Der Minister nimmt flüsternd den Bischof beim Arm: Halt du sie dumm, – ich halt’ sie arm!
Reinhard Mey, Sei Wachsam
Seit 10 Jahren halte ich öffentliche Klimavorträge. Genützt hat es nicht viel, denn in dieser Zeit hat die Menschheit weitere 370 Gigatonnen (Milliarden Tonnen) Kohlendioxid ausgestossen, wodurch die Konzentration in der Atmosphäre von 396 auf 420 ppm gestiegen ist und sich unser Planet um weitere 0.2°C erwärmt hat. Das 1.5-Grad-Ziel ist inzwischen aufgegeben worden und noch nie wurde so viel Kohle verbrannt wie im Jahr 2022.
Meinen ersten Klimavortrag habe ich auf Wunsch der Studierenden im Jahr 2013 gehalten und der Hörsaal war entsprechend voll. Heute ist es deutlich schwieriger, das Interesse der jungen Menschen für ihre eigene Zukunft zu wecken. Es ist, als hätten die meisten von ihnen schon aufgegeben und daran sind nicht nur die Medien, sondern auch das Bildungswesen schuld.
Kürzlich hatte ich mit einigen Kolleginnen und Kollegen eine Diskussion über den Inhalt des Ingenieurstudiums. Mein Vorschlag, dass die Unmöglichkeit eines Perpetuum Mobiles zur Abgangskompetenz gehören müsste, ist nicht gut angekommen. Stattdessen werden naturwissenschaftliche Fächer überall gestrichen, um Platz für andere Themen zu schaffen. Das Ergebnis ist, dass immer weniger Menschen verstehen, wie die Welt funktioniert.
Was ist die Aufgabe des Bildungswesens? Sollen wir kritisch denkende Menschen ausbilden, die in der Lage sind, die Welt zu verstehen und die richtigen Fragen zu stellen? Oder besteht die Aufgabe darin, gefügige Lohnsklaven zu produzieren, die hart arbeiten, um die Renten ihrer Eltern zu finanzieren? Müssen die Studierenden wissen, dass unbegrenztes Wachstum auf einem endlichen Planeten unmöglich ist? Müssen sie verstehen, dass sie in einer Gesellschaft leben, in der sie von allen Seiten angelogen werden?
Ihr finanziert uns die Renten und erbt dafür den Klimawandel.
Dr. Daniel Sager, DEZA
Letzte Woche habe ich mir meine erste Klimapräsentation aus dem Jahr 2013 wieder angeschaut. Alles war richtig aber meine Aussagen waren nicht radikal genug. Zu jener Zeit hatte ich noch etwas Hoffnung, dass eine internationale Zusammenarbeit zur Rettung der Menschheit doch möglich wäre. Heute ist mir klar, dass bestehende politische und wirtschaftliche Machtstrukturen dies verhindern. Trotzdem gebe ich nicht auf. Unwissen schützt nicht vor Strafe und die Ignoranten werden wohl zuerst an den Folgen des Klimawandels sterben.
Ich werde mich weiterhin weigern, nützliche Idioten auszubilden, sondern meinem Motto treu bleiben: «Den Kindern einen Grund geben, uns nicht zu hassen.» Die Rückmeldungen von jungen Menschen geben mir recht.
Wahre Freundschaften sind nicht käuflich und wer etwas Gutes tut, hat ein glücklicheres Leben. Hier einige Beispiele von jungen Menschen, die etwas Positives bewirken.
Rachel Donald hielt am 22. März an der OST einen Vortrag über die planetare Krise: Making Sense of the Crisis. Die Pressemitteilung dazu ist hier zu finden: Die Atmosphäre glaubt keine Buchhalter-Tricks. Im Video oben spricht sie über die wichtige Rolle von Ingenieuren und Ingenieurinnen.
Roman Thurnherr hat Erneuerbare Energien und Umwelttechnik an der OST studiert und ist jetzt damit beschäftigt, den Seegrund vor Uetikon zu sanieren.
Dylan Derradj und Simon Grundler der OST haben zusammen mit Julian Rieder der ETH eine solarbetriebene Wasseraufbereitungsanlage in Liberia aufgebaut.
