The Guardian: . “Fridays for Future organiser warns conspiracy theories are increasingly taking hold despite effects of global heating.”
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““It’s no longer green technologies that are the issue, but the fight for democracy and truth,” said Neubauer. “If there’s no shared reality in which we operate, it will be impossible to move forward with the climate transition.”
[…]
Before the last German election in 2021, all parties bar the AfD promised to stop the planet from heating by 1.5C (2.7F) above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. But in the four years since, public interest in cutting pollution has waned, anger at the Green party has surged – egged on by politicians across the political spectrum – and policies such as phasing out gas boilers have sparked fury among some voters.“With the German heating law, I think media and party politics tested the waters on how easy it is to get people tricked into believing the Greens want an eco-dictatorship … and that we need to protect ourselves from [climate activists], rather than the climate crisis,” said Neubauer. “Apparently that worked out well.”
Neubauer has previously criticised centrist politicans, including the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, from the centre-left Social Democratic party, for polluting the discourse and normalising hateful rhetoric against climate activists. She said Fridays for Future’s greatest failure in Germany was not embedding climate policy across the democratic spectrum “in a way that it could sustainably live on without us”.
“It’s a disaster,” she said. “And I fear Germany is a very prominent example of what is happening in many liberal democracies around the world.””