Peace-ecological incompetence by Bernhard Trautvetter, 5/1/2025

On May 23, 2025, the Bundestag debated sustainable energy and heating policy. CDU representative Gebhart advocated for CO2 pricing through the uninfluenced interplay of supply and demand; the market should regulate the issue, not a planned economy. Lisa Badum, speaking for the Green Party, welcomed the focus on market-based interaction in the pricing of CO2 emissions and argued that the revenue from CO2 pricing should be used for climate protection. SPD MP Scheer supported the Federal Constitutional Court’s demand for improvements in the heating transition.

These are all window-dressing speeches that completely ignore the dramatic nature of the ecological situation. Despite all the disagreements in the scientific assessment of ecological dangers, one thing must be clear: as long as there is a risk of the Earth’s system collapsing, every politician has a duty to take preventive action in case the warnings prove to be justified. Securing the conditions for life must be the number one priority of all social and political action. The aim is to prevent the destruction of the Earth’s system.

The most explosive dangers of our era are the military and ecological risks, which nuclear scientists have also warned about, setting the Doomsday Clock to its most threatening level since Hiroshima. These dangers could abruptly end a development that has grown over millions of years.

The cycles in the human sphere of life, which have developed over many phases of Earth’s history, are in some cases highly sensitive to initially inconspicuous changes due to their closely coordinated sub-processes. Decisions that may initially only throw parts of the ecological machinery out of balance carry the risk, which is difficult to recognize at first, of endangering nature in its life-sustaining entirety. In the imagery of Erich Kästner, it is a matter of stopping a snowball before it turns into an avalanche that sweeps everything away and can no longer be controlled.

Forward-looking action begins with a critical look at the opinion-making in the media world. Karl Marx already knew that the global public is prevented from acting prudently by state manipulation when he wrote that the prevailing ideas are those of the ruling class.

This is how the propaganda of the NATO countries in particular is proceeding in the Ukraine war. The wisdom that a war always has a history is ignored. Criticizing this does not constitute support for the Russian army, but it does follow the peace policy principle of comprehensively considering the sub-processes of the overall situation. And it becomes clear that those responsible are manipulating the public to their own ends by ignoring NATO’s breach of European treaties through its eastward expansion and unilaterally accusing the other side of an urge to expand, which NATO itself is pursuing. They are also distracting the public from strategy papers in which they developed the main orientation of their hegemonic policy against China. One example is the Atlantic Council paper entitled “Blueprint for Strategic Competition.” A war between the US/NATO and China would spell the premature end of humanity, even before a possible ecological collapse.

Meanwhile, as a result of the portrayal of war, ecology is increasingly fading into the background in the media and public consciousness. Yet the ecological collapse is clearly evident in the analysis of data from longer-term processes. What happens in the atmosphere affects one of at least five systems in the workings of the Earth system. The sub-cycles take place in the land mass, in the frost and permafrost areas, in the sea from the seabed to the water surface, and in the atmospheric spheres.

The 1992 Rio Summit, the first major world climate conference, produced Agenda 2010 with 27 principles, the implementation of which is still largely pending. At the time, the resolutions did not include any measures in the event that a party failed to comply with the environmental protection resolutions. The resulting failures were correspondingly massive. The major Kyoto Climate Conference in 1997 produced the Kyoto Protocol, in which the states agreed on emission limits. However, these were marred by the fact that, under pressure from the US, military emissions were not taken into account so as not to jeopardize the operational capabilities of the armed forces, in this case, of course, primarily the US Army.

The failure to implement the decisions of the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference in Paris is a continuation of the inconsistent actions of elites in government and business since the Rio Climate Summit. The loudly and officially declared goal of keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius or limiting it to a maximum of 2 degrees has already been broken. The global average temperature is already rapidly approaching the 1.8-degree level.

At 1.8 degrees, however, a tipping point will be reached beyond which the death of large ecosystems such as coral reefs, with their significant biodiversity, will be irreversible. Prolonged droughts in individual large regions are occurring simultaneously with flooding disasters in other parts of the inhabited Earth’s surface, partly as a result of increased evaporation due to the rise in sea surface temperature.

The entire climate system between the equator and the polar ice caps is losing its usual cyclical stability. Due to the reduced contrast between the melting polar ice caps and the equator, the atmospheric jet stream is weakening, leading to longer periods of stable weather events such as droughts on the one hand and heavy rainfall elsewhere on the other.

These developments pose a massive threat to the food supply and, more generally, to humanity’s supply chains, with large areas of the Earth becoming uninhabitable. As a result, there will be an increase in refugee movements, leading to rising tensions in the fight for water and in the defense against those seeking protection.

Rich countries may be able to isolate themselves from this for a while, but resource wars are becoming more likely. According to Oxfam, the richest 1% of the world’s population is currently damaging the climate twice as much as the poorer half of the world. The increasingly massive ecological catastrophe is not purely an environmental issue; it is also linked to the injustices between rich and poor. The social divide is not purely a North-South issue, but also a scandal of unequal wealth distribution in the so-called industrialized countries.

The super-rich also enrich themselves from the profit margins of arms companies, which offer particularly attractive returns when the neoliberal economy is in crisis, as arms deliveries are based on long-term contracts with government agencies, while day-to-day business on the stock exchanges and markets of the world is conducted over short periods of time.

In his farewell address in 1960, former US President Eisenhower rightly warned against the military-industrial complex: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought. The potential for the disastrous rise of misguided power exists and will remain. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.”

The significance of this warning is underscored by the fact that the world’s nations invest many times what they spend on development in the military sector. However, humanity will only have a chance of survival if it reverses NATO’s strategy of deterrence and the global proliferation of military bases in favor of the UN Charter. The UN Charter was adopted in 1945 in response to World War II. It is about a world peace order based on common, mutual security, not about deterring some of the world’s states against others.

In summary, sustainability in the sense of preserving the foundations of human life can only be achieved through a comprehensive, decisive, and cooperative peace policy.