Fritz Vahrenholt

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Fritz Vahrenholt (right), Henning Voscherau (center) and Alfred Gomolka (Photo: 1990)

Fritz Vahrenholt (born May 8, 1949 in Gelsenkirchen-Buer ) is a German politician ( SPD ), author and manager . In the 1990s he was the Senator for the Environment in Hamburg , then he went into business and has since worked for various energy companies. He received special media attention through his public denial of many scientifically undisputed research results in climate research . Vahrenholt was the sole director of the German Wildlife Foundation until the end of 2019 , which parted ways with him because of his statements on climate policy.

Career

From 1991 to 1997, Vahrenholt was the Senator for the Environment in Hamburg , and had previously been the State Environmental Councilor there for several years. After the Voscherau government was not re-elected in 1997 , Vahrenholt switched to the board of directors of Deutsche Shell, in 2001 to chairing the board of REpower Systems and remained there until 2007. From February 2008 to July 2012 he was chairman of the board of the RWE subsidiary RWE Innogy , after which he switched to the newly constituted supervisory board of the company until he left on March 1, 2014. On August 1, 2012, Vahrenholt took over the sole director of the German Wildlife Foundation , which is committed to protecting and promoting native wild animals.

Since 1991 Vahrenholt has also held teaching positions at the Technical University of Harburg and the University of Hamburg . From 1999 he was an honorary professor at the University of Hamburg in the chemistry department, but has now retired.

Life

education

Vahrenholt began studying chemical science at the Westphalian Wilhelms University in Münster in 1968 and graduated in 1972. He then obtained his doctorate in chemistry from the Westphalian Wilhelms University in 1974. This was followed by a research stay at the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research in Mülheim an der Ruhr . A job as a chemist in an industrial company failed at short notice, despite a contract that had already been signed, according to his own assumption because of his recent past as a student representative in the departmental council for the Jusos .

State institutions

After holding positions at the Federal Environment Agency in Berlin and from 1981 as Ministerialrat under Holger Börner in the Hessian Environment Ministry, Vahrenholt was State Councilor at the Hamburg Environment Agency from 1984 to 1990 . From 1990 to 1991 he headed the Hamburg Senate Chancellery, then from 1991 to 1997 he was Senator for the Hamburg Environment Agency and Chairman of the Supervisory Board of HEW .

During his thirteen years with the Hamburg Senate, he said he relied on environmental governance even in times of increasing deregulation:

“Even during the construction of the flue gas cleaning systems in the mid-1980s, HEW voluntarily reduced the sulfur dioxide emissions by around half by blowing in lime. And the Tiefstack cogeneration plant, which went into operation in 1993, has been approved with emission values ​​that are more than 50 percent below the permissible values ​​of the Large Combustion Plant Ordinance . So far, however, such local measures have been countered, they worsened the quality of the location of the region, i.e. the attractiveness in the competition for companies and jobs - but they were possible (...) This is not an argument against competition, because the Providing companies with environmental standards as a framework (...) In the European internal market, I emphatically demand what was agreed in the Single European Act in 1987: namely the harmonization of environmental protection at a high level. "

Vahrenholt's main priorities as the Senator for the Environment included extensive reconstruction and expansion of urban drainage and waste management , the remediation of contaminated sites , for example in the Bille settlement , and air pollution control . In addition, a number of areas were designated as nature reserves during his tenure , including 860 hectares of the Kirchwerder meadows . In March 1997 he stated that “Hamburg's air has improved in practically all parameters in practically all parameters thanks to the renovation of large combustion systems, modernization of heating systems and a strict, at the same time cooperative, approval and monitoring policy.” In the meantime, the Winter Smog Ordinance was repealed due to lack of necessity and the problem of dioxin emissions from modernized waste incineration was considered to be solved.

Industry

In 1998 Vahrenholt switched to Deutsche Shell AG , which was keen to improve its bad image, which had suffered mainly as a result of the public protests against the sinking of the floating oil tank Brent Spar .

From 1998 to 2001 he was a board member of Deutsche Shell AG, responsible for the areas of chemistry, renewable energy, public relations, environmental protection and the electricity business, and in 2001 moved to the supervisory board. In 2001 he took over the chairmanship of the newly founded REpower Systems , which he held until the end of 2007. During this time he was a member of the Council for Sustainable Development under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and from 2005 under Chancellor Angela Merkel .

From February 2008 to July 2012 Vahrenholt worked as managing director of the newly founded RWE Innogy GmbH , a division for renewable energies of the energy company RWE . He left the supervisory board of his former company REpower Systems in July 2008.

Mandates

Vahrenholt holds several supervisory board mandates at the following companies, among others:

Previous supervisory board mandates:

Other activities and memberships

He is also active in other areas, which is reflected in his previous function as a member of the Council for Sustainable Development and his membership in the Advisory Board of the Körber Foundation . Vahrenholt is currently a member of the Senate of the Fraunhofer Society and the German Bioeconomy Council . In addition, Vahrenholt is a member of the scientific advisory board of the British think tank Global Warming Policy Foundation , which denies human-made global warming.

Vahrenholt is a guest author on The Axis of the Good and Tichy's Insight .

Energy policy and climate skepticism

NASA global temperature data (moving average over 12 months) compared to the forecast for global temperature up to 2030 by Vahrenholt and Lüning (based on Die kalte Sonne, Fig. 73.), as of July 2020.

Vahrenholt denies the scientific consensus on man-made global warming and campaigns against climate protection measures in the media and in his own publications . At the beginning of 2012, he published the book Die kalte Sonne with geologist Sebastian Lüning , who was RWE Dea's Africa expert and Head of Regional Projects until August of the same year . Excerpts from the book were preprinted in a three-part series entitled The CO 2 Lie in the picture . The core thesis of the book is that it was not CO 2 but, above all, changes in ocean currents and solar activity that would have led to global warming and that, due to decreasing solar activity, future warming would be much lower than e.g. B. forecast by the IPCC .

Among other things, he is of the opinion that the sun is at least equally responsible for the current global warming as the carbon dioxide emissions caused by humans : “It is about clarifying the problem of what proportion human activities are really observing Have climate change and how high the contribution of natural climate processes is (...) There are many indications that our sun plays a more important role on the climate stage than CO 2 , that both effects are amplified, but can also work in opposite directions ”. He stated (as of 2012) that the global temperature rise has been at a standstill for 16 years , and the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( IPCC) are influenced by environmental organizations such as Greenpeace and WWF .

While there was a very weak 24th solar cycle in the period up to 2018 , corresponding to a lower radiation output from the sun, in these years, instead of the cooling predicted by Vahrenholt, there was a significant warming surge in the earth's atmosphere.

Vahrenholt believes that the global warming warning is a means of creating jobs, prestige and research funding for climate researchers and restricting citizens' freedom through laws. The environmental philosopher Jens Soentgen and the communication scientist Helena Bilandzic evaluated this in a joint publication as a conspiracy theory .

Vahrenholt's theses were unanimously rejected in the professional world . In addition, several scientists who were quoted in the book Die kalte Sonne , in order to support the theses made there, said that they had been misrepresented. Among other things, the quoted statistician Manfred Mudelsee criticized the fact that Vahrenholt and Lüning continued to claim this on their blog even after he pointed out that his work did not prove any solar cycles. He therefore feels that Vahrenholt and Lüning have consciously exploited him. Numerous journalists as well as energy and climate experts contradicted Vahrenholt's analysis and his political demand to allow "more time" to convert the energy system. The media and climate scientists Birgit Schneider, Thomas Nocke and Georg Feulner, who described Die Kalte Sonne as the most prominent climate-skeptical publication in Germany, found many cases of misleading graphic representations, especially cherry-picking . The climate researcher Mojib Latif and the director of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research Sami Solanki also considered Vahrenholt's solar activity theses to be unfounded. The climate researcher Hans von Storch , himself a critic of an overly "alarmistic" interpretation of the findings of climate research, judged:

“He does not discuss which observations would contradict his argument; he does not examine what an error in individual elements of his overall system would mean for the validity of his statements. There may be points in his analysis, but as he gets closer to areas I have studied myself, mistakes show up, and when I speak to other scientists they say the same thing for their respective subject. It seems that Fritz Vahrenholt and his co-author Sebastian Lüning simply cherry-picked - that is what they accuse their opponents. "

