For years, Germany’s Energiewende, or renewable energy transition, was held up as a best practice for other nations to follow. Yet Germany’s image as selfless defender of the climate, which was once largely deserved, is now a transparent fiction. The German Environment Agency calculated that Germany emitted 906 million tons of CO2 in 2016 — the highest in Europe — compared to 902 million in 2015.

And 2017’s interim numbers suggest emissions are going to tick up again this year. Germany is now in serious danger of hitting neither its 2020 nor its 2030 emissions targets, the very benchmarks that it browbeat other nations into adopting at previous climate conferences.