Green Transition

About an hour’s drive outside of Sevilla, Spain’s old city, past grazing black-footed pigs and olive orchards, sits the Abengoa Solucar complex, and it’s truly a sight: Imagine cresting a hill and then all of the sudden seeing several large towers, over 500 feet high, with hundreds of beams of light striking them — solar rays from an army of mirrors arrayed in a circle on the ground below. They’re called heliostats.

Natural resources should be a major contributor to development in some of the countries that need it most. And yet, in some of world’s poorest and most fragile states, they bring just the opposite.

Lili Fuhr and Niclas Hällström sharply criticize climate-change goals that are based on risky or underdeveloped technologies.

Germany's short-term 2020 climate targets are in jeopardy. This is a serious drawback: if the Energiewende should prove ineffective on the climate front, it will fall short on its declared objective and discourage other countries from following suit. The German government is now taking first steps to fight the country's coal power.

This fall the Heinrich Böll Foundation hosted a delegation of civil society representatives and journalists from Poland for a study tour to Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania and New York State to gain a better understanding of the effects that natural gas exploration have had on local communities along the Marcellus Shale. Tomasz Ulanowski, a reporter for the Polish daily newspaper Wyborcza, wrote this report.

Even the strongest proponents of the Energiewende agree that Germany needs to reform its energy system to accommodate the next influx of renewables while maintaining security of supply of conventional power at all times. The United States has extensive experience with capacity markets from which the German debate could benefit. As such, a German delegation consisting of national and state energy policy makers and experts will visit the United States from September 1 to 5, 2014.