Ich Archive

Circular Design Is Here to Make Our Homes More Sustainable

flip.it Every item on this page was chosen by a Veranda editor. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy.

If you’re anything like me, the word “sustainability” can be fraught with anxiety. It’s something I deeply want to embrace, especially more in my home with my family. Yet I find myself getting overwhelmed with where to start, then feeling paralyzed about by skepticism over whether or not my actions will make a difference.

For a little more perspective on this, I recently interviewed three design experts on how we can live more sustainably in our homes. One of my biggest questions had to do with circularity, one of the biggest buzzwords in sustainability these days.

Circular design is already huge in the fashion and apparel industries: industry veteran and Paravel founder Indre Rockefellar recently launched The Circularity Project, a nonprofit that champions eliminating waste and minimizing environmental impact of the fashion industry; companies like ThredUp, an online consignment and thrift store, have made buying and selling secondhand clothing fun and easy, and brands like Bode have elevated upcycling vintage garments into a high art.

I wanted to know what circularity looks like when designing a home—and when manufacturing products for home design. To find out more, I asked Laura Hodges, an interior designer with an eponymous boutique design firm and retail shop, Domain, in the Baltimore/Washington, DC area, to share with me how her design firm approaches the idea of circularity when working with clients.

“There’s a phrase, ‘cradle to cradle,’ which means once a product is actually created, it can go on to be something else,” said Hodges. At the start of each project, Hodges assesses what her clients already have that could be used for something else. “This can be anything from looking at what furniture we could reuse and reupholster to reusing materials to build something else.”

I’ll be exploring how the home design industry can more fully embrace circularity during a panel discussion I am moderating with Hodges, Patricia Bell, a professor of industrial design at the Savannah College of Art and Design, and Amanda Cimaglia, Vice President, ESG & Corporate Affairs at The AZEK Company, which makes sustainable outdoor living products, including TimberTech decking and railing, AZEK Trim and StruXure pergolas.

The panel is part of Hearst’s Eco-Conscious Living Summit on Friday, April 26, during which editors and industry leaders will discuss sustainable innovations and solutions across a range of topics, from circularity in design to regenerative farming, electrification, deforestation, clean beauty, sustainable design, and more. You can find more information and tune in live to the summit April 26 from 12-2 p.m. EST here.

In the meantime, Hodges, Bell and Cimaglia shared with me five easy steps to living more sustainably at home.

Stay super organized. “It’s a big help to know what products you already have at home, so you don’t rebuy things you have lost or forgotten about, and so you don’t let things go to waste,” says Bell. Choosing soaps or other products that have refillable container options also helps to reduce waste.

Make simple product swaps when it’s time to replace something. “I love to think about baby steps towards living a more sustainable lifestyle, like considering a more sustainable product swap when you run out of something,” says Hodges. “For example, instead of plastic items, you could consider biodegradable and recycled materials like beeswax wraps, bamboo or recyclable electrical toothbrushes (I love Suri), natural deodorant, and powdered detergents instead of plastic pouches.”

Lavender Deodorant Cream Lavender Deodorant Cream $14 at domainbylaurahodgesstudio.com Bee's Wrap Bee's Wrap Reusable Beeswax Food Wraps Bee's Wrap Reusable Beeswax Food Wraps $17 at Amazon $15 at farmandfleet.com SURI Sustainable Electric Toothbrush SURI Sustainable Electric Toothbrush $78 at trysuri.com $69 at Amazon Shop at Walmart Update old furnishings with sustainable accessories. “You can easily refresh your space with new accessories, like replacing throw pillows instead of getting rid of an old couch and purchasing a new one,” says Cimaglia.

Rosie Floral Stripe Pillow Cover Rosie Floral Stripe Pillow Cover $49 at greenrow.com Reversible Cotton Stripe Quilt Reversible Cotton Stripe Quilt $269 at greenrow.com Printed Pleated Lamp Shade & Slipcover Printed Pleated Lamp Shade & Slipcover $59 at greenrow.com Find a good home for your castoffs. One way to give your old furnishings new life is to find a good next home for them—but the key is to make sure the recipient will really use the pieces. “Donating old furnishings or home décor is a great way to give these items a second life, benefiting others in need and reducing demand for new products,” says Cimaglia.

