Climate meets politics at UN summits, so who will save us?

It's that time of year when commitments to change are sought. Is there a different way to power the energy transition?

Julia Kendal

Juila is a writer and social justice advocate.

A fallen statute with tyre tracks over it lies on the steps to a government building, in a form of protest.

Climate protest, Berlin.

Nico Roicke on Unsplash.

We’re coming up to a tipping point: the autumn equinox, when the balance of light and dark shifts. For some, this season change still carries the possibility of September – new term, fresh notebook; for others, myself included, there’s more a feeling of ‘here we go again’ with the nights closing in and the hurtle to the end of another year.

On the global scale, it also kicks off the pattern of international summits and negotiations to drive progress on making this world, our world, a bit fairer, safer, and more hopeful. World leaders gather in New York for the United Nations (UN) General Assembly; then it won’t be long until the next UN Climate Summit (COP29) in Baku, swiftly followed by discussions in Busan to create a new UN Treaty to end plastic pollution. Perhaps that draws another sigh; here we go again.

But there’s something new this time on the agenda in New York: the UN’s Summit of the Future on 22-23 September. It is being touted as a ‘once-in-a-generation’ opportunity to forge a better way forward. Will this be the moment that saves not just us, but future generations and the natural world too?

A few years ago, I was involved in organising an event that brought together experts in sustainable development from science, government and civil society. To get the conversation going, we wrote this question on a flipchart: What will save us over the next decade? We asked people to cast their vote with a sticker, giving them just three options: government; society; technology.

As people gathered around, we noticed a general pattern emerging:

the scientists voted for government
the civil servants voted for society
people from civil society voted for technology

There seemed to be subtext to all this:

‘Who will save us?

Not me.’

I wonder if in that moment, the people voting – knowledgeable and connected, experts in their industries – were feeling the limits of their power.

When we brush up against our own limitations, it can be tempting to look elsewhere for reassurance. I find hope in a too-little-known story of change, a kind of David and Goliath story , that cuts across government, society and technology. A story that has seen leaders held to account, voices heard and literally billions of dollars shifted out of fossil fuels and into clean energy.

It might seem distant from our day to day lives, such wrangling over exact punctuation at global summits. But these commitments can have long-lasting influence.

People said it was impossible, because no one had ever done it before. For decades, the UK and other wealthy nations provided billions in taxpayers’ money for fossil fuel projects in other countries around the world. People’s taxes were spent on a gas plant in Mozambique, oil fields in Brazil, thereby fuelling the climate crisis and risking locking low-income countries into using fossil fuels for decades to come instead of investing in the clean energy transition.

This is a transition that has begun. In most places around the world, solar and wind are cheaper and more easily accessible than oil, gas or coal. Power is transformational; it fuels homes, schools and hospitals, it unlocks jobs, education and healthcare. And it’s getting to the point where there’s little reason it can’t be renewable.

With the technology getting there, it became time for the political will to shift too. So, a few years ago, a small group of campaigners came together to push for an end to this funding in the UK. They built relationships with MPs and civil servants, they got the media interested in this fairly niche issue, and they worked with the communities affected by UK-funded projects, coming with a straight-forward message that got to the heart of the injustice: stop funding fossil fuels overseas.

And it worked. In December 2020, the UK announced an end to all taxpayer support for overseas fossil fuel projects, the first high-income country to do this. But not the last. In the run up to the 2021 UN Climate Summit, campaigners and civil servants worked to get 38 more countries and large banks to make the same commitment to end funding for fossil fuels and shift it into renewable energy projects. With Norway and Australia joining at COP28 last year, that group now numbers 41, and represents over $28 billion a year that could be shifted from fossil fuels and into clean energy.

It’s not been plain sailing, and it’s not fully in the bag. For a few years, I got work alongside the incredible advocates at the frontline of this work. A few weeks ago, some of them published a new report which found good progress on the fossil fuels part of the pledge but much more work needed from governments on getting that money into the renewable energy projects that could be transformative for the 685 million people who currently don’t have access to electricity.

This story reminds me that ‘saving us’ isn’t a once and done thing. It’s bigger than that; something to be lived out, imperfectly, with others, over the years.

