From NoTricksZone
By P Gosselin
“Basic rights in crisis mode” in Germany. The real threat to democracy.
“How we live, heat, get around, travel and what we eat could soon no longer be an individual decision, but increasingly be dictated by the state,” a former German federal minister warns.
Image cropped from Kristina Schröder’s Twitter account.
Kristina Schröder, photo above, who served as the Federal Family Minister from 2009 to 2013 in the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel, recently commented that Germany currently finds itself on a dangerous environmentally dogmatic path under the current leadership.
Pandemic as the blueprint
In a commentary published at Der Pragmaticus here, she writes: “The pandemic has provided a blueprint for the climate movement on how to enforce fundamental restrictions on basic rights.”
“Germany is heading in the direction of a radical climate protection dogma that almost completely ignores the costs of the path taken. And once again, the two predominant patterns of argumentation in the pandemic can be observed: A refusal to weigh things up and an ends-justify-the-means mindset,” Schröder adds. “I am convinced that large sections of the climate protection movement are also fighting our way of living and our economy at least as much as they are fighting climate change.”
CO2 as the virus to fear
Schröder adds that it is easy to see that CO2 is being viewed as a virus and to imagine future measures to curb it: “there is a threat of regulations affecting our most private lifestyles. How we live, heat, get around, travel and what we eat could soon no longer be an individual decision, but increasingly be dictated by the state.”
Schellnhuber “3 tonnes per year”
She also speaks critically of Prof. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the former director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) who proposes “every citizen could be given a CO2 budget of three tons per year.” The average German emits 11 tons per year, and thus getting down to just 3 would certainly entail draconian restrictions and regulations.
But so far many Germans have been acting complacently about such drastic proposals, Schröder notes, adding: “This eager willingness to relinquish fundamental freedoms is all the more disturbing as a crucial question is hardly being asked, let alone answered: Does effective climate protection really have to mean such losses of freedom and prosperity?”
Schröder, who contributes regularly to Welt, also wonders why in Germany there’s such a “blindness to the costs” of reducing CO2. “Why this indifference to the loss of freedom and prosperity?” And: “Why this longing for bans, renunciation and penance?”
“Powerful lever” against capitalism
In Schröder’s view, for the activists, climate protection is “a powerful lever to push back the hated capitalist system.”
She concludes:
“I am certain that if a technical solution were to be found tomorrow that would allow us to render CO2 harmless overall, large sections of the radical climate protection movement would not be relieved, but disappointed.”
Foe the greens and the many activists, it’s follow our politics! It’s not about science.
Read Kristina Schröder’s full commentary here (German).
