Volkswagen is mired in deep crisis. This flagship of the German automobile industry and symbol of our postwar economic miracle is awash in debt, battered by unrelentingly high labour and energy prices. The metalworkers’ union IG Metall has driven wages at Volkswagen to imprudent extremes, and the company has poured mountains of good money after bad in its failing effort to develop serviceable and marketable electric vehicles.
VW has no choice if it is to survive our looming and entirely self-imposed ban on internal combustion engines. Alas, VW’s battery-powered cars compete poorly with foreign models from companies like Tesla and BYD, because electric vehicles are entirely different products that employ entirely different technologies, and there’s no reason that a leading producer of petrol-powered cars should also happen to be a leading producer of electric cars. Demanding, via political fiat, that your automobile industry begin producing a totally different product in the course of the next decade, is not all that different from abolishing your automobile industry.
This week, VW announced plans to cut tens of thousands of jobs and to close three factories. That is a very big deal, because it has never closed a single German factory before. I try to avoid economic topics, but this story is so much bigger than economics. As Daniel Gräber wrote in Cicero last month, “the VW crisis has become a symbol for the decline of our entire country”.
The Green Leftoid establishment is eagerly blaming management for these failures, which is on the one hand not entirely wrong, but on the other hand not nearly an absolution. The German state of Lower Saxony holds a 20% stake in Volkswagen, and so it also manages the company. Recently, in a fit of virtue, it placed a Green politician – Julia Willie Hamburg – on its supervisory board. Hamburg does not even own a car and has used her position to argue that Volkswagen should regard itself not as an automobile manufacturer but as a “mobility services provider” and shift its focus away from “individual transport”.
The absurdly named Julia Willie Hamburg is merely symptomatic of a broader phenomenon. Germany has succumbed to political forces that have nothing but indifference and disdain for the industries that have made us prosperous. Our sitting Economics Minister, Robert Habeck, gave an interview to taz in 2011 in which he said that “fewer cars will not lead to less economic growth, but to new industries”, and attacked “the old growth theory, based on gross domestic product”. And behind Green politicians like Habeck are even more radical forces, like Ulrike Herrmann, the Editor of taz, for many years a member of the Green Party and also an open advocate of wide-scale deindustrialisation. Because I am going to quote Herrmann saying some very crazy things, you need to know that she is in no way a fringe figure. She appears regularly on all the respectable evening talkshows and every politically informed person in the Federal Republic knows who she is.
Herrmann has outlined her political views in various books like The End of Capitalism: Why Growth and Climate Protection Are Not Compatible – and How We Will Live in the Future. From these monographs, we learn that Herrmann sees climatism as a means of imposing a centrally planned economy in which we will own nothing and be happy. Happily, Herrmann also talks a lot, and in her various speeches and interviews she states her vision for decarbonising Germany in very radical terms. I am grateful to this X user for highlighting typical remarks that Herrmann delivered in April of this year before a sympathetic audience of climate lunatics.
There, Herrmann elaborated on her vision for a future economy in which all major goods would have to be rationed (emphasis mine):
Talking about rationing: it’s clear that if we shrink economically, we won’t have to be as poor as the British were in 1939; rather, we’d have to be as rich as the West Germans were in 1978. That is a huge difference, because we can take advantage of all the growth of the post-war period and the entire economic miracle.
The central elements of the economy would have to be rationed. First of all, living space, because cement emits endless amounts of CO2. Actually, new construction would have to be banned outright and living space rationed to 50 square metres per capita. That should actually be enough for everyone. Then meat would have to be rationed, because meat production emits enormous amounts of CO2. You don’t have to become a vegetarian, but you’ll have to eat a lot less meat.
Then train travel has to be rationed. So this idea, which many people also have – “so okay then I don’t have a car but then I always travel on the Intercity Express trains” – that won’t work either, because of course air resistance increases with speed. Yes, it’s all totally insane. Trains won’t be allowed to travel faster than 100 kilometres per hour, but you can still travel around locally quite a lot. This is all in my book, okay? But I didn’t expand on it there because I didn’t want to scare all the readers.
At this point Herrmann begins to cackle manically, ecstatic at the thought that millions of Germans will be stuck riding rationed kilometres on slow local public transit.
She soon recovers, and begins to explain how her plan will mean the obliteration of your savings, the end of banks and even the destruction of “money as we know it”:
But it’s clear that when the economy shrinks – the wealth that exists, including financial wealth, loses its value. So the savings that are there are then largely gone, all right? Of course, millionaires have the largest savings, but it’s also true that the upper middle class, who are sitting here now, with a university education, also have savings. Some of that would be gone.