Start composting. “You can cut your waste down by about half each week, and there are even companies who will pick it up for you,” says Hodges. "Plus, composting makes your plants so happy,” adds Bell.

AIRTHEREAL Airthereal Revive Electric Kitchen Composter Airthereal Revive Electric Kitchen Composter Now 23% Off $270 at Amazon $270 at Wayfair Lomi Classic Lomi Classic Shop at Amazon Vitamix Vitamix FC-50-SP Food Cycler Vitamix FC-50-SP Food Cycler Now 33% Off $270 at Amazon $400 at Walmart $400 at Wayfair Headshot of Steele Marcoux Steele Marcoux Editor in Chief Steele Thomas Marcoux is the editor in chief of VERANDA, where she oversees brand strategy and content across all platforms and manages a team of editors and writers. She also writes about architecture, design, travel, jewelry, and gardening. Prior to joining VERANDA in 2018, Steele held editorial leadership roles at national design and lifestyle brands for over ten years. She has also worked as a freelance writer on articles ranging from celebrity profiles and gift guides to food and beverage trends. Steele has a Bachelor of Arts degree from Williams College (art history) and a Master of Arts degree from University of Alabama (American history). When not working, Steele can be found cooking for her family, cheering her sons on at cross country meets, soccer games, or lacrosse tournaments, playing with her dogs, planning her next design-oriented trip, or trying to find a way to squeeze in a few more minutes on a tennis court. Follow her at @steelemarcoux.

Atomic Power: Dangerous Hype: Big Tech's Nuclear Lies - CounterPunch.org flip.it

Small Modular Reactor, Credit Westinghouse.

In the last couple of months, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, in that order, made announcements about using nuclear power for their energy needs. Describing nuclear energy using questionable adjectives like “reliable,” “safe,” “clean,” and “affordable,” all of which are belied by the technology’s seventy-year history, these tech behemoths were clearly interested in hyping up their environmental credentials and nuclear power, which is being kept alive mostly using public subsidies.

Both these business conglomerations—the nuclear industry and its friends and these ultra-wealthy corporations and their friends—have their own interests in such hype. In the aftermath of catastrophic accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima, and in the face of its inability to demonstrate a safe solution to the radioactive wastes produced in all reactors, the nuclear industry has been using its political and economic clout to mount public relations campaigns to persuade the public that nuclear energy is an environmentally friendly source of power.

Tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, too, have attempted to convince the public they genuinely cared for the environment and really wanted to do their bit to mitigate climate change. In 2020, for example, Amazon pledged to reach net zero by 2040. Google went one better when its CEO declared that “Google is aiming to run our business on carbon-free energy everywhere, at all times” by 2030. Not that they are on any actual trajectory to meeting these targets.

Why are they making such announcements?

Greenwashing environmental impacts

Earlier this year, the Wall Street company Morgan Stanley estimated that data centers will “produce about 2.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions through the end of the decade”. Climate scientists have warned that unless global emissions decline sharply by 2030, we are unlikely to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a widely shared target. Even without the additional carbon dioxide emitted into the air as a result of data centers and their energy demand, the gap between current emissions and what is required is yawning.

But it is not just the climate. As calculated by a group of academic researchers, the exorbitant amounts of water required in the United States “to operate data centers, both directly for liquid cooling and indirectly to produce electricity” contribute to water scarcity in many parts of the country. This is the case elsewhere, too, and communities in countries ranging from Ireland to Spain to Chile are fighting plans to site data centers.

Then, there are the indirect impacts on the climate. Greenpeace documented, for example, that “Microsoft, Google, and Amazon all have connections to some of the world’s dirtiest oil companies for the explicit purpose of getting more oil and gas out of the ground and onto the market faster and cheaper.” In other words, the business models adopted by these tech behemoths depend on fossil fuels being used for longer and in greater quantities.

In addition to the increasing awareness about the impacts of data centers, one more possible reason for cloud companies to become interested in nuclear power might be what happened to cryptocurrency companies. Earlier this decade, these companies, too, found themselves getting a lot of bad publicity due to their energy demands and resulting emissions. Even Elon Musk, not exactly known as an environmentalist, talked about the “great cost to the environment” from cryptocurrency.

The environmental impacts of cryptocurrency played some part in efforts to regulate these. In September 2022, the White House put out a fact sheet on the climate and energy implications of Crypto-assets, highlighting President Biden’s executive order that called on these companies to reduce harmful climate impacts and environmental pollution. China even went as far as to banning cryptocurrency, and its aspirations to reducing its carbon emissions was one factor in this decision.

Crypto bros, for their part, did what cloud companies are doing now: make announcements about using nuclear power. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are now following that strategy to pretend to be good citizens. However, the nuclear industry has its reasons for welcoming these announcements and playing them up.

The state of nuclear power

Strange as it might seem to folks basing their perception of the health of the nuclear industry on mainstream media, that technology is actually in decline. The share of global electricity produced by nuclear reactors has decreased from 17.5% in 1996 to 9.15% in 2023, largely due to the high costs of and delays in building and operating nuclear reactors.

A good illustration is the Vogtle nuclear power plant in the state of Georgia. When the utility company building the reactor sought permission from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2011, it projected a total cost of $14 billion, and “in-service dates of 2016 and 2017” for the two units. The plant became operational only this year, after the second unit came online in March 2024, at a total cost of at least $36.85 billion.

Given this record, it is not surprising that there are no orders for any more nuclear plants.

As it has been in the past, the nuclear industry’s answer to this predicament is to advance the argument that new nuclear reactor designs would address all these concerns. But that has, yet again, proved not to be the case. In November 2023, the flagship project of NuScale, the small modular reactor design promoted as the leading one of its kind, collapsed because of high costs.

Supporters of nuclear power are now using another time-tested tactic to promote the technology: projecting that energy demand will grow so much that no other source of power will be able to meet these needs. For example, UK energy secretary Ed Davey resorted to this gambit in 2013 when he said that the Hinkley Point C nuclear plant was essential to “keep the lights on” in the country.

Likewise, when South Carolina Electric & Gas Company made its case to the state’s Public Service Commission about the need to build two AP1000 reactors at its V.C. Summer site—this project was subsequently abandoned after over $9 billion was spent—it forecast in its “2006 Integrated Resource Plan” that the company’s energy sales would increase by 22 percent between 2006 and 2016, and by nearly 30 percent by 2019.

This is the argument that the growth in data centres, propped up in part by the hype about generative artificial intelligence, has allowed proponents of nuclear energy to put forward. It remains to be seen whether this hype about generative AI actually materializes into a long-term sustainable business: see, for example, Ed Zitron’s meticulously documented argument for why OpenAI and Microsoft are simply burning billions of dollars and why their business model might “simply not be viable”.

In the case of the V.C. Summer project, South Carolina Electric & Gas found that its energy sales actually declined by 3 percent compared to 2006 by the time 2016 rolled around. Of course, that did not matter, because shareholders had already received over $2.5 billion in dividends and company executives had received millions of dollars in compensation, according to Nuclear Intelligence Weekly, a trade publication.

One wonders which executives and shareholders are going to receive a bounty from this round of nuclear hype.

What about emissions?

Will the investments in nuclear power by companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon help reduce emissions anytime soon?

The project expected to have the shortest timeline is the restart of the Three Mile Island Unit 1 reactor, which Constellation Energy projects will be ready in 2028. But if the history of reactor commissioning is anything to go by, that deadline will come and go without any power flowing from it.

Restarting a nuclear plant that has been shutdown has never been done before. In the case of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California, which hasn’t been shut down but was slated for decommissioning in 2024-25 till Governor Gavin Newsom did a volte-face, the Chair of the Diablo Canyon Independent Safety Committee explained why doing so was very difficult: “so many different programs and projects and so on have been put in place over the last half a dozen years predicated on that closure in 2024-25 and each one of those would have to be evaluated and some of them are okay, and some of them won’t be and some are going to be a real stretch and some are going to cost money and some of them aren’t going to be able to be done maybe”.

