By: Nina Žoher
At the transition from the old to the new year, we like to be optimistic. However, considering the beginning of the new year, it seems that it will be quite some time before we manage to pull ourselves onto dry land from the floating raft. On the contrary, it is sinking more and more.
Affairs, ministerial changes, threats of introducing laws that bring additional harm to people are becoming a constant in these already challenging times. For instance, everyone except the highest government officials has yet to figure out where to find basic groceries from the list of products that were supposed to drastically decrease in price. Not only are high food prices hitting us in the pocket, but also the bills for electricity and heating. The prices of the latter have particularly outraged the residents of Velenje, as December was unusually warm. However, convenient excuses in the sense of needing to change habits were once again heard.
Calls for changing habits were already present at the beginning of this government’s term when they advised us on how to give up meat meals. The push for a green transition in the heating sector, through a proposed amendment to the energy law, is increasingly being imposed on us as well. The statement of the State Secretary at the Ministry of the Environment, Tina Seršen, is quite telling in this regard. She mentioned not understanding why some people are concerned about how someone, who is currently building a new house and has a few hundred thousand euros for it, will buy a heat pump. With this, she implied that only the wealthy can afford houses, even though the majority of Slovenians still build on a tight budget, with many doing the work themselves to save money. “I do not know why you are not concerned about all the dead, about all the people who die each year in this country due to particulate matter coming from small biomass heating devices,” Seršen stated, attempting to emphasise the importance of the green transition. However, even the European Environmental Agency, the source of the “sermons” about mortality due to solid particles in the air, is not entirely convinced of this. The National Institute of Public Health’s research suggests that environmental influences can affect health or premature death, but they are not a direct cause of death, as the secretary claims. It is more than evident that we do not live in the same realities, not even by chance. How can we expect such people in power to work in the interest of ordinary citizens?