For the communication researchers Inga Schlichting and Andreas Schmidt, the book represents a late attempt to sow uncertainty about global warming in public . Such campaigns, which not only raised doubts, but also attacked climate research as such, were heavily pursued by industrial associations during the 1990s in order to prevent regulation and, in particular, climate protection measures. Achim Brunnengräber sees a similar motivation, emphasizing that the recommendations in the book are “tailored precisely to the RWE strategy”, Vahrenholt's employer at the time, who was poorly positioned for the energy transition in Germany . RWE denied such a connection, stating that the book was Vahrenholt's "private matter".

In April 2011 Vahrenholt was a guest at an event by EIKE , an association that denies man-made climate change. His approach has in part been sharply criticized by scientists such as climatologist Stefan Rahmstorf . The University of Osnabrück canceled a planned lecture by Vahrenholt after Vahrenholt, according to the university management, wanted to give a lecture on climate change instead of the energy transition as originally planned and refused to allow a climatologist to comment during the lecture. Vahrenholt criticized this as a "muzzle".

In 2019, as the sole director of the German Wildlife Foundation, he wrote a letter to the members of the Bundestag and stated with regard to climate policy that climate protection was not urgent. A model calculation “carried out” by him and a study carried out by Victor Brovkin show that the vegetation can absorb much more carbon dioxide than indicated by the IPCC. Brovkin then accused him of distorting quotations from the study; moreover, both his assumptions and his calculations are wrong. In the same year he founded the "re: look climate institute" with the former member of the Bundestag Philipp Lengsfeld (CDU), whose goal, according to his own description, is to examine "scientific data through independently defined initiatives financed by donations".

In autumn 2019 he was the author and signatory of a declaration by around 500 people, written by the Dutch climate denial organization Clintel , that there would be no climate crisis. Among other things, the declaration demands that science should be less political and that the uncertainties and exaggerations in climate prognoses should be clearly stated. The climate is constantly changing, global warming is proceeding much more slowly than assumed, climate models are inadequate and carbon dioxide is a building block of life. Nor has it been proven that environmental disasters increase; climate change is due not only to humans but also to natural factors, and a zero carbon policy is harmful and unrealistic. The Guardian wrote that the declaration reiterated "deny climate science" and "reiterated well-worn and long-debated climate change issues," which contradict the findings of "scientific institutions and academies around the world" as well as those of the IPCC. A fact check by the science platform "Climate Feedback" rated the scientific credibility of the declaration on a scale from +2 to −2 with −1.8. The opinion written by von Vahrenholt was "distorted", "inaccurate", "misleading" and used cherry picking. In addition, the scientists pointed out that of the 500 signatories who presented themselves as "scientists and experts", only 10 were actually climate scientists.

Vahrenholt protests against accusations of denying man-made climate change as such. He does not generally deny the warming of the climate or its anthropogenic causes, but ascribes half of the warming measured so far to human influence, while natural factors account for the other half. He expects a temperature increase of 1 to 1.5 ° C by the end of the century, which, according to his own statements, is in the lower range of the uncertainty range of 1 to 2.5 ° C of the IPCC forecast. He was convinced that due to the CO 2 -driven warming the switch from fossil fuels to CO 2 -free alternatives was necessary, but assumed that more time was available for this switch than was assumed. However, the state of research is that current global warming is almost exclusively caused by humans.

In the course of the energy policy discussions, Vahrenholt pleaded, among other things, for an extension of the service life of German nuclear power plants and for the further development and construction of pebble bed reactors .

