In two statements, internationally renowned climate-activists Naomi Klein and Bill McKibben have raised their voices to support the mass-action against coal-mining in the Rhineland that will take place right after our summer school.
Naomi Klein, author of "This changes everything. Capitalism vs the Climate" emphasizes the importance of the German anti-coal struggle for the global climate: "Germany's rapid energy transition has been driven by the people, a victory that now serves as a model to the rest of the world. But as long as the German political class insists on using massive machinery to tear up the earth, producing the continent's single largest source of carbon emissions, that transition will remain woefully incomplete. These coalfields pose an existential threat to humanity, which is why our movements need to step in once again and shut them down. This August, there is no more important place to be."
Bill McKibben, co-founder of the climate-campaigning organization 350.org writes: "I'm so glad to see people drawing a firm line in the coalfields, and stopping the planet's largest coal-digging machines. We're driven not by ideology but by physics: there's simply no way to burn all this lignite and keep the climate intact. These protesters are lifeguards for an endangered planet."
Since 2018, a coalition of grassroots environmental groups and progressive politicians in the United States have brought into the public debate the idea of a Green New Deal. The plan is inspired not only by Roosevelt’s New Deal, but also by the subsequent wartime mobilization in response to a large-scale threat. The difference is that this time around the threat is not represented by the Axis p...
By Nina Treu According to recent calculations by the Macroeconomic Policy Institute the Euro-crisis has cost Greece almost a quarter of its GDP. This is the biggest ever recorded contraction of an economy in times of peace. It would be cynical to consider this an example for degrowth (or postgrowth) in Europe. This is certainly not the case. On the contrary, the mission statement of the degrow...
By Christiane Kliemann At the end of a conference like this, there might be as many impressions and insights to take home as there are participants, and so it is almost impossible to nail this rich variety down to a few one-dimensional bullet-points. What seemed to unite the findings of the various reporters, however, was the perception that the multitude and diversity of the represented appro...
