Jürgen Trittin
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Green politician Jürgen Trittin was Federal Minister for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety from 1998 to 2005 in Germany.
[edit] Life and work
Trittin was born on July 25, 1954 in Bremen. He earned a university degree in Social Economy in Göttingen and worked as journalist.
His political career started in 1982 as Secretary of the Alternative-Greens-Initiative List (AGIL) Group in the Göttingen City Council (until 1984). From 1984 to 1985 he worked as Press Spokesman for the Greens Group in the Lower Saxony State Assembly, which he joined in 1985 as member of the state parliament.
From 1990 to 1994 Jürgen Trittin was the Lower Saxony Minister for Federal and European Affairs and the Head of the Lower Saxony State Mission to the Federal Government in a coalition cabinet with the SPD, led by then minister president of Lower Saxony Gerhard Schröder (SPD).
After Schröder's SPD won an absolute majority in the state elections in 1994, the coalition with the Greens was ended. Trittin now worked as Member of the Lower Saxony State Assembly and as Deputy Chairman of the Alliance 90/The Greens group in that parliament. In 1994 he became Spokesman (Chairman) of the national Green Party.
In 1998, Trittin was elected as Member of the federal parliament (Bundestag). At the same time he discontinued his work as Spokesman, because party statutes do not allow concurrently being a member of parliament and a member of the party executive.
In the federal red-green coalition cabinet, he was appointed Federal Minister for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, a role which he held from October 1998 until the Grand coalition took power in 2005. In this position he was responsible for the decision to abandon the use of nuclear power by 2030, called the nuclear power phase-out.
In August 2005 he responded to a question on how best to react to the 2005 petrol prices crisis with "leave the car at home from time to time." The media, in particular Bild, attacked these comments.
At the time of Hurricane Katrina in August/September 2005, Trittin wrote an opinion piece in the newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau associating the U.S.'s failure to sign the Kyoto protocol with the hurricane and its devastation.
Trittin is single and father to one daughter.
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