Headline:

The availability of renewable energy is an important factor for future investment decisions in the chemical and steel industry. This is a key finding of our survey of 300 decision-makers from the chemical and steel industry. 92 per cent of the respondents anticipate that their company will relocate facilities as it seeks to decarbonize production. In addition to low-cost renewable energies, the respondents identify political support as a key factor in investment location decisions.

In February 2023, the EU presented the Green Deal Industrial Plan, in which it laid out its strategy for the green transition in industry and energy. Green hydrogen will be an essential cornerstone of this transition. The scale-up of renewable hydrogen production and its use in industry and transport has the potential to achieve decarbonization where direct electrification is not an option. Green hydrogen also offers opportunities to develop technological leadership and economic perspectives within a future net-zero economy.

The European continent dominated the global hydrogen race before 2022, with France, the Netherlands, Norway, Germany, Spain, Portugal, and the European Union all presenting ambitious hydrogen strategies by 2020 that outlined their major areas of action and objectives, along with key policy interventions to achieve those goals. Nonetheless, in the fall of 2022, the world's attention shifted to the United States. An initial draft of its long-awaited Clean Hydrogen Strategy and Roadmap was published by the US Department of Energy (DOE), and in the summer of 2023, the final version of the strategy was issued (U.S. National Clean Hydrogen Strategy and Roadmap, referred to hereafter as “the strategy”).

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has intensified European policymakers’ interest in developing energy trade relations with Canada, as the former is seeking to identify reliable partners to swiftly diversify its fossil fuel imports.

Abundant energy resources in many parts of Africa position the continent as a potential location for the production and export of climate-friendly hydrogen, either based on renewable electricity (green hydrogen) or natural gas in combination with carbon capture and storage technologies (blue hydrogen). Green hydrogen is produced via electrolysis by splitting water molecules into their component parts using renewable electricity, while blue hydrogen is produced by splitting natural gas into hydrogen and CO2 – after which the CO2 needs to be captured and stored.

The Covid-19 pandemic gives us a glimpse of what climate change has in store for us concerning our globalized economic system. More research is needed to help us better understand these complex interconnections and to translate such insights into instruments to support decision-making.

The G7 Summit in June offers an opportunity to provide tangible funding commitments to developing countries in the fight against climate change. If offers fall short, the world faces the risk that rising global inequality will derail international climate efforts, writes Dr Rainer Quitzow.

Thanks to plummeting prices for electricity generated from renewables, the energy transition in the electricity sector has really taken off. It has also been at the forefront of recent public debates on the coal exit and minimum distance rules for wind turbines. But it is the heating sector that accounts for most of Germany’s energy consumption: According to the German Environment Agency, building heating alone represents around 32 per cent of the country’s total energy consumption. So the energy transition in the heating sector is a key arena for successful climate protection. The Building Energy Act (Gebäudeenergiegesetz) adopted by the German Bundestag on 18 June explicitly refers to the need for action in this sector.

The corona pandemic caught our society off guard. That is one reason for the scale of the crisis. This makes it all the more important to learn from the current situation, not least in the area of climate and energy policy. In what follows, I discuss the lessons we can draw from the crisis in reflections clustered around the terms vulnerability, resilience and solidarity.

In the upcoming days Japan will hosts its first ever G20 Summit. As the main contributers to global warming, the G20 states agreed 2009 on a phase out plan of fossil fuel subsidies. Ten years later the failure of the G20 to act on global warming is evident: around $63.9 billion was spent by G20 countries this year to develop coal industries in the global south.

Without China, little can change in Africa. This is why Germany should work closely with Beijing on the issue of investments in climate-friendly infrastructure in Africa. Following the USA’s announcement of its withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, the international community is facing the first serious crisis of global climate policy since the breakthrough in 2015. Initially, this may not have much impact on reducing emissions in the USA itself.

What does reforming the international monetary system have to do with saving the climate? As it happens quite a bit, says Robert Wade, Professor for Political Economy and Development at the London School of Economics. At a guest lecture at the IASS on 15 June, he described a number of proposals for reducing macroeconomic imbalances and strengthening the resilience of the international financial system.

In its most recent report, the German government’s Expert Commission on Research and Innovation criticised Germany’s feed-in tariff for renewable energy and the associated costs for electricity consumers based on two central claims. Firstly, the rapid diffusion of renewable energy – so the commission argues – has no effect on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.