The rise of the environmentalists in the Ministry of Economics began a full decade ago. For a long time, the view was that the state should impose as few rules as possible on the corporate sector … According to this logic, environmentalism and economic policy were seen as nearly mutually exclusive. It was not until 2013 that the dominance of free-market civil servants began to crumble.At this time, Sigmar Gabriel of the SPD became Minister of Economics, and appointed an unusual state-secretary for energy 1: Rainer Baake … The move was a surprise, because Baake is not a Social Democrat, but a Green. … As State Secretary in the Ministry of the Environment … Baake helped orchestrate the first legislation on Germany’s nuclear phase-out. …In 2012, Baake founded Agora Energiewende, probably the most influential think-tank advocating a carbon-neutral society in German politics. Patrick Graichen was at that time already Baake’s protegé. …
As the old-guard industry-friendly civil servants in the German bureaucracy began to retire, Baake filled their posts with Green technocrats wherever possible, such that when control of the Ministry passed to the centre-right CDU in 2018, the damage was done. The institutional momentum had already shifted towards climate change and begun to gather strength under its own power. The catchword for Baake’s political vision was the so-called “All Electric World,” one in which a grid powered entirely by renewables drives cars (electrical vehicles), heats buildings (heat pumps) and even powers industry (though here the solutions are much vaguer).During his five-year tenure as state secretary, Baake appointed Graichen to head the Agora think-tank, which began churning out policy papers, sponsoring Green scientific research, and gathering an ever-growing crowd of loyal advocates and technocrats. This paid off:
Whenever energy and climate were discussed in Berlin [in the years after Baake’s resignation from the Ministry of Economics in 2018], Graichen’s name came up, often peddling unwieldy terms that only experts understand. The “merit order principle”, for example, or the “locked-in effect”. The red-haired man with the sonorous voice knew his way around this specialist world like no other. …The ability appears to have come naturally to him. His mother worked in the Ministry of Development, his father for a while in the Ministry of Transport. He himself became involved in environmental issues as a schoolboy, initially in the youth organisation of BUND. In 1993, he began studying at the University of Heidelberg. In 1996, he joined the Green Party. In 2001, he became a consultant for international climate protection … and helped draft the Kyoto Protocol.