Maybe that’s not putting climate change on the back burner, but rather putting superstitious anti-nuclear gibberish on the back burner and looking for the best offer from the social democrats and any sane greens if they exist?
d fb
There is an ‘iron law of climate policy’ –
When policies on emissions reductions collide with policies focused on economic growth, economic growth will win out.
DB2
But only after the damage becomes visible…
What is Seen and What is Not Seen, or Political Economy in One Lesson 1 [July 1850] [final edit]
The Captain
Merz will not have a majority without the SPD and the Greens, two radical left-wing parties. So if he wants to become chancellor (and that’s all he has in his head), he will swallow all the crap the other two parties have done in the last three years.
So the urgent changes that the German economy and society need, will not happen.
From the Energy Charts website, below are the percentages for the electricity mix in Germany for 2023 and 2024. This website publishes the electricity generation data in near real-time, so the 2024 information is already available.
Germany Electricity Generation Percentages
2023 2024
Solar 12.6% 14.6%
Wind (combined) 28.6 27.6
Waste 1.9 1.9
Hydro 4.0 4.6
Natural Gas 15.3 15.0
Oil 1.0 1.0
Hard Coal 6.8 5.1
Brown Coal 16.3 14.7
Biomass 8.5 8.0
Other 3.2 2.6
Net Imports 1.8 5.0
----- -----
100 100
Solar generation was up in 2024, but wind was down slightly. Coal was down, but net imports were up. Some of those imports were from fossil fuel power plants, as well as some nuclear plants. The Germans don’t want nuclear power in their own country, but they don’t mind importing electricity from nuclear plants in, say, France.
_ Pete
The Brussels elite was openly quibbling over what was recently unimpeachable climate orthodoxy…The Commission’s current Director General for Climate Action Kurt Vandenberghe had posted that with the U.S. stepping back from climate action, the EU’s strong green laws “may turn out to be a great asset to attract investment.”
This was too much for Jean-Luc Demarty, who led the Commission’s trade department for most of the last decade and the agriculture department before that. Demarty called the argument “not serious.” Green industries were not about to arrest the EU’s decline against overseas competitors, he said. Even worse, the EU’s goal to zero out emissions by 2050 was “not doable” without killing key industries like car manufacturing and agriculture…
The timing was salient. For the last five years, the EU has favored top-down regulation to tackle problems like climate change and biodiversity loss. Now, the top political priority for leaders across the bloc is keeping industries alive.
DB2
Despite significant investment in technology and infrastructure, demographic growth and accompanying rising individual consumption will likely offset reductions leading countries to miss their 2050 targets.
DB2
Europe has no demographic growth of note - but its reductions will likely be more than offset by world regions that have such growth, not to mention countries hell-bent on drilling for the very last drop of oil to burn (or manufacture plastic straws from).
True. The article mentions a projection of 20% world population growth by 2050, then that gets multiplied by developing countries becoming wealthier.
On a side note, the US has reduced emissions by more than any other country (including the EU) since 2000 even while growing its economy and population.
DB2
as Germany heads to the polls on Feb. 23, the country once seen as a climate trailblazer is now in danger of becoming a laggard. And the Christian Democrats (CDU) — the party almost certain to lead the next government — is on a mission to dilute environmental targets, with leader Friedrich Merz framing all things green through the now-familiar “woke” and “anti-growth” lens.
In a recent stump speech in Bochum, the industrial heartlands of the Ruhr, Merz had already stated that the economic policy of recent years had been geared “almost exclusively toward climate protection. I want to say it clearly as I mean it: We will and we must change that.”