by Peter Löcke //
Germany's freedom is no longer defended in the Hindu Kush. Germany has long been one step ahead. Now the global climate is being defended in Germany. To be more precise, the future of the entire planet has just been defended in a small town in the Rhineland called Erkelenz. To be even more precise, in a hamlet, a small settlement called Lützerath, aka Lützi. Yes, Lützi. After all, every soccer fan says Poldi and not Lukas Podolski. So Lützi.
The ironies in fast-forward. A green party was at the forefront of the fight to preserve Lützi, which helped decide to demolish this very hamlet in October 2022. Unfortunately, this was necessary because the representatives of this party are strictly against nuclear power out of religious conviction and considered the coal deal with RWE to be a lesser evil. This ecological, or at least logical, outrage finally reached the brains of the world saviors of the last generation, who are now more angry with their green dads and moms in Berlin. After all, the self-proclaimed climate activists are a supposed grassroots movement fighting against the state and powerful fossil fuel elites. In this unequal David versus Goliath climate battle, activists are grateful for any financial help. Understandably so. Even if David receives the money from Goliath himself. Even if the help comes from the state to be fought against or powerful billionaires like Aileen Getty, an heiress to Jean Paul Getty's oil empire. There are climate activists who do their job on social security in order to feed their children, who, by definition, should not even exist in the "last generation"? Forget about it. Thousands of coal-fired power plants are in operation, under construction or in planning worldwide? Corinthianism. It would have been more honest and sensible to demonstrate in China? That may be so. But such an event would have been almost impossible to realize in terms of planning, feasibility and public relations. Hence "Lützi - the movie". The cineaste in me watched the German Woodstock. As a silent movie. Sound off, pictures on.
Enter Greta and Luisa, God's climate daughters on earth. Accompanied by an entourage of journalists and a PR department. But scandal! The two icons were pushed. Greta and Luisa were clearly pushed by police officers. There is footage of it. From here on, I have to ask the informed reader. Did God's daughters on earth remain unharmed and did you make it to the World Economic Forum in Davos on time by cargo bike via the Anne Will detour? I really don't know. The only thing that sticks with me are the pictures. Luisa's selfie with a communist battle salute will stay with me forever, just like Greta's dance on the edge of the open-cast mine. But let's move on, because the film wasn't just about celebrities and had plenty of humor to offer.
Have you seen the pictures of the brave climate activist who kept throwing police officers back into the mire from which they were desperately trying to free themselves? I liked the costume of the activist. Somewhere between a Jedi knight from "Star Wars" and Sean Connery from "The Name of the Rose". As much as I giggled, I was puzzled by the different public reactions. Remember: shoving is not shoving. Here police violence in its worst form, there a courageous activist as the winner of a mud fight.
But it was also really bad weather. Cold as ass. You have to fight against global warming and dress like a mixture of Inuit and Michelin man. Fair is different. And yet I am sure that every participant will look back on the German Woodstock with inspiration and pride. No autograph from Jimi Hendrix, but a selfie with Luisa and Greta. With one of the two DJ Lützis. The two Che Guevaras of modern times with a millionaire background and the ecological footprint of the whole of Erkelenz.
But what am I talking about? I'm not a climate modeler of the future. I lack the expertise. Only science knows that. I prefer to look to the past and am interested in history, geopolitics and Trojan horses. I'm also interested in movies. So I watch Lord of the Rings. The two towers. What a mud fight. Who are the companions and who are the orcs? I'm not so sure about that.
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9 Responses
As you can also see from the events in Lützerath:
Private individuals once bought plots of land in Lützerath and built houses on them. Not infrequently, they probably saved hard from their mouths and lovingly maintained them as multi-generational homes. Over time, the owners and their families have probably created a wonderful village, built it up and filled it with joy and life.
Then one day the politicians came along and told the people that the entire village would have to be relocated so that coal could be mined there for energy production, which would lie in piles under the village. In a free market economy with property protection and legal security, the owners would have been able to negotiate freely about the price of their land and houses with the person who wanted to buy the land for their own purposes. In view of the increase in value of the land and houses due to their location on highly sought-after land, the extraction of which suggests high profits for the entrepreneur, the original owners would very probably have had interesting negotiating and profit opportunities if property rights had been respected and upheld and the principle of voluntariness and non-aggression had been applied. Equally, any owner could have rejected any offer, no matter how utopian it was, if his property on this patch of earth, in this village community, was worth more to him than all the money in the world. At least the owners would have been able to decide freely and not be fobbed off by politicians with ridiculous severance payments. Perhaps RWE would even have refrained from mining coal in this region altogether if there were too many people unwilling to sell and turned to building new nuclear power plants in uninhabited and suitable areas or whatever. I miss a sober and objective look at the core of this story, even if the spectacle may have a certain entertainment factor for some and, in particular, once again distracts people from the real issue, from looking at the whole truth.
Dear Mr. Löcke, I would like to take your article as an opportunity to articulate myself once again. Imagine it's somehow July 2019 and you wake up with a severe cramp in the right side of your body. Okay, you noticed long before that something wasn't quite right, your back is getting stiffer and you can't move as well. Shit happens, all due to decades of work. They've seen an orthopaedist and started doing yoga and sport. Nevertheless, the complaints become more intense, especially after long car journeys. At some point in South America, everything relaxed and they thought it was nothing. A little too much stress perhaps. But then comes the cramp, which doesn't go away. Now imagine 3 disastrous years in which I ran from pillar to post. Everyone loved my money, but nothing worked. The wildest theories were put forward, from a wandering kidney to liver problems and bowel cancer. One fine Sunday, when I again didn't know what I might have done wrong, I reached for my MRI and read through the incidental findings and found what I was looking for. Tarlov cysts in the sacrum. There is only one professor in the whole of Europe who is able to treat this. I was finally operated on there in June 2022, ok I'm not doing well yet but time will tell or not!
