It’s amazing how capable people are of dissociating problems from each other. It is easy for the flexible human mind to worry in a minute about the climate crisis that has contributed to an unprecedented heatwave and devastating wildfires in Europe this week. And in the next to complain about the unacceptable chaos at the airports.
That flying happily is one of the best ways that you as an individual have to keep heating up the planet? You know, of course, but it doesn’t matter anyway, the Müllers next door do it too, and you really have to recover from all that crap, it can’t always be just a crisis.
Yes it can. And it’s going to get a lot worse if there’s no change in how clear alarms are handled soon. To this day, the summer of 2003 is referred to as the summer of the century, but it can no longer mean the 21st century. It is quite possible that the persistent heat of 2003, which was an exceptional phenomenon at the time, will soon be replaced by a new record summer. But even that is unlikely to keep its title forever – and so on until greenhouse gas emissions stop and the climate stabilizes.
“You are not stuck in traffic, you are the traffic jam” – that still applies
Weeks like these with almost apocalyptic images from Great Britain and from the Autobahn to Kassel could help ensure that everyone really does everything to get this crisis under control. One can hope so. But why should you? After every year of drought, after every severe flood, after every report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and of course after the devastating flood in the Ahr Valley last year, people say that this is really a wake-up call. Only then, apparently, someone quickly presses the snooze button, and everyone turns around again with a grateful sigh.
Unfortunately, this is essentially the case during the energy crisis. Of course, Climate Minister Robert Habeck now has to somehow buy gas together, get dirty coal-fired power plants out of the reserve and call for savings in order to avert the worst for the winter. But if the country is to be climate-neutral by 2045, as planned, it must not use any other or less fossil gas, but no more fossil gas at all, not even coal and no oil. This goal is not getting any closer at the moment, on the contrary.
“You’re not stuck in a traffic jam, you are the traffic jam,” is a somewhat gray wisdom. For the time being, this also applies to the climate crisis.