More than 47,000 people in Europe died last year due to high temperatures – only 2022 saw more deaths when comparing the past nine years. This summer is also very hot in many parts of Europe. In Greece, the high temperatures have currently led to a wildfire spreading rapidly and threatening the capital, Athens. Such news is already almost commonplace today. If the fight against the climate crisis is not accelerated, they could become even more frequent in the future.
In Argentina, Javier Milei has been significantly slowing down climate policy for over half a year. The President denies climate change and sympathizes with Donald Trump. Milei has dismantled the Ministry of Environment and increased funding for fossil resources. For the time being, it remains unclear how the country will position itself in international climate policy. Lisa Pausch has researched the potential scenarios and how extensively Milei is undermining climate and environmental policy.
Meanwhile, EVs continue to sell poorly in Germany. The negative trend from the first half of the year is continuing in July. While the German government remains committed to the goal of having 15 million EVs on the roads by 2030, experts are less optimistic. They are proposing a 5-point plan, reported by Carsten Hübner.
In world politics, you will also read about China‘s cautiously hopeful emissions decline, Australia’s problematic emissions record, and the US megaprojects of the Inflation Reduction Act, some of which are stalled.
Eight months after President Javier Milei‘s inauguration, Argentina is experiencing a significant setback in climate and environmental policy. The environment ministry no longer exists, with its responsibilities unclear and spread across departments in the foreign ministry and the secretariats for energy and interior. Funding for environmental policy has reportedly decreased by about 65 percent. Meanwhile, the Argentine government is promoting fossil fuel extraction with even greater vigor.
President Milei denies climate change and courts the US Republicans. However, he has not spoken of withdrawing from the Paris Agreement. How the country will align itself in global climate policy remains uncertain and could be decided at COP29 after the US elections. Experts believe that consensus for a necessary energy transition has broken down among political factions.
Because President Milei lacks a majority in parliament, his government took six months to pass its first major legislative package. This includes massive 30-year tax breaks for large investments in mining, fossil fuels and agriculture – with few environmental protection requirements. Initially, the law was also intended to facilitate economic activities around glaciers and in forests but faced so much criticism that these provisions were removed.
The law also provides generous tax incentives for exporting natural resources like oil, gas and lithium. The previous government had also offered advantages to investors but not as lavishly. Critics fear that profits will flow abroad more than before, while the population bears the environmental costs.
The port of Punta Colorada in northern Patagonia has been in the spotlight for the oil industry since at least August 2022, when the provincial government in Rio Negro repealed a 1990s law protecting the coast from oil projects. The partially state-owned Argentine oil company YPF, together with Malaysia’s Petronas, plans to build a liquefied gas export facility there. Germany might be a recipient. However, the region is known as a breeding ground for whales and is home to the UNESCO World Heritage site of the Valdés Peninsula. Plans for an oil export pipeline from the Vaca Muerta area, 500 kilometers away, predate Milei’s term.
Dozens of environmental organizations warn that investors may, in the future, go to court against rules restricting subsidized investments.
Discussions about how Argentina should benefit from its vast oil and gas reserves are not new. There has long been a contradiction between the promise in Argentina’s NDC to emit no more than 349 million tons of CO2 by 2030 and the promise to revive the economy through fossil fuel exports.
“Since 2015, governments of both political stripes have put the energy transition on the agenda. Initial implementation instruments have been developed. I believe this process has now been stopped,” says Christopher Kiessling, an Argentine social scientist studying environmental and climate policy in Argentina and Brazil.
Milei’s predecessor, Alberto Fernández, emphasized the need to reduce emissions in the energy sector before the United Nations. Yet, he also highlighted in parliament the potential of oil and gas from Vaca Muerta and the newly built gas pipeline. To resolve this tension, the Argentine delegation demanded international grants for a local energy transition. Milei, on the other hand, did not even mention climate change in his address to Congress, dismisses it as a “socialist invention“, and is only interested in emissions if they can be turned into foreign currency through carbon credits.
