The climate activists of the “last generation” are planning renewed actions in the Berlin area for today, Monday. Her spokeswoman Carla Hinrichs announced this the night before on Anne Will’s ARD talk show. The activists’ actions met with mixed reactions from the guests of the show.
There is no other way to put it: the actions of the “last generation” have had their first effects. The climate crisis is being talked about again. And it’s the third time in the last two weeks that activists from the group have had the chance to represent their interests on a talk show. On Sunday evening Carla Hinrichs is a guest of Anne Will in the first. The young woman is actually studying law, but has taken a break – the fight for the climate comes first. To do this, she blocks the freeways around Berlin and sticks herself to the street with superglue. The goal of the “Last Generation”: fight against the climate catastrophe and stand out in the process. The activists don’t know what else to do, says Hinrichs during the show – and asks the guests to show her other ways of protesting. The deputy president of the Bundestag, Katrin Göring-Eckardt from the Greens, is doing this: shifting the actions to open fields where wind turbines should actually be. “That wouldn’t do anything,” Hinrichs replies a little sheepishly.
What the “last generation” actually wants to achieve are two points: the reintroduction of the nine-euro ticket and a speed limit of 100 km/h on motorways. The FDP, in particular, is opposed to this. Justice Minister Marco Buschmann is a member of the party. He explains that the current aim is to reduce gas consumption. “And the gas-powered vehicles on the road are manageable.” In addition, the CO2 savings with such speed restrictions are manageable. “And should we really tell the operations manager, who drives home late in the evening, that you can only drive at 100 km/h even though the freeway is totally empty?”
Although Katrin Göring-Eckardt supports the demands of the “last generation”, she considers their actions to be disproportionate. “I think the discussion takes an insane amount of energy away from the actual topic.” It should actually be much more important to talk about the “non-result” of the climate conference in Egypt that ended on Sunday. There, the participants again failed to agree on measures to achieve the 1.5 degree target. Instead, a fund was decided to provide financial support to countries in the southern hemisphere in overcoming their climate problems.
Göring-Eckhardt supports the activists of the “Last Generation” on one point: “There is a constitutional court ruling that tells us very clearly: Failure to comply with the 1.5 degree target is anti-constitutional because it threatens the future of the coming generations are not taken into account, and when we talk about the issue of law and order that we have to comply with, it’s about every wind turbine that doesn’t get built, every roof that doesn’t have solar panels, and every official who has to issue permits and works too slowly. “
“Democracy is one of the greatest achievements of our time,” says Hinrichs. But the climate catastrophe is wrong. To draw attention to this, she uses the privileges that come from democracy. “The federal government is breaking the Basic Law,” she accuses Minister of Justice Buschmann: “My right to life is in the constitution.”
For Hinrichs there is another reason for their actions: “The time window is closing. We can’t act at some point. We are racing towards disaster. It is our moral duty to use all peaceful means. And that is also peaceful resistance .”
For Justice Minister Buschmann and Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann, the actions of the “last generation” have little to do with peace. “We live in a democracy. You don’t go out there and enforce your own concerns against the law. And in a democracy you don’t try to blackmail the government and parliaments by threatening to commit further crimes if you don’t meet your own conditions become,” says Buschmann. He asks what would happen if lateral thinkers and citizens of the Reich had tried to implement their demands in the same way in recent years. And Joachim Herrmann doubts that throwing food at works of art, for example, can help protect the climate.
For Göring-Eckardt, Hinrichs and the Zeit journalist Petra Pinzler, the main problem in Germany is clear: the conversion of the supply to renewable energy is taking too long. A feature film shows this very clearly: 397 wind turbines went into operation throughout Germany this year. In order to achieve climate neutrality by 2045, it would have had to be 1,500. In Bavaria, just ten wind turbines were started up in the first nine months of 2022. “You haven’t done anything in recent years. You’re only doing something now because the Green Economics Minister is forcing you to do it,” Pinzler accuses the Bavarian Interior Minister. “We are aware that we have to be faster,” he replies – and refers to hundreds of systems that are soon to be set up in Bavaria.
The climate activist is not implementing Herrmann’s announcements fast enough. “We’re racing into a climate collapse. It’s not enough to tackle something in the near future. It’s about measures that are needed today and tomorrow and in this government,” she says.
The “Last Generation” activists will continue to glue themselves to highways. Again this Monday. Even if they have to go to prison for it – as in Bavaria, where 13 activists are currently still serving preventive detention. “Why are you muzzled?” Hinrichs asks the Bavarian Minister of the Interior. According to Herrmann, the activists are in prison because they admitted to committing further crimes after their release. This is made possible by a police task law that has been in force in the Free State for four years. It was originally decided to ward off terrorists.