The Shift in the climate fight: ‘It's liberating to come out as an asshole society’

image: “straight pride flag”. It would be funny if it weren't so sad, but I thought, what better image to symbolise the coming out of the asshole society?

An interview for Politiken by Lars Dahlager. Link to the Danish original here: https://politiken.dk/klima/art10360533/Der-er-sket-et-skifte-i-klimakampen-%C2%BBDet-er-meget-befriende-at-springe-ud-som-r%C3%B8vhulssamfund%C2%AB (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)

As soon as Tadzio Müller hears my flat Danish accent, his face twitches and he waves his arms apologetically.

"Don't take it personally! But your accent reminds me of when I was in prison for four days in Copenhagen!" he says.

It was during the COP15 climate summit at the Bella Center, where, as a key co-organiser and spokesperson for the activist movement Climate Justice Action, he had been arrested - something that resonated with media around the world.

As one of Germany's best-known climate activists and co-founder of a number of activist movements, Tadzio Müller has spent two decades fighting for a liveable climate for humanity.

But today, the activist is travelling around with an unpleasant message: the battle is lost.

The climate has already tipped over and become unstable. And despite 29 UN summits, we haven't reduced our emissions one iota. In fact, the world increased its emissions in 2024 by more CO2 than ever before in history.

Instead of society rolling up our sleeves, we've given up. In fact, in countries that have been hit by major floods and forest fires, the right wing is surging ahead.

‘We have gone into full denial,’ he says.

Tadzio Müller brought the British Climate Camps to Germany, a kind of festival for activists. But this August, he is organising their successor, where participants will learn how to deal with disaster: the CollapseCamp (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre).

We used to love climate activists

Ten years ago, things looked promising. Because while you might have risked going to jail (for a few days), as Müller has been a handful of times, people more or less loved the climate movement, he says. Like Greta Thunberg and Fridays for Future, who were embraced as society's newfound conscience.

In 2019, the movement organised the largest climate strike ever: 4,500 strikes over two Fridays in over 150 countries. Many of us remember walking the streets with our children in hand, feeling part of a new beginning.

Then the corona epidemic put an end to the protests. And when the climate protests returned in the form of a series of high-profile strikes and actions, including climate activists gluing themselves to motorways, the mood had taken a ‘100 percent turn’.

"In 2018, the attitude towards climate activists was 'hey, you guys, we love you, you're awesome! By 2022, it had become 'fuck you, go away and if you sit on the road and prevent me from getting to work on time, I'll run you over!", says Tadzio Müller.

It didn't take him long to realise why attitudes could change so much when climate activists were basically saying the same truths they had been praised for before.

"Society is just doing what any man in a relationship does when confronted with his own failure and his own fuck ups. He turns away and doesn't want to be reminded of it. And not being able to prevent the climate catastrophe is humanity's biggest fuck up of all time!" he says.

Climate policy is a failed marriage

Tadzio Müller believes it no longer makes sense to look at climate policy as rationally based political disagreements. ‘Basically, the political debate today is better framed in terms and concepts that come from my arguments with my ex-partners,’ he says.

In fact, the situation is now exactly like a marriage where you feel ashamed and promise to improve, but can't. When your husband or wife has nagged you enough times to improve and do what you promise, you end up shouting “shut up” and threatening them with a slap, says Tadzio Müller, a political scientist by training.

"That's what we are. We are a society in total denial of the fact that we have taken part in the destruction of the possibility of human life on the planet within the next 100-120 years," he says.

‘So anyone who reminds us of our failure will be brutally rejected, imprisoned, beaten or run over by a car.’

He points to how climate protests are criminalised in some countries. In the UK last year, five activists behind the organisation Just Stop Oil were jailed for up to five years just for planning motorway blockades. Now Just Stop Oil has shut itself down.

For Tadzio Müller, this is part of a moral shift towards what he calls the asshole society. It's a society that no longer wants to empathise. As rich man Elon Musk put it to podcaster Joe Rogan: ‘The fundamental weakness of Western civilisation is empathy’.

It's also a society that wants the shame to go away.

In Germany, a chill ran down Tadzio Müller's spine when the leader of the far-right German AfD party, Alice Weidel, stood on the podium in January - before the party's big election win - and raised her voice with a cadence that reminded Müller of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.

