Germany and Europe should be “pioneers also for ethical reasons”, Merkel said at the meeting. “It is our moral duty to go through a testing phase and learn how to cope with new energy supply, and even to pay subsidies. Because it was us, too, who overexploited resources over years and decades“.
Merkel had been welcomed by WGBU-chairman and director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Hans Joachim Schellnhuber. The chancellor was especially occupied with the financial crisis these days, he said. But like rating agencies evaluate a country’s debts, “climate scientists evaluate global climate debts”. Both cases deal with a sustainable management of scarce resources, Schellnhuber pointed out. The upcoming conference Rio+20 could be a crucial impulse, he said, for the decoupling of prosperity and ever growing CO2-emissions from burning fossil fuels.
High-ranking scientists like Nicholas Stern from the London School of Economics and Leena Srivastava from the Indian TERI Energy and Resources Institute talked at the symposium in Berlin as well as representatives of the business sector like Frank Mattern, head of McKinsey Germany, or Caio Koch-Weser, vice-chairman of Deutsche Bank Group. Much applauded as a special guest was Su Wei, Director General of Climate Change at the National Development and Reform Commission of China, for his clear commitment to protecting the climate.
Weblink to chancellor Merkel's speech
Weblink to the WBGU and the video documentation of the symposium
