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Chancellor Angela Merkel's thin carbon footprint

2021-12-05T17:47:01.488Z


As Chancellor Angela Merkel aroused admiration and hatred. Its political legacy seems impressive - but in a few years it may serve as a bad example above all else.


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Merkel (center) at the big tattoo

Photo: CLEMENS BILAN / EPA

»I am of the opinion that I have put a lot of effort into protecting the climate.

And yet, with my scientific mind, I am sufficiently equipped to see that the objective conditions require that you cannot continue at that pace, but rather have to get faster. "

Chancellor Angela Merkel in July 2021

If you are currently watching any prime-time commercials on German television, you could come to the conclusion that the matter has long been scratched: the professionals have it under control.

In a Volvo commercial, a little girl pityingly shakes her head because the bearded grandpa is driving the toy car over the carpet with "hum, hum" noises.

Advertising slogan: "The future is electric." At Mercedes, an electric car falls from the sky in slow motion, at the feet of a woman waiting longingly ("I can't wait for tomorrow"), and BMW and Audi also almost exclusively leave their advertisements drive with electricity.

Burners?

Was there something?

The private broadcaster ratings hit "The Voice of Germany" is presented by a fully electric Seat, Amazon lets children speak admonishing words into the camera for its "Climate Pledge", even coffee machines now have to be called something with "Eco".

Vague sense of aspiration

Vattenfall has an »encouraging« and »detailed« Spotify playlist with »relaxing tracks on the energy transition« on offer, and RWE has for years been unsuccessfully pretending that it is in fact a corporation that is no longer making money with dirty coal.

And Shell, of all people, diagnosed: "Germany has the energy to turn."

Whatever one may think of the climate-conscious assurances of all those whose business models have caused the current misery, one thing must be said: the wind has turned.

Don't put climate protection in the shop window, that's no longer possible.

Hypocrisy or not, that's good news: As is well known, advertising creates, in addition to the need to buy specific products, a vague feeling of what is worth striving for.

The world of tomorrow, which today's advertisers are now painting colorful, ethereal, floating, peaceful, is one in which humanity does not drive itself into the abyss.

In spite of all the hypocrisy, that is initially gratifying.

Executive Merkel?

And of course there is a reason: According to a few weeks old ARD Germany trend, 83 percent of Germans consider the need for action in matters of climate to be "very big" or "big".

This new German climate has to do with all sorts of things.

With more and more extreme weather events that are slowly starting to really frighten people.

With the increasing ridiculousness of the theses of climate change deniers.

With Greta Thunberg and Fridays for Future.

But one person has little or nothing to do with this social and meanwhile also media climate change: the manager Angela Merkel.

On Thursday, the outgoing Chancellor did one last time what she has done so often, shortly before the big tattoo.

That for which it was also valued, internationally respected and sometimes even celebrated by its critics.

"Leader of the free world" and all that.

Impressively informed, yet failed

Merkel sat at the federal press conference and, with a serious expression, announced bitterly necessary additional measures to at least mitigate the fourth corona wave.

Once again much too late, but that is probably not primarily Merkel's fault.

She did it with this somewhat leisurely calm and this "this is really not about me" - seriousness that is still believed to this day.

It is well known that other actors in the crisis, such as the outgoing Minister of Health, lack this attitude completely.

This sober seriousness, impressive awareness, subject-independent expertise, the seemingly complete absence of vanity or self-centeredness was Merkel's great, yes: outstanding strength.

She used you when it came to the financial and euro crisis, when dealing with refugees from the Syrian civil war, when dealing with Donald Trump.

All of this will remain part of their legacy.

However, in 16 years she has not been able to use these talents effectively on the most important topic of the present and future.

When it comes to the climate, permanent Chancellor Angela Merkel has failed.

What the climate doesn't care about

Many years after she had long since declared publicly as Environment Minister that climate protection urgently needs to be speeded up, that the environment does not matter "whether we are in a boom or not," she was still laying the foundations with her own hands for new coal-fired power plants. Time and again, the self-imposed climate targets of their governments have been missed. Regardless of whether it was about converting to electromobility, expanding renewable energies or setting your own emissions targets.

Again and again Merkel's governments not only fell over, they helped the fossil companies and the automotive industry, which had been completely unteachable for too long, to keep going.

Although Merkel herself had understood long before she took office as Chancellor that this would lead to disaster.

In Brussels, Merkel's envoy lobbied for the most harmless CO2 limit values ​​possible for cars, and the diesel scandal was allowed to pass unused.

In the federal states, her party friends sabotaged the expansion of power lines, wind and solar energy.

Renewables grew rapidly in Germany for a while - but this bitterly necessary change was most effectively slowed down during the Merkel era.

The risk of historical retrospect

"Every additional wind turbine harms the coal," a CDU politician once inadvertently said in a disarmingly honest way.

The "leadership", the ability to lead, which Merkel has repeatedly demonstrated nationally and internationally on other topics, which earned her such great respect - on the subject of the climate that, according to her own assessment, "actually shaped my entire political work" is supposed to, she couldn't achieve anything.

It can be assumed that it is completely clear to her that she is serious about the sentences quoted above from her last summer press conference this year.

That she knows that the science journalist Christian Schwägerl was right when he wrote about the Merkel era this summer: “Those responsible who will later be said to have been able to avert the climate crisis but did not do it are at risk that all other successes of their terms of office, however, pale completely. "

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Stocker, Christian

We are the experiment: our world is changing so breathtakingly that we stagger from crisis to crisis.

We have to learn to manage this tremendous acceleration.

Published by Karl Blessing Verlag

Number of pages: 384

Published by Karl Blessing Verlag

Number of pages: 384

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Danger and hope

From this failure grows both a danger and a hope.

The danger is that other politicians from Merkel's generation, above all her successor Olaf Scholz, persist in the same mistake.

Because now to act really decisively and, above all, quickly, that presupposes that you do something that you don't like to do in politics: admitting to yourself that you really did something wrong.

Scholz in particular, who has really not distinguished himself as a climate politician and whose SPD is largely complicit in the misery, could find it difficult.

But maybe the fundamentally changed social climate will help him.

And, that is the hope that grows from Merkel's climate policy failure, perhaps that will also help him and his government: In retrospect, we can hopefully finally name this failure as such.

Admit a huge mistake and look ahead.

Don't just continue to justify why things didn't work out differently, but finally start doing it fundamentally differently.

And quickly.

Perhaps this will be Angela Merkel's most important legacy, as bitter as the conclusion may be: she can serve as both a good and a very bad example.

Source: spiegel

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