What about frozen pipes?

Keeping a house warmed to 5°C is probably enough to keep the pipes from bursting, but uses much less gas than heating it to 21°C

Yes. (nobody will freeze to death btw)

And the reasoning is as follows:

The actually morally necessary step is to establish a no-fly zone above Ukraine, enforced by force with NATO fighter jets and anti-aircraft systems.

People (possibly rightfully) consider that this could lead to a WW3, possibly escalating into the usage of nuclear weapons.

So far so good.

So the bargain we do is basically "Ukraine, we would do everything for you, except for starting WW3, which you hopefully understand!".

Really? Everything? Then quit Russian gas cold turkey! No matter how bad it will be (possibly fairly bad, I admit), it will still be less than WW3, which we bargain is the only thing that we don't want, everything else we would do for Ukraine.

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Can anybody put this into better words??

> The actually morally necessary step is to establish a no-fly zone above Ukraine, enforced by force with NATO fighter jets and anti-aircraft systems.

The "total NFZ over Ukraine" idea will definitely lead to a direct war with Russia because it essentially requires striking AA sites within Russia and Belarus.

The only NFZ scenario that's plausible is a partial NFZ with a sufficiently large buffer zone that it does not overlap with Russian AA on Russian soil. Which puts Kyiv outside the NFZ, btw.

I’ll try:

“Don’t trip the most obvious trigger for ww3 until all avenues for sanctions, embargoes, and boycotts have been exhausted. This obviously includes stopping gas purchases from Russia.”

But as D’s A, I would wonder where this stops. Should US be opening domestic production with gusto? Should Germany demand oil from Middle East with threats of soft and hard power? Shall they buy from Iran, Russia’s friend? Shall they embargo China, who presumably still buys fossil fuels from Russia, and every other customer of Russia?

Assume Germany’s need for gas is not elastic - they can’t simply endure with less. To what lengths shall they go to avoid Russian gas?

Once Russia is economically desperate, will ww3 be triggered anyway?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I do wonder about them.

> nobody will freeze to death btw)

Ceaușescu was deposed (and very rapidly shot at the wall) also because of the fact we, Romanians, were freezing in our very homes. That and the food rationing.

I believe the plan is to let Russia fire first, and escalate progressively until a) Russia wisely retreats, or b) Moscow is fallen, while carefully rendering nuclear options seem undesirable. That except the last part was how it went last time for us.

Agreed. In other words, the EU and US are at war with Russia by all means except direct fire. In a war, citizens will have to make sacrifices. This may include painful economic sacrifices.

A half-hearted proxy war, perhaps. It’s hard to ask US citizens to make real sacrifices (who, beyond symbolism and sympathy, probably don’t give a practical shit about Ukraine - specifically, very few are interested in sending family members to die in Ukraine).

Not sure how my 25 cent analysis of US would translate to Germany, but demands on citizens should probably not get too out of sync with the level of existential threat the citizens perceive. If there’s a perception problem, fix that and then make the demands for sacrifice.

Also, making sacrifices may looks good for a few days, but it will sure cause massive problem after that. And, the funny thing is many people indulge in so much luxury, I don't think it is even possible.

I didn't sign up for a war

Six million Jews didn't sign up for a war either.

Nor did everybody on the 'allied' side in WWII.

Nor did millions of Koreans, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Afghanis and so on.

Millions of Ukrainians did not sign up for it.

In fact: almost nobody except for the aggressors signed up for a war and even there that's debatable, usually it's only a few people at the top and then 100's of enablers and thousands to millions of conscripts, who didn't sign up for it either.

But that doesn't mean that you won't end up in a war. The question is how much control you will have over the location of the battlefield. That's why the Americans had this 'fight them over there rather than here' doctrine going. Which given their lack of proximity always was a bit of misdirection, but that doesn't mean that the idea by itself does not have merit.

Most people involved in wars did not sign up for them, from my reading of history

Take that up with the Russian president.

But that's outside, not inside. Even an old building with lesser insulation and double-pane windows will hold a higher temperature when inhabited. Humans radiate more than a few watts. It's not comfortable, it's definitely a health concern, but it's still not 0°C.

An anecdote from earlier this winter when the electricity prices peaked in Europe: my girlfriend and I live on 79 sqm in a modern apartment building with triple-pane windows, and because of the landlord being a stingy d*ck we went through several weeks without any heating. During the worst 7-10 days we had a temperature of -4°C outside, but never below 15°C inside. When the temperature rose to 5°C we had about 18°C inside.

