German states don't try to fight climate change; they want to exploit it
As I was working on my private notes, MDR published a mere ticker update that can't be linked where it's stated that the state of Thuringia wants to expand its funding of orchards but not in terms of granting volunteers more money, instead they expanded their list of fruit trees eligible for funds to now include various nuts, apricots and peaches.
If it wouldn't have witnessed the sheer endless incompetence and overtly economical interest of my own local administrative district office, which unsurprisingly is plagued by nepotism and their cronies, not once but more than FIVE times, three times being directly being at the receiving end of it, this would be the most obvious case of intentional greenwashing. Unfortunately, and thanks to various press outlets and Twitter/X preachers, this term is reserved to big industries and academics resort to "greenwasting", which actually implies good intentions, rather than, uh, economical profits. But let's address the orchard funds first.
Useless and over-bred trees as a cheap compensation measure for laws that benefit industries
Any discussion around orchards largely is non-existent since the 1993 complaints regarding the Federal Nature Conservation Act ("BNatSchG") died down. Its fundamental issue is the demand for any conservation effort to be economically profitable. Not only that, any industrial project of "public interest" automatically renders the BNatSchG void, meaning that any healthy biotope will get destroyed if Rheinmetall wants to build a factory in this area [1].
The mention of Rheinmetall is not random on my part; a new passage added in 2025 explicitly emphasizes the construction of "military infrastructure", exempting it from ALL nature conservation laws. As catastrophic as it sounds and considering how various tons and cities such as Nordhausen are BEGGING for Rheinmetall to build new factories in their districts [2], it needs to be noted that the federal law already didn't apply in practice in the same way its EU-wide counterparts are virtually unknown outside of Brussels. The state-specific nature conservation laws ("LNatSchG") are applied on local levels, with each state relying on their own laws and thus providing 16 different frameworks. All of them share in common that they don't even get close to the EU laws but since even the extremely-watered-down local laws so far have not contributed to any positive impact, the EU decided to sue Germany in 2020 for the latter's pervasive negligence. And although the investigation still is ongoing, Germany likely only will be fined LESS than €5,000,000, which naturally will be covered entirely by tax payers who are fully unaware of this court case and currently deal with nearly daily news about new taxes, hefty tax increases and the de-facto abolishment of our healtcare and retirement systems for the Average Joe, not only exempting clerks from all of those but even outright planning massive pay increases for themselves [3] (e.g. chancellor and former BlackRock consultant Merz is set to receive an increase of a whopping 55k per year; feel free to look the public reactions on X up yourself, everyone was furious when the news broke).
As most Germans rightfully worry about their very existences no one really bothers with conservation matters anymore. Even before the growing disinterest any debate was almost exclusively focused on renewable energies, highlighting that it never was about "protecting nature" but rather about new industries that won't change anything once being scaled to match the oil, gas and coal industries. "We should take Bikini Bottom and push it somewhere else", so to speak. Just prior to this, in the early to late 00's, discussions were focused on conservation fads such as LIFE+, a funding program that rewarded artificially-created steppes [4]. Since the program formally ended in the mid-2010's the focus shifted back to the remaining funding programs such as that for orchards. The artificial steppes, which actually were orchards for the most part before being damaged "in the name of conservation", now are suddenly becoming attractive for the creation of new orchards.
This only adds to the actual insult of the sheer idiocy of Germany's protection laws and the entire concept of "ecosystem services" and "eco points" on which those laws are based on: The creation of new orchards already was the preferred option of many districts, including mine, to "compensate" for any industrial project causing "significant damage". As the "lower nature protection agencies" ("Untere Naturschutzbehörden") have been using the "lack of staff" as an excuse for decades, they don't even keep track of any of the species that claim to track, making it easy to argue that "no significant environmental impact is expected" seemingly randomly. Unless the mayor of a town himself is passive or, in the very rare case, outright against any such project, "significant damages" MAY be noted and thus will demand another area to be improved enviromentally-wise.
Several new housing areas popped up in my municipality within the last ten years, one that still is in its planning stage which formally wasn't sound at all to the point the new mayor had to restart it all. There had been talks about a housing area in the northern area of the town but unlike the one in the southern area none of the plots ever were advertised or sold publicly – the town proudly admitted that the plots already were sold and with virtually no laws being followed at all, not even any environmental audits. This area in question currently is used as a sunflower field that sees regular fallows in order to restore the soil.
In another case that also is happening in my municipality right now is another project that surprisingly went through all audits. It was determined that the lost area needs to be compensated by demolishing a small and long-abandoned fire department building and the creation of two small orchards. The building was located in the center of a small village, the orchards are planned to be created on private property in the outskirts of another village that already hosts a orchard and several more less than one kilometer to the north. While the old orchards, largely consisting of local fruit breeds that long have been feared to be on the brink of extinction, are in direct but hilariously weak competition with mass-produced breeds from tree nurseries but to a much stronger degree to our local cider makers that took it upon themselves to protect ancient fruit breeds that also are much more popular among their customers than those from tree nurseries. Ironically the vast majority of nursery trees are so poorly adjusted to our rural environment that most of them die off within five years without ever producing blossoms or even fruits. Those planted near streets almost always are cherries, whereas forests have begun to resort to "exotic" species from Southern Europe and the warm and dry regions of North America, all of which have died within the last four years. Everyone was counting on the drought of 2022 to continue and were shocked when the weather shifted to wet halfway through 2023 and continued to persist until 2025, with the current weather once again being dominated by north and west winds just like in the spring of 2024 (and thus indicating that this wet and rather cool season will persist for at least a few more months).
