ONCE upon a time, Angela Merkel was a green heroine. As Germany’s environment minister in the 1990s she chaired talks that led to the Kyoto protocol. Now she is chancellor and greens call her Darth Merkel for defending her coal and car industries and for watering down the climate change package at the European Union’s Brussels summit last week (see “World leaders ‘failing to get’ climate message”). Europe has chickened out on climate change. Merkel is mainly responsible – and as a qualified chemist she should know better.
As a result, the politics of climate change has been turned on…
