unsaveSave
expand-left
fullscreen Autobahn near Stuttgart. Photo: Krister Hansson
The car-loving Germans may experience an involuntary engine shutdown.
Transport Minister Volker Wissing threatens to ban cars during the weekends.
Wissing, from the liberal government party FDP, has long tried to bring about a renegotiation of the climate law that deals with reduced carbon dioxide emissions in the country. The transport sector continues to have high emissions, and now the minister is threatening to stop driving at weekends – unless the governing coalition adopts a change by July at the latest, writes Politico.
– The fact that the amendment has still not entered into force leads to significant legal and factual uncertainty. It benefits neither the climate nor the government’s reputation, he writes in a letter to the group leaders according to the German newspaper Bild.
– A reduction in traffic to help achieve the climate goals would only be possible through measures that are difficult to communicate to the public, such as “extensive and unlimited driving bans on Saturdays and Sundays.
The amendment to the law on emission reduction wants to allow all sectors to be hit instead of having individual targets now.
The country’s environmental organizations, including Greenpeace, criticize the planned change and believe that an overall calculation instead hides the climate effect within the sectors. Above all in the transport sector, which rarely reaches the targets, writes Politico.