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Knuckling Under

Is Germany's 'Climate Chancellor' a Failure?

By Dirk Kurbjuweit and Christian Schwägerl

Part 2: Merkel is Mercedes' Chief Lobbyist in Brussels

When it comes to cars, the only thing Merkel has lost is her credibility. She is already the chief lobbyist for Mercedes, BMW, Audi and Porsche in Brussels, where CO2 limits for the European Union are currently being negotiated. New Franco-German talks on the issue are scheduled for next week.

France, which tends to manufacture smaller cars than Germany, wants to see emissions limits imposed that would make things difficult for large, powerful, German-produced sedans. Merkel, for her part, wants to put a stop to the limits, a move that would be good for the German automobile industry but bad for the climate.

Part of the effort to protect the domestic auto industry is the elimination of a rule that would require manufacturers to disclose the gas mileage on all car models. This would have enabled customers to determine at a glance whether a particular model is a gas guzzler. This much transparency was apparently incompatible with industry interests.

Technological limitations presented another sticking point. Only last year, Merkel's government sold biofuel and biodiesel as environmental and technological blessings. But the government had not done its homework. First, it was revealed that the engines in millions of older vehicles would not be capable of handling higher percentages of biofuel. The coalition government in Berlin was loath to require owners of older cars to switch to the more costly higher-octane Super Plus gasoline, which contains less bioethanol and would be the only gas their cars could run on.

Global food shortages also make it seem obscene for Western drivers to be driving cars powered by fuel derived from crops that people in poor regions would like to eat. The fact that Greenpeace has found that biodiesel contains palm and soybean oil, most of which comes from forest land cleared to make way for cropland, has only undermined the chancellor's claims that biofuels could be produced in an environmentally friendly manner.

Now the biofuel strategy is in limbo and expansion beyond current levels seems more than questionable. This too will cost several million tons of CO2, on paper.

Posted CO2 savings that have been eliminated are only partially replaced in calculations. Besides, in some cases it is unclear whether a posting truly holds up under scrutiny. Take wind energy, for example. When he lost the battle to introduce a biofuel quota, Gabriel promptly introduced more wind-based power to offset the loss. Although wind turbines are still being built in large numbers, the curve is beginning to flatten. Moreover, there is an absence of investors for the most important linchpin in the expansion, the offshore wind parks far out in the North and Baltic Seas. The expansion of renewable forms of energy is expected to contribute 54 million tons of CO2 savings by 2020, or just shy of one-fifth of the total amount. But in the case of wind, not everything is falling into place as expected.

The government has not even managed to ensure that consumers can gain access to electricity generated by wind turbines. Many hundred kilometers of new power lines are needed to transport electricity from the plants in northern and eastern Germany to the country's south, where a number of nuclear power plants are scheduled to be gradually phased out. The necessary expansion of the power grid has been held up by citizen protests, red tape and costs.

To address these problems, Economics Minister Glos supports a law that is now scheduled to be part of the cabinet resolution on June 18. But because he fears citizens' initiatives against new power lines, Environment Minister Gabriel advocates the installation of underground power lines, which are several times as expensive as overhead lines. The conflict has made potential investors nervous for months.

The entire structure of Merkel's climate policy is faltering. The relevant SPD ministers feel insufficiently supported by Merkel. Transportation Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee wants Merkel not to abandon plans to modernize the automobile tax. "When it comes to climate protection, rising energy prices must spur us on and not slow us down. Getting away from oil is the only response to high prices that makes sense," says Tiefensee. But Gabriel complains that "we can no longer accept the fact that Merkel allows herself to be celebrated as the climate chancellor, while the rest of her team is steadily mowing everything down."

But why can the rest of the team mow everything down in the first place? Because Merkel comforts herself with the thought that German climate policy still looks good compared with the rest of Europe, and that the government can always add additional taxes later on if the currently approved measures prove to be insufficient.

She isn't interested in fighting for the idea that an effective climate policy means making sacrifices, nor has she ever been. In the spring of 2007, after her success in Brussels, Merkel did not discuss the burdens. She is more capable of asserting herself with other heads of state than with German voters. She is reluctant to hurt voters suffering from high energy costs. But when it comes to the dramatic aspects of climate change, nothing has changed since 2007.

Thus, a more precise picture of this chancellor is gradually taking shape. She abandons her own convictions when she feels that they would force her to impose unreasonable demands on the public. This has been her strategy in social policy so far, and now she hopes to make it succeed in environmental policy.

Meanwhile, officials at the Economics Ministry are already devising plans for a redemptive "Plan B," which would save the world without the need for political intervention. "We can depend far more than before on the momentum of energy prices," says Homann, adding that millions of citizens are already taking trains instead of their cars. "Huge CO2 savings," says Homann, will occur naturally. There is a strange logic behind this: The world has to consume more energy so that prices will go up, and so that energy consumption can go down. Politics can be so straightforward.

-- Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan