“Only those who benefit from the climate and nature are the future winners.” Bonifatius-Verlag chose this quote from “It’s not enough!” For advertising. Indeed, this is one of the main demands of the latest work of Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker, an ecologist and former member of the Social Democratic Party of the Bundestag and former co-chair of the “Club of Rome”. However, the sustainability pioneer in his book not only aims to separate economic growth from resource use and environmental pollution, but also advocates a different foreign policy between industrialized, emerging and developing countries.
Any global problem needs global solutions
It’s a little sad that even in 2022, a book on the climate crisis may still have to contain the science of climate change and its consequences. At least a quarter of the book is on the subject, if you include parts of the introduction. One difference is that von Weissäcker, in the tradition of “the limits of growth,” draws attention to the empty world and the whole world. “Our children and grandchildren live in a completely different time than people in all previous eras of humanity,” the ecologist said in the introductory interview by Eckart von Hirschhausen. By this, he means that the number of people has nearly quadrupled since 1950 – and this has resulted in very different relationships between human use and sustainably available resources.
Von Weizsäcker lists a number of known problems that often cannot be named enough because they persist: he points out that fossil fuels are still subsidized by hundreds of billions of US dollars each year, or that climate protection is supported globally, but 200 countries National or so thinking at the national level first. Von Weizsäcker’s preliminary inventory leads to the conclusion: “Realistically, it must be assumed that only far-reaching changes in the economy, even in human civilization, can lead to an acceptable future for our planet.”
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