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German city residents sue government over air pollution

Seven residents in Germany are taking the government to court over the poor air quality around their homes, an organisation representing them said on Monday.

Published: 26 September 2022 17:03 CEST

Cars, trucks and delivery vehicles drive into Berlin.

Cars, trucks and delivery vehicles drive into Berlin. Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Michael Kappeler

The residents of Berlin, Duesseldorf, Frankfurt and Munich believe current government legislation is “demonstrably inadequate to protect people’s health”, according to the organisation, Deutsche Umwelthilfe (DUH).

Levels of particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide in Germany are up to five times higher than the safe levels recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO), according to DUH.

The complainants are calling for immediate action to bring about “a reduction in dangerous air pollutants from, among other things, traffic, wood burning and agriculture”, said Juergen Resch, national director of DUH.

“Politicians are doing too little to protect people like me who live on a busy road,” said complainant Volker Becker-Battaglia, from Munich.

This time last year, a new coalition government was elected in Germany on a promise to make environmental concerns one of its top priorities.

READ ALSO: Germany should ditch Christmas lights this year, says environmental group

The Greens entered power for the first time in more than two decades, promising that Germany would end coal power and generate 80 percent of electricity from renewables by 2030.

But since then, climate concerns have been overshadowed by the war in Ukraine, an acute energy crisis and record inflation.

Germany has accelerated plans to import liquefied natural gas (LNG) by sea and has even decided to reactivate mothballed coal-fired power plants.

In 2021, climate activists won a landmark victory in Germany when the constitutional court ruled that the government’s climate plans were insufficient and placed an unfair burden on future generations.

German environmental groups also last year announced a legal offensive against car giants Volkswagen, Daimler and BMW over their emissions.

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'It's all the same to me': Why German auto workers are learning to install heat pumps

Production of the car component at the town of Gifhorn will end in 2027 and move to Croatia, the Czech Republic and Wales to keep the costs “competitive”, according to Continental, which will cut about 7,000 jobs worldwide.

The relocation means a new career for 49-year-old Karaca, one of a rising number of workers in companies supplying Germany’s vital automotive sector who are being hit by a tsunami of redundancies.

Facing up to the double shock of the end of combustion engines and rising competition from China, European suppliers like Bosch, ZF and Webasto have all announced cuts — which have piled up to the point where the issue has cast a shadow on the forthcoming EU elections.

Brussels has promised to do more to boost the domestic car industry and tackle unfair competition from cheaper Asian rivals.

But EU plans to outlaw the sale of new fossil fuel-powered cars from 2035, meaning some jobs will inevitably become redundant.

Battery transition

The upcoming closure to the Continental plant in Gifhorn has been the catalyst for Karaca and the other 800 employees working there to start retraining in another area.

A local heating systems company, Stiebel Eltron, has proposed to take over the site and retain some employees for future production.

“Brakes or heat pumps, it’s all the same to me,” said Karaca, whose two parents both worked for Continental at the factory.

Making exhausts, headlights, gear boxes or brakes has long been a steady job with suppliers in Germany alone employing some 270,000 people.

But the technologies they have specialised in are obsolescent and the process of making battery cars is a less labour-intensive undertaking.

“If today you need 100 people to produce a normal motor, then with the electric motor you only need 10,” said Jutta Rump, a business professor at Ludwigshafen University.

In Gifhorn, Stiebel Eltron is offering the prospect of further employment to some 300 of Continental’s workforce.

Another 100 could find a home at a nearby Siemens mobility plant that supplies rail companies.

Poor prospects

What jobs remain are under increasing pressure from Chinese competitors, who are hauling in a growing share of the market.

The Chinese battery-maker CATL has grown in short order to become the world’s third largest auto supplier, in a sector still led by Bosch, according to consultancy Roland Berger.

In Germany, one in three companies in the sector is planning to move part of its production abroad in the coming years to cut costs, according to a study by the German carmakers association VDA.

The axe has already fallen on 3,400 workers at Ford’s factory in Saarlouis, in the west of Germany.

The plant closure takes with it a whole network of local suppliers, whose workers staged a six-day strike in March to get better redundancy terms.

Among them, 33-year-old Luca Thonet, employed by Ford supplier Lear, said he would like to stay in the region, close to the French border.

“But there is almost no industry left in the region, and the other factories are not in a very good situation either,” he told AFP.

Thonet cited the situation at ZF, the second-largest German auto supplier, which announced the closure of two sites in its domestic market.

The ZF works council fears some 12,000 job cuts could be in the pipeline, with a number falling in the same region as Saarlouis.

Germany may be facing a shortage of workers, but not all sectors are equally impacted.

In IT, product development, or sales “there’s a lack of qualified personnel”, said expert Rump. “That’s not the case in production.”

By Lea PERNELLE

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