The climate crisis is the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced, and yet we carry on acting as though that were not the case – that was the central message from Christian Stöcker on RTL on Friday morning. A cognitive psychologist, he also writes commentaries for German magazine Der Spiegel and teaches digital communication at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences.
Not nearly enough, in his view, is being done, though there are also encouraging developments to point to.
Stöcker, a guest at the Our Nature Park's Climate Pact event on Thursday, said he is no fan of being labelled a climate activist. Labelling people who speak factually about the climate crisis as activists, he said, was an old trick used by the oil and gas industry.
In his view, there is not nearly enough public debate about the climate crisis. An international survey of 130,000 people published in the journal Nature, he pointed out, found that 87% of respondents wanted their national governments to do more.
A failure to act, he argued, would only play into the hands of the fossil fuel industry.
Asked about the strong election results notched up by the climate-sceptic Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Germany, Stöcker pointed to another survey showing that even most AfD voters felt the energy transition was not moving fast enough.
People, in his view, were voting for the AfD because of other issues altogether.
The EU is sticking to its climate goals, but has also adopted an approach aimed at cushioning the consequences of the climate crisis.
Stöcker agrees that both are needed. The priority, however, must be to do everything possible to slow the rise in global temperatures, he added.
The journalist and professor reached for the image of a fever: One would do everything to make the patient as comfortable as possible, he said, cooling them down, wrapping them up warmly, giving them aspirin, doing what is needed to bring the fever down.
But one also had to fight the underlying illness, because if the temperature kept climbing, the patient would eventually die.
Air conditioning, he noted, has become unavoidable, but we also need "more greenery, more water, and so on".
Far too much is still being thrown away, he added, and there is still "absurd consumption", such as fast fashion. Cutting down a tree, he pointed out, remains more profitable than planting one.
Global CO2 emissions are still rising. At some point, human civilisation may no longer be able to cope with that, and the danger, Stöcker said, remains "very acute" at present.
Progress is not fast enough, yet Stöcker also pointed to positive developments. In China, the world's largest emitter, emissions are now plateauing.
In Europe, he welcomed the fact that the continent had managed to decouple economic development from CO2 emissions.
He also posed, and answered, a quiz question of his own: in 2024, 92.7% of newly installed electricity generation capacity came from renewable sources, compared to 86% the year before and 83% the year before that.
Can one still speak of an energy transition in a country where oil accounts for 60% of total energy consumption, largely as a result of tax revenues from politically-welcomed "fuel tourism"?
In response, Stöcker remarked that internal combustion engines are essentially "rolling heaters" and "extremely inefficient machines".
Scientific studies, he pointed out, show that despite the carbon footprint involved in manufacturing an electric vehicle, it is better to scrap a combustion-engine car straight away and replace it with an electric one.
One must not, however, put the old combustion-engine car back on the second-hand market, otherwise nothing would really change on the ground.
Batteries, he added, can be "excellently recycled", and yet fossil fuels continue to be subsidised with "grotesquely high sums".
