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Two days before the recent German election, crowds gathered in cities across the country, demanding serious action on climate change. After catastrophic floods this summer, and protests from school climate strikers and anti-coal activists in recent years, climate breakdown overtook COVID as the issue of most concern to German voters, according to pollsters tracking attitudes in the run-up to the vote.
That this has become a significant political issue is a powerful demonstration of how social movements can shift the very ground on which political battles are fought.
Earlier this year, Germany's constitutional court found that the country's climate targets weren't ambitious enough, forcing Angela Merkel's government to adopt stricter climate targets for 2030, and neutrality by 2045. The case, brought by young climate activists, is just one way that the Fridays for the Future movement, and those around it, have transformed German politics.
As one journalist covering the election told me, you used to have to look hard for discussion of climate policy in Germany. This time, it was a central feature of almost every party's manifesto and a keystone in the press coverage of the vote.
The question of what impact that will have on the carbon cycle is being discussed as I write.
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For decades, much of the country has been powered by lignite, dirty brown coal that the Ende Gelaende civil disobedience movement has long mobilised against. In the current coalition negotiations between the Social Democrats, the Greens and the Free Democrats, the question isn't whether these power stations and the mines that come with them should close. The issue will be how, and how fast. Will it be required by the state, or left to the market forces of the EU's emissions-trading scheme? Will a final closure date of 2038 remain, or will it be brought sooner?
That this has become a significant political issue is a powerful demonstration of how social movements can shift the very ground on which political battles are fought. Merkel herself has admitted that school strikers have forced her to be much more ambitious.
The negotiations over the next government are likely to last at least until the end of the year, meaning Merkel will remain Germany's leader through the Glasgow talks, and is likely to use the conference as a last chance to present herself as 'the climate chancellor'.
At the conference, Germany will negotiate as part of the EU block, which has struggled to agree on a position in recent weeks. While wealthier western European countries tend to want carbon-reduction targets to apply within five years, poorer states in eastern Europe prefer ten-year targets. Announcing the conclusions of internal EU negotiations last week, the Council of Ministers produced a classic fudge: "The council expresses, with a view to reaching consensus in Glasgow, its preference for a common time frame of five years".
The difference between five and ten years might not seem much. But it's important to remember that greenhouse gases going in the atmosphere are more like a bath than a shower: it's the total volume that matters, and all of the physical evidence is that the bath is about to overflow. The best evidence is that, if the world continues to emit at its current rate for the next eight years, then it's likely that warming will pass the 1.5degC that we must stay below.
In this context, it's likely that Merkel will try to portray herself one final time as the tough leader forcing the EU into a consensus. Her problem, though, is that the German example is far from perfect. As I explained last week, Germans are sitting on higher per-capita historic emissions than any other country on earth apart from the US and UK.
The country has seen an impressive surge in renewable energy: in 2003, wind, solar and hydropower were responsible for 17GW of Germany's power. Last year, it was 120GW. But this has largely been on top of, rather than instead of, its coal consumption: in 2003, coal was responsible for 49GW. In 2020, that was 44GW. It's a bit like Germany has attempted to go on a diet, not by giving up burgers, but by also ordering a salad on the side: total energy production has almost doubled in that time.
And in recent years, German manufacturers have been actively outsourcing many of their emissions to the very countries that are now reluctant to cut them, with, for example, factories of the major German car companies a common sight--and a significant set of employers--across Hungary.
The German target to achieve net-carbon neutrality by 2045 is one of the best in the world, but it also isn't really enough: that's when scientists estimate that the world needs to get to net zero. But Europe's biggest economy has--like Britain and the US--used up more than its fair share of carbon wealth already, and if it keeps burning until the last minute, it creates no space for less developed countries to catch up.
