As coal burning was explicitly politicized with reference to coal’s contributions to climate change over the last ten to fifteen years, a number of policy norms associated with phasing out coal burning (or its financing) have emerged and stabilized in transnational politics. This chapter tracks aspects of these normative politics focusing on both the promulgation and diffusion of the new policy norms and a number of critiques and challenges – many grounded in distributional and procedural justice – to coal phaseout norms that emerge as a response to the transnational promulgation of coal phaseout policies.

This chapter assesses the extent to which the emergence of Fridays for Future (FFF) resulted in a politicization of climate change and how this affected climate policy and politics in Germany from 2018 to 2022. We show that the politicization resulted in a situation in which the Merkel government decided to gradually phase out coal-fired power plants as the key climate policy decision of the last few years. While this step was triggered by the EU’s announcement in 2017 that it would adopt stricter emissions standards for large combustion plants burning coal and lignite, FFF increased the pressure on the government to act. The politicization of the issue also resulted in changes to climate politics. The positions of mainstream political parties and their candidates have converged in their positions on climate change and the need for climate action. However, this convergence refers to climate policy in abstract terms and not to the specific policy measures supported by the individual parties. While climate change became depoliticized for a while, geopolitical conflicts are expected to repoliticize it and to have an impact on climate politics and policy.