“GERMANY MAKES up 2% of global emissions,” a legislator recently informed his Bundestag colleagues. “So even if we became climate-neutral overnight, it would not prevent a single extreme weather event.” Such statements are commonly used as justifications for inaction by Europe’s hard right, opposed as it now is to almost all forms of climate action. Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK, was singing from the same hymnal when he recently accused the government of “[defrauding] British taxpayers of billions of pounds every year [by] subsidising wind energy and solar energy for literally zero effect on global CO₂ emissions.” But the German MP was not one of the similarly aligned climate sceptics from the Alternative for Germany. He was Friedrich Merz, the country’s chancellor.