TRANSCRIPT
Sam: It's only 329,000 and it's got 5 rooms.
Hasan: That's not that bad actually. Oh, that's gas – central heating.
Sam: And it's from 2000.
Hasan: But it's not that old actually – 25 years.
Sam: Yeah, but I think... don't we have to replace it by 2028?
Sam Baker: This is my partner Hasan and I sitting at our kitchen table, in our tiny apartment in Cologne, crunching the numbers and dreaming big about buying our first house.
Sam: Ok, this one's in Bergisch Gladbach... not very expensive, but I think it needs some work. But it's under 300,000.
Sam: We're starting this episode a little closer to home – my own home in fact, or my home buying journey anyway, because how homes are heated and who pays for it has become a huge political and financial issue here in Germany. The country has cultivated an eco-friendly image over the years, and recently, it's tried something quite ambitious to reach its climate goals. What may sound like a run-of-the-mill household decision – installing a new heater – has become a big headache for homeowners, and prospective homeowners, like us.
Sam: Ooo, the windows were replaced in the 80's. So, if we were to upgrade the heating system, we'd also have to upgrade the windows and the insulation probably? Wait, ok this is good though, so it's 379,000 but in 2024, the heating system was completely renovated and replaced with a Bosch air heat pump. So we wouldn't have to do that. Oh, and it has solar panels!
To reduce Germany's emissions, the plan is to switch out oil and gas heating systems for heat pumps in the next few years. But it's pretty expensive, and a bit of a complicated process.
Hasan: Yeah, it should be fairly good then, the rating. So, I wonder why they're not coming up with that information.
Sam: One of the things that's been stumping us, is how much exactly does this add to our home-buying budget, as most of the homes we can afford are older and their heating systems are pretty old too. Also, do we put that money down now or wait? And what help is available to pay for it? For that, we need someone who can walk us through the process. Someone like Barbara Metz of Environmental Action Germany.
Barbara Metz: If you are a homeowner or you want to buy a home, there's some steps you have to go through. Of course, first of all, you have to understand the benefit of a heat pump.
Sam: Ok, I got this – a heat pump basically works like a refrigerator in reverse. Instead of burning oil or gas, it runs on electricity, moving heat from the outside air through a refrigerant cycle into the house. Because it runs on electricity rather than oil or gas, it should reduce our emissions and save us a decent amount of money on heating in the long run.
Barbara Metz: Of course, if you have an existing building and you want to install a heat pump, maybe you need new windows or insulation of walls or floors…
Barbara: Then you have to select a qualified installer.
Sam (muttering to self): Ok... but what about subsidies to help save us money?
Barbara: All households can receive 30% subsidy for installing climate-friendly heating system.
Barbara: ...then you have an efficiency bonus, to get an additional 5% if you're installing a highly efficient heat pump.
Barbara: Then you have an income bonus. Homeowners with a taxable annual household income below 40,000 euros may qualify for an extra 30% subsidy.
Sam: Ok... €30,000 euros minus 30%, minus 5%, minus 20% (Climate Speed Bonus)...
Sam: So even if with these subsidies, that's still... 13,500 euros for us to cough up, not including maybe needing new windows and insulation.
Barbara: And you have to hand in all the documents, then you proceed with installation after receiving approval and then of course you have to hand in final documentation and then hopefully you get your subsidy.
Sam: Hopefully?!
*RECURRING OPENING SEQUENCE*
Music
Sam: I don't know if you heard, but gosh climate change is expensive…
[clips of politicians/prominent figures talking about how it's all going to cost TOO much]
Charli: As we learned last week in Part 2 of our Cost of Climate Change series, transitioning to an energy system that doesn't rely on fossil fuels is going to cost around $2-4 trillion dollars a year.
Sam: And by 2050, we're going to have at least $38 trillion dollars in damages and lost income due to climate disasters every year, as we heard in Part 1.
