The Guardian
The Colour of the Climate Crisis – in pictures
The Colour of the Climate Crisis is an exhibition by the environmental social initiative Do The Green Thing. It showcases the work of 24 Black and other artists of colour exploring the relationship between racial injustice and climate injustice.
The exhibition will launch on 31 October and run until 2 November at Pipe Factory in Glasgow, Scotland, with a selection of works to coincide with the start of the Cop26 global climate summit. The works will form a permanent digital display at www.thecolouroftheclimatecrisis.art. Further gallery exhibitions will take place in London and New York in 2022
Eco-anxiety over climate crisis suffered by all ages and classes
Poll finds most Britons believe global warming will have far greater effect on humanity than Covid-19
A clear majority of people believe that climate change will have a more significant effect on humanity than will Covid-19, which has already claimed about five million lives worldwide, according to a new poll conducted ahead of the Cop26 summit being held in Glasgow this weekend.
The survey, carried out as part of a study into “eco-anxiety” by the Global Future thinktank in conjunction with the University of York, also finds that concern about global warming is almost as common among older and working-class people as it is among those who are young or middle-class. Overall, 78% of people reported some level of eco-anxiety.
Continue reading...Mankind is not trapped in a deadly game with the Earth – there are ways out | David Wengrow
As the Cop26 climate summit gets under way, scientists and activists are in broad agreement that our prevailing cultural system has placed us, and our planet, on a course to disaster. They agree that it is time to change course. Yet, at this critical moment, we find ourselves paralysed, with new horizons closed off by a false prospectus of human possibilities based on mythological conceptions of history.
We need only look at the notion that underpins our idea of human development. In this story, our species originated in egalitarian bands of hunters and foragers, at one with their surroundings, only to somehow fall from grace into a state of inequality. In this “coming-of-age” fairytale, we humans began in innocence and then developed by way of a voyage of technological discovery – from foragers to farmers to fossil fuels – that enabled our “advancement”, but saw us relinquish our original freedoms. We became “civilised”, only to find ourselves locked in a tug of war with nature that now threatens the planet.
Continue reading...Reasons to be hopeful: the climate solutions available now
We have every tool we need to tackle the climate crisis. Here’s what some key sectors are doing
The climate emergency is the biggest threat to civilisation we have ever faced. But there is good news: we already have every tool we need to beat it. The challenge is not identifying the solutions, but rolling them out with great speed.
Some key sectors are already racing ahead, such as electric cars. They are already cheaper to own and run in many places – and when the purchase prices equal those of fossil-fueled vehicles in the next few years, a runaway tipping point will be reached.
Continue reading...Macron and Johnson’s preening rivalry keeps lobster pot boiling
While the French and British leaders make political capital out of fishers, the row threatens to spill into crucial Cop26
To publicly accuse a long-time friend and ally of lacking credibility and breaking his word whenever its suits him is disobliging at the best of times. To do so on the eve of a watershed global summit, Cop26, which your “friend” is hosting and where trust is vital, looks like a verbal act of war.
Whether the accuser, Emmanuel Macron, France’s centrist president, deliberately sought to escalate his confrontation with Boris Johnson over fishing licences is unclear. He probably did. He knows his words are potentially deeply damaging as Britain struggles to achieve a breakthrough in Glasgow. But Johnson has become his bete noire.
For him, Johnson is an opportunist, a rightwing nationalist-populist, an anti-European – in short, an unscrupulous, unprincipled bounder. The problem with this latest iteration of perfidious Albion, an abiding theme in French politics, is that, in significant ways, Macron himself is not so very different.
Resilience: the one word progressives need in the face of Trump, Covid and more | Robert Reich
The climate crisis, the economy, Biden’s struggle to enact his spending agenda. The list goes on. The lesson? Be strong
I often tell my students that if they strive to achieve full and meaningful lives, they should expect failures and disappointments. We learn to walk by falling down again and again. We learn to ride a bicycle by crashing into things. We learn to make good friends by being disappointed in friendship. Failure and disappointment are prerequisites to growth.
The real test of character comes after failures and disappointments. It is resilience: how easily you take failures, what you learn from them, how you bounce back.
Continue reading...Crimes Against Nature: $2 million whales, wartime Britain and the economics of saving the planet | Jeff Sparrow
We can respond to environmental crisis with good planning, Jeff Sparrow writes in an extract from his book
In his book Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher diagnoses the dominance of a ‘business ontology’, a mentality that can only conceive of human activities insofar as they’re profitable.
For instance, researchers associated with the International Monetary Fund recently noted that whales – especially great whales – capture from the atmosphere considerable amounts of carbon, which they store in their huge bodies and take down to the ocean floor when they die. A single great whale can thus sequester 33 tons of carbon dioxide – a not-insignificant quantity, given that a tree only absorbs 22kg annually. Whales also feed populations of phytoplankton with their waste, and, globally, those phytoplankton capture some 37bn metric tons of carbon dioxide, four times the emissions sequestered by the jungles of the Amazon.
Continue reading...Australia has trashed the Paris agreement and exposed itself as the worst kind of climate hypocrite | Thom Woodroofe
The Morrison government has shown that it quite simply does not do what it says on the world stage
Six years ago, I was one of hundreds of official delegates that stood in a makeshift UN plenary hall at Le Bourget when the Paris agreement was adopted after years of negotiations.
It was then, and may well remain, the most significant thing I have ever been part of in my life.
Continue reading...‘It’s the protests which are giving me hope’: activists descend on Glasgow
Campaigners from around the world are uniting to disrupt the Cop26 conference and put pressure on political leaders
Thousands of protesters from around the world arrived in Glasgow on Saturday to demand urgent action on the escalating ecological emergency before the two-week Cop26 climate conference.
Campaigners from scores of environmental justice, indigenous and civil society groups are converging on Scotland’s biggest city to forge alliances and pressure political leaders.
Continue reading...Chances of Cop26 success six out of 10, says Boris Johnson – video
Boris Johnson has said in a TV interview that he believes the chances of the Cop26 summit in Glasgow concluding with the right commitments from world leaders to tackle the climate emergency are still only six out of 10
Continue reading...50 years, 25 Cops: the slow-motion movement to save the planet
How Guardian journalists reported on the long, twisting road to global action on the climate crisis
From the earliest global environment conference in the 1970s, through the Rio Earth Summit and 25 subsequent Cops, Guardian journalists have reported on every twist and turn of these gargantuan gatherings, which have attracted hundreds of thousands of delegates over the years.
One of the success stories of the conference [is] the little blue and white bicycles parked outside the main buildings used by the UN delegates, UN staff and the press, who have particularly taken to them, sign out a key which fits a lock of any machine. By lunchtime yesterday every key was taken.
Continue reading...Hertz’s supercharged Tesla deal could haul us into the electric vehicle age | John Naughton
The firm’s agreement to buy 100,000 cars from Elon Musk’s company could change people’s minds about EVs for good
On Tuesday, Hertz, the car-rental firm that recently emerged from bankruptcy, announced that it had made a deal to buy 100,000 cars from Tesla for what knowledgeable sources estimate to be worth $4bn. On learning this, my first thought was that if this is what insolvency is like, please direct me to the nearest bankruptcy court. My second thought, though, was that this could be a significant moment on the road to wider adoption of electric vehicles (EVs).
The reason is, as anyone who has rented conventional cars will know, is that the best way of having a realistic test drive of a vehicle is to rent one for a week or two on holiday. As Teslas become available via Hertz, many more people will have a chance to experience what an EV is like. This is important because, generally, only geeks and masochists (like this columnist) are early adopters of novel technology and normal cautious consumers regard EVs as rather exotic and peculiar, not something you’d rely on for commuting or the school run.
Continue reading...Don’t put climate activists on trial, CPS urged
Questions raised over purpose of prosecuting peaceful protestors after activists are found guilty of calling climate-change sceptics ‘liars’
Prosecutors are under growing pressure to drop cases against environmental protestors after activists were found guilty of calling the UK’s most prominent climate-change sceptics “liars”.
Three campaigners were found guilty of criminal damage after spraying graffiti on the Westminster office of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. The organisation, which was once chaired by the former chancellor Nigel Lawson, has been criticised by the Charity Commission for breaking rules on impartiality, with critics accusing it of being the UK’s most prominent source of climate-change scepticism.
Continue reading...Cop26 failure could mean mass migration and food shortages, says Boris Johnson
Ahead of G20 meeting, PM warns of ‘difficult geopolitical events’ echoing those that ended Roman empire
A failure by world leaders to commit to tackling the climate emergency at the Cop26 summit in Glasgow could prompt “very difficult geopolitical events” including mass migration and global competition for food and water, Boris Johnson has said.
Speaking before the start of a gathering of leaders from the G20 industrialised nations in Rome, where he will push for countries to arrive in Glasgow with fixed plans to cut emissions, Johnson said the chances of success hung in the balance.
Continue reading...Afghans have Cop26 delegate applications rejected days before event
Five men and one woman who have fled Taliban are given no reason for rejection
Six environmental experts from Afghanistan who were due to attend Cop26 as their country’s delegates to the global conference have had their applications rejected just days before the event begins.
The six – five men and one woman who cannot be named because it could jeopardise their safety – were looking forward to travelling to the event to help make the concerns of Afghans about the climate emergency heard at the summit.
Continue reading...Our climate demands we change the world right now. The good news? We can | Rebecca Solnit
Glasgow has to be a turning point. There is no other option
Nothing and everything and not nearly enough has changed in the six years since the Paris climate summit and agreement. The four players in our climate future – climate chaos, climate activism, climate solutions and climate finance – are still on a playing field filled with floods, flames and false solutions. Two of them are racing away from catastrophe, one is rushing toward it, and the fourth is undecided.
Runaway climate change itself has gotten far worse: we’re seeing chaos and destruction, ice melt and early signs of systemic collapse of ocean currents, ice sheets and much else. Both the climate movement and the practical solutions have gotten far stronger, more ambitious, more capable, more diverse. Climate finance has run in both directions: far too much money is still pumped into the fossil fuel industry, but there have been significant successes getting governments, development banks, and private investors to cut financing and reframe the industry as fundamentally criminal.
Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses
Continue reading...Cop26 will be whitest and most privileged ever, warn campaigners
Thousands from frontline communities in global south have been excluded, activists claim
The global climate summit in Glasgow will be the whitest and most privileged ever, according to campaigners, who warn that thousands of people from frontline communities in the global south have been excluded.
World leaders and delegates are expected to be joined by celebrities, corporate chief executives and royals at the critical two-week event.
an underlying “hostile attitude” from the UK Home Office towards those travelling from countries in the global south, particularly Africa, which has led to many visas being refused;
a failure to honour a pledge to offer Covid vaccines to all delegates, leaving many to search for vaccines in countries with little or no access;
constantly changing Covid restrictions for those entering the UK, with travel banned from countries on the UK’s red list, which, until this month, included many of the countries worst hit by the climate crisis. This has left many to seek costly and complicated routes to Glasgow via third countries;
an accommodation crisis in the city that has made finding a safe place to stay difficult and expensive. Campaigners have set up a “homestay network” to try to link people up with spare rooms, but say they have thousands on their waiting list
Continue reading...UK’s top climate adviser launches scathing attack on Australia on eve of Cop26
Lord Deben says there is ‘no indication’ Scott Morrison has a plan to deliver the net zero commitment ‘we’ve squeezed out of him’
The UK government’s climate change adviser has launched a scathing attack on Australia’s net zero commitment on the eve of critical talks in Glasgow.
Lord Deben, the Climate Change Committee chair, told the BBC on Saturday there was “no indication” that the Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, had a plan to deliver on the commitment to net zero that was “squeezed out of him”.
Continue reading...G20 must say goodbye to fossil fuel and recommit to Paris 1.5C goal | The Secret Negotiator
G20 countries are way off track on delivering on 1.5C. Acknowledging this would be a good start ahead of Cop26
The Glasgow Cop26 talks could fail before the conference even begins. This weekend, just as Cop26 starts, the G20 are meeting in Rome. This is a moment of maximum trepidation, as those 20 developed and emerging economies account for 78% of global greenhouse gas emissions. They meet outside the scrutiny and inclusivity of the UN process in Glasgow. What they agree to, or not, could affirm the Paris agreement goal of limiting global heating to 1.5C, or put it firmly out of reach for ever.
First, the bad news. The G20 communique is a consensus document, a minimum agreement. If one country says no, for example, to specifying a phase-out date for coal, it won’t be in the final communique, so a vaguer formulation may be used.
Every week we’ll hear from negotiators from a developing country that is involved in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiations and will be attending the Cop26 climate conference.
Continue reading...Climate experts warn world leaders 1.5C is ‘real science’, not just talking point
Scientists say keeping temperature rises to 1.5C is vital physical threshold for planet that cannot be negotiated
The 1.5C temperature limit to be discussed by world leaders at critical meetings this weekend is a vital physical threshold for the planet’s climate, and not an arbitrary political construct that can be haggled over, leading climate scientists have warned.
World leaders are meeting in Rome and Glasgow over the next four days to thrash out a common approach aimed at holding global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, the lower of two limits set out in the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
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