The Guardian, the London daily that has risen from a respected but fringe player on the British political scene to a major transatlantic voice of liberal thought, did something notable and gutsy a few weeks ago, and just about nobody on this side of the ocean paid any attention.
Flanked by stories and commentaries, Alan Rusbridger, the editor credited with leading the Guardian’s rise, announced March 6 that his organization was launching a campaign intended to head off the climate catastrophe that the scientific consensus has concluded is unavoidable without deep changes in public policy and industrial practice.
The Guardian’s objective is to slow the production of fossil fuels by pressing to halt the exploitation of new energy reserves. The world has much more coal, oil and gas in the earth than it can safely burn. “Leave it in the ground,” is the rallying cry.
The immediate goal is to encourage investors to dump their holdings in fossil fuel-based companies, on grounds that pulling money out would slow the use of suicidal fuels and goad the energy giants into investing in environmentally palatable power sources. As a first step, the Guardian would lead a drive to persuade two immensely rich—and by reputation, socially responsible—foundations, UK’s Wellcome and the U.S.-based Gates, to unload the $1.5-plus billion worth of energy shares they own.
The Guardian was allying with an organization called 350.org, associated with the influential U.S. environmentalist Bill McKibben. It takes its name from the prediction that unless the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is cut from its current 400 parts per million (ppm) to 350, we’re all in very big trouble.
In a personal note, Rusbridger explained that as he looked back on his two decades as The Guardian’s editorial chief—he retires this summer—his greatest regret was “that we had not done justice to this huge, overshadowing, overwhelming issue of how climate change will probably, within the lifetime of our children, cause untold havoc and stress to our species.”
Now I’m a big fan of the Guardian, and I’ve watched its ascent under Rusbridger with admiration. It stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the world’s top news organizations in the Wikileaks stories and in the publication of the Edward Snowden leaks, for which it shared a Pulitzer, and I applauded.
And I was moved by Rusbridger’s epiphany that, for all the fights he’s fought and won, none will matter 20 or 30 years from now if climate science is right, and we have lost it all.
So I don’t wonder why Rusbridger took this move, but I do wonder why it has gone unnoticed. I’ve poked around online and can find almost no mention of this campaign—to which The Guardian devoted lavish space, solid reporting, and gorgeous graphics—in the U.S. media. It’s as if, to borrow an English image, the quirky matriarch had now become the batty old aunt in the attic. Continue reading “British daily’s campaign to prevent climate change raises bold questions about role of press advocacy”
