German commission to oversee end of coal use

Germany’s ministers have appointed a 31-member commission to set a date for ending the country’s use of coal, with Berlin hoping to meet its greenhouse gas targets ahead of a global climate change conference in December in Poland.The commission is expected to set a date by the end of this year for Germany’s withdrawal from the mining and burning of coal, which produces harmful greenhouse gases.The commission also aims to make suggestions by the end of October for the creation of new jobs for thousands of coal industry workers in the German coal-mining regions of Lausatia in the east and the Rhineland in the west.“We’re bringing the jobs to the people,” Minister of Economic Affairs and Energy Peter Altmaier said.“Opportunities and protection, that is what we need,” Labour Minister Hubertus Heil said.Coal will certainly not “be switched off rapidly,” he said.Meanwhile, Environment Minister Svenja Schulze said the commission had a “historical task” to fulfil.Critics have said the government is too close to the coal lobby and needs to do more to meet the climate goals of the Paris climate accord of December 2015.“We won’t allow the government to use the commission as a climate policy fig leaf,” Green parliamentary faction leader Anton Hofreiter told DPA last week.All signatories to the Paris accord have agreed to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 40 per cent of 1990 levels by 2030.Between 1990 and 2015, Germany had achieved a 28-per-cent cut.