Sunday afternoon wasn’t the finest – or greenest – hour of Angela Merkel’s career as Germany’s sometime Klimakanzlerin, or climate chancellor.
Two days after Fridays for Future marchers dismissed her government’s new climate proposals as too little, too late, the chancellor hoped the United Nations climate summit in New York would yield kinder reviews.
But her Berlin departure brought an odd change of travel plans. New defence minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer was scheduled to fly with the chancellor to the United States and, after arriving in New York, continue in the government jet to Washington and her inaugural visit.
For reasons the government is keeping to itself, the minister – along with nine staffers and three journalists – were told there was no room on the Merkel aircraft. In fact there was plenty of room – at least 20 seats, say those on board. Instead of squeezing them in, another government aircraft was organised for the smaller delegation at a cost of at least €130,000 – and countless tonnes of carbon dioxide.
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Some 48 hours after insisting they were serious about the climate, two senior German politicians, in two separate aircraft, departed Berlin within half an hour of each other for two US cities just 360km apart.
Detailed grasp
Merkel has certainly come a long way since her early years as an energetic advocate for countering climate change. She has retained her great interest in climate policy and science and has an unusually detailed grasp of details and data.
It was these talents that helped her as a young federal environment minister, bringing the 1997 Bonn climate talks to a successful conclusion and paving the way to the Kyoto protocol.
But power has changed Merkel’s climate record – for the worse. After she took office in 2005, Germany missed the same carbon dioxide promises she and her political mentor Helmut Kohl had agreed two decades earlier.
Soon her chancellorship became bogged down in crises – banking, euro, Ukraine, refugees - with little capacity, or interest, in climate change.
She skipped the 2014 UN climate conference, telling a confidante she wasn’t going to fly to New York “just to eat canapés with Leonardo di Caprio”.
Like in other political fields, the chancellor has never mastered the art of nudging beyond their comfort zone German voters who want to have their schnitzel and eat it.
Compounding the problem is her ability as a world-class ditherer who, eight years ago, managed to change her mind on nuclear power – twice – within six months.
First, in September 2010, her second coalition overturned a previous government’s agreed shift to renewable energy, away from nuclear power.
But after the March 2011 Fukushima disaster, an ashen-faced chancellor reversed her reversal. She justified her double about-face by suggesting the Japanese disaster had made clear to her that such nuclear accidents were possible in western countries. Never mind that a leading watchdog notes at least 102 nuclear plant incidents and accidents in the western world since 1955.
Today, Germany is back on track to close its last nuclear plant by 2022, but the chancellor’s policy pirouettes have opened the door to multibillion-euro compensation suits from plant operators.
Merkel is also a world leader in hot air. In the autumn of 2017 the chancellor promised a young woman at an election event that Germany would, in 2020, meet its goal to reduce greenhouse gases by 40 per cent of 1990 levels. Six months later, her fourth cabinet conceded the goal would not be met – in large part due to Germany’s ongoing love affair with mining – and burning – coal and filthy lignite.
Efforts to transition away from fossil fuels have opened a second line of legal battle for the same energy companies suing over the confused nuclear shutdown.
Another trademark of Merkel’s interest in climate policy is how it dwindles whenever it comes into conflict with German commercial interests.
Car manufacturers
The 2013 Irish presidency of the European Union experienced this first hand when the chancellor intervened personally – and successfully – with Enda Kenny to halt emissions targets she said would discriminate against larger vehicles built by German car manufacturers. BMW, VW and others are among the country’s biggest employers, an economic force and a power political lobbyist.
Just as German car executives let Merkel do their bidding at EU level they were double-crossing her – and millions of their customers – with discreet cartel-like meetings. On the agenda: dodgy car components and engine software fixes to circumvent EU clean-air provisions.
As that scandal drags on in Germany, all-night talks in Berlin last week yielded a climate package that underwhelmed observers.
Climate experts say the proposals – including a modest levy on CO2 and major investment in the rail network – are at best a policy “pick and mix” and, at worse, outdated promises that will do little to help Germany meet its greenhouse gas goals by 2030.
Merkel’s friends say that, when she leaves front-line politics by 2021 at the latest, the chancellor hopes to get a role in the environmental field. If she’s to be taken seriously in this field, she has just two years to up her game.
But it may already be too late. When she had power to throw her weight behind the campaign against climate change, she lacked the courage. Even if she finds belated courage to take climate change seriously, she will soon lack the political power to make things happen.
Derek Scally is Berlin correspondent