Germany floods spotlight climate change
BERLIN — With deaths surpassing 160 and rescue efforts intensifying, the once-ina-millennium floods that ravaged Germany and Western Europe this week had by Saturday thrust the issue of climatechange to the center of Germany’s politics and its campaign for pivotal elections this fall that will replace Chancellor Angela Merkel after16 years in power.
The receding floodwaters revealed not only extensive damage but also bitter political divides on climate policy in a week when the European Union rolled out the globe’s most ambitious proposals to cut carbon emissions in the nextdecade.
“The Weather is Political,” Germany’s ARD public television said in its lead editorial onthe Friday evening news.
The death toll in Germany climbed to at least 143 Saturday, while the toll across the border in Belgium stood at 27, the authorities there said.
More than 90 of those who died in Germany lived in towns and villages in the Ahr River valley in the western state of Rhineland-Palatinate, the police said. Ms. Merkel,
who has said she will leave politics after the election, was expected to visit the district Sunday to survey the scope of the destruction, her office said. She spoke with the governor of Rhineland-Palatinate by video link Friday, hours after touching down in Berlin fromher trip to Washington.
The chancellor and President Joe Biden signed a pact that included a commitment to “taking urgent action to address the climate crisis,” which is to include stronger collaboration “on the policies and energy technologies neededto accelerate the global net-zerotransition.”
The European Union’s ambitious blueprint, announced Wednesday, is part of plans to make the 27-country bloc carbon-neutralby 2050, and it will arguably affect no European country more than Germany, the continent’s largest economy and its industrial powerhouse.
Armin Laschet, 60, the conservative governor of North Rhine-Westphalia, who is looking to succeed Ms. Merkel, has lauded his regional government for passing legislation on climate change, but critics point to the open-pit soft coal mines in the state that are still threatening local villages and his repeated emphasis on the importance of Germany remaining an industrial power house.
When pressed Thursday during an interview on WDR local public television over whether the floods would be a catalyst for him to take a stancetoward climate change, Mr. Laschet snapped at the moderator.
“I am a governor, not an activist,” he said. “Just because we have had a day like this does not mean we change our politics.”
Annalena Baerbock, 40, whois the Greens party candidate for chancellor and Mr. Laschet’s strongest rival, cut short her vacation to visit stricken areas in RhinelandPalatinate Friday.
“Climate protection is now: In all areas of climate protection, we need to step up our game and take effective climate protection measures with an immediate climate protection program,” Ms. Baerbocksaid.