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Luisa Neubauer and Ulrich Schneider
Photo: Christoph Soeder / dpa / Xander Heinl / photo library / IMAGO
Every crisis is an opportunity?
It would be nice.
Corona pandemic, climate crisis, energy crisis, growing poverty;
the crises are escalating, with no end in sight.
People are overwhelmed by worries.
"How am I supposed to pay my heating bill?" some ask.
»Do I have to give up my business?«, the others.
And one wonders what is to come.
The federal government wants to relieve people financially.
However, this does not happen comprehensively and purposefully enough.
While the climate crisis is currently taking a kind of pause in public perception, it is actually turning up: Recently, 30 million people in Pakistan lost their homes due to floods, Europe experienced historic droughts in the summer, the Rhine dried up, and forest fires in Brandenburg forced villages to evacuate .
All this in a world that is 1.2 degrees hotter.
In a few generations, the world could have reached plus three degrees of warming.
Anyone who calls for radical climate protection that is appropriate to the circumstances is told that the current relief must first be dealt with.
No time for climate protection.
You express yourself differently, of course, you say: »We'll do it«.
But the numbers speak a different language.
Most recently, a review of climate protection efforts in the transport sector was canceled because there was not enough to check because of the standstill.
On the other hand, anyone who finds that the relief is not nearly enough to do justice to the needs of the people is accused of having a free mentality.
We are moving further and further away from the vision of a society based on solidarity that counteracts the climate crisis and creates social security.
Ironically, a government led by Social Democrats and Greens remains well below its potential when it comes to climate and social justice.
All of this is accompanied by the fairy tales of those who are neither interested in social equality nor in climate protection.
You have managed to put an »or« between »climate« and »social«.
Climate protection is portrayed as anti-social and too expensive, poverty in turn as a law of nature.
With this "or" political forces explain that you have to decide between social balance and climate protection, both together do not work, especially not now.
The second fairy tale is the story of financial scarcity: you have to choose between relief for people today and investments in climate protection for tomorrow's world.
In this fairy tale, the black zero is more important than the dignity of the people living below the minimum or the securing of ecological livelihoods.
It is said that wealth cannot be redistributed: whoever has it deserves it, and whoever is poor deserves it too.
In this way, the lack of aid and climate investments can be justified without appearing too inhuman.
But it could also be different.
Imagine a different story being told of a society trying to emerge from crises in a socially just and ecologically sustainable manner.
That would not be a fairy tale, because it is possible.
The roots of the energy crisis and the climate crisis are the same: dependence on fossil fuels and fossil fuel corporations, and policies that privatize profits and collectivize losses.
In the first half of the year, the profits of the energy company RWE grew to well over two billion euros, made possible by a shortage caused by the war and paid for by people for whom the utility bills at the end of the month have become an abyss.
In order for this winter to be the last in which people fear gas bills, we have to get away from fossil fuels, their autocrats and mega-corporations.
That would be possible with an unprecedented acceleration of the energy transition and a radical expansion of wind and solar power.
Never before has it been so obvious that climate protection and social issues are inseparable.
Fridays for Future has proposed a special fund of 100 billion that can finance and above all accelerate this transformation in its early stages.
That would mean relaxing the debt brake in 2023.
Yes, that puts a strain on the household, but protects against significantly greater strains.
The less we invest now to protect ourselves from the climate catastrophe, the greater the climate damage from the next floods, fires and crop failures.
The crises hit everyone, but not everyone equally.
The poorest feel the effects of climate damage first.
The flood in the Ahr Valley alone must have cost around 30 billion euros financially;
what could have been done with the money for the poor, for education and health?
There is no social security without climate protection
On the other hand, successful climate protection depends on social security.
Anyone who lives with concerns about utility bills and rising food prices today lacks the money and time for what can be called »ecological participation«.
There is a lack of opportunities to help shape and get involved in the fight against the climate crisis.
Without ecological participation for all, the transformation will foreseeably be unfair and certainly not sustainable - because precisely the perspectives that should make the difference are missing.
It is in everyone's interest that everyone has the opportunity to contribute to finding solutions.
Hardship can be alleviated with targeted, substantial relief for the poorest.
The undeserved excess profits of the electricity companies should be used to pay the electricity bills of the poorer part of the population.
It should be over with the debt brake in 2023.
Social inequalities and collapsed ecosystems outweigh debt.
The fairy tale of the contradiction between social justice and climate justice benefits few and harms many.
So let's take to the streets together for social security and climate justice and give the government a clear signal that we won't let ourselves be played off against each other.
