Trump climate decision 'harms trust', spurs Chinese-German leadership

Germany’s chief climate diplomat Karsten Sach has stressed the need for China and Germany to show joint “pragmatic” leadership in climate protection in light of new disorder in international climate diplomacy following the decision of US President Donald Trump to pull his country out of the Paris Climate Agreement. At a conference by the Mercator Institute for China Studies (Merics) in Berlin, the climate policy director at the German environment ministry (BMUB) said Beijing’s and Berlin’s intensified climate cooperation at the G20 summit in Hamburg was needed “to show we are moving in the right direction and strive to find solutions” for mitigating and limiting global warming. Sach said this meant the two countries had to sustain collaboration on “getting carbon prices right” via a jointly developed emissions trading system, intensify common deliberation on e-mobility infrastructure and also expand on joint efforts to promote green growth opportunities in third countries, for instance in South East Asia or Africa. Germany and China may be structured very differently and disagree on a number of issues, but there also were many shared “core interests” for the two exporting nations that had only increased in importance over the last years.

For background, read the CLEW article Germany, China urge US to remain in climate agreement and the CLEW dossier G20 2017 - Climate and energy at the Hamburg summit.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel may not want to be US President Donald Trump’s opponent, but she is, writes Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger in an opinion piece in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “This could pay off in terms of domestic politics,” as other parties had called on her to take a tougher stance, writes Frankenberger.

For background, read the CLEW article EU leaders pledge to work for joint solution on climate at G20 and the CLEW dossier G20 2017 - Climate and energy at the Hamburg summit.

The United States’ delegation successfully pushed for significant changes to the G20 climate and energy action plan draft during working group negotiations, reports Arthur Neslen for Climate Home. The latest draft of the plan, which was initiated by the German government with the aim to be adopted by the world’s largest economies at the Hamburg summit next week, lacked the first version’s ambitious language on energy and defined natural gas as clean technology, writes Neslen.

Read the article here.

Find reports in German media and the Clean Energy Wire on the changed draft here and here.

Climate policy should be integrated with the G20 finance ministers’ agenda in order to stay below the 2 degrees Celsius guardrail set in the Paris Agreement, a team of authors including Ottmar Edenhofer, director of Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC), write in an article in Nature Climate Change. “Finance ministers should consider the merits of carbon pricing for sound fiscal policy and thereby stimulate investments in carbon-free infrastructure,” writes MCC in a press release on the article.

Find the press release in English here and purchase the article in English here.

The federal economy ministry’s proposed new strategy “Energy efficiency and heat from renewable energies” could endanger Germany’s climate goals as it hindered house owners from installing modern fossil fuel-based heating systems, say conservative politicians, writes Daniel Wetzel in Die Welt. These were already cleaner than old systems and, if forbidden, owners could be inclined to keep their old systems for as long as possible because of the current price of renewables-based systems, writes Wetzel.

Read the article in German here.

For background, read the CLEW dossier The Energiewende and Efficiency.