ONCE upon a time, Angela Merkel was a green heroine. As Germany鈥檚 environment minister in the 1990s she chaired talks that led to the Kyoto protocol. Now she is chancellor and greens call her Darth Merkel for defending her coal and car industries and for watering down the climate change package at the European Union鈥檚 Brussels summit last week (see 鈥淲orld leaders 鈥榝ailing to get鈥� climate message鈥�). Europe has chickened out on climate change. Merkel is mainly responsible 鈥� and as a qualified chemist she should know better.
As a result, the politics of climate change has been turned on its head. The old villain, the US, is our best hope 鈥� and a good one, too, because Barack Obama is serious. Three cheers for his choice as energy secretary of Steven Chu, who has championed plans for a nationwide super-grid to bring solar electricity out of the west and wind power out of the plains (see 鈥淣obel laureate is next US energy secretary鈥�). The grid looks likely to be the centrepiece of Obama鈥檚 grand plan for reviving the US economy with green jobs that will build a green infrastructure. Shame on Europe for not backing a similar proposal to tap into power from the Saharan sun, Scandinavian rivers, Icelandic hot rocks and North Sea winds.
An Obama administration could yet turn the world on to renewables. The UN Climate Change Conference in Poznan, Poland, which ended last week, demonstrate how urgent a task that is. The one bright spot to emerge was the promise by UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon to convene a summit at which he will try to make heads of government see sense. We need a new treaty. But the lesson of these ever more tortuous negotiations is that treaties only work in combination with political will, technology and, inevitably, the pursuit of profit.
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