Charli: But as we've also been learning in this series, NOT doing anything about climate change commits us to a much more dangerous and expensive world:
Catherine: Once again, we are not understanding climate change properly, that the cost, that we are all paying now and that life is about choices…
Gernot: If 30, 50 years from now, we are still talking, debating the right price per ton of CO2, I'm afraid we would have lost this particular battle.
Sam: In this series, we're unpacking the real costs of climate change…
Charli: If you missed the previous episodes, don't worry, you're welcome to start here. But we do recommend going back and checking out earlier episodes in this series, once you're done with this one!
Sam: Today, we're getting into the political quagmire of how to pay for climate change, and who should foot the bill?
Charli: I'm Charli Shield.
Sam: And I'm Sam Baker. This is Living Planet.
Sam: So Charli, last week you gave us a real education on just how much we need to do to shift to a world where we're not emitting greenhouse gases. Some of those things are already paying for themselves, which is great – like the rapidly dropping price of renewables.
Charli: Yes. And this week, you have got the easy task of figuring out how we’re going to pay the upfront costs of switching from dirty to clean.
Sam: Easy task, yes, thanks for that. There are different ways to go about doing that, which we'll explore over the course of this episode, but one of the big ones is government subsidies. So, starting with an example that's top of mind in my life, as you just heard, my partner Hasan and I are trying to figure out how to factor heating upgrades into our budget in order to buy a home. Now, this thing that seems like something only energy efficiency nerds would be interested in, has actually been described as “one of the greatest political dramas in recent German history".
Charli: Ah huh right, and for people outside of Germany who very understandably haven't been paying attention to this drama, could you run us through the debate and why it matters?
Sam: Yeah, well, aforementioned energy efficiency nerds will know that home heating is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. It's about equal to driving a car. So transitioning our heating away from fossil fuels is a really big goal to reduce emissions – not just in Germany, but everywhere really. To do that though, you need to replace fossil fueled heating systems with something that can run off electricity.
Charli: So, heat pumps?
Sam: Heat pumps. So, a couple years ago, when Angela Merkel left office, and a new coalition government came in – which included the Green Party – one of their first goals was to make a bigger push toward renewable energy. As part of that effort, they wanted to ban the installation of any new heating systems that relied solely on oil and gas by 2024. And 2024 wasn't just a random date because when you install a new heating system, it usually lasts for about 20 years. AND, Germany has pledged to reach climate neutrality by 2045–
Charli: Mmm - in 20 years' time.
Sam: Exactly. So not switching these fossil-fueled heating systems to heat pumps by this date means the country is off track in its emissions reduction targets.
Charli: Right. So, the idea then was to give people subsidies to encourage them to install heat pumps and to help them do it, which would ultimately benefit them by eventually lowering their energy bills, as well as benefiting society at large by reducing emissions?
Sam: Yes, that would be the logical conclusion and the point of having subsidies, and the government was able to get subsidies passed eventually. But only after some serious backlash against the cost of this plan, and the proposed 2024 ban on new oil and gas heaters.
Sam: To quell the fury over the new Heating Act, which some tabloids dubbed the Heizhammer, or heating hammer, the government postponed the full ban on new oil and gas heating systems to 2028, so they pushed it 4 years down the road. But even still, many are not happy with the new regulations and subsidies... including some environmental groups.
Barbara: Heat pumps in Germany are still really really expensive, which has to do with the subsidy structure we have here in Germany. And we have to change that.
Sam: This is Barbara Metz again. She's the executive director of Environmental Action Germany, an environmental and consumer protection NGO.
Barbara: Well, I think the point that we give subsidies is the right way to do things. So in principle, that's a good idea. But I think the structure is the crucial point. We have percentage subsidy, which means for installers it's really attractive to put high prices on the heat pump and also on the installation.
Sam: That's right, subsidies are making heat pumps more expensive. So in Germany, rather than getting let's say an 8,000 euro subsidy to put towards your new heat pump, the government says they'll give you up to 70% of the cost of the heat pump installation.
