Some political leaders talk about the need to fight climate change and are full of, er, ideas about what everyone else should do to cut greenhouse emissions. But if you get the chance to ask them directly what, specifically, they might be doing
privately , you often get a shrug, a few vague answers, a few lame excuses or assurances they turn off their unused lights.

So it was all the more surprising when German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told me at the end of an interview the other day that his brother had just installed a photovoltaic system on his roof and that he, too, planned to put one on his roof as soon as possible. It was a precious moment — a politician doing something rather concrete and only reluctantly talking about it instead of making a fuss.

Steinmeier, who seemed genuinely taken aback by the question, has become a leading voice on fighting climate change and has warned of the threat of instability it is already causing in some unsettled regions of the world. He also says that Germany, despite its reputation as a world leader in the struggle, could do more to combat global warming.

“My brother just put up a system on his house,” Steinmeier said, as a smile started to spread across his face. “We’re going to put one up too. We’ve got to renovate a section of the roof soon anyhow, and as soon as that’s finished we’re going to put photovoltaik on it.”

But Steinmeier, chief of staff to former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder who helped draft Germany’s renewable energy law (EEG) that sparked a boom in solar power, could not resist a self-deprecating joke about his government’s plans for tariffs that oblige utilities to buy solar-generated electricity. Some 300,000 private power producers are able to sell the power at nearly triple market rates, but Merkel’s government plans to accelerate their elimination.

“I just hope the EEG will still be available for me too,” he said.