Sunday October 24th 2021
“Coup de grace for Lausitz”
Kretschmer warns of an earlier coal exit
The traffic light negotiators can imagine getting out of coal as early as 2030 and not eight years later. That doesn’t go down well with the Saxon Prime Minister. He holds the SPD and FDP responsible and warns them against breaking their word.
Saxony’s Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer has warned the traffic light negotiators of an earlier coal exit. “It’s a very bad political style,” he said on the ARD program “Report from Berlin”. The coal phase-out was a compromise between all social groups. “Whom should you still believe something?”
In the exploratory paper by the SPD, Greens and FDP, however, it is said that an accelerated phase-out of coal-fired power generation is necessary in order to meet the climate protection goals. Ideally, this would be successful by 2030. The CDU politician Kretschmer said: “For Lusatia, for example, this is the coup de grace.” It will take until 2038 to build infrastructure there and locate new jobs. Proponents of an earlier coal phase-out consider this to be necessary in order to achieve the climate targets, because a lot of CO2 is released into the atmosphere through coal-fired power plants. Several thousand people have just demonstrated again at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.
Kretschmer said he was counting on SPD chancellor candidate Olaf Scholz, who helped negotiate the 2020 compromise, said Kretschmer. Scholz is someone who sees the problems very clearly. “I hope that he can prevail against the Greens at this point, that the SPD will not break its word here and that the FDP will not break its word either.” Both parties had previously had a different position. In the exploratory paper, the SPD, the Greens and the FDP agreed, among other things, that the coal phase-out should “ideally” be achieved by 2030 and that the expansion of renewable energies should be significantly promoted.
Kretschmer said he thinks it is impossible to get out of nuclear energy and coal while keeping Germany competitive. That cannot simply be decided politically, but must also be solved technically. The Greens are no longer the opposition, but the government and have to answer the question: “What is a sustainable energy concept for this industrialized country, Germany?” During the election campaign, CSU boss Markus Söder also spoke out in favor of examining after the federal election whether a coal phase-out would be possible as early as 2030.
DGB chairman Reiner Hoffmann said on Thursday that he thought a faster coal phase-out would only be possible under certain conditions. “If a future traffic light coalition wants to move forward from coal-fired power generation, the pace of the energy transition must be massively increased and the settlement of jobs and added value in the districts accelerated.”