Marc Bernhard, December 6, 2024, Heating Law

German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 20/204, pp. 26450-26451. 

Frau President. Ladies and gentlemen. 

Last year, the Ampel, against every sense and reason, come hell or high water, flogged the heating law through the Bundestag, without regard to loss, and thereby practically banned the new installation of oil and gas heating. 

Konrad Stockmeier (FDP): Wrong!

30 million households, thus around 64 million people, heat with oil and gas. That means that 75 percent of the people in Germany are directly affected by your heating hammer, and regardless whether owner or renter. Yet it was already clear prior to the passage that for many it will be unaffordable, that it destroys the old age provision of many millions of people, and is nothing other than a cold expropriation. Your heating hammer makes the costs of dwellings and heating unaffordable for many people. 

It was previously also fully clear that your heating hammer is absolutely ineffective; since even the most optimistic estimates of Habeck’s ministry proceed on a yearly savings of just one, single percent of the total German CO₂ emissions – thus, the CO₂ quantity which China blows into the air in just five hours. And for that, you destroy the savings, the old age provision and the prosperity of the people in our country? How crazy are you, actually? 

            Stephan Brandner (AfD): That is a rhetorical question!

Had you simply done nothing, but simply just let the last three nuclear power plants continue to run, 

            Bernhard Herrmann (Greens): Ach, you heat with atomic power, or what?                            Nonsense!

we would each year – just listen for once – save 15 million tons of CO₂, thus double as much as by your entire heating hammer. 

Even Construction Minister Geywitz has practically confirmed here in a questioning in the Bundestag that, with the heating hammer, what demonstrably works was forbidden, without really knowing, without having any functioning plan, as to how the people instead should heat in the future. 

Almost every second municipal utility considers an affordable heating supply no longer secure on account of your heating hammer. The city of Leipzig ascertained that the implementation of the heating hammer for Leipzig alone costs 30 billion euros. 

            Karsten Hilse (AfD): It’s only money!

That is 45,000 euros from infants to old men. No one can pay for this madness. 

Mannheim in 2035 as the first city in Germany completely disconnects people from the gas network. And thus happens exactly what I had said many times last year in the Bundestag: On account of your heating law, people now need to tear out new heating in the most brief time because it does not suit their city’s heating plan. 

Yet the crowning is that you of the FDP, then still in the government, yourselves had reckoned, before passage of the heating law, that the heating hammer will cost the people the unimaginable sum of 2,500 billion euros, and despite that, you in common with red-green, against better judgment, against every reason, simply forced through this law. 

And now? After the Chancellor showed you the door, you suddenly want to know nothing more at all of this. You, like the Chancellor, can remember nothing more, simply assert the opposite, and apparently want to rescind the law which you yourselves introduced. Thus, how credible your turnaround actually is, you can here and now give evidence by you voting for our motion [Drucksache 14031]. 

The same applies to you of the CDU. In all media, you announce that you want to rescind the heating law – exactly as Jens Spahn a couple of minutes ago here in the Bundestag confirmed – thus exactly what we today propose. 

If you of the CDU and the FDP thus really meant it seriously, then we would have for this today a majority. Yet you know quite precisely that with the reds and greens with whom you want to form a coalition in the future, there will never be a revocation. Thus show whether you mean it seriously, 

            Vice-president Katrin Göring-Eckardt: Many thanks.

or whether you are only once again lying to the people out there.

[trans: tem]

 

 

Marc Bernhard, May 24, 2023, Heating Policy

German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 20/105, pp. 12701-12702.

Frau President. Ladies and gentlemen.

“We have erred in regards the energy transition”.

            Jürgen Coße (SPD): You have erred in regards Putin!

Who said that ten years ago already? No climate denier, no conspiracy theorist and no AfD politician. No, it was Habeck’s dismissed State Secretary Graichen, whom he last week dismissed as one of those who ran the energy transition. Graichen ten years ago verbatim:

We have erred in regards the energy transition. Not in a few details, but in a central point. The many…windmills and solar installations which Germany is building do not do what we have promised for them. It was hoped that they would replace the dirty coal power plants…Yet they do not do that…

 

If Graichen thus knew ten years ago that the energy transition does not work, why then has it been with all power forced through? Why was agriculture and species protection annulled by emergency decree, the fought-for minimum distance between dwellings eliminated, the environmental compatibility testing disempowered and the consultation rights of citizens eliminated so as to make possible the construction of an additional 90,000 wind industry installations, and thereby maximize the damages of the self-confessed errors, Herr Habeck?

