German Minister admits ruinous home heating ordinances were merely a "test" to determine "how far society is prepared to go in terms of climate protection"

We are governed by crazy lunatics, Part 2436502345.

The Greens really are every inch as crazy as they seem to be.

Climate policies have long been a source of annoyance and exasperation, but they really began to terrify me for the first time with last year’s proposed changes to the Gebäudeenergiegesetz, or the Building Energy Act (GEG). The technocratic wing of the Greens, under Economics Minister Robert Habeck, proposed to mandate that all new heating systems installed after 2024 in Germany use no less than 65% renewable energy. In its original form, the law amounted to a de facto mandate to install heat pumps, and it would’ve entailed catastrophic renovation costs for the owners of many older buildings. The law proved so controversial that even some of the establishment press broke ranks to criticise it; in the end, Habeck had to sacrifice his powerful state secretary Patrick Graichen, and the legislation passed in modified but still pretty terrible form, laden with a wealth of complex subsidies and exceptions.

Yesterday, at a town hall event, somebody asked Habeck about the GEG, and he responded by saying that the first and most ruinous draft of the law was a test, to see how much the people would put up with:

Many of you will remember that we went as far as we could go in the buildings sector – at least that’s what I would say for myself – without risking the complete collapse of climate policies. The debate about the Building Energy Act, that is how we will heat in the future, was honestly a test of how far society is prepared to go in terms of climate protection when it becomes a reality. And I went too far. You could see that the reaction was immediately there, so to speak, and it would have been a reaction that would probably have ended up knocking the entire climate protection programme off its feet.

The pandemic really did inaugurate a new era in politics. As the vile Neil Ferguson said some years ago, “People’s sense of what is possible in terms of control changed quite dramatically between January and March [2020],” and the pandemicists were not the only ones watching and learning. From lockdowns, mass vaccination hysteria and the rest of it, our technocratic betters drew a terrible lesson, namely that they could go much further than they ever imagined possible. In the post-pandemic era it remained merely to find out where the new boundaries were. Habeck discovered that immiserating millions of Germans with climate protection legislation that will do nothing about emissions is not quite within his powers. But if it were, he would’ve done it. And then he would’ve tried to do the next even more extreme thing.

In this and in all other areas, you get not the reasonable interventions or the correct measures or the policies most likely to achieve the stated ends, but the maximal policies – the most our rulers can do given the political will and the ambient public hysteria at their disposal. These are very dangerous people, made even more dangerous by a complacent and inattentive citizenry. In its current, modified form, the GEG is projected to reduce German carbon emissions over the next six years by the same amount as China emits on a single day. We have this law not for not to save the climate, and not for any other concrete purpose, but merely because this is the maximum that Habeck could enact. This pointless exercise in political power has introduced substantial uncertainty into the housing market, and it will cost taxpayers and many ordinary Germans billions of Euros in the coming decades. All for nothing.