Do you know how Lützrath and the climate terrorists affect me as a 59-year-old who has passionately pursued her profession???? Do you know that??? Maybe you do, but these young people probably don't. I'd give a kingdom for the day when I can move again without pain and, above all, sit without pain without having to use a ring cushion due to a dysfunction of the right pelvic nerve that may never recover. OK. I am not in a wheelchair, I can walk even if only 300 meters without pain. But what is that? What kind of life is it where you can hardly leave your home without running the risk of being dependent on someone else? And then I see Luisa Neubauer, Greta Thunberg and all their names. Young women who have achieved nothing in their short existence, I was the only sales representative in the industrial door sector in Germany for over thirty years, I was proud of my clientele, proud of the solutions I was able to develop for people of all backgrounds who trusted me. Now I'm more or less a cripple whose mind is awake but whose carcass no longer cooperates. I never wanted it this way, but it affects one in 20,000 and nobody knows why, why, why. It's a disease of the CNS, and research into it is unfortunately still in its infancy.
Child's play. The aforementioned people seem like buffoons to me, no, it's worse - it really hurts me to have to look at them.
I would like to add a P.S. because I found Dr. Wessel's contribution very helpful. What I am missing in this whole climate issue is any kind of holistic approach. What bothers me are the "fighting words" of these predominantly young people. I think there is no question that we would all do well to treat the environment, Mother Earth, our resources and ourselves with care. I miss all these aspects in this - I almost want to call it religion. I'm not familiar enough with it to be able to assess it all. But it just seems wrong and so one-track to me to declare these wind turbines a "one-and-only" solution by hook or by crook and completely ignore what it does to entire populations of birds, how many trees have to die for it etc. p.p.. "Fighting the climate" sounds as crazy to me as "fighting against the sun shining".
Many people don't realize that democratic institutions are an important target for infiltration, and the same applies to the media. If you look at the flow of money and other interdependencies, you realize that the originally assumed independence does not exist. The information from there may very well be untrue. This realization would be of central importance for a functioning democracy. The truthfully informed citizen can be a sovereign voter. Quite a few people now assume that NGOs such as Greenpeace could also be the target of such covert efforts by interested parties. It is undisputed that science is no longer independent due to external funding from industry. Knowledge of these abuses should become common knowledge; I cannot imagine a more important stimulus for our community at the moment. Then we would have fulfilled a decisive prerequisite for informed opinion-forming and the associated discussions.
Dear Mr. Löcke,
Have we reached "them"? Just because the climate movement seems to have obscure, sometimes ridiculous icons doesn't mean they are all stupid and ridiculous. I am convinced of a constant change in climate in the history of the earth, what is now the Dogger Bank in the North Sea was a land connection between the British Isles and continental Europe, the Ems was a tributary of the Elbe. Traces of settlement can be found on the Dogger Bank, the sea level has risen without any industrialization with all the CO2 emissions, even a climate fairy couldn't do anything about it. Just look it up on Wikipedia. Just one example that could be a starting point for a discussion. The majority of the population does not want to radically change their lifestyle without any real necessity, which I personally cannot see. If we wanted to start a conversation with these citizens, we might be able to do something. Incidentally, I use a cargo bike with a pedelec drive because it's fun, not to save the world. I am also against nuclear power plants in their current form, if only because no private insurer would insure damage like Thernobyl or Fukushima. The Asse near Wolfenbüttel, secretly tolerated by Trittin, then Green Environment Minister in Lower Saxony, certainly not at all. The dual-fluid reactor, which is operated with nuclear waste, may be a way out. We should not rule out the search for nuclear solutions, which would be just as unrealistic as banning combustion engines. In general, we can work on getting people out of their artificially created fears - such as viruses, CO2, overpopulation, Russians and Chinese, energy and so on and so forth... . I think everyone would benefit, especially the scaredy-cats. We should come together again instead of letting ourselves be divided.
Kind regards H.W..
Joo I think that's cool too and you can't call this Punch and Judy show anything else. I have to go to the physio in Berlin later because there is no trained therapist out here for my problem. I'm putting up with almost 180 km there and back because I don't want to run the risk of being late, including looking for a parking space, because one of these degenerate mutants might have glued himself to the road again. In my eyes, they're just neglected good-for-nothings, born stupid and never learned anything, just too lazy to do a decent job.
I agree with the two previous comments, dear Mr. Löcke. Every word is a hit, a linguistic jewel that rolls before our feet. Thank you for that! And yes. Irony somehow makes the whole madness easier to bear.
Dear Mr. Löcke,
You "save the day" for me too!
You save with your perception of the "climate-idiot-root-movement"... uhhh... sorry... "world-improvement-bond" =WVB... or was it WEF? also my cracked irony-&-sarcasm-'pool'...or was it 'tool' ?? anyway... ❗️
Dear Mr. Löcke, ... as they say so aptly in Anglo-Saxon: You made my day !!! ...delicious, simply delicious !!!