Martin Daum is CEO of the world’s largest commercial vehicle manufacturer Daimler Truck and is currently quite dissatisfied with the energy policy of the federal government. In an interview with the “FAZ” he criticizes them sharply. “We would like to save gas, but we are not allowed to because of emission protection regulations,” says Daum. “This is an absolute nonsense. We discuss the number of degrees when showering and whether we no longer illuminate monuments: That is an absolute joke compared to what we as an industry can save if we quickly and unbureaucratically convert our thermal power plants to heating oil.”
Since the beginning of August, the company has been able to convert all of its process heat to heating oil. According to the manager, this could save around 40 gigawatt hours of gas per month. However, the Bundestag will not decide until the end of September or the beginning of October whether the bureaucracy will be reduced. “Sometime at the end of October we may be allowed to switch.”
Daum tried it several times and at all administrative levels, but the application would be passed on from the district to the state and from there to the federal government. “We have an operating license under the Federal Emission Control Act. The change requires expert opinions and justifications,” he told the “FAZ” and went to court harshly with the administration. “It’s like Asterix and Obelix’s bureaucracy. Nobody means anything bad. If we ran out of gas tomorrow, that would probably be possible overnight.”
In addition, the CEO of the truck manufacturer, whose business is otherwise considered very dependent on the economy, had doubts about the negative forecasts for economic development: “The signs of a recession are: unemployment and supply exceeds demand. I don’t observe either.”
He is neither in the council of wise men, nor researchers. “It is popular at the moment to say: the sky is falling and the end of the world has come. I don’t see that, even if the system is fragile. Maybe one day we will have a recession and then everyone will say: I told you so.”
