Berlin and Sustainable Development
For a while now Germany has been one of the leaders in sustainability which includes renewable energy, recycling and climate change. During our visit to Germany we had the opportunity to visit different institutions as we traveled to three different German cities. Most of our visits revolved around this idea of German sustainability and both its past and future in Germany. So how did this movement start in Germany towards sustainability. One of the most important groups was actually Greenpeace Germany which was established in 1980 so over forty years ago now. Today it has over 580,000 members in Germany and was essential in German sustainable accomplishments so far like the nuclear phase out. We actually had the chance to speak to one of its co-founders Monika Griefahn who even went on to serve in parliament. She explained to us how they organized campaigns and raised awareness in Germany. She talked about how these movements were big in Germany even before events like Chernobly and Fukushima which gained international attention. One of the major victories of Greenpeace occurred in 1989 with the stop of the planned reprocessing plant in Wackersdorf. They have been continuing to push for sustainability ever since and the Greenpeace movement has gathered 2.8 million members worldwide.
Now that we had learned about Germany’s past in sustainability, we traveled to Berlin to learn about the present and future of these issues in Germany. One of the most interesting visits we had during this trip was to the Bundestag (German Parliament), where we got the chance to sit in on a topic discussion and then speak to a member of the parliament. The topic that we got to listen to was the Russia and Ukraine conflict where different parties argued whether or not to send weapons to Ukraine. On the surface, this sounds like it doesn’t have much to do with renewable energy but actually this situation has led Germany to stop purchasing energy from Russia. The last three nuclear power plants in Germany were shut down around a year ago now, but this conflict has led to some public opinions supporting the return of nuclear plants in Germany. We have also seen rises of the far-right in German politics with parties like the AfD who essentially completely deny climate change. This points to some of the unresolved tensions where some people who never got on board with German sustainability are now starting to speak out against it. While we had the chance to sit in during a Bundestag session, we didn’t understand anything as it was in German but we saw the emotions. You could see that there is a growing polarization which in some ways reminds me of the US. Not everyone supports Germany’s policy of energiewende as they continue their reduction of CO₂. For example, you could look at the automobile industry, which is a very large sector in Germany. For around a century now Germany has been known for its production of cars. There is debate on how fast Germany should transition into electric cars. We visited Ubitricity, a subsidiary of Shell which specializes in electric vehicle charging. We learned about the different ways the company was developing smart electric vehicle charging stations. However, there are still many issues that the company has to address before they can perfect the stations. An example of this is the prevention of people removing QR codes on the charging stations. The future for Germany is clearly moving towards renewable energy but there are also still clear obstacles that must be hurdled. A lot of this comes down to how much the average German cares about sustainability over other issues. This is the one thing that I would like to ask if I had the opportunity.
#Berlin
