A Sunday evening in May 2019. Anne Will has invited to her talk show on ARD.
Annalena Baerbock and Armin Laschet are also there.
The program is about the performance of the parties in the European elections and the enormous increase in votes of the Greens in Germany.
CDU politician Laschet tries to explain: "For some reason," he says, "the climate issue has suddenly become a global issue."
Greta Thunberg will probably have something to do with it.
Shaking his head, his own perplexity can be seen.
Today, two years later, the talk show guests Baerbock and Laschet face each other as Chancellor candidate and Chancellor candidate.
The climate issue is still there - and it also plays a decisive role in the battle for the Chancellery.
Today, Laschet would probably no longer allow climate votes to automatically be green votes.
The CDU leader also claims leadership competence for his party in this task of the century.
Again and again confronted with the comparatively weak profile of the Union in ecological issues, Laschet has recently tried to score points.
He spoke of a "decade of modernization" that Germany needed, of the vision of making the Federal Republic the number one hydrogen country.
With their ideas for a sustainable industrialized country, the CDU and CSU took their time, more than any other party, and only last week they presented a party program.
The expectations for the climate chapter were correspondingly high.
The conservatives are now clearly committed to Germany's climate neutrality in 2045 and they also want to meet the intermediate target of minus 65 percent greenhouse gases by 2030 compared to 1990.
But what are your concepts with which this can be achieved?
The energy economist Claudia Kemfert, member of the Advisory Council for Environmental Issues, which advises the Federal Government and guest in this episode of the “Climate Report” podcast, does not want to speak of a “great success” in any case.
However, the expert has a completely different assessment of some of the proposals from the political competition.
How green is the Union?
And what do the other parties have to offer to tackle the climate crisis?
We are discussing this this week in the »Climate Report«, the new weekly SPIEGEL podcast on the climate crisis, which appears every Tuesday, on SPIEGEL.de and wherever there are podcasts.
Curious?
Then you will now hear our »Climate Report«.