European governments are blindly supporting the car industry and this extreme support appears in ever more absurd manifestations. In Germany, with the pretext of promoting “green cars”, the government is currently offering €2,500 to people buying a new car. It doesn’t matter if you scrap a small fuel-efficient car to replace it with a Hummer. Maybe the idea is to go further and faster in the dead-end street of oil production and consumption, in order to be sure that there is a huge problem to deal with. Then it would look like a perfect strategy.

Unfortunately this payment just appears as a new lack of creativity to face existing problems. Verkehrsclub Deutschland (VCD), a member of the European Federation for Transport and Environment organised an interesting protest against this incentive. They set up a web page to allow people to apply for this €2,500, in order to replace their old car by a bike or public transport’s tickets. VCD has been therefore threatened with legal actions by German authorities, if they wouldn’t remove this web page. The message is clear, car industries represent the public interest; environmental and social issues belong to the private sphere! So, if you want to act as a responsible citizen, buy a new car!