Climate change threatens humanity. And there is only a limited amount of time left to turn things around. The new federal government therefore has to face a number of tasks.
Geneva / Berlin – In view of the startling IPCC report, politicians and experts are urging the future federal government to act. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), man-made global warming is accelerating.
People would have to prepare for more extreme weather events such as floods and heat. A warming of 1.5 degrees could soon be exceeded. According to the Paris Climate Agreement, the states want to keep warming well below two degrees compared to the pre-industrial level, but if possible stop it at 1.5 degrees.
“Increase the pace”
The report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change emphatically confirms: “We still have to increase our pace with climate protection. We have already laid the foundation stone with the Climate Protection Act, ”said the deputy chairman of the SPD parliamentary group, Matthias Miersch. Immediately after the election, a binding pact between the federal, state and local governments is necessary to give the expansion of renewable energies a further boost. “The construction of wind turbines, solar parks and power lines must become faster and easier.”
The environmental policy spokeswoman for the CDU / CSU parliamentary group, Marie-Luise Dött, said with a view to the next climate conference in Glasgow in November: “Germany and the EU have again tightened their climate targets according to the climate agreement and are thus making a fundamental contribution to the increase the global average temperature to well below 2 degrees. ”She now expects the same approach from our international partners, especially from the G20 countries.
Left: Testimony of failure
“All the alarm bells are ringing, but the fire brigade stays in the garage!” Said the left-wing climate and energy politician in the Bundestag, Lorenz Gösta Beutin. The climate report also gives the federal government a testimony of failure, “after all, Germany is the fourth country in the world that has emitted most of the CO2 climate killer into the atmosphere since fossil industrialization”. Now a “climate booster” has to be ignited: “Bring coal phase out to 2030, gas phase-out law, climate neutrality 2035.”
The German Renewable Energy Association (BEE) is calling for barriers to be removed. “Renewable energies are available reliably and affordable in a wide range of technologies for all needs. We want to make our contribution to climate protection. To do this, the hurdles must be removed and a program for accelerated expansion in the first 100 days of the new federal government must be launched, ”said BEE President Simone Peter. “In 2020 alone, the use of renewable energies avoided the emission of around 227 million tons of greenhouse gases, and a total of around 300,000 jobs were created.”
Biden: “Signs unmistakable”
In total, more than 230 scientists evaluated around 14,000 climate studies for the IPCC report.
“We cannot wait to overcome the climate crisis,” wrote US President Joe Biden on Twitter – without mentioning the report in his tweet. “The signs are unmistakable. Science is indisputable. ”French President Emmanuel Macron called for more ambitious climate policy. The report was once again unequivocal, he wrote on Twitter. The time of indignation is over. At the world climate conference, an agreement had to be reached that would do justice to the urgency of the matter.
Statement on 2030 rejected
Meanwhile, two IPCC authors contradicted reports that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that the temperature will rise by 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels by 2030, and that this will be 10 years earlier than previously communicated. A statement about 2030 was in an earlier draft of the report, but was ultimately discarded, said climate researcher Dirk Notz from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology of the German Press Agency.
Jochem Marotzke from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology said that if you assume from 2023 to 2042, the center of this period is simply the beginning of the 2030s. According to Notz, it is also wrong that the point of exceedance is now accepted ten years earlier than in the 1.5-degree report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2018. dpa
