Germany’s Government has collapsed over its refusal to budge on Net Zero after Chancellor Olaf Scholz fired his Finance Minister on Wednesday evening. The Telegraph has more.
The Chancellor sacked Christian Lindner after days of crisis talks and amid a deluge of rumours that his turbulent coalition was about to come to an end.
In a statement to the press on Wednesday evening, the Chancellor accused his Finance Minister of “breaking his trust” and putting the “short-term survival of his party over the wellbeing of the country”.
Mr. Scholz, 66, said that he would put his Chancellorship to a vote of confidence in January, a move that will clear the way for early elections in March.
Mr. Lindner, head of the pro-business Free Democrats, had been pushing for corporate tax relief and a delay to Net Zero targets as part of a comprehensive package to get the economy moving after years of stagnation.
Mr. Scholz claimed that he made a “generous offer” to Mr. Lindner but that the Finance Minister “showed no interest whatsoever in accepting this offer for the good of the country”.
“Too often, Mr. Lindner has blocked laws in an irrelevant manner, too often he has engaged in petty party-political tactics, too often he has broken my trust,” Mr. Scholz said.
Mr. Lindner hit back in a statement made shortly after in which he accused Mr. Scholz of “not having the strength to give our country a new start”.
He added that the Chancellor had tried to get him to suspend the country’s strict debt brake rules, something he refused to accept.
At the end of last week, Mr. Lindner set out his conditions for staying in the Government in an internal paper that called for an “economic transformation”.
Among the measures were a demand to cut the corporate tax level, freeze all new business regulations and push back the target of achieving Net Zero by five years.
The paper was immediately rejected by Mr. Scholz’s Social Democrats and the Greens, the third party in the coalition.
In true European style, the slow-motion collapse involves a confidence vote in January (yes, really), followed by a likely early election in March – rather than the scheduled September. No rush to consult the people, it seems. On the plus side, the Government won’t have a working majority for nearly half a year.
Worth reading in full.
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I’m sure there are well meaning people working in “public health” – lots of them perhaps. But I don’t think anything will ever convince me to give my support to any initiative or organization that labelled itself “public health”.
“Public Health” is actually a good thing. In wealthy countries it enabled the eradication of preventable diseases like Malaria. What it is we need to be worried about is the hijacking of bodies and institutions in the pursuit of political agenda’s. In the case of climate that is “Sustainable Development” and “Net Zero”.
It should be good but I have zero confidence that the hijacking you mention can be prevented.
Yes but it is the hijacking that is the problem not the idea of public health. As regards climate all institutions have been hijacked —science, education, all government departments, art, media, and virtually everything else you can think of. So eg we would not say that the arts or education are bad things. Only the hijacking of them is bad.
I think publicly funded bodies that set out to “do good” will get hijacked so the less we have of them, the better.
So you want “less” public schools? “Less” public fire brigades and police? “Less” public hospitals. ———-I am a small government person myself but I think you are rather taking things to extremes.
Bodies are only being hijacked by the progressive left, and it is they we should be attacking, not the actual bodies.
The bare essentials only that the market is not able to provide sensibly/affordably. The NHS is a disaster, but in any case it’s concerned with treating sick people, which isn’t quite the same as “public health”.
“Public Health” gave you vaccinations for everything from Small Pox to TB. ———-But I think we are wasting our time here. We are playing with words. —–Notice I say “we” not you. —–Perhaps we should focus our attack on this parasite new government, because if we both want smaller government that doesn’t interfere in our lives then we now have the very opposite.
Never a waste of time debating with a fellow sceptic. I think we agree on who the enemy are and where we should focus our efforts. If there is ever a winding back from the gigantic state and all of its tentacles, it almost certainly won’t go as far as either of us would like! I guess my point is that the political branch struggles to implement what it purports to want even regarding the most basic and fundamental or services it directly controls never mind all the other do-gooding institutions that it funds. As for vaccines, I don’t know enough to comment. Sanitation and food hygiene I would be ok with but when the state starts wanting to nudge my private health choices I have to say no. Have a good day!
“The Director-General of the World Health Organisation is adamant that this must be his organisation’s priority”…….Bet he isn’t adamant in private, and I bet he also has a private Jet.
Great article, and I have been saying all of those things since about 2007. Climate Change dogma is based on faith and emotion rather than fact and reason. It is a political agenda that requires it’s own facts and makes statements of certainty about things where there are none. It will all the time make claims that are a tiny smidgeon of the truth and will turn that into a planetary emergency. The Malaria scaremongering is typical of this idea that people must be filled with fear in order that they accept the politics masquerading as science. Malaria used to exist in the UK, Holland, USA etc and what wiped it out was good public health enabled by prosperity. It is not a disease of climate yet that is what we are repeatedly told and it all seems plausible because it is told to us as if it is common knowledge with this air of authority because “all scientists agree”. This is FALSE and matters of science are not decided by a show of hands from government funded data adjusters and climate modellers.
A friend said to me one time “Why would governments tell us there is a climate emergency if it isn’t true”? ———This is the crucial question that everyone needs to ask. I asked it in 2007 and what I have found is that Climate Change and its solutions are the biggest pseudo scientific fraud ever perpetrated. ——-My friend asked me that question because he is getting his information from mainstream news who are presenting a particular narrative, and he, like most people think that these news channels (like BBC, SKY News) are doing investigative journalism on this issue and so can be trusted. But once you read books like “Hubris” Michael Hart, —-“Watermelons” James Delingpole, —-“Energy and Climate Wars” Economides and Glover, ——“Taken by Storm” McKitrick and Essex, —–“Climate Uncertainty and Risk” Judith Curry etc etc you realise very quickly there is a completely different story altogether. You may disagree with that other story, but like my friend, how can you disagree with it if you NEVER HEAR IT?
Very true. And the reason why the politically driven “Climate change” is clearly nonsense, is simply its basis on CO2.
The personalities driving this global policy originally needed a scientific term to justify and promote their novel idea and they chose CO2, a gas everyone had heard of but few know very much about.
They forgot, and presumably did not know at the time, that human beings are simple animals which require oxygen to breathe, whereby we convert some of that oxygen into CO2 as part of the biological process of life.
In fact, we all exhale 100 times as much CO2 as we inhale: simply put, we are all CO2 generators – with every breath we breathe.
So, using CO2 as the basis for all evil is idiotic and requires the extinction of all animal life, not just human life.
And then one can discuss the logarithmic relationship between CO2 and its greenhouse effect, or the research showing CO2 at high atmospheric levels has a cooling effect, or the far greater effect of water vapour on the climate (the public would never have accepted water being the source of all evil), and so on and so forth.
Leave the climate alone! We are far too stupid to fully understand its workings and we are frighteningly arrogant if we believe we can control it.
Finally, to your list of authors, I suggest you add Patrick Moore (ex Greenpeace), Ian Plimer and Gregory Wrightstone.
Yes but we can argue about science all day. We can talk about feedback loops, logarithmic rather than linear effects, climate sensitivity to CO2, models full of speculations regarding a myriad of parameters etc etc but we are mostly wasting our time because this issue isn’t and never was about science in the first place. The science is just the excuse for the policies.
I am just trying to find ways to open people’s eyes to the obvious. We are animals, therefore we exhale CO2, therefore CO2 cannot be harmful.
Having said/written that, I have not been able to convince people with science PhDs! Very frustrating!