By Jo Nova
The Pandemic woke up a lot of people
Thanks to Pierre Gosselin at NoTricksZone who lets us know that Kristina Schröder — a minister in the Angela Merkel government for four years, has written in Der Pragmaticus, of her fear that the German government is copying the dark pattern of the pandemic to create a nation where the government controls what people eat and wear, and whether they can travel.
It would have helped if she had seen this coming ten years ago, when she was a Minister, but she says, she did not believe Germans would accept drastic restrictions for the “collective good” until the pandemic hit. Now she asks why there is a blindness to the costs of climate action, and why there is indifference to the losses of freedom. (Obviously, the German media and industrial censorship complex is just like the rest of the West, and there is no outrage allowed, no node for protests to gather on, and a constant stream of gaslighting — “renewables are cheap”, the “world is hotter than ever” and “climate change makes goldfish alcoholic”, that sort of thing).
The good news is that word is spreading…
Kristina Schröder: (Google translated)
Fundamental rights in crisis mode
Corona is now over, now it’s about climate change . And again, the two argumentation patterns that predominate during the pandemic can be observed: refusal to weigh things up and an end-justifies-the-means way of thinking.
Against the background of the experience of the pandemic, it is easy to imagine these future measures to contain the infection, pardon, CO 2 occurrence: There is a threat of requirements that affect our most private lifestyle. How we live, heat, move, travel and what we eat could soon no longer be an individual decision, but increasingly dictated by the state.
The long-time director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, who is considered in some circles to be Germany’s most important climate protector, has already made a corresponding suggestion: You could provide every citizen with a CO 2 budget of three tons annually. Anyone who knows that Germans are currently responsible for an average of eleven tons of CO 2 emissions per capita per year can appreciate what that would mean.
As Gosselin observes Schröder “…so far many Germans have been acting complacently about such drastic proposals”. Schröder asks the 64 trillion dollar question of our times — why are Germans (like so much of the West) willing to accept these losses of basic rights so easily?
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?”
Schröder is now aware (belatedly) that the activists don’t care about the environment but are using climate change to fight the evil capitalist system.
Fight against the system
I am convinced that large parts of the climate protection movement also fight our way of living and doing business at least as much as they fight climate change. They adhere to the narrative, which has been very powerful in left-wing movements in the Western world since the 1970s, that free and market-economy societies are structurally exploitative and destructive. Also, of course, structurally discriminatory and racist; This is what the members of the wokeness movement deal with.
Clear empirical findings that the more capitalist a country is, the cleaner the water and air and the more diverse the flora and fauna are, are robustly ignored in these circles. With climate protection, activists have found a powerful lever to push back the hated capitalist system.
It is the crisis for the sake of having a crisis — and by definition it must never be solved:
I am sure that if a technical solution were to be found tomorrow that would allow us to make CO2 harmless overall, large parts of the radical climate protection movement would not be relieved, but rather disappointed.
Perhaps Pierre can mention nuclear energy to her?
Photo by Leonhard Lenz
Kristina Schröder’s full commentary is in Der Pragmaticus
Image adapted by Jo from work by PayPal.me/FelixMittermeier and Presentsquare