Freiheit im Anthropozän

To mitigate climate change at around one-and-a-half degree of warming compared to pre-industrial averages, current emissions must drastically decline to zero, leaving no more than 7.5 years before the global carbon budget will be exhausted. Can we avert climate breakdown without limiting our political and individual freedoms, or does addressing the climate challenge require giving up freedom? In this essay, I argue that we don’t need to give up freedom for fighting climate change if we act fast, but risk our freedom if we act too slow or not at all. What we need to give up instead of our freedom is our taken-for-granted privileges. I will proceed as follows. Section I will review the relationship between freedom, progress and unsustainability. Section II outlines three areas of transition that will keep the 1.5-degree goal of the Paris Agreement alive. Section III will in turn discuss the necessary scope conditions for transformative change, in particular what we can learn from the global COVID-19 pandemic for balancing radical mitigation within personal and political freedom.