Germany is letting a domestic squabble pollute Europe’s green ambitions

For an internal-combustionEUEUEUEUMEPEU engine to keep chugging along requires hundreds of parts to move in perfect unison: just one component misfiring can blow the whole thing up. Much the same is true of the process to create new laws, a human creation whose inner workings rival the complexity of a car motor. Nobody knows this better than Germany, present at the birth of both the automobile and the . And yet. A clumsy attempt to scupper new European legislation at the last minute—on scrapping the sale of new internal-combustion cars by 2035, as it happens—has left fellow members seething. Not for the first time, the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, is accused of putting domestic political convenience ahead of the European interest.This month would have marked something of a public-relations triumph for the ’s regulatory machine. Seldom do laws agreed in Brussels—by 27 member states, the European Commission and 705 s—draw much interest from anyone beyond lobbyists and a few Twitter obsessives. The banning of the internal-combustion engine was such a case. It points to Europe taking tangible steps towards reaching “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050, including a 55% cut on 1990 emissions by the end of the decade. Forcing change on the powerful car industry was a feature of the law: it gave the credibility when it demanded that the rest of the world should also take action to combat climate change.