what was once the price of bread is now the price of gas and that is why Germany is in a state of cold rage. Shortly after midnight from Wednesday to Thursday, when the tank discount expired and the tax rose again, the five dominant oil companies routinely turned the price screw. The price per liter rose by 50 cents, later by 22 cents for Super and around eight cents for diesel.
In the days before, some gas stations had stocked up on cheap petrol or blocked gas pumps, probably due to maintenance work like that of the Russian gas monopoly Gazprom. 2.50 euros per liter were not as rare as one might think. It is always the same perversion of a market that is no longer one.
An ADAC tank expert explains: “The fuel prices have risen more than the elimination of the tank discount justifies!”
There is currently a run on French gas stations for this: The government in Paris has increased its own tank discount. And so we simply encourage ourselves with the national poet Victor Hugo: “God only created water, but man made wine.”
One of the most superfluous debates in recent weeks has been the argument about extending the remaining nuclear power plants. Everyone knows about the risks of this technique. But everyone also knows that given Vladimir Putin’s big blackmail game, every single power capacity counts. The notorious doubter Robert Habeck is now getting proof of a temporary pro-nuclear solution in the form of the second stress test on security of supply.
The four operators of the power grids – 50Hertz, Amprion, Tennet and TransnetBW – believe that it could make sense not to take two of the three reactors that are still active off the grid at the end of the year. It therefore looks as if Economics Minister Habeck could decide to continue running Isar 2 and Neckarwestheim 2 for a limited period of time, in “extended operation” with existing fuel rods. The Emsland nuclear power plant, on the other hand, would no longer supply electricity. The nuclear phase-out debate is no longer a phantom debate.
If you want to understand the technical details even better, I can refer you to a podcast discussion that my colleague Kathrin Witsch recently conducted in the “Green & Energy” series entitled “Nuclear power – yes, please?”. Your counterpart: Felix Christian Matthes, environmental economist and energy expert at the Öko-Institut.
In Russia, after the invasion of Ukraine, the energy business is causing sanctions, skyrocketing prices, bubbling profits – and mysterious deaths of oligarchs and top managers. People do fall out of a window here, in the case of Rawil Maganov from a hospital window on the sixth floor. The CEO of private oil giant Lukoil, a rival of state octopus Rosneft, had been hospitalized with a heart attack.
Even more bizarrely, his ex-board colleague Alexander Subbotin died in May: He allegedly had toad poison drip into his scratched wounds by a pair of shamans, followed by necromancy, animal sacrifices and a rooster bloodbath – which the billionaire did not survive. Other strange deaths include dying in the pool with a gunshot wound, dying in the bathroom, dying by hanging, or falling off a cliff while hiking. The Italian mafia’s distribution fights are solved in a similar way, only sometimes no corpse turns up.
Nobody will be able to claim that Lufthansa is on the move. First it botched its comeback after the pandemic with unrealistic flight plans, then the takeover of the Italian airline ITA failed for the time being – and today the airline has to cancel 800 flights. The Frankfurt and Munich hubs and 130,000 passengers are affected. Strike!
The management around CEO Carsten Spohr, a former pilot, cannot cope with the wage demands of the Cockpit Association (VC), which demands 5.5 percent more wages by the end of the year plus inflation compensation. That would mean 16 percent higher wage costs, says Lufthansa – and threatens to hand over the feeder flights for Frankfurt and Munich to the planned Cityline 2.0 if there is no agreement with VC. Because there are also collective bargaining talks with the UFO cabin union, the year of flight cancellations should continue happily.
In his first interview as head of Volkswagen, Oliver Blume is as resilient as a good shock absorber. At first glance, you can see little difference to the complimented predecessor Herbert Diess, both swear by “robust, consistent financial planning”. What is new is that Blume attaches great importance to the fact that since Heinrich Nordhoff he has been the first person from Lower Saxony to drive in Wolfsburg (after 28 years at VW), whereas the Austrian Diess came to the Mittelland Canal from BMW.
In detail, the new CEO of VW and former CEO of the most important subsidiary Porsche says about…
- his dual role: “The strategic management of the group and the operational management of a brand are very different – and complement each other ideally. This means that I am closely linked to the technologies, the entrepreneurial processes and the talents.”
- an IPO by Porsche: “In this case, Porsche AG would be an independent company without the authority of Volkswagen AG to issue directives. As far as my personal role is concerned, I am on the side of Porsche AG in the planned IPO. I am not involved in the Volkswagen Group’s decisions in this regard.”
- a job cut: “I always think in terms of opportunities. Lowering costs is not yet a strategy. The key is the right product offering.”
The Blume talk (“I always play to win”) is part of our weekend title about “Germany’s most difficult job”: According to Sigmund Freud, conflicts of interest among people are principally decided through the use of force. In the event of a conflict between Porsche and VW, Blume will have to cause pain in the right place.
(Photo: Thomas Kuhlenbeck)
There are all sorts of crises these days, just no unemployment crisis. It has been observed for years that “economic development and the labor market have become somewhat decoupled, also because the demographic development is now making itself felt,” summarizes Andrea Nahles, the new head of the Federal Employment Agency and the old head of the SPD, in an interview with the Handelsblatt.
Unemployed people are only registered in Nuremberg for an average of 19 weeks, and the shortage of workers is getting worse. “Better today than tomorrow,” Nahles comments on the plans of her former political colleagues in Berlin to facilitate immigration. A big problem is that of the 1.14 million people who come to us every year and get annoyed by the bureaucracy, two-thirds move on. Nahles: “We obviously still don’t see ourselves ultimately as an immigration country.”
My cultural tip for the weekend: “KI 2041 – ten future visions” by Kai-Fu Lee and Quifan Chen. Bestselling author Lee, whose last book “AI Superpowers” was a huge hit, has teamed up with a sci-fi writer to share ten stories centered around “tech map” phenomena.
It’s about topics like self-driving cars or deep learning. After each of these episodes, the computer scientist explains the technology behind what is being described. For example, how neural networks compete against each other to outdo each other in generating and recognizing manipulated videos, voices or images. The book is number three on our shortlist for the German Business Book Prize 2022.
And then there is the transformation researcher Maja Göpel, who was recently given the verb “göpeln” by “Zeit” magazine. It had come out that the journalist Marcus Jauer had co-written her celebrated bestseller “Rethinking our world”, but remained unmentioned at his own request. In the new book “We can also be different” everyone can actually be different and it says: “With the collaboration of Marcus Jauer”.
In the Handelsblatt interview, Göpel asks in view of the multiple problem pressure (climate, pandemic, energy, war): “Why do we not trust ourselves anymore?” and calls for a “new social contract” – not as a “please-please redistribution mode”, but as a policy package “that combines social and environmental goals well”. It becomes clear in the case of SUVs, the profit vehicles of the auto industry and its engineers: Binding 2.5 tons to move 70 kilos is – even if we manage to do it CO2-neutrally at some point – “a fairly uneconomical use of resources”.
As experts, we can put Arthur Schopenhauer on the witness stand here: “Common sense can replace almost any degree of education, but no degree of education replaces common sense.”
I wish you a restful weekend where your common sense will probably tell you to pay close attention to your gas mileage and fuel bills. I’m going on vacation for two weeks. On Monday, my trusted colleague Christian Rickens will do the wake-up call. Bonn chance!
Her
Hans Jürgen Jakobs
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