The new energy-saving plans, with which Economics Minister Robert Habeck wants to prepare the country for the coming winter and the lack of Russian gas supplies, have reached the level of populist symbolic politics. So now it's the turn of the gas-heated private pools, which are supposed to stay cold in winter.
There shouldn't be a "heat police" that controls this. Unless the neighbor snitches that the pool is still steaming suspiciously. The minister said that the contact restrictions in private households worked well during the corona pandemic.
Employees should work from home if possible so that the offices can stay cold. Instead, the employees then heat their apartments all day and kindly also assume the corresponding additional costs - at least Habeck's proposals so far do not provide for any immediate relief. To be on the safe side, the ministry has not yet calculated whether these measures will save energy at all, and if so, how much.
Such proposals are sheer activism. Instead of a joint effort to pass this enormous test for the country, it's suddenly a question of who has to contribute more: those up there or those down there?
Habeck has done a lot of things right in the last few weeks and months. He has introduced laws and regulations that can at least delay or mitigate the catastrophe into which decades of failed energy policy by the Union and the SPD have led the country. In many places he has placed pragmatism over ideology, reactivated coal-fired power plants, bought gas from the sheikhs in the Gulf and has rightly been praised for it.
But for weeks, the main focus within the coalition has been ideological trench warfare. Anyone who rejects longer running times for nuclear power plants because they would bring little relief in the gas crisis cannot demand a speed limit in the same breath. The federal government must finally return to its course of pragmatism.
Of course, comfortably heated private pools would be absurd if part of the industry in Germany were to be shut down forcibly at the same time. But will the ban on heating swimming pools really help prevent gas shortages? Certainly not. Vladimir Putin's goal isn't just gaining land in Ukraine and cold apartments in Germany. He wants to split Western societies. He is well on the way to achieving this goal.
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