Habeck's biggest mistake? He listened to the wrong people

For the opposition, the dispute over the gas levy is a godsend. Economics Minister Robert Habeck (Greens) struggles for words, has to admit mistakes. Thieving joy among the government critics. Only: In reality, the dispute over the gas levy is a trifle. It blocks the view of the actual problems - and the biggest mistakes of the crisis manager Habeck.

The fact is: the gas allocation is necessary. Without them, the two largest gas importers would slide into bankruptcy and trigger a cascade of subsequent bankruptcies. If it came to that, we would be talking about completely different problems. That a small portion of the revenue goes to companies that don't need the money is annoying, but not the scandal it's made into. Because 95 percent of the 30 billion surcharge ends up in the right hands, with the systemically important importers.

Habeck could have avoided the wastage of a few hundred million to foreign commodity traders. But one could give him credit for having to make decisions under great time pressure in a problem tsunami. Never before has a federal government faced a problem of this magnitude. Of course mistakes happen. But one should separate the serious from the forgivable.

The gas surcharge is financially manageable. Adjusted for the reduction in VAT, it costs a large household 85 euros a year. The big problem is not the levy, but the explosion in prices on the gas market, which means that households no longer pay 1,200 euros a year for heat, but 4,000 or 5,000 euros. And with electricity, similar scenarios threaten.

This is where Habeck's real omissions lie: Although experts demanded immediately after the start of the war that all coal and nuclear power that was still available be mobilized, he hesitated to break the green taboo that was necessary. He preferred to allow the power generation of horrendous amounts of gas to continue over the summer. The consequences can be seen in the skyrocketing energy prices, which are leading Germany straight into recession.

"For the next few years, all available coal and nuclear power plants are to be maintained or reactivated." This sentence comes from an open letter from several dozen energy experts at the beginning of March. A week after the start of the war it was clear what had to be done. But the government lacked emphasis, did not act, shied away from the nuclear decision and regulated the return to coal-fired power generation so restrictively that only one coal-fired power plant has been connected to the grid to date, while the superfluous gas-fired power generation continues at full speed.

That is the real, hardly forgivable mistake of the federal government. The consequences are extreme: the cost of gas on the wholesale market has increased tenfold. On Friday, the price of electricity on the futures market broke through the threshold of 1,000 euros per megawatt hour. A price increase of 3000 percent over previous normal values. This avalanche is now rolling towards consumers.

Perhaps Robert Habeck's biggest mistake lies on another level. He belongs to a party that has always believed in only one type of advisor, namely those who have been uttering sentences of this quality for years – and in some cases even after the start of the war: “The renewables are ready.” “Coal and nuclear power are clogging just the nets.” “We don’t need LNG.”

None of that was true. However, it was carried into people's minds in the media via the NGO scene, which is mainly financed by the European Climate Foundation. Politicians therefore felt that they had to comply with the will of the people and switched off large quantities of electricity generators through state market interventions without having a replacement.

We can now see that the renewables were not ready, after 12 gigawatts of coal-fired electricity and almost all nuclear reactors have already fallen victim to this ideological quark - and the electricity price on the wholesale market has increased thirtyfold. Not having exchanged his advisers is probably one of the biggest mistakes of the Greens-Realo Habeck. Maybe it's also a mistake that he hasn't looked for another party yet.

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