It sounds like self-flagellation: Germany threatens to miss its climate targets for 2030 and 2045 by a mile. The traffic light coalition must now make this knowledge public.
It is in the federal government’s projection report, which the Öko-Institut and the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research have drawn up. The paper is currently being coordinated in the ministries and will then be sent to the EU Commission. Projection reports are intended to record the status of European climate efforts and will in future be sent to Brussels once a year.
The bad news doesn’t really come as a surprise. Because for years it has become increasingly clear that the bar for climate protection, which was essentially set by the previous black-red government, is unreachably high in Germany. In 2030, the industrialized country is expected to emit only 440 million tons of climate gas – 65 percent less than in 1990; In 2045 there should even be climate neutrality.
Getting there is already difficult – and it’s getting harder and harder, since Germans are apparently becoming more and more eco-weary, which also underlines the strength of the AfD in surveys. Against this background, no one who is even halfway familiar with German climate protection can assume that the republic will make the planned ecological precision landing in 2030 and 2045.
The promises made by the traffic light coalition that there are still many climate protection measures that will only take effect in the future and improve the situation seem to be little more than hopeful values.
Failure is largely homemade. And therefore predictable. The transport sector in particular is to blame for this, because everything in it remains largely the same, thanks to the established political and economic structures.
According to the projection report, in 2030 Germans will cause around 200 million tons more greenhouse gas than planned – that’s pretty much the amount by which the transport sector is lagging behind its climate protection targets. According to the projection report, by 2030 it will still emit at least 187 million tons more greenhouse gases than it is actually allowed to.
Federal Transport Minister Volker Wissing shrugs his shoulders at this finding. The FDP man regards it as his destiny that the volume of traffic on the road – compared to the pre-Corona year 2019 – will increase by another 54 percent by 2051. This is mainly due to the growth in freight traffic, against which his ministry has no effective recipe.
More and more trucks on increasingly broken roads, which cause even more traffic jams and thus even more emissions, will further worsen the ecological balance of his department. Bringing freight traffic more onto the rails through intelligent logistics concepts fails not only because of Wissing’s commitment, but also because of the ailing and overloaded rail network.
But private car traffic will also grow. That would be manageable if e-mobility made great strides forward. But it doesn’t (anymore).
One reason: The federal government is now creating more confusion than clarity on the path to electrification. She actually wanted to put at least 15 million electric cars on the road by 2030 – according to the projection report, it will now be 8.2 million at best. There are currently just around one million electric vehicles on the road in Germany, and just under 16 percent of all new registrations in the first half of the year were pure electric vehicles.
The reluctance is not least due to the inconsistent funding policy. Last year, the environmental bonus for e-cars was drastically reduced from 6750 to a maximum of 4500 euros per vehicle (next year: 3000 euros). At the same time, Economics Minister Robert Habeck (Greens) capped the subsidy pot. No consumer knows exactly when it will be empty and whether it will still receive the subsidy when the new car arrives after a long delivery time.
This does not exactly create a buying mood, especially since small electric vehicles in particular are sometimes twice as expensive as comparable petrol engines. The fact that the total costs over the holding time of the e-vehicle are generally significantly lower than with combustion engines, for example due to tax exemption or lower “fuel costs”, has not yet fully reached the public.
The charging infrastructure is also completely inadequate, especially in rural areas. Critics accuse the traffic light of ultimately preferring to invest in concrete and asphalt than in power lines for a lavish charging network.
The previous government had already announced a “Germany network” with fast charging points at 1,100 locations in 2021, but so far there has not been much more than the announcement. The first charging stations are not to be installed until the end of 2023. The originally promised, attractive price cap at 44 cents per kilowatt hour of traction current was also cashed in again.
There are no signals from the traffic lights that they want to change anything in the funding policy for e-cars; it is said that manufacturers are now obliged to lower prices. There’s truth to that. There are far too few inexpensive e-models on the world market to bring about a rapid, comprehensive traffic turnaround.
The German manufacturers in particular are completely blank. VW currently doesn’t have an electric “Volkswagen” under €30,000 let alone under €25,000, which many experts see as the price ceiling for the emergence of a mass market. Audi and Mercedes are only in the high-price segment anyway. Not even the Chinese can provide really cheap little cars. After all: Next year Tesla wants to bring a small car for under 25,000 euros onto the market, VW at the earliest in 2025.
Anyone who believes that the 49-euro Germany ticket, subsidized by the state with three billion euros, can significantly speed up the turnaround in traffic will be disabused by the projection report. It hardly deters people from buying their own car, they say. The climate effect is well below one million tons of savings per year.
It is hard to understand why much simpler methods of reducing emissions keep failing, not least due to resistance from Wissing’s FDP: a general speed limit of 120 km/h on motorways would result in at least 4.7 million tonnes less CO₂ per year. But although the majority of ADAC members are now in favor of it, a limit is still politically taboo.
