Fighting populist arguments with wit and wisdom – and solutions that actually work.
KLIMAZIRKUS
by David Nelles
Penguin Germany, May 2025
« Why should I stop eating burgers? » – How populism slows down efforts to counteract climate change, and how to effect real change.
Eco-anarchists, selfish SUV drivers, tree-hugging snowflakes, compulsory veggie days, net zero… hardly any other topic these days is as contentious as climate change, and what to do about it. Again and again, we get ourselves entangled in populist pseudo-debates instead of finding workable solutions. No wonder that many people switch off whenever the subject comes up.
Bestselling author David Nelles thinks it’s high time we started a new kind of discussion about climate change and its consequences. In his entertaining new book « The Climate Circus », he uses the sort of statements made by politicians, journalists and various people on social media as a starting point to debunk the disinformation, incitement, binary thinking and misguided arguments we encounter daily. Armed with eye-opening graphics and a wealth of facts, he confronts us with our misconceptions, demonstrates how best to argue the case, and explains how we might go about making real progress.
As so many other business studies students, David Nelles was annoyed by all those over-emotional debates around climate change. He and fellow student Christian Serrer looked around in vain for a book that could provide them with a science-based yet accessible short introduction to the subject, with lots of useful graphics – so they decided to write it themselves with the help of more than 100 experts on the subject. The result was Kleine Gase – Große Wirkung: Der Klimawandel (‘Climate change: little gases – big consequences’), which was an instant hit and became the country’s bestselling book about climate change. Since then, Nelles has given and led more than 200 talks and workshops for businesses and communities. He is also founder of Klimafabrik, a ‘climate factory’ that helps organisations and their staff become greener.
It’s been 80 years since the Holocaust and the end of the Second World War, and only few eye witnesses are still alive. Yet the effects of the past persist. Shaped by a dark age that was over before they were even born, generations are suffering from a trauma whose cause they don’t fully understand: loved ones who show little emotion, feelings of guilt, fear, loneliness, a sense of rootlessness. Many families suffer from a leaden silence – suppressed memories, well-kept secrets, lies that won’t go away. It is an oppressive legacy, whose poison circulates to this day.
From the moment they met in 1940 in Ravensbrück concentration camp, Milena Jesenska and Margarete Buber-Neumann were inseparable. Czech Milena was Kafka’s first translator and epistolary lover and a journalist opposed to fascism. A non-conformist, bi-sexual feminist, she was way ahead of her time. With the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, her home became a central meeting place for Jewish refugees. German Margarete, born to a middle-class family, married the son of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. But soon swept up in the fervor of the Bolshevik Revolution, she met her second partner, the Communist Heinz Neumann. Called to Moscow for his “political deviations,” he fell victim to Stalin’s purges while Margarete was exiled to the hell of the Soviet gulag. Two years later, traded by Stalin to Hitler, she ended up outside Berlin in Ravensbrück, the only concentration camp built for women.