A clear majority in favour of climate protection
In the summer of 2024, the European Investment Bank (EIB) wanted to know how seriously Europeans take climate change.
The most important results from the 24,000 respondents:
- 94% of Europeans consider climate adaptation in their country to be important; 50% of them say the issue should be a priority.
- 86% assume that investing in adaptation can create jobs and boost the local economy.
- 85% say that investing in climate adaptation now prevents higher costs in the future.
This unequivocal result is surprising in view of the current UN Climate Change Conference in Azerbaijan, which is not expected to achieve any major progress in climate protection. The most important heads of state (Biden, Xi, Scholz, Macron, Putin and Lula) did not even attend the conference, even though it is dealing with the issue of humanity’s survival. This shows that the population takes this issue far more seriously than the leading politicians.
What role does the election of Donald Trump as US President play for international climate policy?
Despite Trump, the triumph of renewable energies will continue globally. This is because solar and wind energy are constantly becoming cheaper. A kilowatt hour of solar energy can already be produced in the United Arab Emirates for less than one euro cent. And renewables will become even cheaper in the years to come because they are available in almost infinite quantities and are gifts of nature – while fossil and nuclear energies are becoming increasingly scarce and therefore more expensive. The sun alone sends us 15,000 times more energy every moment of our existence than the eight billion people consume today.
In 2023 and 2024, twice as much money was invested in renewable energies worldwide as in fossil fuels. This trend will continue in the US despite Trump, because Republican-led states benefit particularly intensively from low-cost renewable energies. Nuclear power is not only at least twice as expensive, new nuclear power plants also take far too long to build. Ironically, it is Republican-led states that benefit most from the tax breaks that President Biden has introduced for renewable energies. The fact that Trump is once again planning to withdraw the USA from the Paris Agreement does not change this.
At present, renewables are not growing linearly worldwide, but exponentially, so there is still a chance of achieving the Paris target (no more than 1.5 degrees, at most two degrees, of global warming more than in the pre-industrial era) in the medium or long term. In the short term, we are already at 1.5 degrees.
The solar energy transition begins regionally: with solar panels on your own roof, with the switch from combustion cars to electric cars, from gas and oil to heat pumps, from aeroplanes to trains, from meat to healthier food, away from plastic and and from plastics.
The producers of gas and oil will then stop producing when millions more energy consumers switch because the sun and wind do not send a bill. No matter how loudly Donald Trump shouts ‘Drill, baby, drill’ – Bohr, baby. Bohr’. More and more people trust the sun and the wind more than the old energy sources. According to a survey, one in three homeowners in Germany wants to have a solar energy system installed on their roof next year. The future belongs to renewables, whoever governs.
This grassroots optimism is necessary and helpful if we do not want to be crushed by the multiple crises of our time. England’s new Prime Minister Keir Starmer also gave cause for hope at the opening of the climate conference in Azerbaijan. The former coal-producing country has already completely phased out coal and aims to reduce its CO2 emissions by 81 per cent by 2035 compared to 1990. It can be done if the political will is there.
China is currently building twice as much solar and wind power capacity as the rest of the world combined. China’s investment in green technologies is contributing significantly to economic growth in the ‘Middle Kingdom’ – 40 per cent. In Germany, the number of solar balcony power plants doubled in the first ten months of 2024.
