Focus on climate crisis
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Reporting on climate change is one of the major journalistic challenges of our time. The climate crisis is also one of the most important issues of humanity for SPIEGEL. For this reason, we support an international initiative that seeks to take a look this week: "Covering Climate Now" has been initiated by the Columbia Journalism Review and the Canadian newspaper "The Nation", with more than 200 media companies worldwide including the Guardian, El País, La Repubblica, The Times of India, Bloomberg or Vanity Fair. SPIEGEL is dedicating the cover story of the current issue to the climate crisis this week and every day pays special attention to mirror.de
For the leaders of the CDU, CSU and SPD, the agreement on a climate package was a show of strength, opposition and climate activists, however, criticize the agreement partly as piecemeal without a clear line, but also as far-reaching, anti-social and discouraged.
What is known about the climate package: electricity cheaper, gasoline more expensive, commuter package up - the details at a glance
The German section of the global climate protection movement "Fridays For Future" wrote on Twitter: "If you do nothing for years to protect the climate and then after massive months of pressure from the population discussed measures that have absolutely nothing to do with 1.5 degrees, is this is not a 'breakthrough', but a scandal. "
Greens chief Robert Habeck went specifically to the announced increase in commuter allowance, which he criticized. "This is really nonsense, because it is rewarded so to travel long distances," said Habeck the newspaper "world".
The package is a "mixed bag", one must first "wait to see what's coming". So shortly after getting the picture was "diffuse". The package provides for an increase in the commuter tax allowance of five cents per kilometer from 2021, then 35 instead of 30 cents should be deducted from the tax.
Group leaders Sahra Wagenknecht and Dietmar Bartsch said that the climate pact was based on "useless, market-liberal instruments instead of effective state governance". He was also unsocial and ineffective. Above all, small and medium incomes would be burdened, rich and corporations spared.
The FDP called the package aimless and discouraged. It is "here and there with a lot of money turned on screws," but it lacks a "great vision for effective climate protection," said the construction and housing policy spokesman of the FDP parliamentary group, Daniel Föst . The grand coalition sells the package as a "master plan", but in fact it is "a hodgepodge without a specific goal". Among other things, more courageous steps were necessary in housing construction.
AfD parliamentary leader Alice Weidel criticized that the climate change would make fossil fuels more expensive. With a ban on oil heating and more expensive oil, gasoline and coal, citizens would be "mercilessly squeezed out for ideology". The AfD is the only party in the Bundestag that does not consider man-made climate change as real and therefore rejects climate policy measures.
Greenpeace CEO Martin Kaiser, however, criticized the increase in fuel prices as too low. "A ridiculously low CO2 price, the gasoline and diesel only a few cents more expensive and is also repealed by a higher commuter allowance, suggests climate protection, but remains completely ineffective for another ten years."
