Marc Bernhard, January 28, 2022, World’s Dumbest Energy Policy

German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 20/15, pp. 991-992.

Frau President. Ladies and gentlemen.

Minister Habeck now wants to construct the so-called renewable energies three times faster, withdraw from coal by 2030 and never again allow the CO₂ price to fall below 60 euros per ton. Herr Minister, is it actually clear to you what that means for the people and the workplaces? Your Ministry proceeds on the basis that our electricity requirement will triple by 2030 because in the future we should drive and heat with electricity. In the last year alone, eleven coal power plants and three coal power plants with a total of 9 gigawatts capacity were shut down.

            Timon Gremmels (SPD): Gut so!

Germany is the only country in the world that withdraws from coal and nuclear energy at the same time.

            Timon Gremmels (SPD): Gut so!

The Wall Street Journal designates that as the “world’s dumbest energy policy”.

            Enrico Komning (AfD): So it is!

Alone in Green-governed Baden-Württemberg, the energy supplier EnBW wants to shut down in this year an additional 6 gigawatts – over 60 percent of the electricity required there. Even if the Green State government in Stuttgart could realize its unrealistic wishful thinking of 1,000 additional wind industry installations, these would achieve just an insufficient 1.5 gigawatts. So-called alternative energies thus cannot cover even nominally the necessary electricity requirement.

            Timon Gremmels (SPD): Complete nonsense!

And what do you actually do when it is night and no wind blows, Herr Minister? An industrial country plainly cannot be managed with wind and sun alone. On account of the electricity incapacity, EON chief Birnbaum warns of, besides many other things, the danger of the shutdown of entire cities; that is, of blackouts.

The world’s dumbest energy policy has led to that we in Germany have the world’s highest electricity prices – twice as high as in our neighboring countries. You are thus forcing businesses to shift their production and workplaces to foreign countries; as for example, Daimler and BASF to China because there energy is secure and of good value.

Each year the electricity will be shut off at 400,000 households and 7.4 million people will freeze in their dwellings

            Beatrix von Storch (AfD): That is asozial!

because they can no longer pay the high energy prices. The explosion of the gas prices, in regards which the state receives around 60 percent, is not allowed to remain hidden even from you.

Put an end to this madness! Finally concern yourself that in Germany one no longer freezes and needs sit in the dark. Stop the world’s dumbest economic policy!

Hearty thanks.

 

[trans: tem]

 

Stefan Keuter, January 27, 2022, Ukraine

German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll, 20/14, p. 885.

Frau President. Right honorable ladies and gentlemen.

Let us together take a time trip to the year 1962: At that time, the American President Kennedy threatened the Soviet Union with a third world war should it station atomic weapons in Cuba – practically at the front door of the U.S.A. If you ask me, he was right to do that. Why did he do that? The security interests of the United States were massively threatened.

Let us go a good thirty years further, to the year 1999: Poland, Czechia and Hungary joined NATO. A few years later, 2004 to 2007, followed Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Roumania.

            Alexander Lambsdorff (FDP): Because their security interests were threatened.

Let us for once consider the relation between the Russian Federation and the Ukraine; in the post-Soviet time, it is shaped by skirmishing over gas and the Crimea. Let us speak of the Crimea. For 180 years, it was Russian; it was russified after it had been conquered from the Ottomans. In 1954, Khrushchev, by an administrative act – it was then about the construction of a railway – attached the Crimea to the Ukraine. Since then, the Crimea twice sought to return to Russia: In 1994, and lately in 2014 in a referendum in which almost 97 percent of the population of Crimea voted for annexation to Russia. International law provided various possibilities of evaluation; yet in that regard, our Foreign Minister will likely be able to say a bit more.

What alarms me is this propaganda against Russia, indeed in the media, in politics and before all things in this sovereign house, in the Bundestag. We need only to have listened to our previous speakers so as to notice that here an unspeakable rhetoric deals with threatening scenarios of war and the suspension of gas deliveries. On this front [Horn] also pushes the ambassador of Ukraine, Melnyk, who today is a guest in this house. I am happy, Herr Melnyk, that I can also thus say to you: The demand for weapons we Germans cannot fulfill, and your unspeakable war-mongering I can only condemn. You insult Germany, you draw unworthy comparisons with German history, with national socialism. Frau Baerbock, under your predecessors such an ambassador would have been called in and a state secretary would have conducted a very protracted conversation with him.

Yet there are also other tones. Vice Admiral Schönbach recently stated that Russia wants eye-to-eye respect and also deserves it, that war is absolute nonsense, that the Crimea is gone and would never again return. I say to you, ladies and gentlemen: This officer is not only right, he has pluck.

To whose use is this escalation on the border in the Ukraine, cui bono? The U.S.A. uses the Nord Stream 2 pipeline as a means of pressure. Germany should sacrifice its own interests for foreign interests. We may look at the 2014 EU sanctions for which the U.S.A. quite ably clamored. Those suffering are primarily Russia with a business loss of 36 billion U.S. dollars, followed by Germany – a disparity beyond all other European states together – with 23 billion U.S. dollars. With these sanctions, we carve our own flesh and this must stop.

