eugyppius on the transition: Part 1
Those future deadlines to abolish, ban, etc various things have dreadful effects, even if there is no intention to ever follow through, or kick them into the future forever. The car you will be buying in 2035 is already on the drawing board, but manufacturers now have to reckon with political risks. Do they spend trillions on ramping up electric production capacity only to have the rug pulled when the ban is overturned in 2034? We know most people will avoid electric given the choice, and the chances of the network being ready for millions of electric vehicles is zero. Or do they take the risk of investing billions in continued design of ICE vehicles?
The German solution, as always, will be to handsomely "compensate" the big auto manufacturers, with masses of taxpayer money, for the consequences of shifting political sands. There will be subsidies (already are) for electric, there will be compensation for lost electric sales if (when) the ban is removed, and compensation for lost ICE sales because manufacturers had scaled back. Good for the shareholders, but we will be making fewer cars, and importing more, whatever happens.
The opposite tack is being taken with domestic heating, where you have an effective ban on anything except heat pumps, just coming into effect a year or two later than the 2024 that the greens wanted to force through (at zero notice). Builders and homeowners have no political clout, they will have to pay, and pay, and pay. No compensation for political risk, and for the first time since the war this law has subjected property ownership to political risk. If this really does happen and is not reversed, the pumps will be installed, and successively rendered obsolete by banning the "climate changing" gases they rely on to function.
Once your heat pump springs a leak and loses all its coolant, your only choice will be to replace the entire system with a new one. This will bring a whole new experience to heating systems failing in winter, as you cannot get this fixed in a day or two, you won't be able to patch it up so it can limp on a few more months and replace it later, you will have to tear the whole house apart, every couple of decades, and in many cases without warning at a very inconvenient time. There is of course nothing remotely green about this, destruction of capital value is extraordinarily environmentally unfriendly.
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