Will we all have to go shopping with cargo bikes in the future?

Or do we just have to wait for hydrogen-powered factories and means of transport to relieve us of thinking about global warming?

This is, somewhat pointedly, one of the central controversies in the climate discourse: Do we have to do without it or can we rely on advances in technology?

In Glasgow, Scotland, governments are fighting for solutions.

The consequences for everyday life remain hidden.

Philipp Krohn

Editor in business, responsible for “People and Business”.

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In the Bundestag election campaign, too, it was often about the great industrial transformation.

The Greens called for an earlier phase-out of coal-fired power generation and the combustion engine.

The Union and the SPD promoted industrial transformation projects, the FDP relied on emissions trading and wanted to fool people as little as possible.

Concepts that include sufficiency, i.e. a more restrained, resource-saving lifestyle, have been off the table since the green election debacle of 1994 at the latest.

At that time the party campaigned for a gasoline price of 5 marks per liter.

Thomas Unnerstall considers a political concept that relies on renunciation to be absurd.

After professional experience in the Baden-Württemberg state administration, he was an energy manager for two decades and started his own business as an energy consultant five years ago.

In February he published the book “Fact check sustainability: ecological crises and resource consumption under the microscope”.

It made liberal hearts beat faster.

Unnerstall showed that billions in investments are necessary to master the ecological crisis.

Scourging oneself personally, on the other hand, is of no use at all.

Corona has shown that doing without is structurally beneficial

“You can work out what CO2 reduction would be if everyone in Germany waived,” he says in an interview. One could do without domestic flights and international air travel, cut down meat consumption, reduce heating. “But you only end up with a reduction of ten to eleven percent of emissions. That is not nearly enough. ”The Corona crisis underlined that little could be gained with a little reluctance to consume.

Unnerstall's approach is interesting: He describes climate change as the greatest challenge facing humanity.

All other ecological problems, however, are derived from it.

When he did a survey on the short message service Twitter, many overestimated the extent of species extinction by a factor of 10: Eight out of ten said that 10 percent of species had become extinct in the past 500 years.

But it was only 1 percent.

If the CO2 problem is solved, the situation of the corals will be defused and biodiversity will be less threatened.

"If we are successfully combating climate change, we will have pulled the decisive lever to get the issue of biodiversity under control," says Unnerstall.