1. Farmer protest for next week in Germany?
Yeah, nationwide situation. They intend to block autobahns....so delivery of goods to grocery stores...will be affected.
I should add....cold spell arriving on Sunday, and a fair amount of snow in the northern half of the country is expected. Might be interesting to see how the shortage affects people.
Angle to this? There was supposed to be a heathy subsidy paid to farmers on fuel (increased cost in taxes going on) and in the dumping of the supplemental budget back in November....that subsidy entirely disappeared (funds weren't there). This week, they repaired this to a small level....creating a fresh new but lesser subsidy. Farmers said it wasn't enough.
This a threat to the 11 Feb re-do vote in Berlin (the city)? Well....interesting concept....if you did have 5,000 tractors descend down into the city on this voting day (a Sunday)....it'd cause a heck of a lot of problems in getting the vote down.
2. Protest against Habeck (the Green Party Economy Minister)?
Well...he was spotted at some ferry operation yesterday in Schleswig-Holstein. Police had to assist in holding back the protest folks. If you go around working class Germans, I would estimate that near 50-percent are critical of his accomplishments.
3. Higher diesel and gas taxes at the fuel tank....to pay for E-cars?
Yes, it is remarkable but there's talk that some additional tax will be handed down...to hand out some discount when you buy an E-car. It probably would start before the end of 2024....avoiding harsh criticism in 2025 (the next election year).
To be honest, there is some belief that the peak of interest (at least in Germany) to buy an E-car has arrived. Even if you said a 4k Euro discount running....it probably wouldn't be much of a plus-up.
WELT had a piece today saying that by 2025...the shift in new registrations will go back to gas cars being the majority....instead of E-cars.
4. This Block-gal scandal going on where the German millionaire lady sent some thugs to kidnap her two kids from the ex-husband...has taken a twist. Apparently in the week or two before the kidnapping...a Danish judge (where the husband lives) assigned custody of the kids to the husband. Rumor has it (could be BS).....these rough guys hired were former Mossad agents (from Israel).
5. As part of the back-up plan for cutting coal/nuke plants (by 2030)....there was supposed to be around 50 natural-gas power plants (small operations) built around the country as part of the plan. Money there?
This got brought up today in the AM and part of the billions (sixty billion Euro to be exact) cut from the supplemental budget....killed off that back-up power idea.
Presently, the clock here is ticking and they really need to sign the contracts here in 2024, to get the plants up as the final coal plants are shutdown.
6. That terror attack in Iran, which the Iranian authorities immediately blamed on Israel.....takes a twist?
OH YEAH.....ISIS folks (you remember them) have now said they were the party responsible, and that the Iranian authorities are basically just moderate Muslims (thus not true to the religion). Whether true or not....it's a curious development.
3 comments:
On point 3, maybe we should just stop giving over 6.5 billion a year in oil subsidies. We'd certainly be inspired to adopt some new technologies then.
If the 'push' on E-cars back ten years ago had not happened....we would be slowly progressing today to hydrogen-powered vehicles/trains/buses. Presently, if you talk to BMW, Mercedes, VW, etc.....they've put a couple of billion Euro into development. They must have a payback (period).
In some way, we've paid the 'prostitute' already and have to accept the act that follows...even if things seem to be finally progressing with hydrogen power.
But on a added note....around working-class Germans, it's just a low acceptance factor. I've done the test drive (BMW E-Mini and the Audi-Etron). I've gone to the solar show and asked the forty-odd questions. I haven't bought into this.
First, using the E-car for a long-distance trip is a pain-in-the-ass to plan (figure minimum of one charge along the way, involving 3 hours stalled somewhere). Second, no one can assure the public on the grid being able to handle both E-cars and heat-pumps. This translates to me some kind of electrical distribution limit coming in five to ten years, unless I do a solar panel deal for the house. Third, all this chatter over chopping off nuke/coal power, then going full-throttle to wind/solar....then adding more use? No one is really impressing me with numbers or facts.
On the other side of the coin? If hydrogen arrives shortly....those BMW and VW folks are in a crappy position and wasted several billion to build/market E-cars.
Whilst oil is so heavily subsidised there's no incentive to develop anything independently of government regulations. All the same people that talk about a technological solution to climate issues are the first to shriek in horror about any new technology and frantically seek to undermine it so it doesn't threaten their corporate rent seeking.
That or they're just the useful idiots not realising how easily used they are by those corporate rent seekers. The ones that buy media and politicians.
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