Germany announced Friday that it will leave the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT), an initiative from which countries such as France, the Netherlands and Poland have also withdrawn for standing in the way of the climate targets set in Paris.
«We are consistently aligning trade policy with climate protection and are therefore withdrawing from the Energy Charter Treaty,» Franziska Brantner, State Secretary at the Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection, Franziska Brantner, said on her official Twitter profile.
In another message on the same social network, she stressed that this is an «important» measure for Berlin, since it comes in the context of the holding of the 27th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP27) in Egypt.
«In addition, we are serious about diversification and we want to quickly establish partnerships with Chile and Mexico that allow free and fair trade,» he said, adding that Germany will ratify the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement between the EU and Canada, while deepening cooperation with the United States.
For his part, the deputy head of the parliamentary group of the Free Democrats, Lukas Koehler, explained that «in the face of the growing threat of authoritarian regimes, we must strengthen economic relations with our allies in the Western community of values,» according to Bloomberg.
Likewise, Andreas Audretsch, a member of parliament for the Greens, emphasized that «the numerous demands for billions demonstrate the extent to which the Energy Charter Treaty stands in the way of climate protection», as reported by Bloomberg.
The ECT allows energy companies, especially those involved in fossil fuels, to sue countries in a court system if they consider the legislation to be against their interests. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) called the treaty a «serious obstacle to climate change mitigation».