The cost of keeping Diablo Canyon open has been estimated by the plant’s owner at $8.3 billion and by independent environmental groups at nearly $12 billion. There are no reliable cost estimates for reopening Three Mile Island, but Constellation Energy, the plant’s owner, is already seeking a taxpayer-subsidized loan that would likely save the company $122 million in borrowing costs.

One must also remember that Microsoft already announced an agreement with Helion Energy, a company backed by billionaire Peter Thiele, to get nuclear fusion power by 2028. The chances of that happening are slim at best. In 2021, Helion announced that it had raised $500 million to build its fusion generation facility that would demonstrate “net electricity production” in three years, i.e., “in 2024”. That hasn’t happened so far. But going back further, one can see a similar and unfulfilled claim from 2014: then, the company’s chief executive had told the Wall Street Journal that the company hoped that its product would generate more energy than it would use “in the next three years” (i.e., in 2017). It is quite likely that Microsoft’s decision-makers knew of how unlikely it is that Helion will be able to supply nuclear fusion power

Dangerous Hype: Big Tech's Nuclear Lies - CounterPunch.org flip.it

Small Modular Reactor, Credit Westinghouse.

In the last couple of months, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, in that order, made announcements about using nuclear power for their energy needs. Describing nuclear energy using questionable adjectives like “reliable,” “safe,” “clean,” and “affordable,” all of which are belied by the technology’s seventy-year history, these tech behemoths were clearly interested in hyping up their environmental credentials and nuclear power, which is being kept alive mostly using public subsidies.

Both these business conglomerations—the nuclear industry and its friends and these ultra-wealthy corporations and their friends—have their own interests in such hype. In the aftermath of catastrophic accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima, and in the face of its inability to demonstrate a safe solution to the radioactive wastes produced in all reactors, the nuclear industry has been using its political and economic clout to mount public relations campaigns to persuade the public that nuclear energy is an environmentally friendly source of power.

Tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, too, have attempted to convince the public they genuinely cared for the environment and really wanted to do their bit to mitigate climate change. In 2020, for example, Amazon pledged to reach net zero by 2040. Google went one better when its CEO declared that “Google is aiming to run our business on carbon-free energy everywhere, at all times” by 2030. Not that they are on any actual trajectory to meeting these targets.

Why are they making such announcements?

Greenwashing environmental impacts

Earlier this year, the Wall Street company Morgan Stanley estimated that data centers will “produce about 2.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions through the end of the decade”. Climate scientists have warned that unless global emissions decline sharply by 2030, we are unlikely to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a widely shared target. Even without the additional carbon dioxide emitted into the air as a result of data centers and their energy demand, the gap between current emissions and what is required is yawning.

But it is not just the climate. As calculated by a group of academic researchers, the exorbitant amounts of water required in the United States “to operate data centers, both directly for liquid cooling and indirectly to produce electricity” contribute to water scarcity in many parts of the country. This is the case elsewhere, too, and communities in countries ranging from Ireland to Spain to Chile are fighting plans to site data centers.

Then, there are the indirect impacts on the climate. Greenpeace documented, for example, that “Microsoft, Google, and Amazon all have connections to some of the world’s dirtiest oil companies for the explicit purpose of getting more oil and gas out of the ground and onto the market faster and cheaper.” In other words, the business models adopted by these tech behemoths depend on fossil fuels being used for longer and in greater quantities.

In addition to the increasing awareness about the impacts of data centers, one more possible reason for cloud companies to become interested in nuclear power might be what happened to cryptocurrency companies. Earlier this decade, these companies, too, found themselves getting a lot of bad publicity due to their energy demands and resulting emissions. Even Elon Musk, not exactly known as an environmentalist, talked about the “great cost to the environment” from cryptocurrency.

The environmental impacts of cryptocurrency played some part in efforts to regulate these. In September 2022, the White House put out a fact sheet on the climate and energy implications of Crypto-assets, highlighting President Biden’s executive order that called on these companies to reduce harmful climate impacts and environmental pollution. China even went as far as to banning cryptocurrency, and its aspirations to reducing its carbon emissions was one factor in this decision.

