I really hate how German environmental activists resort to hyperbole and alarmist language by default when voicing concerns. This only makes it harder for me to take them seriously.
And then there is this tried and true tradition of commissioning studies with the sole intent to support a predefined viewpoint rather than taking an unbiased approach. This makes it so hard to trust any information when political arguments become heated.
To make the connection back to the tunnel: it consumes a huge amount of concrete and that releases the associated amount of CO2. Thisnpart is fairly easy to estimate. But estimating the impact on traffic emissions is fraught with issues. There are so many assumptions about lifetime, amount of traffic, types of vehicles that I can easily imagine the error bars to stack up to the point where a little tuning of model parameters gives just about any desired result.
"Environmentalists" also made a big fuzz about the Øresund connection, claiming that the artificial island midway would disrupt the entire Baltic Sea ecosystem by drastically reducing the flow of water.
Didn't happen. The (fairly small) compensatory digging had the effect the engineers had calculated and the water flow actually increased slightly and the Baltic Sea ecosystem is fine -- or at least not harmed by this particular project.
I think we should trust the people who can (and do) make calculations over those who can't (and don't).
The tunnel will very likely be less disruptive to marine animals than ferry boats. During the construction yes it will be worse but 10 years after? The ecosystem will have forgotten the disruption and will have gained additional peace from reduced/eliminated ferries.
Ferries do not mess up the ground and the riffs which is where most sea life is to be found. Big ships are only a problem to sea life if they dump their old oil there, their anchors ... or well, trawling (which is forbidden there for a reason).
Where exactly is there a claim that "They also love to receive support from foreign state actors to harm Germany"?
In the first link there the evidence is a statement from Hillary Clinton as well as unnamed other NATO members.
"WWF Germany, BUND (Friends of the Earth), and NABU (Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union), three environmental organisations who were avowed opponents of Germany’s NordStream pipelines with Russia, dropped their opposition after Gazprom promised funding for environmental protection"
And this says they dropped opposition that the russian state does good for environment elsewhere, not that they get money.
And the second link is about the peace movement which is not exactly the same.
From a Danish perspective I don't really see any positive long, or short, term gains from the Fehmarn tunnel, but I also live in the wrong part of the country.
This is a tunnel for Sweden, Norway and Copenhagen, it's moving the center of everything in Denmark closer and closer to the center of Copenhagen, completely disconnecting the rest of the country. A few days ago a new train start running Copenhagen to Oslo, a seven hour trip. That's the same time it takes me to get to Copenhagen by train within Denmark. Everyone is happy that you can "Get on the train and just pop to Hamburg, Berlin or Prag", but you can't, only if you happen to live in a few select spots does that work. It's a multi-day journey with a layover within the country if I want to leave by rail.
Internationally this is a great project, internally in Denmark, it's going to make international train travel worse for the majority of the country.
Skagen to Flensburg is 7 hours? It’s a painful number of connections, sure, but hardly multi-day. Even going on to Hamburg only adds another couple of hours onto the journey.
(german source ... and very critical of the project)
https://www.nabu.de/umwelt-und-ressourcen/verkehr/verkehrsin...
Personally I like the concept of having a more direct access to scandinavia and see lots of other positive long term effects.