2020 climate target should be included in government coalition agreement – state secretary

The next German government alliance should not “seal a coalition agreement that does not include the goal of achieving the 2020 target,” Jochen Flasbarth, state secretary in the environment ministry told the Clean Energy Wire. “The 2020 target is about political credibility and decisive for the question of how easy or hard the path will be toward achieving the 2030 commitments,” he said. For Germany, it was necessary to “drop the 80 to 95 percent emissions reduction idea” for the year 2050. Making the country almost greenhouse gas neutral by that time would not work by reducing emissions by only 80 percent. “When focusing on an 80 percent reduction one could have the false impression that certain energy processes may remain fossil fuel-based. That’s not possible when the goal is near-complete greenhouse gas neutrality. Because this means that only agriculture and certain industrial processes would be allowed a limited amount of emissions, but that’s it. Otherwise we’ll go into technology development that leads into dead ends,” said Flasbarth. The best example for this was bioenergy. “It was the wrong decision to push biogas technology as much as we did, and politicians have to take responsibility for that,” he told Clean Energy Wire.

For background, read the CLEW factsheet Germany’s greenhouse gas emissions and climate targets and the dossiers The energy transition and climate change and Bioenergy in Germany.