German climate minister says speed of carbon cuts needs to be trebled | Germany | The Guardianhttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/11/germany-must-pull-together-to-achieve-climate-targets-says-green-ministerHabeck said a radical overhaul of planning and building processes would be required as well as changes to industry and a slimming down of bureaucracy. Announcing a mandate for solar panels to be put on all new builds, he repeated his party’s pre-election manifesto that 2% of the entire surface of the country should make way for the mechanisms required for renewable energy, such as windfarms, solar panels and hydrogen technology.
He urged people to embrace the technology and said this would help free Germany from dependence on unstable global markets. So far only two out of 16 states, Schleswig-Holstein and Hesse, are anywhere near the 2% target. A more relaxed and flexible approach towards rules governing the building of turbines was required, he said, expressing his frustration over a recent ruling in the southern state of Bavaria, according to which turbines cannot be erected closer to homes than a distance equivalent to 10 times their height.
Habeck said he was planning to announce a first tranche of climate protection measures by Easter, and a second by the end of the summer, to come into force by 2023. The government’s plans have been fiercely criticised by Fridays for Future climate activists, who say they are too little, too late and are a betrayal of the Greens’ own principles.
“We can no longer follow the policy of ‘we’ll do what we can’, rather we must have a policy according to the principle of ‘we’ll do what is necessary right now’. That is unfortunately not the case right now,” Hannah Pirot of Fridays for Future Berlin told the broadcaster InfoRadio
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Habeck said large-scale immigration would be necessary to realise the energy transition, which would require a considerable number of engineers, craftspeople and carers. “We have 300,000 job openings today and we expect that to rise to a million and more. If we don’t close that gap, we will face real productivity problems,” he said
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