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Union politician Schäuble: "I'm more for slow"
Photo: Kay Nietfeld / picture alliance / dpa
How far is Germany actually on the way to becoming climate neutral as quickly as possible?
The past few weeks could confuse even interested observers.
On the one hand, the Federal Constitutional Court found that the Federal Government's Climate Protection Act was partly unconstitutional.
The freedom rights of the younger generation threatened to be excessively curtailed.
Not very far, is it?
On the other hand, members of the government outbid each other to emphasize that they always wanted more.
The cabinet decided in a hurry to implement a reform based on what the think tanks Agora Energiewende, Agora Verkehrswende and the Climate Neutrality Foundation currently believe to be feasible: climate neutrality in Germany by 2045.
So very far?
The government is fighting the climate crisis with full force?
Is the Union green?
In this situation, Bundestag President Wolfgang Schäuble (CDU) said a remarkable sentence about the climate crisis at the event "Leipzig reads extra", which helps to sort out the political situation.
"We have already mastered bigger problems", as the "Welt" quotes him.
It is a clarifying sentence.
It shows that not everything has changed yet.
The goals approach what is necessary
In order to understand why, it helps to formulate schematically how political problem solving works: Politics recognizes need for action, formulates new goals, takes these goals seriously and initiates targeted measures.
Applied to climate policy, the situation looks like this:
Until about three years ago, politics and society had not even recognized a fundamental need for action, even if there were international agreements and inadequate national goals.
Voters didn’t really care about climate policy, and politicians hardly at all.
A side issue, not for the important people.
The climate protection movement and hot, dry summers have changed that.
As described, the climate targets have been adjusted several times and are now approaching what is necessary.
The decisive final step, the implementation in action, is still pending.
What it looks like depends largely on how seriously politicians take the problem.
That brings you to Schäuble's sentence.
This makes it clear that the awareness of the problem has not kept pace with the ever new goals - that sometimes it has not even changed.
Schäuble once said: "We have overcome much greater challenges in history."
That was at the end of 2019 when the goals of the government and thus the Union were still those that the Constitutional Court has now objected to.
Last year he discussed in a dispute in SPIEGEL with the climate protection activist Luisa Neubauer.
He criticized that a lot had been neglected, he affirmed that the country was facing a huge task.
But he also said: “If I am faced with the alternative of implementing something quickly or slowly, then I tend to be slow.
Because the price for acting quickly is the loss of freedom «.
Climate protection is only one topic among many that politics has to deal with.
Three years, three very similar analyzes: Schäuble speaks a lot about the climate crisis, but he speaks of it as one major political problem among many.
Only it is not.
That can be determined without attempting a horror ranking.
You don't have to judge whether the climate crisis is the biggest political problem so far to recognize that it is a novel, a special problem.
What makes the climate crisis unique
First, it is ubiquitous.
It does not stand next to all other political fields, it influences them all: foreign policy, security, economy, social affairs, migration, transport, agriculture, housing.
There is no place and no time outside of the climate crisis.
You can't escape it.
Therefore, as has so often been the case in the past, costs cannot be externalized, i.e. burdened others.
Of course, the climate crisis is hitting some harder and some in the global north less hard at first.
But sooner or later there will be no others.
Second, if it continues unchecked, it creates a new world.
Even if all the countries on earth just stick to their current political course, children born today could experience an earth at Schäuble's age that is hotter than a homo sapiens ever experienced.
It's literally about the fact that today's daycare children could live on a completely different planet.
Nobody can know how societies will deal with this.
Probably no one can even imagine it.
The impending loss of control
Third, the climate crisis will either be contained in the next few years or it will not be contained.
It intensifies itself when so-called tipping points are exceeded: when the ice melts, the permafrost thaws, the Amazon dies.
Nothing people do then will stop the process.
It would be a complete loss of control.
It is not possible to say with any certainty when exactly these tipping points will be reached.
It's probably not going to be long.
Science has indications that some processes are already developing a life of their own.
The short window of time to act is already closing.
Normal political problems, on the other hand, remain available: A tax reform can be decided now or ten years from now.
In principle, national borders can be closed or opened at any time.
Even wars can, in principle, be ended at any point in time, given the appropriate will or the appropriate means.
Fourth, the climate crisis cannot be fought with the usual methods, because there is so much time pressure and, to make matters worse, the basis of modern societies must disappear from our lives with fossil fuels.
So humanity faces nothing less than a controlled revolution if it is to prevent the uncontrolled revolution that would inevitably devour its children.
The climate crisis defies the routines of politics and especially the method of conservatism of Schäuble's Union.
He lives from blocking a political demand until it can no longer be prevented and then integrating it into his own worldview.
He defends what he just fought because it now belongs to him.
Conservatism is last-minute reformism as a power technique.
It was never necessary to worry about the nature and essence of a political problem.
It might even have been a hindrance.
This method worked for decades because the political problems remained available in post-war society.
They could be resolved a decade earlier or later, whenever the zeitgeist was ready.
The climate crisis is different.
The Union has adjusted the goals of climate protection policy, but apparently not yet.
