The electorate in Germany is old, averaging over forty, and it is affluent. Poor people hardly ever vote. Current climate models predict a warming of three to four degrees by 2100; on the European mainland, this means an annual average warming of six to eight degrees. Those who fly to Scandinavia from June to August may be able to spend a pleasant retirement. Those without money rarely vote anyway: voter turnout in poorer neighborhoods is on average thirty percent lower than in middle-class residential areas.
So it is the most enlightened, affluent, best-informed and best-educated strata of the population that are in charge of politics. That is, if we want to believe in democracy at all. It would be more convenient if we didn’t. Because the reference to systemic constraints, wrongly set incentives, progress and its consequences, human nature, global competition is tantamount to a personal excuse.
We unashamedly conduct discussions about it from the point of view, of personal renunciation, as innocent victims of our sense of entitlement culturally acquired in the rich North.
This is normal.