On Thursday, the EU Environment Committee will vote on a law to restore degraded ecosystems, the core of the “Green Deal”. Above all, the European conservatives led by CSU man Manfred Weber are up in arms. In doing so, our guest author believes that they are threatening precisely the prosperity that they actually want to preserve.
In recent weeks, the Greens have been badly hit with their climate policy plans, which was largely their own fault. This raises the question of what the opposition is doing to counteract climate change. But instead of acting constructively, the European People’s Party, led by CSU man Manfred Weber, is currently launching a violent attack on the European Green Deal. In particular, she fights against the limitation of the use of pesticides in European agriculture, which is part of the implementation of the “Nature Restoration” directive.
The peasantry, caught in an inescapable spiral of subsidies, rejoices. This peasantry is being knowingly led into a blind alley as a profession by Europe’s conservative “voice for the peasants”. Because by now it should be clear to everyone that nothing threatens our prosperity more than unbalanced earth systems.
The ultimate loss of wealth
In many parts of the world it can be clearly observed that nature is becoming a brake on prosperity: in Italy, which is falling from drought into floods. In insect-free China, where cheap laborers pollinate the remaining fruit trees. In a Baltic Sea in which the nitrogen input has destroyed 75 percent of the herring stocks and also the fishing industry. And in a global agriculture where yields are stagnant and depleted soils require increasing costs and dependencies in the form of fertilizer and pesticide inputs. A model that abolishes itself. “We have 50 harvests left!” – these drastic words are not chosen by just anyone, but by the UN organization FAO, which is responsible for agriculture.
What would really have a nature-preserving effect under such circumstances would be a program to turn the farming community into producers of ecosystem services, healthy food or sustainable raw materials.
But the conservative federal states are also behind in developing areas for wind energy. Suddenly the residents’ right to be heard applies to them about everything, after it had been consistently dismissed as hostile to the location when it came to the expansion of the freeway, the disposal of nuclear waste or the construction of “non-places” – that is to say, extensive industrial areas and hardware stores.
Or one refers to nature conservation as an opposition maneuver. Yes, it is true that in Germany around 120,000 birds die every year from wind rotor strikes. However, studies from the USA suggest that the number of birds killed by domestic cats(!) could be over 1,000 times higher. And the number of birds decimated by intensive agriculture is even higher, writes a team of scientists in the renowned PNAS magazine of the National Academy of Sciences about the reasons for the dramatic decline in European bird populations.
Systematic hindrance to progress
But impeding progress is only part of the EPP matadors’ strategy. The second? To declare the restructuring of society towards economic sustainability as a fundamental attack on prosperity. The newspapers are filled with headlines like: “How the eco-mafia is destroying our prosperity”. The goal of this economic stab-in-the-back legend? It should distract from the unwillingness to reconsider our own material prosperity, so that we can succeed in securing a world worth living in for our generation of children and grandchildren. To this end, we must of course be prepared to make appropriate investments in a necessary and also attractive transformation.
It should be the goal of all of us to create a resource-productive, circular, climate-friendly knowledge society with a service orientation, closed cycles, green energies, healthy food and markets that offer incentives to invest in sustainability. In short: a world where quality over quantity and resilience over efficiency. A world that reduces dependencies and in which new technologies are used intelligently. And a world in which we act in solidarity with the Global South. Our loss of credibility and broken climate promises to Africa, Asia and Latin America are developing into a geopolitical boomerang.
Twisted debates
Such an economy needs the right debates. At the moment they are completely wrong: we can’t afford 5 percent flower strips, but we can afford 30% food waste. Or 50% more space required through a meat-centric diet.
We also resolutely speak up for an extension of the combustion engines (for “location reasons”), but not for the creation of intelligent mobility systems that get by with significantly fewer vehicles. And we resolutely defend the use of pesticides, but we find the alternative – welfare-promoting work by soil organisms, insects and bees – after deducting the camera teams, which for a moment suggest responsibility, annoying.
Such an economy requires both the expansion of digital infrastructure and green energy as the elementary foundations. These are the two things that German conservatives have successfully prevented at federal and state political level over many years of government responsibility. The CSU has been responsible for German digitization for decades and has thus taken us to one of the last places in the European table. A rogue who thinks there is a method behind it.
Instead, the financial resources were consistently put into road construction, while political attention was shifted to extending the life of the discontinued combustion engine model. However, the maneuver did not work: while German manufacturers still had a market share of over 20% in the combustion engine segment in China, the most important automobile market in the world, it is now just under 1% in the electric segment. The sum of all these acts of omission to act or deliberate misdirection may outweigh all the suspected corpses in Habeck’s boiler room.
While the USA is going full throttle when it comes to climate change under the keyword Inflation Reduction Act, structurally conservative Europe likes to stick to the traditional and Germany prefers to discuss Habeck’s technical mistakes than the inaction of the last decades.
It is high time to recognize that the real attack on our prosperity comes from the progress resisters and their negation of the new climate policy and industrial realities. Denial of responsibility is actually not a core concept of conservative thinking – quite the opposite. Preserving the history of creation actually requires the unconditional will to be able to describe alternative and sustainable designs for the future and to make them capable of winning a majority. The attack on our prosperity began with the negation of science and the new realities, with client loyalty and the inability to describe alternative and sustainable future designs and make them capable of winning a majority.
We must preserve the foundations of our prosperity
It is not the prosperity itself that needs to be conserved – certainly not the current level or that of those who preserve vested interests. What needs to be preserved are the foundations of our prosperity. Of course, taking this step requires more courage, imagination and a scientific orientation than Germany’s conservatives are currently able to muster. In that sense, they themselves are the last generation.