Home to Freud, Austria Debates Carbon-Tax Therapy to Ease Climate Anxiety
As record heatwaves stress the urgency of the climate crisis, Austria lawmakers want a plan to make everyone pay for pollution.
Despite already generating some fourth-fifths of its electricity with renewable hydropower, Austria’s emissions are up over the last three decades because of industrial pollution and a love affair with cars.
Photographer: Sven Hoppe/Picture Alliance/Getty ImagesWhen temperatures soar and Austrians start to get a little stir crazy, they dream of Alpine hills where scientists and philosophers like Sigmund Freud retreated to refresh mind and body. These days, ever-hotter summers are turning that discomfort into full-blown anxiety over climate change.
The record heatwaves ravaging large parts of the Northern Hemisphere are just the latest trigger. Average temperatures in Austria have surged almost 2 degrees Celsius over the last century, prompting many to ask if their country — a middling polluter that already has some of the most ambitious climate targets — needs to take more drastic action.