If something should change, we have to price natural consumption, demands climate researcher Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker. The opening speaker in Fresach talks about why he doesn’t think the sustainability agenda is sustainable and it is childish to define his happiness only by the volume of possessions in an interview with the magazine “Die Wirtschaft”. Die Wirtschaft: You were President of the Club of Rome, climate scientist and a graduated physicist. Is climate change different for a scientist than for politics, which seems to have problems with taking effective measures? Weizsäcker: A physicist knows something that climate skeptics keep pointing out. Namely, that there were drastic climate changes millions of years ago. What the skeptics don’t know, but a physicist does, is that we see additional warming beyond the periodic warm period. Die Wirtschaft: The scientists are very agreed on this finding, and the knowledge is not exactly new. You yourself sat for the SPD in the German Bundestag, so you know the system from the inside. Why is there so little going on? Weizsäcker: When I’m angry, I say: to the voters. They want it to be comfortable, and they think it would be inconvenient if what climate researchers say is true. In addition, politics must also take into account those who make money from the consumption of natural resources. To turn everything upside down and say, for example, to industry: You won’t earn any more money that way, that is a thing of the past, is almost impossible politically. So you have to find compromises, and that’s slow. >> Here’s the full interview.