Crypto bros, for their part, did what cloud companies are doing now: make announcements about using nuclear power. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are now following that strategy to pretend to be good citizens. However, the nuclear industry has its reasons for welcoming these announcements and playing them up.

The state of nuclear power

Strange as it might seem to folks basing their perception of the health of the nuclear industry on mainstream media, that technology is actually in decline. The share of global electricity produced by nuclear reactors has decreased from 17.5% in 1996 to 9.15% in 2023, largely due to the high costs of and delays in building and operating nuclear reactors.

A good illustration is the Vogtle nuclear power plant in the state of Georgia. When the utility company building the reactor sought permission from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2011, it projected a total cost of $14 billion, and “in-service dates of 2016 and 2017” for the two units. The plant became operational only this year, after the second unit came online in March 2024, at a total cost of at least $36.85 billion.

Given this record, it is not surprising that there are no orders for any more nuclear plants.

As it has been in the past, the nuclear industry’s answer to this predicament is to advance the argument that new nuclear reactor designs would address all these concerns. But that has, yet again, proved not to be the case. In November 2023, the flagship project of NuScale, the small modular reactor design promoted as the leading one of its kind, collapsed because of high costs.

Supporters of nuclear power are now using another time-tested tactic to promote the technology: projecting that energy demand will grow so much that no other source of power will be able to meet these needs. For example, UK energy secretary Ed Davey resorted to this gambit in 2013 when he said that the Hinkley Point C nuclear plant was essential to “keep the lights on” in the country.

Likewise, when South Carolina Electric & Gas Company made its case to the state’s Public Service Commission about the need to build two AP1000 reactors at its V.C. Summer site—this project was subsequently abandoned after over $9 billion was spent—it forecast in its “2006 Integrated Resource Plan” that the company’s energy sales would increase by 22 percent between 2006 and 2016, and by nearly 30 percent by 2019.

This is the argument that the growth in data centres, propped up in part by the hype about generative artificial intelligence, has allowed proponents of nuclear energy to put forward. It remains to be seen whether this hype about generative AI actually materializes into a long-term sustainable business: see, for example, Ed Zitron’s meticulously documented argument for why OpenAI and Microsoft are simply burning billions of dollars and why their business model might “simply not be viable”.

In the case of the V.C. Summer project, South Carolina Electric & Gas found that its energy sales actually declined by 3 percent compared to 2006 by the time 2016 rolled around. Of course, that did not matter, because shareholders had already received over $2.5 billion in dividends and company executives had received millions of dollars in compensation, according to Nuclear Intelligence Weekly, a trade publication.

One wonders which executives and shareholders are going to receive a bounty from this round of nuclear hype.

What about emissions?

Will the investments in nuclear power by companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon help reduce emissions anytime soon?

The project expected to have the shortest timeline is the restart of the Three Mile Island Unit 1 reactor, which Constellation Energy projects will be ready in 2028. But if the history of reactor commissioning is anything to go by, that deadline will come and go without any power flowing from it.

Restarting a nuclear plant that has been shutdown has never been done before. In the case of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California, which hasn’t been shut down but was slated for decommissioning in 2024-25 till Governor Gavin Newsom did a volte-face, the Chair of the Diablo Canyon Independent Safety Committee explained why doing so was very difficult: “so many different programs and projects and so on have been put in place over the last half a dozen years predicated on that closure in 2024-25 and each one of those would have to be evaluated and some of them are okay, and some of them won’t be and some are going to be a real stretch and some are going to cost money and some of them aren’t going to be able to be done maybe”.

The cost of keeping Diablo Canyon open has been estimated by the plant’s owner at $8.3 billion and by independent environmental groups at nearly $12 billion. There are no reliable cost estimates for reopening Three Mile Island, but Constellation Energy, the plant’s owner, is already seeking a taxpayer-subsidized loan that would likely save the company $122 million in borrowing costs.

