Mr. Nassehi, the activists of the "Last Generation" have been trying for weeks to paralyze traffic in the capital. Does this help climate protection?

Ralph Bollmann

Correspondent for economic policy and deputy head of economics and "money & more" of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in Berlin.

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Protest movements have an almost tragic logic of increase: in order to maintain public attention, actions must become more and more spectacular. Then it makes sense to paralyze the whole city. The tragedy is that the outsider is more annoying than promoting climate protection.

The activists have to get louder and louder so that someone else listens?

Perhaps, in the end, this kind of protest is just a seismograph: society obviously still lacks concepts to really tackle climate protection. One concludes from necessity to possibility, but suitable concepts that work politically, economically and in everyday life are rare. By the way, protest movements are rarely the ones that can provide such concepts. They attract attention.

Well, the demands of the "last generation" are modest: 120 km/h on motorways, the Deutschland-Ticket should be 40 euros cheaper.

This is not the world revolution!

Is there a mismatch between drastic measures and harmless demands – unlike previous protest movements that wanted to abolish "the system"?

Such big words can also be found now. If you don't know what to do, in the end it's always against "capitalism" or "the system". But these are rather clumsy sentences. This shows the drastic nature of the problem: How a society adapts to structural changes during ongoing operations is not trivial and, above all, not simply a question of the right attitude.

A majority of the population thinks climate protection is a good thing. When it comes to your own car or heating, it becomes more difficult.

There are goals that are hard to disagree with: the approval rate for combating climate change is high. But when everyday routines change as a result, approval becomes lower. This is not surprising. The task of politics is to moderate this. Confessions do not help here. Concepts are needed that can be integrated into everyday life.

So are democracy and climate protection a contradiction?

Of course not. You can't just decree such things from above. This requires a society that can support this in its various instances, and an industry that is creative enough to creatively implement incentives for structural change. We even need an increase in democracy, a competition for the best concepts. Incidentally, autocracies are certainly not ecological model boys.

When it comes to electric cars or solar cells, autocratic China is one step ahead.

It may be possible to impose certain technical innovations in autocracies from above, but I doubt that this is a comprehensive recipe for success. By the way, how are we supposed to abolish democracy in the first place? By parliamentary decision?

Perhaps through an overly ambitious climate policy that arouses resistance from populist forces?