Baerbock in the Triell: relapse into Veggie Day

There it is again, the prohibition party. The Greens had carefully tried to cast off their reputation for being one. They had made good progress with that in the past few years. At the party congress at the end of last year, for example, the Greens committed themselves to “freedom of research” and opened up to green genetic engineering instead of demonizing it as a poison. And then Chancellor candidate Annalena Baerbock arrives and with a single sentence falls back into Veggie Day times that were long believed to have been overcome. "Every ban is also a driver of innovation," she said with a view to fossil internal combustion engines in the TV trio on Sunday without batting an eyelid.

The competition rubs their hands together.

Because up to now, Armin Laschet's accusation that Baerbock only ever comes around the corner with new bans has largely fizzled out.

Now the Green top candidate has delivered campaign help free to her opponents and has revealed a way of thinking that is at least irritating in its simplicity.  

Because, of course, bans can be part of a solution and accelerate innovation.

Think, for example, of the CFC ban.

At lightning speed, companies brought other substances onto the market that replace the gas but protect the ozone layer.

As long as they got good business with CFCs, they had little interest in it.

But putting the ban as a driver of innovation in the foreground, as Baerbock did, exposes completely wrong priorities.

First and foremost, enough well-trained researchers and engineers are needed for people to develop innovations.

You need free spaces in which you can tinker, networks in which you can exchange ideas and money that you can also burn.

It takes openness instead of moral statements about which technology is good and which is reprehensible.

The example of atomic energy shows that one is often smarter afterwards when it comes to bans.

Shouldn't a Green man, if he's honest, say today: “First the coal phase-out and then the nuclear phase-out?” That would be a sentence that Baerbock should utter.