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.
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.