Minister: Germany could fail to meet climate targets in 2022

Berlin (dpa) – Climate Action Minister Robert Habeck thinks that Germany could fail to meet its climate targets in the next two years.

“We will probably miss our targets for 2022, and even 2023 will be difficult enough,” the Green politician said in an interview with the weekly newspaper Die Zeit, which is due to come out on Thursday and which dpa saw in advance.

With regards to reducing climate-damaging greenhouse gases, he explained: “We are starting with a drastic backlog.”

However, the coalition agreement between the Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens and the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) offers “many opportunities” to make improvements in the future, should the individual sectors such as transport, agriculture or even energy fail to meet their CO2 reduction targets, Habeck explained.

All ministries have the “common will” to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees compared to pre-industrial times and thus mitigate the effects of climate change.

In Germany, there is no way around the massive expansion of renewable energies, Habeck said. This also means that there will have to be wind turbines “virtually everywhere the wind blows.”

On average, there would have to be 1,000 to 1,500 new wind turbines per year, said Habeck – also depending on how many old turbines could be replaced by new ones. In the past few years, he said, that figure was “hardly more than 450.”

Commenting on the new federal government’s goal to obtain 80 per cent of electricity from renewable energies by the end of the decade, Habeck said, “It took us 30 years to get to a 42-per-cent share. Now we have a good eight years to double that.”

In the course of this structural change, “there will also be disappointment and perhaps anger. I have no illusions about that,” said Habeck, referring to jobs that could be lost in the coal regions of Germany, for example.

This would be “bitter news” for those affected, Habeck said. However, he assured, “New jobs will be created. we won’t run out of work, quite the opposite.”