Climate change in the election campaign: “Politics have been too hesitant for a long time”

The climate goals are becoming more and more ambitious, but there is a big discrepancy between goals and measures, says physicist Brigitte Knopf. Politicians have not been brave enough for a long time “to tell the voters that this transformation is imminent and that fossil fuels can no longer be relied on in the long term.”

ntv.de: On your institute’s website, a CO2 clock how much time remains for mankind until the global carbon budget is used up. What must have happened by then?

Brigitte Knopf: A lot. Every ton of CO2 we emit contributes to the rise in temperature. If we want to achieve the 1.5 or 2 degree target, we only have a limited budget for CO2 that we can store in the atmosphere. So we have to get to zero emissions before this budget is used up. The CO2 clock shows the remaining time and makes the problem clear.

As we speak, your watch is still 24 years, 4 months, 4 days, 8 hours and 37 minutes. The global CO2 budget will therefore be used up in 2045. Does that mean that the federal government’s goal of greenhouse gas neutrality by 2045 is sufficient?

We still have the period of time you specified to reach the 2-degree target. The CO2 clock, however, shows another countdown: the 1.5-degree scenario. If the world continues to burn fossil fuels, it will only have six and a half years. In the Paris Agreement of 2015, the global community of states agreed to stay well below 2 degrees and to make efforts to achieve 1.5 degrees. In Germany, too, practically every party is now committed to the 1.5 degree target.

Down to zero emissions in six years, that’s hardly achievable.

If we now reduce emissions quickly and the clock then ticks more slowly, so to speak, we will have a little more time mathematically. And some climate scenarios assume an “overshoot” – in other words, more emissions than actually allowed, which one then pulls back from the atmosphere in one way or another. But there is no question about it: reaching the 1.5 degree target will be very difficult. The basis for our watch was the special report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change from 2018, according to which at that time just under 420 gigatons of CO2 were allowed to be emitted in order to meet the 1.5-degree target – and 1170 gigatons at 2 degrees. The clock is ticking at the rate of the annual rate of emissions of around 42 gigatons assumed in this report. The next update is likely to come soon with a view to the IPCC’s sixth assessment report.

What is the difference between the 1.5 and 2 degree goal? And why don’t we set ourselves a 3-degree goal when the others are so ambitious?

At 3 degrees we end up in a completely different world. Even if the global temperature rises by 1.5 degrees, so-called tipping points are triggered in the climate system, which accelerate global warming once again. So when the Arctic sea ice melts, the surface there is no longer white – the sunlight is reflected less strongly, the ocean warms up even more, the ice melts even faster and the sea level rises even more. The last IPCC report showed that every tenth of a degree makes a huge difference. Some island states are threatened with their very existence, vast amounts of methane are threatened to be released in permafrost soils that have been frozen for ages, and the 2,300-kilometer-long coral reef Great Barrier Reef off Australia would be completely destroyed at 2 degrees. In Germany, too, we can expect a significant increase in droughts and extreme weather events.

Chancellor Merkel was recently asked in the Bundestag for a balance sheet on climate protection. In her answer, she referred to the 1997 Kyoto Agreement, the increasingly stricter CO2 targets and the recently amended climate protection law, in which the intermediate CO2 target for 2030 was increased from 55 percent to 65 percent greenhouse gas reduction compared to 1990. Sounds like a success story, doesn’t it?

Two things about it. One is: We were always way too slow. The problem of climate change has long been understood – it has been on the political agenda since the Rio conference in 1992 at the latest. Since then, something really could have been done. But even years later, new coal-fired power plants were built, this was also the case in Germany and even last year a new coal-fired power plant went online. The second point: The climate targets became more and more ambitious. But there is a big gap between goals and actions. The Paris Agreement was a major breakthrough. After that, it gave the impression that politicians had leaned back and said: We now have the goals – they will be fulfilled by themselves.

