There are a lot of big questions this week, but let’s start with the little ones: hair soap.
If I had written this text a few years ago, I would probably have explained what it is, but today you can get the round things in every drugstore, of course 1000 percent eco, great for the environment, yeah, yeah, yeah. Next to it are the shelves full of shampoo bottles and I haven’t counted them, but my impression is that they tend not to disappear in the same proportion as solid shampoos appear. But capitalism has only once again conquered new land. Between vanilla scented candles and bath crystals, there is a question that will be decisive in the next few weeks:
Are we really changing something now – or are we just pretending to be?
Anyway, of course, the answer will have to be given in a completely different place than the drugstore, because even if each of us never buys a shampoo bottle again from tomorrow, the climate crisis will not be resolved. (This truth only sells worse than grapefruit conditioner.)
Big politics are needed for big solutions, and although the Climate Protection Act was passed before the Bundestag elections, the new ones have to implement it now. It is perhaps not so important whether there will be a climate ministry, as FDP leader Christian Lindner first announced this week and then withdrew it. As long as work is being done at the desks in Berlin, whatever building they are in. So: expanding renewable energies, railways, local transport, an endless list.
In the meantime everyone joins the chorus of sustainability, shampoo companies, concrete manufacturers, cigarette companies, and also all major parties repeated the mantra, sometimes more, sometimes less convincingly, before the federal election: climate protection, climate protection, climate protection.
Now they have to show that they can do it.
On Wednesday, the Fridays for Future movement gently reminded the negotiating groups of their six demands – including the concrete adoption of a CO₂ budget with the 1.5 degree target is compatible, as well as an immediate stop of the expansion or new construction of motorways. However, the fact that a speed limit on motorways is no longer being negotiated does not give much hope for a point like the latter.
But just because things don’t seem realistic at the moment doesn’t mean they should be forgotten, on the contrary. And who knows, maybe the social tipping point at which people are suddenly ready for more climate protection than before is not as far away as we think (this is not the only thing my colleague Marlene Weiß talks to physicist Dirk Brockmann about in this interview worth reading). If there is one thing the climate protection movement has distinguished in recent years, it is its persistence. Wouldn’t it be good if the same could be said of the new government’s climate policy in the future.
(This text is from the weekly Newsletter Environmental Friday you here free of charge can order.)