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Germany is known as a leader in energy transition, but the country keeps falling short of meeting stated objectives. While attention has been high on climate change related policy leadership, the competing domestic alliances in the field of energy transition have received scant attention. In Germany, the strong momentum of the conversion to renewable energy has been stalled in the second half of the 2010s. Enabled by an increasing weight of neoliberal economic concerns, traditional energy coalitions have managed to reshape the path of energy transition. In this article three competing discourse coalitions are introduced to examine their constituencies and projects in the field of energy and politics. It focuses on radical ecological forces around the Öko-Institut, environmental modernization capacities linked to Green Budget Germany and fossil interest groups intersecting with neoliberal academic and partisan think tanks. As such, the article opens a view on multiple contestations over Germany's Energiewende. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forest management affects carbon sequestration (mitigation) and resilience of forest ecosystems (adaptation) under climate change. Therefore, the efforts to integrate these two approaches have been made by the political arrangements to seek the synergy effects and deal with trade-offs. To study the state of the art linkages and forest policies to realize both adaptation and mitigation, we systematically review the literature highlighting the topic (136 publications) and outline two different approaches from Germany and Japan as countries with substantial forest resources and high influences on international forest policies and wood trade. We identify three linkages: (1) an ecosystem (based) approach assuming that a resilient ecosystem (adaptation), has high potential as a carbon sink (mitigation), (2) a sustainable forest management (SFM) aiming for enhancing forests' resilience and carbon sink potential simultaneously, and (3) a cross-sectoral approach generating synergies among multiple sectors of agriculture, forestry, urban design, and nature conservation. We find that a significant objective is still SFM for sustaining the forest area andwood production, where SFM examples in Germany and Japan exemplify contributions to carbon sinks and ongoing disaster risk management, respectively. Overall, the current differentiated objectives of SFM do not underpin the twofold approach and their synergy effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Company cars have received considerable attention because of their partial tax-exemption and the changes in travel behaviour they stimulate, including car model choices, distances driven, and car ownership patterns. This paper is the first to present evidence on actual transport behaviour change, based on mobility and fuel diaries, and comparing a sample of 624 company cars and 9328 private cars in Germany. Analysis confirms that company cars belong to the more heavily motorized car segments (with an average 97 kW, as opposed to 79 kW of private cars), and are driven more than private cars (24,672 km per year, compared to 12,828 km per year for private cars). Company car benefits also increase average household vehicle numbers by 25%. Results show that it is imperative to distinguish company cars of company owners relative to those driven by employees, as negative externalities increase significantly where company cars are used by the latter. Abolishing company car benefits could significantly reduce emissions from passenger road transport and stimulate change in the country's automotive industries towards a lower-carbon path. As Germany is not currently on track to meet its climate mitigation targets, this would be a timely policy shift. Key policy insights Company car benefits increase transport demand, car ownership, and average vehicle fleet engine power. These effects are particularly relevant for employees. Company cars have, in spite of their larger size and greater engine power, a (modestly) better fuel economy than private cars, possibly because they represent more recent and hence more efficient car models. A policy focus on vehicle fuel efficiency improvements will fail to reduce the German car fleet's CO2 emissions to a sustainable level. Abolishing company car benefits could yield a significant reduction in GHG emissions from passenger road transport. Company car subsidies are an out-dated mode of support for the fossil-fuel based automotive industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]