One must also remember that Microsoft already announced an agreement with Helion Energy, a company backed by billionaire Peter Thiele, to get nuclear fusion power by 2028. The chances of that happening are slim at best. In 2021, Helion announced that it had raised $500 million to build its fusion generation facility that would demonstrate “net electricity production” in three years, i.e., “in 2024”. That hasn’t happened so far. But going back further, one can see a similar and unfulfilled claim from 2014: then, the company’s chief executive had told the Wall Street Journal that the company hoped that its product would generate more energy than it would use “in the next three years” (i.e., in 2017). It is quite likely that Microsoft’s decision-makers knew of how unlikely it is that Helion will be able to supply nuclear fusion power by 2028. The p

EU zieht Bilanz: Wann treten Ukraine, Georgien und Moldau wirklich dem Bündnis bei? flip.it Die EU-Kommission hat am Mittwoch ihre jährliche Bilanz über die Reformfortschritte der zehn EU-Beitrittskandidaten vorgelegt. „Die EU-Mitgliedschaft ist heute mehr denn je eine strategische Entscheidung“, sagte der EU-Außenbeauftragte Josep Borrell. Die EU sei wie ein Magnet, der Menschen und Staaten anziehe.

„Schon jetzt genießen die Bürger der Erweiterungsländer spürbare Vorteile“, sagte er und nannte als Beispiele den Zugang zum Forschungsprogramm Horizont und erleichterte Visabestimmungen. Wichtig sei aber, dass die Kandidaten auch die Werte und die Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik der EU teilen. „Man kann nicht die Beziehungen zu Russland aufrechterhalten und glauben, man könne Mitglied der EU werden“, so der 77-Jährige. Die EU müsse nicht nur größer, sondern auch stärker werden.

In Brüssel wiederholte der EU-Außenbeauftragte seine Kritik an der Vielzahl schwerer Unregelmäßigkeiten bei der Parlamentswahl in Georgien am Samstag und forderte eine unabhängige Untersuchung. In Gesprächen mit den Behörden habe er in den letzten Monaten jedoch einen klaren Trend festgestellt: „Das Land bewegt sich weg von der EU.“ Borrell kritisierte mehrere Gesetze nach russischem Vorbild, darunter die Einschränkung der Rechte von LGBTQ+-Personen. „Diskriminierung ist kein Wert der EU“, stellte er klar.

Das Sorgenkind des Staatenbundes Georgien ist das große Sorgenkind der EU, der Beitrittsprozess liegt bereits seit dem Frühjahr auf Eis. „Angesichts der EU-feindlichen Rhetorik und Wahlmanipulationen ist hier kein Fortschritt zurzeit denkbar“, sagte Grünen-Außenpolitiker Sergey Lagodinsky dem RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland (RND). Für die proeuropäische Mehrheit im Land müsse die Tür zur EU aber offen bleiben.

Die EU-Kommission bescheinigte der Ukraine mit Blick auf die Reform des Justizsystems, die Korruptionsbekämpfung und den Schutz von Minderheiten im letzten Jahr bedeutende Fortschritte. Auch die mit dem Kriegsrecht verbundenen Grundrechtseinschränkungen seien verhältnismäßig. Im Sommer fand die erste Beitrittskonferenz statt, bisher seien alle Prüfungen „reibungslos“ verlaufen.

Proteste gegen offizielles Wahlergebnis in Georgien

Staatspräsidentin Surabischwili wirft der Regierungspartei Wahlmanipulation vor. Die Bundesregierung will mit der Anerkennung des Ergebnisses noch warten.

Quelle: Reuters

Ähnlich fällt das Fazit zu Moldau aus. Die Geschwindigkeit, mit der Moldau Reformen vorantreibe und etwa gegen Oligarchen vorgehe, sei bemerkenswert, so die Kommission. Gleichzeitig habe das Land mit der ständigen Einmischung Russlands und den Folgen des russischen Angriffskrieges gegen das Nachbarland Ukraine zu kämpfen. Für nächstes Jahr ist die Eröffnung der nächsten Verhandlungskapitel mit der Ukraine und Moldau vorgesehen. Aus Sicht von Lagodinsky sollte dies lieber früher als später geschehen. „Beide Gesellschaften brauchen Signale der Hoffnung und Stabilisierung sowie Reformdruck“, sagte er. Zusagen zum Beitrittszeitpunkt wollte die Kommission nicht machen, solange noch nicht alle Kapitel abgeschlossen sind.

