How we can still stop climate change

Climate protection is extremely complex. Global CO₂ emissions continue to grow.

The Paris Agreement contains ambitious targets but no matching commitments and measures. The negative dynamics concerning climate result from the understandable economic aspirations of many poorer countries who want to catch-up with the rich, industrialized countries. China is successfully leading the way in this regard but, as a result, is now emitting one-third of the world’s CO₂ emissions and continues to increase her emissions. Simultaneously, the world’s population is growing at a rapid pace. By 2050, some 2.5 billion people will be added to the current figure. That is equivalent to adding a population the size of Germany’s, every year.

German and European climate policy do not deal with these issues. We are concerned solely with reducing our own CO₂ emissions. Though this is largely irrelevant to the global climate, it demands all our attention and costs us enormous financial and intellectual resources. We are totally fixated on electromobility but disregard climate-neutral synthetic fuels for passenger cars, including for the existing global fleet. Nuclear power is rejected across the board, as is the capture and use of CO₂ from industrial plants and coal-fired power plants.

Are there alternatives? Yes! Because Germany is a high-tech country and the world needs new technological solutions. Huge amounts of cheap green electricity from the great solar deserts, green hydrogen as a by-product from these regions, synthetic energy carriers like methanol and methane for use everywhere in the world – combining these three solutions would totally change the situation. Siemens Energy and Porsche are currently pursuing this path in the Haru Oni project in Chile. Also interesting in this context is the recycling of CO₂ from power plants and industrial facilities, allowing them to become climate-neutral using green methanol and methane as energy sources.

The Development and Climate Alliance (www.allianz-entwicklung-klima.de) of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development is another promising approach. It mobilizes companies, individuals, cities to voluntarily support impactful projects for development and climate protection in the world’s poorer regions. Anyone can join in. Nature-based solutions are particularly effective, i.e. reforestation on degraded soils in the tropics, resolute rainforest protection, humus formation in agriculture etc. But even this approach has not been widely pursued to date. Some even view it as a “free-for-all.” Their main concern is that all money spent on climate protection is spent in Germany only. It is obvious that a global climate catastrophe cannot be prevented this way as the central questions of justice between North and South continue to be ignored, for decades already. This must change urgently if a climate catastrophe is to be averted.