One of the hot topics at the Summit for the Future, is whether the leaders can agree to transition away from fossil fuels in a new ‘Pact for the Future’, echoing language that was fought for, weakened, then mostly put back into the final commitment made at COP28 last year. (This counts as a high stakes drama in the climate policy world). It might seem distant from our day to day lives, such wrangling over exact punctuation at global summits. But these commitments can have long-lasting influence. For nearly 80 years, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been protecting people – or showing the gap when their rights are being violated.

And really, this isn’t just about words, it’s about power.

Part of the problem with our question on that flipchart was that it divorced people and opportunities, rather than bringing them together. The best way of driving change is to build collective power, holding each other and our decision-makers to account.

Perhaps thinking of the future brings more fear than hope. But this story reminds me that ‘saving us’ isn’t a once and done thing. It’s bigger than that; something to be lived out, imperfectly, with others, over the years. And lived out with God. This is a partnership that he invites us into: to join in his work of seeing a world full of potential being nurtured and restored. We might not see the whole change we hope for, but sometimes we’ll get to see the scales tip.

The energy transition has begun – but it’ll take the collective influence of a movement of people to ensure that it’s fast, fair and serves those who need it most. With a big gap remaining between the finance needed and the finance pledged, all eyes are on this year's COP29 in Baku to see tangible progress.

Here we go again.

Snippet

America

Comment

28 November 2024

3 min read

America: two nations under God?

Red, blue, and rarely purple.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

a tattered American flag flies against a blue sky.

Mario Sessions on Unsplash.

I've just come back from the USA. A few days on the east coast was a chance to take the temperature of America after its recent election, a brief impressionistic sense from conversations, reading the runes – and the blogs. In short, I had heard much about the divided state of America. I didn’t realise quite how divided it was.

America has always made a great deal of unity. The vision for the USA imagined immigrants from different nations across the world invited to forge a new life in a new continent, leaving behind the divisions of the old world. It was the coming together of varied States across the vast continent into one Union. The language is everywhere. Most cities have a ‘Union Square’, Street or Turnpike. The chosen name itself was the United States of America. The slogan E pluribus unum – “out of many, one” was first featured on the original 1776 design of the Great Seal of the United States and formally adopted by the U.S. Congress as the nation's official motto in 1782. The American civil war of the nineteenth century was such a trauma for the nation precisely because it threatened that union. “One nation under God” says the pledge of allegiance, recited by every American child. Yet today it feels that a more realistic description would be two nations under God. The Disunited States of America.

The split is pretty even. 73.7m people voted Democrat. 76.4m voted Republican. That itself is no great cause for alarm. What does cause alarm is the utter divide between the two groups. New York, for example. is pretty solidly Democrat. Someone who voted Trump told me they would never admit to it publicly because of the public shame it would bring. The same is true in the red states. To admit you voted Democrat in some Southern Baptist churches in Texas would be to invite social ostracism. Many Evangelical pastors who have their doubts about Trump have to keep quiet otherwise they would lose the support of their congregations and quite possibly their jobs. As a result, the only Evangelicals that tend to criticise Trump will be academics or journalists who have little to lose.

As a taxi driver joked, if a young Democrat goes out on a date with someone they've met on Tinder, and discover their partner voted Republican, there is unlikely to be a second date. A Christian visitor centre in Washington DC tells me that they are looking forward to Trump being President again, because the flow of evangelical Republicans visiting the capital dried up during the past four years as they felt it was Biden’s town. It’s well known that nearly 80 per cent of white Evangelicals voted for Donald Trump. Such families were more likely to come to DC to see the seat of government if they knew ‘their guy’ was in the White House.

It seems that in the current version of the USA, who you voted for is the number one identity marker. And the two groups rarely talk. In New York I preached in an Episcopal church. The Bible readings for the day spoke of ‘wars and rumours of wars’ – ‘everything will be thrown down’ – apocalyptic texts that invited me to talk about the election in the light of Jesus. Beforehand I asked the Rector what the voting pattern of the church was. “It’s genuinely purple” he said – “a mix of red and blue, Republican and Democrat, Trump and Harris. At least here they do talk to each other.” That seemed a rare thing in this deeply divided country.

Jesus once said: “Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and every city or household divided against itself will not stand.” Trump may well fix the economy and illegal immigration. Yet such deep division, especially in a nation whose identity rests of unity is perhaps a more existential threat.