The Glass is Half Full: Environmental and Climate Policy of the Last Merkel Government Between Protest and Pandemic

ABSTRACT

A number of situational events had an impact on the environmental and climate policy of the last Merkel government. The drought in the summer of 2018, the flood disaster of 2021, the climate protests of Fridays for Future throughout 2019 and also the decision of the Federal Constitutional Court on the Climate Protection Act of 2021 generated a great deal of attention for environmental and, above all, climate policy. On the contrary, the COVID 19 pandemic since March 2020 diverted public attention from environmental issues. All in all, however, the processes can largely be characterised as ‘business as usual’ – with the usual conflicts of partisan, departmental, and interest politics, and an overall impact of EU policies. In terms of the policy results, the glass seems more ‘half full’ than ‘half empty’. Some progress was made on insect protection and the circular economy, and the coal phase-out was finally initiated. In climate policy, however, there is still a gap in implementation despite clear progress, and there is also what can best be described as an ambition gap. Other issues remain to be fixed, for example in wind energy, animal welfare, and moorland protection.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Fabio Bothner, Fabian Engler, Alexander Franke, Katharina Schleicher, Reimut Zohlnhöfer, and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier version of the text. For research assistance, I thank Paul Schnase and Julia Özdemir, and for managing the literature and creating the chart, Hanno Hahn. As always, the author alone is responsible for possible errors or biased views.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I identified relevant measures on the basis of three sources: (1) The evaluation of the section “current developments in federal environmental law” of the Zeitschrift für Umweltrecht (ZUR) (cited as Schütte and Winkler 2018a–2021); (2) A press search. For these, keywords were first identified for the areas of emissions, mobility, energy supply and consumption, environmental protection and nature conservation, and circular economy. Based on these keywords, coverage was researched in the databases of major national newspapers (Süddeutsche Zeitung, Tagesspiegel, Tagesschau, Handelsblatt, Zeit, Spiegel, dw and Frankfurter Allgemeine) as well as at Klimareporter for the period from March 14, 2018 to September 01, 2021. (3) A dossier of the BMU, which was distributed to press representatives in June 2021 as a success report of the outgoing environment minister (BMU 2021a).

2 The 1.5°C target is a much more ambivalent target than the clarity of the number might suggest. The Paris Agreement in Article 2 aims at “Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels” In its last environmental report, the SRU argued that a 1.75°C temperature increase should be interpreted as well below 2°C (SRU 2020, 46). Recently, the discussion in Germany (for example, in the election programs or the coalition agreement) has often referred to “1.5°C” or “as close to 1.5°C as possible”.

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Annette Elisabeth Töller

Annette Elisabeth Töller is a professor of public policy and environmental politics at FernUniversität in Hagen. She has published widely on a variety of environmental policy issues and since 2020 has served as a member of the Scientific Council on the Environment (SRU).