German Chancellor Angela Merkel speaks at her summer press conference in Berlin, Germany on July 19, 2019. (Emmanuele Contini/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
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With Germany set to miss its 2020 emissions reduction targets, Chancellor Angela Merkel says a national price on CO2 will be the only way to reach targets for 2030.
Speaking at her annual mid-year press conference Merkel, Merkel said the teenage Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg and the Fridays for Future protest movement taking place across Europe has motivated her government to expedite decisions on tackling the climate crisis.
Merkel also said recent “unusual weather patterns” had spurred her government into action. Western Europe is experiencing an unprecedented heat wave this week, following a brutal heat wave on the US East coast.
Over the past months she has set up a “coal commission” to determine how to phase out Germany’s burning of coal, and in May she performed a u-turn and decided to back a European Commission plan for the EU to get down to net zero emissions by 2050.
That 2050 plan was vetoed by Poland and its Eastern European allies at a European Council summit last month – though EU leaders hope they can convince them to end their veto at the next summit in October.
Even if they can achieve this, it will come too late for the EU to arrive at a UN climate summit in New York in September having raised its ambitions. So Merkel has proposed that her cabinet adopt its plan for a national CO2 price on September 20, in time for the New York summit.
The price would be part of a package designed to get the country to its 2030 climate target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 55% compared to 1990.
Saying that her government’s failure to meet the 2020 target was a “weak point” in her record, she implied she wants to secure her legacy as the chancellor who put the tools in place to enable Germany to meet its targets in a decade. She stressed that the goal of putting the price on carbon is not to “make money”, but to reduce emissions.
The package will also include “social balance” measures that will help people working in industries that will be phased out, like coal mining. Germany is still 40% reliant on coal power for its electricity.
