Effectively the only option they got. Nuclear is gone thanks to the Green party but also Merkel's CDU - who reversed the nuclear exit at first, thereby fucking up planning and investments into renewables, and then reversed that reversal after Fukushima.

The current government that has the Greens as a major coalition partner isn't really investing in new fossil fuel stuff, but replacements of existing fossil fuel stuff. E.g. the LNG terminals are meant to replace the capacity lost from ceased imports from Russia.

Building nuclear now isn't really an option anyway, at least not to deal with the current situation.

The operators of nuclear plants already signaled that running their plants longer is not an option. That would require a lot of investment, and more importantly a lot of time to renovate, modernize and re-certify these things. An effort I believe they said was in the range of 3 or more years.

Building entirely new plants, even with existing designs, would require at least 4 years even on a very expedited schedule.

So in the short term the only option is to keep using fossils - sourced from some place not-Russia. The Greens, while they certainly do not like that, understood this.

Would we Germans be better off if we had some nuclear plants left? Sure. But we'd also be better off if we instead had that energy mix that the Greens envisioned at the start of the century, that entailed renewables at the core, a bit of carbon (mostly from renewable sources, with tech to make it more or less carbon-neutral in totality) and storage, and investments (driven by government incentives) to use less energy in the first place.

If I had to blame anybody, it would be the 16 years of Merkel governments which managed to fuck up both nuclear and renewables, not the Green party.

Not really. Short term the German nuclear plants cannot be kept operational any longer. While fossils are bad, they are less bad than having none and getting old buclear planta ready when they are not needed anymore. Also, the fossil plants are there, and this cheaper to ramp up. Mid term, the goal seems to be renewables.

All in all, quite reasonable and well thought through under the current circumstances.