Berlin, Nov 14 (AFP) Angela Merkel has been dubbed the"climate chancellor" but she now faces the real risk ofGermany, a green energy pioneer, missing its emissionsreduction target on her watch.
Battles over dirty coal plants and the combustion enginehave dogged her efforts to forge an unlikely three-waygoverning alliance with the Greens and pro-business FreeDemocrats (FDP).
They are also flashpoint issues as Germany and Fiji co-host UN climate talks in Bonn, which Merkel will addressduring a visit tomorrow with French President Emmanuel Macron.
Critics charge that Merkel, a trained physicist who hasoften championed climate action on the world stage, tends tocave in to business and political interests when it matters.
Merkel has opposed stricter EU emissions limits for cars,fought planned diesel bans in cities suffering toxic airpollution and shelved a plan to get one million electricvehicles onto German roads by 2020.
Weekly newspaper Die Zeit harshly compared Merkel'spolicies to that of climate change-denying US President DonaldTrump, adding that "at least Trump is honest about it".
Merkel, at a G7 summit she hosted in 2015, wrested acrucial if lofty promise from the world's leading economies --to "decarbonise" by the end of the century.
On Saturday she said that Germany and other advancedeconomies must make sure "things change" in order to slow thetrend of melting ice caps, rising seas and worsening storms,floods and droughts.
"The urgency, as we can tell from the natural disasters,is great," she warned in her weekly video podcast, stressingthat an overheating planet was a key driver of migrant flows.
But she also made clear that Germany must protect its"industrial core" and that "if steelworks, aluminium plantsand copper smelters all leave our country and move somewherewith weaker environmental regulations, then we won't havegained anything for the global climate".
Missing from that list were coal-fired power plants,Germany's current environmental hot-button issue that hassparked mass rallies.
Germany has in the past two decades raised the share ofwind, solar and other clean renewables to one third of itselectricity needs, while mothballing nuclear plants.
But coal, cheap and abundant, still makes up 40 percent,and Germany's carbon emissions have not fallen for the pasteight years.
Germany has promised to cut its greenhouse gas emissionsby 40 per cent by 2020 from 1990 levels. But it is now ontrack for only a 32 percent reduction.
Missing the closest target would raise big questionsabout Germany's far more ambitious goals of slashing emissionsby 55 per cent by 2030 -- and by up to 95 percent by mid-century.
The Greens, in the lead-up to September elections, hadpromised to immediately shutter Germany's 20 most pollutingcoal plants, and to phase out coal and fossil fuel-poweredcars by 2030.
But last week, in the face of harsh opposition from theirnegotiating partners, the party dropped those specificdeadlines.
The pro-business FDP -- which has in the past blockedreform plans for the EU carbon market and railed against windfarms during the campaign -- has suggested Germany couldsimply scrap its emission targets.
Merkel's conservatives also oppose rapid action on coal,given the more than 20,000 jobs involved, many of which are inthe ex-communist east where the far-right AfD party hasalready made major inroads.
On the other side of the debate, Greenpeace urged Merkelto "signal a full coal phase-out in the new coalitiongovernment agreement", warning that "the time for climatesweet talk has ended".
An alliance of more than 50 companies including Adidas,Puma, Deutsche Telekom, Deutsche Boerse and SAP, has alsourged "a socially viable pathway for phasing out coal power".
(AFP)UZM.
This is unedited, unformatted feed from the Press Trust of India wire.