Then there would be no more banks, because they can’t grant loans so they’d have to collapse. And money itself would have only a limited significance, so to speak, because so much is only available if you have your ration card. So I mean, what use is money to me if I can only get water if I have a water card, or what use is money to me if I am not allowed to live in more than 50 square metres anyway, and so on and so forth. So you have to say that in this system, money as we know it today loses some of its function.
There is nothing more to say, really, it speaks for itself.
All year, the eminently adult, mature political class of Germany has been having a collective seizure over “Right wing extremism”. Its members have told me that it is extremely Right-wing to say that maybe the European Union isn’t the greatest. They have told me that it is extremely Right-wing to say we should maybe close our borders to opportunistic mass migrants. They have told me that it is extremely Right-wing to suggest that securing cheap energy should be a higher priority than elaborate schemes to control the weather or defeat Putler.
What is not in any way extreme, according to this very same farsighted and eminently reasonable establishment, is the suggestion that nobody should have cars, that everything from train kilometres to water should be rationed, that we should wipe out most savings, abolish banks, stop all new construction and force everybody to live in DDR apartment flats. Were we to do all of that, we would replace our mass immigration crisis with a mass emigration crisis. Sooner or later the state would have to close the borders or be deprived of all able-bodied people. I wonder if anybody considers restoring the Berlin Wall to be in any way extreme.
Herrmann’s is not the whole Green vision, but it is a weight-bearing column of the Green system, and the Green system now controls the Federal Republic. Alongside Herrmann’s fanatical degrowth politics, the Green system consists of technocrats who are eager to expand their supervision of the economy for their own obscure bureaucratic reasons, of opportunists and grifters eager to get their hands on state subsidies, of corrupt entrepreneurs who think that destroying established industries will open opportunities for them, and of ageing 1968ers who still hope to destroy their hated enemies in the petite bourgeoisie.
All of that, together, is the Green system, and the energy transition is the policy that this system has vomited forth. This is the only energy transition that anybody wants in Germany, so please don’t tell me that actually solar power is great and if we just did a billion wind turbines differently we’d be awash in free energy. First, I don’t believe you, but second, your vision isn’t on the menu. The renewables infinity energy futurists only get to do the things that the degrowthers and the bureaucrats and the grifters and the 1968ers also want to do. That’s what the energy transition is, it is the only reason there even is an energy transition, and maybe you should ask yourself why the renewables infinity energy futurists don’t control anything by themselves and basically spend all their time running public relations ops for vastly darker and more malign forces.
This is not a joke, okay? Renewables are not a fun cool futuristic techbro thing, and they are only incidentally groovy new technology you screw to your roof. Fundamentally and economically, they are weapons of mass deindustrialisation. I don’t know how far down the deindustrialisation rabbit hole we’re going to fall, but the way down is very long and we are gaining momentum. Every moment we continue to fall, turning things around becomes monumentally harder. And although the degrowthers are but one voice in this whole mess, as long as we continue to screw up our economy, they’re the only ones who are really winning. Dare we believe that is even an accident? Until these people are out of power, the factories will keep closing, the companies will keep leaving, unemployment will climb, and we will keep getting poorer. And all of it, for nothing.
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I don’t know who the lady is in the first picture but I bet those glasses she is wearing are top quality frames and lenses made with precision machines. That haircut looks expensive too, done with top quality scissors. I don’t know much about the manufacture of cosmetics other than they do get manufactured. She is not smeared in whatever people used to put on their faces before cosmetics, or wearing an animal skin or leaves or whatever. Don’t know about her state of health but bet she’s had scans from high-tech machines.
That is absolutely the first thing that came into my mind – they look like pretty high end glasses, but presumably even low end glasses cannot be produced under “deindustrialised” conditions, she is also wearing a printed top that looks suspiciously industrially produced as well, has a nice haircut like you say (under her future plans, presumably it would have to be grown long or hacked at roughly with a flint knife); and I am willing to bet ten squillion pounds that she currently has more than 50 square metres of space to call home. These people should be forced to live as they are advocating for several years with no exceptions (if she gets ill, for example, she can’t take industrially produced medicines – a bit of herbal medicine is all that’s permitted) then see how they like it. Although doubtless some of them WOULD like it, of course.
Absolutely. You can bet that when she envisages the glorious future, she doesn’t imagine she will live in a mud hut, scavenging and foraging for survival. Oh, no, she will be part of the elite, shielded from these uncomfortable conditions, but of course that’s the least she deserves for sacrificing her life for the salvation of mankind (oops, sorry, humankind).
Oh yes there will be exceptions of course, for the important rulers. Just like we are seeing already, when they tell us to stop flying cattle class once a year for a nice holiday but insist that they need to take private jets everywhere for “security” or “timetabling” reasons.
