On a recent Monday morning, Jan Peter Klatt sat in his office in Germany’s Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy and strained to hear a recording of an interview with Kansas Sen. Forrest Knox, R-Altoona. Knox was making one last unsuccessful pitch to repeal Kansas’ renewable energy standards by citing Germany, where he said the transition from fossil fuels to renewables was “de-industrializing” the nation. “It isn’t,” Klatt says. “And especially it wouldn’t be de-industrializing for the States (now). We have to differentiate between the past and the future.”