The only way to make progress on climate change is to get big money—especially fossil money—out of politics, according to German political scientist and Green Party advisor Arne Jungjohann.
“It’s very, very important to make this a non-partisan issue, otherwise you cannot create the stability and certainty that is needed for the investment people,” Jungjohann told an event in Ottawa last month, hosted by the German embassy and National Observer.
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“If you are an energy company in Germany, and you know there’s an election coming up, there are some things at stake, but you know that after the election, no matter who governs, there won’t be a 180° reverse of course.”
The key lessons for Canada from Germany’s Energiewende, or energy transition, are that “corporate money must exit the equation, citizens must be involved early on, and clean energy must become non-partisan,” the Observer notes. Jungjohann “called it the ‘democratization’ of clean energy.”
Jungjohann traced three steps in Germany’s transition that dated back to 1991, warning that there’s no silver bullet to decarbonizing a country’s economy. “Careful timing, patience, political will, and a broad range of policies and frameworks are necessary,” writes the Observer’s Elizabeth McSheffrey. “It’s a technical transition from fossil fuel-based energy to renewable energy,” but “it’s also a political and cultural transition; it’s a transition from centralized, corporation-dominated energy, to a smaller, decentralized power grid.”