With the dissolution of the environment ministry, expertise at the federal level has also disappeared. “Today, the provinces have no institutional contacts to review their climate action plans, as envisaged by the climate change act,” says Kiessling. The National Cabinet for Climate Change, an entity established in 2016 to create national action plans for the obligations of the Paris Agreement, has not met since Milei took office. The committee, which was founded in 2016, draws up action plans at national level for the commitments of the Paris Agreement.
However, unlike his ideological ally Donald Trump, Milei has not yet announced a withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. Surprisingly, in December 2023, Milei sent the COP-experienced Marcia Levaggi to the climate conference in Dubai, where she assured that Argentina remains part of the Paris Agreement.
Christopher Kiessling estimates that the agreement does not present disadvantages for the government, at least in the short term. However, a withdrawal could still occur in the midterm. “The biggest international pressure against this would likely come from Brazil,” says Kiessling. Since 2016, both countries have collaborated as part of the Grupo Sur climate coalition in international negotiations, benefiting from this partnership.
Argentina’s stance on climate policy is also likely to depend on the outcome of the US presidential elections. Since taking office, Milei has made eleven trips, five of them to the USA. He has not met President Joe Biden once, but has cozied up to Trump and appeared alongside him at conservative and right-wing conferences. “COP29 in Baku is likely to be a test,” says Kiessling. How large the Argentinian delegation will be and who will lead the negotiations is – like so much else – still unclear. Lisa Pausch
EVs continue to sell poorly in Germany, as current figures from the Federal Motor Transport Authority show. According to the data, in July 2024, slightly more than 30,000 EVs were newly registered. This accounts for about 13 percent of all new registrations. Compared to the same month last year, this is a decline of nearly 37 percent.
The negative trend from the first half of the year continued. In contrast, gasoline and diesel vehicles saw a slight increase. The average CO2 emissions of newly registered passenger cars rose to 121 grams per kilometer.
Germany, according to the organization Transport and Environment (T&E), is becoming a stumbling block for e-mobility in the EU. “Germany is the sick man of Europe when it comes to EVs,” says Susanne Goetz, mobility specialist at T&E Germany. An analysis of EU-wide sales figures shows that sales in the 27 member states have risen by just over one percent overall. Without Germany, it would have been more than nine percent.
The coalition agreement of the SPD, Greens and FDP included a commitment to make Germany a “lead market for electromobility”. To achieve this, more than 15 million EVs are supposed to be on German roads by 2030. However, this seems increasingly unrealistic. At the beginning of the year, there were only about 1.4 million. The number would have to more than tenfold.
The think tank Agora Verkehrswende has calculated that to achieve this, 5,500 new EVs would need to be registered every day in the coming years. In the first half of 2024, it was only 1,012 per day.
Given the weak market development, the goal of 15 million electric cars will likely be missed by around six million vehicles, according to the study “Last Chance for 15 Million EVs by 2030” recently presented by Agora Verkehrswende and the strategy consulting firm Boston Consulting Group (BCG).
“This would not only push the emissions target for the transport sector for 2030 far out of reach, but also the long-term overarching goal of making all areas of life in Germany climate-neutral by 2045 would be endangered.” Moreover, “the unavoidable structural change in the automotive economy” could face turbulence, the authors warn.
The Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport (BMDV) stated upon request that it is sticking to the goal of 15 million EVs by 2030. “This target arises from the necessary CO2 reduction in the transport sector, but is not based on state planning specifications; it must be achieved through market dynamics,” said a spokeswoman. The BMDV is therefore pursuing a technology-open approach so that other options, like fuel cell drives and e-fuels, can also contribute to climate action.
The reasons for the deadlock are largely homemade. An important factor is that in the traditionally conservative automotive market in Germany, inexpensive entry-level models from domestic manufacturers are missing.
Another reason is that EVs are still significantly more expensive than comparable vehicles with diesel or gasoline engines. Nevertheless, the federal government abolished the so-called environmental bonus last year – first for commercial customers in September, and then unexpectedly for private buyers in December.
