Friday, March 14, 2014
Executive (Omni Shoreham)
Following the 2007 G-20 Summit at Heiligendamm, Angela Merkel was dubbed the “Climate Chancellor” well before other national leaders were willing to put global warming and sustainable energy policies on the global agenda. Jettisoning an SPD-Green decision to cap the life-span of the country’s nuclear plants by 2020 as head of the CDU/CSU-FDP coalition in 2009, Merkel reversed course 180-degrees following the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi melt-down and dramatically accelerated the country’s own Energie-Wendeinitiated in 2008 ("Road Map: New Thinking, New Energy"). By 2012, Germany had exceeded several EU targets set for 2020 (e.g., reducing its total greenhouse emissions by 26.4%, vs. an EU 2020 target of 20%; creating 1.8 million jobs in the environmental protection arena; earning €56 BILLION per year via green technology exports). It now has a solid stake in compelling other member-states to do likewise. This paper argues that while Merkel’s “visibility” as a mover-and-shaker in the Euro-crisis has impeded her ability to take an obvious lead in the EU energy field, the last five years do provide evidence of a substantial amount of “policy uploading” by Germany, reconfiguring technology access and “best practices” for other member-states.
