Climate Clashes Split the Left in Germany

"If U.S. Democrats aren't inspired by the moderation of Britain's Labour Party on climate policy, they should be sobered by the cautionary tale on environmentalism playing out in Germany.

The coalition government led by Chancellor Olaf Scholz has been humiliated by its failure to push through an ambitious law to overhaul the way Germans heat their homes. The Buildings Energy Act, commonly known as the heating law, was supposed to have received a final vote in the parliament last Friday.

Instead, a court ruling has pushed the vote -- if there is one -- to September at the earliest. The bill is controversial and this legislative timeline is too close for comfort to state elections in Bavaria and Hesse in October, raising questions about whether it will happen at all.

That judicial ruling is a symptom rather than a cause of the heating law's travails. The law's journey through the Bundestag was beset by more complications than Frodo's trek to Mordor. The Federal Constitutional Court found that the bill has been through so many last-minute changes that to have rushed it through last week would have violated lawmakers' right to know what is actually in it.

That complexity and the haggling that produced it arise because Germany's home-heating proposal epitomizes a collision between green virtue signaling and scientific reality that has kicked off an environmental culture war in Europe. Virtue signaling dictates that Something More must always be done to restrict carbon-dioxide emissions. Science demonstrates that, measured in terms of carbon dioxide emitted per unit of gross domestic product, Europe already is very green -- and that further emissions reductions are unlikely to have much impact on global climate.

Unwilling to accept they've gone as far as they can, Europe's climate left insists on eking out ever more costly emissions reductions. The German heating law would require millions of households and communities, at enormous expense, to ditch the cheap and reliable natural-gas-fired boilers they use for central heating in favor of costly, untested hydrogen units or heat pumps. All while China and India continue to open new coal-fired power plants.

Because the costs are so high and the global stakes so low, such legislation inevitably becomes subject to horse trading of the most ridiculous sort. All the last-minute dickering over the heating bill created an almost indecipherable matrix of deadlines, zoning regulations and subsidies. The point was to give the impression that Germany is definitely doing something about climate while moderating and obscuring the cost.

American Democrats should take note of the target audience for this deception. For all the uproar, only one party is experiencing a crisis over the proposed law, and that's Mr. Scholz's center-left Social Democrats (SPD). The eco-leftist Greens know they're for the law by huge margins (73% support in one poll last month, for instance). Conservatives know they're against it (57% opposition from the center-right Christian Democrats and 63% from the classically liberal Free Democrats).

Only the SPD is divided, with 43% of its voters supporting the law and 45% opposed. This echoes other climate polling, even on vague questions such as whether Germany is implementing global-warming-related policy changes too fast or too slowly, where time after time only the SPD is internally split down the middle.

If the heating law dies in September, this will be why. Mr. Scholz's SPD is especially eager to make up the ground it has lost in previous state elections in industry-heavy Hesse. Yet costly environmentalism pits the rising urban eco-left within Europe's old center-left parties against their traditional base of blue-collar voters who increasingly appear to feel economically and socially unsettled -- and threatened by urban-leftist priorities.

To date, Europe's center-left parties have tried to reconcile the interests of these two disparate voting blocs, chiefly with vague and implausible promises that a green economy could replace all the dirty jobs that green policies eliminate.

But Europe, much further down the green road than America, appears to be reaching a point where this sort of reconciliation can no longer be done. The backdrop to Mr. Scholz's political meltdown over the heating law is an economy where energy prices are sky-high; where large companies such as BASF have announced that environmental and other regulations are forcing them to downsize; and where a recent debate about introducing speed limits on the Autobahn brought into focus the sort of daily cultural change the war on carbon will entail.

At this point, one side or the other is going to have to win on the European center-left, with the "losing" cohort of voters then making their peace with the policy result or voting for some other party. The SPD and other center-left European parties may not have enough of a base left to survive the latter; Mr. Scholz won barely a quarter of the total vote in 2021 as it is.

This environmental culture war on the left threatens to be all the more brutal for being both internecine and existential. And don't assume it will stay in Europe.” [1]

1. Political Economics: Climate Clashes Split the Left in Germany -- and Beyond. Sternberg, Joseph C. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 14 July 2023: A.17.