In a little more detail:
Clement entered federal politics after the 2002 elections, when Schröder thought pushing Clement to the forefront could give a boost to the government and the SPD: Clement got both the economy and labour ministry, for which reason he was referred to informally as Superminister.
However, right at the start, Clement faced unbending opposition from environment minister Jürgen Trittin/Greens: on the issue of who is responsible for renewables. Clement, with some justification, insisted that energy policy is the remit of his ministry, but Trittin had every reason (see below) to suspect ill will, and prevailed.
The two continued in the same manner on all the other main reforms introduced by the Greens: highway tolls, can deposit, review of the feed-in law and the exceptions to it. To my continuing amazement (and to Clement's rising and ever more public frustration) Trittin usually prevailed.
The one issue where Clement was stronger (because he got the support of most of the SPD) was... coal. The Greens long demanded the elimination of coal mining subventions. By the time they got a shot at it, Clement was in, and it can be counted as an achievement that in the end at least a continuous reduction of the subventions was agreed.
I once thought that this was mainly due to the different orientation of the bureaucracies, which I still think to be an important factor (the differences continue to this day), but I must say that the way Clement has developed into a total flunky for coal makes me think he had quite a bit of influence, too.
Well, Clement's total flunky is not a new development.
Clement hails from the Ruhr Area. The SPD used to have total control there, a power based in no small part on coal miners. (The number of employees in coal mining in Germany peaked at 607,000 in 1957, more than 80% of this in the Ruhr area!) Clement grew up in this.
What's more, he has a personal history of conflict as economy minister (1995-8) and then PM of Northrhine-Westphalia, the state harbouring the Ruhr Area. For all this time, he was in a coalition government with the Greens, which was a marriage of inconvenience, marked by heavy and very public internal conflict, especially with environment minister Bärbel Höhn.
The main conflict concerned coal: the coal mining subventions in general, and specifically Garzweiler-II, a then planned open-cast coal mine extension. (After a 'marathon run' to crush all resistance, the excavators began to munch it in 2006.)
But Clement was a man for conflict in completely unrelated fields, too. For example, after he became PM between elections, he merged the justice and interior ministries. Separation of powers, anyone?... The most significant opposition was again his coalition partner... *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
The 'national allocation plans' started off well with a tight plan being offered by the United Kingdom. Then everyone was looking at what the Germans would do, and when the German plan turned out to be permissive, the rest turned in permissive plans to and the Commission was not in the position to correct them by more than a few tonnes of CO2 equivalents. This eventually led to the bottom falling out of the first ETS market as of course real emissions stayed markedly below the cumulative cap that was set.
Then again, the bottom falling out of the market really worried the Commission and led it to become much more proactive in the second (current) period, which has seen the German cap being reduced far below what Trittin originally proposed for the second period.
I mean, the SPD being pro-coal was originally just a consequence of being pro-jobs and pro-workers. Then, with simultanerously reducing production and improving productivity, jobs in coal mining reduced to 5%(!) of their peak, while the companies in the business still remained big. But the old SPD guys never changed -- or, more correctly, they changed in their personal life, by experiencing upward social mobility, and getting seated on company supervisory boards for reasons other than being union delegates. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
