Climate-change initiative in Switzerland, February 2025

Dwindling glaciersThe Umweltverantwortungsinitiative is best translated as “How do you say virtue-signaling in German?” Predictably, it failed. The following are some notes from conversations I had about the initiative with friends.

The referendum is basically Switzerland promising that it will be climate-neutral per citizen as a proportion of its population’s share of the world population.

I am basically for every country on the planet doing this thing but I also think that it has no chance of happening.

That would mean probably about at least a 90% reduction of CO2 output per person in Switzerland. A massive lifestyle and societal change. They list zero measures that they would enact to do this. That is left up to the Bundesrat, the Nationalrat, and the Kantonsrat.

They don’t dare mention that it would mean reducing cars massively, reducing flying massively, reducing imports of high-CO2 goods like chocolate and coffee, etc. … in which case absolutely no-one would vote for it. My God, it was 14 years ago that I read Heat, a book about how we could get to climate-neutral. Here are my 14-year-old notes: Citations from Heat by George Monbiot.

This initiative will not pass no matter which way we vote, so those who support fighting climate change can feel good about voting yes, and those who think the MARKET and TECHNOLOGY will fix everything can vote NEIN and feel all tickled pink about that. Either way, we’re in the shitter because no-one is doing anything about climate change but making it worse.

I’ll vote yes, but have no hope that it will pass — in which case CH can brag on the world stage that it has promised to do its part, which it absolutely will not be able to do — and also have no hope that they will pass a single measure even moving in the direction of CH fighting climate change any better than it already does.

If no-one else fights with us, it doesn’t matter one whit.

I’ll say “yes” because it lines up with my principles and with what I think we need to do if we want to keep the planet habitable for more than (maybe) our generation, but I also know that 30 years ago was when we should have started and doing stuff now is better than nothing, but it’s like farting into a hurricane.