Article
Climate
Comment
Politics
5 min read

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?

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.

Article
Community
Culture
Nationalism
Politics
5 min read

Nationality can never unite a nation

For countless people, it’s a complicated thing.

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

A montage of two conversation participants side-by-side.
Fraser Nelson and Konstantin Kisin.
Triggernometry.

What does it mean to be English? A debate has broken out on this thorny question, sparked by a conversation between Konstantin Kisin and Fraser Nelson, where Kisin, a British-Russian social commentator suggested Rishi Sunak, as a ‘brown Hindu’, was British but not English, and Nelson (a Scot) said that it was simple – if you’re born and bred in England, you’re English. End of story.  

The video on YouTube got 4 million views. Since then, Suella Braverman has weighed in with her instinct that despite being born and raised in England, she will never be truly English. The debate has generated more heat them light over these past weeks – just read the comments after Nelson-Kisin YouTube video to get the gist.  

Now this is something I've thought about all my life, as it's been a bit of an issue for me.  

I was born in England, have lived most of my life in England, my dad was English, I speak with an English accent, and love it when England beat the Aussies at cricket.  

However, my mum was Irish. She was born and grew up in Limerick, met my dad in Dublin after he had moved to Ireland to train to be a Baptist minister. I never knew my father's family, as his parents had both died before I was born. So, the only family I knew in my childhood were Irish. Family summer holidays were spent in Dublin or most often in County Clare in the wild west of Ireland. Growing up, I felt at home in Bristol where we lived, with my English friends, supporting the mighty Bristol City at Ashton Gate. Yet the place where I felt most secure and rooted, at home in a different way, surrounded by grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and people who had known my family for generations, was Ireland.  

While my dad liked football, and we cheered when England won the World Cup in 1966, my mum was a big rugby supporter. So when it came to the Six Nations (or Five Nations as it was in those days) there was no question of who we followed, driving to Cardiff Arms Park or Twickenham, festooned in green scarves, cheering on the boys in green. I still do support Ireland, rooting for Peter O’Mahony and Caelan Doris as well as players in the team less Irish (at least by descent) than me, like New Zealanders James Lowe and Jamison Gibson-Park, the Australian Finlay Bealham, or the very un-Irish sounding, yet hero of the nation, Bundee Aki.  

Of course, my story is far from unique. The Irish diaspora is everywhere. Irish people for centuries have left Ireland to find jobs, to see the world, or like my mum, following a spouse to different shores. There are loads of us, part-Irish, living in England, caught in our nationality somewhere in the middle of the Irish sea. 

So am I English? Or am I Irish? I have held both passports, long before Brexit. I can sing God Save the Queen and Amhrán na bhFiann. The truth is that I'm a bit of both. Sometimes my Englishness comes to the fore, sometimes my Irishness. I remember being at school in the 1970s during the IRA bombing campaign and getting abuse and graffiti on my school locker for being Irish, then spending holidays in Ireland and being teased for sounding English. Such is the fate of the half-breed.  

So for me, and for countless other people who have a mixed heritage, nationality is a complicated thing.  

When nationality becomes the primary location of a person's reason for being, that's when it can become dangerous. 

There are many different factors involved in a person's national allegiance: where they were born, where they grew up, where their parents or ancestors came from, where they decide to settle later in life. It can also be affected by emotions as varied as gratitude for a welcome received or resentment for rejection. Centuries ago, when people didn't travel much, and most didn't travel far from the place where they and their parents were born, the nation states that emerged in Europe and across the world out of the great empires of earlier times were relatively stable entities and could claim a degree of settled character, and a claim to loyalty. The twentieth century, with two world wars fought largely over nationality and race showed us the dark side of absolute loyalty to country or ethnic origins. 

In today's hyper-mobile world, and especially in the UK, which is a magnet for people all over the world, there are probably very few people with simple, pure national heritage. Most of us have some migrant blood in our veins, stemming from some ancestors who moved from their home at some point in the past, seeking a better, or a different life elsewhere.  

Being nationalistic or patriotic by supporting a sports team, learning a language, or being proud of one's origins is a good thing. Life would be a lot poorer without the possibility of rooting for your national team, taking pride in your national culture or history, feeling rooted in a particular place on this good earth. We were made to put down roots in a place, to care for it and take pride in it.  

Yet nationality is too fluid and imprecise a concept to provide a firm sense of identity. When it becomes the primary location of a person's reason for being, that's when it can become dangerous. That's when we begin to fight wars over national sovereignty, identity and superiority.  

Nationality can never become a strong enough centre to unite a people. It’s why the debate on ‘British values’ never quite lands. Even if we could decide what they are, is the implication that they are better than other values? And if they are does that give us the right to feel superior to other nations who don’t share them? And even if we could identify them, I imagine the French, the Germans or the Swedes would probably recognise a lot of them and claim them as their own.  

To have a firm sense of identity, a centre around which to gather, requires a stronger and more unshakable foundation. I may be part English, part Irish, but I am wholly a child of God. Even more deeply rooted than my Irish mother and English father, the place of my birth or my family roots, lies my identity as someone whose true origin comes not from them but from the God who made me, continues to love me, and will hold me until my dying day and beyond. And unlike national identity, this identity can be true of anyone, therefore it’s not something I can ever use as a badge of superiority over anyone else.  

That is who I am. Nothing can disturb or change it. And only something like that – something unshakable, independent of our changeable feelings and shifting allegiances can provide a firm basis for belonging and cohesion.  

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