Climate policy – is it all it’s cracked up to be?

17 March 2026, by Dr. Anne Gerstenberg

Photo: UHH/ESRAH/T. Wasilewski

Actually, it’s all pretty straightforward: the European Union has set itself the goal of becoming climate-neutral by 2055, while Germany wants to do so by 2045. Accordingly, it has ratified a Climate Change Act and corresponding regulations are in place. For example, greenhouse gases are to be gradually reduced and climate protection is to be implemented. But if you add up the total CO₂ reduction for all the approved measures, it won’t be enough to achieve our goals.

I asked myself: why don’t targets produce the measures needed in order to actually achieve them? At the University of Hamburg’s Cluster of Excellence for climate research CLICCS, I took a closer look at the process and interviewed the people directly involved in developing these instruments – including staff from various federal ministries, members of the EU and German Parliaments, and experts from economic and environmental associations.

In extensive conversations, I learned a great deal about what they were hoping to achieve and which measures they considered to be suitable. To do so, I used the example of a fairly complex climate instrument: the CO₂ price, which can be modified in various ways. One way is EU emissions trading, which already applies to power plants and industry.

I soon realized: there’s no single roadmap for reducing future greenhouse-gas emissions, as CO₂ touches on nearly every aspect of our day-to-day lives. And when it comes to the question of how we can successfully avoid a climate crisis, there are also various answers.

With regard to the CO₂ price, for instance, it’s all about striking a balance between market and state. While one party wants to leave it all up to supply and demand, due to the higher production costs a second wants to offer companies subsidies, while a third is focused on minimizing the financial burden for the populace. So, to what extent should the state intervene?

For example, given the current CO₂ price, coal power plants are unprofitable and will eventually be shut down – which is good for the climate, but also means people losing their livelihoods. In such cases, should the state provide funding for retraining measures? Further, the upcoming CO₂ price will make heating with gas and kerosene more expensive down the road. Should the state provide a “climate bonus,” and if so, for everyone – or should high-income families be excluded? Who stands to benefit or lose out is the subject of political conflicts: the measures themselves are political.

My analysis also shows that how the politicians surveyed design measures greatly depends on their political standpoint and views; these determine which scientific findings they consider to be trustworthy, and how they use them to forward their own plans.

There are also some actors who engage in “false flag operations”: while paying lip service to protecting the climate, they actually use their influence on emissions trading to protect selected high-emissions industries. As a result, some measures aren’t really what they claim to be. Each is the result of negotiations involving different visions of the future – and many reflect unseen power relations. There’s no such thing as a neutral instrument, which is an aspect that conventional theories on political processes have underestimated to date.

What can we do? From now on, we can start looking at climate protection instruments more as strategies that are shaped by values – which also means that e.g. the negotiations on these measures need to be observed and assessed from a strategic standpoint. And finally: we can recognize that ambitious climate policy can only succeed when the populace clearly signals its support.