Tiroler Tageszeitung, editorial, April 6, 2022 edition. By MATTHIAS CHRISTLER. “No more pouring oil on the fire”.
Innsbruck (OTS) – The world climate report makes it clear that a system change is needed. Now or never. But the bitter truth is:
Too many people still live under the mistaken belief that they can somehow make ends meet despite the climate catastrophe.
It’s almost impossible to read anymore, the end of the world was prophesied so often. Science has been warning of global warming for centuries – and the predictions have been spot on. Rising sea levels, dying glaciers, more flood events and forest fires like recently in Pinswang or Längenfeld, all of this is happening as announced or even more clearly. The latest world climate report calls for a radical renewed reduction in emissions. You know that. But man is not a small child who learns through constant repetition no longer to run into the street without looking. Society prefers to hit the wall with its eyes wide open. Because self-protection must follow in the head, which wants to make us believe that one WILL somehow not be affected. The researchers are now trying a different strategy and are also sending a positive message: we can do it. If we act. Now or never.
Too much time has been wasted already, the world is heading for three degrees of warming. When a young girl appeared on the world stage with a sign in her hand in 2018, there was great hope that Greta Thunberg could become some kind of figurehead for the climate movement. A year later, 20,000 people took to the streets in Innsbruck under the banner of “Fridays For Future”. A week and a half ago there were only 900 participants. There are still too many petrol SUVs and too few e-cars driving through the cities. Less than 40,000 Tyroleans bought the climate ticket for public transport (as of the beginning of March), and there is still enough room for improvement there too. And in a TT survey of 1,000 people in late March, 60 percent said they wouldn’t convert their oil or gas heating because the cost and complicated subsidies would put them off.
All of this proves what the researchers are saying: in addition to immediate savings in greenhouse gases, a radical system change is needed. Everyone, the entire economy and the individual household, has to save energy. Politicians are obliged to create the conditions for a new lifestyle. As hard as it may sound, the Ukraine war shows that quick, concerted action can be possible. This solidarity is also needed in the fight against climate change.
The uncomfortable truth is: Such a system change will endanger our prosperity. The bitter truth, however, is that the majority of the population would rather complain about high petrol prices and still continue to fill up instead of driving less. Right now, most of us are adding way too much fuel to an increasingly hot world.
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