Was that only your apartment or the whole building?

The whole building. Central heating, can't be disabled per unit.

Maybe stop shutting down all their nuclear plants? That would be a good first step.

Except it would achieve absolutely nothing, because the vast majority of German homes are heated with oil or gas, not electricity.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...

In fact the German government also had that idea but it's not that simple. For once, you can't power the gas heaters in millions of households with electrical power. Also the plant operators would have to buy more uranium to continue operation – from Russia. So that kind of defeats the purpose.

Sure, in retrospect it would have been better to invest even more money into renewables ten or twenty years ago, and to keep the nuclear power plants running for just a few more years. But you can't change the past so that discussion really leads to nothing for the current situation.

Why not buy the uranium from e.g. Australia?

The German minister for economics is visiting Qatar and the Emirates to talk about gas deals. He probably hates it, because he is in the Green Party.

Also: Germany and US are in talks to lift the sanctions on Iran.

There are gas reserves in Germany that would last for months (I've seen 6-9month figures). Maybe cut gas purchase rate to 50%. That would give >1 year of runway.

Again, a mass oversimplification of current issue.

Gas reserves wont last that much because human hoards if they know government are starting to use reserves. And, when politician act, they should think about future too. And, can they purchase gas at 50%? Are those written in deals?

How do you hoard gas?

Asking for a friend? With the right incentives (black market demand), that’s how.

In a balloon?

Gas reserves are at a historical low right now. I'm not sure why this misinformation keeps popping up.

https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/deutschland/politik/erdgas-ru...

Just honesty and that the German government states this clearly at the same time that says “we are fully with Ukraine”.

You can just say “we are with Ukraine up to the russian gas.” But that would just be true not beautiful.

interestingly, most split air conditioning units also have a heating function. Usually, they convert 1kwh of electric energy into 4-5 times the heat energy.

Heating with electricity is therefore something quite achievable and sometimes even economical. At current German electricity prices of 0,33 EUR/kwh electricity heating is currently cheaper than gas heating (currently at 0,20 EUR/kwh for new contracts - was at 0,04 before the crisis).

Most people here don’t have air conditioners - more than used to, but most of the people I know here (Nürnberg area) don’t.

I feel like we temporarily dodged a bullet by sheer laziness - before the pandemic, we were all set to do the whole Energiesanierung with full KfW incentives, which would have required chucking out our oil furnace (replaced right before we bought the house a few years ago) for, most likely, natural gas. Instead, we are still sitting on 1.5 years of normal or possibly 3 years of very carefully used heating oil supply.

Now, like everyone, we’re looking into heat pumps. Because we are still sitting on a year or two of heating oil, I think we shouldn’t be competing against our gas-heated neighbors for that changeover this year or next.

It is more like 2-3 times, depending on the outside temparature and degrading rapidly below e.g. -5C. Also, there is a noticeable effect on quality of life (noise, sometimes uncomfortable air currents).

What you are saying is you prefer dead ukranians to be slightly uncomfortable in Germany.

You know that 90+% of heating in Berlin is Gas based, probably 50%+ of stoves and ovens are gas based. More warm water is also gas based.

Numbers are similar for many parts of eastern Germany.

For western Germany the a slightly less, but still very high.

Gas Germany imports is also re-exported to other countries.

Some financially much worse off.

You are literally asking Germany to derive a non-small amount of their financially weaker of people of heating, cooking and warm water. And this would not just affect Germany but other EU countries too, destabilizing all of the EU.

At the same time it doesn't necessary stop the war, and might even escalate it even.

Also many of the alternative sources we could buy gas from don't have the infrastructure to ship it to us fast enough (yet).

Worse some of the alternative sources are states like Qatar, which are from a democratic, ethical and cultural point of view worse then Russia, they are just spacial further away...

The main objective of the EU is to protect it's citizens and implicitly secondarily democracy. Switching of Russian gas _now_ would fail both. Leading to internally instability we can't afford which would be a perfect presence for the word wide re-emerging fascism.

Now that's how it's now, a lot of thinks are already underway to change this.

But changes take time.

To be fair here, an extra blanket on the bed, a sweater during the day, and everyone could reduce rheir homes to 12C. Massive, massive savings in gas usage... maybe enough for all!

People in Mariupol, Kharkiv and Okhtyrka haven't frozen to death. They have it much harder than Germans would have.