Energy, Climate, and Enviro Policy: Oh, Boy!

Amazing what difference a day makes. Especially when it’s a day complete with presentations and programs. Let’s go to the numbers: seven policy experts, over two meals, and 14 hours. Long day, rich with information and calories. Oh, and two thirty minute train rides. Can’t forget mass transit.

The day began and ended with exceptionally intense policy discussions with two respected German trans-Atlanticists, SPD Bundestag member Uli Klose, and German Marshall Fund Fellow Constanze Steizenmueller.

And the middle dayparts were filled with substantive discussions on energy and climate policy at the German Foreign Office, as well as a visit to the famous Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, one of the foremost centers for the study of global warming. If only policymakers and brilliant theoretical scientists were able to communicate directly with us, perhaps they would be better able to command the attention of those who don’t possess their primary interests, or their intellectual firepower.

But for the early morning and late evening speakers, Klose and Steizenmueller, they each expressed concern about the future. Klose about the long term, Steizenmueller the short term. Each had primary concerns: Russia for Klose, which he feels should recognize its’ role as part of Europe, not the globe; and China for Steizenmueller, which she feels can move things forward, but has to be more transparent, and more bold in it’s international affairs.

Klose feels Germany will continue to lend support to the U.S. in Afghanistan, even with a vote coming up in Parliament next month. And while he is concerned about the challenge to the Euro that exists with the European debt crisis, he feels that it won’t lead to street protests, or any virulent type of public opposition.

Steizenmueller, on the other hand, was nothing short of dark and depressing. On a cold winter’s night in Berlin, it was as though with her words she was trying to mirror the temperature we all felt on our walk to dinner through a deserted Brandenburg Gate, a temperature impacted by the sub-freezing chill.

Though she expressed a bit of optimism by noting that the self-regulating nature of the American system seems to adapt to change, she didn’t feel that Germany, or Europe, had that same flexibility. Some, perhaps, but not as much as their neighbor 4000 miles west. Her concerns for China, which were significant, and deep, were not as great as her sense that India has the leg up on the race to lead the 21st century, or that Turkey has made significant progress as a nation in this past decade, or that Russia poses a challenge, but not as a military power, but as a geo-political entity.

After closing out with a line about conflict trumping cooperation, noting that this seems to be the prevailing manner in Chinese leadership circles, she all but threw up her arms in dismay at the challenge that those who govern civil society have been compelled to address.

Oh, to think what joy tomorrow might bring. If there is a tomorrow, following tonight's Cassandra. Anon.