Thousands protest at Frankfurt show on emissions concern

Thousands of climate protesters marched past the Frankfurt auto show on Saturday, highlighting the simmering tensions between the German car industry and the country’s environmentalists as the country's government prepares to take action to curb runaway carbon dioxide emissions.

"Make love not CO2," read one 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.

Police in Frankfurt said some 15,000, including many cyclists, took part in the march. Organizers put the number at 25,000 and said that about 18,000 cyclists took part.

"The automotive industry makes money by destroying the environment," Marion Tiemann, a transport expert at Greenpeace and one of the event’s organizers, said at the protest. "We are in the midst of a climate crisis."

Germany has pledged to cut carbon emissions by 55 percent by 2030, compared with 1990 levels. But by the end of this year, the country will have reduced CO2 output by only 30 percent, 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.

The protest came as German Chancellor Angela Merkel convenes a climate cabinet tasked with cutting emissions from Germany’s transport and heating sectors. "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."

Merkel faces a balancing act when she chairs the first meeting of her high-level climate cabinet on Sept. 20. The chancellor is trying to thrash out a common position between squabbling ministers from her coalition’s conservative and social democrat parties.

The outcome of the negotiations could have profound consequences for the country’s economy as signs of a looming recession mount."Of course -- and we can’t beat about the bush -- climate protection comes at a price," Merkel said. "But I'm convinced if we don’t put this money in the right place, the price that we will pay later will be much higher."

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 Frankfurt's 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 that has brought lawsuits against German cities where nitrogen oxide pollution has exceeded legal limts. "They are climate killers."

The conflict between German environmentalists and automakers sits uneasily with the fact that about 5 percent of Germany’s economic output depends on car companies. About 820,000 people are employed in the production of cars or automotive parts, according to the VDA carmakers’ association.

"We would do well as a society to not demonize one of Germany’s leading industries," Axel Schmidt, head of automotive research at consulting firm Accenture, said in an interview.

German automakers are under intense pressure to speed up a transition to electric and hydrogen vehicles, after the 2015 diesel scandal in which Volkswagen Group admitted to cheating emissions tests.

Germany's big three, VW, Mercedes-Benz maker Daimler and BMW, assume that in 10 years about half of their cars will be emissions-free.

Automakers are expected to invest some 40 billion euros ($44 billion) on alternative drivetrains in the next three years, highlighting the urgency to fix the image of an industry tarnished by the diesel scandal and avoid bans on diesel cars in cities.

Despite calls for calm, tensions have boiled over several times in recent week. Climate change activists met with representatives from Germany's 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, prompting 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. They would 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 country’s decision to quit coal-fired power generation by 2038.

Reuters contributed to this report