Why the Green Paradox is no mistake

The good and green intention can nevertheless lead to rising emissions: if improvements in efficiency and the deployment of Renewable Energies in some countries lead to a rising consumption of coal, oil and gas in other countries that do not want to implement climate policy. Hans-Werner Sinn called this effect the Green Paradox.

For that, the ifo President recently was attacked very sharply. Ottmar Edenhofer, director at the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC) and chief economist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), now defends the scientist in the „Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung“ (FAZ). He points out that a climate policy that disregards the supply side of the oil, gas and coal producers turns blind and is ineffective.

Hans-Werner Sinn had always stressed that to him the problem of climate change was one of the greatest challenges for mankind and needed an urgent solution. “His criticism may have been occasionally overcast in some details. But that international climate policy is facing tremendous challenges especially because the supply of fossil energies is much higher than the limited disposal of the atmosphere is something the latest IPCC reports have shown impressively,” Edenhofer writes. “It remains true: The Green Paradox is no mistake but a guideline for an effective climate policy without illusions.”