Deciding on long-term goals has always been easy for politicians. That’s why I’m not starting to cheer for the goal of climate neutrality in 2045 either. Politicians have always been too hesitant to take specific measures for implementation – be it the coal phase-out, the CO2 price, the establishment of a charging infrastructure for electromobility or the question of how things will go with the combustion engine. Most of the time, what was necessary was not decided and enforced.

Why is that?

For a long time it was because climate change is a problem that is difficult to grasp because it is not so visible. In 1992, climate change still appeared to be a rather abstract threat – at the time it was almost an esoteric topic. Most people have not in principle doubted that there is man-made climate change, but in their minds it took place somewhere in Africa. The hot summer of 2018 changed this perception. That’s when people understood that climate change is something that is also taking place in Germany. We too have droughts, in Brandenburg the forests burn in summer too. But it is a tough process to organize the national consensus. If you are the prime minister of a state that lives on coal, it is difficult to win elections with the coal phase out. For a long time, politicians were not brave enough to tell voters that this transformation is imminent and that fossil fuels can no longer be relied on in the long term.

Since January 1st, a CO2 price of 25 euros per tonne of carbon dioxide has been in effect in the heating and transport sectors. What’s the point behind it?

The first point is to make fossil fuels more expensive in order to give renewable energies a competitive advantage. Of course, it should have a steering effect on the behavior of citizens: driving less cars, for example, when the price of petrol rises. But first and foremost, it is a signal to companies. A reliably increasing price of CO2 gives investors the signal that investments in low-carbon technologies are worthwhile in the long term.

When gasoline prices rise, some politicians always like to take the example of the nurse or the police officer, who depend on the car because they cannot afford an apartment in Munich. Politicians who have decided on the CO2 price themselves do the same, but the problem really does exist.

The nice thing about the CO2 price is that the state generates income with it. This income can be redistributed and spent in a number of ways. Many other instruments do not have this option. If the state prohibits oil heating, for example, there will be burdens, but no income that can be used to compensate for them. This is different with the CO2 price.

In addition, politicians are always happy to come up with individual case studies. We took a look at it statistically. The result: It depends a lot on how the income is distributed. If – as in Switzerland – you take all income from the CO2 price and give it back per capita at the end of the year, then on average poorer households are even better off on average. So, so to speak, the nurse and the policeman, the much-cited individual examples of politics. Wealthy households have a much larger carbon footprint, but do not get more in return than anyone else – this is how social compensation takes place. As an alternative to the climate dividend, the EEG surcharge can also be used to relieve the electricity price, which also benefits poorer households more. What the federal government is currently doing is reducing electricity prices plus investing in climate protection measures such as expanding local public transport.

Is a CO2 price of 25 euros enough?

No, and that is also the consensus in politics. There is already a time path with increases in the next few years, but it would be important for further adjustments to be made here after the federal elections.

In our CO2 price report for the federal government in 2019, we calculated that in order to achieve the climate targets valid at the time, you would have to start with 50 euros and then come to 130 euros by 2030. The new climate protection law has clearly tightened the targets once again. The Greens give specific figures. But the Union also says in its election manifesto that it wants to “tighten the growth path for CO2 pricing”.

It wasn’t that long ago that CSU boss Markus Söder was in interview with the “time” advertised for a CO2 price that “can be higher”, and he said that without ecology “in the end growth will be limited”. Nothing has remained, and climate policy does not play a major role in the election campaign. How confident are you that the next federal government won’t be far too slow again?

Climate change is definitely an issue in the election campaign. The question is how that is embedded. At the moment, climate protection is too often played off against the economy. That is fatal. In the current situation, all parties should have an interest in showing that an industrialized nation can also protect the climate. Economic development is also possible with fewer emissions. We have to change fuel, yes, but we can shape this transformation. There is already green steel, green hydrogen, and renewable energies. We should argue about which instruments are the better and what exactly the path of transformation looks like and how we can best cushion social hardship. But it has to be about the design of this path, not whether we take it. Getting this message across during the election campaign should be in the interests of all parties.

Hubertus Volmer spoke to Brigitte Knopf