(Hint - it's not the climate)

In an interview in Der Spiegel, German environment minister Sigmar Gabriel comes right out and says, "People are acting as if the world climate depended on whether the legislation is fully enacted three years earlier or later. I think this is totally absurd."

He thinks it's totally absurd?

I'm speechless.

This is the kind of thing I might expect from people on planet car lobby, but shouldn't an environment minister be just a little bit concerned about the environment? He's clearly not armed with any of the facts. How can he be when he thinks that "the problem lies elsewhere"?

Well, I've done quite a bit of research for this blog, so let me spell it out for you Mr Gabriel.

Here are some facts:

According to Wikipedia the EU ranks 3rd highest in CO2 emissions, at 14.7%, behind the US and China.

Even with the US coming in at 22%, it's difficult to argue that the problem lies elsewhere. You see, Mr Gabriel, that 14.7% of the problem lies in Europe. (And by the way Germany is way up that list, coming in 6th.) And 14.7% of the solution is a big deal whichever way you look at it.

When he's taken a look at the figures, Mr Gabriel might want to check out this handy Greenpeace report - energy [r]evolution and turn to page 11 where he'll find that if emissions don't decline by 2020 we will be in deep trouble. He can find a list of those troubles on the same page.

And he might be interested to know that the sea bed, already heating up with the warming effects of climate change could unleash a massive store of methane that will speed up the effects of climate change faster than we've ever seen.

If Mr Gabriel had been reading this blog he'd have already known that transport emissions make up nearly a quarter of the EU's carbon footprint.

And car ownership has been growing - it was up 25% in the period 1995 -2005.

According to the EU Environment Agency report "Climate for a transport change" (I'd recommend Mr Gabriel gets hold of a copy - it has plenty of facts and figures that he would find useful in his work) if transport sector emissions had followed the same reduction trend as in society as a whole in 1995 -2005, greenhouse gas emissions in the EU would have fallen by 14 % instead of 7.9%.

Or put simply, we'd have doubled the reductions in Greenhouse gas emissions if the car industry had done something about it back in 1995. Ten years has made a huge difference, and not in a good way.

Mr Gabriel wants to add another three years delay onto that.

To use his own words, I think that is totally absurd.