It won’t be easy to get rid of coal.
Worried the nation might miss its 2020 target to drastically cut emissions of carbon dioxide, the German government proposed a steep levy last year on the most heavily polluting generators. The tax was intended to deliver a decisive blow against lignite or brown coal, the dirtiest fuel around and Germany’s main source of electricity.
Germany views itself as a leader in the push against climate change. It is probably the world’s most enthusiastic investor in renewable energy, mainly wind and sun. But even the powerful Chancellor Angela Merkel couldn’t quite pull it off.
Facing blowback from labor unions and governments in coal country, Berlin backed off, replacing the levy with a subsidy of 1.6 billion euros to gradually mothball eight coal-fired plants and shut them down permanently by 2023.
Environmentalists hated it. “Instead of being fined for polluting by the proposed new climate levy, utilities will instead get paid for keeping their oldest and most inefficient lignite plants on standby,” noted a report for Oxfam on Germany’s energy policies by the environmental nonprofit E3G. It “amounts to a golden handshake for utilities at the expense of taxpayers and consumers.”
And that wasn’t all. The chancellery also rejected a push by Barbara Hendricks, the environment minister, to establish a road map to the total phaseout of coal, hoping to postpone timing decisions until after national elections next year.
Berlin’s hesitance may seem like little more than a snag in Germany’s vaunted “Energiewende.” At least the coal generators are scheduled to shut down eventually.
But the resistance in the greenest of green countries underscores a more substantial challenge to the international effort to drastically reduce fossil fuels in the world’s energy supply: workers and retirees, local economies and communities still depend on the fuels the rest of us hope to let go of to preserve the planet for our children and our children’s children.
I’m old enough to remember President Jimmy Carter going on TV on April 18, 1977, declaring a “moral equivalent of war” against dependence on foreign oil, and telling Americans that “we need to shift to plentiful coal.” It seems unfair to simply tell the communities that worked on this shift: “We’re sorry, but it didn’t work out.”
But making those who will suffer from this transformation whole is not just a matter of fairness. A successful transition to a low-carbon future requires their support. And yet they remain pretty much an afterthought in the public debate over climate change.
“The scale and the scope of the transition is enormous,” said Matt Baker, a former commissioner with the Colorado Public Utilities Commission who is now a program officer for energy and climate at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. “You can’t do it in the time frame we are thinking about without the consent of the so-called losers in the transition.”
Germany may have few coal workers left: Only about 63,000 jobs are directly or indirectly related to coal out of a total work force of 43 million. But they are well organized into powerful unions. Even in the United States, where 50,000 remaining coal miners have next to no political power, the fate of coal country has grabbed the headlines during the presidential campaign.