Last year, Germany’s Constitutional Court rejected 60 billion euro ($65 billion) fund set aside for renewable energy investments. Ever since, the country’s climate policy has been set adrift, with political parties struggling to agree on how to achieve Germany’s climate targets. In response, the country’s climate activist movement has tried taking matters into its own hands.
What theories of political change do climate activists have? Can fears of the apocalypse be reconciled with democratic compromise? And is there any precedent for the sweeping economic and social changes that meeting the West’s official climate goals would require?
Those are a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter.
This conversation draws on themes from Cameron Abadi’s new book, Climate Radicals: Why Our Environmental Politics Isn’t Working.
Cameron Abadi: Germany does have a remarkably diverse climate activist movement that goes back decades. But in recent years, the movement has flourished, becoming an ecosystem with various different kinds of groups, each of which is acting in parallel with one another toward similar goals but each of which also has its own theories of political change in service of climate policy. Adam, you’re familiar with this scene—which group do you think has the most promising ideas of political change?
Adam Tooze: Cam, it actually shouldn’t be me answering that question because your new book is just out, Climate Radicals, and it’s a fantastically interesting parallel history comparison of strategies of environmental radicalism in both Germany and the United States. And so I’m just going to spin that question back to you. What do you think?
CA: I’m happy to try to answer. In the book, I discuss three German climate activist groups that I think are instructive in thinking about the theories of change involved in climate activism across the West, across democracies in general.
And so one of those groups is called Fridays for Future. This is the group that follows in the footsteps of the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. What the German group does, inspired by Greta, is to take her individual moral protest and make it into a mass social movement. You know, at the height of Fridays for Future, there were hundreds of thousands of people, not just young people—although young people were at the center of those protests—but people from all walks of life in Germany who took to the streets to protest the lack of ambitious climate policy in the country. They would do this in consensual ways in conjunction with the police. They would announce their protest ahead of time. And, again, the scale was larger than any other protest on any policy really in postwar German history.
And yet, despite all that, I would say the group has sort of been a failure in the sense that not only have the protests died down but they’ve died down because of the response that the political system gave. The political system both acknowledged the demonstrations and the mass involvement, and yet it also did what democracies always do, which is sort of find compromises. And the compromises were, frankly, so compromised that they were almost insulting as a reply to what the demonstrations were demanding. And the sort of underlying theory here struck me as exposed as naive in some ways—this idea that public demonstration of support for change and public demonstration of scientific fact would be sufficient to create the change. At least on the timeline necessary that the protesters were pointing to, that’s been exposed as insufficient.
Now, the most active group currently is one called Letzte Generation—that translates to Last Generation. Their strategy has been very different and much more provocative. They’ve aimed essentially for public disruption, social disruption. And the idea is that they could make society so disrupted that politics would have to change as a result. And so, starting a few years ago, they started blocking streets in Berlin, major thoroughfares, major highways. They would arrange secretly to meet in various places and then sit down and block traffic, often supergluing themselves to the streets so it made it impossible for them to be removed. This extended beyond Berlin to other cities across the country and also to other kinds of infrastructure, including, most recently, some airports that were shut down across Germany by activists from this group.
There’s plenty of momentum behind this group. But the theory about how disruption is supposed to produce political change has also, I think, been exposed as pretty questionable, because what it has really produced is anger among the people exposed to these protests and then anger among policymakers—or at least opportunistic policymakers who’ve been willing to channel that anger in ways that actually have led to reversals of climate policy. And when I tried to talk with activists from across this group, they themselves admit that they have trouble connecting the dots between their actions and the kinds of policies that they envision coming to fruition. And I think, for me, that raised the question of whether policy changes were what entirely they wanted at all. Maybe there were other motivations.
AT: Well, moral motivations, right? It’s about making a statement before the world ends, somehow. Not being passive in the face of what, as their name suggests, you take to be an apocalyptic threat to our humanity.
CA: And I think you’re right to mention the word “apocalypse” because I do think that’s a lot of what informs the activists themselves—this idea, again, a scientifically grounded idea, that the climate is changing in irreversible, potentially eschatological ways that are not reversible. And this does not easily line up with our normal democratic politics that, as I said before, is sort of designed to produce compromises of various kinds, to bring various interests together and find ways of reconciling them. That’s not a perspective easily reconciled with the apocalypse. And so, you know, this book was kind of motivated by this question of how these modes of politics relate to each other and how those tensions produce the excesses that we are all witness to and that we’re all obliged to deal with now as a result.
AT: And then there’s the third mode, which will be Ende Gelände and the kind of project of attacking fossil infrastructure, right? Actually trying to target a more classical kind of industrial sabotage, industrial obstruction. Whereas Letzte Generation is ultimately trying to shake ordinary citizens awake, Ende Gelände has a strategy that is sort of more power-centered, isn’t it? It’s about like, you know, blockading coal mines and power stations.
CA: Yeah. And in that way, I would say the groups that perhaps are most clear-minded in their approach to activism might be the ones that are most focused on destruction.
AT: And that has a tradition in Germany, doesn’t it? It goes back to the big protest movements around the atomic reactors in the ’70s and ’80s, which were very confrontational, that were sort of Germany’s civil rights movement, if you like, in that generations of young protesters confronted the police with water cannons and baton charges. And it was very, very heavy.
