German Climate Activism and Policy Today

After 2023 was confirmed to have been the hottest year ever recorded, NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt warned that “it could imply that a warming planet is already fundamentally altering how the climate system operates, much sooner than scientists had anticipated.” In this context, Sabine von Mering will provide an assessment of current German climate activism and policy, including the impact of the European parliament election of June 2024 and what will be at stake for climate policy in the German federal election of 2025.

Given recent warnings, decarbonization should be a top priority and uncontroversial anywhere, Von Mering argues. Germany, whose first red-green government coalition in 1998 launched programs to shoulder the start-up cost to the renewable energy revolution, is currently on track to meet its ambitious carbon reduction target of 65% compared to 1990 by 2030.

Young climate activists of Fridays for Future helped the German Greens to a historic election result in 2021, lifting them into their second government coalition after sixteen years in opposition, with great expectations for climate prioritization. Although the Russian attack on Ukraine led the newly elected “traffic light” coalition to embrace a climate-unfriendly frenzy of deregulation and fast-tracking of terminals for the import of fracked gas from the United States, Germany has also seen massive expansion of solar and wind, highest-ever renewable energy consumption, and record energy efficiency since 2022.

About the speakers

Sabine von Mering is Director of the Center for German and European Studies (CGES), Professor of German, and Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies and a core member of the Environmental Studies Program at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA, USA. Amongst her recent publications we find Antisemitism on Social Media with Monika Hübscher (Routledge, 2022) and Right-Wing Radicalism Today: Perspectives from Europe and the US with Timothy Wyman-McCarty (Routledge, 2013). She has been a climate activist with 350 Mass and NoCoalNoGas for many years and has also worked with Indigenous water protectors against the Line 3 tarsands pipeline. A 2023 Public Voices Fellow on the Climate Crisis with The OpEd Project, in partnership with the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, she is currently co-editing the Routledge Handbook on Grassroots Climate Activism.

Ruud van Dijk is senior lecturer in the History of International Relations at the University of Amsterdam. He focuses on the history of the Cold War, nuclear weapons in international politics, transatlantic relations, and how the so-called international system has related to climate change, and vice versa.

Krijn Thijs (moderator) is a historian, affiliated with the Duitsland Instituut Amsterdam (DIA). He has studied History at the VU University in Amsterdam. Thereafter he wrote a thesis at the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam about the political usage of Berlin’s city history in The Third Reich, GDR and West-Berlin. Since 2009 he works at the DIA, where he assists the DAAD-Graduiertenkolleg, organises workshops and lectures. Furthermore, he is a lecturer at the University of Amsterdam (History, German Studies).