This story has even made it into the Anglophone press, so you know it’s a big deal: “German transport minister warns of weekend driving ban,” says the Telegraph. “German minister threatens ‘indefinite driving bans’ on weekends,” proclaims Politico. “German transport minister under fire for weekend driving ban threat,” declares Reuters.
But no, despite the headlines, they are not going to take away our cars. Amazingly, not even the Greens want to do that. For once the story is not about German authoritarianism, or woke insanity or anything like that. Rather, it’s about how nobody can really bring himself to care about the climate anymore – not even our forward-thinking, progressively minded, environmentally responsible political establishment.
For the backstory, we must go all the way back to the pre-Covid era, when aggressive climate legislation was popular even with centre-Right CDU voters, and before the electorate had a taste of what Green policies like the draconian home heating ordinances really feel like on the ground.
Back in those halcyon days, when the child saint Greta Thunberg was cutting class to save the Earth, Angela Merkel’s Government passed the Climate Protection Act. The law mandates a 65% reduction in CO2 emissions compared to 1990 levels by 2030, an 88% reduction by 2040 and an utterly unrealisable carbon neutrality by 2045. In the near term, the Climate Protection Act also establishes maximum annual emissions levels for various economic sectors. Should a given sector exceed its maximum, the responsible ministry must submit an ominous “action programme” to bring things back on target.
The Climate Protection Act is archetypal climate nonsense. Politicians like to take credit for Doing Something about the climate, but because Doing Something amounts to massive economic restrictions and drastic interventions in daily life, they would prefer not to Do that Something themselves. Far better is to pass legislation committing future governments to Do Something and let them deal with the mess. Then you can reap the short-term rewards of being tough on carbon emissions, without bearing direct responsibility for all the chaos that actually being tough on carbon emissions would unleash. Alas, time marches forwards at a steady pace. I am sure that 2030 sounded like an unimaginably distant date when it was floated at the Paris Accords in 2015, but now it is a mere six years away. That is becoming a big, big problem for the climatists.
You could say that Merkel’s Climate Protection Act bequeathed the hapless Scholz Government a small collection of ticking time bombs, which they’ve developed a considerable interest in defusing. One way to do this, is to revise the Climate Protection Act and remove its strict sector-based emissions limits before anybody is forced to field a climate-saving ‘action programme’. In the meantime, they’ve been studiously ignoring the requirements, which is why our Minister of Economic Destruction Robert Habeck could be found complaining back in June that no cabinet ministers were complying with Climate Protection Act emissions limits.
The fly in the ointment is the Green Party, who are as crazy as their oblivious out-of-touch upper middle-class urbanite constituents, and who have thought it best to block government efforts to (however temporarily) defang Merkel’s odious law. In a fit of frustration, the liberal Transport Minister Volker Wissing therefore warned that if no Climate Protection Act reforms were possible, he might be forced to impose “drastic interventions” on motorists:
In the dispute over a reform of the Climate Protection Act, Federal Transport Minister Volker Wissing (FDP) has warned of drastic cuts for motorists – including weekend driving bans. This is according to a letter from Wissing to the heads of the SPD, Green and FDP parliamentary factions. It was made available to the Deutsche Presse-Agentur on Thursday…
The letter states that if the amended Climate Protection Act does not come into force before July 15th, the Ministry will be obliged under the current law to present an action programme to ensure compliance with the annual emission levels for the transport sector in the coming years.
And just like that, the climatists are falling all over themselves to reassure Germans that no, don’t worry, driving is fine, nobody wants to take away your cars:
The Federal Environmental Agency believes [driving bans are] unnecessary. “Of course we don’t need driving bans. Nobody is even discussing such a ban; this is frightening people for no reason,” said [Green-affiliated] President Dirk Messner. Instead, he once again suggested a general speed limit on German motorways …
There is more, there is always more:
The SPD also criticised the proposal: “Scaremongering with far-fetched proposals won’t help climate protection in the transport sector at all, quite the contrary,” SPD Bundestag faction leader Detlef Müller said… “The proposal does not further our common goal of reducing CO2 emissions, but to unnecessary uncertainty for people in our country.” The SPD Bundestag faction clearly rejects driving bans for cars and lorries. Such manoeuvres would hardly advance the ongoing deliberations on the Climate Protection Act in the Bundestag, said Müller.
I like this paragraph so much that I’ve read it five times. It’s just so entertaining to read some right-thinking lunatic like Müller insisting up and down that literally banning driving “does not further our common goal of reducing CO2 emissions.”
Along with the Green Party and Greenpeace, the environmental organisation BUND has also criticised Wissing’s statements on the threat of driving bans. BUND transport expert Jens Hilgenberg said: “It fits the picture that this Minister, of all people, who blocks every measure, no matter how easy to implement, such as a speed limit on motorways, is now playing on people’s fears.” He is only doing so to further increase the pressure on the coalition partners, Hilgenberg says. “This is a shabby tactic.”
