‘If you ignore emissions, we did great’: Germany’s challenging fight to go green

Germany vital statistics

For decades, Germany has forged a reputation as an environmental powerhouse: a sustainable world leader in recycling and renewables, whose citizens care deeply about protecting the planet. But in many ways, that popular green tale is being exposed as fable.

The decision to turn off nuclear reactors before closing coal plants has sullied the country’s climate credentials among clean energy advocates. The diligent recycling culture has lost its shine, as separate waste bins have sprung up across Europe and public faith in recycling has taken a hit.

Even Germany’s once-punctual trains and expertly engineered vehicles have become cause for embarrassment. Railways have long been neglected in the car-centric country, which is one of the few in the world without a general speed limit on motorways, while the prized auto industry has been overtaken by Chinese and US competitors in the race to electric vehicles.

“Germany benefited from a time when environmentalism was happening through the way you’d change lightbulbs, buy tote bags and organic food, and maybe invest in a local wind park,” said Luisa Neubauer, a climate activist from Fridays for Future. “If you ignore emissions, we did great.”

Luisa Neubauer is a prominent green campaigner in Germany. Photograph: Clemens Bilan/EPA

Now, Europe’s biggest polluter has been presented with an unwelcome opportunity to rebuild its green reputation. As the US under Donald Trump has upended climate agreements, slashed funding to countries battered by violent weather and bullied its allies into buying more of its fossil fuels, Germany is seen as a pivotal force in prodding governments toward a safer future.

“Someone needs to step in and the only player who can is the European Union,” said Niklas Höhne, a climate scientist and the co-founder of NewClimate Institute, a research organisation that tracks climate policy in big economies. “Germany drives the EU, but currently Germany is pushing it in the direction of less ambition.”

To its credit, Germany has made meaningful progress beneath the rapidly unravelling hype. It has nearly halved the amount of planet-heating pollution it pumps into the atmosphere since 1990 – a global baseline that critics say works in Germany’s favour because industry in the east collapsed after post-Soviet reunification that year – and it is almost on track to meet its midterm target of a 65% cut by 2030.

If all goes well, Germany hopes to hit net zero emissions by 2045 – five years earlier than most rich polluters.

The progress so far has been driven by a shift in power generation from fossil fuels to renewable energy, which contributed 59% of the country’s electricity last year. Together with savings from industry, which in the past few years has wasted less energy but also cut production, it has let Germany compensate for failing to clean up sectors such as transport, buildings and agriculture.

Though the hardest climate challenges are yet to come, analysts say Germany enjoys better institutional conditions to cope with them than most rich polluters. Popular student protests since 2019, which have dwindled less in Germany than elsewhere in Europe, persuaded all major parties except those on the far right to agree to stop the planet from heating 1.5C (2.7F) by the end of the century.

There has been fierce opposition to previous efforts to replace gas boilers with cleaner alternatives such as heat pumps. Photograph: Imago/Alamy

Then, after Neubauer and other activists sued the government for weak climate action, the country’s top court found its climate law to be “partly unconstitutional” and demanded it be strengthened. “That was a super important moment,” said Höhne. “Society stood up, the court issued a ruling and the government did what the court said.”

Yet public and political support for climate action has waned since the coronavirus pandemic and the war in Ukraine, which hiked up inflation and stopped Russian gas from fuelling factories and heating homes. The economy ministry, led at the time by the Greens, reduced some of the barriers to building new renewable projects but faced fierce anger for efforts to replace gas boilers with cleaner heaters.

The shift in the political mood is now as visible in central Berlin, where the centre-right has delighted in removing cycle lanes and raising speed limits, as it is in rural towns – both rich and poor – where the ascendant far right blames “woke” green rules for the deindustrialisation of Germany.

Protesters scaling the fence of a construction site of a nuclear reprocessing power plant in Wackersdorf in 1986. Photograph: Dieter Endlicher/AP

Political enthusiasm for fossil gas, in particular, has grown under the centrist coalition led by Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats, which took office this year. The drastic change in energy policy recently earned the approval of Trump, who praised the German government after claiming that many European countries were “on the brink of destruction because of the green energy agenda”.

“They were going green and they were going bankrupt,” he told world leaders at the UN general assembly last month. “And the new leadership came in and they went back to where they were with fossil fuels and with nuclear.”

Neither statement is true – nuclear, for one, is still off the table, and current efforts to slow the transition are very different from a full-blown return to the dirty coal era – but the sentiment aligns with rhetoric pushed by senior politicians before federal elections in February.

Similar shifts are happening in Brussels and Strasbourg, where German conservatives wield disproportionate power. Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, has started to scrap key parts of her “Green Deal”, while Manfred Weber, the chair of the European People’s party (EPP), the grouping that commands the most votes in parliament, has led the crusade against green rules in the name of supporting farmers and cutting red tape.

The EU has already taken steps to water down and roll back rules around sustainable finance, carbon border taxes and deforestation in supply chains. The EPP is also pushing to weaken a ban on new combustion engine cars scheduled for 2035. It remains unclear whether Germany will join several member states who are fighting the expansion of carbon pricing.

Despite numerous cycle lanes, especially in urban areas, Germany is still a car-centric country. Photograph: Mickis Fotowelt/Alamy

The emissions trading system (ETS), which already puts a price on pollution in Europe’s power and industry sectors, has been credited as a key force driving decarbonisation. From 2027, a second ETS is to cover transport and buildings – a landmark step that would put three-quarters of European emissions under a hard cap – but it has been the subject of growing anger from German industry in recent months.

“I am really afraid that the biggest mistakes are ahead of us, not behind us,” said Ottmar Edenhofer, a climate economist and director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “The biggest mistake, from my point of view, would be if Germany were to become a leader in dismantling the European Green Deal.”

It’s a far cry from the mood during federal elections in 2021, when all mainstream parties backed the goals of the Paris agreement in a vote that took place shortly after devastating floods made stronger by climate change killed 190 people, mostly in the Ahr valley. The environmental disaster, the deadliest in Germany for more than half a century, dominated public attention for several weeks but soon after disappeared from political debates.

For Neubauer, Germany’s piecemeal and at times contradictory approach to climate policy – which includes subsidising fossil fuels as well as renewables – is the result of mainstream political parties not being fully sold on the “why” of climate action, and instead rushing to superficial debates on the “how”.

She compared public acceptance of the looming decarbonisation challenges with the prospect of improving Deutsche Bahn, the German rail operator that has been plagued by delays owing to chronic underinvestment. Fixing the creaky railways would require large debt-fuelled investments, create chaos during construction and raise tensions throughout society – from hiring migrant workers at a time of rising racism to disrupting daily commutes.

“It’s going to suck so much, the next 20 years,” she said. “And if we don’t know why we’re doing it, we won’t stick to it when it gets really hard and tough and polarising.”

Neglect of the railways means even the once-punctual trains have become cause for embarrassment. Photograph: Ina Fassbender/AFP/Getty Images

That polarisation is already well under way, with the climate-sceptic Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) consistently leading German opinion polls over the past two months. Like far-right parties elsewhere in Europe, as well as in the US, the AfD has made climate and energy its number two priority after migration. Centre-right parties have aped much of its rhetoric while staying broadly committed to long-term emissions targets.

Edenhofer said climate policy should be seen as crucial to safeguarding prosperity – a core tenet of the German postwar era that has enjoyed cross-party support – in the same way that residents of a municipality view waste collection and railway stations. Instead, he said, it had been drawn into a culture war.

“Would we say a well-functioning Deutsche Bahn is a sacrifice?” he asked. “I don’t think so.”