By P Gosselin
The online, center right Junge Freiheit of Germany here reports on how German award-winning economist Niko Paech is calling for a profound scaling back of industry in Germany, and a 20-hour workweek, in order to protect the climate.
The DLF article on the interview here summed it up: “If working hours and hence income were to fall, there would also be less need for mobility, consumption and housing. Unemployment would be overcome and everyone would have a livelihood based on a lower level of work.”
In the interview Paech spoke of rolling back the workweek to 30 or even 20 hours.
Communal living
So how would people spend all the extra free time?
Paech says the extra time could be used “to provide their own services, in addition to a less high income, for example cultivating food, the repair of goods and, thirdly, for communal use.”
This is how cars, lawnmowers or tools could be shared in the community, he suggests, which means “the demand form industrial production and transport would be decreased.”
People need to be turned off about “holiday flights, meat consumption, housing”
In the DLF interview he also criticized the construction of new housing in Germany: “Here every child knows that every square meter of living space that we develop is an ecological disaster.”
He added that a CO2 tax would only be effective if it “turned us off about holiday flights, meat consumption, housing, driving and excessive consumption.”
He also told the DLF there’s a need to start disputes among fellow citizens, saying: “that I tell my neighbor, listen, why did you book a cruise, who gives you the right to drive an SUV, why do you have to make a flight to the ski vacation, too?”
2 tonnes of CO2 per year
He also tells the DLF that every child needs to understand that in order to rescue the planet, every person should have two to two and a half tons of CO2 at their disposal every year.
He sees no chance of policymaking and technology ushering in the needed course change.
So what is needed to get society to change? It won’t be easy telling people to profoundly go without, so Paech tells the DLF it will take “a minority of people in Germany who are willing and able to live like this” and thus demonstrate “that it is possible”.
There’s no indication from the interview that Paech himself is setting an example and emitting only 2 tonnes of CO2 annually. And when we see the lifestyles of other leading activists calling for the same, then it all looks awfully hopeless for the global warmists’ movement.
