Despite years of preaching about the need to combat emissions, Germany is one of the biggest polluters of all
Source - Daily Telegraph 18/01/23
It is the only major country where the Greens hold one of the great offices of state. It invests massively in cycle lanes and recycling. And it prides itself on being a model global citizen, leading European and international efforts to persuade countries to work together on agreed rules for the common good. Yet after years of preaching to everyone else about the need to combat CO2 emissions, Germany has turned into one of the biggest polluters of all. The hypocrisy is breath-taking.
Over the last week, Germany has been gripped by images of riot police taking on protestors in the tiny village of Lützerath. Owned by the energy giant RWE, its residents have already been forced out of their homes. Protestors have been fighting running battles to save the village, but the water cannons, batons and riot shields look to have been enough to force even the determined Greta Thunburg out of the way of the diggers. All this conflict and drama has arisen because the whole area is being dug up for open-cast coal mining to keep Germany’s power stations on.
Coal is by far the dirtiest of all fuels, with double the emissions of natural gas and more than a hundred times more than wind, solar or of course nuclear. But despite all the eco-preaching, it’s hardly an unfortunate accident that Germany has come to depend on the most polluting form of energy. It made an explicit choice to rely first on Russian gas and, now that it has been turned off following the invasion of Ukraine, on coal. In the wake of the Fukushima accident, it abandoned nuclear power, even though it is one of the countries least at risk of earthquakes anywhere in the world. “We can become the first industrial country to abandon nuclear energy,” then Chancellor Angela Merkel piously told the German Parliament in 2011. “It is a Herculean task. We all can work together on this project to combine future ethical responsibilities with economic success.”
And yet it is hard to see that there is anything very ‘ethical’ about shutting down nuclear plants and razing villages for open-cast coal mines instead. But when it comes to double standards, it doesn’t stop there. The German record on climate change is genuinely shocking. It was only a few years ago that Volkswagen was fined hundreds of millions of euros for systematically fitting defeat devices to its diesel cars that disguised their pollution levels, while the national economy remains critically dependent on power-hungry heavy industry consuming vast quantities of electricity to keep afloat.
That hasn’t stopped the endless preaching. “Let's not waste time arguing about mechanisms that reflect the world of 1992 while we already live, in 2022, in a 1.2 degree world. Let us take responsibility,” the Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock told the Cop 27 conference in November last year. “That is why we are here as politicians. Let us stand up for the damage the emissions all major emitters have caused.” Funnily enough, she didn’t mention the razing of Lützerath, or trouble herself with the details of an economy that depends on cheap power more than any other major industrial nation.
True, all governments are guilty of double standards, especially on climate change, and not least our own. Politicians can’t resist the opportunity to grand-stand, and speeches about saving the planet practically write themselves. They are rarely willing to make the hard choices that might involve. Even so the scheinheiligkeit of the political class in Berlin is breath-taking. It can lecture other countries on how it ‘combines ethical responsibilities with economic success’ in Merkel’s phrase if it wants to, but it can’t expect us to listen.
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