The Green Deal does not mean replacing gasoline with hydrogen

In fact, the non-aggression pact came about because obviously all three candidates were sent into the race with the rule of thumb not to unsettle the electorate or even to question the comfort zones of our affluent society.

How the Trielle shut out reality

Repelled by the martial showdowns of the last two US election campaigns, which symbolically portrayed a dramatically divided country, the boring Trielle quickly blocked reality and thus the view of the future.

This will bring Laschet a historic defeat. The Scholz SPD will benefit – at least temporarily – from the lack of a conservative, bourgeois vision of the future.

But the big loser could be the Greens, whose part in the collective parliamentary denial of reality was to have corrupted their core competencies as drivers of innovation and troublemakers by hand in power.

A fatal mistake by Team Baerbock: having bought the pragmatic ability to govern (Annalena Baerbock as “Merkel 2.0”) by renouncing a courageous and approving vision of the future, with which many people in the country would definitely have been enthusiastic about a serious social-ecological transformation permit.

Because it is undisputed (the fabric softener from Trielle will not save us from this realization) that we can only get a Green Deal, as required by the EU, through a spirit of entrepreneurship and research, enthusiasm for experimentation and new approaches, drive, but also the ability to fail without immediately burying your head in the sand.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, the US President of the “New Deal”, put this down to the famous formula in the 1930s: “It is common sense to take a method and try it out. If it fails, let’s openly admit it and try another. But for God’s sake let’s try something. “

Four directions for a green deal

Such a green deal is the opposite of the technocratic pseudo-turn à la FDP, which dreams of only having to replace gasoline with hydrogen so that everything stays the same.

From the scientific point of view, there is no longer any doubt that we have to start this radical transformation as quickly as possible. And we firmly believe that we can do it.

The following are especially important for this four course positions important, which primarily affect our dealings with nature and technology:

1. Humans have to see themselves as part of nature: In the pedagogy that should accompany a Green Deal, we have to make it clear that the dualism of human culture versus exploitable nature has been the fatal invention of an ideology-driven economic order since the 1940s. Corona has shown that we cannot cut our connection to nature (but have tried for a fateful 50 years). The future consists in the fact that we develop new options for action for the post-fossil era from such being-in-nature and in-the-world. A goal-oriented Green New Deal must address this change. Or as Albert Schweitzer puts it: “I am life that wants to live, in the midst of life that wants to live.”
2. Investing in nature differently, an alternative “natural capitalism”: Cambridge economist Sir Partha Dasgupta calculates that real capital in the world doubled between 1992 and 2014. Human capital, the collective knowledge and skills of people, has grown by 13 percent.
   In contrast, “natural capital” has fallen by a dramatic 40 percent. The report literally states: “We all failed together to develop a sustainable relationship with nature.”
   According to Dasgupta, there are three factors of production in the world: labor, capital and nature. On the basis of this economic triad (no triad!), He proposes a new “grammar” for how the economy deals with nature.
   Dasgupta sees four ways to end the war with nature: firstly, consume less, secondly have fewer children, thirdly, use nature more efficiently, for example through genetic engineering and less meat consumption. And fourthly, invest in nature, for example for better nature conservation and reforestation.
3. Does the earth need chemotherapy? The paths to achieving the 1.5 degree goal have been described by many researchers over the past two years. Tenor: Actually, we all have technologies and we know what we have to do. Last but not least, technologies of carbon capturing and geoengineering are already priced in in the IPCC report.
   The problem: The technology of carbon capturing is still not fully developed and far too expensive (but further positive developments are by no means excluded). Special measures such as solar geoengineering, in which, for example, calcium carbonate particles are shot into the earth’s atmosphere, could lead to cooling effects.
   However, if you stop the particle supply, the earth’s atmosphere suddenly heats up. The question that needs to be answered in the near future is how far we can go in controlling nature. Elizabeth Kolbert dealt with geoengineering in “Under A White Sky”.
   She emphasizes that fundamental technological interventions in ecosystems have been taking place for more or less 10,000 years. Seen in this way, geoengineering could impose itself as an alternative “chemotherapy of the earth”. The decision about this must be made in the political arena and with regard to the living conditions of present and future generations.
4. State and public authorities as “risk absorption bodies”: Again and again a classic in election campaign times: the fear of the encroaching state invoked by liberals and conservatives. In fact, it is absolutely impossible for companies to represent the risks that must be taken in the coming years for the development of sustainable technologies.
   In order to cope with the gigantic challenge of climate change, the public sector must position itself more than ever as a trend incubator and risk partner for companies. It takes more than the role of the money distributor walking around with the watering can.
   We need a system exchange as quickly as possible: Instead of crude oil, natural gas, coal and combustion engines, the technology system of the future will rely on solar energy, energy storage, heat pumps and electric vehicles.
   If the great transformation of the green deal is to succeed, we also need new cooperation relationships between the state and companies, international networks and closed recycling cycles. The state does not compete with the private sector in the design of markets that are important for the future – its task is to shape the transition into the post-fossil era in close cooperation with the other actors.

As a risk absorption authority, the state will have the task of not only “making those decisions that nobody makes if the state does not make them”, as the British economist John Maynard Keynes put it, but also to provide impulses in all relevant future fields without prescribing business and civil society.

Eike Wenzel is an author of the book “The New Green Age: How the Green New Deal Will Radically Change the Way We Live”. This text is the second part of a three-part series about the interplay of technology and sustainability in the run-up to the federal election.