Niemand tut etwas gegen die Klimazerstörung, weil es heute weder politisch noch wirtschaftlich Sinn macht, etwas dagegen zu tun. Klimaschutz kostet nämlich Geld und politisches Kapital. Greenwashing, hingegen, besänftigt das Gewissen der Menschen, ohne etwas zu kosten.
Unser Problem ist nicht, dass die meisten Politiker und Unternehmer böse Menschen sind. Das Problem ist, dass sie alle im Rahmen des bestehenden Wirtschaftssystems, welches die externen Kosten der fossilen Brennstoffe konsequent ausblendet, rational handeln. Wer sich für Klimaschutz einsetzt ist irrational. Dies muss sich ändern!
Die Globale Klimakompensation ist ein Versuch, die Spielregeln der globalen Wirtschaft so zu verändern, dass die Zerstörung des Erdklimas etwas kostet. Einige Details dazu sind in diesem Vortrag vom 18. November 2021 an der OST zu finden.
There are still beautiful places in the world — you just have to know where to look. Now we have to make sure that they will still be there for our children and grandchildren.
I guess only Swedes will understand the musical reference, but it is a nice hymn.
If you do not have time to watch this 55 minute talk by Jeremy Rifkin, you’re really not entitled to have an opinion on the issue of climate change.
In my opinion, he is far too optimistic about the possibilities of technology and he could have questioned the need for economic growth and talked about Degrowth. However, he is right about the fact that we are facing a revolutionary transformation of business and society. Old business models simply do not work anymore.
What Mr Rifkin misses
I have recently proposed Global Climate Compensation as a way to solve the climate crises. It is interesting to compare it with the lecture given by Jeremy Rifkin above. Here is my perspective:
Rifkin is right about the seriousness of the Climate Crises and the need to act now.
He is also right about the need for a fundamental transformation of technology and that digitalization and information are important.
One problem is that ICT is currently a main driver of environmental destruction. Currently, data centers consume enormous amounts of power worldwide, even though they try to run in an optimal fashion. Distributed data centers will be less efficient and use more resources.
Mr Rifkin wants to finance the transition by allowing governments to borrow more money, which is essentially equivalent to printing money. In other words, he wants to inflate and already inflated economy with more cheap money. Since global debt is already at a record level, this is probably not a good idea.
He is not talking about a carbon tax, meaning that there will be no incentive to use less energy under his plan. By making energy even cheaper, it is unlikely that energy demand will decrease. We will only use renewable energy in addition to oil, coal, and gas.
Even though he talks about unequal wealth distribution in this introduction, he fails to address this in his plan, which contains nothing about climate justice.
Obviously, Mr. Rifkin believes that economic growth will fix problems all. His views on technology and the environment are reasonably modern – albeit slightly naïve – but his economic ideas are still firmly rooted in the 19th century.
In contrast, Global Carbon Compensation takes money out of the fossil sector and uses it for the energy transition. This increases the price of fossil fuel and provides the necessary funds without further increasing global debt. In other words, it slowly deflates the carbon bubble and uses the money to deflate the debt bubble. Seems like a good idea.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Although the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a great book, its opening statement is wrong. Earth – it turns out – is very significant. As far as we know, it is the only planet in the universe which has managed to outsmart the entropy principle to create a biosphere full of fantastically complex life forms. This is a remarkable feat, which took billions of years to accomplish. Among other things, it required removing large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to create oxygen and the ozone layer. The fossil fuel deposits in the ground are the reason why we can breathe. Unfortunately, Earth’s ape-descended life forms seem to be too primitive to understand the importance of this fact. Douglas Adams got that right!
The biosphere is a precious thin layer of life on the surface of a small planet in an otherwise dead universe. The picture above shows the Earth, the Moon, and the volume of the Earth’s biosphere as small green sphere. To create the picture, I assumed that most life is located between –2 km and +3 km relative to the sea level. This green sphere thus represents the totality of habitable space in the known universe. It is roughly ten times smaller than the Moon and we basically use it as a sewer!