That might sound like a more generous subsidy, but it’s ended up making heat pumps more expensive here. Because companies know that you get a percentage of the cost of the heat pump, they're incentivized to raise the cost, and particularly the installation fees. While in other countries' installation teams only needs two days to install a heat pump, in Germany they will take their sweet time – up to 18 days!
Barbara: We have talked to installers from France, also from Denmark, from Poland and we have figures from Great Britain which show that heat pumps there and their installation is about 15,000 euros.
Sam: Germans are paying twice that much. That's because, Barbara says, the subsidies have created a situation where manufacturers and installers can charge significantly more.
Barbara: If you know that you can actually have subsidies for costs up to 30,000 euros, then in the end a heat pump will cost 30,000 euros. That is the problem. And the high costs are because of long installation times and unnecessary bureaucracy and they are slowing down the installation of heat pumps and preventing, of course, that heat pump rollout we actually need here in Germany.
Sam: When my partner Hasan and I were working out the math on this, a gas or oil heater might cost us 7,000 euros. Whereas even with subsidies, in Germany, installing a heat pump will be double that.
Barbara: It's only working if the installation and the cost of a heat pump can compete with the cost of a gas and oil heating.
Sam: This is why Barbara and her organization are advocating for fixed-cost subsidies. But she points out that despite the upfront investment on the part of homeowners, it’s still cheaper to have a heat pump.
Barbara: On the long run it's of course cheaper to have a heat pump, especially if you take into consideration that the prices for gas and oil are increasing with CO2 pricing and if you have a lot of renewable energy available, which is cheaper in the end, then it's more cost-efficient.
Sam: A fixed subsidy would also mean less taxpayer money spent per heat pump and as it would incentivize installers to work much faster, it would mean a quicker heat pump roll-out across the country. Barbara is hopeful that with the recent change in government here in Germany, this problem will be addressed.
Charli: So, this sounds like an example of a subsidy that went a little haywire, which hopefully is an important lesson for Germany going forward with emissions reduction schemes. And it's interesting to contrast it with other subsidies around the world that have actually been successful. So, one that comes to mind for me is Norway’s and its massive uptake of electric vehicles.
Sam: And why was theirs successful?
Charli: So they took away VAT, which is sales tax, and import duties from EVs, and that made the EVs cost-competitive with gasoline-powered cars. They also exempted EVs from toll road charges and parking fees, and let EV drivers use bus lanes in and around the capital, Oslo. And now, about 90% of new cars sold in Norway are electric.
Sam: Those are some pretty good incentives. So these are some examples – successful, and less so – of using carrots to help address climate change.
Charli: Carrots?
Gernot Wagner: It's about finding ways to balance the carrots and the sticks. // it's either a price on the fossil fuel, the negative, the carbon, or it's a carrot, it's a subsidy for the good, what we want to subsidize.
Sam: This is Gernot Wagner. Gernot is a climate economist from Columbia Business School. You might remember him from the last episode. And he's saying we've basically got two levers to pull, in order to reduce emissions.
Charli: Carrots and sticks... Please explain.
Sam: Carrots like incentives and subsidies, sticks being disincentives. Now, I must admit, I'm kind of picturing Looney Tunes antics here when I hear this phrase.
Sam: Though, in that case, maybe it should be carrots and anvils? Anyway...
Gernot: There are costs to cutting emissions. Some emissions cuts pay for themselves, but yeah, there are costs. There are adjustment costs. And just to say this out clearly now, the costs of not acting are much larger than the cost of acting. And so, it's important to know who would pay for cutting emissions. At the end of the day, there are three sources of money in the world. Shareholders, consumers, and taxpayers.
Sam: So shareholders – that's companies, consumers – you and me, and taxpayers – also you and me, but via the government.
Charli: Right. So when we're thinking about reducing emissions, with the heat pump example or the EVs in Norway, in those instances that would be taxpayers plus consumers paying for that.
Sam: Yep, but you could come up with a different combination.
