Wednesday October 27, 2021
Future talk with Markus Lanz
“The greatest impertinence is the climate crisis”
By Marko Schlichting
The Fridays for Future movement is certain: the new government will not achieve the climate goals it has set itself. Limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees is at risk. At Markus Lanz, activist Carla Reemtsma explains what, in her opinion, needs to change.
You are calling for coal-fired power generation to be phased out by 2030. You want to get rid of cars with internal combustion engines as quickly as possible. They want no new gas pipelines to go into operation and no new roads and highways to be built. They fight for this – with school strikes, with demonstrations, with hunger strikes. They are climate activists like Luisa Neubauer or Carla Reemtsma. Reemtsma is a cousin of Neubauer, who has been a co-organizer of demonstrations and other activities of the Fridays for Future movement and her nationwide press spokeswoman since January 2019. On Tuesday evening, she discussed the question of how the 1.5 degree target could be achieved at Markus Lanz on ZDF with CDU environmental politician Wiebke Winter.
At the Paris Climate Conference in 2015, it was decided that the average temperature on earth could not increase by more than 1.5 degrees by 2100. This is the only way to prevent unimagined environmental damage. The participants in the climate conference assumed the temperature that prevailed on earth before the start of industrialization in the mid-19th century. In mid-September 2021, the United Nations published a report according to which this goal would be unattainable without an immediate change of direction. The report assumes that the average temperature on earth could have risen by 1.5 degrees by 2026.
Traffic turnaround must go beyond traffic light plans
“Our demands are not radical, but necessary.” This is what Carla Reemtsma says with a view to the UN report and other studies commissioned by Fridays for Future, among others. Your demand: “We have to invest in the expansion of renewable energies.” The dependence on fossil energies such as coal and gas drove the world into the climate crisis, explains Reemtsma. If we had started phasing out fossil fuels in good time, people would not suffer from the high gas prices now.
What really helps against climate change? Klima-Labor is the ntv podcast in which Clara Pfeffer and Christian Herrmann scrutinize ideas, myths and claims that sound clear but are rare. Climate killer cow? Misleading. Afforestation? Exacerbates problems. Artificial rain? A weapon.
The ntv climate laboratory: Listen to it every Thursday – half an hour that informs, is fun and tidies up. On ntv.de, in the ntv app and wherever there are podcasts: Audio Now, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, Spotify, RSS feed
Reemtsma calls for a traffic turnaround that goes beyond what the traffic light coalition is likely to decide. “In the future there will be electric cars, but far fewer than there are now cars with internal combustion engines on the streets. At the moment there are around 48 million cars for 80 million citizens. We will not replace every internal combustion car with an electric car, however because we don’t have the raw materials for it. ” Reemtsma calls for the rapid expansion of local public transport and a bicycle infrastructure in large cities. That would cost jobs in the auto industry, which would, however, be created elsewhere. After all, buses and trains also have to be built, serviced and maintained.
At the same time, Reemtsma is calling for the CO2 price to be raised to 180 euros per ton. Only then would renewable energies, which are now too expensive, also pay off. The price increase would have to be returned to the citizens in the form of a flat rate per capita. That was also an election campaign demand of the Greens, but it was put to the files during the exploratory talks of the traffic light coalition. In addition, Reemtsma wants the subsidies for fossil fuels to go away – 45 billion euros, she says. Her conclusion: “We will not be able to solve the climate crisis just through technical innovations. We no longer have the time.”
“We have to take the people with us”
The young CDU politician Wiebke Winter, briefly part of a team of experts for the Union Chancellor candidate Armin Laschet, can basically make friends with the goals of Fridays for Future. But a lot of things are going too far for her. In order to reach the 1.5-degree limit, you need “really ambitious international goals,” she says. It is clear to her that an energy turnaround has to come. But she doesn’t want to imagine doing without something – not even cars and roads. “If we talk about doing without, I lose the fact that we live in a democratic system. We have to live what people want. That means: we have to take people with us.” You have to set incentives to achieve climate neutrality, but you shouldn’t choose the path that achieves the most radical transformation, says Winter. And you shouldn’t expect too much from people.
Reemtsma disagrees: the greatest impertinence is the climate crisis, she says. But no party really had ideas in the election manifesto to combat this crisis effectively. Reemtsma does not fear a possible radicalization of Fridays for Future, even if she says: “The school strike was civil disobedience, but other forms of civil disobedience may also follow.”
What she mean by that are demonstrations or blockades in front of party headquarters. She fears that the parties in the traffic light coalition are not really serious about meeting the 1.5-degree target. That is why protests are still legitimate. “We have to dare to name the uncomfortable truths.”