Fonts

  • Development of an SCF perturbation method for the treatment of geometry changes in molecules. Dissertation. University of Münster, 1974.
  • with Egmont R. Koch : Seveso is everywhere. The deadly risks of chemistry. With a foreword by Erhard Eppler . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1978, ISBN 3-462-01290-8 ; Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt 1980, ISBN 3-596-23804-8
  • with Egmont R. Koch: The state of the nation. Environmental Atlas of the Federal Republic. Data, analyzes, consequences. Gruner & Jahr, Hamburg 1983, ISBN 3-570-03870-X .
  • with Rainer Grießhammer & Frank Claus : Formaldehyde. A nation is glued. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1984, ISBN 3-499-15543-5
  • (Ed.): Tempo 100. Immediate aid for the forest? Rowohlt, Reinbek 1984, ISBN 3-499-33058-X .
  • Global market potential for renewable energies. Deutsche Shell AG, Hamburg 1998.
  • The days of cheap oil are over. Finite resources require a new energy mix. In: International Politics . 56 (1), 2001, pp. 11-16.
  • Renewable energies: Strategic development of a new core business. In: Klaus Fichter & Uwe Schneidewind (Ed.): Environmental protection in global competition. New rules of the game for the borderless company. Springer, Berlin [a. a.] 2000, ISBN 3-540-67468-3 , pp. 223-228.
  • Profits and Principles. In: Thomas Bausch, Annette Kleinfeld & Horst Steinmann (eds.): Business ethics in business practice. Hampp, Munich / Mering 2000, ISBN 3-87988-458-7 , p. 33ff.
  • with Sebastian Lüning : The cold sun. Why the climate catastrophe does not take place. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-455-50250-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ansgar Graw: Fritz Vahrenholt: collateral damage of an expulsion . December 21, 2019 ( welt.de [accessed December 25, 2019]).
  2. ↑ Fritz Vahrenholt changes to the supervisory board ( memento from January 6, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ). Business magazine Ruhr, January 27, 2012, accessed on February 13, 2012.
  3. ↑ Press release of the German Wildlife Foundation ( memento of April 6, 2012 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on April 1, 2012.
  4. ^ Wirtschaftswoche : Heads: Fritz Vahrenholt (Source: Munzinger Archive ).
  5. ↑ cf. Fritz Vahrenholt: Westphalian "wild" sixties , in: Böckling, Jürgen (Ed.): I think of Münster ... , there in 1995.
  6. ^ Fritz Vahrenholt Grüner Querdenker, FAZ of March 25, 2007 (accessed on May 25, 2013) .
  7. ^ Fritz Vahrenholt: Reform possibilities from the point of view of a federal state , in: Hoffmann-Riem , Wolfgang / Schneider, Jens-Peter: Environmental policy control in a liberalized electricity market , Baden-Baden 1995, pages 20 f.
  8. ^ Foreword in: Hamburg Environment Agency (ed.): Air pollution control in Hamburg 1982 to 2000 , Hamburg 1997, page 5.
  9. ↑ RWE AG: RWE bundles renewable energies in the new company RWE Innogy . Press release from November 21, 2007.
  10. ↑ Report in the magazine Sonne, Wind & Wärme. No. 11/2008.
  11. ↑ Hamburger Abendblatt from November 23, 1999 a. v. a. m.
  12. ^ Academic Advisory Council. Global Warming Policy Foundation, accessed January 10, 2017 .
  13. ^ Articles by and about Fritz Vahrenholt on the axis of the good .
  14. ^ Fritz Vahrenholt . In: Tichy's Insight , Retrieved October 10, 2019.
  15. ↑ a b Stefan Schmitt & Christian Tenbrock: Climate change: Cold from space? . In: The time . No. 5, January 26, 2012
  16. ^ Fritz Vahrenholt: SPD rebel considers climate forecasts to be exaggerated . In: Berliner Zeitung . February 6, 2012.
  17. ↑ Christopher Schrader : Climate Change - What Role Does the Sun Really Play? In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . February 8, 2012.
  18. ^ Fritz Vahrenholt / Sebastian Lüning: Die kalte Sonne , Hamburg 2012.
  19. ↑ Fritz Vahrenholt & Sebastian Lüning: The CO2-lie: "For 12 years, the Earth-warming stopped!" . In: image . February 7, 2012.
