Why German industry is thanking the Green party

[pampango]

One of Germany's first senior politicians from an immigrant background describes how environmentalism went mainstream – and celebrates the national football team's ethnic transformation

The key realisation was that we live on a planet with limited resources, on which you can't have unlimited growth. To sum it up in one image: the Greens had a poster at the time which said: "We've only borrowed the Earth from our children." That single sentence still sums up the philosophy of my party for me. We need responsible lifestyles: we need to make sure that we don't use up the resources that belong to other generations, but also that we don't use up the resources of other countries. Fairness shouldn't end on Germany's doorstep.

The Greens are more at ease with German society and its values: this is our country, not an enemy we have to fight against. We want to change and improve this country because we like it. And society as a whole has become greener too. When I joined, I would have never believed that the world's fourth largest economy would eventually agree to phase out nuclear energy...

How would you sell the benefits of wind energy to the Brits? That's easy. It's not about ecology: there are pragmatic economic reasons for taking wind energy seriously. Onshore wind energy is cheaper and faster; offshore is more expensive and takes longer to build. It's that simple. For those who think it spoils their view of the landscape: would you rather have a nuclear power station plonked in the middle of the countryside? I find that logic strange.

In Germany we now have just over 20% of our energy coming from renewable sources. All predictions from the past have turned out not to be true: when I went to school, my teachers used to say that maybe, just maybe we might have 3% of renewable energy one day. Angela Merkel says we'll have 35% by 2020; we at the Green party say it'll be 45%. My guess is: we'll both be wrong, because it'll be even more than that.

In Germany, industry is now starting to thank us for pestering in the past, because it forced them to go through the kind of innovations that the rest of the world is now catching up with.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/20/cem-ozdemir-green-politician-germany?newsfeed=true