A NEW world is within our grasp. That’s the message emerging from our special report on the greatest challenge we face in bending the climate curve: rebuilding our energy systems for a cleaner, greener, more sustainable future.
Our current fossil-fuelled system has brought unprecedented prosperity and comfort for billions – and wrought damage on Earth’s climate and support systems the full extent of which we have been all too slow to grasp.
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Bald economic reality dictates the end of the fossil fuel era is coming. Just as coal, oil and gas in their time displaced wood, wind, water and human and animal muscle power, we now have vast, cheap and hugely superior energy sources at our disposal: solar and (once again) wind.
Managing the transition to these energy sources is now not a question of can or can’t, but will or won’t – and whether we do it as expeditiously as our current emergency dictates.
Heatwaves in the western US and Canada, wildfires ripping across Siberia, Turkey and south-east Europe, record-breaking floods carrying away lives and livelihoods in Germany and China – the accumulation of extremes just in the past few weeks leaves no room for doubt that climate change is already here. Our report from the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard gives a foretaste of even more dramatic changes that may be to come.
“Managing the transition to better energy sources is now not about can or can’t, but will or won’t”
So far, action has been pitiful, the influence of those who either don’t recognise the painful reality of the science, or who would rather continue to profit from burning the house down, still all-too evident. The COP26 climate conference this November in the UK is perhaps a last chance to set in train an orderly energy transition that limits global warming to a halfway liveable level and ensures our future prosperity.
That requires solid commitments from richer countries to translate warm climate words into immediate, consequential action to reduce emissions. But it also means finally agreeing the funding package that will allow the lower-income countries of the world to leapfrog fossil fuels to a cleaner future. The way is clear – it’s up to us to find the will.
