“Confrontation instead of consensus”

Germany’s political culture has ceased to vividly debate environmental challenges because “everybody has become green nowadays”, Bernhard Pötter writes in an op-ed for Tageszeitung (taz). “But the price for this is high,” he says, arguing that a consensus on a certain topic apparently means that it is no longer open for debate. Environmental achievements such as  Germany’s nuclear exit or the Paris Climate Agreement “simulate that we’re making progress” but tend to cause complacency and adaptation to ongoing environmental destruction, Pötter writes. A slogan of the anti-nuclear movement had been “Peacefully into the catastrophe” – “this warning is as up-to-date as anything”, he says.

Read the commentary in German here.

For background, see the CLEW factsheet Polls reveal citizens' support for Energiewende.