We must add avoiding political suicide to the long and growing list of things – from the rights of Palestinians to the threat posed by “disinformation” to third-world poverty – that are more important than climate change. This is becoming a very long list indeed.
So what are the solutions, if we’re not going to ban driving on weekends, and the Greens insist on blocking reforms to the Climate Protection Act? Well, aside from the speed limit, which has the same attraction for the Left in Germany as banning guns does for the Left in the United States (and about equal chances of achieving any of the stated goals), the experts have nothing but the same tired nostrums: We need more public transit! We need more electromobility! We need more expansions to the electric vehicle charging networks! The problem is not only that none of this amounts to an ‘action programme’ to sink vehicle emissions posthaste; it is also that there is no money for any of this. Electric vehicle subsidies have been withdrawn since the courts blew a 60 billion dollar hole in the Government’s budget. Far from expanding public transit, we’re fighting to maintain the decaying rail network we already have. And nobody believes that more charging stations will save the planet.
This is late-stage climatism and it will linger for a long time. There await years, if not decades, of haggling over the ambitious goals set by past governments, years of fig leafs and excuses, years of relaxing restrictions in elaborate ways so we can pretend we’re still doing something. It is going to be very tedious, but also, I suspect, occasionally entertaining.
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Looks and sounds like the German ptb should be dusting off the old ww2 ss uniforms for their next party convention!
Small black clip on moustaches available at the door!
More like the old Communists of the DDR. People remember them in the Eastern Lande,and that is part of the reason they vote for the ‘Faaaar Right’ AfD.
The Germans just aren’t world class at fudging things like us here in the UK. They are too rational.
We on the other hand are world leaders at proclaiming two opposing things and carrying on quite happily. We are pragmatists.
Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
“Rational” ——-Do you think covering a beautiful country in 40,000 huge industrial turbines and hoping to soon have 55,000 of them is the work of rational human beings?
Absolutely. A lot of money is made in this way.
Do you mean having all those turbines is rational because they make money for people or do you agree with me it is irrational to cover a country in this clutter?
I mean that the people operating the turbines have a perfectly rational interest in the money they’re getting because of this. That they must be built is demanded by a law which came into force under Merkel and as all mainstream parties agree with the climate change agenda, ordinary people don’t have any input into this process. All they can do to express their opposition to it is vote for a party opposed to it. The largest of these is the AfD and not even the AfD stands a realistic chance to influence actual government decisions for the forseeable future.
As one of the people in the climate movie put it: Climate change hoax is a bad term. It should really be called a scam. And scams work because the victims can’t help it.
I think there is a not insignificant correlation between rationalism and disregard for aesthetic beauty.
Perfidious Albion.
If only there was an EU wide election in June where those opposed to the Nut zero nonsense could vote for Parties opposing Nut zero. Even the EU could not ignore a 70% plus anti vote which was enough to see off Varadkhar.
Are you sure?
The Irish simply got confused and put the cross on the wrong box. It is an easy mistake to make.
They are Irish!
I had my doubts as I was typing my original message!
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/2000-elderly-pawns-of-the-eco-nutters/
The 2,000 Swiss witches and the recently formulated new law on climate management passed by the ECHR.
There can be no question that the only sane action wrt the ECHR is to leave the Council of Europe or – even better – disestablish it altogether. Assuming the climate change CO₂ narrative was true, there’s absolutely nothing the government of Switzerland could do to improve the global situation in this respect short of declaring war on China, India and the USA and invading all three countries with armed forces in order to make them cut their CO₂ emissions and the chances of success wouldn’t exactly be great. This means the court ruling is outright disingenious.
And in doing so create even more C02, maybe even unclear, but don’t worry about any of that.
Neither of which will reduce CO2 output if the electricity is generated with gas or coal. Fortunately Germany’s neighbour, France, is happy for now to sell excess nuclear generated electricity to idiots who trashed their own nuclear power capability. However, when the EU rules about EVs start to bite in France they won’t have spare electricity to sell – which will royally screw up Germany meeting it’s Climate Protection Act requirements.
This is what happens when Ideology trumps common sense. But the pretend to save the planet house will all come tumbling down
You can live in cloud cuckoo land. You can pretend you are In Alice in Wonderland. You can Follow the Yellow Brick Road, but in the end there is only one world you are going to have to live in ——-The REAL ONE. ——-Reality has this very nasty habit of giving you a proverbial uppercut and knocking some sense into you. For all of these phony planet savers, Mike Tyson is winding up the big uppercut for you, and the sooner the better so we can get back to living in the real world.
Never tested it but some experienced street fighters swear by the open palm heel strike.
And the circus rolls on, as the sun weakens and we fall into 30 years of endless winters here in Northern Europe. I guess that’ll solve the immigration crisis. They’ll all be clambering back into their boats as the frostbite sets in.
Just one black shirt and an arm band away from doing it all over again.
Jawohl mein führer.
King Canute has left the building.
I do hope he is correct in his final paragraph, but there is a lot of pain to come before then.
Log burners in Scotland, anyone?