Ironically, the Greens core the Ministry of the Environment

Michael Schroeren headed the press department of the Federal Environment Ministry from 1998 to 2009 and from 2014 to 2017 and was spokesman for ministers Jürgen Trittin (Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen), Sigmar Gabriel (SPD) and Barbara Hendricks (SPD)

The Federal Environment Ministry (BMU) was often ridiculed for its limited formal powers, but just as often it was also underestimated. Because the BMU is anything but a weak ministry. On the contrary: It has taken on almost all of the country’s major industrial sectors: with the energy companies on the nuclear phase-out, with the auto industry on emissions levels, with the agricultural lobby on nitrate levels and glyphosate, to name just three examples.

The comparatively small department could only afford this willingness to engage in limited conflict because it was able to rely on social majorities or at least the sympathy of a large part of the public on many controversial issues.

Whatever the blame for the dilution or prevention of environmental laws, for example for a ban on fracking, lay in the Chancellery – the demonstrators always rolled out their banners in front of the BMU first, because they knew that they would find open ears and mostly also open doors there.

You have to remember this astonishing story in order to fully grasp the drastic consequences of the coalition agreement just concluded between the traffic light parties for the BMU. You can see nothing less than the organizational deconstruction and political devaluation of a ministry, the establishment of which can be described as the only institutional success of the ecological movement in Germany.

That would be the material for a tragic comedy on Netflix

The fact that this happens not only with tolerance, but with the active instigation of a party that also has its roots in the environmental movement, would provide material for a tragic comedy on Netflix: “Darling, I have shrunk the BMU!”, Starring: Robert Habeck and Annalena Baerbock.

What happened? The coalition agreement of the traffic light parties provides for the responsibility for the entire climate protection policy to be separated from the Ministry of the Environment and transferred to the Ministry of Economic Affairs, which is to be expanded into a “super ministry”. Once again (as in 2002), major social transformation tasks are to be mastered in the traditionally structurally conservative Ministry of Economics, by packing conflicting interests under its roof and hoping that something good will come of it.

But skepticism is appropriate. And this is not only nourished by bad experiences with super departments, but also by doubts as to whether the pooling of responsibilities is a prerequisite, let alone guarantee, for better politics. The 20-year odyssey of the building and housing sector through the world of federal ministries – from the Ministry of Transport (1998) to the Ministry of the Environment (2013) to the Ministry of the Interior (2018) and back to your own home (2021) – is a cautionary example.

The Ministry of Ecology has already had to give up a lot

On the other hand, the collateral damage that the operation will cause in the Federal Environment Ministry is calculable. The BMU had already had to give up when it came to the departmental cuts in previous legislative periods: In 2014, responsibility for renewable energies, which the first green department head Jürgen Trittin had brought from the Ministry of Economic Affairs in 2002, where they were not taken seriously, went back there.

In 2018, the BMU lost the building and housing departments to Horst Seehofer’s “Home Ministry” without being given any new skills. The fact that climate protection has now been separated from the BMU surpasses everything that has come before. It is tantamount to an amputation of his mainstay, a loss that is not compensated for by the assignment of consumer protection from the Ministry of Justice.

The ministry loses billions in operational budget funds. The program to decarbonise industry alone is designed to run until 2024 at around two billion euros. The BMU has been able to spend 500 to 600 million euros every year on international climate protection projects, plus funds from the “National Climate Protection Initiative”, for which more than 100 million euros are estimated in the current funding period up to the end of 2022.

Gone is the holistic, integral processing of climate protection and its facets, which extend into all areas of environmental policy – biodiversity, soil protection, groundwater protection, flood protection, immission control, and consumer protection. Embedding climate protection in a ministry that is still primarily focused on protecting the economy from consistent climate protection is a daring, perhaps even frivolous experiment. And there was no compelling need for it.

The environmental department should have become the central authority in the transformation

But, it is objected, weren’t climate protection and the transformation of the economy and society the central concerns of Green government participation? Doesn’t that require the entire government work to be geared accordingly? Isn’t it necessary to create a powerful climate protection department? Yes, yes, and yes! Precisely for this reason it would not only have been conceivable, but also more obvious, to make the Ministry of the Environment the central authority in the transformation towards climate neutrality by giving it additional competencies, responsibilities and powers. Which of course would have included putting the Ministry of Economic Affairs under a green leadership finally on the course to climate neutrality.

The BMU is left behind as a torso: a department on the verge of immobility and insignificance, which hardly anyone will be torn and which one must therefore seriously worry about. According to all political experience, there is little to suggest that the dismantling of the BMU that has now begun will ever be reversed. What is more to be feared is that future government formations will deal with him even more unrestrainedly, should the BMU end up on the leftovers as an “environmental thing”.

The new Green Head of Department Steffi Lemke can be trusted and hoped that she will be able to prevent this in the next four years and make the most of the situation with clever initiatives. In any case, it is not because of her that the eco-party Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen has to bear a double responsibility from now on: as those who sponsored the Federal Environment Ministry when the Federal Environment Ministry was born, and at the same time as those who took on the ax 35 years later have laid its existence.