I wonder if any of them have ever set out exactly how they see this working. Would love to see it – hard to think that is would be in any way plausible or coherent. You can focus what you put effort into in order to prioritise what you feel is of most value (THEY decide this, of course) but you can’t turn the clock back across the board without huge knock on effects that they are unlikely to feel happy with if affected personally.
I think the really scary bit is they may actually believe what they say…
I find it hard to fathom. I would like to have a serious discussion with someone like her, but my experiences trying to have such discussions with covidians were fruitless – they won’t engage – and I suspect ecoloons would be the same.
Bye bye radio and chemo therapy, x-rays, scans of any sort and any types of joint replacement. Welcome to a painful old age.
This would suit them (as long as it only applied to other people of course) as an easy way to ensure depopulation (of other people).
Without the fossil fuels industry modern make-up would not exist. The ladies would be back to sticks of charcoal, gravy browning and white lead.
Indeed. It’s hard to imagine they actually believe this crap. It’s probably as MajorMajor says above – they don’t think it applies to them. Trouble is that a lot of modern comforts are only really viable if made at scale for a mass market.
“Green intellectual” now there’s a contradiction in terms!
‘Demanding, via political fiat, that your automobile industry begin producing a totally different product in the course of the next decade, is not all that different from abolishing your automobile industry.’
The genius of the self licking lollipop.
This doesn’t end well.
Wars never do.
The genius of the self licking lollipop.
A superb summary.
‘Green Intellectual’ is an oxymoron.
These people are actively destroying society with an insatiable callousness. They are absolute monsters. But who is promoting them, who is always providing them a public platform and why?
All western societies are going down the same road to hell and they are all doing their utmost to drag the rest of the world down with them too.
Emphasis on ‘moron’.
‘Intellectual’….a person who can’t plant a flower, fix a roof, or unfold a folded box.
Useless.
Maybe this tard can lead by example.
Everything made with hydrocarbons – leave them, strip them off, run naked to the woods and survive with Gaia.
Problem solved.
All revolutions are sponsored by powerful individuals. Are these people their useful idiots?
The collective death-wish is strong with these people.
Aren’t these ideas just a little bit similar to Pol Pot’s?
State ownership, rationing, abolishing money, restrictions on property, etc, etc…
So my suspicion is that this is just another educated intellectual who has fallen in love with the idea of communism, except this time the liberation of the masses will be done for environmental reasons.
The outcome would of course be the same.
Aren’t these ideas just a little bit similar to Pol Pot’s?
Pol-Pot – preceded by Mao, preceded by Lenin. For example: in 1921, after four years of Lenin’s government, the Russian economy was less than 20% what is was in 1913.
Exactly.
The end result of all these ideas is always, always the same. Totalitarianism, political terror, mass starvation, forced labour camps.
And the madleft tell us that they are the wise ones!
You need to move up the food chain to find the real psychopaths.
Yes, after murdering all the oil well owners in Baku – except for Alfred Nobel’s brother who was saved by his workers – oil exports slumped so Lenin was forced to beg the western oil companies to step in to revive production and income.
The whole of the green eco lunacy industry is based on the Club of Rome 1972 statement – mankind is the virus and climate (Co2) is the means to control that virus.
All about depopulation and control.
On what basis, and on who’s say so, is she an intellectual? Really?
No, she is an intellectual in the sense that she is well educated, articulate and intelligent.
The problem is that this is not enough.
Lenin was also extremely well educated too. But their educated mind has been captured by a fundamentally evil idea.
Perhaps the way to look at it is to view them as high priests of an evil cult. You can’t be a high priest if you are dumb, certain human qualities are necessary. But the cult you are serving is still evil.
Or, another way to understand is: the devil is not stupid.
No, she is an intellectual in the sense that she is well educated, articulate and intelligent.
Let’s see:
The central elements of the economy would have to be rationed. First of all, living space, because cement emits endless amounts of CO2. Actually, new construction would have to be banned outright and living space rationed to 50 square metres per capita. That should actually be enough for everyone. Then meat would have to be rationed, because meat production emits enormous amounts of CO2.
Assuming the translation is accurate, these are two factually dubious statements even when considering climate politics standards. The reason we’re supposed to decarbonise energy generation first and foremost is not that most of the CO₂ emitted as side-effect of economic activities comes really from construction and husbandry. The repetiveness (emits endless amounts of CO₂ … emits enormous amounts of CO₂) is very poor style people who had any (German) education worth anything would have been taught to avoid. The hysterical tone is a sign of someone getting carried away by his own emotions, another mark of the poorly educated who never learnt how to structure their thoughts instead of just letting them rush on like a waterfall.
