Wieduwilts week: Where is the riot of the young generation?

Climate protection is out, we live in the here and now.

Wieduwilts week: Where is the riot of the young generation?

Climate protection is out, we live in the here and now. Instead of huddled together, the older ones stamp their feet - only a few young lunatics stick to streets.

You can lose track a bit, in these times: Pandemic, war, politically incorrect songs ("Layla", always hotter), how are our weary brains supposed to keep up? However, there is one thing that this one Swede always warned about - right: climate things, well, -change.

At the moment, this unfortunately globally relevant ailment is only remembered by a bunch of media heroes with superglue under their hands. They're annoying, they're a bit embarrassing, they want a future that their elders won't give them. "The Last Generation" screeches and theatrically glues itself to freeways, annoying everyone who has work to do. Videos of meanwhile more robust police operations on German streets are surrounded by a certain satisfaction from all those who wish for "normality": pull these children off the streets, we want our peace.

The stuck people are right about one thing: the world is not exactly turning for the better. How climate change is changing the situation in Germany can be read in many places, for example in "Germany 2050" by Toralf Staud and Nick Reimer. We recommend reading it, which is also annoying because it makes you nervous, you can now get it from the Federal Agency for Civic Education for a paltry 4.50 euros.

The climate in Hamburg is like that in Pamplona, ​​in Berlin it is as cozy as in Toulouse, the authors write. They meticulously list everything that will be different here: cold rooms will be needed where citizens can protect themselves from the heat. It is said that hedgehogs and cuckoos are threatened, while new mosquito species are spreading dengue fever. Migration flows of unprecedented dimensions would become a national security issue. If you think the scrap metal heap known as Deutsche Bahn is already dysfunctional, then wait for the desert-like climate where locomotives won't start and tires get stuck on melting asphalt.

But, quite honestly, do you and I actually care? Let me put it this way: in 2050 I will be seventy. Of course I don't want to sweat the rest of my manageable time, but hopefully I'll have ticked off my main life goals and I'll do the rest at home. Even older people don't have to worry about this period of time at all: the kids are fine, but now we have other worries and, by the way: with me the Ahr valley flood, after me the deluge.

That's the dilemma. It is not easy for politics, which by definition is ultimately intended to solve dilemmas affecting society as a whole: the urgent is ever more pressing, energy prices, fear of a decline in prosperity, social peace. And so the traffic light, the traffic light of all things, uses coal again in an emergency.

Climate change takes a back seat, not only where it falls victim to other priorities. There is no nationwide heat action plan, some federal states are doing something about it, others are not, responsibility is being shifted to the municipalities, there is no such thing as coordination. So Germany is doing what it does best: pointing to responsibility trees.

In the meantime, the young are trying the courts so that the old people are still concerned about their future, for example before the European Court of Human Rights. The Federal Constitutional Court quickly invented a kind of intertemporal justice in terms of CO2 emissions - i.e. a right to action in the here and now to prevent loss of freedom in the future. That was a legal revolution. Not only since then have there been complaints: VW should stop the combustion engine, a farmer recently demanded.

It's actually a miracle that Germany isn't being torn apart by a tangible generational conflict. At the time of the hooligan riots in the 1950s, it was only about the sexual uptightness of the zeitgeist. Today, the quarter-thick tolerate practically every restriction and much more: after the current generation of students lost two years to the pandemic measures, really lost, they may soon be threatened with a second guess at universities: if heating is too expensive and the lecture halls are too cold, that is the solution, again, stay at home. It will then be taught remotely again. Which raises the question: why isn't anything burning in the republic yet? Are "the young people" sane or just dull?

Especially since the older generation challenges the younger ones to a duel. It is mainly stubborn men who, in view of the current problems, shine with information about their personal warm washing behavior. Bundestag Vice-President Wolfgang Kubicki takes a shower until he's "done," and journalist Helmut Markwort also reported on his completely disinhibited hygiene behavior. That's just how it is on the last few biographical meters: Everything in the future is secondary. And because the big fact, climate change, is certain, but not the effectiveness of individual measures, we are again running on knowledge quicksand as in the pandemic.

There is hardly a middle way between these fronts, the bridges have been torn down, and nobody is building new ones. The climate activists assume that all those who seek measure are willing to destroy or stupid. Some older people react to reminders with hysterical laughter mojis, glowing hatred of girls, often in the form of anti-Greta Thunberg trunk stickers. In between there is a political cavity that no one dares to enter. Is that why climate policy has slipped out of the talk shows? The loudest reminders to save energy come straight from the federal government. How good and conservative can a society actually be?

"Fridays for Future" were once the most well-known climate protectors. Today the movement has shifted its protest to podiums, even on the anniversary of the Ahr Valley flood it plays a much smaller role than it did a few months ago. They provide the appropriate admonishing extras in adult debates. Their warnings and "last generation" superglue have ultimately become the understated accompaniment to disaster management.

The revolution has apparently been cancelled. This is actually quite comfortable in the now. The future may not forgive us for that - but then, with a bit of luck, we won't be there anymore.