Comment

On 20 September, the German government released its long-awaited climate package. It is nowhere near ambitious enough to meet the objective of the Paris Agreement to limit warming to 1.5°C.

The Green New Deal (GND) is currently only in the form of a “resolution” introduced by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey; any actual legislation that results from the resolution will be taken up by the respective chambers of Congress – and likely will not be done as a whole package. Having said that, the GND is a rare example of proposing how to tackle a societal-scale set of challenges not by looking at individual components but by presenting a vision for the whole system.

School kids around the world are taking to the streets demanding that the older generation step up efforts to tackle climate change, which they see as a major threat to their future. The teenagers of today will still be alive to bear the climate impacts of tomorrow - like sinking coastlines and cities, droughts, floods, crop failures - and will have an ever shrinking range of options to deal with the legacy of inaction on cutting carbon emissions.
(Also available in German)