Those compensation measures not only are "cheap" in the eyes of clerks but they generate a disproportionate amount of points for their virtual "bank accounts". They can collect such points in order to justify large projects in the long run that inevitably will cause much more damage than those tiny compensations ever could, well, compensate for and not only due to their inherent poor management regimes. A this point it's fair to argue that everything has been designed to be practically useless to protect anything just to fool shareholders and tourists who either couldn't care less or only like "nature" performatively (e.g. those that genuinely believe that owning an electric car and using a heating pump will suddenly lessen the effect of their regular travels to Bali and their online-shopping additions).
"We learned nothing, thus we must continue"
Depending on which source you rely on, the weather forecasts will be drastically different. While I personally prefer the Switzerland-based "Kachelmannwetter" which regularly explains complex meteorological concepts and provides in-depth comparisons and data, public broadcasters almost always emphasize dry and "too warm" conditions, even when simultaneously stating that the current temperatures are "slightly too low" in the same sentence and quickly moving on from the climate topic. Wet weather, even when models calculate an unusually high amount of rain for several regions, often gets played down as "not enough", except when a handful of rivers transport the desired amount of water – then they complain about the increased risk of floods just to distance themselves from those the minute water levels drop to its critically lows again.
Our public broadcaster is particularly prone to giving off the impression that they're actually in favor of climate change and outright want to see several states being turned into cheap Toskana-knockoffs. All the way back in the early-00's they predicted that my area will develop into a desert; just a few weeks ago they published a new article in which they assume that vast parts of my state needs to be adjusted to climate change by setting op olive plantations. The same public broadcaster documented the mass failures of "exotic" trees that were planted in various forests after multiple icy and relatively snow-rich winters, highlighting that none of those plants considered suitable for the adjustment to climate change to be suited in practice. The former article demanding olive plantations got published under MDR's "science" resort, the latter in a general one. (I'd link both if the MDR's search engine wouldn't be this intentionally useless and the MDR's shady tendency of quietly deleting articles that may portray certain projects in a bad light such as the group of landscape architects that outright complained about a sudden landslide in an abandoned brown coal opencast mine in Saxony/Brandenburg that revealed an underground swamp just a year ago, arguing that this is bad for conservation efforts in spite of the excellent health of the swamp).
Even after multiple failures, Thuringia in particular now opts for its next failure. While we already got almost too many nut trees especially right next to orchards, more hazel nut trees certainly will not be in favor of those allergic to either its nuts or its pollen. This year's hazel pollen apparently were so aggressive that two property owners in my village who can't stand each other individually cut their respective hazels back while they still were blooming, something neither had done before and with both normally not even being allergic to them. This season also was the first time I reacted to hazel pollen, despite having grown up with them in the same vein I grew up among hay that, according to "common sense", should have protected me from developing hayfever in 3rd grade. My immune system responds aggressively towards common meadow grass every eight to ten years by giving me hives that block my throat.
Unlike nuts, which certainly aren't even in such a huge demand in my area to begin with (judging by the sheer amount of walnuts that never get collected and already grow on their own in the wild), apricots and peaches fall into the same category of species that will die off within less than five years just because they can't deal with our local climate without constant radical intervention. The only apricot tree growing in my village can be found in a tiny garden that primarily hosts patches between stone slabs and whose owner is obsessed with English lawns. My grandparents living less than 20 kilometers away from my village attempted to cultivate peaches roughly ten years ago and planted two trees between some wild-grown plants in their yard, only for both trees to die during the 2018 drought. This same spot now harbors the rare and protected snowdrop that do much better than the peaches.
Governments are a lost cause but if environmentalists ever want to be taken seriously again, they need to call out state-sponsored conservation efforts directly. Sadly this will never happen as many of them also are only in for the money, most of the time directly dependent on the very same state funds that cause more harm than good [5], and performative actions for social media as currently perfectly demonstrated by the seemingly never-ending tale of the whale in the Baltic Sea which attracted virtually any group that shouldn't be dealing with this at all [6].
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[1]
[GER] "Experten warnen vor Rückschritten beim Naturschutz" (tagesschau, 17 Feburuary, 2026)
[2]
[GER] "Nordhäuser Landrat wirbt für Rüstungsindustrie in seinem Kreis" (MDR, 22 July, 2025)
[3]
[GER] "Dobrindt plant 3,5 Milliarden Euro mehr für Beamte" (tagesschau, 15 April, 2026)
[4]
I already covered the damage it did to my "bog hill" zone but a recent online search regarding another LIFE+ area nearby warrants another post that makes this project EVEN WORSE. Not to spoil it all but it involves copypasted tourist boards that mostly resort to very obvious stock photos and a sheer random selection of species that either are extremely common or can't be found at all).
[5]
Perverse incentive (English Wikipedia)
[6]
Timmy (whale) – English Wikipedia
/gemlog/