Gernot: The question is, okay, so we want heat pumps, who pays for them? In part, clearly, it's the household because they ultimately benefit. Well, in part, it's the taxpayer because, you know, the general public, the planet benefits. And in part, it's the utility, in part it's the fossil gas company that of course ought to be paying a penalty for basically continuing business as usual and encouraging the consumers to keep installing gas furnaces.
Sam: So this combo is sort of in action in Germany. You've definitely got taxpayers and consumers paying. And not sure if you caught this, but Barbara mentioned the price of oil and gas are increasing with CO2 pricing? That's thanks to the European Union's Emissions Trading System.
Charli: So we can think about that increased price as a kind of stick for the fossil fuel companies? And then consumers getting carrots in the form of government subsidies?
Sam: Exactly, incentives and disincentives. And this is another key way of reducing emissions – instead of providing just subsidies for things that help reduce emissions, we actually put a price on the emissions themselves.
Charli: And what does that look like?
Sam: For that, we're heading to Canada. After this quick break.
Trailer break
Catherine McKenna: Hi, I'm Catherine McKenna. I am the principal and founder of Climate and Nature Solutions. I am a recovering politician, a former Minister of Environment and Climate Change, as well as Minister of Infrastructure for Canada.
Sam: Catherine McKenna served in Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government and just days after being named Environment Minister in 2015, she was sent to Paris to work on the landmark climate deal.
Catherine: Well, I was a new minister. I was in Paris like 3 days after being named. And actually, I'm not, I mean, my background was not an environmentalist.
Sam: Nations came together in creating the Paris Agreement and pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by enough to keep global warming well below a 2-degree increase from pre-industrial levels – that's 2° Celsius or 3.6° Fahrenheit for the Americans in the back. But after the Paris Agreement was finished and signed, Catherine had to return home, and help Canada deliver on their promised emission reductions. More specifically, she was tasked with putting a price on carbon pollution for both heavy emitters and consumers.
Catherine: Well, when I came in, we had 80 percent of Canadians living in a jurisdiction where there was a price on carbon pollution. Either through a cap-and-trade system with California. So that was Ontario and Quebec, our two largest provinces, or with a direct price, and that was British Columbia and Alberta. So, you know, I had to sit back and look and say, OK, well, what makes sense here? So we decided that we would have a price on pollution that would start at $10 and go up to $50, on this was the consumer price.
Sam: So a quick explanation on two important concepts when talking about the 'stick' of pricing CO2 emissions. There are basically two options. The first, is a cap-and-trade system, like the EU's Emissions Trading System. In this setup, there's a cap on how much can be emitted and that keeps get ratcheted down over time. If you're a company that wants to delay reducing your emissions, you can buy allowances or permits in order to emit more. The supply and demand of these allowances sets the price, so that price will continue to go up as fewer allowances are available. The idea is that companies have a strong incentive to save money by cutting their emissions and even selling their allowances if they decarbonize faster than others.
Now, the other option is a carbon tax. This is where you simply put a direct price on each ton of carbon dioxide emitted and then the company emitting that carbon, or the consumer at the gas pump or heating their home, they pay that price. In both systems, there's a price for emissions.
Canada went with the second option. For consumers, that meant paying an added $10 per ton of CO2 emitted, with that number set to go up each year until it reached $50 per ton. Though as Catherine is quick to point out, theirs wasn't technically a tax, because the government didn't keep the money.
Catherine: When I was trying to figure this out, it was a conservative prime minister, Brian Mulrooney, who actually supported it. He said, yes, you've got to use the market. It's the smartest way. When I worked with George Bush and Ronald Reagan on acid rain, we looked at how we could put a price to create the incentive for industry to act. So I was like 'great'. He said, go talk to George Schultz, a lovely Republican who was secretary of state under Ronald Reagan. He said to me, 'okay, Catherine, you must return the revenues. You must give it all back in a transparent way.' And I was like, oh, that's smart. And then I had conservative premier in Quebec who supported it because he had established a cap-and-trade system. I had a conservative premier in British Columbia who had brought in a direct price. So I felt like I had done everything, including with like conservative dudes to like get people on side.
