I was choking on my coffee this morning when the news reported about a letter 26 FDP (the German liberals) politicians have written to their party leadership. In the letter they are questioning being a member of the coalition government (together with the SPD and the Greens) and suggest that they should look for more suitable partners elsewhere rather than work for a quasi religious ideology. Admittedly, they are not doing particularly well. But maybe it's because they are entirely out of ideas and nobody needs them. What more suitable partners are they thinking of, the fascist AfD?
With quasi religious ideology they presumably mean the scientific consensus that climate change is a real problem that we better deal with. A cheap shot accusing the Greens of being irrational. At best, they are full of their own ideology that endless growth is possible in a finite world. Electricity comes out of the socket in the wall and toys appear on your doorstep at a click. At worst, they fully well realise that our position in the world is based on centuries of exploiting people and the environment and that continuous growth depends on the misery of countless people slaving away unseen, dying in wars at home, or at our borders trying to escape the world the West has created. Not much has changed in the last few centuries except for the fact that many people are not confronted with this reality.
Words are important. Accusing the Greens of irrationality and thus doubting the well established scientific consensus of the mechanism of climate change, its impact and that it is man-made is deeply against enlightenment ideas. These accusations come from the same rulebook as the anti-vax Querdenker and QAnon conspiracies. It is about maintaining power at all costs.
As far as I am concerned, science has done its bit to investigate how this part of our world works. There are plenty more interesting phenomena that can be investigated. However, these nuances will not get us out of the basic problem of living in the real world that is limited and obeys physical laws. It is now up to our leaders to come up with solutions of how to deal with this crisis. Their position of power is not there to protect the interests of the few and to lock up those who demand meaningful change.
The effects of climate change are getting harder and harder to overlook: floods, droughts, heat waves and fires are hard to ignore. As in the case of the Covid pandemic, only collective action can deal with these issues. However, collective action challenges the neo-liberal ideology.