Germany has committed to phasing out fossil fuels by 2045, and the government’s new roadmap says, for the first time, that it will explicitly “transition away” from them. The document, published on Wednesday, is being sold as climate seriousness. It also reads like a familiar state compromise: a promise on paper, a fight over who gets to keep burning, and a long list of targets that will be enforced from above while ordinary people are told to adjust.
Brussels-Style Planning, Berlin-Style Delay
The roadmap raises the share of electricity generated from renewables from 55% to 80% by 2030. It also sets an additional 12GW of onshore wind and a target of 215GW of solar energy by 2030. The government reaffirmed its previously stated target of winding down coal use in the next decade, with a view to an exit from coal in 2038, and said there could be an earlier target of 2035. Methane emissions, the plan says, will be cut by 30% by 2030, in line with a global methane pledge signed in 2021.
That is the official script. The machinery behind it is less tidy. Andreas Sieber, head of global political strategy at 350.org, called the plan a “notable shift” in making the phaseout of fossil fuels an explicit policy goal. But he also warned that Germany’s ministry for economic affairs and energy was pushing intensely for greater use of gas. “The economic ministry keeps sabotaging the transition away from fossil fuels,” he said. “This year has shown in the starkest terms that fossil-fuel dependence is a risk for everyone as it exposes households and businesses in Germany and around the world to price shocks, volatility and geopolitical insecurity.”
That’s the state in miniature: one arm announces transition, another arm keeps the gas taps open. The people below get the bills, the volatility, and the lectures.
Who Gets the Transition, Who Gets the Costs
Germany’s former climate envoy Jennifer Morgan said the government must put more effort into electrifying transport and heating. “Accelerating the shift from coal, oil and gas to clean renewables will bolster energy independence and insulate consumers from price shocks at a critical moment,” she said. “However, a roadmap is only the starting line.” She said the strategy must be paired with a faster, more deliberate rollout of green electrification.
The language is polished, but the pressure point is obvious. Energy policy is being managed as a question of national resilience, consumer insulation, and industrial control, not as a democratic break with fossil dependence. The roadmap sets targets. The ministry fights over gas. Households and businesses are left to absorb the consequences when prices jump and policy lurches.
The push for heat pumps to replace gas boilers came under attack from the far-right wing of German politics after a heating law was passed in 2023 that would have banned the installation of most oil and gas heating. Alternative für Deutschland made the issue a key campaigning point and forced a watering down of the rules earlier this year, while the party’s co-leader Alice Weidel has described wind turbines as “windmills of shame”. Heat pumps now make up about half of all new domestic heating systems.
That fight shows how quickly climate policy becomes a battlefield for parties that want to keep the old order intact, even when they dress it up as common sense. The law was passed. Then it was watered down. The boilers stayed in the frame.
The Climate Circus Keeps Rolling
Germany is the third major developed economy to publish such a roadmap, after France and the Netherlands, following a major international conference in Colombia in April at which all participants promised to set out plans for a full phaseout of fossil fuels. It comes after nations debated how to expand their currently inadequate efforts to tackle the climate crisis at the UN general assembly in New York.
António Guterres, the UN secretary-general, has been a strong advocate of climate action for his 10 years in office, but the end of his term this December has raised fears that his successor may be less firm. The whole arrangement depends on declarations, conferences, and the hope that the next office-holder will keep repeating the right phrases. Meanwhile, the fossil-fuel system remains in place, and the states that claim to manage it keep bargaining over pace, optics, and political damage.
The UK has still not published its pledge to phase out fossil fuels, and will take up the presidency of the G20 group of developed and developing economies in December, for which the climate and the soaring costs of oil and gas are expected to be key issues. Another summit. Another presidency. Another round of promises about a crisis that keeps grinding through homes, workplaces, and heating systems while governments argue over who gets to control the timetable.
Germany’s roadmap is a real document, with real targets. It is also a reminder that the state’s preferred answer to ecological collapse is managed transition from above, with ministries, pledges, and deadlines, while the fight over who pays and who profits stays exactly where power wants it.