Volker Quaschning: Today is a good day to save the world.
Volker Quaschning has a mission: He wants to save the world from climate catastrophe. Because he can’t do it alone, he goes out and talks about what’s already real today, what could still come, and most importantly, what each individual can do.
Volker Quaschning: “The climate crisis is the greatest threat to our world. If we want to preserve our livelihood and that of our children, we should have an energy supply based only on renewable energies in half a generation. Science and industry have developed the solutions. We all have to act together.”
Quaschning is a sympathetic scientist and professor of regenerative energy systems at HTW Berlin. He advocates for the energy transition and climate protection both as the expert author of the standard work on renewable energies and through his public advocacy.
He is genuinely concerned with alerting people to the dangers of a climate catastrophe. He does this in an unagitated way; despite all his concern, he radiates optimism that what is facing mankind as a task is feasible.
Volker Quaschning about the question: “Can the earth still be saved?”
He says: “I am often asked whether the earth can still be saved at all. And my answer is: definitely yes.” Nevertheless, in the climate crisis, there would be a temperature that should not be exceeded. If that were to happen, catastrophic conditions would result. He’s talking about the 1.5 degree limit.
Quaschning said clearly in an interview with DZ-4: “It will be decided in the next 5 years whether we still have a chance to comply with the Paris climate protection agreement. If we continue at a snail’s pace for another five years now, we will miss it in any case. We can’t add any number of renewable energies in any short period of time; we have to start today. And I would say with ambitious action, it’s still possible now to comply with the Paris climate agreement.”
What each individual can do for climate protection
In addition to the framework conditions that policymakers must create, every individual can also do something for climate protection. Volker Quaschning sees opportunities particularly in nutrition and mobility: “If I reduce my meat consumption and do without airplanes, that already makes an extremely big difference.”
Likewise, doing without plastic bags helps, but the greatest leverage would be in nutrition, mobility and energy supply. For example, he recommends switching to a green electricity provider, or even better, having your own photovoltaic system.
From science to the streets
Quaschning has begun to bring the topic of climate protection to a wider audience not only as a scientist and expert author, but also speaks in his own podcast and on YouTube. He believes that “in the current discussion about climate change in Germany, there is often the impression that we in Germany are doing particularly well and that climate protection is only not working because countries like China or the USA are not joining in. If we make a sober comparison, we are no better than the USA or other countries – at least as far as the expansion of renewable energies is concerned. The fact is that here in Germany we emit twice as much CO2 per capita as the world average. So we are actually the problem and we also have to deliver the solution and act.”
In his presentations, he talks about energy transition and climate protection and why we need a real energy revolution instead of a tepid energy transition. He educates on the topic of sector coupling through the energy transition, talks about electricity, heat and transport and what needs to change for successful climate protection. He also discusses electromobility as the key to climate-compatible transport, the requirements placed on the heating industry by the Paris Climate Agreement, the importance of wind power for the energy transition and climate protection, and the significance of photovoltaic self-consumption systems for climate protection in Germany are among his main topics.