Ninth Letter from Michael to Andreas
Dear Andreas,
Your eighth letter has been sitting on my desk for days, and I have read it more often than I would like to admit. Not because I was looking for disagreement. Because your four dispositions, decisiveness, inspiring others, getting things done, staying positive, touched something in me that is larger than the question of Europe’s digital future.
They are the answer to a question I have not yet asked you. Perhaps because I have been avoiding it.
What do you do when the change is larger than the tools we are using to manage it?
I am talking about the climate, Andreas. About the state of the planet on which we have been negotiating everything we exchanged in the past eight letters. Sovereignty, community, departure, posture. All of it presupposes a simple condition that sounds so self-evident we rarely speak it aloud: that there is a place where all of this can take place.
And precisely this place is changing at a speed our political and cultural repertoire has not caught up with.
The diagnosis nobody wants to hear
In the year 2026, the situation can be described soberly, and it is the sobriety itself that hurts us. The European Green Deal stands, but it stands under fire. The 2040 target of minus 90 per cent greenhouse gases has been diluted by what are euphemistically called “flexibilities”. The launch of ETS-II for buildings and transport has been pushed from 2027 to 2028. Fleet limits for cars have been softened. The CBAM, the carbon border adjustment mechanism designed to prevent us from simply exporting our emissions, is being fought by the United States and increasingly by China and India.
The lobbying spend of the fossil industry has crossed the billion mark globally, for the sole purpose of delaying European climate policy.
In parallel, we know from climate science that the risk of a collapse of the Atlantic overturning circulation, the AMOC, is no longer a fringe hypothesis. It is a risk discussed in serious journals. We know that soils, water and biodiversity in Europe are under pressure not seen since the industrial revolution. We know that the consequences of warming are not arriving in thirty years. We are paying for them already, in the form of drought, flood, crop failure, health costs, migration pressure, insurance premiums.
And yet a remarkable share of our public life behaves as though all of this were a matter of perspective. As though climate change were a political camp one might join or reject. As though physical reality could be negotiated, if only one disputed it loudly enough in the media.
It is not the not-knowing that blocks us. It is the not-wanting-to-know. And that is a different category.
In your fifth letter you named a force I had overlooked: division as the method of those who profit from collapse. The same applies here. Climate denial has long since stopped being a scientific phenomenon. It has become a geopolitical one. The Polish intelligence services have documented Russian disinformation campaigns aimed specifically at undermining the European climate consensus. A strong European energy transition is not in Russia’s interest. Nor is it in the interest of the fossil industry. Both have learned to play the same cultural fault lines.
But that explains only one half. The other half is us.
People deny because denial is cheaper than change. Because admitting that the world in which one built a career, a house, a business model has no future is an imposition from which one flees.
There is an entire industry of reassurance that makes the fleeing easier. Sometimes it is called “technology openness”. Sometimes “pragmatism”. Sometimes “securing the location”. At its core it is always the same thing: the promise that we do not have to change.
It is the same pattern as the silence you described in your sixth letter. The paralysing stillness of people who sit in the same room and have nothing left to say to each other. Only this time it is not just rooms. It is a continent. And it is not only words that go unspoken. It is decisions that go unmade.
The solutions are there. Something else is missing.
And here comes the part that, like you in the eighth letter, makes me optimistic. The solutions are on the table. They are not theory, they are practice. Renewable energy has become the cheapest form of electricity generation in most markets. Heat pumps work at minus twenty degrees. Electric cars are mature. Storage scales. The circular economy is no longer a niche topic but industrial reality. The first European Soil Protection Act was passed in 2025. A water resilience strategy is on the table. Repair rights are anchored. The energy system of the future is technically describable.
What is missing is not the technology. It is exactly what you described in the eighth letter. It is people who have decided.
And here is where we come in. You and I and everyone reading this exchange. Because the four dispositions you laid out are not only answers to the question of European sovereignty. They are the answer to every form of structural change. Including the ecological one.
Let me work through them, because I believe they hold.
Be decisive. The climate debate has suffered for thirty years from what you called the premature pivot. A measure is decided. At the first resistance it is softened. At the second it is postponed. At the third it is reformulated as “technology open”, which usually means it demands nothing more. The CBAM is currently taking exactly this path. So is the 2035 combustion engine phase-out. Anyone serious about changing something in this debate needs what you described: a stake in the ground. A decision that holds when things get hard.
Inspire others. The climate movement has made a serious mistake in recent years. It has leaned on guilt where it should have leaned on invitation. Guilt paralyses. Invitation mobilises. Anyone who wants to win people over to a different form of economic life must offer a direction that is more attractive to follow than the one of holding on. Not through instruction. Through conviction. Through living a form of life that is better, not more deprived.
Get things done. I know enough sustainability strategy papers to fill a library. What I know less of are companies that have implemented them. Careful thinking has become, here too, a refined form of postponement. We report on sustainability instead of producing it. The CSRD has been delayed, the taxonomy diluted, supply chain due diligence hollowed out. The result is what you described: language that has separated itself from action. What helps is the simple question at the end of every day: what did we actually change today?
Stay positive. This is the hardest of the four disciplines, because it is most easily mistaken for naivety. But you are right. It is a disciplined decision about where to direct one’s attention. Anyone who sees only the defeats in the climate debate has already lost. The shoots of something growing are there. Solar deployment that exceeds its own forecasts every year. Cities rethinking transport. Farmers working regeneratively and suddenly seeing returns where there used to be only subsidies. A young generation that no longer asks whether the world will change, but how quickly.
What each individual can do
Here comes the point at which letters like this often tip into the homiletic or the all-encompassing. I will try to avoid both by being concrete.
It is not about every individual saving the planet. That expectation is wrongly framed and rightly overwhelms anyone who takes it seriously. It is about every individual ceasing, within their own sphere of influence, to normalise what is wrong, and beginning to practise what is right.
Concretely: anyone running a business can decide that sustainability metrics carry the same rank as financial metrics. Not in reporting. In decision-making. Anyone working in advisory, as you and I do, can tell their clients honestly what technological and regulatory reality looks like, instead of explaining to them how to circumvent it. Anyone investing can ask whether the business model they are entering will still exist in ten years. Anyone voting can refuse to participate in the fiction that climate policy is a question of political colour. Anyone with children can speak to them about what is real, without paralysing them.
And anyone who writes, as we do, can refuse to adopt the language of denial. That sounds small. It is not.
Because every form of structural change begins with people ceasing to think in the old language. And it begins with those people finding each other. Letters like these are not the end of the story. But they are a beginning, and beginnings are no small good in times of paralysis.
Where I thank you again
You closed your letter with a line I have been carrying with me ever since: these four qualities can be practised. Not perfected. That is the most humane form of hope I know. It removes the pressure of having to be perfect, and leaves only what counts: the steady approach.
Applied to climate change, this means we will not be in a position to save everything. There will be losses. Some have already occurred and are not reversible. But every tenth of a degree of warming we prevent is one less. Every tonne of CO₂ not emitted is one that future generations will not have to fight. Every decision in a supervisory board, a town council, a cabinet that points in the right direction has consequences that add up.
The approach is the achievement here, too.
Let me close as you closed. You have decided. So have I. And I assume that everyone who has read this exchange to here is just now catching themselves having to decide.
Let us keep going. But this time not only for Europe. Also for the ground on which it stands.
Michael
This text is an experiment: a public exchange of letters between Michael Mrak and myself, inspired by Epistulae morales ad Lucilium, in which reflections on sovereignty far beyond the digital context are developed further through dialogue.