Burn as much fossil fuel as you can. Create prosperity for as many people as possible. And if that doesn’t work anymore due to climate change? Then simply switch to eco and sustainable. Is it really that easy?
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00:00 Burn as much fossil fuel as you can.
00:04 Create prosperity for as many as possible.
00:07 And if that's no longer possible due to climate change,
00:11 then simply switch to eco and sustainable.
00:14 Promote green growth and everything will stay the same.
00:17 Is this really the way to prevent climate collapse, dystopia or happy ending?
00:24 The biggest polluters such as airlines want to become sustainable.
00:29 Almost every company is committed to this, including the automotive industry.
00:34 Manufacturers such as Volkswagen want to become climate neutral, as do entire countries.
00:40 I believe that managing our prosperity without any environmental impact
00:45 or within the Earth's boundaries is fundamentally conceivable and should definitely be our goal.
00:51 The highlight of this model is that, as before, growth also strengthens social cohesion.
01:00 The issue of social security systems or the preservation of the welfare state,
01:06 medical care systems and so on, has always been solved by having more and more to distribute.
01:12 And that's been very successful.
01:14 Which is why all the systems are now actually dependent on this growth.
01:19 To stop climate change, an ambitious target must be met.
01:23 Our atmosphere tolerates a maximum of one tonne of CO2 emissions per capita per year.
01:28 Only a few developing countries such as Niger and Africa currently achieve this.
01:33 The current global average is 4.7 tonnes.
01:37 In the US it's 14.2 tonnes. What can be done?
01:41 We have to decouple these two factors from one another.
01:46 Economic output and resource consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.
01:51 There's still a long way to go and it's happening far too slowly so far.
01:56 Promote rail transport more than before?
02:00 Make flying more expensive and thus less attractive?
02:03 Eat less meat? Are the existing ideas we have sufficient?
02:07 This is particularly evident in the German energy transition,
02:15 which has essentially not contributed to a significant reduction in CO2 emissions.
02:20 And even where a supposed reduction has occurred,
02:23 it's primarily due to a shift in production processes abroad,
02:27 which are therefore emissions-intensive.
02:30 Industrialized nations would actually have to reduce their emissions 15 times faster than before
02:38 in order to become climate neutral by the middle of the century.
02:42 To achieve this, Germany would have to produce four times more electricity
02:46 from exclusively renewable sources than it does today.
02:50 Pretty unrealistic.
02:52 The dilemma we currently find ourselves in is that no political power has the courage to come clean
03:00 and tell people that we are physically and ecologically living beyond our means.
03:09 In the industrialized world, a drastic reduction would actually be necessary, realistically speaking.
03:16 After all, they've emitted an excessive amount of CO2.
03:20 In these countries, the economy and prosperity would have to shrink in order to prevent a climate collapse.
03:27 I don't believe that we can get people to live in a more sustainable, climate-friendly way
03:33 by shrinking prosperity or making losses.
03:36 And that's why we have to do everything we can to reconcile the economy and ecology.
03:42 The problem? Sectors with high CO2 emissions, such as the chemical industry, would have to produce less.
03:52 Millions of jobs would be lost. That could endanger social peace in industrialized countries.
04:01 The first step would be to think about how a smaller economy could still be just and fair,
04:07 and how we could also stabilize an appropriate level of material supply.
04:12 Here, it would be very important to deal with working hours differently.
04:17 Reducing average working hours to a four-day week could help to achieve full employment
04:25 even under the conditions of a shrinking, gross domestic product.
04:30 People could probably keep their beloved smartphones, as their carbon footprint is relatively small,
04:36 provided they stick to the most important mantra for saving the climate – sharing instead of owning, as with car sharing.
04:44 Then an industrialized country could manage with one-seventh the cars.
04:49 Sorry, no real happy ending, but no dystopia either.
04:53 [Music]
04:58 (upbeat music)