Benjamin Wolf 🇺🇦

Hear ye, hear ye 🥁🙌 So happy and proud to announce that we won the Jean Monnet Prize for European Integration 2020 for our project “Home Is Where the Herz Is” europeanconstitution.eu/2020-jean-monn… Check it out ☺️❤️ metropole.at/herz So proud of our team at @metropole_vie 🤩

La natura non sbaglia mai, ecco "Il diamante del Civetta" fotografato, ieri mattina, che indica ogni anno l'inizio della primavera. Quando il sole, all'alba, si insinua perfettamente nella spaccatura del monte la primavera è qui🤩

In the future, oil will be used only as a chemical, not a source of making wheels go round and round inefficiently.

St James’s Park, London, this morning. #StJamessPark #RoyalParks #London #Spring

200 year old wisteria tree. Hyogo, Japan 🇯🇵

Le printemps en Alsace 🥰

Iran rolling out a new 10m rial banknote, less than two months after it introduced the 5m rial one, is a very visible counterargument to the idea that the war will end with a stable, hegemonic regime in Tehran ft.com/content/f84e45…

International forest day from the Netherlands. Our forests might not be that big and wild, but they're very photogenic and pleasant to walk around in. Nothing beats a peaceful morning walk in the forest.

What a stroke of luck. Right time right place!

Keukenhof Gardens, Netherlands!🤩At 80 Acres, it is one of the world's largest flower gardens with millions of plants!

@AdamPerkinsPhD @AscendedYield And yet all those places had very diverse trajectories in the following years and decades (and most of them had even more deaths in WWII).

@AdamPerkinsPhD @AscendedYield It's an argument, but I don't find it convincing. Whole Britain had to pay a terrible price for the war, the share of young men who perished in the war was far larger in the likes of Germany, France, let alone most of central and eastern Europe.

It was me

Tokyo and Tehran appear to be negotiating billaterally safe passage for Japanese-flagged oil tankers. One possilibity is that Iran emerges from the war keeping the keys of the Strait of Hormuz, deciding who crosses, when, and under what conditions ($$$).english.kyodonews.net/articles/-/727…

If France 🇫🇷 had continued building at that pace, Europe would today have between 400-800 TWh / year more nuclear power generation. That's equivalent to 100-200 bcm gas a year, or 34-68% of Europe's annual gas needs - equivalent to all the flows from Hormuz, the US, or Russia.

I'd say it's pretty clear that France had the capability, the means and was on the trajectory to achieve not only domestic energy independence but also European energy independence to a signficant degree - but then it all slowed down.

I think the way now will mostly be renewables + battery, plus some hydrogen and nuclear at the margin. And in two decades, we'll be mostly energy-independent with that. But what a wasted opportunity, no doubt.

France 🇫🇷 did an amazing job, decades before China - and then just stopped. Quite a shame, really.