Although Graichen knew exactly that the energy transition does not at all work, he wanted, in your motion, Herr Habeck, with the heating hammer to force more than 60 million people in the future to heat only with electricity. He nevertheless quite clearly knew that there was not sufficient electricity for that due to the shutdown of nuclear and coal power plants. Thus for example Germany’s largest housing company cannot operate countless electric heating pumps because of the lack of electricity. He nevertheless quite knowingly wrote the draft law that, for most people, only the installation of a heating pump is possible – and that, even though heating with electricity is around 30 percent more expensive than with gas. It’s good that such a person is gone!

Yet now this heating hammer must also go, and indeed completely. Since it is completely absurd that people shall be forbidden to heat with gas while the government at the same time wants to build 50 gas power plants with which it is desired, with dirty fracking gas, to generate electricity which will in the future warm the people. What an absurdity!

            Bernhard Herrmann (Greens): That is nonsense!

As I calculated for you in April that this heating hammer would cost people 2,000 billion euros, you here in the German Bundestag looked at me in disbelief and shook your heads. Now you yourselves of the FDP quite obviously have re-considered and even come to 2,500 billion euros, thus 30,000 euros per capita. Scientists confirm that with that it still comes not once to a savings of CO₂. The imbecility was nevertheless confirmed by your FDP colleagues – who have reconsidered: 2,500 billion euros.

Yet one thing is clear: The heating transition is not doable; since we do not have sufficient heating pumps, we do not have sufficient tradesmen, we do not have sufficient electricity and the people certainly do not have sufficient money so as to pay for this craziness.

Now come you of the CDU to play at being the nation’s saviours and ostensibly want a socially acceptable re-start of the heating transition. As to what you understand as “social”, have you clearly and distinctly indicated with your motion in the last sitting. You therein set out to make the Brussels CO₂ certificate for oil and gas so expensive that the people practically can no longer afford oil and gas. Experts proceed therefrom to that by 2027 it comes to a tenfold increase of CO₂ prices and up to 300 euros per ton. For a liter of diesel, that means a price increase of almost one euro. That is what you of the CDU understand as “socially acceptable”.

The only thing that is really socially acceptable and which protects people from old age poverty and a de facto expropriation is to dispose of this entire heating transition on the dung heap of history.

 

[trans: tem]

 

 

 

 

Marc Bernhard, February 10, 2023, Electricity Meters and Surveillance

German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 20/86, pp. 10290-10291.

Frau President. Ladies and gentlemen.

Imagine, your electricity service knows when you get up, when you go to bed, whether you are alone at home, when you cook what you eat and what you watch on television.

            Till Steffen ( Greens): What is that for complete rubbish?

And then also imagine that the electricity service can at anytime without warning turn off the heating and the electricity for e-autos.

            Markus Hümpfer (SPD): That is not right!

            Rainer Kraft (AfD): Ask Herr Müller!

That means: You come home from work glad of your warm dwelling. Which however is cold because for you, on account of electricity rationing, the heating electricity was shut off.

Maik Außendorf (Greens): You need for once use your intelligence and not cool down the level!

So you decide to drive to friends so as to warm up. Yet the accumulator of your e-auto is empty; since for that also the electricity was shut off. You believe this is from a Hollywood end-of-times movie or from George Orwell’s 1984?

            Maik Außendorf (Greens): A bad AfD fantasy, this is!

No, these are the scenarios which this government prepares with this law.

That the intelligent electricity counter, the so-called Smart Meter which the government wants to extensively bring to every household, makes possible the deepest insight into the private life of citizens is even confirmed by a study of your own Federal Research Ministry. Researchers of the FH Münster could with this Smart Meter exactly determine when which household equipment was used and even which television program was watched.

            Timon Gremmels (SPD): What you peek at, I know without a Smart Meter!