Adding to the confusion are the contradictory signals from the German government regarding phasing out combustion engines. An EU regulation from last year stipulates that no new cars with combustion engines may be registered from 2035. The only exceptions: vehicles that can be powered exclusively by e-fuels or biofuels. The FDP insists on this under the term of technological openness, while SPD and Greens continue to focus on electromobility.
This not only contributes to buyer hesitation but also unsettles the automotive industry. Without clear political and regulatory frameworks, their willingness to direct billions in investments solely into electromobility decreases – especially since good business can still be conducted with combustion engines.
A backward movement is already noticeable. Following Mercedes CEO Ola Källenius, VW CFO Arno Antlitz recently also announced investments in combustion engine technology. In addition to 120 billion euros for electrification and digitalization, 60 billion euros are also planned by 2028 to “keep combustion engines competitive in the future,” Antlitz told Auto Motor and Sport.
The automobile club ACE has outlined a five-point plan to still achieve the targeted 15 million EVs. “A clear commitment to electromobility, underpinned by the right political measures,” could create the necessary trust, says ACE Chairman Stefan Heimlich. The plan includes:
The think tank Agora Verkehrswende goes a step further by proposing closer cooperation with Chinese manufacturers. “Anyone who wants to achieve climate targets and secure Germany’s automotive base in the long term should push for a rapid ramp-up of electromobility, including Chinese companies,” suggests Agora Director Christian Hochfeld.
Such cooperation could also address technological development gaps, particularly in battery technology. “Chinese products, especially in the low-cost small vehicle segment, can help accelerate the market’s ramp-up for EVs in Europe. The German government and the EU should consider this in negotiations over import tariffs on electric cars from China,” Hochfeld advises.
Currently, the debate around the new climate finance goal (NCQG) dominates international climate policy. What’s getting overlooked is that countries are expected to submit their next NDCs, with targets for 2035, by Feb. 12, 2025. UNFCCC Secretary Simon Stiell has described these as the “most important climate documents produced so far this century in securing the safety and prosperity of your peoples“.
NDCs are the central innovation of the Paris Agreement: For the first time, all countries, not just industrialized ones, committed to making contributions to emissions reductions. However, these targets are nationally determined, lack sanctions for insufficient implementation, and progress is hard to measure due to a lack of transparency and comparability. Current NDCs, if fully implemented, would lead to a temperature rise of up to 2.6 degrees Celsius.
The second generation of NDCs delivered primarily qualitative improvements. The upcoming update, coined “NDCs 3.0” by the UN and other stakeholders, aims to make a quantitative difference through two new requirements:
The approach for the new NDCs faces a political problem that it attempts to address with predominantly technical means. It is rooted in the relationship between mitigation and financing. Given the limited remaining CO2 budget for 1.5-degree pathways and the vast financing gap, conflicts over the fair distribution of mitigation burdens and their financing are likely to become the focal point of international climate policy – exactly the tensions NDCs are supposed to overcome. The extent to which the financing issue is increasingly hardening divisions between industrialized and developing countries was recently evident at the SBs in Bonn.
While the concept of NDCs 3.0 as investment plans implies that ambitious NDCs are a prerequisite for more financing, developing countries argue the opposite: Their climate goals depend on the level of climate financing provided by industrialized countries. The troika of the COP presidencies from the United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan and Brazil explicitly supported this at the year’s outset.
Ultimately, whether this demand can be justified by the Paris Agreement is secondary, because:
No diplomatic initiative will solve the structural political problems alone. NDC diplomacy should aim to mitigate existing conflicts and attempt to replicate the success of COP28 – enabled by a progressive coalition of industrialized and developing countries. The German government can also contribute:
Whether the NDC 3.0 approach can initiate the necessary course correction in international climate policy remains to be seen. What is clear is that the challenge is enormous.
Ole Adolphsen, Jule Könneke, and Dr. Sonja Thielges work as researchers on international climate policy at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP). This article is based on a text published in the SWP-Aktuell series.
