Are you satisfied with the election result last Sunday (unless you happen to live in my hometown Berlin, where, regardless of the result, unfortunately you cannot be satisfied with the way it went)? Or would you have wished for a different result?
But what the heck: the people voted that way. It is the way it is, an election is not a horse race, even if it sometimes works that way in the election campaign. Nevertheless, one can ask oneself what the result means for climate protection and how it will proceed. To do this, of course, you would have to know which coalition will come out in the end. But it is very likely that both the Greens and the FDP will co-govern. And at least that could actually be a very exciting combination.
If you look at the climate programs of the two parties, there are of course big differences; that of the FDP landed in last place in an evaluation by the German Institute for Economic Research, while the Greens were ahead. The FDP relies heavily on market forces, i.e. on EU-wide trading in emission certificates. That has its drawbacks. In traffic, for example, even a high CO₂ price has almost no effect for a very long time, because hardly anyone gets rid of their car for a few cents more for a liter of gasoline or diesel. If you do nothing else, everything will continue as before. And in the end you are left with a transport system that is as far removed from climate neutrality as ever, but certainly no longer has time to change that. Without measures such as efficiency targets, investments in local public transport, purchase bonuses, combustion engines and so on, a CO₂ price does not bring much in the transport sector.
On the other hand, it is also the case: practically everything else is nothing without the CO₂ price, and that doesn’t just apply to traffic. If engines become more efficient, people buy heavier cars and drive around with them more, greenhouse gas saving effect is zero, that has been observed in the past few years. A safe and lasting incentive for the individual to emit less and less is provided by the rising CO₂ price alone. This is also the case in other areas: Nothing, for example, pushes coal out of the market faster and more elegantly than high CO₂ prices.
It is by no means an easy and certainly not a cheap undertaking to become climate neutral by 2045. If the market can help, let it be. And if the FDP consistently insists on it, that might not be so bad after all.
On the other hand, the Greens could make sure that their ambition in climate policy does not weaken because of their sheer firm belief in miraculous market forces and future technologies that will regulate the matter. You could keep an eye on everything that the market is not doing or not doing enough: expanding power grids, overcoming resistance to wind turbines, making cycling more attractive, renovating buildings.
Perhaps they can also gently convey to the FDP that hydrogen, which some liberals apparently see as a convenient substitute for oil and gas, is unlikely to be the first choice of market forces, at least in transport and heating. Electric cars and heat pumps are much cheaper.
Ideally, one can still dream, the parties complement each other in terms of their strengths in climate protection and mutually discuss their weaknesses – at least I hope that it will turn out this way and not the other way around.
(This text is from the weekly Newsletter Environmental Friday you here free of charge can order.)