‘We will tear down the windmills - these windmills of shame,’ she said.

It was, Müller says, a reference to an AfD leader's criticism of the Holocaust memorial in Berlin as a monument of shame - a monument to remind the German people of their shame and act as an instrument of power to keep them down.

"It's the same with the windmills. They are monuments to our failure to solve the climate problem. You see a wind turbine and somewhere deep in your subconscious it reminds you of what you couldn't do for your children," he says.

‘Wind turbines are seen by many as something designed to make you feel ashamed, and that's where Donald Trump and Alice Weidel's hatred of wind turbines comes from: anything that shames them has to go.’

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Drop your values

It's our relationship with shame and guilt that causes the paradox that the most climate-critical parties are growing as climate change becomes more apparent and the need for dramatic climate action grows.

‘Every day we decide to live in a way that destroys the world,’ says Tadzio Müller.

"We accumulate shame. And suddenly the right wing comes in and says: Hey, I have an idea. Since the difference between your values and your behaviour makes you feel like a bad person, you have two options‘, says Tadzio Müller, leaning forward:

’You can change your behaviour or change your values. You, dear Germany, have understood that you cannot change your behaviour because all your money comes from producing big smelly fossil fuel cars. You cannot protect the climate without making yourself poor. So how about you change your values?" he says.

"The far right is the only player that says you don't have to feel bad about everything bad that happens in the world. Just look away, eat a schnitzel, beat your wife, and drive 150 miles per hour past a school. That's your right. And that's a very powerful message," he says.

‘It's very liberating to come out as an asshole society’.

But we also have powerful images from the US of raging fires and in Europe of flooded cities. Why aren't these images so powerful that they move us to action?

"Denial happens in your brain, in a space that you can control 100 per cent, so denial is always stronger than reality. Remember one important thing: Denial is not 'not knowing something'. It's deciding not to know something you already know," he says.

"Have you seen what actually happens in areas affected by climate disasters? There is less support for green parties and the climate agenda than before," he says - something that has been confirmed in several recent elections.

In the US, the presidential election took place just after the deadly and extremely costly hurricanes Helene and Milton, but made no difference to the Democrats' chances, and in Austria, the extreme right-wing Freedom Party won 30 per cent of the vote after massive flooding killed five people.

"We have always believed that more disaster would at some point drive more rationality. But this is not the case. More disaster breeds more irrationality. That's what's happening in political discourse in our part of the world. We are losing our minds! That's why you see Trump blaming diversity policy in the fire service for the Californian fires," he says.

Prepare for the collapse

So what now, I ask him. Shouldn't we just give up?

‘For a while in 2021 and 2022, I tried to blow my brains out with drugs on the Berlin party scene,’ he says.

"By then I had recognised the impending climate collapse and the rise of fascism that we see now. But I found hope again."

He realised that the collapse itself is not a sudden catastrophe like the apocalypse in “Revelations” or the climate disaster film “The Day after Tomorrow”.

It's more a situation where things we take for granted are no longer available. Power, food, water, security. It's something someone has to organise. You have to help each other.

"Recognising that the climate disaster is here now doesn't mean we should do nothing. There is actually more to do, not less. It just means recognising that there is a new strategic space to work in. And if that new space is the disaster, either the fascist disaster - as we see in the US - or the climate disaster, then so be it. There is still a need for us to organise, to create justice and to create light, solidarity and love," he says.

Tadzio Müller has been met with criticism in Germany, with his ideas being labelled as dangerous left-wing prepping and ‘sticking his head in the sand’.

But that hasn't stopped the activist. As previously reported, he is now organising the first of a new kind of climate gathering in Germany: KollapsCamp. It's a place where activists learn to accept that disaster is here. And learn how to act when there's a fire, a flood or a heatwave. Learn self-defence. Learning how to grow a garden. Learning how to create a communication network when there is no power.

"We will spend time at camp recognising that collapse is inevitable. It will be painful. But if you do it with other people, you can come out stronger on the other side. With strategies and tactics that empower us, even in a world of disaster," says Tadzio Müller.

Lars Dahlager