The recent elections were the best ever for Germany's Green party, which got 15%, while polls earlier in the year showed the party doing even better and, for one brief moment, leading. The coalition negotiations are very likely to produce a government that includes both Greens and Social Democrats, the latter of which know that their final victory came from luring their historic voters back from the brink of voting Green. This government won't just lead Germany for the next four years. It will, in reality, be leading the EU into the decade in which a radical reduction of carbon emissions must happen.
If it succeeds in doing so, it will be because of the political pressure skillfully generated by a new generation of climate activists, who have refused to let their future be boiled away.
A "brutal lesson in geopolitics," is how the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel described the announcement of AUKUS, the new security partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The deal is not just a major financial blow to France, whose contract to deliver 12 submarines to Australia for $A50 billion ($36 billion) was unceremoniously ditched in the process. Perhaps even more important was that US President Joe Biden chose to announce AUKUS in a manner that can only be interpreted as a deliberate humiliation of France and, by association, the rest of the European Union.
When any US president slaps them in the face to remind them who is boss, they have no choice but to turn the other cheek, because it is they who have decided to choose their current privileges at the expense of European independence.
It was not the first brutal lesson the US had taught the EU recently. When Donald Trump reneged on the deal that former President Barack Obama and the EU had jointly struck to end Iran's nuclear program, one of his reasons was to put Germany in its place. Hours after German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that EU corporations would ignore Trump's sanctions and continue to trade with Iran, German corporations made their own announcement: Unwilling to be cast out of the US market, and to miss out on Trump's corporate tax cuts, they would cease trading in Iran.
The two incidents served the purpose of preserving America's financial and geostrategic hegemony over the West. Both incidents inflamed European leaders enough for them to consider retaliation. Trump's threat of sanctions against EU-based corporations continuing to deal with Iran sparked discussions in the EU of corresponding sanctions on US companies. Last week, French President Emmanuel Macron responded to Biden's AUKUS announcement with a move once reserved as a last resort just before declaring war: recalling France's ambassadors from Washington, DC, and Canberra.
Predictably, once their anger subsides, and their threats fizzle out, Europe's leaders soberly turn to addressing the root causes of their weakness vis-a-vis the US. But it is a charade that should fool no one.
After European companies acquiesced in Trump's sanctions on Iran, EU officials reasonably concluded that, as long as the US controls the payments system, Europe will be at America's mercy in any confrontation involving money. So, they decided that Europe needs a payments system that the US government cannot block. Similarly, after the AUKUS fiasco, the need for a cohesive European military came into sharp focus.
But, in both cases, creating the European institutions needed to challenge American hegemony would require Europe's leaders to make a move that they are loath to contemplate.
Consider the ambition to create a euro-dominated payments system that allows companies and states to trade independently of the US-dominated financial system. For such a system to work, it must be liquid, which means it must be able to attract other people's money--Japanese, Chinese, Indian, and certainly US money.
This in turn requires that non-Europeans holding loads of euros have a euro-dominated safe asset in which to invest their stash for a day or for a decade. In the dollar-denominated, US-dominated financial world, such an asset not only exists but increases daily in proportion to gargantuan US government borrowing. But in the EU, there is no equivalent to US Treasuries. German bunds may be as safe as houses, but there are not enough of them to support a euro-denominated competitor to the dollar-dominated international payment system.
Europe's officials know that creating a European equivalent of US Treasuries, the much discussed but never-realized eurobond, is a bridge too far. After all, creating the necessary volume of eurobonds would imply a large pan-European debt. That, in turn, demands a common treasury, which can be legitimized only by ditching the EU's intergovernmental architecture in favor of European elites' greatest nightmare: a democratic federation.
Indeed, during her 16 years in power, Germany's outgoing chancellor did not block the creation of eurobonds out of petulance or antipathy to a European safe asset. She did so because she had no interest in clashing with European elites' determination to stop the EU integration process well before anything resembling a democratic federation takes shape.
The same is true of military integration. Even the modest project of piecing together a five-thousand-strong European rapid deployment force can never be more than tokenism. Who will send these men and women to spill their blood in some faraway war? The French president? The German chancellor? The president of the European Commission?
