Search

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]

The successful implementation of the Paris Agreement requires substantial energy policy change on the national level. In national energy policy-making, climate change mitigation goals have to be balanced with arguments on other national energy policy goals, namely limiting cost and increasing energy security. Thus far, very little is known about the relative importance of these goals and how they are related to political partisanship. In order to address this gap, we focus on parliamentary discourse around low-carbon energy futures in Germany over the past three decades and analyze the relative importance of, and partisanship around, energy policy goals. We find that the political discourse revolves around four, rather than three, goals as conventionally assumed; improving the competitiveness of the national energy technology industry is not only an additional energy policy goal, it is also highly important in the political discourse. In general, the relative importance of these goals is rather stable over time and partisanship around them is limited. Yet, a sub-analysis of the discourse on renewable energy technologies reveals a high level of partisanship, albeit decreasing over time. Particularly, the energy industry goal's importance increases while its partisanship vanishes. We discuss how these findings can inform future energy policy research and provide a potential inroad for more ambitious national energy policies. Key policy insights In addition to the three classic goals of energy policy (limiting cost, securing access and reducing the environmental burden) we identify a fourth policy goal: strengthening the national energy technology industry Conformity between the three classical energy and the industrial policy goals is a key driver explaining policy change For renewable energy technologies, partisanship around this fourth goal is lower than around other goals and decreases over time as innovation allows these technologies to increasingly correspond to policy-makers' high-level goals Extant research underestimates the importance of industry policy goals, but overestimates environmental co-benefits of low-carbon energy options Paradigmatic policy change in Germany did not depend on top-down shifts in high-level policy goals but was driven by lower-level technology-specific goals [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]

The objective of this study is to quantify the contribution of the German forestry to climate change mitigation and to calculate the associated costs at the national level. For that, the forest and harvested wood products carbon pools are considered as well as energy and material substitution. We compare five different scenarios, each referring to an alternative level of timber harvests (due to changing rotation lengths or setting aside of forest areas). The study shows that enhancing the use of wood products at the expense of other materials, such as steel, plastic or concrete, can have a substantial impact on the overall carbon balance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Paris Agreement calls on all nations to pursue efforts to contribute to limiting the global temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. However, due to limited global, regional and country-specific analysis of highly ambitious GHG mitigation pathways, there is currently a lack of knowledge about the transformational changes needed in the coming decades to reach this target. Through a meta-analysis of mitigation scenarios for Germany, this article aims to contribute to an improved understanding of the changes needed in the energy system of an industrialized country. Differentiation among six key long-term energy system decarbonization strategies is suggested, and an analysis is presented of how these strategies will be pursued until 2050 in selected technologically detailed energy scenarios for Germany. The findings show, that certain strategies, including the widespread use of electricity-derived synthetic fuels in end-use sectors as well as behavioral changes, are typically applied to a greater extent in mitigation scenarios aiming at high GHG emission reductions compared to more moderate mitigation scenarios. The analysis also highlights that the pace of historical changes observed in Germany between 2000 and 2015 is clearly insufficient to adequately contribute to not only the 1.5 °C target, but also the 2 °C long-term global target. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) confers an obligation on developed states to lead in mitigation. This obligation challenges traditional conceptions of the modern state by calling forth a more outward looking state that is able to serve both the national and international communities in the service of global climate protection. Yet, the more skeptical theories of the ecological state suggest that climate leaders will only emerge if they can connect their climate strategy to the traditional state imperatives of economic growth or national security. How the governments of Germany and Norway, both relative climate leaders with ongoing fossil-fuel dependencies, have legitimated their climate policies and diplomacy is examined through a comparative discourse analysis. While both governments rely heavily on discourses of Green growth, they also construct national identities and international role conceptions that serve purposes beyond themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A successful carbon capture and storage (CCS) policy and programme is widely considered essential to curbing carbon dioxide emissions. What explains the strikingly different policy outcomes in two key European Union political heavyweights and coal economies, the UK and Germany? The UK has decided to contract two specific CCS projects, with explicit timelines for realisation; Germany has made no such decisions. From scrutiny of official documents and in-depth high-level interviews, it was found that the UK has more favourable structural capacity, including offshore storage capacity (which evokes less conflict) and significant oil-industry expertise, and thus an easier task. Moreover, this structural capacity has interacted with a solid political commitment to bring CCS forward in the UK, including specific, multistage funding and a high-level drive to develop CCS, especially after 2009. In Germany, by contrast, CCS has encountered increasing local and central opposition since 2009, with the Energiewende and renewables being accorded priority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local climate policy depends on a transformation of the built environment. In urban areas, the built environment is largely an integrated product of land management and real estate management. This paper examines the effects of sense-making on urban climate policies in the built environment. Three major German cities are analysed in a comparative case study. The structuring element for both qualitative and quantitative data analyses is the concept of knowledge orders (Heinelt and Lamping in this issue). This study demonstrates the important role that the selection of beliefs, ideas and knowledge play in the development of local strategies against climate change by identifying a strong relationship between local knowledge orders and climate policy. The paper contributes to the urban policy literature by improving the understanding of local differences, including how knowledge orders affect land management and real estate management. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]