We are horrified by the current climate politics moving at a crawl, or even crawling backwards. According to the general operating plan that is approved by mining law, lignite mining in the Rhinish lignite mining area is supposed to continue until 2045 (link is only in German). The state government of Northrhine-Westphalia is opposed to a time limitation for coal mining. In the state of Brandenburg, they are even considering developing new mines in Lusatia. The federal government doesn’t dare either to touch upon the “holy cow“ that coal is: the “Climate Protection Plan 2050“ doesn’t contain an explicit date for a coal phase-out. First, it did contain a ban of new power plants and the expansion of mines, but the coal lobby and the ministry of economics managed to prevent that from being included in the final paper.
Usually we are huge fans of decelaration! But we are quite on edge when taking a look at the carbon clock by the Mercator Research Institute (MCC) (link is only in German). It allows us to actually see how much of our remaining carbon budget is vanishing each and every second. According to more optimistic (!) estimations, it will take humankind only four years to use up the amount of CO2 that it can still emit without crossing the 1.5 degrees.
Across the world, more and more enormous fossil infrastructures are being constructed, such as pipelines connecting Spain and France or in the northern part of the USA. Multinational corporations continue to set up new and gigantic projects to extract resources, e.g. the drilling for oil in Yasuni national park in Ecuador or the scheduled Carmichael coal mine in Australia.
Politicians are not taking any measures that do justice to the urgent state we are in. That is why we need to take the protection of the climate into our own hands!