In Germany, the high price of going green

GELSENKIRCHEN, GERMANY — In this nation that embraced one of the world’s most aggressive campaigns against global warming, the Pokropp family can almost hear the cha-ching when switching off their lights.

A kilowatt of electricity costs three times as much here as it does in the United States, supercharged with high taxes to discourage use and to help fund renewable energy development. Meanwhile, a 50 percent “eco-tax” has sent the price of gasoline soaring to $8 a gallon. To manage costs, the family of three unplugs all their appliances but the refrigerator at night, avoids driving and limits steam baths — a favorite German custom.

“We have no choice,” said Andreas Pokropp, a former coal refinery worker. “We have to be green, even if we can’t afford it.”

Yet the Pokropps have also reaped rewards from Germany’s fight against global warming. After years of looking for steady work in this moribund coal region, Mariola Pokropp found it in 2006 at Eickhoff, a 145-year-old manufacturer of mining equipment that has reinvented itself in green times, retooling its assembly lines to make 30-ton gearboxes for wind power generation. It is part of a heavily subsidized industry that has generated hundreds of thousands of jobs, paid for by consumers through higher energy bills.

Washington Post