Little time? At the end of the text there is a summary.

Ottmar Edenhofer, one of Germany's best-known climate researchers, has an impressive picture of international climate policy. Her current condition can be compared with a "overweight who has decided to run a marathon," says the 57-year-old head of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).

To achieve this goal, the overweight should actually begin to train immediately. "Instead, he sits down on the couch, opens a bag of chips and watches sports on television," says Edenhofer. "Then he's going to train harder tomorrow."

Global climate policy suffers from a central contradiction: most states, including Germany, are doing too little to achieve their CO2 reduction targets. In order not to look bad, they set themselves for the coming decades, the more ambitious goals, which are certainly not to create.

This Aufschieberitis is dangerous. Because if we wait too long with climate protection, the planet will overheat. Habitats are lost. Devastating natural disasters threaten. Flooding. Heat waves. Trillions of damages.

Such horror scenarios often paralyze more than they help. Worrying about the future and powerlessness are difficult to tolerate. You prefer to distract yourself again, eat a chocolate bar after the chips and do not jog until tomorrow.

There is certainly a solution for the climate problem. At its core, as so often in life, it's about money.

1. The trillion dollar problem

From a purely economic point of view, the biggest threat to the climate is that too little money flows into low-carbon and too much money into carbon-intensive technologies and industries.

For example, rich industrialized countries have set themselves the goal of mobilizing $ 100 billion a year from public and private sources by 2020. Among other things, the money will be used to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in developing countries. In the protection of tropical forests, which store a lot of CO2. And in the adaptation to the consequences of the earth heating.

The goal is barely achievable. According to an evaluation of the UN, only about $ 70 billion came together in 2016. It should be "very difficult" to get enough money together in the short remaining time, says climate researcher Edenhofer. Especially now that the US is leaving the Paris climate agreement and is threatening other large countries like Brazil.

It is worrying that the world community is missing this comparatively small target. For $ 100 billion a year is still far too little to save the planet.

The United Nations Environment Program estimates that developing countries will need $ 140- $ 300 billion by 2030 alone to address the negative consequences of global warming, plus $ 2 billion in CO2 avoidance. And the industrialized countries even have to raise billions of euros to reduce the CO2 emissions of their electricity, industrial, heating and transport sectors.

So far, so depressing.

2. The redirection of global financial flows

In order to solve the trillion dollar problem, global financial flows must be directed towards climate protection. With government loans alone, this goal can not be achieved. The majority of private investors must also invest their money in green technologies in the future.

Until now their motivation is limited. For example, of the $ 70 billion that went into climate finance in 2016, only about one-fifth came from private sources. And these private investors usually put their money into projects that are supported by state promotional banks. Without grants or benefits, many projects are not worthwhile.

In the industrialized countries, the situation is hardly better. There, energy efficiency is being invested in many sectors of the economy, which reduces CO2 consumption. But as the economy grows, emissions continue to rise on the bottom line. "It does not do anything to reduce the CO2 emissions of cars, while at the same time more and more cars are sold," says PIK researcher Edenhofer.

At the same time, hundreds of billions of dollars are to be invested in new coal-fired power plants worldwide. Their estimated capacity is around a thousand gigawatts. This alone would heat the earth by much more than the desired 1.5 degrees.

So something has to change urgently. And there is a proven political instrument that can do just that.

3. A way out of the climate catastrophe

If a carbon-sensitive world economy is the main problem, then CO2 consumption worldwide must become unprofitable.

If there were a sufficiently high price for carbon dioxide in as many countries as possible, investments in low-carbon and CO2-free technologies would automatically be worthwhile - even without the support of state development banks. Investments in coal-fired power plants and other climate-damaging technologies, on the other hand, would automatically become less attractive.

The world community is still far from this goal. In 2015, 195 countries agreed on a global climate agreement in Paris, but only in 51 regions or states is CO2 priced in any way. And if there is a carbon price, then this is often too low.

