{"id":136,"date":"2023-03-27T20:16:34","date_gmt":"2023-03-27T20:16:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/advancedenvironmentalresearchandtransformativesustainabilityexchange\/?p=136"},"modified":"2023-03-27T20:16:34","modified_gmt":"2023-03-27T20:16:34","slug":"survey-and-german-trip-reflections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/advancedenvironmentalresearchandtransformativesustainabilityexchange\/2023\/03\/27\/survey-and-german-trip-reflections\/","title":{"rendered":"Survey and German Trip Reflections"},"content":{"rendered":"

Greetings everyone!<\/p>\n

Welcome back to another blog post. Today, I will be discussing a very brief summary of our class trip to Germany, along with my experiences with surveying throughout the country.<\/p>\n

In terms of the results of my surveys, I was surprised to see the responses that many of my participants provided on natural gas and nuclear energy. Most of my participants indicated that they equally disliked natural gas alongside nuclear energy. This is quite interesting considering in the United States, most people would define nuclear energy as a more ‘clean’ energy source compared to natural gas due to its immediate difference in pollution compared to others. I also found it interesting to notice that many individuals indicated that they were unaware of the German use of Russian natural gas before the war in Ukraine. This was particularly interesting considering the sheer amount of gas imports that were coming from Russia before the Ukraine war began. Even more, natural gas dependency in Germany was not a completely new conversation before the war in Ukraine began, although it was not as loud as it is now. Interestingly enough, I was shocked when I was actually able to meet an individual who was a victim of Putin’s war crimes in Ukraine. Although she did not feel comfortable partaking in my survey, her experiences fleeing the war-torn country with her 1-year-old son while leaving her husband behind to fight was an incredibly humbling exchange for me.<\/p>\n

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One of the three remaining operational nuclear power plants in Germany. (Source<\/a>)<\/p><\/div>\n

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As a summary of the entire trip, Germany clearly is approaching sustainability in a much faster and more efficient way than the United States has been in the past years. During our trip, we met with examples from both the public and private sectors of methods in which they are using sustainability methods to enhance profitability and initiatives set by the German government. For example, we visited a wind energy company in Breman, Germany. The company highlighted how it is not only leading both wind and PV capabilities within Germany but has recently begun expanding its capabilities throughout 4 other continents. Getting to see a company that is focused heavily on renewables and actually turned the profitability of them into an effective product on the marketplace has demonstrated to me how government subsidies towards renewables can not only be environmentally friendly but also useful for companies to make a profit on something that is hard to predict its productivity of. In the United States, we provide tax breaks to many individuals who construct renewables. The reason why this is not as effective is that it is hard to economically predict the production of wind and solar since the weather changes on a daily basis. In Germany, the government resolved this issue by setting a price for wind or solar energy produced in order to make the marketplace for these renewables more predictable, and in turn invested in more by the private sector.<\/p>\n

We also visited the Berlin Senate’s committee on Environment and Energy (Note: the Senate of Berlin is what they call the local city governing body). Through this visit, we were able to see how local organizations within Germany are approaching solutions to the climate crisis. Berlin, for example has set a goal to where it plans on making 25% of its energy from Photovoltaic (solar) energy by the year 2050. After the Ukrainian war began, Berlin came to realize that the rapidly increasing transformation away from natural gas energy has caused the city to be able to make this 25% goal by 2035 instead of 2050. I think that this interesting observation shows how issues within a region of the world that you are apart of can vastly change the policy that your own country is pursuing. This is something that the Untied States is very fortunate to have security from thanks to its geography. Both of its neighbors (both Mexico and Canada) are relatively neutral countries or allies.<\/p>\n

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The bridge over Saxon Switzerland National Park, which we accessed by public transportation! (Source<\/a>)<\/p><\/div>\n

Lastly, its important to note the numerous greenspaces that exist within the cities in Germany. Not only this, but there are even greenspaces that are integrated with the transportation sector throughout the country. It boggles my mind how one can access almost anywhere within the country via transportation, even if the area seems remote. In America, there are entire states that do not have any passenger rail lines inside their borders. This is vastly different to Germany, let alone their almost completely electrified rail infrastructure. In the United States, we see many of our major greenspaces as only accessible by car. Nearly every United States National Park requires a car to access all parts of it for example. In Germany, this was quite different. In fact, we were able to visit one of the popular national parks in the country by bus (Saxon Switzerland)!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Greetings everyone! Welcome back to another blog post. Today, I will be discussing a very brief summary of our class trip to Germany, along with my experiences with surveying throughout the country. In terms of the results of my surveys, I was surprised to see the responses that many of my participants provided on natural […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4837,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/advancedenvironmentalresearchandtransformativesustainabilityexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/advancedenvironmentalresearchandtransformativesustainabilityexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/advancedenvironmentalresearchandtransformativesustainabilityexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/advancedenvironmentalresearchandtransformativesustainabilityexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4837"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/advancedenvironmentalresearchandtransformativesustainabilityexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/advancedenvironmentalresearchandtransformativesustainabilityexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/advancedenvironmentalresearchandtransformativesustainabilityexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/advancedenvironmentalresearchandtransformativesustainabilityexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/advancedenvironmentalresearchandtransformativesustainabilityexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}