These two systems – cap-and-trade and carbon pricing – were, until more recently, many conservative politicians' preferred answer to addressing climate change – precisely because they are market-based solutions.
Now in Canada, this price on carbon pollution returned the money to citizens, at first through their tax refunds.
Catherine: But the problem is most people through their taxes, there's so much going on when you file your taxes. When you get a rebate, like people weren't directly relating it.
But people were noticing it when they filled up their cars or looked at their energy bills.
Catherine: So that's obviously very tricky because people are very price-sensitive. Like people will travel kilometers for a penny on their gas.
Sam: After COVID hit, the government realized they could send checks to people, and so they started giving people the (rebate) money back that way. Even still, Catherine says explaining the new pollution pricing was a struggle.
Catherine: It's interesting, because we did go through different iterations of how to talk about a price on pollution. So we started with a carbon tax, because we didn't know exactly how we were going to design it. That polls terribly. So free advice to anyone doing it, don't call it carbon tax. Then we did carbon pricing. And then people are like, 'what is carbon pricing?' They kind of got it, but still not that popular. Then you did a price on pollution, much more popular. But the best way to describe it, honestly, is the way you would go in, if you go into a classroom of grade four students, which I would do, I'd say, 'do you think it should be free to pollute?' They'd be like, no, no! And so like, then you kind of are winning when you say like, it cannot be free to pollute. There's a cost. Everyone kind of understands that, even if you're a grade four student. And so I just think if you're gonna do it, you have to sell it, you have to advertise it, you have to talk about it, and you have to see it as a winning issue, not an issue you're hiding from because I think at the end liberals were like, 'oh, we don't talk about this, this seems kind of hard...' Well you do that, you're basically giving the floor to folks that are just lying about what it's doing and have no plan.
Sam: The Liberal Party did manage to win two elections defending their price on pollution, but Catherine also faced setbacks, including strong opposition from industry, online disinformation campaigns, and personal attacks. She even needed security at one point. She also had setbacks within her own party, including Prime Minister Trudeau putting a pause on the rising price of heating oil.
Catherine: Because I had to go out then and unfortunately speak against the government, and I said the reason people are paying more for heating oil and gas by the way is because the price charged by oil and gas companies. You want to deal with that? Give everyone a heat pump. Like that's the way you lower prices. You do not put a pause on heating oil and gas. And I think progressives need to learn lessons to be honest. The price goes up every year. People did not really go all in in defending it, but hard things are hard and we did go through COVID and then inflation. But then we kind of lost the narrative. And we lost the resolve on the narrative.
Sam: Mark Carney, who succeeded Trudeau as prime minister in March 2025 (and is in the same party as Trudeau and Catherine), he scrapped the consumer portion of the carbon price, as his first move in office. Catherine might not be happy about it, but she says she gets it.
Catherine: I talked to Mark Carney and he is a very smart guy who, who cares about climate change. We also have a separate fight going on. So sadly for the Americans who are listening, you probably know like we are facing massive tariffs from Donald Trump, but also threats of annexation. That is not a joke. This isn't the time to be divided over, you know, carbon pricing. We need to actually come together as a country to fight the most existential threat we face right now. So, I was supportive, but my quid pro quo, and he got it, was that the big polluters need to pay. They are not paying enough. Their emissions continue to rise. So, you know, if we are not gonna create incentives for consumers through a carbon price, then we need to ratchet up – well, we should be doing that anyway – but we need to ratchet up against big polluters. That's, you know, oil and gas. It is also cement, aluminum, steel.
Sam: It would appear that repealing that consumer carbon price might have been the right political move after all, as voters chose to return the Liberal party to power again in recent elections/elections this week. Trump's trade war and annexation threats propelled the Liberals and their new leader Mark Carney to lead in the polls. When we spoke before the elections, Catherine told me that Carney has talked about revenues from the industrial carbon price being used to subsidize other emissions reductions – things like helping Canadians switch to electric vehicles, and install heat pumps.
