“It will be expensive and very hard”

Professor Lamia Messari-Becker dissected the traffic light coalition’s strategy on the talk show “Anne Will”. They have a plan, but nothing in common. The TV review.

Anne Will broadcast on March 26, 2023 on ARDScreenshot/ARD media library

Who says opposition sucks? In the round of “Anne Will” on Sunday evening, nobody was as relaxed as Jens Spahn. The former CDU Minister of Health, who did not always pursue the best ideas during the pandemic, has reinvented himself as his group’s energy expert.

Then, as Spahn did, you can agree with the FDP, which would like to subsidize e-fuels for luxury cars, and once again accuse the Greens of being the ban party. More is not expected from the Union, because the traffic light coalition is already so divided that the objections of the opposition parties seem almost harmless.

At least there wasn’t a fight

Konstantin Kuhle (FDP) and Jürgen Trittin (Greens) sat in the talk show of “Anne Will” (ARD) on Sunday evening. The more important representatives of the traffic light coalition were needed at the coalition committee, which was meeting at the same time. Those present on the show pulled themselves together and hardly ever argued with each other, as Trittin noted in a good mood at the end.

However, the two did not have much to contribute to the topic. “No more gas, oil, diesel and petrol: does the traffic light have a plan for this?” was the question of the program. The answer in the remote studio was: “Of course the traffic light has a plan, but unfortunately not a common one.” But if everyone talks about their project, at least there’s no argument.

The solar industry and its “Altmaier kink”

First of all, the FDP thinks it’s great that their transport minister has slowed down the EU compromise on the ban on internal combustion engines. Negotiations are now continuing there, while Finance Minister Christian Lindner is already considering how he can subsidize the expensive synthetic e-fuels, which will almost certainly only be used in the Porsche 911.

Trittin contented himself with pointing out that the scarce synthetic fuels should primarily be used in industry. For this he held up to Spahn that it was the CDU Minister of Economics Peter Altmaier who had almost single-handedly flattened the domestic solar industry. The slump in production is still called “Altmaier-Knick” today.

heat pump strategy

But it should be about the future and it was a bit of luck that Lamia Messari-Becker was there. The 50-year-old is a civil engineer and professor of building technology. So she knows how climate-neutral heating should soon be in Germany. She diplomatically certified that the Greens and FDP parties both have very different approaches to climate policy.

Neither of the two parties praised her. Instead, she explained in a furious lecture that e-fuels are totally inefficient and that the heat pump strategy of Economics Minister Robert Habeck represents, shall we say, a not very clever narrowing of the solution strategies.

“It will be expensive and very hard”

Messari-Becker spoke of bottlenecks and that more bottles were simply needed. Many homeowners are of retirement age and often don’t have enough money. “Only the heat pump is propagated,” said the scientist and warned of social hardship. But nobody reacted because she jumped further. Did the group know that it is possible to produce your own hydrogen in private households with photovoltaic systems, which then makes your own gas heating more climate-neutral? Significantly, that evening it was the engineer who – flanked by the journalist Petra Pinzler – explained that climate policy is more than simply filling the same number of cars with a different type of fuel.

In the building sector, according to the professor, the CO2 emissions have been reduced by 40 percent over the past 30 years, and in the transport sector by just one percent. And then came another sentence that politicians rarely hear: “It’s going to be expensive and very hard.”

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