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Angela Merkel at the UN climate summit: World savior aD

2019-09-23T19:40:35.654Z


In her speech to the UN, Angela Merkel tries to make climate change her subject again. While her home climate chancellor hardly decreases, she gets recognition on the international stage.



Focus on climate crisis

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Reporting on climate change is one of the major journalistic challenges of our time. The climate crisis is also one of the most important issues of humanity for SPIEGEL. For this reason, we support an international initiative that seeks to take a look this week: "Covering Climate Now" has been initiated by the Columbia Journalism Review and the Canadian newspaper "The Nation", with more than 200 media companies worldwide including the Guardian, El País, La Repubblica, The Times of India, Bloomberg or Vanity Fair. SPIEGEL is dedicating the cover story of the current issue to the climate crisis this week and every day pays special attention to mirror.de

The chancellor comes to the microphone at 11.02 am New York time, her jacket blue, a shade darker than the blue of the United Nations, in whose general meeting hall she now speaks, in the background the image of a coral reef.

"We have all heard the wake-up call of the youth," Merkel opened her nearly five-minute speech, which surprisingly also meets US President Donald Trump as a listener. "There is no doubt that climate change, or global warming, is essentially man-made," Merkel says, as if she anticipated the flashback visit of the US president and doubters of climate change. "The industrialized countries are the cause of this global warming, as we see it today." The developing countries are the main victims. "

It is a sober speech that Merkel holds. Maybe that's why it only seems so emotionless, because minutes before Greta Thunberg has turned with clenched fists and pressed voice to the assembled world community. "We will not let you come," Thunberg called to the delegates. "The world is awakening, and change is coming, whether you like it or not." It was a disturbing rant that could be heard there.

Merkel works on her legacy

Merkel gets less applause than Thunberg, but her speech contains at least clear commitments. "The benchmark for our actions must be the Paris Agreement, which sets the framework for limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees," Merkel says, promising that the EU's CO2 emissions will be reduced by 2030 before the assembled heads of state and government Reduce 55 percent and in 2050 be climate neutral.

The Chancellor is working on her legacy, including on this three-day trip to New York. There are many topics on the agenda, however, to clarify Europe's attitude towards Iran at a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on future development cooperation with Africa over lunch with African heads of state. But the focus, at least for the public, is the climate.

The label of the World Savior will not get her back

Twelve years ago, Angela Merkel was celebrated internationally as climate chancellor. She had put the topic on both the then EU summit and the G8 meeting on the agenda and was photographed in the red anorak in front of threatened Greenland ice. After all, she can now claim for herself that the CO2 consumption in Germany receives a fixed price and reduction of the greenhouse gas is enshrined in a law. Every year Germany has to save a precisely defined amount of CO2. If that fails, fines will be due from 2021 onwards. It is a powerful lever that the Chancellor now holds in her hands.

The label of the Weltenretterin but will not regain them, not after the 19-hour negotiation marathon in the Chancellery and not after the 4 minutes and 40 seconds she spoke now before the United Nations. Too much has dragged the issue in recent years, with the result that Germany will not meet its once full-bodied announced climate targets for 2020.

No pioneer in climate protection anymore

Your close friends point out that in Merkel's term, after all, the share of renewable energies in electricity generation has increased to around 40 percent today. When Merkel was Minister of the Environment at the beginning of the 1990s, it was around twelve percent. In addition, there have been many other challenges for the Chancellor in the past few years in addition to the climate, the Greek rescue, the refugees, the many hot spots in the world. It was not always time to think about how Germany could produce less CO2.

It would be unbelievable, Merkel would now again staged as a pioneer in environmental and climate protection. Instead she tries, as so often, to go the way of the middle. On the one hand, she admires the young people who protest for climate protection. She has great respect for Thunberg, whom she meets for a short talk before her speech, as a photo shows, which the government spokesman immediately tweets. The young people would have made the policy properly, says Merkel repeatedly, without them, the federal government would not be where it is.

Escape from criticism from Germany

On the other hand, the chancellor likes to remind people in the countryside, from the Uckermark or from their own constituency in Vorpommern, where the approval of a wind turbine can take a few years, because a protestant citizens' initiative is formed immediately.

She pleads for creating incentives rather than prohibitions, knowing that society is as deeply divided on the climate issue as in the refugee debate. The proposals of the Climate Cabinet are in the eyes of the Chancellor, the attempt not to further deepen this split and still get ahead in the matter. So far, the public has been discussing the low price of ten euros, which will cost one tonne of CO2 in the future. Scientists judge the climate package to be useless in this form.

In New York Merkel promises to increase the German funds for global climate protection from two to four billion euros compared to 2014. It is her way of escaping criticism from Germany. On the international stage, she receives one thing above all for such announcements: recognition.

Source: spiegel

All news articles on 2019-09-23

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