Germany wants to be climate neutral by 2045. But a panel of government climate advisers says it’s already in danger of missing a key target to cut planet-heating emissions by the end of the decade.
Germany’s climate advisory body has called for new policy measures to slash greenhouse gas emissions, warning that the country looks set to miss its 2030 climate change targets.
In a report published on Monday, the Council of Experts on Climate Change said Germany was unlikely to reach its goal of cutting 65% of emissions by the end of the decade compared to 1990 levels.
The panel, which is appointed by the government and has independent authority to assess the country’s climate performance, said sectors such as transport and construction in particular were struggling to decarbonize.
The findings contradict statements from German Climate Protection Minister and Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck, who said in March that projections from the Federal Environment Agency (UBA) showed emissions were falling and Germany would meet its goal.
Despite the internet’s insistence to the contrary, Germany has not increased its power production from fossil fuels.
It is in fact at the lowest level of the past 30 years
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts
Deactivating a clean energy source means that you have to get energy from somewhere else. If they hadn’t taken the nuclear plants offline, they could have taken coal plants offline instead. So the fact that there are still coal plants operating means that they did, in fact replace nuclear with coal, even if they don’t add more capacity to do it.
Yes, one can argue that more fossil energy could have been shut down if the nuclear plants had continued operating.
That said, Nuclear was replaced by renewables. Coal was also replaced by renewables.
Maybe more coal could have been replaced but claiming that nuclear was replaced with coal is a rhetoric trick but it is literally not true.
Also these assumptions about replacing coal always seem to come from people who have no idea about the power of the German coal lobby.
Coal is just about the only natural resource Germany has and is a massive industry.
The coal exit movement is decades old as well. But as the graphs show it is also glacially slow due to massive lobbying.
Looking at the second image. That’s factually wrong. Natural gas generators increased in capacity while nuclear is being killed. The whole process of killing nuclear has been over time period considerably greater than apologists like you tend to look at.
But you do you. If nuclear was allowed to stay active they could have killed off ALL hard coal and some natural gas at this point.
You mean “Installed net power generation capacity”?
Because that measures how much could theoretically be produced, not how much is actually produced.
For actual production, you might want to look at the two graphs below.
Particularly the 4th one shows that gas peaked in 2000 and has not gone up during the nuclear phase-out.
So capacity went up… But somehow that’s not building more? So almost like my original statement isn’t incorrect by any means then. Why so much nonsense arguments against me? Regardless of your argument. Nuclear should have been the LAST source turned off.
Those are peaker plants. They run seldomly but when they’re needed they need to be able to produce a lot.
Nuclear power btw is not suitable as peakers, they react too slowly.
You original comment was that someone “turned on coal/oil…”
That statement is factually and demonstrably incorrect.
Gas was not even part of that original claim but whatever.
Building capacity as a reserve for peak times is not the same as the plants actually running and producing emissions.
As the graphs show, the actual production and therefore emissions from fossil sources have gone down. This is what matters in he climate change debate.
The mere existence of buildings has little to do with the topic at hand.