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The following is an interview with Hans-Josef Fell. Fell is the drafter of the Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG), a law that came into force in Germany 25 years ago and has been copied over 100 times in more than 60 countries. Hans-Josef Fell was a member of the German Bundestag from 1998 to 2013. As a leading climate figure of the Green Party he helped to advance the energy transition in Germany. Today, he is president of the Energy Watch Group and, together with climate activists such as Bill McKibben, an ambassador for 100% renewable energy. Fell has received numerous awards.
David Goeßmann: While greenhouse gases continue to rise to record levels globally, the U.S. is still the second-largest emitter in absolute terms, but with much higher per capita consumption and historical emissions than China. President Donald Trump has reversed the steps toward energy transition initiated under the Biden administration, attacked all environmental protection measures, and issued over 300 new oil and gas drilling permits while U.S. greenhouse gas emissions are going up again. In the EU especially the German government under Chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU) watered down the EU’s climate targets and undermined the EU’s ban on combustion engines from 2035. In Europe we see a boom of fossil gas and gas-fired power plants while overall ambition on climate is in rollback. How do you assess climate protection in the industrialized world?
Hans-Josef Fell: There is no climate protection worthy of the name in the rich countries, nor globally. The Earth’s temperature is accelerating toward three degrees Celsius by 2050, as new calculations by the German Meteorological Society and the German Physical Society show. The Energy Watch Group has also clearly described this; one only has to extrapolate the current exponentially rising temperature increase path of the last 20 years.
This alarming result is also clear, because as early as 1990, the limit of 350 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that is sustainable for human civilization was exceeded. Today, the atmosphere is already overloaded with almost 430 ppm. An effective climate protection target that could enable the planet, which is already overheated by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius in 2024, to cool down can therefore only be to reduce the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (not to be confused with annual emissions!) to below 350 ppm.
This can only be achieved if all emissions are stopped in about two decades and, at the same time, huge amounts of carbon are removed from the atmosphere. The measures mentioned above and many others are irresponsibly........