CDU leader Friedrich Merz does not believe in green steel. "This statement is a slap in the face of all the employees," said Habeck on Tuesday in Berlin at the annual kick-off meeting of the extended board of the Green parliamentary group. Steel production in Germany would then be phased out. According to Habeck, there will be no chance of steel produced with coal in the 2030s on the world markets.
"Germany must remain an industrial country," added Habeck, who is still Minister for Economic Affairs. "To achieve this, it must continue to develop." He pointed out that the steel companies themselves wanted to make the change to climate-neutral steel. Habeck had distributed large subsidies for this in recent years.
On Monday evening in Bochum, the CDU/CSU's candidate for Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, had questioned the plans for a rapid restructuring of the industry. "I don't think that a quick switch to hydrogen will be successful. Where would the hydrogen come from?" He said that there were other possibilities, such as the capture or storage of the greenhouse gas CO2. There should be no "ideological commitments" in industrial policy.
(Report by Christian Krämer, edited by Christian Götz. If you have any questions, please contact our editorial team at berlin.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for politics and the economy) or frankfurt.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for companies and markets).)