For almost ten years I have been writing – among other things – about climate change. I was sometimes hopeful, sometimes angry, sometimes sad and very often frustrated. As a journalist, if you fear that your own importance could go to your head, I can only recommend trying climate reporting. You then quickly notice how great the influence you have on political events even with the most flaming comments: in most cases it is roughly zero. Everyone who wants to know what’s going on has long known. The only difference is that “knowing” doesn’t also mean “acting”, at least that’s what I’ve learned over the past few years.
The floods also came and went during this time. I missed the great Elbe flood in 2002, which is now often mentioned again because of Gerhard Schröder’s rubber boots, but 2013 and 2016 were not nice either. “Nothing is as powerless as an idea whose time is not right now”, my colleague Detlef Esslinger wrote years ago in this still very readable text about everything that goes so wrong in climate and nature conservation. The sentence also applies to much that has long been written about the obvious connection between climate change, soil sealing and floods.
And now another storm disaster, only this time the consequences are even more terrible. More than 170 people are dead and many more are still missing; Thousands face the ruins of their existence.
But this time something seems to be different: This great disaster, not directly caused but promoted by the climate crisis, happened at a moment when the time for the climate protection idea might finally finally come or at least be on the march. Suddenly, even politicians are calling for more climate protection, who were previously unsuspicious of such commitments. This sometimes leads to involuntary comedy, for example when the head of the CSU regional group, Alexander Dobrindt, of all people, says that one must “continue to fight ambitiously”. But I don’t want to be petty if you delete that “further”, the sentence is correct.
I wonder why it took a storm to get such insights. Weren’t the steady rise in temperatures, ever more extreme heat waves, ever longer droughts, ever faster species extinction scary enough? Obviously not.
But I am even more concerned with the question of how to proceed now. Unfortunately, experience shows that even the greatest shock does not last long; the memory quickly fades, and then nothing comes of the good intentions, neither in flood, nor in disaster, nor in climate protection. But who knows, maybe this time it will be different, I hope so. What do you mean? Please write to us at [email protected].
(This text is from the weekly Newsletter Environmental Friday you here free of charge can order.)