“AfD wants to end climate protection”
Germany’s right-wing national conservative party Alternative for Germany (AfD) calls the human effect on global warming into question and wants to scrap efforts to cut carbon emissions, Maria Fiedler writes in Tagesspiegel. “There have been cold and warm periods also before industrialisation started,” AfD top candidate Alexander Gauland said at a presentation of the party’s energy policy concepts in Berlin. The concept paper says human influence on climate change was “an invention”, while leading party figures call for leaving the Paris Climate Agreement, ending all climate protection efforts of public services and stopping the Energiewende, and consequently the funding of renewable energy sources, Fiedler says. The AfD’s other top candidate, Alice Weidel, also called for a guarantee for owners of diesel cars to be allowed to use their vehicles until at least 2050, and said the debate over high NOx pollution in German cities was “a campaign issue inflated by the Greens”. Weidel also accused Chancellor Angela Merkel of “de-industrialising Germany” by considering a possible end to combustion engine technology.
Read the article in German here.
For an overview of German party positions on energy and climate, see this CLEW factsheet. Also, see this CLEW dossier for background on German parliamentary elections 2017.