And now there’s a gas levy on top of that – is that fair? If gas prices quadruple in the next few months, one has to say: the citizens didn’t ask politicians for that.
In the end, consumers pay. Always. If gas prices now triple or quadruple, again because of the gas levy that the traffic light coalition recently decided, then it will affect all customers, from the poorer to the wealthy. is that fair Hardly likely.
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Turning from the private to the political: the customers who are at the end of the gas chain pay for the wrong decisions made by politicians. And everyone has made mistakes – green-minded people (ie not just green ones) with their fixation on the unconditional phase-out of all fossil energy plus nuclear power.
And “local politicians” who designed their policy against fracking, against power lines and wind turbines according to the motto: Not in my garden. These “homeland politicians” can be found not only in the CSU, but also in the SPD and the CDU, you only have to look at Lower Saxony.
What is this unfairness towards voters? Well, they didn’t choose this energy policy. Never, at no time, was there a political “impact assessment”; there was never a discussion about all the risks that result from the various “exits” as well as from the gas dependence on Russia.
Examples: After Chernobyl, and then again after Fukushima, the two nuclear Armageddons, politics was cross-party, driven by the Greens, for the fastest possible end to nuclear power. Politics carried the population along. Would that have been the case if the long-term risks of phasing out nuclear power had been explained to the public at the same time?
Today there are again clear majorities in favor of letting the three reactors, which are to be shut down at the end of the year, continue to run. You can also read the corresponding survey results like this: More and more people are disillusioned, also because the Greens have never explained why it should make sense for Germany to give up nuclear energy if it not only continues to be used around Germany, but actually does so will be expanded (France, Netherlands, Belgium).
People are also disillusioned because one can understand the exit from lignite – because coal is harmful to the climate. But she was like that ten years ago. Why, if not for ideological reasons, should it have made sense to phase out first the – climate-neutral – nuclear power and only then the – climate-damaging – coal? This has little to do with sustainability and more to do with party politics.
Most recently in Mülheim an der Ruhr, Olaf Scholz not only said, as everyone quoted, that continuing to operate the nuclear power plants “can make sense”, he also announced, a little mumbling, that “many” coal-fired power plants would soon be needed again . Which meant hard coal and lignite. Citizens have to learn the hard way: The gas gap is now followed by the climate gap. And once again: the citizens ordered neither the one nor the other.
Example of domestic gas: When the federal government banned fracking in 2017, there was no resistance to it. Zero. But by then Putin, the gas czar, had already invaded Crimea and Donbass. Couldn’t one really have realized how risky it could be not to use domestic gas if one became dependent on imperialist Russian gas in return?
In Lower Saxony there is now a grand anti-fracking coalition made up of Prime Minister Stefan Weil from the SPD and his Economics Minister Bernd Althusmann from the CDU. And in Berlin, the Federal Minister of Economics, Robert Habeck, of the Greens, left German gas in German soil in order to import fracking gas from America instead. In any case, none of this can be explained with reason.
Just as little as the scuffle that Bavaria’s Prime Minister Markus Söder is currently having with the Greens. Söder is right if he now wants to run the nuclear power plants longer – necessity knows no law. He is also right when he calls for Germany to get back into fracking.
Minimize the risk of a sudden loss of capital. This is how you always act correctly and reduce your risk of loss!
However, one must have the impression that Söder wants to distract from his own failures – the refusal to expand power lines – the then Prime Minister Horst Seehofer called them “monster lines”. And the years of unwillingness to build more wind turbines in Bavaria, which he is now slowly correcting. Or to build power plants for Russian gas that are no longer needed.
From a reasonable point of view, it would be right to do everything to avert or mitigate an energy crisis, in the sense of not omitting anything, i.e.: “fracking” gas in Lower Saxony, letting nuclear energy run for a few more years, and power lines in the south to build and more wind turbines.
And to promote green hydrogen as quickly as possible and wherever possible. Why is Green Environment Minister Steffi Lemke currently putting the brakes on industry’s hydrogen plans – for example because their use could extend the life of combustion cars? The “Handelsblatt” reports that even the “own” Greens shake their heads. Once again, it smells suspiciously of green ideology when the infatuation with the green exit now also meets a green future technology.
Finally: Now there is talk of state aid again, 30 billion have already been decided. Yes, it doesn’t make sense if the state also enriches itself through the gas levy via the value added tax. But it doesn’t help in the end:
“The state” does not exist. “The state” has no money. The citizens have the money, they and the companies that generate profits and pay taxes on them. “Politics” has no money of its own to distribute, it only redistributes what others have earned.
A special responsibility arises from this. Namely in the conception of a more sustainable, future-proof energy policy that courageously draws the consequences from all the mistakes of the past. This also applies to a social policy that, surprisingly, perhaps not in this emergency situation, is constantly discovering new social imbalances. And “Sterntaler” policy operates as if the money just fell from the sky.
Citizens should be able to expect that things won’t go headlong. But fair.
