Now his colleague in the cabinet, Environment Minister Steffi Lemke from the Greens, is opposing Wissing and opposing his plans to have new trunk roads and motorways approved more quickly. Such plans, according to the valiant Green Party, “certainly do not make sense” in times of climate crisis and species extinction.
Wissing wants to speed up road and bridge construction and halve the planning times for such projects. To do this, he suggested, one might have to curtail the rights of environmental groups.
According to the FDP minister in an interview, one can see that processes are being conducted in order to “delay infrastructure projects for as long as possible. That must be avoided.”
The Environment Minister, who wants to curb her colleague Wissing’s concrete and asphalt mania, can only be shouted at: “Steffi, stay strong!” Because it is striking how the transport minister and his FDP as a whole ignore the alarming signs of the times. Global warming, climate catastrophe, species extinction – all because of air pollution, which we still cannot slow down.
Wissing, however, carried on undisturbed and continued to give priority to road traffic – one of the main sources of pollutants. It doesn’t seem to matter to him that his ministry is doing particularly badly when you compare the efforts of the departments to protect the climate. Just recently, experts in this field saw particularly severe deficits in the Wissing Ministry and called its projects completely inadequate. Wissing’s so-called emergency program for climate protection is “already in the approach without sufficient claim”.
Recently there was a crisis meeting with Lemke, Wissing and Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) because of the dispute over road and motorway construction. It was announced afterwards that they had parted ways without an agreement. If the SPD takes environmental protection as seriously as it repeatedly claims, the chancellor could perhaps put his foot down. Or is that thought too simple?
Ironically, Volker Wissing, with his policies against the environment and climate, sounds the loudest when activists from the “last generation” get stuck somewhere, most recently at Munich Airport, and disrupt the flow of traffic for a few hours. “Criminal activities,” he ranted. The rule of law must “resolutely defend itself” against such criminals.
If he talks like that, one would like to remind the minister and civil servant Volker Wissing of his oath of office. In it, the Minister of Transport had also committed himself: “…that I will dedicate my energies to the well-being of the German people, increase their benefit, turn away harm from them…”.
Reverse damage from the German people … with his climate-damaging concrete policy, this air pollution minister, Volker Wissing, is definitely not doing that.
The original to this post “In the concrete and asphalt mania, the FDP ignores the signs of the times” comes from Mopo.
