In which a leading Green intellectual demands wide-scale deindustrialisation, permanent rationing, the prohibition of all new construction and the end of the banking system – all to save the climate

Germany's ongoing deindustrialisation is no accident; key Green intellectuals have demanded precisely this for decades, and now the Greens are in government and they are getting what they want.

Volkswagen is mired in deep crisis. This flagship of the German automobile industry and symbol of our postwar economic miracle is awash in debt, battered by unrelentingly high labour and energy prices. The metalworkers’ union IG Metall have driven wages at Volkswagen to imprudent extremes, and the company has poured mountains of good money after bad in its grasping effort to develop serviceable and marketable electric vehicles.

VW have no choice if they are to survive our looming and entirely self-imposed ban on internal combustion engines. Alas, VW’s battery-powered cars compete poorly with foreign models from companies like Tesla and BYD, because electric vehicles are entirely different products that employ entirely different technologies, and there’s no reason that a leading producer of petrol-powered cars should also happen to be a leading producer of electric cars. Demanding, via political fiat, that your automobile industry begin producing a totally different product in the course of the next decade, is not all that different from abolishing your automobile industry.

This week, VW announced plans to cut tens of thousands of jobs and to close three factories. That is a very big deal, because they have never closed a single German factory before. I try to avoid economic topics, but this story is so much bigger than economics. As Daniel Gräber wrote in Cicero last month, “the VW crisis has become a symbol for the decline of our entire country.”

The Green leftoid establishment are eagerly blaming management for these failures, which is on the one hand not entirely wrong, but on the other hand not nearly an absolution. The German state of Lower Saxony holds a 20% stake in Volkswagen, and so they also manage the company. Recently, in a fit of virtue, they placed a Green politician – Julia Willie Hamburg – on its supervisory board. Hamburg does not even own a car and has used her position to argue that Volkswagen should regard itself not as an automobile manufacturer but as a “mobility services provider” and shift its focus away from “individual transport.”

The absurdly named Julia Willie Hamburg is merely symptomatic of a broader phenomenon. Germany has succumbed to political forces that have nothing but indifference and disdain for the industries that have made us prosperous. Our sitting Economics Minister, Robert Habeck, gave an interview to taz in 2011 in which he said that “fewer cars will not lead to less economic growth, but to new industries,” and attacked “the old growth theory, based on gross domestic product.” And behind Green politicians like Habeck are even more radical forces, like Ulrike Herrmann, the editor of taz, for many years a member of the Green Party and also an open advocate of wide-scale deindustrialisation. Because I am going to quote Herrmann saying some very crazy things, you need to know that she is in no way a fringe figure. She appears regularly on all the respectable evening talkshows and every politically informed person in the Federal Republic knows who she is.

Herrmann has outlined her political views in various books like The End of Capitalism: Why Growth and Climate Protection Are Not Compatible – and How We Will Live in the Future. From these monographs, we learn that Herrmann sees climatism as a means of imposing a centrally planned economy in which we will own nothing and be happy. Happily, Herrmann also talks a lot, and in her various speeches and interviews she states her vision for decarbonising Germany in very radical terms. I am grateful to this twitter user for highlighting typical remarks that Herrmann delivered in April of this year before a sympathetic audience of climate lunatics.

There, Herrmann elaborated on her vision for a future economy in which all major goods would have to be rationed:

Talking about rationing: It’s clear that if we shrink economically, we won’t have to be as poor as the British were in 1939; rather, we’d have to be as rich as the West Germans were in 1978. That is a huge difference, because we can take advantage of all the growth of the post-war period and the entire economic miracle.

The central elements of the economy would have to be rationed. First of all, living space, because cement emits endless amounts of CO2. Actually, new construction would have to be banned outright and living space rationed to 50 square metres per capita. That should actually be enough for everyone. Then meat would have to be rationed, because meat production emits enormous amounts of CO2. You don't have to become a vegetarian, but you’ll have to eat a lot less meat.

