Journalist Michael Miersch at blogsite Die Achse des Guten reports on remarks made by Germany’s recently sworn-in President Joachim Gauck at Schloss Bellevue on Tuesday in a speech to open the Week of the Environment, where the elite of Germany’s environmental protection are meeting for two days.
German President Gauck bringing Germany back to eco-sobriety? (Photo by J. Patrick Fischer)
The eco pow-wow includes Daimler, Deutsche Bank, Lufthansa and 197 other ecological companies who have pitched tents at the Schlossgarten to show how to rescue the planet.
According to the German Press Agency (dpa), President Gauck warned against forcing an energy supply transition through central planning measures:
‘We are not going to succeed with central planning regulations, and absolutely not with excessive subsidies,’ said Gauck .”
Moreover Gauck gave two thumbs up to free markets and competition, adding:
There’s no better way to solve problems than having a society with open markets and free competition.”
Miersch also adds Gauck delivered one of the most sensible speeches he has heard from a politician so far:
No apocalyptic scenarios, no tacky ecology prose, but a few sentences that got stuck in the throats of the audience. There was also a call to approach questions regarding the environment and climate reasonably and factually.”
Gauck also made another statement that surely irritated some in the audience:
Sustainability does not mean restriction or going without. Rather it means reason and responsibility.“
Gauck, who spent a large part of his life under the boot of Soviet/East German tyranny, ended with a call for “sustainable progress“. Surely he knows something about what that means, having seen little of that in the communist days.
Overall, a detectable shift in tone is taking place; alarmism is being ratcheted back. Gauck did not not cite a consensus of scientists. This year his speech mentioned only “leading scientists warn of a consequential global climate warming that can hardly be stopped.“
This is indeed a toning down compared to last year’s speech by then-President Christian Wulff who claimed that “THE climate scientists“ and even “THE climate research“ left “no doubt“ of an imminent huge warming.
Miersch writes:
Now its only ‘leading climate scientists’ who are ‘warning”. A diplomatic retreat from an all-party dogma.”
Let’s hope.
A few thoughts:
-“Es wird uns nicht gelingen allein mit planwirtschaftlichen Verordnungen. ”
“We will not make it with planned economy style regulations ALONE.”
(Okay, so we need 80% fat bureaucrats helped by 20% Kulaks? Nice idea, Gauck.)
-The mighty have thrown CO2AGW under the bus. They can use Fukushima now as the reason for the “Energiewende”. The goal stays the same: SOMEHOW destroy freedom and take ALL the money. If they can do it via artificially induced energy scarcity WITHOUT using the global warming pseudoscientists, that’s EVEN BETTER – their lies were becoming a dangerous legacy anyway.
-But the real vehicle is the Eurozone crisis anyway (which they brought about to no small part with the EU-wide command to switch to intermittent, subsidized, worse-than-planned-economy wind + solar, siphoning off billions from the ratepayers and taxpayers of these fledgling economies right into the pockets of whoever owned the solar panels and wind turbines). And it has been going on all the years; Ireland, for instance, expected one of the next to default after Greece, continues to build wind power for 30 bn.
-Like a vampire, this continues to draw the lifeblood out of the PIGS, and now the ESM is on its way, and no democracy will remove it once it is in place.
Gauck is just another pretty face on another watermelon party; the goal is to finally turn the EU into a parody of the USSR, and they’re nearly there.
Or can all of this be only incompetence? I have serious doubts.
I really think Gauck has no interest in returning to the old days of repression. He really knows what that stuff is all about, and never wants to see it again.
Dirk, keep in mind that all the socialist paradises were not planned for inefficiency – they dearly would have loved to produce “missile like canned sausages” to quote Comrade Nikita. It’s just that central planning, complete bureocracy and tyranny leave absolutely no space to get something done on an efficient scale. For large-scale planned projects, either natural laws prohibit their implementation, or the sheer lack of resources, material or human workforce and engineering know-how put the lid on.
That said, the eurocrats (many of them, at least) do not see themselves as soviet-style apparatchicks. It’s just that a goal of central planning, a Great Goal for Society, pushed with religious fervor, a decoupling from economic realities, etc. pp. result in a case of parallel corporate evolution.
So you are voting for incompetence. That might be possible.
But I think the ease with which they throw CO2AGW under the bus, NOW that they have found a different scapegoat, SHOWS a deeper, more sinister plot. Or is it deep? No, just profit-driven. The subsidy juggernaut is so out of control that it will use ANY lie to maintain its economy-ravaging speed.
One of the major beneficiaries of e.g. the wind power subsidies is the shadowy power of the German aristocrats who own huge swathes of the countryside, especially huge forests. They are knee-deep in the BUND and NABU and wield a lot of influence in the CDU. As long as they can, they will strangle the entire EU with green policies; as they also have lots of family connections across the continent.
But there are many other profiteers as well.
FYI
in 5 June 2012 WSJ
Europe’s Green Energy Suicide By RAEL JEAN ISAAC
If it’s cheap and plentiful—even low in carbon-dioxide emissions—much of the continent wants no part of it.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304203604577398541135969380.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion