If you are racing towards the abyss, you can easily figure out that at some point it will no longer be enough to simply take your foot off the accelerator pedal. But it becomes really tragic when, in endless traces of argumentation, it is pretended that the brake is the problem and not the engine. Then it continues forward into the abyss. And that is precisely the “catastrophic path” that climate policy is still going, as UN Secretary General António Guterres complained at the start of the current UN General Assembly. All those who have to grapple with climate change for a long time have to console themselves, namely with announcements about future goals and measures that seem to have only one common goal: First of all, driving pleasure should suffer as little - if at all - as possible.
In Brazil, Mexico and Russia, the political class has come back to the point where it has other priorities than excluding the catastrophe. The national climate targets of these countries will soon allow higher emissions again. If you take all UN states together that presented new and short-term (i.e. also verifiable) climate targets in this crucial year of negotiation for climate policy, global warming can still not be brought below the Paris minimum target - well below two degrees. After all: in the announcement loops, political intentions for climate neutrality are circulating, which, according to a report submitted to the UN assembly, point to the hypothetical possibility of warming of 1.7 degrees by the turn of the century - provided thatthe twenty richest and most emitting countries are again significantly increasing their short-term climate policy ambitions.
So the hope grows the closer the next climate summit in November comes. At the same time, reality continues to put a lot of pressure on the gas. With current commitments from all countries, emissions will increase by 16 percent by 2030. And then? Is braked. Promised. You can already announce that much.