THE CARBON WAR

Lies, organised crime, and doomed policy resets 279
in the renewables sector whose view deviates much from derision. The whole
spectacle has descended beyond farce.
But all this unpleasant politics I must eschew tonight, for fear of antagonising
the Conservatives in the congregation.
In my upbeat proposition that the global energy transition is underway,
unfolding right in front of us, I do risk a reference to the Pope. His call for
action on climate change has shifted US views, I recount. A survey just completed
shows that after after Pope Francis’s visit to Washington, the number
of Catholics “very worried” about climate change has doubled. The Protestant
vicar, sitting in the audience, lifts his thumbs, turns to his parishioners, and
memorably announces that he thoroughly approves.
I quickly add that the Church of England is playing a solid game as well.
Gothenburg, 19 th & 20 th November 2015
The City of Gothenburg presents me with one of its Sustainable Development
Awards. City officials hope such awards will one day come to be recognised as
the green equivalent of the Nobel Prize. It is a wonderful occasion, but quite
surreally uncomfortable for me at the same time. I won the award for my solar
work with SolarAid and Solarcentury, yet previous winners include Al Gore,
Kofi Annan, Gro Harlem Brundtland, and Paul Polman. I can’t stop wondering
how they could justify an award to me, in that company, when Solarcentury
is a middleweight solar company, not a rock-star heavyweight, and SolarAid
may have catalysed the first two African solar lighting markets, but is very
much unfinished business. Solarcentury is in fair health – fingers crossed –
notwithstanding the UK government’s wrecking assault on solar and much
else low-carbon in order to make room for shale and nuclear. We are genuinely
international now. But SolarAid remains in a highly vulnerable position, with
an ebb and flow of encouraging news and bad news. There is no rule that says
it is easy helping the poor, it seems.
Brussels, 23 rd November 2015
On a Eurostar to Belgium, I catch up on my backlog. The storm that is breaking
on the fossil fuel industries immediately before Paris is not yet what users of
metaphor would call a perfect one. The US shale story is still widely viewed as