Der Spiegel reports (partial English translation here, courtesy of the Global Warming Policy Foundation) that the German Green Party has announced that it intends to get petrol-driven (gasoline and diesel) vehicles off German roads, aiming to have no more such vehicles registered from 2036 onward.

“‘We Greens want to get away from oil on the road over the next 20 years. We want to give cities, cyclists and pedestrians enough room that is free of toxic emissions,’ it says in the draft of their ‘Weimar Declaration on Climate Change’, the news agency dpa reports.”

So, with no petrol-fueled vehicles on the roads, and electric vehicles still hideously expensive and ill suited for more than fairly short drives, how are Germans expected to get around?

The government will subsidize electric vehicles (because of course money for subsidies falls out of the sky courtesy of Gaia) and expand bus and train services.

And where will all the electricity for those vehicles come from? The German Greens are also intent on shutting down all coal-fired electric generation, and they oppose nuclear energy. And they grudgingly accept natural gas only as a transitional technology to get from coal to wind and solar—which are far more expensive and, because intermittent, less reliable.

The report says, “This climate policy has emerged from a plan that the parliamentary Green Party in the Bundestag intends to adopt at its meeting in Weimar.” So this is climate policy. Why, then, the mention of “toxic emissions”? Frankly, this policy will have no discernible effect on global climate, and regulations of actually toxic emissions (which don’t include CO2 at the levels generated by vehicles) already have succeeded in making the air in Germany’s cities (not to mention its countryside) plenty healthful.

What’s the real motive? It can’t be fighting climate change. It can’t be improving public health.

Might it just conceivably be driving people back into pre-industrial poverty? Just wondering.

 

 

Featured image courtesy of 25 Jahre Tschernobyl – Demo in Gronau, Creative Commons