LIf you laid all the gas lines in Germany one after the other – how far would you get with that? Far behind the moon. Or: once there and almost half back. It’s 511,000 kilometers, surprisingly many. Germany wouldn’t be Germany if the road network weren’t even longer: around 830,000 kilometers, 13,200 of which are motorways, and that in a country that’s no more than 1,000 kilometers at its longest point.
These figures make it clear how developed the infrastructure is in two areas that play a significant role in the change and therefore in the increasingly urgent need to protect the climate. No matter how often one can dismissively point out that we shouldn’t overdo it with climate policy, when the Chinese, the Americans and the Indians… The figures also clarify what is at stake or what is up for grabs and how far-reaching that is change that will come one way or the other – the only question is how quickly? In any case, it is a topic that still gives you cold feet, even in spring.
“Ban on oil and gas heating, out for the combustion engine – has that really been thought through?” was the title of the program “Anne Will” on Sunday evening in the first. It soon became clear that asking a question means answering it. The draft from the Green House of Habeck (Economy/Energy) – and that’s all it is for the time being – provides for January 1, 2024 to only allow and install new heating systems that run on at least 65 percent renewable energies. No one in the group considered this deadline to be realistic, neither logistically nor, as they say, socially, not even the Greens co-head Omid Nouripour, who left a moderate impression overall and only got along with the CDU chairwoman of small and medium-sized enterprises, Gitta Connemann got the hair.
FDP parliamentary group leader Christian Dürr, who went to work in a fairly authoritative manner, used the category that is currently used a little too often in his party: “Openness to technology”. You’re already fed up with it: by no means prohibitions, but innovation, incentives, doing one thing but not neglecting the other. But maybe it’s not all that wrong at this point. It starts with the fact that it is still completely unclear who will be able to afford the necessary heat pump in the future for 25,000 to 30,000 euros alone, quite apart from the question of whether there will be enough craftsmen to install the things.
The state wants to promote again
However, it quickly emerged that Habeck’s draft also stated that the “compliance costs” would be “submitted later”. Nouripour spoke, as the pleasant moderator Anne Will found: “nonchalantly” about funding programs that the state then just (add: once again) had to set up. And that was the moment when Henrike Roßbach, Berlin business correspondent of the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”, formerly editor of the FAZ, used her analytical skills for the first but not for the last time and referred to the “fundamental” party differences within the governing coalition, especially as far as the role of the state is concerned. She was allowed to assume that she knew how the three colors thought about it.
Roßbach specified that the question was: “How much money is enough?” At some point, and FDP man Dürr was entirely of her opinion, the state must return to a sensible economic mode. Lower Saxony’s Prime Minister Stephan Weil (SPD) was also skeptical as to whether providing more and more money would do the trick. Connemann insisted on pointing out that the traffic light coalition was already running into debt in a record-breaking manner, but it was easy for the other participants to use the 16-year argument: time , which had just been wasted under Angela Merkel’s CDU, in questions of building conversion as well as the overall infrastructure renovation and conversion in the country.
It was also about cars
That – the pun may be allowed at night sleeping hour – the citizens will soon be burned, so it will not come to that. Time and time again, FDP leader Lindner commented, who had said smugly that pen pal Habeck’s draft was well-intentioned in terms of climate policy, but had to go back to the “assembly hall”. I-am-a-plumber-by-profession: You almost wanted to sing with Reinhard Mey in this solid, hardly ever really argumentative show, which finally had to take the corner in the direction of a very hot topic: the combustion engine. Here the positions were already known beforehand.
Christian Dürr’s technological optimism as far as the usability of e-fuels is concerned was a little surprising. The rest agreed: not worth it for cars, too expensive to produce, not efficient enough. The fact that German car manufacturers were counting on it would have been new to Stephan Weil – and he, as a member of the VW supervisory board, must have known it. In any case, and others were of the same opinion, German car manufacturers would continue to build their combustion engines after 2035 and then export even more to other countries.
This Anne Will show didn’t bring anything that you haven’t heard in the past few weeks. But it was properly conducted and never left any doubts about the premise, which probably no one will dispute anymore. Let’s say it with Norbert Blüm: One thing is certain – climate change.