The 1980s saw the continued politicization of environmental topics in West Germany. While acid rain and the “forest death” it caused provoked outrage and demands for action from many Germans, the new Green Party’s entrance into parliament in 1983 shocked the political establishment. By 1986, amid a fierce ...
(Show more)The 1980s saw the continued politicization of environmental topics in West Germany. While acid rain and the “forest death” it caused provoked outrage and demands for action from many Germans, the new Green Party’s entrance into parliament in 1983 shocked the political establishment. By 1986, amid a fierce public debate about the planned Wackersdorf nuclear fuel reprocessing center, and in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster, debates over nuclear energy reached fever pitch. And yet, climate change, the issue which Chancellor Helmut Kohl deemed in 1987 the “greatest environmental problem” of the era, seemed to be a matter of political consensus rather than contention.
This paper asks how and why protecting the climate became a matter of widespread political consensus in late 1980s West Germany. Focusing particularly on the Bundestag’s Enquête Committee on “Precaution for Protection of the Earth’s Atmosphere” (1987-1990), it shows how a seemingly apolitical, scientific approach was applied to climate change, and how politicians consciously decided to separate the issue of climate change from contentious subjects like nuclear energy or the destruction of the tropical rainforest, despite the fact that those matters were closely linked to climate change. Placing the Enquête Committee’s work into a longer context, then, this paper shows how the emergence of alternative research institutes, the Greens’ entrance into the political mainstream, and establishment politicians’ eagerness to prove that they were serious about environmental protection—all of which were on display within the committee itself—helped “climate protection” emerge as a separate and less contentious area of environmental politics.
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