The German Greens have adopted an election programme for the European Parliament that stresses the need for carbon capture and storage.
The German Green Party, like most of their European counterparts, has long opposed carbon capture and storage (CCS) as a costly distraction from efforts to reduce global warming CO2 emissions.
The party’s reluctance to change its position has long prevented the adoption of a coherent carbon and CCS strategy, as required by successive Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports.
Now the party is reversing this position and campaigning for the 2024 EU elections on a platform open to this technology. In hard-to-recover sectors such as the cement industry, “we want to take advantage of technological opportunities and capture, store and, if necessary, use CO2 directly in the production process,” says the Greens’ new party programme. It added:
“We strive to create a standardised regulatory framework across Europe and to develop an integrated European infrastructure, including common European CO2 storage facilities.”
For the German Greens, the decision was a historic moment.
Ottmar Edenhofer, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research and author of the IPCC, compared their refusal to consider carbon capture to the reluctance of German conservatives to take on debt.
Robert Habeck, Germany’s minister for the green economy and climate change, has championed the idea of sending German CO2 to Norway, which has usually drawn rebukes from his party.
The shift should also be positive news for Brussels, where the European Commission is working on an “industrial carbon management” plan due to be published in the coming weeks.
Sources said previous attempts to launch such a European strategy had failed due to high-level opposition to CCS at the European Commission.
A change of stance by the German Greens could now change the situation. In its programme, the party stresses the need to introduce “negative emissions targets” at national and EU level in order to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and meet UN climate goals.