Rechtsstaatlichkeit und Demokratie „Der mögliche EU-Betritt der sechs Westbalkanländer, der Ukraine und der Republik Moldau liegt im sicherheits- und geopolitischen Interesse Europas“, sagte der Vorsitzende des Auswärtigen Ausschusses, David McAllister (CDU). Vor einem Beitritt müssten jedoch die vorgegebenen Kriterien vollständig erfüllt werden. „Es darf keine Abkürzungen geben, vor allem wenn es um Fragen der Rechtsstaatlichkeit und Demokratie geht“, so McAllister zum RND.

Auch er ist über den zunehmenden Einfluss Russlands auf die Beitrittskandidaten besorgt. „Putin wird weiterhin versuchen, einen imperialen Graben durch Europa zu pflügen, der nicht nur die Ukraine von uns trennen soll, sondern auch die Republik Moldau, Georgien und den westlichen Balkan“, sagte er. Die EU könne sich daher keine Grauzonen mehr erlauben.

Mehr zum Thema

Deutsche leisten zu wenig? „Millionär Merz“ hat Bezug zur Lebensrealität verloren flip.it Startseite Politik Stand: 30.10.2024, 20:16 Uhr

Kommentare

Friedrich Merz plädiert für mehr Leistung im Land. Mit der Lebenswirklichkeit vieler Menschen haben seine Forderungen nichts zu tun, sagt unser Gastautor.

Ein Gastbeitrag des SPD-Bundestagsabgeordneten Macit Karaahmetoğlu.

So richtig wohl schien Friedrich Merz sich nicht zu fühlen, als er am vergangenen Wochenende beim Deutschlandtag der Jungen Union die Bühne betrat. Sein Einmarsch durch die Menge im Stil eines Boxers wurde nicht nur von wummernden Bässen einer Rap- Version des Grönemeyer-Hits „Zeit, dass sich was dreht“ begleitet. Sondern auch von unzähligen Bodyguards, die ihn vom jungen Parteinachwuchs abschirmten. Man konnte den Eindruck gewinnen, der Parteivorsitzende fühle sich unsicher, umgeben von so vielen jungen Menschen.

Friedrich Merz „betreibt Sozialstaat-Bashing“ In seiner Rede wechselte er wahllos zwischen „Sie“ und „Ihr“ sowie „meine Damen und Herren“ und „liebe Freunde“. Auch wenn der Kanzlerkandidat der Union – zu diesem Anlass ausnahmsweise ohne Krawatte – den Anschein erwecken wollte, es wäre anders, ist die Jugend weder seine Lebenswelt noch Komfortzone. Mir fällt bei Merz immer wieder auf: Der Mann ist irgendwie schräg und hat einen damit verbundenen anderen Blick auf die Lebensrealitäten vieler Menschen in unserem Land.

Macit Karaahmetoğlu im Bundestag Gastautor Macit Karaahmetoğlu ist seit 2021 Bundestagsabgeordneter. Er ist stellvertretender Vorsitzender der Deutsch-Türkischen Parlamentariergruppe im Bundestag. © Peter Sieben Bürgergeldbeziehenden macht er gern pauschal den Vorwurf, sie würden dieses als bedingungsloses Grundeinkommen ansehen. Inzwischen ein Merz‘scher Klassiker: die Behauptung, Asylsuchende würden den Deutschen die Zahnarzttermine wegnehmen. Und ohnehin wird ihm zufolge in unserem Land zu wenig geleistet. Dieser Kanzlerkandidat betreibt völlig schmerzbefreit Sozialstaat-Bashing und stellt das oberste Prozent unserer Gesellschaft, also die absoluten Spitzenverdiener, gern als die wahren Leistungsträger unseres Landes dar. In der sozialdemokratischen Idee für die kommenden Jahre, 95 Prozent der Bevölkerung steuerlich zu entlasten, während die besagten 1 Prozent etwas stärker zur Kasse gebeten werden, sieht Merz einen Angriff auf den Mittelstand.