How valuable this data is can be seen in that Google is giving consideration to making free electricity available to customers for access to their data.

The government asserts that with Smart Meter electricity costs would fall and the stability of the network would improve. Yet what the government here is actually doing is to shift onto the backs of the citizens the blame for its own failures in its botched energy transition. Since, who  may disconnect all, withdraw from all, and wants to provide for an industrial nation with wind and sun alone, is himself the greatest danger for the stability of our energy supply.

Counter to better knowledge, the Federal government asserts – you too, Herr Habeck, plainly – that with the Smart Meter electricity costs would fall. Yet the Ernst & Young analysis commissioned by your own ministry comes to the conclusion, as can be read word for word in evaluations of your analysis, “that no costs are to be saved in average households with intelligent counters”. It is further said: “Accordingly, the costs considerably exceed the possible savings.” An extensive installation obligation is evaluated in this analysis “as unreasonable”. And consumer protection organizations in States which have already introduced these Smart Meters confirm that as a result costs have even further increased.

What you are thus doing here is to knowingly deceive the people in this country so as to divert from your own total failures in regards the energy transition. According to the federal association of consumer centrals, you thereby expose people to dangers of criminal machinations, since this data can be abused. For the people, this law yields no use, but only harms and risks.  

Simply let the world’s safest nuclear power plants and cleanest coal power plants continue to run! Then we need not at all occupy ourselves today with this entire madness. Do not give Big Brother a chance!

            Michael Kruse (FDP): We give the rightists no chance!

 

[trans: tem]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Marc Bernhard, December 1, 2022, Home Ownership

German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 20/73, pp. 8602-8603.

Frau President. Ladies and gentlemen.

In Germany, 75 percent of renters dream of their own four walls. Yet only the fewest have succeeded in also realizing this dream; since, according to the ECB, the Germans are the poorest in the euro zone. Thus, the assets of an average Greek family are double as high as that of a German family, in Spain and Italy even four times as high as with us. And in regards the pension level, Germany with just 48 percent is far behind. Spain, for example, has 83 percent, Austria 89 percent and Italy even 91 percent.

We have the world’s highest energy prices, and we have with just 45 percent the lowest rate of home ownership in the EU. Here in Berlin it is even just 15 percent, while in France 64 percent, in Italy 72 percent, in Greece 76 percent, in Czechia 80 percent and in Slovakia even 92 percent live within their own four walls. The European cut thus lies over 70 percent. We thus have not only the highest energy prices, the smallest household assets with the lowest pension level, but also the lowest home ownership rate in the EU.

Now the inflation also devours the rest of the citizens savings. It is therefore now certainly much more important to bring as many people as possible within their own four walls. Since this is the best inflation protection, the best safeguard for elders, and provides in crises like today’s stability and security to people. And therefore we want to make Germany from a land of renters into a land of homeowners.

Yet then why is Germany at all the taillight in the EU’s home ownership rate? The German Bundesbank states in a study that for one thing it lies, in international comparison, in the much too high real property sales taxes [Grunderwerbsteuer]; and for another, that the mortgage interest, unlike as in many other countries, cannot be deducted even for the self-use dwelling. Yet that was once in Germany otherwise, as in the administration of Helmut Kohl, – it is already quite a while – the costs for one’s own home could be deducted from taxes. That then made home ownership possible, despite astronomical rates well over 10 percent.  

We demand in our motion [Drucksache 20/3204] that the real property sales tax be lowered to 3.5 percent throughout Germany, and before all, that the purchase of one’s own first home must be completely free of taxes. That would of course finally eliminate the social injustice that large capital companies pay practically no real property sales tax, while the normal citizen always needs to pay for everything.

In addition, the prices for home ownership need again to become affordable. For that, the construction guidelines and the cost-driving climate guidelines are to be reduced, the contract procedures accelerated and the rural area finally again made more attractive. Since while in the urban centers 2 million affordable dwellings are lacking, 1.7 million dwellings in rural areas stand empty.  

Let us finally do it like our European neighbors and as the German Bundesbank recommends: With one’s own four walls, we attain for the people inflation protection, an old age safeguard, stability and security. Let us finally make Germany from a country of renters into a country of owners! 

 

[trans: tem]