Reinhard Steurer, Professor of Climate Policy at BOKU, sees ineffective climate protection as a "crime against humanity" and calls Austria's ambitions "sham climate protection".

Reinhard Steurer is Associate Professor of Climate Policy at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU) Vienna. He has been working for many years on the political dimension of the climate crisis in general, and in particular on the political significance of excuses and sham climate protection across all areas of society.

At the beginning of his book The Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson describes a heatwave in India where temperatures rise to 50 degrees. People are dying en masse. Is this kind of description scaremongering, or a portrayal of a future situation that's simply necessary to shake people awake?

Prof Reinhard Steurer: Many people think that only the elderly and the sick die in a heatwave. The book makes clear that beyond a certain temperature and high humidity, virtually everyone dies within a matter of hours, because the body can no longer cool itself through sweating. On our current trajectory, the question isn't whether such a mass dying event will occur, but when and where it will happen for the first time...

Read the full interview on kurier.at!