BERLIN — Angela Merkel’s career as a climate-change warrior can be summed up with a simple maxim: overpromise and under-deliver.

The German leader was true to that principle again on Friday as her government presented a set of climate initiatives — advertised in the run-up as a game-changing package of reforms — that even polite experts described as underwhelming.

On Sunday, Merkel flew with the plan to New York, where she will address the United Nation’s climate change summit and meet with Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York turned climate activist.

The plan entails a series of carrots and sticks, such as incentives for electric vehicles, higher fuel taxes and carbon levies designed to ensure Germany reaches its 2030 greenhouse gas reduction targets.

Merkel declared the basket of measures, which was negotiated between her Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats, a “paradigm shift,” even as she acknowledged some would disagree with that assessment.

Going by Germany’s record since Merkel has been involved in climate policy, there would seem to be little reason to believe her.

“Politics is that which is possible,” she said after the agreement was announced, offering a Merkelian twist on the famous line attributed to Otto von Bismarck.

The pact was announced after a 19-hour negotiating session in Merkel’s office as thousands of protesters stood at the nearby Brandenburg Gate demanding bold action to combat global warming.

By the looks of it, they won’t get it from Merkel.

“Today’s climate package is a sham, a collection of inefficient rules, prohibitions and subsidies and hardly a paradigm shift in climate policy,” said Martin Menner, a climate expert at the normally reserved Freiburg-based Center for European Policy.

Merkel defended the plans, saying she is confident "that we will reach the targets and that we have laid foundation to do so."

Rosy predictions

Going by Germany’s record since Merkel has been involved in climate policy, there would seem to be little reason to believe her.

From the time she was Helmut Kohl’s environment minister in the 1990s through to her 14-year tenure as German chancellor, Merkel has been enthusiastic in her public embrace of ambitious climate goals her governments have consistently failed to meet on time.

As environment minister in Bonn in 1995, Merkel told a U.N. climate conference she hosted that developed countries like Germany needed to take the lead in combatting climate change. “What’s at stake is the preservation of the one world we have,” she said.

That same year, Germany declared it would reduce emissions by 25 percent, compared to 1990 levels, by 2005 — a goal it failed to reach by a wide margin. It eventually met the target in 2010, mainly thanks to the shuttering of old East German factories.

Ten years ago, Merkel predicted that by 2020, there would be 1 million electric cars on German roads. At the beginning of 2019, the total was just 83,000. In August she revised her target, saying she now believes Germany can meet the goal by 2022 at the latest.

“We’re going to catch up fast,” she said last month.

Germans don’t seem to care that Merkel – once celebrated as the “climate chancellor” – has led them down the garden path. What most have come to expect of the chancellor, whom many Germans only half-jokingly call Mutti (Mom), is reassurance. In a highly industrialized country such as Germany, there's a natural tension between citizens' desire for continued prosperity and their wish to be good stewards of the environment.

Even so, with the effects of global warming increasingly apparent and Germany missing one climate target after the next, pretending Mutti will come through has gotten a lot harder.

Merkel has tackled that contradiction by telling Germans what they want to hear — that the climate situation is serious but manageable with a bit of German ingenuity. They pretend to believe her.

Merkel's grand climate change plan is expected to cost more than €50 billion in the coming years, but will still be "budget neutral" (read: won’t force Germany into the red), the government insisted on Friday. The chancellor understands that while Germans want to save the environment, they don't want to pay too much for it.

The clutch of coal

Even so, with the effects of global warming increasingly apparent and Germany missing one climate target after the next, pretending Mutti will come through has gotten a lot harder.

Merkel’s most celebrated environmental decision as chancellor was her move in 2011 to accelerate Germany’s withdrawal from nuclear energy in the wake of the Fukushima disaster in Japan. Though many Germans still take pride in the call to withdraw from nuclear power (an example they were disappointed to see other countries did not follow), it has made Germany even more dependent on coal. To compensate for the loss in nuclear power and sustain its energy-hungry industrial economy, Germany has been forced in recent years to burn more coal, dashing its hopes of reducing climate emissions.

Coal accounts for about 35 percent of German electricity generation. Even as more and more Germans say they’re extremely worried about climate change, villages in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia are still being bulldozed to allow for coal mining.

While the country has succeeded in expanding wind and solar, the centerpiece of Merkel's climate strategy known as the Energiewende (energy transformation), has come at a huge cost. Retail electricity prices have more than doubled since 2000, leaving Germany with the highest prices in Europe.

What’s more, the Energiewende has been plagued with problems, from local resistance to construction of transmission lines and wind turbines to soft demand from investors.

A key north-south transmission corridor to transport renewable energy from the windy northern reaches of Germany to the industrial corners of the south is years behind schedule. The result is an overcapacity of renewable energy in the north and more coal burning in the south.

If those issues aren’t resolved soon, Germany is unlikely to meet Merkel’s goal to draw 65 percent of the country's electricity from renewable sources by 2030, much less her more ambitious target to be "climate neutral" by 2050.

Of course by then, Merkel’s promises will be someone else’s problem.

This article has been updated.