More than 47,000 people in Europe died last year due to high temperatures – only 2022 saw more deaths when comparing the past nine years. This summer is also very hot in many parts of Europe. In Greece, the high temperatures have currently led to a wildfire spreading rapidly and threatening the capital, Athens. Such news is already almost commonplace today. If the fight against the climate crisis is not accelerated, they could become even more frequent in the future.
In Argentina, Javier Milei has been significantly slowing down climate policy for over half a year. The President denies climate change and sympathizes with Donald Trump. Milei has dismantled the Ministry of Environment and increased funding for fossil resources. For the time being, it remains unclear how the country will position itself in international climate policy. Lisa Pausch has researched the potential scenarios and how extensively Milei is undermining climate and environmental policy.
Meanwhile, EVs continue to sell poorly in Germany. The negative trend from the first half of the year is continuing in July. While the German government remains committed to the goal of having 15 million EVs on the roads by 2030, experts are less optimistic. They are proposing a 5-point plan, reported by Carsten Hübner.
In world politics, you will also read about China‘s cautiously hopeful emissions decline, Australia’s problematic emissions record, and the US megaprojects of the Inflation Reduction Act, some of which are stalled.
Eight months after President Javier Milei‘s inauguration, Argentina is experiencing a significant setback in climate and environmental policy. The environment ministry no longer exists, with its responsibilities unclear and spread across departments in the foreign ministry and the secretariats for energy and interior. Funding for environmental policy has reportedly decreased by about 65 percent. Meanwhile, the Argentine government is promoting fossil fuel extraction with even greater vigor.
President Milei denies climate change and courts the US Republicans. However, he has not spoken of withdrawing from the Paris Agreement. How the country will align itself in global climate policy remains uncertain and could be decided at COP29 after the US elections. Experts believe that consensus for a necessary energy transition has broken down among political factions.
Because President Milei lacks a majority in parliament, his government took six months to pass its first major legislative package. This includes massive 30-year tax breaks for large investments in mining, fossil fuels and agriculture – with few environmental protection requirements. Initially, the law was also intended to facilitate economic activities around glaciers and in forests but faced so much criticism that these provisions were removed.
The law also provides generous tax incentives for exporting natural resources like oil, gas and lithium. The previous government had also offered advantages to investors but not as lavishly. Critics fear that profits will flow abroad more than before, while the population bears the environmental costs.
The port of Punta Colorada in northern Patagonia has been in the spotlight for the oil industry since at least August 2022, when the provincial government in Rio Negro repealed a 1990s law protecting the coast from oil projects. The partially state-owned Argentine oil company YPF, together with Malaysia’s Petronas, plans to build a liquefied gas export facility there. Germany might be a recipient. However, the region is known as a breeding ground for whales and is home to the UNESCO World Heritage site of the Valdés Peninsula. Plans for an oil export pipeline from the Vaca Muerta area, 500 kilometers away, predate Milei’s term.
Dozens of environmental organizations warn that investors may, in the future, go to court against rules restricting subsidized investments.
Discussions about how Argentina should benefit from its vast oil and gas reserves are not new. There has long been a contradiction between the promise in Argentina’s NDC to emit no more than 349 million tons of CO2 by 2030 and the promise to revive the economy through fossil fuel exports.
“Since 2015, governments of both political stripes have put the energy transition on the agenda. Initial implementation instruments have been developed. I believe this process has now been stopped,” says Christopher Kiessling, an Argentine social scientist studying environmental and climate policy in Argentina and Brazil.
Milei’s predecessor, Alberto Fernández, emphasized the need to reduce emissions in the energy sector before the United Nations. Yet, he also highlighted in parliament the potential of oil and gas from Vaca Muerta and the newly built gas pipeline. To resolve this tension, the Argentine delegation demanded international grants for a local energy transition. Milei, on the other hand, did not even mention climate change in his address to Congress, dismisses it as a “socialist invention“, and is only interested in emissions if they can be turned into foreign currency through carbon credits.
