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by Markoff
1456 days ago
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I think you overestimate influence of Western politicians abroad, we can clearly see how on board is world with sanctioning Russia when it comes to their own interests (almost whole world DGAF about some silly Western sanctions), it's even funnier to think they would hurt their economy for some abstract changed in environment. Have you ever lived in developing Asian or African country? |
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The point is that Western politicians don't care about the climate catastrophe. For a data point, my own government (Germany) magically conjured up a €100bn emergency defense budget for the Russian war in Ukraine in addition to a promise to boost its defense budget to the NATO recommendation of 2% of GDP (over €70bn in 2020[0]). In contrast, total government budget for "ecological protection" in 2019 was €79bn[1], but more than 2/3rds of that is just waste and water management -- less than €2bn ended up in research and development. The federal budget in 2021 only allocated €2.7bn[2] to the "Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection" either. Even the "The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action" only had a budget of €10.4bn (it was called "... and Energy" at the time).
If German politicans took the climate catastrophe as the world-ending threat serious that it is according to researchers, how come they haven't assigned a similar 2% of GDP or a similar "emergency budget" to preventing it? Instead solar subsidies have been cut, subsidies for sustainable private building development have been slashed and a conservative-led (not even the Greens!) coalition decided to shut down nuclear power in favour of coal and (Russian) gas.
There's no will to address the climate catastrophe among Western governments and there never has been. The only climate action you see are concessions to voter demographics that maintain minimal impact to the economy. Your mistake is to believe that the effects you're seeing are the consequence of politicans in power actually cracking down on something.
FWIW the effect of sanctions, since you mention them, are always delayed and always affect the weakest members of society first. We've already seen moderate capital flight in Russia (e.g. foreign companies extracting their local talent or simply shutting down their Russia offices with mass layoffs). The problem is that much like trickle down economics, "trickle up sanctions" have never been shown to work. Individual seizures of oligarch properties have been vastly more effective than blanket bans that mostly hit the middle and lower classes.
Plus, of course, the sanctions are ridiculous when the same countries enacting those sanctions still pay Russia billions of dollars for resources like gas that they depend on and can't just give up. And of course other countries like China take this opportunity to offer loans and cheap buyouts with zero competition.
[0]: https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/gdp
[1]: https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/daten/umwelt-wirtschaft/ausga...
[2]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundeshaushaltsplan_(Deutschla...