Germany

Deutsche Bank last week released a research note of curious interest just ahead of this busy week of international climate meetings and upcoming Senate action on federal climate law. Called Creating Jobs and Growth: The German Green Experience, it reviewed the policy architecture responsible for Germany's rise as a global clean tech leader over the last decade.

The plot line goes like this: Thanks especially to a mechanism called a "feed-in tariff," Germany has been able to create 300,000 new jobs since 2000 in a booming renewable energy sector, with renewable energy supply more than doubling, jumping from 6.3 percent of total electricity supply in 2000 to 14 percent in 2007. The people of the European nation of 82 million also saw only modest electricity price rises.

Over the same time period in the U.S., the contribution of renewable sources of energy to total supply has contracted, going from 10.1 percent in 2000 to 9.4 percent in 2007, with the sector still struggling today against a right wing campaign that vilifies the very idea of green jobs and a clean energy future as a socialist plot to undermine the U.S. economy.

The brief report from one of the largest investment banks in the world tells a different story, with a clean energy boom being an outcome that any genuine capitalist would be proud to have engineered. But the report also sounds a warning to U.S. lawmakers: Failure to enact climate and energy legislation will keep investors away from U.S. markets.

"Capital is a free-flowing system," Bruce Kahn a Deutsche Asset Management senior investment analyst and co-author of the report told SolveClimate. "If the U.S. is not an attractive place to invest in renewable energy, capital will flow elsewhere. The German example shows how capital can be attracted when there are a clear set of policies."

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• David Sassoon's blog
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Like a household that has been living beyond its means, the world has been expending more greenhouse gas emitting energy than it can afford.

With the costs of profligate CO2 emissions increasingly apparent and less than 90 days until the start of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen that will determine the successor to the Kyoto Protocol, early September has brought a number of new proposals for achieving carbon reductions.

Among these is a report from the German Advisory Council on Climate Change (WBGU) outlining what the council – an independent scientific advisory board – calls a “budget approach” to reducing CO2 emissions that in effect proposes putting the world on an emissions diet.

The budget approach, explains Stefan Rahmstorf, professor of ocean physics at Potsdam University and WBGU member, is based on the premise that there’s a limited amount – or fixed budget – of CO2 that can be released worldwide between now and 2050 if we’re to avoid raising global temperatures beyond a point that would cause irreversible climate change.

“The fundamental idea behind the budget approach,” says Rahmstorf, is that it ties reduction targets to total – or cumulative – rather than annual CO2 emissions.

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• Elizabeth Grossman's blog
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A consortium of 20 blue chip German firms has thrown its weight behind the gigantic Desertec Sahara solar plan.

A new study helps explain why: The mega project could help spawn 240,000 new green jobs in Germany and deliver up to $2 trillion in profits to companies by 2050, according to the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy.

Desertec was launched in 2007 by the German association of the Club of Rome. Its architects seek to spread a supergrid of concentrating solar thermal plants (CSP) across a 6,500 square-mile stretch of North African desert to eventually power most of Europe.

According to the Wuppertal report, exporting the CSP technologies to Africa and other desert solar hotspots would help German manufacturers build on their already strong solar market share.

CSP "offers great opportunities for German plant builders," the authors wrote. They reveal the nation's likely winners:

Germany plans to bring a slew of new dirty coal plants online by 2012 and even later, Reuters reports. That fact highlights both the extent of its coal addiction and the growing energy and climate dilemma facing the nation as it prepares for a nuclear phase-out.

Specifically, 14 coal plants, totaling 14,000 MW of capacity will open by 2012. At least 9,000 more megawatts worth could be built after 2013.

The news comes at a time of mounting global policy backlash against coal. The UK and Canada are moving to impose moratoriums on new coal plants that don't capture and sequester climate-warming CO2. Germany is moving in the opposite direction.

The German government passed draft laws that would ensure new power plants are "carbon capture ready" in the event that the technology is ever possible. Don't be fooled: That policy provides no commitment to cut CO2. Said NASA climate scientist James Hansen in his famously blunt op-ed, Sword of Damocles:

"The dirtiest trick that governments play on their citizens is the pretense that they are working on 'clean coal.'"

For Germany in particular, this dirty coal boom is a puzzling move. The government has approved some of the world's toughest emissons-reduction targets and is heavily subsidizing a renewable energy economy. Take a look:

GM news of the day: SolarWorld, the Germany-based maker of solar photovoltaic systems, has unveiled plans to take over the German factories of the Detroit automaker's troubled Opel unit. The goal: to convert the cash-starved Opel into "Europe's first green automobile maker," focusing on creating the next generation of fuel-efficient, low-emissions vehicles.

The announcement has "stunned investors in Germany," said CNN.

As rumored, New York-based private equity giant Blackstone Group is pouring $1.5 billion into an offshore wind farm in Germany that will power half a million homes and avert 1.6 million tons of CO2 emissions.

It’s being billed as one of the largest wind projects in the North Sea and should spawn a heap of German "green collar" jobs. Says the Blackstone Group:

It is planned to source all technical expertise and substantially all materials from within Germany.

Why would Blackstone choose Germany for its mammoth project? In the company's own words:

Give hot rocks a chance. That's all the geothermal experts have been saying.

And now, it seems, more and more nations are paying attention.

Take Australia.

By the end of '08, it will shut down the diesel-fueled generators in the southern town of Innaminck (population 12).

And in their place will come the nation's very first geothermal power plant.