INTERNAL MEMORANDUM, FEDERAL WORKING GROUP FOR CLIMATE PROGRESS PERCEPTION CLASSIFICATION: FOR INTERNAL CIRCULATION ONLY (LEAKED) TO: Chancellor's Office, Rank Management Unit; Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs; All State Secretaries Concerned FROM: Dr. h.c. mult. Volker Klemm, Deputy Director General for Ranking Perception RE: Our position on the Climate Change Performance Index CC: Two banks, forty insurers, one coal exit date (revised)

Filed from Berlin, where our correspondents obtained the document:

Colleagues, the facts are inconvenient but manageable. Renewable energy expansion in Germany has reached record levels. Other countries, working from identical records, are advancing. Germany and several major emitters are falling behind — sixteenth place, down four, trending structural. The Directorate has classified this as a communications challenge, not an atmospheric one, and notes the atmosphere itself has filed no complaint, which we have logged as engagement.

Action Item 1: prepare language positioning our decline as "structural leadership." Action Item 2: commission a study demonstrating the methodology penalizes countries that miss their targets, which is precisely the sort of bias a study can locate. Action Item 3: rename the missed targets "transitional targets" and place the originals on a waiting list, so that missing them becomes technically impossible until the list is processed. The list has been processing since 2013.

Finance Minister Almut Brandt (CDU) was consulted and replied, in writing: "We are not failing the targets. The targets are failing to arrive on schedule. That is a scheduling matter, and scheduling sits with the Treasury." Herr Jürgen Watzke, CEO of a lignite operator currently installing solar panels on the roofs of its cooling towers, told shareholders: "Every megawatt we label green is a megawatt we don't have to defend. Labeling costs less than decommissioning. We do the labeling."

Annex C, Cost Allocation (approved):

  • Wind turbines, record quantities: paid by households, per kilowatt-hour, forever (definition of "forever," see Annex F)
  • Certificates proving the above: paid by industry, resold at margin
  • Missed targets: paid by persons born after 2040, who have not yet been invoiced and therefore cannot object
  • The ranking itself: unpaid, and thus, in our experience, valueless

Postscript, K.K.: The Minister's office asks whether the atmosphere can be listed as a debtor. Advise the Minister that the atmosphere keeps its own books, sends no reminders, and settles all accounts in a single transaction at term. Until settlement, our position holds: by the final reckoning we will have led the index in communication, perception, and structural leadership — every category except performance, which we are renaming. The ledger will balance. It is, after all, the only item here arriving on schedule.