This person who self-identifies as human being despite not everyone will want to agree with that is certainly neither well-educated nor intelligent nor articulate. Just another post-menopausal green autocunt who excellently networks in her chosen social environment and has no skills beyond that. Narcisstic, shallow, domineering and with an almost psychopathic lack of empathy for others.
Your final paragraph sums up Kneel to a tee.
They’re probably lab-grown somewhere.
How deranged do you have to be to count as an intellectual these days
“Leading green intellectual.”
The epitome of an oxymoron.
The fannification of the workplace continues at pace.
With predictably disastrous results.
We all look back prior to 1989 at the truly awful life East Germans, Russians etc had before the Berlin Wall came down. But what emerged was an even bigger communist monster called GREEN. It hijacked the environment for its purpose and has brainwashed the last couple of generations of young people who truly believe that without massive government intervention, central planning of every aspect of people’s lives that billions of people will die in a climate apocalypse and that all scientists agree this to be so. Young people so easily manipulated now clamour for their own impoverishment then head off home with their placards to their cosy house, laptop, fridge, satellite television, all courtesy of the very fuels they think they want rid of, without realising that without those fuels they would be back in the Stoneage, where no doubt they would have something different on their placards. —–“WE ARE RUNNING OUT OF STONES”.
Well their plan to destroy Germany is working very well. Manufacturing is heading for the exit if it hasn’t gone bankrupt. Retail chains are closing down. Construction is in a total mess. Inward investment is cratering. Educated people are leaving in droves. And of course those with wealth will be gone as there are plenty of other countries that will welcome their contribution to the economy – obviously not the UK of Two Tier and Thieves.
Ulrike Herrmann is seriously deranged, and her (honest) supporters are seriously deluded. Her dishonest supporters will be figuring out how they can gain from this madness. The rest of us must resist these people, all of them.
Basically she wants a society like pre-WW1 Russia …. peasant farmers, tied to the land.
Or post WW1 under Stalin.
The trouble with 50 square metres per person is that residential properties rarely approach this now. They are either too big or too small. Unless you have a rebuilding program of 50 square metres dwellings and compel people to move as their life circumstances change, the provision of these dwellings means pulling down what already exists and building new. Even with low environmental cost building that’s a huge environmental cost for very little environmental gain.
Lunacy.
I think you’re underestimating the unorginality and callousness of this far/ hard left columnist revolutionary: 50m² is the limit of what the German welfare state will pay for for people who are long-term unemployed or otherwise dependent on it¹ which is doubtlessly where she got the number from. Why would any of these … excess human beings deserve more than that?
¹ About 50% of the people permanently living off welfare in Germany are “refugees” and other unemployable/ not-looking-for-work foreigners.
Ulrike Herrmann is a leading Green intellectual? Well, she’s certainly not clever. Her opinions would have been kept more discreet if she had written them in her books rather than allow herself to be filmed/recorded spouting this drivel. At least in her book people would have to read past the first page to find these ideas – which would filter out all but the most afflicted insomniac.
These people have to be stopped by any means necessary, and I mean ‘any’.
Surely you don’t mean… ridicule?
Soapbox, ballot box, jury box…
Greens – Reds who Hate the Countryside
“…as long as we continue to screw up our economy, they’re the only ones who are really winning.”
Perhaps, but there are plenty of examples in history where it’s not good to be on the receiving end of large groups of poor, hungry and angry people. What is also not good is when those poor and hungry people know who made them poor and hungry because the architects of this poverty have been loudly telling the world everything they are doing and want to do.
Well finally the lunatics are spewing their rhetoric forth, all part of the WEF/WHO’s plans, and we are called “right wing” for opposing this, One can only assume this only applys to us “lower” classes, and not the “elite”, she needs help from professionals clearly if she believes this really will happen.
How can we argue against these people ,or better still stop them gaining more ground?.
These people take the veritable biscuit. They lack basic education on economics, powers of imagination and critical thought. They think they will save the planet but such policies mean the end of civilisation, bedlam and scorched earth with no trees standing and just about every living thing eaten by those not killed by their fellow younger and stronger fellow human beings (they, like most of us, forget that dying at the hands of other humans is a perfectly natural death).
This woman originally started in apprenticeship in banking she then broke off to get degrees in philosophy and history. She is obviously lacking education, but not for want of opportunities, more, because she’s naturally immune to learning beyond the biannual exercises in rote memorization students usually apply to get past the next round of tests.
Since this happened a long time ago, her mind has meanwhile again broken free of any factual knowledge inadvertenty gained in this way and reverted back to the excitable female teenager she never meant to stop being.
Surely “green intellectual” is an oxymoron?