Unbelievable! The emission of greenhouse gases, and the associated heating of the earth, continues to be heavily subsidized with taxpayers' money - both internationally and in Germany. The coalition government is still not living up to the claim made in its own coalition agreement to reduce climate-damaging subsidies. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), subsidies for fossil fuels in Germany are still unacceptably high at 1.9% of economic output. This corresponds to 70 billion Euro per year, as the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) recently described in an article. This means that each of the 746 million tons of CO2 emitted in Germany in 2022 was subsidized with almost 100 Euro. On average, however, emissions trading prices in 2022 amounted to only 80 Euro per ton. Drastically reducing emissions to comply with planetary boundaries is not optional, but mandatory!
An effective and socially just alternative could be a counter-proposal from the NPO SaveClimate.Earth. Their proposed solution is to establish a consistently polluter-based system at consumer level: through personal tradable CO2 budgets in the form of a complementary resource currency ECO (Earth Carbon Obligation). The resulting change in the purchasing behaviour of the vast majority of consumers will create the necessary pressure for change on the economy to defossilize its production processes in an intrinsically motivated way - towards significantly more green alternatives for consumers. After all, industry produces what we citizens (can) buy with our limited budgets.
More information: www.saveclimate.earth
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