Merz versus Scholz: „Es klingt, als verachte er diesen Mann“ Zu diesem zählte er sich in einem Interview von 2018 übrigens auch. Im selben Interview gab er preis, etwa eine Million Euro im Jahr zu verdienen. Friedrich Merz und die Lebenswelten – das ist so eine Sache. Merz besitzt ein Privatflugzeug und hat während einer gut zehnjährigen Auszeit von der Politik, dem Vernehmen nach, ein beträchtliches Vermögen angehäuft – als Partner einer Wirtschaftskanzlei, aber auch als Aufsichtsrat bei Privatbanken, Vermögensverwaltungen, der deutschen Börse, Versicherungsunternehmen sowie einem Flughafen.

Diese Goldrauschphase nannte er kürzlich einen „Teil der Lebenserfahrung“, die er im selben Atemzug dem amtierenden Bundeskanzler absprechen möchte. Dieser habe sich ja entschlossen, „auf Dauer und allein Berufspolitiker“ zu werden. Es klingt, als verachte er diesen Mann, Olaf Scholz, dafür, nicht auf die Karte Geld gesetzt, sondern sein Leben in den Dienst an der Gesellschaft gestellt zu haben. Und es stimmt – weder als Rechtsanwalt, der sich vor allem für Arbeitnehmer einsetzte, noch als Bürgermeister Hamburgs oder Arbeits- und Finanzminister der Bundesrepublik, war Olaf Scholz, gesellschaftlich gesehen, ein Spitzenverdiener.

Sein Vater betonte vor einigen Jahren in einem Interview süffisant, auch als Bundeskanzler verdiene Olaf Scholz von seinen drei Söhnen am wenigsten. Und trotzdem steht der Berufspolitiker Scholz in schwersten Zeiten mit nie dagewesenen Krisen da und hält Deutschland auf Kurs. Er ist, ganz unabhängig seines Einkommens – wie viele Millionen fleißige Menschen in unserem Land – ein Leistungsträger. Der Millionär Merz hingegen stellt sich bei der Jungen Union auf die Bühne und stellt den Beginn des völkerrechtswidrigen Angriffskrieges Putins als „Chance“ dar, die Scholz nicht genutzt habe, um Deutschland im Bereich Verteidigungspolitik und darüber hinaus auf einen „neuen Kurs“ zu bringen.

Meine news bullet point US-Wahl 2024: Harris gegen Trump – Letzte Umfragen und Prognosen lesen bullet point Im Falle eines Harris-Sieges: Trump-Anhänger verlangen öffentliches Eingeständnis der Niederlage lesen bullet point Trump untergräbt US-Wahl bereits jetzt – und spricht von Betrug in „nie dagewesenem Ausmaß“ lesen bullet point Ampel sinkt weiter in die Notlage: Unvorhersehbare Zukunft – was nun drohen könnte lesen bullet point „Macht mich wütend“: Republikaner Schwarzenegger bezieht vor US-Wahl deutlich Stellung lesen bullet point US-Wahl-Umfragen: Meinungsforscher berichtet – „Leute schrien uns ‚Trump‘ entgegen“ lesen Der Mann ist wirklich schräg. Derartige Verdrehungen politischer Realitäten sind schlicht geschmacklos – erst recht nach 16 verlorenen Jahren für die Bundeswehr unter CDU/CSU-geführtem Verteidigungsministerium. Die Menschen in Deutschland sollten sich in der Tat vor der kommenden Bundestagswahl die Frage stellen, welche Lebenserfahrung sie im Amt des Bundeskanzlers vertreten sehen wollen – die des Mannes mit Millionen auf dem Konto oder die des Mannes, der sein politisches Engagement für unser Land zu seinem einzigen Lebensinhalt gemacht hat und der nahezu jeder Herausforderung im Regierungshandeln bereits einmal begegnet ist. Den Bezug zum Großteil der Bevölkerung und ein Verständnis für ihre Lebensrealitäten besitzt jedenfalls nur noch einer der beiden.