And who will have the right, at the drop of a hat, to recall them if necessary? Without a sovereign parliament to back a federal government that makes these decisions, no European military worthy of the name can ever emerge.
European leaders get what they deserve. When any US president slaps them in the face to remind them who is boss, they have no choice but to turn the other cheek, because it is they who have decided to choose their current privileges at the expense of European independence. Every slap angers them enough to issue threats and recall ambassadors. But then they run up against their own hostility to what it would take to liberate Europe from American hegemony.
To prevent the type of humiliation to which Trump subjected Merkel, Europe needs a eurobond. To prevent humiliations like the one Biden has inflicted upon Macron, it needs a common military. But eurobonds and a common military require Europe's national ruling classes (particularly those in creditor countries) to give up their own exorbitant power; and to embrace, instead, the radical idea of transnational voting for a transnational federal government.
Their dilemma is clear: Turn the EU into a democratic federation, and thus lose the exorbitant power over Europe's citizens that they enjoy in today's nondemocratic EU, or submit to ritual flagellation by whoever resides in the White House. Behind the sound and fury of their periodic protests, Europe's leaders seem to have made their choice.
More than 140 Nobel laureates and former heads of state signed an open letter Tuesday urging the next German chancellor to throw their support behind a proposed patent waiver for coronavirus vaccines, a step the nation's outgoing leader has steadfastly refused to take.
Addressed to Annalena Baerbock, Armin Laschet, and Olaf Scholz--the leading contenders in Germany's September 26 election--the letter stresses the urgency of ramping up vaccine production and distributing doses to low-income countries that have been denied the resources necessary to inoculate their populations, leaving billions of people vulnerable to the coronavirus and its dangerous variants.
"Intellectual property rules are today locking out people across the world from the benefits of lifesaving science."
--Joseph Stiglitz
"German publicly-funded science developed the world-class mRNA BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine, which was a huge achievement. Yet vaccines are zero percent effective for those who cannot access them," reads the letter, which was signed by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, former U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, former Malawi President Joyce Banda, and dozens of others.
"In low-income countries, less than two percent of adults are fully vaccinated," the letter continues. "The global supply falls far short of the levels needed to provide global vaccination coverage. The artificial restriction on manufacturing and supply is leading to thousands of unnecessary deaths from Covid-19 each day, and countless thousands of cases--a proportion of which will suffer long-term, adverse health impacts."
The letter, coordinated by the People's Vaccine Alliance, was published as the World Trade Organization's (WTO) TRIPS Council convened on Tuesday to continue negotiations over a temporary patent waiver first proposed last October by India and South Africa. The waiver aims to lift intellectual property barriers that are stopping qualified manufacturers around the world from producing generic vaccines for low-income nations.
Under the leadership of Chancellor Angela Merkel, Germany has been one of the waiver's principal opponents, along with the U.K., Canada, Switzerland, and other rich countries that have swallowed up much of the global vaccine supply. More than 100 nations--including the United States--have endorsed the proposal, but its adoption would require unanimous support from WTO member countries.
Concerned about the waiver's potential impact on their bottom lines, pharmaceutical companies have lobbied aggressively against the proposal in Europe and elsewhere. Earlier this year, just days after the Biden administration announced its support for the patent waiver, Merkel echoed the pharmaceutical lobby's talking point that "the protection of intellectual property is a source of innovation and it must remain so in the future."
In their new letter, the former world leaders and Nobel laureates counter that temporarily suspending certain intellectual property protections "is essential in the fight against the pandemic," which has killed more than 4.6 million people and counting.
"Moreover, a waiver would still allow for vaccine originators to be fairly compensated whilst vaccines truly become a public good," they argue. "Let us be clear that this is an unparalleled moment: Germany can and must lead the charge to vaccinate the world."
Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University and the former chief economist of the World Bank, said in a statement Tuesday that the upcoming German election represents an opportunity for the country to potentially alter the course of the global pandemic by ending the pharmaceutical industry's monopoly control over vaccine production.
"The new chancellor of Germany will hold extraordinary power to turn the tide on this horrific pandemic and can be the world leader remembered for helping save millions of lives," said Stiglitz. "Intellectual property rules are today locking out people across the world from the benefits of lifesaving science--it is time for Germany to ensure the transfer of vaccine technologies and join the rest of the world in backing a temporary waiver at the World Trade Organization."
Read the full letter:
Dear Annalena Baerbock, Armin Laschet, and Olaf Scholz,
We, the undersigned former Heads of State and Government and Nobel Laureates, write to you in the conviction that Germany has a significant role to play in global efforts to bring the Covid-19 pandemic to an end. The impact of that would be of huge significance to people in Germany and around the world.
As candidates to be the next German Chancellor, responsibility for your country's leadership on this issue will fall on one of you.
German publicly-funded science developed the world-class mRNA BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine which was a huge achievement. Yet vaccines are zero per cent effective for those who cannot access them.
The fact that a few vaccine producers hold monopoly control over how much vaccine is made and where it is made has resulted in a serious shortage of doses. As a result, billions of people remain unvaccinated in countries without access.
In low-income countries, less than two per cent of adults are fully vaccinated. The global supply falls far short of the levels needed to provide global vaccination coverage. The artificial restriction on manufacturing and supply is leading to thousands of unnecessary deaths from COVID-19 each day, and countless thousands of cases--a proportion of which will suffer long term, adverse health impacts.
In light of this we are deeply concerned with Germany's continued opposition to a temporary waiver of the World Trade Organization's (WTO) intellectual property rules which thwart more rapid production of Covid-19 vaccines and access to technologies.
There are qualified manufacturers around the world who, with a temporary waiver of intellectual property rights and the necessary knowledge and technology transfer, could produce the billions of additional doses of safe and effective vaccines needed to fight the pandemic.
However, the position taken by Germany and some other countries at the WTO is undermining the will of the more than 100 countries which do support negotiations on a TRIPS waiver. South Africa and India have led the push for those negotiations, and they have been joined by others from across regions, including France and the United States.
We write to express our hope that, after its general election, Germany will change its position and will support negotiations on the proposed TRIPS waiver.
We do not advocate a suspension of intellectual property rules lightly, but we believe that it is essential in the fight against the pandemic. Moreover, a waiver would still allow for vaccine originators to be fairly compensated whilst vaccines truly become a public good.
While donating excess vaccines to developing countries is crucial, it is not in itself a sustainable solution--the vaccine problem is one of both distribution and supply. Covax aims to provide vaccines to cover nearly thirty per cent of populations in countries that it serves--and has been unable to obtain sufficient supply to meet even that modest goal. Its challenge is even more daunting as Germany and other high-income countries move to offer their citizens booster shots, while billions of people remain unvaccinated.
That is why developing countries being able to manufacture their own vaccines, and dramatically increase their supply, is vital. We need, more than ever, a people's vaccine.
If elected and chosen to lead the next German Government, we urge you to support a wide and comprehensive waiver of intellectual property rules on all Covid-19-related technologies at the WTO.
We also urge you to ensure that German pharmaceutical companies openly and rapidly share life-saving mRNA vaccine technology with qualified producers around the world, including by working with the World Health Organization Covid-19 Technology Access Pool and the mRNA hub in South Africa.
We urge you to make these the policies of any future coalition government.
Germany is in a unique and historic position today. Having helped create the most successful vaccine technology against Covid-19, by overcoming pharmaceutical monopolies and insisting that the technology be shared, it has the ability to help end this pandemic.
The experience that many of us share allows us to empathize with the realities of political office and the pressures you face. But let us be clear that this is an unparalleled moment: Germany can and must lead the charge to vaccinate the world.