The German Ministry of Environment has falsified the conclusions of a UN climate change report in the German-language version released last week, in an attempt to hide the fact that the country’s ‘green policies’ are useless.

The ministry’s four-page summary of the report contains outright contradictions and falsifications of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recommendations, apparently made to hide UN criticism of the way the German government has turned emissions-trading into a cash cow for futile renewable energy projects.

Die Welt said on Sunday that parts of the thousands of pages-long English-language report which the ministry found embarrassing were mistranslated in the government’s “core messages” version released to the German news media and public.

“The UN declares emissions trading an effective instrument that makes subsidies for renewable energy unnecessary. But the German government reverses the conclusion and makes emissions trading the culprit that supposedly ‘constricts the impact of other measures’,” Die Welt reported.

According to Pierre Gosselin, writing on the independent climate news website notrickszone.com, this “brings us yet another spectacular scandal, one that shows how the Environment Ministry of the German government is not really interested in climate science after all, but in using the climate issue as an instrument to generate hundreds of millions of euros for funding pet environmental programmes.”

Die Welt said the UN report debunks German green energy as useless.

The newspaper called the Ministry of Environment version “the brazen falsification of a climate trickster,” explaining that: “Emissions trading is by definition a system in which a number of freely tradable emission certificates is prescribed so that free market prices can result for the emissions certificates. From this system of a fixed certificate number and flexible prices, the German translation turns it into a system of flexible certificate numbers to force the highest possible price for emission rights.”

According to Gosselin’s interpretation of the Die Welt article, the Ministry of Environment was banking on high CO2 certificate prices. The auctioning of emission certificates was supposed “to feed a billion-euro energy and climate fund which in turn would finance a number of environment programs of Ministry, led by Barbara Hendricks. Now that certificate prices are so low, the German Ministry has to go begging for money.”

Meanwhile the German Association for Emissions Trading and Climate Protection (BVEK) views the misinterpretations of the IPCC report as “a scandal”.

Die Welt reports: “‘Essential statements of the UN IPCC were simply reversed to say the opposite,’ criticised association director Jürgen Hacker: ‘The demand for the highest possible CO2 prices have nothing to do with that statements of the UN report, but they do correspond very well to the interests of the German Federal Ministry of Environment.'”

The original UN report included a 99-page Technical Summary in English, and a 33-page Summary for Policymakers, also in English. The government agencies responsible for helping the Ministry of Environment with the dishonest translation were the German IPCC Coordination Office in Bonn, the Federal Environmental Agency in Dessau and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

Die Welt points out that with such ministries behind the translation no one suspected that the summary did not match the original in important ways.