The catastrophic flooding in Italy shows how the climate crisis is already threatening our lives and quality of living here in Europe. We know what we need to do to slow it down. But the longer we wait, the greater the restrictions on our freedom will be in the future.
“In five minutes, we lost everything we had built up over 20 years”.
This statement of a victim of the disastrous floods playing out in Italy at the moment, published last week by the German broadcaster ZDF, reflects the reality for many. Extreme periods of drought are followed by heavy rains, which the parched land cannot absorb – resulting in flooding and landslides. This is just one of the consequences of the climate crisis. The others include heat waves, forest fires and crop failures. And they are becoming both more frequent and more serious.
The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) recently calculated that the increase in average global temperatures over the next five years will temporarily exceed the critical 1.5° mark for the first time. The community of nations meeting at the Paris Climate Summit did not simply pluck this figure out of thin air. Science has repeatedly, and with overwhelming unanimity, told us that once if the rise in temperature exceeds this level, there will be uncontrollable consequences for people and ecosystems (article in German only). Chain reactions and tipping points that will make human life on planet Earth dramatically worse and quite simply impossible in some places.
What is still all too often dismissed as alarmism, even in circles that like to think of themselves as educated, is a sober reflection of what has already become reality. It must be called to mind again and again that the findings and statements of the UN meteorological authority are not just vague estimates; they are based on the levels of greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere, which are, unquestionably, far too high. The effects to which this leads, such as rapid warming of the oceans, carbon-rich soils and plants drying out or even burning away, the melting of the ice caps and glaciers and the thawing of permafrost, will drive these levels up even further, over and above the emissions directly caused by humans. There is currently little prospect of any meaningful global reduction in these human emissions in comparison to pre-pandemic levels. It is not alarmist to point out that this is the situation we are in.
Because we must sound the alarm. Not just because of the devastating consequences for people, flora and fauna. Not just because of the massive costs to society and our economies, compared to which our current spending on climate protection measures looks like a drop in the ocean. Not just because in some parts of the world, there are already conflicts, some of them violent, over water, resources, fertile land, living space and affordable energy. We must sound the alarm, because our lives of freedom are at stake. Our free society is facing its biggest-ever test. Contrary to what self-styled liberal forces would have us believe, however, this freedom is not being tested by radical climate protests or bans on efficient, climate-unfriendly technologies such as light bulbs, the internal combustion engine or conventional gas heating.
Rather, the challenge to our freedom comes from the fact that the options available to us will continue to shrink in number and scope – exponentially. In essence, it is simple: the higher the proportion of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the lower the prospects of us continuing to freely determine societal and economic developments. Every time we postpone climate measures, every time we adopt another interim regulation, it makes the urgently needed deceleration all the more difficult. While there are currently several options to change our way of life, we will be forced to cease certain activities altogether in just a few short years. Or, to put it in the drastic language of the campaign against the Building Energy Act: new heating systems must be climate-neutral now, so that they will not have to be ripped out of people’s basements a couple of years later.
In the last decades, policymakers have not only overslept the entry into decarbonisation measures and an economy based on zero-emission technologies. Rather, they have deliberately neglected to communicate to people the uncomfortable consequences of their high-emissions lifestyles, due to fears of being voted out of power. Yet these and other possible solutions have been on the table for years. The “Paths to a Climate-Neutral Energy System” study by the Fraunhofer Society and others, commissioned by former CDU Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy Peter Altmaier, describes exactly how high the proportion of renewable energies in the heat sector needs to be in order to achieve decarbonisation in time. Anyone familiar with these numbers could hardly be surprised by the heating conversion measures laid out in the draft of the Building Energy Act.
Anyone who aspires to guarantee a free and safe life for us all, should have decided on a mandatory share of renewable energies in the heating sector much sooner. Delaying this step now means that in some particularly difficult cases there may not be enough time to implement this in an orderly manner. In these cases there is the risk of operating bans at short notice and spiralling prices for the fossil fuels still needed. This could lead to expropriations, albeit slow to start with, because of deepening climate change – indirect expropriation without any compensation, decided upon by nobody, which will occur more and more rapidly until prosperity, livelihoods and individual freedoms in the sense of the possibility to shape circumstances are lost for good. Increasingly, this can happen within five minutes, as is currently the case in Italy.
History teaches us that it is possible to free oneself and society from extremely difficult situations. When the German people took to the streets 175 years ago call for freedom and democracy, they fought in the spirit of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution for a life of freedom, even though they knew how difficult it would be to actually to achieve this. And although their revolution failed, our democracy today and the freedom of us all stand on the shoulders of these courageous people. When people took to the streets for freedom and democracy in the GDR in 1989, many did not believe that they would actually succeed. And although we are still working today to keep the promises made back then, it is also thanks to these courageous struggles the people in reunited Germany and Europe live in free and democratic societies. What is needed today is a new freedom movement, a global freedom movement, for the fastest possible decarbonisation of all areas of life and the economy. The good news that we have everything we need to achieve this. We have the technologies that allow us to switch to zero emissions in most sectors–in mobility, heating and even in production. In many key areas, they have already existed for decades and are waiting for their breakthrough on the market, that is still dominated by old vested interests and distorted by misguided government incentives. We already have the economic actors ready to bring about the change. Many of them have been in the starting blocks for a long time and are just waiting for clear political decision-making, for instance on technological standards. And we also have the financial resources to finance the transformation. If we wait no longer. We still have our freedom! Let us recognise what is really at stake – nothing less than our freedom and that of the future generations.
This article was first published in German on boell.de.
