Berlin. The state has a wide variety of tasks. It is meant to ensure internal and external security. It is meant to provide the infrastructure citizens need for their everyday lives. It is meant to offer educational opportunities and cultural venues. And it should enforce rules that everyone must follow, because that makes life easier and better for each individual. For example, in road traffic. Or in environmental protection. In a democracy, it is ultimately the sovereign – that is, the citizens – who decide which rules the state should establish and how they should be enforced.
Not so in Germany. Between the North Sea and the Alps, people appear to be driven above all by one mission: to save the world. All other issues and problems are secondary to that noble goal. Because whatever Germans do, they do properly. Half measures are frowned upon. Either you speed down the motorway at 220 km/h or you are a climate activist. Either you devour mountains of roast meat and sausages or you are a hard-core vegan. Healthy moderation is rather alien to the average German.
Judicial climate policy instead of democratic deliberation
You need to know this to understand the scale of what German courts have now set in motion. Take the Federal Administrative Court (BVerwG) in Leipzig, for example. For non-lawyers, the BVerwG is the highest German court in all disputes concerning the relationship between citizens and the state. This includes commercial law, tax law and school law. Whether climate policy belongs in this category is debatable. Unlike a traffic ticket issued by the police, climate policy has no immediate or direct impact on individuals.
Nevertheless, the organisation Deutsche Umwelthilfe (DUH, German Environmental Aid) brought legal action against what it considered to be the German government’s inadequate climate protection programme for 2023 – and the judges at the BVerwG ruled in its favour. The government must now readjust its climate policy and align it with climate targets.
At first glance, this may not sound particularly spectacular, but it is. In other words, according to the highest court ruling, German politics must subordinate all other tasks to climate targets. If necessary, following the logic of the ruling, the government must put other political goals such as economic growth, infrastructure development or the promotion of prosperity on hold in favour of climate policy. It sounds crazy, and it is – but there is a method to it. After all, we are in Germany.
Class action lawsuits and the long arm of activism
The DUH, which had filed a lawsuit against the federal government, is one of the most unspeakable lobby groups in Germany. Its business model essentially consists of issuing warnings to companies, campaigning and lobbying. For years, the DUH has been trying to impose its climate policy ideas on the rest of the country, bypassing democratic processes and parliamentary decisions. To this end, it initiates test cases and instrumentalises the courts, which, in a mixture of opportunism towards the woke-green zeitgeist and adherence to the DUH’s legal logic, have repeatedly ruled in its favour in the past.
To make matters worse, the DUH is subsidised every year by German taxpayers. It has been receiving millions from the federal budget for years and acts on numerous projects directly on behalf of the state.
The DUH then takes great pleasure in suing the same state and fighting pretty much everything it considers harmful to the environment, from private transport in citizens’ own cars to diesel engines.
This questionable form of political activism is made possible by an unfortunate construct of German and European law: class action lawsuits. These were initially created with the good intention of protecting legal interests that are not in a position to assert their rights themselves – individual consumers against powerful companies, for example, or nature against political or economic interests. This approach, which is sensible in principle, has got out of hand amid rampant climate hysteria, as the Leipzig ruling shows.
The court states that the German government’s climate protection programme must include all measures “necessary to achieve the binding national climate protection target for 2030”. However, the target of “reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 65 per cent compared to 1990” will not be met, which is why the federal government must “supplement the programme, taking into account the development of greenhouse gas emissions since then”.
Climate, climate above all else
In plain language, this means that climate protection takes precedence over everything else. Over economic security. Over social peace. Over democracy. The ruling of the Federal Administrative Court amounts to a capitulation of the democratic state. This is all the more serious given that the Federal Republic of Germany’s compliance with climate targets has no relevant impact on the global climate. In other words, Germany is submitting to a purely ideologically motivated climate dictate – and a completely pointless one at that.
However, the ruling by the highest administrative judges did not come as a complete surprise. Back in 2021, the Federal Constitutional Court – also in response to a lawsuit filed by the DUH – had already elevated climate neutrality to a German national objective in a landmark ruling, even if this entailed far-reaching transformations. According to the constitutional judges at the time, it could not be ruled out that “CO2-relevant use of freedom would have to be essentially prohibited at some point”. This amounts to a dangerous carte blanche to undermine civil rights of all kinds with reference to the climate – even if the climate does not change as a result.
Trees instead of safe roads
In view of such encroachments on the civil liberties of every individual, a recent ruling by the Berlin Administrative Court seems downright trivial. Here, too, an environmental association filed a lawsuit and won. The court ruled that the use of road salt to combat black ice in Berlin is once again prohibited with immediate effect. The background to the ruling was the prolonged and still dangerous cold spell in the German capital, combined with snow and freezing rain.
Given the danger posed by black ice, especially to older people, Berlin’s Environment Senator Ute Bonde (CDU) lifted the ban on the use of road salt at the end of January by means of an immediately enforceable general ruling. One might shake one’s head at the fact that there is a ban on the use of road salt in Germany – namely to protect the trees along the roads, which should not come into contact with salty meltwater. In Berlin, however, the ban led to overflowing hospitals and countless accidents, especially among older people on slippery pavements. Approving road salt after all was a sensible and necessary response to protect the city’s citizens.
However, this was not the view of the Naturschutzbund Deutschland (NABU, Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union), which took legal action against the senator’s decree – and won. According to the environmental activists, the environment senator had attempted to override applicable law with her decision. “A blanket deviation from the legal ban on road salt without a sound legal basis is unacceptable and would have set a dangerous precedent.” The court agreed with this assessment. In Germany, legal compliance takes precedence over health – especially when it comes to the environment.
Trapped in the dungeon of environmental protection
Germany is tying itself ever tighter into a climate corset. A handful of activist groups are imposing their will on the majority of society, undermining citizens’ freedom, prosperity and security. Political action is thus becoming increasingly restricted. Even gritting and salting pavements are becoming an almost impossible task.
Politics itself is, of course, to blame for this disaster. After all, it is not the courts that devise the laws they apply. Berlin’s nature conservation law was enacted by politicians. The same applies to the absurd climate targets and the inclusion of environmental protection as a state objective in the German Basic Law. It was politics that first gave fanatical environmental groups the weapons they needed.
One of the defining features of democracy is that it is open – the direction and content of political decisions can be changed at any time by the will of the electorate. Nothing is more undemocratic than making every political decision permanently subject to an all-dominant state objective. A society has very different interests and goals. Locking them away permanently in the armour of a hysterical environmental policy without any sense of proportion is undemocratic and alienates citizens from the state. The result is frustration and disillusionment with politics – with the well-known consequences.
But in Germany, not even the CDU is able to oppose this political trend driven by a minority. Compliantly in line with the supposed zeitgeist, it was not least centre-right politicians who created the legal framework for the current situation. It is the citizens who have to pay the price for this opportunism: slipping on icy pavements, barely able to pay their heating bills, restricted in their mobility and losing their jobs. But the main thing is that the trees are not harmed.