  20. ^ Frank Drieschner, Christiane Grefe & Christian Tenbrock: Fritz Vahrenholt: Störenfritz des Klimafriedens . In: The time . No. 7, February 9, 2012.
  21. ↑ Controversial book "The Cold Sun": Half-truths about the CO2 lie. In: Focus Online . July 30, 2012, accessed March 18, 2016 .
  22. ↑ Vahrenholt / Lüning: Die kalte Sonne , pp. 7–8.
  23. ↑ a b Norbert Lossau : Fritz Vahrenholt: Is the climate catastrophe going past the earth? In: The world . February 7, 2012 (interview).
  24. ↑ Toralf Staud : Global warming: Skeptics in the fact check . In: The time . February 8, 2012.
  25. ↑ Jens Soentgen, Helena Bilandzic: The structure of climate- skeptical arguments. Conspiracy Theory as Critique of Science . In: GAIA . tape 23 , no. 1 , 2014, p. 40-47 , doi : 10.14512 / gaia.23.1.10 .
  26. ↑ Researchers feel they have been instrumentalized by climate skeptic Vahrenholt . In: Die Zeit , August 10, 2012. Retrieved June 20, 2016.
  27. ^ Skeptics in the fact check , ZEIT Online from February 8, 2012.
  28. ↑ Birgit Schneider, Thomas Nocke, Georg Feulner: Twist and Shout: Images and Graphs in Skeptical Climate Media . In: Birgit Schneider and Thomas Nocke (eds.): Image Politics of Climate Change . Transcript Verlag, 2014, ISBN 978-3-8376-2610-0 .
  29. ↑ a b c Konstantin Kumpfmüller: AfD politicians in the Bundestag: Wrong and twisted things about the climate. www.tagesschau.de, September 27, 2019
  30. ↑ Hans von Storch : A skeptic lacking skepticism: Fritz Vahrenholt. The climate bulb, February 8, 2012, accessed on March 25, 2016 .
  31. ↑ Inga Schlichting, Andreas Schmidt, Climate Change and Sustainability. Strategic frames of companies, political actors and civil society organizations , in: Martin Nielsen, Iris Rittenhofer, Marianne Grove Ditlevsen, Sophie Esmann Andersen, Irene Pollach (ed.), Sustainability in Business Communication . Wiesbaden 2013, 109-136, pp. 116f.
  32. ↑ Achim Brunnengräber : Climate skeptics in Germany and their fight against the energy transition . Website of the Free University of Berlin . Retrieved October 23, 2016.
  33. ↑ Stefan Rahmstorf: Climate Change - Against the cherry picking of the climate skeptics . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . June 7, 2011.
  34. ↑ Climate change: Osnabrück University invites RWE manager Vahrenholt because of controversial theses ( memento of March 13, 2012 in the Internet Archive ). In: New Osnabrück Newspaper . February 8, 2012.
  35. ↑ RWE manager Vahrenholt accuses the University of Osnabrück with a muzzle strategy and criticizes scaremongering about climate change. In: noz.de. September 11, 2012, accessed March 18, 2016 .
  36. ^ A b Bernhard Pötter : Climate change deniers in Germany. Half true, completely false . In: taz , September 20, 2019. Retrieved October 9, 2019.
  37. ^ Stefan Rahmstorf: How Fritz Vahrenholt wanted to sell the Bundestag for stupid . Klimalounge, blog by Stefan Rahmstorf. September 12, 2019. Retrieved October 9, 2019.
  38. ↑ Hundreds of climate skeptics to mount international campaign to stop net-zero targets being made law . In: The Independent , September 6, 2019. Retrieved October 9, 2019.
  39. ↑ There is no climate emergency . Clintel statement, September 23, 2019. Retrieved October 9, 2019.
  40. ↑ 'CO2 is plant food': Australian group signs international declaration denying climate science . In: The Guardian , September 26, 2019. Retrieved October 9, 2019.
  41. ↑ Letter signed by “500 scientists” relies on inaccurate claims about climate science . In: Climate feedback , September 23, 2019. Retrieved October 9, 2019.
  42. ↑ Marlies Uken: Energy Policy: "The repository problem does not depend on the running times" . In: The time . September 1, 2010 (interview).
personal data
SURNAME Vahrenholt, Fritz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German chemist, politician (SPD) and manager
DATE OF BIRTH May 8, 1949
PLACE OF BIRTH Gelsenkirchen-Buer