An expensive, razzle-dazzle climate referendum in Berlin aimed to bring forward “climate neutral” ambitions from 2045 to 2030, and no one even led a counter campaign, but it failed miserably:
Climate Referendum fails in Germany
Berliner Morgenpost
Berlin. The referendum for more ambitious climate goals in Berlin has failed. The state election authority announced on Sunday evening that the required minimum number of yes votes had not been reached.
An alliance “climate restart” wanted to achieve a change in the state energy transition law with the vote. Specifically, Berlin should commit itself to becoming climate neutral by 2030 and not by 2045 as previously planned.
Of 2.4 million voters in Berlin, the Yes camp needed 608,000 voters (or 25%) to turn up and agree in order to win. While 860,000 people turned up to vote, only 442,000 said “yes” and 420,000 said “no”. Essentially 82% of the total voter population either didn’t want it, or couldn’t be bothered turning up.
Pierre Gosselin of NoTricksZone reports it was a crushing defeat
He says “It’ll take a longtime for the radical climate activists to recover from this major setback”. Apparently the promotion was intense: “more than a million euros spent in a massive run-up campaign that included plastering the city with posters, concerts by famous performers, huge support and propaganda by the media and hefty donations coming from left wing activists from the east and west coasts of USA.”
There was no leader of the “No” case, yet the No votes were almost equal to the “Yes”.
Predictably, the inner city voted yes, and the “rest” voted No or didn’t turn up.
Gosselin points out that the rich upper class supporters were in agony, calling people names like “climate destroyers”. Their bafflement makes sense if we assume the believers are in a sheltered cult where their news services are controlled and none of them have even met a skeptic. They’ve not heard a single reason why using power plants to command storms is a form of neolithic sorcery with computer support.
“The bubble has burst”
According to one German commentator Gosselin found, it’s a major victory over the Greens:
For this, even major international donors were landed, who were supposed to positively influence the opinion of Berliners about the referendum. And in the end you fail miserably. Not only was the quorum missed by a wide margin, but the number of no votes was only just below the number of yes votes. Nobody had led a counter-campaign against the “climate restart”. That makes the defeat for Neubauer and Co. particularly embarrassing.
They, mostly members of the upper middle class, have declared war on the lower and lower middle classes with destructive climate measures. Outside of the Berlin political bubble and the other urban feel-good oases of Germany, the Neubauers and Schramms of this world never had much support. And now the bubble has finally burst. In Marzahn, Köpenick and Lichtenberg, the majority of voters voted against the referendum.
Meanwhile, the EU has abandoned plans to ban traditional cars by 2035
After Germany, Italy, and five other nations opposed the ban, the EU had to concede and also allow the sale of ICE (internal combustion engine) cars that run on carbon neutral fuels. There is no such requirements for sacred EV’s, of course. Electric vehicles will be fine to run on coal fired electricity.
NetZeroWatch calls on the British Government to abandon similar plans which would destroy the British car industry.
The Wall Street Journal editorial says the Greens were aghast at this too:
Consumers will be allowed to buy internal-combustion autos as long as those cars can run on synthetic fuels, which are fuels made from captured carbon or renewable energy. Brussels still seems to hope that these cars will run only on such “e-fuels” by that deadline. But doubts about the technological feasibility of that pledge may explain why environmental groups were aghast at the weekend decision.
They always project their own flaws…
The usual suspects complain that this is another earth-destroying crony gift from Berlin to its auto industry—as if there’s no cronyism or corporate welfare involved in subsidizing electric vehicles that carry their own high environmental costs. The reality is that the big winners are consumers…
That’s a luxury consumers won’t enjoy in California, Oregon and Washington state, where bans on new cars with internal-combustion-engines remain on the books for 2035.
There is hope.