“Widespread misbelief”

Environment minister Barbara Hendricks wants to have her Climate Action Plan 2050 approved before the climate conference in Morocco in November, “to send a signal to the global community”, she writes in a guest commentary in the Handelsblatt. “What astonishes me is an apparently still widespread misbelief that climate protection requires changes all over the world, but not from us,” Hendricks writes. While she says that “by mid-century”, German power must be generated fully through renewables, Hendricks adds that her ministry omitted a date for a German coal exit from the current draft of the climate plan to “leave no man behind” and plan the process carefully, including the views and needs of all parties concerned.

Read the CLEW factsheet Germany's trimmed-down Climate Action Plan and the CLEW article Ministry avoids concrete targets in weakened Climate Action Plan for background.