German Environment Minister Svenja Schulze | Pool/Getty Images
POLITICO’s rundown of the German presidency’s climate agenda.
After spending years shaping EU energy and climate policy from behind the scenes, Berlin is moving into the hot seat.
During the next six months, German officials will oversee crucial negotiations over raising the EU’s 2030 climate goal and attempt to broker a legally binding commitment to slash greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050, as the country takes over the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU from Wednesday.
The presidency also comes as Brussels moves to back hydrogen and offshore wind power. Berlin is betting on both technologies to advance its industrial leadership globally and achieve its domestic clean energy goals.
Of course, Berlin will also be well occupied with managing the fallout from the coronavirus crisis, Brussels’ budget plans and Brexit. But speaking on her podcast Saturday, Chancellor Angela Merkel said that reaching climate-neutrality was one of three “key challenges facing Europe.”
Here are six policy issues expected to dominate the German presidency.
Efforts to dig the EU economy out of a coronavirus-sized hole are increasingly tied to the objective of turning the bloc climate-neutral by 2050, laid out in the EU’s Green Deal strategy. Berlin is on board.
Earlier this month, the government steered its €130 billion pandemic recovery effort into an exercise aimed at cleaning up the country’s teetering national economy while also saving it.
“It will be even more important to invest in the future now, in the great challenges. This means that we will work very closely together in the area of climate protection,” Merkel told reporters Monday following a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron to discuss the bloc’s recovery funding plans.
EU leaders will meet in July to try and reach an agreement on a proposed €750 billion four-year recovery package and a €1.1 trillion seven-year budget. Berlin’s green-minded politicians may look to tighten criteria to access the cash, for example by tying payouts more clearly to emission-reduction targets, Environment Minister Svenja Schulze suggested in an interview with Germany’s Taz paper on Monday.
Berlin has for years stood in the way of efforts to increase the EU’s 2030 climate target. Now it wants to be the dealmaker.
Schulze will oversee tough negotiations on raising the bloc’s emissions reduction goal from 40 percent to as high as 55 percent by 2030. The issue will heat up in late September when the European Commission is due to come out with a plan for reaching that goal, and map implications for the energy sector.
Under a best-case scenario, ministers would agree a position at the formal Environment Council in late October, and then start negotiations with the European Parliament.
It’s far from certain that Schulze will rally EU countries that quickly. Although a sizeable alliance backs increasing the goal to 55 percent, that doesn’t yet have sufficient support to overcome opposition from coal-reliant and poorer nations such as Bulgaria and Poland.
A lot will depend on where Germany ultimately settles. While Schulze has come out in favor of a 55 percent goal, Merkel has so far remained shy of committing to a number.
“We need, as the EU, a higher climate goal by the end of 2020,” Schulze said. “It’s a Herculean task but we can do it.”
Merkel’s reputation as the “climate chancellor” is back on the line and likely to rest on whether Germany can see through a deal on the EU Climate Law before year-end.
Under the Paris Agreement, countries are expected to submit updated, and ideally higher, climate pledges by the end of 2020.
With the COP26 climate summit postponed to next year, green officials argue the Climate Law is key to signaling that the EU is committed to pressing ahead on emissions cuts despite the delays.
“Either we strike [agreement] under the German presidency … or we take the risk that everything is delayed,” said Pascal Canfin, the French Renew Europe chair of the European Parliament’s environment committee.
A deal could be part of Merkel’s “legacy on climate,” he said, adding, “I think it’s Germany’s responsibility … to have a conclusion of the Climate Law in December.”
German politicians are aware the upcoming debate about raising emission reduction targets in areas such as transport, agriculture or construction could get thorny.
That’s why Berlin is also keen to push talks on using carbon pricing to squeeze out fossil fuels from the transport and building sectors, and introduce a minimum carbon price in the EU’s Emissions Trading System — something France has long argued in favor of.
Proposals for an EU carbon border tax could also fuel the bubbling Franco-German relationship on climate.
Paris has been in favor of the idea for years, arguing the EU should do more to protect its businesses as it tightens environmental requirements at home. While Berlin was reluctant thanks to its export-driven industrial sector, it’s now come around — as long as the scheme is World Trade Organization-compatible.
Merkel said Monday it is “a common position that we need such a tax.”
“If we have those very ambitious climate goals, we must protect ourselves against those who import products to us that are more harmful to the climate,” she said.
Berlin plans to put special focus on rapidly expanding offshore wind power, including by promoting common rules for joint renewables projects across countries.
Hydrogen is the German government’s darling, and it has scheduled talks on how EU energy rules can help develop a market and infrastructure for “CO2-neutral and preferably CO2-free gases, such as renewable-based hydrogen.”
The timing couldn’t be more in line with Brussels’ own agenda. The Commission is due to come out with a hydrogen strategy plus a proposal to electrify other industrial sectors beyond energy July 8. Strategies on offshore wind and building renovations are expected in the fall.
Berlin might have been hoping to score global brownie points by championing an international deal on halting biodiversity loss at October’s COP15 summit in China, but that’s been postponed.
Germany says it will plow ahead with diplomacy to lay the ground for a binding agreement next year.
That includes a high-level biodiversity summit in New York in September, while Schulze also wants to adopt Council conclusions on the 2030 Biodiversity Strategy this fall.
“We have to see the crisis behind the Corona crisis: accelerating nature destruction increases the risk of disease transmission from animals to humans,” Schulze said Monday, adding she’ll push for “more nature protection and stricter species conservation on the international level.”
That will be tough. Brazil (under fire for rampant deforestation in the Amazon rainforest) has little interest in compromise. Other emerging powerhouses also don’t share Europe’s enthusiasm for signing on to another binding environmental agreement that could saddle them with new costs and regulatory complications.
Louise Guillot contributed reporting.
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