Economist denounces climate-friendly lifestyle: "The majority live like ecological vandals"

Hundreds of thousands take to the streets on Friday for climate protection, activists demonstrate against coal mining and the word "flying ash" finds its way into the general vocabulary. Will society become more ecological overall? On the contrary, says the economist Niko Paech.

Before the World Climate Change Conference Paech certified many citizens, to deceive themselves about the fatal environmentally harmful consequences of their lifestyle. In the midst of the plaintiff's speech about the climate crisis, the demand for decadent luxury, which brings with it an immense emission of climate-damaging greenhouse gases, is growing the strongest, said the economist of the University of Siegen, the news agency dpa.

"These are cruises, that's SUVs, that's the air traffic, the digital electronics and the demand for more living space." This is pure comfort that can not be justified as the satisfaction of essential basic needs. "Here lies the lie of a society whose majority thinks it is climate-friendly, but lives like ecological vandals."

Karlheinz Schindler / picture alliance

Economist Niko Paech: "There is no human right to book a cruise"

"We have achieved nothing, but nothing at all"

The UN Climate Change Conference, which begins in Madrid on Monday, discusses how to limit global warming to a tolerable level without ecosystems collapsing within a few decades.

Paech said a radical changeover was needed to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions - and in short. For decades, attempts have been made to decouple economic growth from environmental damage of all kinds. "And we have achieved nothing, but nothing."

Therefore, not only an economy without growth, but a decommissioning program is indispensable. But this was not a march into the asceticism or the Middle Ages, but could be understood as a liberation from the abundance.

"The decay of a mobility that corresponds to decadent luxury and uses up tons of oil is paramount, there is no human right to book a cruise, there is no human right to vacation by plane." But there were endless possibilities to spend holidays here in Europe without kerosene.