Consequently, we are now facing a sustainability crisis of astronomic proportions. The consensus of most studies published in 2018 is that the manmade destruction of the biosphere is progressing much faster than previously thought and that we have very little time to act. Amazingly, very few people are prepared to accept the consequences of this. To give one simple example: the latest IPCC report calls for a reduction of CO2 emissions by almost 50% in 11 years. A modern commercial aircraft is designed to last for 25 years. In other words, if we were to take the report seriously, we should stop the production of aircraft tomorrow. This is not a political statement but a mathematical fact.
The good news is that this would easily be possible. The key to solving our sustainability crisis is to stop doing things which harm the environment but are not necessary. Today, most flights and travels by car are for pleasure, with tourism accounting for 10% of CO2 emissions. In other words, we are destroying the planet out of boredom. The same is true for consumption; most people go shopping in order to break the monotony of daily life. If we weren’t that miserable, we would consume less.
There are many reasons for our inability to respond to the climate crisis. The most important one is that our capitalist system requires growth to function. Capitalism is based on the idea that capital is a scarce resource and therefore valuable. The problem is that capital income (or ROI) also leads to an increase in the amount of capital available. If the real economy does not grow, we soon have a situation with more money available than is needed, leading to negative real interest rates. Unfortunately, the correlation between GDP and environmental destruction is almost perfect. On the other hand, there is only a weak correlation between GDP and quality of life. To simplify the discussion, it might be better to refer to GDP as Global Destruction of the Planet at this point.
Another problem is that politicians have no incentive to be bearers of bad news. In recent years, it has become clear that people rather listen to pleasant lies than inconvenient truths. In addition, the status of the politician has declined to a level where there are very few political visionaries and leaders left. Why bother to tell the truth, when you can win by lying?
Finally, scientist – who have been warning us about climate change for decades – are not very good at getting things done. They are trained to find and communicate the truth. Leadership, on the other hand, can best be described as the ability to act on incomplete information. We have known enough about global warming to take action for many years know. What was missing was the political will to act. We are suffering from paralysis by analysis.
This leaves us in a very difficult situation. Although we know that we need to ban the use of fossil fuel before 2050, global demand for energy still grows faster than renewable energy production. As a result, we now use more coal, gas, and oil than ever before in human history. The picture below shows the energy forecast by BP. It predicts 74% of the global energy demand to be covered by fossil fuel in 2040, down from 85% in 2016. Because of the increasing energy demand, more fossil fuel will be used in 2040 than today. You can criticize BP for a lot of things, but they do know a thing or two about the global energy market. And they have a strong incentive to keep the oil flowing.
The problem is that the rich and powerful benefit from the current system and are convinced that they can buy themselves out of any problem. The only way to instigate real change is to ensure that these people feel the pain too, by destroying the global financial system. A massive financial meltdown would ruin many banks and global corporations, requiring society to step in and take charge again. The global accumulation of wealth has reached such absurd levels – with 1% of people receiving 82% of the wealth – that we now need to press the reset button. Homo Economicus cannot not solve our current crisis.
Homo Sapiens, on the other hand, might still have a chance. In order to survive, we need to rethink the way our society is organized. Above all, we need to stop defining ourselves by what we steal from others – including future generations – and start appreciating what we contribute to society. Our basic problem today is that people can get rich by destroying the planet. A coal mine – to take an obvious example – destroys value, but still allows its owners to get rich. Why? The problem is that the free market optimizes the economy locally rather than globally.
This is why I advocate and implement a consumer strike. By not buying stuff, I save money and time and drastically lower my global footprint. Rather than running around in shops or browsing for the best deal on the internet, I spend time with my family, going for a walk, reading a good book, or doing some other meaningful activity. And it is perfectly legal; nobody can force me to buy things I do not need. More importantly, by not spending money, I actively sabotage the global financial system. If enough of us join in, it will collapse. Forget digitalization – what we need is demonetization!
If this sounds like a drastic solution, it is important to remember that the alternative is even worse. We do not get to cherry pick. The future of humanity is not a Disney movie with a guaranteed happy ending. We must choose between protecting the financial system or the biosphere; you can’t have the planet and eat it. The decisions we take today will determine if human civilization will collapse or not. Fortunately, more and more young people realize this and are prepared to fight for their survival. I have decided to join them. It is fun, it is rewarding, and it gives me a sense of purpose. It is better to die fighting than to live on your knees.