The U.S. economy besides in this same time frame has made a gain in this business. A conclusion to this is needed. The Ukraine requires a solution, a solution which considers on one side the interests of the Ukraine yet also on the other side the security interests of the Russian Federation as well. We have just heard it, and here I grant you are right: There is to be no peace without Russia. Allow me to draw one conclusion. There is no war, no war threatens. No gas shortage threatens. We need to take seriously the security interests of Russia since this also suits world peace.

Many thanks, ladies and gentlemen.

 

[trans: tem]

 

 

 

 

 

Alice Weidel, January 26, 2022, Vaccination Obligation

German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 20/13, pp. 825-826.

Right honorable Frau President. Valued ladies and gentlemen.

Our country stands on the threshold of an unexampled fall from grace. The intention to introduce a general vaccination obligation against the Corona virus is an attack on freedom and human dignity and on the basic right to bodily inviolability.

The vaccination obligation is an authoritarian run-amok against the foundation of our democratic and legal basic order. When the state presumes to decide over the bodies of its citizens, that is an elementary breach of civilization. It is a tragedy that we at all need to speak of it. There is no justification for a Corona vaccination obligation, whether it be for all or for specific groups of the population, neither medical, nor ethical, nor legal.

A vaccination obligation against an illness which presents no life-endangering threat for more than 99 percent of the people, with a vaccine which reliably protects neither from infection nor from transmission of the antigen, is absurd. To require and to compel people to a vaccination is therefore an unheard of overstepping of boundaries. The vaccination obligation is unconstitutional and disproportionate.

There are other reasonable and purposeful ways to uphold healthcare; for example, in which the health ministers in the Bund and States do their job and provide for proper working conditions, decent pay and more personnel in the clinics.

The vaccination obligation is also not enforceable. Of that warn the panel doctors, of that warns the officials’ union, of that warns the Gesamtmetall employers association. How do you want to actually compel millions of citizens who do not want to let themselves be vaccinated? With fines and coercive detention? How do you imagine that? Thus, our advice to you is: Do not only listen to the pharmaceutical lobbyists but also listen to the practitioners in this country!

            Kathrin Vogler (Linke): You certainly know about pharmaceutical lobbyists!

Yet you also know that the vaccination obligation, the forced vaccination, is wrong. Before the election you yourselves still spoke quite otherwise, Herr Scholz and Herr Lindner. The vaccination obligation is not least primarily a gigantic election fraud, a scandalous breach of trust. Of that are we speaking here.

You cling to the vaccination obligation because you have got yourselves stuck, stuck in a politics of paternalism and deprivation of rights. Two years of rigid Corona policy built on false numbers, manipulated statistics and contradictory asseverations have thoroughly squashed your credibility.

You have covered the country with crippling rules and regulations and a Kafkaesque Corona bureaucracy which drive the citizens to despair. Your attempt to introduce a de facto vaccination obligation by means of senseless and arbitrary 2G and 3G rules has already deeply divided the society.

            Claudia Moll (SPD): Nein, you divide!

Primarily children and youth suffer under the destruction of their social environment which these rules and regulations inflict upon them. There must be an end to this torment.

You have in this regard empowered an authority, the Robert Koch Institute, to continue overnight and at discretion to curtail millions of people in their rights with one-sided alterations of these rules. The citizens rightly perceive as an insult that arbitrary decisions calculated in the Bundestag, such as the limitation of the recovered status, should only apply with mitigation. All men are equal, some are more equal – you have thereby in other respects unintentionally and fully disclosed what you really make of the people out there.

And now already is perceived that the vaccination obligation railroaded by you ruins livelihoods in the area of medicine and nursing, inflicts an occupation ban on engaged skilled labor and only intensifies the crisis in this sector. Thus come out of your bunker mentality! Open the window! Look at Europe, at what is happening here!

In England, little by little, the Corona restrictions fall away; not despite of but on account of Omicron; the same in Denmark. In Spain, the virus in the future will be treated just as a normal flu. In Czechia, the planned vaccination obligation for elders and specific occupation groups is again cashiered; it of course proved to be a flop.

And stop disparaging the citizens who in this great protest movement in the history of our country express their opinion. Take this opinion seriously and finally abolish these nonsensical and discriminatory rules, and fully and thoroughly. Spare us the vaccination obligation, condemned to failure, for hospitals and nursing homes. Right yourself, before it is too late! We beg that of you.

We need to live with the virus. Freedom and self-responsibility are the key. Each must be able to freely decide for himself whether he wants to protect himself by means of a vaccination or in another art and way. Therefore, for God’s sake, hands off the vaccination obligation!

I am grateful.

            (Members of the AfD rise.)

 

[trans: tem]