With the dissolution of the environment ministry, expertise at the federal level has also disappeared. “Today, the provinces have no institutional contacts to review their climate action plans, as envisaged by the climate change act,” says Kiessling. The National Cabinet for Climate Change, an entity established in 2016 to create national action plans for the obligations of the Paris Agreement, has not met since Milei took office. The committee, which was founded in 2016, draws up action plans at national level for the commitments of the Paris Agreement.
However, unlike his ideological ally Donald Trump, Milei has not yet announced a withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. Surprisingly, in December 2023, Milei sent the COP-experienced Marcia Levaggi to the climate conference in Dubai, where she assured that Argentina remains part of the Paris Agreement.
Christopher Kiessling estimates that the agreement does not present disadvantages for the government, at least in the short term. However, a withdrawal could still occur in the midterm. “The biggest international pressure against this would likely come from Brazil,” says Kiessling. Since 2016, both countries have collaborated as part of the Grupo Sur climate coalition in international negotiations, benefiting from this partnership.
Argentina’s stance on climate policy is also likely to depend on the outcome of the US presidential elections. Since taking office, Milei has made eleven trips, five of them to the USA. He has not met President Joe Biden once, but has cozied up to Trump and appeared alongside him at conservative and right-wing conferences. “COP29 in Baku is likely to be a test,” says Kiessling. How large the Argentinian delegation will be and who will lead the negotiations is – like so much else – still unclear. Lisa Pausch
EVs continue to sell poorly in Germany, as current figures from the Federal Motor Transport Authority show. According to the data, in July 2024, slightly more than 30,000 EVs were newly registered. This accounts for about 13 percent of all new registrations. Compared to the same month last year, this is a decline of nearly 37 percent.
The negative trend from the first half of the year continued. In contrast, gasoline and diesel vehicles saw a slight increase. The average CO2 emissions of newly registered passenger cars rose to 121 grams per kilometer.
Germany, according to the organization Transport and Environment (T&E), is becoming a stumbling block for e-mobility in the EU. “Germany is the sick man of Europe when it comes to EVs,” says Susanne Goetz, mobility specialist at T&E Germany. An analysis of EU-wide sales figures shows that sales in the 27 member states have risen by just over one percent overall. Without Germany, it would have been more than nine percent.
The coalition agreement of the SPD, Greens and FDP included a commitment to make Germany a “lead market for electromobility”. To achieve this, more than 15 million EVs are supposed to be on German roads by 2030. However, this seems increasingly unrealistic. At the beginning of the year, there were only about 1.4 million. The number would have to more than tenfold.
The think tank Agora Verkehrswende has calculated that to achieve this, 5,500 new EVs would need to be registered every day in the coming years. In the first half of 2024, it was only 1,012 per day.
Given the weak market development, the goal of 15 million electric cars will likely be missed by around six million vehicles, according to the study “Last Chance for 15 Million EVs by 2030” recently presented by Agora Verkehrswende and the strategy consulting firm Boston Consulting Group (BCG).
“This would not only push the emissions target for the transport sector for 2030 far out of reach, but also the long-term overarching goal of making all areas of life in Germany climate-neutral by 2045 would be endangered.” Moreover, “the unavoidable structural change in the automotive economy” could face turbulence, the authors warn.
The Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport (BMDV) stated upon request that it is sticking to the goal of 15 million EVs by 2030. “This target arises from the necessary CO2 reduction in the transport sector, but is not based on state planning specifications; it must be achieved through market dynamics,” said a spokeswoman. The BMDV is therefore pursuing a technology-open approach so that other options, like fuel cell drives and e-fuels, can also contribute to climate action.
The reasons for the deadlock are largely homemade. An important factor is that in the traditionally conservative automotive market in Germany, inexpensive entry-level models from domestic manufacturers are missing.
Another reason is that EVs are still significantly more expensive than comparable vehicles with diesel or gasoline engines. Nevertheless, the federal government abolished the so-called environmental bonus last year – first for commercial customers in September, and then unexpectedly for private buyers in December.
