berlin brief

Chancellor Angela Merkel had a sober assessment of the climate talks in Copenhagen on her return to Germany: “The deal isn’t enough for us to achieve the 2 degree goal”. According to Spiegel Online, she openly addressed China as one of the major culprits.

Sigmar Gabriel, the new leader of the opposition Social Democratic Party (SPD) and a former minister of the environment, called the outcome of the Copenhagen conference a “mid-sized disaster” and a “disgrace”. Claudia Roth, the chairwoman of the Greens (Die Grünen), said it was “a betrayal of the future for all the children on this planet”. (See DW-World.de, 20 December 2009)

In a blog for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Joachim Müller-Jung quotes Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the head of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and a member of the German delegation, speaking of the talks as “climate hallucination”. The negotiations were conducted “beyond reality”.

Germany will play a leading role in taking the Copenhagen process further. The mid-term review in the run up to the next round of talks in Mexico City will be held in Bonn at the seat of the UN’s Climate Change Secretariat in July 2010.

Take a look at the current issue of the foreign policy journal Internationale Politik, published by the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP). Sascha Müller-Kraenner of Ecologic Institute and Martin Kraemer, a diplomat who has just returned to Berlin from his London post for a secondment to the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), come up with six recommendations for the Foreign Ministry’s role in German climate policy. (For now only available in German, but there is a short summary in English on the Ecologic website)

With the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen starting on Monday 7 December 2009 I want to draw your attention to some news here in Germany.

Take a look at the website of the Federal Ministry of the Environment under its new Minister Norbert Röttgen and the website of the Swedish EU Presidency currently representing the 27 member states of the European Union.

The Berlin-based think tank Ecologic has been very active on environmental questions over the last years and will continue to be in the Copenhagen talks: Camilla Bausch and Ralph Czarnecki of Ecologic will support the German and European negotiation team during the two-weeks conference. (more…)

With the Copenhagen Climate talks approaching, I want to draw your attention to an article by R. Andreas Kraemer, the director of the Ecologic Institute, Germany’s leading think tank on applied environmental research.

“Security Through Energy Policy: Germany at the Crossroads” has just been published in the US State Department’s eJournal USA. (more…)