Generally, Diesel Summit II went by the normal Merkel-team script....you pay off people with issues or problems to make the issue go away (Libya, Greece, and Turkey would all be great examples).
From this summit episode, a fund will be set up and pay out to the twenty-eight noted urban areas with diesel "pollution". As Bild tells the story....it's around one-billion Euro of 'gift-money' that will be hauled out....half to be federal money and half to be car-company money. So far.....no one from the car companies has said anything about this deal and I suspect they aren't that happy over the government's talk.
All of this supposed to lead to urban governments NOT going to ban diesel cars. Not much has been said over that part of the deal, and I suspect that this gift is nowhere near an end-point.
You can find various diplomacy deals of the Merkel government over the past fifteen-odd years that was solved by paying out money. It's a popular trend.
The problem with the billion-Euro talk? If you live in a town of 100,000 and not among the 28 cities getting the gift-money? You ought to stand up with some lawyers and sue the federal government for excluding you out of the deal.
How will the gift-money be spent? Imagine breaking up a billion Euro among twenty-eight urban areas, and not having much oversight. You could shift 100,000 Euro over to some landscape crew for amounts to a 80,000-Euro job. You could put up an environmental wall to capture the 'bad-dust'....only to discover that it's a regular wall and has no legitimate 'capture-ability' but wasted half-a-million Euro for the fake-wall.
At the end of this whole discussion....if Merkel had done nothing and the ban occurred? That's an interesting scenario. Waking up on 2 January to realize that 100,000 diesel drivers have parked their cars in various chaotic park-and-ride lots (overflowing by the thousands) and that the transportation hub of Stuttgart is completely unable to handle the sudden traffic? It would have been a major embarrassment to the city of Stuttgart and the environmentalists. I suspect that in less than three weeks....they would have stood up and admitted massive defeat with their ban idea and reversed the whole thing. But don't worry....thanks to the money-crowd, enough 'gift-money' (Baksheesh in Egypt-talk is the best word to use)....will fix the problem.
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