Why Germany has blocked the road to banning EU combustion engines
Road rage
The tone was “constructive”, said European commission president Ursula von der Leyen of yesterday’s conversations with German cabinet ministers about Berlin’s threat to veto an EU ban on internal combustion engines by 2035.
But there was no sign of a breakthrough in a row pitting Germany and Italy, Europe’s big carmaking nations, against the majority of the continent, write Laura Pitel in Berlin and Alice Hancock in Brussels.
Context: Rome and Berlin last week demanded that the ban (which has already been agreed by member states and the European parliament) be watered down, forcing the EU to indefinitely postpone what was supposed to be a rubber-stamp vote tomorrow.
Officials in Berlin say they are waiting for a compromise proposal. That has gone down badly in Brussels. “I think this is Berlin trying to pin it on the Commission,” said an EU official, who said that the demands of German transport minister Volker Wissing to “go beyond” what had already been agreed would mean reopening the whole negotiation, adding: “That is impossible.”
Germany has demanded that cars using synthetic e-fuels, which are produced using electricity from renewable hydrogen and other gases and can be used in conventional engines, should be exempt from the ban. That would offer a lifeline to the German car industry, which is home to auto giants such as Volkswagen, BMW and Mercedes-Benz and generates about a fifth of the country’s industrial revenues.
Wissing, the free marketeer, pro-car Free Democrat who has spearheaded Germany’s opposition to the ban, said that Frans Timmermans, the EU’s commissioner for the Green Deal, should “simply exempt combustion engines . . . if they only run on synthetic fuels”. He told German tabloid Bild am Sonntag: “Then we would have a technologically-open solution.”
Von der Leyen (who joined a German cabinet away day at Schloss Meseberg, a baroque palace north of Berlin) said yesterday that Brussels was fully supportive of new technologies. But she stressed that those “must also always be in line with our climate policy goals”.
The row has caused splits in the German cabinet. But yesterday chancellor Olaf Scholz, who often plays umpire in his three-party coalition, praised Wissing as a “very, very good transport minister.”
Scholz voiced confidence that the gridlock could be eased. But there still seems plenty of mileage left in the dispute.