Top economist Hans-Werner Sinn criticizes energy policy: "We are ruining the German car industry"

Created: 07/07/2022 04:52

By: Lisa Mayerhofer

Hans-Werner Sinn is a professor emeritus at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität and was head of the ifo Institute from 1999 to 2016.

© picture alliance / ZB

The top economist Hans-Werner Sinn is harsh on the federal government's energy policy and calls for a quick turnaround.

Munich – Germany is in the energy crisis.

On Thursday, the federal government declared the alarm level in the gas emergency plan because of the sharp reduction in Russian gas supplies.

Economics Minister Robert Habeck (Greens) also wants to focus more on coal-fired power generation in the short term in order to be able to fill the gas storage tanks by winter.

In the medium and long term, it is planned that the expansion of renewable energies from wind and sun in Germany will be massively accelerated.

However, the Greens and the SPD do not want to move away from the planned phase-out of nuclear power.

And in the EU, combustion engines will probably be phased out by 2035.

Economist Sinn criticizes energy policy: "Not even helping the environment a bit"

The top economist and former head of the Munich ifo Institute, Hans-Werner Sinn, sharply criticizes the energy policy of the government and the EU under these circumstances.

In a guest article for

, he warns of the energy transition and calls for a U-turn on the part of the federal government.

The economist considers the measures in the energy transition to be wrong because green energy has to be forced through a ban on conventional energies or an artificial price increase.

“That fuels inflation and lowers the material standard of living.

Because of the high proportion of renewable energies, Germany already has the highest electricity costs in the world alongside Denmark,” writes Sinn. 

In addition, the economist doubts that the energy transition will benefit the environment at all, since Europe is acting alone.

With “its ruthless policy to cut back on internal combustion engines”, Europe is freeing up oil for the world markets and harming its own car industry.

Because then those countries would burn the oil that had not committed themselves to reducing CO2 emissions.

"As can be shown empirically, there is almost as much more CO2 in the air as we save," writes the economist.

His conclusion in the

: "We are ruining the German car industry, promoting our Far Eastern competitors and not even helping the environment a bit."

Sinn: "Fundamentally rethink German energy policy"

Sinn therefore called for an about-face by the federal government in energy policy and criticized the simultaneous phase-out of coal combustion and nuclear power.

Green hydrogen could replace dark lulls in wind and solar energy in the long term.

But even that cannot be produced well from wind and solar power, because it is too "fickle".

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The hydrogen will therefore come from the many new nuclear power plants that France has just decided to build and which the EU calls “green”, explains the top economist.

And affirmed: “It would then be better to pull the ripcord and fundamentally rethink German energy policy.

The last nuclear power plants are still standing.”