Week 42: Climate tariffs, alarmism and the connection between the climate crisis and racism

Next week, the UN climate summit will take place in Glasgow. This gives reason for debaters in Sweden to discuss what the world needs to make a climate change.

The Swedish news flow is dominated by the pandemic, instead of making room for the health threats posed by the climate. This is the opinion of the author and writer Mats Sederholm, who is also active in the democracy movement DiEM25, in an article in Göteborgs Posten. He further writes that today's climate reporters focus on "solutions that politicians pragmatically discuss and that keep themselves at the helm". Sederholm believes that we must dare to discuss the system changes that are needed in society.

During the most recent climate summit in Paris, an agreement was reached that richer countries will finance annual contributions to climate initiatives. However, it is not yet clear how the grant will be financed.

- If you include private climate investments, we easily reach the goal of 100 billion per year. If only public funds are included, it will be more difficult, says Mathias Fridahl, researcher in climate policy at Linköping University, to the outside world.

Sweden and the EU must take the lead in climate policy through instruments such as the introduction of climate tariffs, the environmentalists write Pär Holmgren and Jakop Dalunde in SvD. At the same time writing Peter Wennblad in SvD that Sweden's emissions target does not meet the reality and that the most realistic timetable for change is given by the Sweden Democrats - that is, no real timetable at all.

Furthermore, eight climate scientists in one article in DN that the image that it is too late to save the climate must stop spreading. They believe that change should take place, but that there is no scientific evidence that the human species is on the verge of extinction. The researchers express their concern that alarmism can lead to paralysis of action and hopelessness, especially among young people. However, the psychologist Kali Andersson does not agree with this. Andersson means instead that the countries most affected by climate change have the most anxious, but not paralyzed citizens, and that we in the West should take young people's climate anxiety seriously.

Representatives of Fridays for Future and Black Lives Matter writes in Aftonbladet that the climate crisis is linked to racism, and points to how the consumption patterns of the western world have affected, and continue to affect, the climate - without regard to the people in the producing countries. The groups argue for a system change towards a more sustainable world.