The party-affiliated Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation is dedicated to the Christian Democrats’ relationship to climate protection and wants to combine theological and scientific thinking. In fact, the proximity to the Greens is just as great as the distance to the Liberals.
The CDU also wants to protect the climate through a mobility turnaround.
Under Friedrich Merz, the CDU wants to lead the debate. In recent years, the new chairman harshly judged that the CDU had renounced “any clarity and any position” in favor of government work. One has to become intellectually satisfaction-capable again. Merz has already gained ground in the field of economic policy and attacked the government, and the party is resolute when it comes to migration policy. There is a problem with climate protection. A new publication by the party-affiliated Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation recognizes the grievance, thinks of ways out – and warns against Gyro Gearloose.
The cartoon character by Walt Disney represents an inventor, an engineer who, as the rhyming German translation puts it, “nothing is too sworn”. In the hundred-page “Climate Reader: Christian Democracy and Climate Protection” presented this Wednesday the chairman of the FDP, Christian Lindner, is declared the Gyro Gearloose of German politics.
Less consumption, less technology
Like his fictitious counterpart, the real Federal Minister of Finance believes in technology, i.e. for the conviction that all problems can be solved technically. The author of the chapter on the relationship between climate protection and technology, a freelance journalist, counters this: State regulations cannot be dispensed with. For a “permanent and significant reduction in energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions” “perhaps less consumption and less technology makes sense”.
The willingness to engage in polemics is surprising – especially since the elections to the Bundestag would have had a different outcome in relation to the party with which the CDU would coalition today. The Greens or Attac would also be more likely to have sympathies for degrowth and consumer renunciation. Restrictions on international passenger traffic, it is said elsewhere, are “the only way” in the medium term.
To back up the argument, the foundation objectively references what is already known: the sea level is rising, extreme weather, heavy rain and dry seasons are increasing, the snow cover is shrinking. The “very steep increase in temperature since the beginning of industrialization” can only be explained by man-made amplification of the greenhouse effect”.
What does the C stand for?
What follows? Where is the Christian Democratic Proper? The foundation documents a speech by Angela Merkel at the beginning of 2020 at the Davos World Economic Forum, in which the then Chancellor recognized Germany’s exit from nuclear power and coal energy as a “huge feat”. In an interview, the historian Andreas Rödder pleads for the market and innovation, a mixture of Ludwig Erhard and Gyro Gearloose, so to speak.
The theologian Markus Vogt, in turn, appreciates the ecological contributions of Popes Paul VI, John Paul II, Benedict XVI. and Francis. Benedict’s reflections on the “Grammar of Creation” have proven to be groundbreaking, while Francis has opened a new chapter in Catholic social teaching with his environmental encyclical “Laudato si”. It is uncertain whether this thinking will remain permanently anchored in the structures of the church.
The increased focus on climate protection coincides with the debate also newly initiated by Rödder about the meaning of the C in the name of the CDU. Taking the contributions of the Adenauer Foundation as a benchmark, climate protection from a Christian perspective would be the pragmatic application of both theological and scientific knowledge.
Green identity
A farmer from Mecklenburg-West Pomerania calls for more objectivity and future optimism in livestock husbandry and in arable farming; «Chemical plant protection» cannot be dispensed with entirely. With its “Climate Strategy 2.0”, the German Farmers’ Association has committed itself to the goal of climate efficiency.
A particularly detailed post promotes “green identity”, understood not as a party preference, but as “more ecological behavior” in general. Nevertheless, the emphasis on climate policy, which the Adenauer Foundation makes on a hundred pages, is in fact much closer to “Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen” than to the former liberal ideal partner. The engineer has it much harder here than the renunciation apostle. The field of clarity remains a wide one.