The German Advisory Council on the Environment is a body of experts convened by the Federal Republic of Germany to advise the state on matters of environmental policy. I’m grateful to @tomdabassman on Twitter for drawing attention to its recent and deeply creepy 200-page report on ‘The obligation of policymakers: facilitating environmentally friendly behaviour‘. It abounds in remarkable and revealing statement, and I’ve spent a good part of the day studying it for a longer post that I hope to write in the coming weeks.

For now, I want to draw your attention to the introduction, which is bad enough. Its authors depart from the premise that the state currently lacks “policy measures… targeting environmentally relevant behaviour”, and join others in affirming that it is the job of the state to nudge individual decisions in the right direction. Tellingly, both the pandemic and the sanctions-induced European energy crisis play a very large role in their thinking: