Extract from The Guardian
With crucial climate talks on the horizon, Keep it
in the ground turns its focus to hope for the future – the power to
change and the solar revolution. Join us and help make that change
happen
- Get all Keep it in the ground stories by selecting ‘Follow series’ in the Guardian app and sign up via email to get involved
The next phase of our campaign will champion solar
power and its potential to transform the global energy supply.
Photograph: Tom Payne/Alamy
Monday 5 October 2015 17.00 AEDT
A year ago, more than 300,000
people took to the streets in New York to demand action from
their leaders on climate change.
Nearly the same number took part in similar events
in 161 countries across the globe. For 24 hours, the sun did not set
on the largest climate protest in history.
These grassroots activists are part of a powerful
global movement for change that has continued to grow as crucial UN
climate talks in Paris in December have drawn nearer, bolstered
by interventions from other important global voices – Pope
Francis, Graça
Machel, Desmond
Tutu and Mary
Robinson, to name a few. The pope last week repeated his message
of climate justice and change to world leaders at the UN.
Crucially, that change is now beginning to take
hold, with clean energy on the march and the low-carbon economy
becoming a reality on the ground, rather than just a PowerPoint
aspiration.
It is against this backdrop that the Guardian is
launching the next stage of its climate
change campaign as our team of environment correspondents around
the world champion a rare commodity in the climate change debate –
hope.
There is hope in the many voices who are now
calling for action from their leaders.
There is hope in the rapidly falling cost of
renewable energy that is starting to transform our dirty energy
system.
There is hope in the pledge
by G7 countries to phase out coal power.
There is hope in the communities and innovators
around the world who are getting on with the job rather than waiting
for the politicians.
In short, the world is beginning to get to grips
with the biggest problem it faces, but has arrived at a crossroads.
Powerful forces are still at work against a meaningful agreement in
Paris. So those who believe that climate change needs urgent
solutions cannot let up the pressure.
More of that later. First a recap.
Six months ago, the Guardian took a stand on
climate change with an editorial push and campaign. The intention was
to highlight the uncomfortable fact that a large proportion of the
oil, coal and gas reserves that states and companies already hold
have to stay untapped in order to avoid dangerous climate change.
It is estimated that the
world can afford to burn between one-fifth and one-third of proven
reserves before there is a reasonable chance of tipping the
planet over the 2C danger threshold of warming. Uncomfortable is
putting it mildly. As our reporting has sought to demonstrate, the
implications of this analysis are huge for our economies, the
stability of our financial system and the way we live our everyday
lives.
The project has also sought new and better ways to
cover the biggest and most important issue of the age – one that
affects so much else that the Guardian’s journalists around the
world report on every day. Extreme weather, food and water shortages,
conflict, migration, energy bills, technology and many other issues
are influenced by the steady march of climate change.
Aside from making a big investment in
investigative journalism and reportage from locations as diverse as
the Arctic,
China,
Brazil,
Australia
and South
Africa, the Guardian also launched
a campaign in partnership with the NGO 350.org
to persuade the world’s two largest health charities – the Bill
and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome
Trust – to move their investments out of fossil fuel-producing
companies. The Guardian’s own commercial board took the decision
to divest its £800m fund from coal, oil and gas.
There was always a broader context, however –
the Paris climate talks. In December, governments will attempt to
thrash out a deal that many hope will chart a course to transforming
the world’s dirty energy system and so keep at bay the worst
consequences of climate change. Keep it in the ground phase one began
to turn up the heat on politicians in advance of those talks by
highlighting the stratospheric growth of the fossil fuel divestment
movement.
In 43 countries, more than 400
organisations with a collective worth of $2.6tn – including
Stanford University, the Church of England, the Norwegian sovereign
wealth fund and the Australian city with the largest
coal port on the planet – have made commitments to move their
investments out of fossil fuels. This is civil society putting
serious money where its mouth is – something those involved in the
talks have noticed.
With just over two months to go until the talks it
is right that we shift the focus of the campaign. We will continue to
highlight the message that the majority of fossil fuels must be kept
under the ground and to make the divestment case to the Wellcome
Trust and Gates Foundation. But it is time for a new direction.
60-second climate fix: can the sun cool down the
Earth?
Naturally, the journalistic focus now moves to the
talks themselves. Which countries are the heroes and which the
villains? Will the deal be fair to the poorest nations? Most
importantly, can the agreement save the world? Despite a relentless
diplomatic push by the French hosts to make the talks a success, an
ambitious agreement is far from certain.
Notwithstanding the importance of the UN process,
focusing solely on Paris would be to tell only part of the story. One
of the most significant features of the Keep it in the ground
campaign so far has been the response from Guardian readers. More
than 226,000 of you have signed up as supporters from more than 170
countries – and you have been central to what we and 350.org have
done. You bombarded us with ideas for stories to cover. Hundreds of
you wrote well-informed and often moving
letters to the Wellcome Trust board requesting divestment. Many
of you took part in a video
appeal direct to Bill Gates. And numerous others in his home town
of Seattle have joined the cause with their
own campaign. Nearly 1,000 health professionals – including the
editors of the British Medical Journal and the Lancet – signed
a letter urging health organisations to “do no harm” and
divest their assets on grounds of medical ethics. Thank you for your
support so far.
