The Climate: Right and the Climate Crisis – How the Poison of Doubt seeps into Parliaments

If Karsten Helles has his way, the next federal government’s biggest challenge will likely have been dealt with before it ever took office. “There is no CO₂ climate emergency — not now, not tomorrow and the day after tomorrow either,” says Helles, an environmental policy spokesperson at AfD.

Helles is not an isolated case in his party. In public statements and speeches and also in the election platform for the upcoming federal elections, the right-wing party denies the scientific facts about man-made climate change in many places.

In addition to longstanding immigration policy, gender language and criticism of the European Union, the AfD has long explored the climate crisis as a theme. During the 2019 European election campaign, the poster “Is it still possible in Brussels?” Save diesel! The title most requested by county associations. In the current federal election campaign, the party is rejecting climate protection programs as well as phasing out coal — and stressing the purported burdens on citizens of a green turn, embellished with right-wing populist ideas.

Anne-Catherine Muller, editor at Spiegel’s bureau and guest guest on this episode of “Climate Report” says the right’s discovery of opposition to climate protection in itself is part of a tactic because it can fill a vacancy left by other parties. «- Podcast. At the same time, the rejection of scientific findings fits “well with the party ideology.” There are also now links in the right wing of the CDU to the theses of the AfD.

Theses of climate denial, which the AfD also uses in some cases when they spread quickly on social networks, notes Andrea Kochler of Der Golden Theology, who explains conspiracy ideologies and is also a guest.

Kochler explains how fake weather news is structured and how to identify it. Additionally, we talk about mechanisms in the climate discussion because they are also used outside the denial scene which often make constructive discussion more difficult. How dangerous are theses climate denial, how do they work and what impact do they have? We’ll discuss that this week in “Climate Report”.

The Spiegel podcast on the state of the planet is published every Tuesday on SPIEGEL.de and wherever there are podcasts.