CA: Yes, so I do discuss this group, Ende Gelände, which has really made a recent turn to trying to specifically target fossil fuel infrastructure and destroy it. And there’s a kind of materialist aspect to that theory of change, which involves simply increasing the costs on those who support fossil fuel infrastructure and make it less sustainable directly. And I think there’s something bracing to that theory. Of course, the ways it intersects with politics are also unpredictable and have led to all kinds of backlash. So there may be weaknesses in that approach as well.
AT: Well, see, this is where I would break a lance for Fridays for Future, to be honest, because it was the culmination, perhaps, of the Ende Gelände-style occupations and the massive confrontations with the police on the one hand and the huge political protests—which were very menacing for the Social Democratic government and contributed to the collapse of the social liberal coalition of the late ’70s and ’80s, and ultimately gave birth to the Greens, which then, whether you like it or not, led to the decision to close down Germany’s atomic program. So it had consequences over decades. And I think in Brussels, anyway, if you talk to people there such as Frans Timmermans and people like that—who, in the Ursula von der Leyen-led European Commission, was the social democrat from the Netherlands charged with climate policy—you know, as inadequate as that official reformist climate policy may be, there’s no question that it was powerfully motivated by the spectacle of hundreds of thousands of European schoolkids refusing to go to school on Fridays for months on end. It was very, very disruptive to ordinary life in many German cities without the blood-pumping, blood pressure, road rage kind of moments of teenagers having glued themselves to the Autobahn, which is more the Letzte Generation shtick. Kids were just refusing to go to school every Friday.
And I think, I don’t know, I have a more optimistic overall assessment. I can see they all at some level, you know, there’s aporia. There are gaps. You know, there’s some key missing element. But then I think democratic politics is often like that. It’s super messy, and you don’t really ever quite know what in the end moves it. But all of these modes of pressure at least force choice. You know, they won a very important supreme court judgment in Germany against the government. And you mentioned the ruling on the 60 billion euro climate fund. But the supreme court also ruled that the coalition’s policy was inadequate because it was not protecting, ultimately, the constitutional freedoms promised to future generations of Germans, which was momentous, really, in terms of jurisprudence, I think, on the climate issue. So maybe this is where my reformism shows through—that I actually find this a more promising story.
CA: And progress is evident everywhere. I don’t mean to suggest otherwise. Whether it’s sufficient, though, to meet the goals that the activists themselves have set and that politicians and policymakers have officially set—namely, the goals in the Paris climate agreement to limit warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius—I think that’s another question. Because the analogy to the protest movements of the 1970s and ’80s, you know, at that time they were talking about one energy source, about eliminating nuclear power, rightly or wrongly; at the time, that was their goal. And yeah, they were successful in that effort as practitioners of civil disobedience. But we’re now talking about a complete societal transformation of all production across the board and all consumption across the board. And, you know, there’s support for that shift in Germany, at least in the abstract; all the surveys show that, and the party landscape shows that as well. But when you get to the trade-offs, all of a sudden the public demonstrations are met by all sorts of other expressions of political realism. And that’s true in the European Union as well as in Germany, as well as everywhere I’ve looked on that question.
AT: I think it’s totally novel. I mean, this I would entirely agree on. It’s worth saying, isn’t it, that it’s democracies that actually created this problem for themselves in the first place. It was democracies that drove into existence the global climate political frame. It was Western researchers preeminently who identified this and said, “This is the acid test of our collective rationality,” in the ’80s and ’90s. And then, yes, you’re right, of course, we failed, and then we’ve gone on failing, and it seems very unlikely that we will reach net zero in a timely fashion. And the consequences of that are spectacular. But the two-sidedness, one has to think about democracy’s creative element in actually even framing this in the first place, along with the frustration of its failure to reach that. But if you think about, you know, if you come from the socialist tradition, if you come from the Marxist tradition, it’s not like this will be the first time that democracy has enabled the formulation of a vision of dramatic progress, which then remains fundamentally and profoundly unsatisfied over decades. Of course, the climate crisis is different in the sense it changes the parameters at the biological level, it changes the parameters at the planetary level, and it prejudices the possibility of all further progress henceforth. But, no, that’s something to be laid at the doorstep of industrialism and urbanization, not at the doorstep of democracy. Democracy enabled the realization of the scale of this problem.
And if you really had to make a defense, you would simply say, look, the acid test of whether or not we are responsive is carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions per capita. Look around the world—who has reduced their CO2 emissions per capita since the realization that this might be an issue? And the answer is unambiguously that the only places that have seen a substantial reduction in CO2 emissions per capita are all the big rich democracies. It’s the United States and Europe where you see, in the case of the former, a 35 percent reduction since peak and the U.K., where they’re literally about to shut down the last coal-fired power station, a reduction that is closer to 55 to 60 percent over a period of 20 years in the face of, as you say, a completely unprecedented diagnosis of a crisis and problem we’ve never seen before. Nowhere else in the world, there’s no regime that comes close to producing that outcome. And it’s not only the result of policy by any means; it’s to do with cost curves and gas replacing coal and everything else, and it’s very partial, and it doesn’t extend to any of the difficult bits yet. But the only places that have acted on this are the democracies.
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