Trailer break
Charli: So, taking these two examples together – a price on carbon in Canada and subsidies for heat pumps in Germany – is the major takeaway then that the real cost of reducing emissions is a political one, because consumers and companies and taxpayers - so voters - will often revolt against paying for these things?
Sam: I mean I think we can't downplay how annoyed people have been about these moves both in Germany and in Canada. And, I get it. Like going back to the heat pumps – what happens going forward with these subsidies and how soon we'd need replace a heating system – ok, I'm not sure that will be a determining factor in buying a house or not, but it's huge cost that we have to factor in. I mean, I'm all in on the benefits of heat pumps and the lower monthly heating bill. I report on this climate all the time, I understand the climate benefits of them, but if costs like this are making me hesitant, you can see how these things quickly turn into a political mess.
Charli: Yes, that’s a good point, at the end of the day, most people very understandably just want to go with the cheaper option, and they're concerned about their bottom dollar. But one thing I've always wondered about, if we're talking about footing the bill and particularly with regard to how governments will approach paying for reduced emissions... How about the subsidies that fossil fuel companies have enjoyed for so long and continue to benefit from? Like why don't we stop giving them carrots, and use the savings from that to fund things like heat pumps and decarbonizing the steel industry?
Sam: I've wondered about this for a long time as well. So I put it to economist Gernot Wagner.
Gernot: Actually, there's some famous famous/infamous annual IMF calculation to this point. And they go into the trillions of dollars total per year globally. How we subsidize the wrong stuff. And that's a real problem.
Sam: So I looked up that International Monetary Fund report and it found $7 trillion dollars of fossil fuel subsidies in 2022 alone.
Charli: Right. So, more than enough to cover the roughly $2 to 4 trillion per year we’ll need to transition our energy system - with some left over to help with adapting to a hotter climate?
Sam: Yes. Now some of these subsidies thought are not so clear cut. It’s not like governments are writing checks directly to fossil fuel companies.
Gernot: Actually, one of the major issues is kerosene. Kerosene for aviation is famously exempt from European excise taxes because, well it's global. You fly across borders and international travel is exempt from the regular taxes. Guess what isn't exempt? International train travel. So, you buy a ticket for a train from wherever, from Berlin to Brussels, let's say, and you pay tax. You fly, you don't. That's a subsidy ((on fossil fuels)).
Sam: So that's one type of subsidy. Obviously, sort of hidden, but you can see how it works. Another type of subsidy for fossil fuel companies is when we're not fully charging what it costs our economy to use that fossil fuel. So we're not charging for the things like global warming and local air pollution that we do have to pay for in one form or another.
Charli: So essentially fossil fuels are cheaper than they should be because we don’t factor these costs?
Sam: Right, cheaper than they should be for the burden they put on our economy.
Charli: And so how do you figure out how much they should cost then?
Sam: Well, climate economists like Gernot actually have done the math–
Gernot: $281.62. Kidding, around that much. Like, you know, it's in the 200s emphasis on there being a range, sort of high 200s, let's call it around $300 per ton of CO2.
Charli: But how do they actually figure that out? How do they come to this figure?
Gernot: It's complicated. It is invariably described (the process of coming up with this) as the world's most expansive calculation here. It's about as global, as long-term, as uncertain as these calculations get. But basically, you look at damages of CO2 in the atmosphere, every ton of CO2 emitted today stays up there for a while, hundreds of years. For each ton today, 40% of that ton is still there 1,000 years from now. And yes, CO2 up there causes damages down here, droughts, floods, storms, and so on, and lots of other things, of course, too, sea level rise and so on. And those are all damages. So climate economists look to the science to tell us the physical impacts. Then climate economists turn those damages into dollars. And then the calculation basically is, let's discount those damages back to today to calculate what each ton of CO2 emitted today causes over its lifetime in the atmosphere.
