German Government ignores Climate Sciences and blocks Renewable Energies
by Anna Leidreiter and Dr Matthias Kroll (World Future Council)
“How dare you?” asked Greta Thunberg, Right Livelihood Award Laureate, the UN General Assembly on Monday in New York. The 16-year-old angrily -or rather, furiously- dunned the government representatives, including Angela Merkel, to finally implement adequate measures to avert the climate crisis instead of making empty promises. One may wonder what Angela Merkel and the German Minister of the Environment Svenja Schulte were thinking at this moment. They arrived with a climate package guilty of these exact same accusations. While the first two pages outline the importance of meeting the Paris Climate Agreement goals and state that the costs of climate inaction are higher than the costs of climate action, the measures suggested in the next 20 pages are nothing more than a drop on the hot stone.
It’s like the German Government failed to recognise that the current climate targets of reducing fossil fuel energy by 80 to 95% until 2050 don’t even achieve the 2ºC Paris threshold. Calculations by the IPCC and other scientists revealed that carbon emissions must fall to net-zero by 2040 to maintain the last chance of limiting global warming to the recommended 1.5ºC.
Barriers for Renewable Energy continue to block energy transition
However, the biggest failure of the government´s climate package are the limitations to renewable energies despite their crucial role in solving the climate crisis. The target for 2025 remains 40 to 45% renewable power, although 46% was already achieved this year. To prove the scale of the actual urgency, here are a few numbers:
According to a study from the HTW Berlin, a complete decarbonisation of the German energy system in line with the Paris Agreement requires approximately a quadrupling in wind power supply — to 200 GW onshore and 76 GW offshore — as well as a nine-fold increase in solar energy to 415 GW. Other studies, for instance, one from the German Institute of Economic Research achieve similar conclusions or even higher number for renewables. Implementing these suggestions in the upcoming decades may sound challenging but thanks to the sinking costs of renewable energies, it is economically viable and last week’s protests in the streets showed high popular demand for decarbonisation.
Yet, the current scale and speed of governmental action and plans don’t get even close to meet the necessity. According to the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy (ISE), new onshore wind installations accounted for 0.4 GW instead of needed 7GW. More jobs have been lost in the wind power industry than there are in coal mining and energy production. The Government announced an expansion of offshore wind energy to 20GW until 2030, well below the recommended 76GW by 2040. The situation for solar energy is not much better. Only 2GW were installed, while 18GW are needed. In this light, the abolition of the 52GW cap for solar energy production does nothing but prevent the ultimate collapse of the entire German photovoltaic sector, rather than boosting it.
Renewable Energies are the only alternative
Too many numbers? Maybe. But there is no way around it, as the adequacy of policy solutions can only be assessed based on climate science.
If photovoltaic and wind energy capacity is not expanded to meet the demand (due to an increase of electric cars or electric heat pumps), fossil fuel sources will continue to fill the gap. Therefore, advocates of a CO2 price tax also need to answer the key question of what measures complement the market solution to shift towards 100% renewable energy.
The price prosed by the German government, 10€ per tonne of CO2 as of 2021, is negligible. Yet, the main challenge for the urgently needed energy transition remains the lack of eligible space for renewable technologies as well as the necessary legal framework. Until these are put in place, market forces alone will not solve the climate crisis. Instead, we need appropriate regulatory legislation that provides rules and investment security. This would have been the task of the German government. This is the least that Greta Thunberg and others expected. For all these reasons, Fridays for Future rightfully calls this climate package “a scandal”.
Because the solutions exist: renewable energies are economically competitive and boost socio-economic development. Only political inaction prevents the transition to 100% Renewable Energy, which is the prerequisite to fulfil ‘Paris Climate Agreement ‘and allow young and future generations a future on our planet.