Then train travel has to be rationed. So this idea, which many people also have – ‘so okay then I don’t have a car but then I always travel on the Intercity Express trains’ – taht won’t work either, because of course air resistance increases with speed. Yes, it’s all totally insane. Trains won’t be allowed to travel faster than 100 kilometres per hour, but you can still travel around locally quite a lot. This is all in my book, okay? But I didn’t expand on it there because I didn’t want to scare all the readers.

At this point Herrmann begins to cackle manically, ecstatic at the thought that millions of Germans will be stuck riding rationed kilometres on slow local public transit.

She soon recovers, and begins to explain how her plan will mean the obliteration of your savings, the end of banks and even the destruction of “money as we know it”:

But it’s clear that when the economy shrinks – the wealth that exists, including financial wealth, loses its value. So the savings that are there are then largely gone, all right? Of course, millionaires have the largest savings, but it’s also true that the upper middle class, who are sitting here now, with a university education, also have savings. Some of that would be gone.

Then there would be no more banks, because they can’t grant loans so they’d have to collapse. And money itself would have only a limited significance, so to speak, because so much is only available if you have your ration card. So I mean, what use is money to me if I can only get water if I have a water card, or what use is money to me if I am not allowed to live in more than 50 square metres anyway, and so on and so forth. So you have to say that in this system, money as we know it today loses some of its function.

There is nothing more to say, really, it speaks for itself.

All year, the eminently adult, mature political class of Germany has been having a collective seizure over “right wing extremism.” They have told me that it is extremely right-wing to say that maybe the European Union isn’t the greatest. They have told me that it is extremely right-wing to say we should maybe close our borders to opportunistic mass migrants. They have told me that it is extremely right-wing to suggest that securing cheap energy should be a higher priority than elaborate schemes to control the weather or defeat Putler.

What is not in any way extreme, according to this very same farsighted and eminently reasonable establishment, is the suggestion that nobody should have cars, that everything from train kilometres to water should be rationed, that we should wipe out most savings, abolish banks, stop all new construction and force everybody to live in DDR apartment flats. Were we to do all of that, we would replace our mass immigration crisis with a mass emigration crisis. Sooner or later the state would have to close the borders or be deprived of all able-bodied people. I wonder if anybody considers restoring the Berlin Wall to be in any way extreme.

Herrmann’s is not the whole Green vision, but it is a weight-bearing column of the Green system, and the Green system now controls the Federal Republic. Alongside Herrmann’s fanatical degrowth politics, the Green system consists of technocrats who are eager to expand their supervision of the economy for their own obscure bureaucratic reasons, of opportunists and grifters eager to get their hands on state subsidies, of corrupt entrepreneurs who think that destroying established industries will open opportunities for them, and of ageing 1968ers who still hope to destroy their hated enemies in the petite bourgeoisie.

All of that, together, is the Green system, and the energy transition is the policy that this system has vomited forth. This is the only energy transition that anybody wants in Germany, so please don’t tell me that actually solar power is great and if we just did a billion wind turbines differently we’d be awash in free energy. First, I don’t believe you, but second, your vision isn’t on the menu. The renewables infinity energy futurists only get to do the things that the degrowthers and the bureaucrats and the grifters and the 1968ers also want to do. That’s what the energy transition is, it is the only reason there even is an energy transition, and maybe you should ask yourself why the renewables infinity energy futurists don’t control anything by themselves and basically spend all their time running public relations ops for vastly darker and more malign forces.

This is not a joke, okay? Renewables are not a fun cool futuristic techbro thing, and they are only incidentally groovy new technology you screw to your roof. Fundamentally and economically, they are weapons of mass deindustrialisation. I don’t know how far down the deindustrialisation rabbit hole we’re going to fall, but the way down is very long and we are gaining momentum. Every moment we continue to fall, turning things around becomes monumentally harder. And although the degrowthers are but one voice in this whole mess, as long as we continue to fuck up our economy, they’re the only ones who are really winning. Dare we believe that is even an accident? Until these people are out of power, the factories will keep closing, the companies will keep leaving, unemployment will climb, and we will keep getting poorer. And all of it, for nothing.