Adding to the confusion are the contradictory signals from the German government regarding phasing out combustion engines. An EU regulation from last year stipulates that no new cars with combustion engines may be registered from 2035. The only exceptions: vehicles that can be powered exclusively by e-fuels or biofuels. The FDP insists on this under the term of technological openness, while SPD and Greens continue to focus on electromobility.
This not only contributes to buyer hesitation but also unsettles the automotive industry. Without clear political and regulatory frameworks, their willingness to direct billions in investments solely into electromobility decreases – especially since good business can still be conducted with combustion engines.
A backward movement is already noticeable. Following Mercedes CEO Ola Källenius, VW CFO Arno Antlitz recently also announced investments in combustion engine technology. In addition to 120 billion euros for electrification and digitalization, 60 billion euros are also planned by 2028 to “keep combustion engines competitive in the future,” Antlitz told Auto Motor and Sport.
The automobile club ACE has outlined a five-point plan to still achieve the targeted 15 million EVs. “A clear commitment to electromobility, underpinned by the right political measures,” could create the necessary trust, says ACE Chairman Stefan Heimlich. The plan includes:
The think tank Agora Verkehrswende goes a step further by proposing closer cooperation with Chinese manufacturers. “Anyone who wants to achieve climate targets and secure Germany’s automotive base in the long term should push for a rapid ramp-up of electromobility, including Chinese companies,” suggests Agora Director Christian Hochfeld.
Such cooperation could also address technological development gaps, particularly in battery technology. “Chinese products, especially in the low-cost small vehicle segment, can help accelerate the market’s ramp-up for EVs in Europe. The German government and the EU should consider this in negotiations over import tariffs on electric cars from China,” Hochfeld advises.
Currently, the debate around the new climate finance goal (NCQG) dominates international climate policy. What’s getting overlooked is that countries are expected to submit their next NDCs, with targets for 2035, by Feb. 12, 2025. UNFCCC Secretary Simon Stiell has described these as the “most important climate documents produced so far this century in securing the safety and prosperity of your peoples“.
NDCs are the central innovation of the Paris Agreement: For the first time, all countries, not just industrialized ones, committed to making contributions to emissions reductions. However, these targets are nationally determined, lack sanctions for insufficient implementation, and progress is hard to measure due to a lack of transparency and comparability. Current NDCs, if fully implemented, would lead to a temperature rise of up to 2.6 degrees Celsius.
The second generation of NDCs delivered primarily qualitative improvements. The upcoming update, coined “NDCs 3.0” by the UN and other stakeholders, aims to make a quantitative difference through two new requirements:
The approach for the new NDCs faces a political problem that it attempts to address with predominantly technical means. It is rooted in the relationship between mitigation and financing. Given the limited remaining CO2 budget for 1.5-degree pathways and the vast financing gap, conflicts over the fair distribution of mitigation burdens and their financing are likely to become the focal point of international climate policy – exactly the tensions NDCs are supposed to overcome. The extent to which the financing issue is increasingly hardening divisions between industrialized and developing countries was recently evident at the SBs in Bonn.
While the concept of NDCs 3.0 as investment plans implies that ambitious NDCs are a prerequisite for more financing, developing countries argue the opposite: Their climate goals depend on the level of climate financing provided by industrialized countries. The troika of the COP presidencies from the United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan and Brazil explicitly supported this at the year’s outset.
Ultimately, whether this demand can be justified by the Paris Agreement is secondary, because:
No diplomatic initiative will solve the structural political problems alone. NDC diplomacy should aim to mitigate existing conflicts and attempt to replicate the success of COP28 – enabled by a progressive coalition of industrialized and developing countries. The German government can also contribute:
Whether the NDC 3.0 approach can initiate the necessary course correction in international climate policy remains to be seen. What is clear is that the challenge is enormous.
Ole Adolphsen, Jule Könneke, and Dr. Sonja Thielges work as researchers on international climate policy at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP). This article is based on a text published in the SWP-Aktuell series.
