German Chancellor Angela Merkel speaks at the BMW stand while a Greenpeace activist protests against the auto industry behind on the opening day of the IAA 2019 Frankfurt Auto Show on September 12, 2019 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.Sean Gallup / Getty Thousands of climate protesters marched past the Frankfurt auto show Saturday, highlighting the simmering tensions between the German car industry and the countrys environmentalists.Make love not CO2, read one protesters banner as activists from Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth joined scores of cyclists to demand that Germany take action to cut the number of cars on its roads, with some calling for an outright ban on SUVs and other large vehicles.Organizers claim that more than 25,000 people took part in the event, which came as the chancellor convenes a climate cabinet tasked with cutting emissions from Germanys transport and heating sectors.The automotive industry makes money by destroying the environment, Marion Tiemann, a transport expert at Greenpeace and one of the events organizers, said at the protest. Were in the midst of a climate crisis.Germany has pledged to cut carbon emissions by 55 per cent by 2030, compared with 1990 levels. But by the end of this year, the country will have reduced CO2 output by only 30 per cent, with transport emissions rising steadily.Record-breaking heatwaves, the dwindling of the Rhine river and a series of powerful storms have turbocharged the climate debate in Germany and lifted the environmentalist Green party to second place in election polls.In the last 50 years, storms, hot spells and floods have increased threefold in Germany, Merkel said in her weekly podcast Saturday. We must act. Cars are an obvious target for climate protesters who on Saturday paraded effigies of Volkswagen, BMW, Daimler and Toyota executives with exhaust tailpipes in place of where their sexual organs would be. Other banners called for Clean air for all as a giant, black, inflatable upturned car drifted over those gathered around Hauptwache, a square that borders Frankfurts main shopping street.Our message to the automakers is: Stop selling sports utility vehicles, said Juergen Resch, executive director of Deutsche Umwelthilfe, an environmental group thats brought lawsuits against German cities where nitrous oxide pollution has exceeded legal limits. Theyre climate killers. Demonstrators on bicycles are pictured on their way over the A 648 motorway to protest against the Frankfurt motor show IAA 2019, in Frankfurt am Main Germany, on September 14, 2019. Daniel Roland / Getty The conflict between German environmentalists and automakers sits uneasily with the fact that around 5 per cent of Germanys economic output depends on car companies.Despite calls for calm, tensions have boiled over several times in recent week. Climate change activists met with representatives from Germanys car lobby earlier this month in an unusually hostile debate in Berlin. A fatal accident last week, when a Porsche SUV crashed into a group of pedestrians in Berlin, prompted a local politician to call for a ban on such tank-like vehicles.Some protesters in Frankfurt on Saturday called for the German government to go further and ban all cars from city centers. Theyd also like Germany to invest billions of euros in its rail network and plot an eventual exit from the internal combustion engine, similar to the countrys decision to quit coal-fired power generation by
Origin: Thousands protest at Frankfurt car show over emissions concerns