Around 20 per cent of Germans reportedly fear for their jobs amid the country’s green agenda push, research has reportedly found.
A survey done by the German Trade Union Confederation has reportedly found that one in five employees now fear for the future of their jobs as a result of the country’s push for green agenda measures aimed at curbing climate change.
It is the latest piece of evidence showing how the European Union’s leading economy is struggling with its own carbon emission goals, with the price of energy soaring over last year as renewable energy sources are unable to fill the hole left by missing Russian gas and deliberately scrapped nuclear energy.
The surging price of electricity and home heating is not all that Germans are worrying about, though, with a report by Die Welt claiming that around 20 per cent of the German workforce now feel the country’s green push could endanger their employment.
Such a statistic is said to increase to 43 per cent among Germans who say they have no training opportunities within their company, who are perhaps more likely to be working-class.
The high number of Germans afraid of losing their jobs due to the green agenda push is unsurprising considering how reliant the country is on its automotive industry, a sector of the economy extremely vulnerable to both domestic and EU climate policy.
In particular, plans to see a ban on all new combustion engine vehicles from 2035 onwards have spooked many in the country, with the German Transport Minister, Volker Wissing, threatening earlier this week to see Germany veto the measure should exceptions not be made at least for cars that can burn synthetically produced fuels.
“The EU Commission should propose regulation that allows combustion engines to be registered after 2035, if they can verifiably only be fueled with synthetic fuels (sic),” the minister remarked.
However, the German government minister’s push for leniency from the European Union has already been undermined by figures within his own coalition government, with members of the German Green Party coming out on Wednesday to decry any attempt to stop the progress of the climate change measures.
“Transport Minister Wissing is slipping deeper and deeper into illegality if his ministry doesn’t finally work seriously on implementing the climate laws,” the party’s spokesman on transport, Stefan Gelbhaar, reportedly remarked.
“Synthetic fuels will not change anything because they are not available in relevant quantities now and in the foreseeable future,” he insisted, adding that Wissing’s libertarian-leaning Free Democratic Party must remember that they signed a coalition deal with the Greens and Chancellor Scholz’s Social Democrats in which they agreed to push the green agenda forward, not hinder it.
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