No Driving on Weekends?

Nut Zero strikes again. 

The German Transport Minister is bowing to the inevitable: Net Zero laws in Germany must be changed. Unless they are, driving on weekends will have to be banned. 

Germans warned weekend driving may be banned to meet ‘net zero ‘ targets.

A corresponding reduction in traffic performance would only be possible through restrictive measures that are difficult to communicate to the population, such as nationwide and indefinite driving bans on… pic.twitter.com/U6i3rdZ9Na

— Steve Milloy (@JunkScience) April 15, 2024

Volker Wissing, a member of the minority Free Democratic Party–a center/center-right party in Germany that often holds the balance of power in the German Parliament–is lobbying for a change in the law to allow the transport sector a larger fraction of the emissions budget in the country. 

If that doesn’t happen, he warns that cars will be forced off the roads. 

Who could have guessed?

Germany’s transport minister has warned that driving will have to be banned at the weekends unless the country’s net zero laws are changed.

Volker Wissing’s FDP party wants the law amended so the polluting transport sector can miss carbon emissions reduction targets, as long as Germany as a whole reaches them.

But the change is opposed by the Greens, who are part of the three-way coalitionwith the pro-business FDP and the Social Democrats (SPD), led by Olaf Scholz, the chancellor.

Negotiations over the law have dragged on since September last year. In a bid to heap pressure on his coalition partners to amend the law, Mr Wissing said that he would have to enforce a ban on weekend driving to abide by the law unless it was changed before mid-July.

The Greens accused Mr Wissing of stirring up unfounded fears at a time when German enthusiasm for climate-friendly legislation is at a low ebb during the cost of living crisis.

Germans’ enthusiasm for “climate-friendly legislation” is at a low ebb? I wonder why? 

The fact is that net-zero has been a disaster for Germany, and whether or not a full ban on driving on weekends would be necessary is not really the point: Germans will have to radically change their transportation system and behavior in order to meet these targets, just as they have had to deindustrialize. 

Net-zero policies are designed to reduce the consumption and quality of life for ordinary people. This is so blindingly obvious that you don’t even have to read all the literature of the people pushing it to know it. If you do read it, you will see that they say it often enough. 

Pushing “solutions” like renewable energy and electrifying everything are simply dodges, not solutions to a problem. If you look at what has actually happened instead of what the pie-in-the-sky utopian promises say you realize it is impossible to live a modern life without reliable, abundant, and inexpensive power. Net zero makes that impossible. 

According to the current climate protection law, the ministry responsible for underperforming sectors must launch an immediate programme to put them back on track.

Mr Wissing has not yet done so. His ministry claims reforming the sector is more challenging than other areas of the economy because it affects people’s everyday lives and cannot be changed quickly.

“A corresponding reduction in traffic performance would only be possible through restrictive measures that are difficult to communicate to the population, such as nationwide and indefinite driving bans on Saturdays and Sundays,” he wrote in a letter dated Thursday to coalition parliamentary group leaders.

Wissig’s coalition partners are attacking him as a scaremonger, but the truth is obvious enough: if the climate law isn’t changed, driving will have to be curtailed. Whether it is banning driving on weekends, radically increasing prices, imposing onerous limits on distance traveled, reducing speed limits, or something else, the law requires a dramatic cut in mobility. 

All the whining in the world won’t change that, and the whining itself is for show. The Greens are all about reversing modernity; if they cared about greenhouse gases, they wouldn’t have pushed for getting rid of nuclear power. 

You can’t reduce power output, destabilize the grid, and electrify everything without a collapse of the economy. Germany is doing these things, and the Left is pretty clear about wanting to collapse the economy. They just don’t want this to become a damaging political issue. 

I hope the Parliament refuses to change the law. Germans have been far too complacent about the damage being done to their economy, and it is about time they face the consequences of their actions. If Wissig goes through with his threat the coalition will blow up quickly enough. 

Then a real debate about trade-offs can begin.