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.

Review

Books

Culture

4 April 2024

4 min read

Remembering red on red

The cultural revolution's factions have a disconcertingly contemporary feel.

Simon Burton-Jones

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

A Chinese stamp depicts a map of the country from which people march holding a little red book

Long Live the Overall Victory of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, stamp, 1968.

Public domain, via Wikimedia.

Modern era China has suffered human loss on an unimaginable scale. The Taiping Rebellion in the mid-nineteenth century cost over 20 million lives, more or less the global total from the Great War of 1914-18. The vicious Japanese occupation in the 1930s led to 15 million Chinese deaths. The famine begun in 1958, precipitated by the Great Leap Forward, caused around 40 million deaths.

For one nation, however large, these are appalling losses. By contrast, the fatalities in the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) amounted to one million or more. But the impact of this communist insurgency within a communist state is profoundly felt today, for its generation is still alive. The trauma of those years has wounded the bodies and minds of millions; people who are unsure how to come to terms with it because of the uncertainty of what can be safely talked about.

Mao’s incitement to younger people to turn on their teachers and elders in vitriolic criticism and violent attack, including torture and murder, was an attempt to re-boot the revolution by exterminating elements of western capitalism and traditional Chinese authority – the so-called Four Olds of ideas, culture, customs and habits. The humiliation of teachers and parents was profoundly at odds with the Confucian culture of respect for elders, and it was embedded in young minds whose frontal lobes had not fully developed and where empathy was unformed. The ensuing violence, pain and hardship was sickening, encompassing millions.

Many of the bereaved and injured, the perpetrators and the victims, are still alive. Some bury their memories as a way of coping; others search for meaning, but run up against an authoritarian government with new digital tools that make totalitarianism possible. In her book Red Memory (Faber and Faber, 2024), Tania Branigan has produced a masterpiece of literature. Interviewing survivors, bystanders and instigators of the violence, she has produced a history of their guilt and trauma, while reflecting on the uses of memory.

The collateral from this is human rights abuses on an industrial scale, to ensure there is no opposition to the CCP as the true expression of being Chinese.

The word remember is coded with meaning. When we piece together our memories of the past, we re-member them and the members are frequently not put back together again in the way an event happened. This becomes more pronounced with the passage of time and the known tendency for people to make themselves more central to a story than they were at the time. We also narrate the past in ways that burnish our reputation and preserve our conscience. The Cultural Revolution has been reassembled in fragments; there is, and there will be, no initiative like South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. People can make of it what they want; but without justice, the losses fester.

The lack of a shared public memory also means the Cultural Revolution can be made to service any goal. Detached from the moorings of truth, it becomes a malleable symbol. Xi Jinping suffered himself. His father was purged, denounced as a counter-revolutionary, and sent to hard work in rural Shaanxi Province. This is his creation myth, and how it made a man out of him. But there are other lessons to be taken from that time which he has strategically and wilfully ignored. The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) who followed Mao were determined that never again would one man develop a cult of personality like his, by ensuring limited presidential terms. Xi Jinping has abolished this limit and introduced Xi Jinping Thought in an echo of Mao’s Little Red Book. If there is one thing Xi has taken from his experience, it is the terror that chaos unleashes and the need to avoid it at all costs. The collateral from this is human rights abuses on an industrial scale, to ensure there is no opposition to the CCP as the true expression of being Chinese.

Idolatry is much harder to identify in our own culture, yet it is here we need to do this work

The cult of Mao was idolatrous, usurping Christ. Jesus said he would divide families: ‘father against son…mother against daughter…mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law’. This divisiveness was located in his claim to be the way, the truth and the life. He did not seek to divide families, but knew his claims would do so. Mao intentionally turned families against themselves - the foundation of a civil society - to ensure loyalty to him would not be compromised.

It is easy to identify this several decades on and at the safe distance of several thousand miles. Idolatry is much harder to identify in our own culture, yet it is here we need to do this work. It is also sloppy to make links between the ideological fervour and purity of Maoism and today’s social media culture. There is no direct link, despite some claims. But the story of how groups coalesce righteously and are manipulated into ever more extreme forms of factional purity has a disconcertingly contemporary feel.