Charli: Woah. So based on these calculations, we should be paying somewhere in the high 200's or even 300 dollars every time we emit a ton of carbon?! But that's so much higher than the price that Canada had for consumers, which I think Catherine said would go up to only $50?
Sam: Yeah. At least for now, Canada does still have a price on major heavy emitting industries, which vary by province. And there are prices on carbon in other parts of the world that are higher. In the EU's Emissions Trading System, it costs about $70 per ton of CO2.
Gernot: China by now has a carbon pricing system. It is much less ambitious overall. Of course, it covers 1.3 billion people. Uruguay has a carbon tax. Uruguay, the world's highest carbon tax, not in Sweden, not in Denmark, not in Norway, in Uruguay! $130 or so per ton of CO2.
Charli: So we should be paying like $280 per ton of CO2, but the handful of countries that are charging people for CO2 are only charging them at most $130.
Sam: Yep.
Charli: So, the highest carbon price in the world is still about $150 short of where it should be?
Sam: Yes. So you can see how that's effectively a subsidy.
Charli: Right.
Sam: And just to bring this whole issue of fossil fuel subsidies home, a study commissioned by the German Ministry of Economics found that Germany spends €35.8 billion euros per year on fossil fuel subsidies (that's mainly in the transportation sector).
Charli: So if we cut all those subsidies this year effectively pay for all of the heat pumps we need to install by 2028.
Sam: Yeah.
Music
Sam: So, I think this whole episode about who foots the bill for climate change really points to the conversation we should be having right now. Not if we pay or not, not if we do something, not if (or when) we reduce our emissions, but how do we do it?
Gernot: At the end of the day, it can't just be taxpayers. It can't just be shareholders either. And it definitely can't just be consumers either, right? It's not possible to say to say, look, we are doing this on the backs of households, individuals, consumers, while the shareholders are made whole and the state taxpayers pay very little. And of course, that's not really what's happening precisely because it's not the right move. It's not possible politically to go in that direction. The politics comes in when we are looking at trying to create the right balance between who pays.
Charli: And as we’ve seen with examples in this episode from Germany and Canada and Norway, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all formula to figure out how to spread the costs out in a fair way, and sometimes governments get it right, and sometimes they won’t.
Sam: Yeah. I don't have all the answers, of course, but I think if we - consumers and voters that is – if start having this debate and figuring these things out, we will be headed in the right direction. Companies are certainly offering up their opinions already in the form of lobbying, and usually their vote is to do nothing, keep the status quo (and those fossil fuel subsidies). And we know who will be paying that bill down the road –
Charli: Taxpayers.
Sam: Right. So if we want to have a say in what the future holds, we have to start participating in this debate about how we distribute the costs and we need to be having it, now.
Gernot: If 30, 50 years from now, we are still talking, debating the right price per ton of CO2, I'm afraid we would have lost this particular battle. What is necessary is to find the appropriate policy mix to get off the dirty and move toward the clean.
Sam: And I keep thinking back to one thing Catherine kept saying throughout our conversation, over and over, kind of like a mantra:
Catherine: You know, it's been really hard to be honest. Like, hard things are hard and nothing is harder than climate policy.
Sam: And that's ok. We can do hard things.
Charli: It might not be easy, but we know how we can pay to deal with climate change, and we've got options for what that looks like. Next week, another climate cost that often flies under the radar, but can lead to some big bills…
Teaser clip: I mean, if you're also facing a busy department and the heat itself, and it's already a stressful day, the systems that you rely upon to look after your patients going down makes it even more difficult and more chaotic. It turns into a perfect storm.
Sam: This episode was reported and produced by me, Sam Baker along with Charli Shield. It was edited by Kathleen Schuster and mixed by Charli Shield and Neil King. In the studio we had help from Gerd Georgii, Jurgen Kuhn, and Ziad Sleiman. Do you have strong opinions on who should be paying for climate change, and how? Or did this episode make you think differently about the mix of options for doing so? We want to hear your thoughts or maybe even your questions as you mull over what the right answers are. Drop us a line at livingplanet@dw.com and share your thoughts.