To save Ukraine, slow down on the autobahn

Rather as the US is an outlier among developed countries in equating freedom with gun ownership, Germany is almost unique in defining liberty as the absence of speed limits on the autobahn. That mentality, however, is now slamming into the imperative to save energy, which is in turn part of the West’s common effort to resist the warmongering of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In Europe, only the Isle of Man keeps Germany company in eschewing categorical highway limits. But driving on the curvy roads of a windswept island is hardly the same as surviving in the fast lanes of the world’s most obsessive car culture.
Here’s what driving on the autobahn is like for me, an average dad in an aging minivan trying to get the people whining in the back row to their next potty break. The other day, I was coasting in the right lane but briefly had to venture into the middle and left lanes — in Germany you never, ever, pass on the right.
I checked my rearview mirror, which showed only tiny dots in the distance — basically empty highway. Seconds later, I was in the left lane, going 130 kilometers per hour (about 80 mph), and looked in the mirror again. Three Porsches were suddenly on my tail, each a car’s length apart, all signaling left and flashing high beams to bully me out of the way and back into the slow lanes.
In an otherwise bureaucratized, over-regulated and rules-obsessed society, limit-less autobahns have come to symbolize the last remnants of freedom. At least they play that role for about half of Germans. That demographic skews male and conservative-libertarian. Politically, it’s represented by the center-right, including the Free Democrats, one of the junior partners in Germany’s current government. They made autobahn freedom a condition for joining the coalition.
The other half of the country mostly considers autobahn racing self-indulgent, dangerous and crazy. And yet it’s surprisingly hard to argue that the absence of speed limits kills more people. Germany has relatively few traffic deaths compared to other countries, and the fatalities that do happen occur mostly on rural roads that have speed limits.
But there’s also that other line of argumentation, having to do with wasted energy. Owing to the laws of physics, driving faster requires a lot more fuel. In an era of climate change, that counts against speeding. In a time of war, it does so twice over.
Putin’s war machine requires Russia to be a petro-state. He uses his country’s coal, oil and natural gas in two ways. One is to earn money to pay his army. The other is to make other European countries, including Germany, dependent on his pipelines, and thus vulnerable to blackmail.
He’s already turned off the gas to Bulgaria, Poland, Finland, the Netherlands and Denmark, and throttled it to Germany and other countries.
—Bloomberg