Leading scientists like Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz expect the price of CO2 to rise to at least $ 40 by 2020 to accelerate phasing out of climate-damaging technologies. In the EU - the largest confederation of states in which companies have to issue a certificate for each tonne of CO2 emitted - the CO2 price is currently only about $ 20.

Still, at least. Because the world economy is on the move.

4. Growing support

On the one hand, the EU has announced that it will significantly reduce the number of available CO2 allowances from 2019 onwards. Most experts agree that this will lead to a stable high CO2 price by the end of the twenties at the latest.

At the same time, more and more countries are considering price carbon dioxide in some form. Mineral oil, energy and air traffic groups and the Federation of German Industries (BDI) are now also working for it.

At the climate conference in Katowice, Poland, 415 major banks, pension funds, life insurers, asset managers and other investors also campaigned for a consistent pricing of emissions. But these financial groups together put together funds of $ 32 trillion.

The fact that the financial giants are so worried about climate protection, does not arise primarily from altruistic or moral motives - but above all economic:

  • First, investors fear that global warming could also be devastating to the world economy.
  • Second, they are hoping for billions of dollars through a global energy transition that would require a lot of capital.
  • Third, they can use nothing less for their investment than the uncertainty that prevails in international climate policy.

The incentives to invest in green technologies are already rising. As well as the entrepreneurial costs for excessive emissions. What is still missing are greater political incentives for climate protection.

5. The change of the global discourse

"The CO2 price is indeed a very efficient instrument," says Felix Matthes, head of research for climate policy at the Freiburg Öko-Institut. "But it only works very indirectly, making it difficult for politicians to earn political merit."

To make the system more attractive to politics, at least two things need to change.

Firstly, there have to be clear concepts of what happens with CO2 revenues. Governments that introduce a sufficiently high carbon price have to face strong resistance so far.

Business leaders are worried about falling behind in competition with other nations because high carbon prices drive up production costs for industry - which ultimately also affects consumers when they buy their products.

Countries that push for high carbon prices must therefore find ways to feed the money they derive from carbon pricing elsewhere back into the economy. For example, as tax credits, as relief for low-income earners or as support for future industries.

The second problem of many CO2 pricing systems is their vulnerability to mumbo-jumbo. Developed countries were sometimes accused of deliberately raising emissions in other countries, only to reduce them with their own projects and thus to improve their own carbon footprint. In 2011, hackers also took advantage of a lack of security rules to steal two million carbon credits.

If CO2 pricing is to be successful globally, then it has to become even more serious. It needs rules and controls that make fraud impossible as much as possible. Only if this succeeds is there a chance that the global economic system will eventually turn green.

PIK boss Edenhofer is confident in this regard. "We are already changing the global discourse," he says. Felix Matthes from Öko-Institut also sees good chances that CO2 prices will ultimately prevail worldwide. And he also has an idea of ​​how the global economy is going to change.

6. Rescue net for the planet

In a first step, Matthes says, more and more countries are expected to develop national solutions for CO2 pricing. There will be other climate protection instruments that can be combined with the CO2 price. "In the second step, some of the active countries will then join."

At the end of this evolution, according to Matthes, there would not be a global carbon price - but a network of regional, national and supranational pricing systems.

This should be closely linked in some places, in other places rather loosely and in other places not at all, because some states rely on individual solutions.

Either way, there would be a kind of rescue net for the planet in the end.

So there is a very concrete vision of how the climate can be saved. Unfortunately, there are too few governments that derive concrete political goals from them and start to realize them. Accelerating this is probably the key to success.

To stay in the picture of the sluggish jogger that Ottmar Edenhofer has chosen: It's about starting now - if the earth should not heat up too much.

In summary , the biggest threat to the climate is that too little money flows into low-carbon and too much money in carbon-intensive technologies and industries. To solve this trillion dollar problem, global financial flows must be directed towards climate protection. An effective lever would be a global pricing of CO2 emissions. The idea is finding more and more supporters in politics and business.