Economist Ottmar Edenhofer complains about climate ignorance in the federal election campaign, looking at the tearing of the 1.5-degree limit on global warming.
“Some people do as if climate protection belongs to the luxury goods after the motto: When we no longer have anything to do in politics, when the economy is booming again, then we’ll make climate policy” Edenhofer told the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung (NOZ). “We talk – quite rightly – about the difficulties of the climate transition. But we’re not talking at all about what an unchecked climate change costs.”
According to the EU’s Copernicus Earth observation program, temperatures last year were for the first time 1.5 degrees higher than before the Industrial Revolution. The fact that an unchecked climate change is already causing massive damage that will continue to grow, “has somehow been forgotten in this federal election campaign” Edenhofer, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), stated. A production decline of 20% within 25 years compared to a world without damage is foreseeable. “The damage of climate change will be six times as high by 2050 as the costs of climate protection” he said.
Edenhofer reacted to his criticism mainly in response to the Union’s announcements to repeal the EU combustion engine ban and the heating law if re-elected. “There is a conservatism that primarily tells how wonderful the past was. For me, nostalgia is the longing for a place we never were” Edenhofer told the “NOZ”. “Such a conservatism will not help us, it will lead us to the abyss.” His approach for a conservative climate policy: “Who wants to change a lot must tell the people what is being preserved. People can only accept changes if they don’t feel that the ground is being taken from under their feet. This is the opposite of saying everything will be rolled back and creating the illusion that it could be like it never was.”
Germany can only come in the future if it reinvents itself. “Politics can only take people with it if it tells them what remains, what is being preserved, and that climate protection is not a thoughtless rush into the future” the researcher and institute director said. “There will always be mistakes made. But the transformation is not induced by the Greens, but by new global economic developments, geopolitical shifts, and of course by the Earth’s warming.