Merkel and Schulz shun climate & energy / NRW climate ambition

After the TV debate between conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel and her social-democratic challenger Martin Schulz in the run-up to the German election on 24 September, Merkel was largely seen as more convincing, the Süddeutsche Zeitung reports.  In a debate that sidestepped many important topics, notably energy and climate policy, the two candidates whose parties have governed Germany together for the past four years were often seen as old colleagues rather than rivals, the article says. “It could be expected that Merkel was not going to show any drive for change, but also Martin Schulz lacked impulses for true social and ecologic transformation,” the Green party’s top candidate Katrin Göring-Eckardt said.

Find the article in German here and an overview of reactions to the TV-debate in German here.

Get background on the German election campaign and the energy and climate policy issues in the Clean Energy Wire dossier.

German economic liberal party FDP is increasingly wooing adversaries of the energy transition and climate policy sceptics in its bid to reenter parliament, write Anna-Sophia Lang and Gerald Traufetter in Der Spiegel. The FDP fell short of the required number of votes in 2013, for the first time in postwar history. During the state elections in Germany’s most populous state North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), party head Christian Lindner successfully employed a strategy of opposing wind power expansion – “now he is using the same trick for the federal elections,” the authors say. Most other parties, except the right-wing populist party AfD, “do not cater for the turbine opponents,” they argue. Lindner, however, stresses that “we don’t question the entire energy transition,” while at the same time speaking of an “uncontrolled and at times ideological” expansion of renewable power – an ambiguous strategy also used by the AfD in the context of immigration, Lang and Traufetter write.

Read the article in German here (behind paywall).

See the CLEW factsheet Fighting windmills: When growth hits resistance for background.

German climate policy often overlooks the important principle of keeping costs at a minimum, economists Hubertus Bardt and Thilo Schaefer write in a guest commentary for the Handelsblatt. “Of course, there might be good reasons to diverge from this principle in individual cases,” but “when the exception becomes the norm, something is wrong,” they argue. In 2016, 9.6 billion euros of support were invested into solar installations, “equaling about 400 euros per saved tonne of CO2”, the researchers from the industry-affiliated IW Köln institute say. “The next government has to make climate policy more efficient. The EEG auctions are an important first step,” they argue.

See the CLEW dossier The energy transition and climate change for more information.

Germany’s energy transition “is no energy transition” since the country continues to heavily rely on lignite power as its most important source of energy, Christian Schlesinger writes in the business weekly WirtschaftsWoche. If Germany wants to lower its carbon emissions “it has to exit coal-fired power production,” he argues. Even current plans to shut down several lignite plants are by far insufficient for achieving the country’s 2020 climate target of reducing emissions by 40 percent compared to 1990 levels, Schlesinger says. The most effective way to manage CO2 reduction would be to put a higher price tag on it, “a simple economic hypothesis,” he argues. If the EU’s emission trading system (ETS) cannot be reformed properly, “a CO2 tax would be an alternative,” he says.

Find the article in German here.

See the CLEW factsheet When will Germany finally ditch coal? for background.