So when deciding where Keep it in the ground
should go next it made sense for us to ask this global movement where
they wanted us to shift the focus. Naturally, there was a range of
ideas but one clear message kept coming through time and again. It
can be summed up in one word – hope.
Supporters told us they wanted to hear more about
the positive climate stories – the new technologies that are
capturing the sun’s energy even more efficiently; the rapid drops
in the price of renewable energy; the currently off-grid communities
in Africa that are developing clean power; the smart technology
helping homeowners to use less energy.
Another message that came through was a desire to
hear about the other side of the divestment coin. If you take your
money out of the problem, where should you put it to be part of the
solution? We’ve heard about “divest”, now what about “invest”?
Children touch a solar panel at their school.
Photograph: Alamy
Above all, you told us that even though the Gates
Foundation and Wellcome Trust have not yet chosen to move their
investments, the Guardian must not give up on the climate issue. With
global warming so high on the world agenda, it would be wrong to
abandon the momentum that Keep it in the ground has created.
So a major strand of our climate coverage up to
Paris and beyond will be about climate change as a story of hope.
That doesn’t mean wilfully ignoring the gravity of the situation we
face. Far from it. The Guardian will continue to report on the
science of climate change, visit the places around the globe that
will experience the worst impacts and uncover bad corporate behaviour
and misinformation where it happens. But we will also make a point of
bringing positive stories to the fore. In particular, the next phase
of Keep it in the ground will champion the amazing growth of solar
power and its potential to transform the global energy supply. Since
the disappointing outcome at the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009,
the cost of solar panels has dropped by about 70% and continues to
fall, meaning that solar is now as cheap or cheaper than fossil fuels
in some countries.
In Queensland, Australia, last year, wholesale
energy prices went negative during the day for the first time
because of the expansion of solar installations to more than 350,000
rooftops across the state. There was so much power on the grid its
price crashed.
In the US, solar is the fastest-growing
source of power with residential rooftop installations up 70%
year on year. And politicians there have woken up. Last month,
President Obama announced measures to encourage more take-up by home
owners. He was speaking in a Las Vegas casino that has 20 acres of
solar panels on its roof. Hillary
Clinton has made solar a big part of her pitch for the presidency
with a pledge for half a billion panels across the country.
Republicans too – even those who don’t regard
climate change as a problem – are seeing the potential of solar to
give households energy independence and security. “Rooftop
solar makes it harder for terrorists to render a devastating blow to
our power grid,” says Debbie Dooley, who was one of 22
organisers of the first nationwide Tea Party protest in 2009.
Around the world, far-sighted countries are
helping investors to put serious money into solar. A few months ago,
a deal was signed in conflict-riven Burundi for a solar
field that will provide 15% of that country’s energy-generating
capacity. Tanzania
has a plan to give a million homes access to solar energy by the
end of 2017. Bangladesh
aims to expand solar power to every home by 2021. Morocco
plans to build five big new solar plants by 2020 at a cost of
$9bn (£6bn) and become a major energy exporter to Europe.
Technology improvements can and will help drive
this transition by making clean energy cheaper, but we are no longer
waiting for some mythical breakthrough invention to solve climate
change. Many of the tools already exist.
With so much momentum behind clean energy around
the world, it is all the more jarring that the British government is
going
in the opposite direction. With the opposition distracted, the
Conservatives have moved to systematically remove support for
renewable energy. The government is consulting
on subsidy changes that will make it essentially uneconomic for
people to install solar panels on their roofs. The Australian
government too has acted as a brake on solar energy when we need an
accelerator.
A 10MW solar power station in Delingha, in China’s
Qinghai province, is the first phase of a solar-thermal plant with a
total capacity of 50MW. Photograph: Zhang Hongxiang/Corbis
In the coming weeks and months, the Guardian will
increase its reporting all of these developments and more. We will
look in detail at the potential for solar power and the obstacles it
faces. And campaign supporters will continue to play a crucial role.
The Guardian will ask readers what you want to see covered and we’ll
bring you closer to the experts who can help answer your questions.
We will be at the Global
Climate March in Paris on 29 November and will give information
on what individuals around the world can do to get behind the climate
movement.
So whether you are already a supporter of Keep it
in the ground or whether you are seeing the Guardian’s campaign for
the first time, please sign up to find out more. By doing so, you
will receive regular updates on our coverage and the progress of the
campaign, as well as an opportunity to participate and influence the
direction we take.
This is the most exciting and hopeful time for
anyone interested in solving the biggest problem that humanity faces.
As Pope Francis put it in his encyclical
on the environment in June: “All is not lost. Human beings,
while capable of the worst, are also capable of rising above
themselves, choosing again what is good, and making a new start …
to embark on new paths to authentic freedom.”
That new start is already rising from the dirty
energy system we inherited from the 19th and 20th centuries but for
now it is just that – a start. It is only with unrelenting pressure
from below that world leaders will continue with enough purpose on
the right path.
The time is now. Join us.
No comments:
Post a Comment