
The Guardian became the first major international newspaper to put an outright ban on accepting money from the fossil fuel industry, citing the industry's "decades-long effort" to subvert, undermine and prevent action to stop the climate crisis, according to The Hill.
The move was announced on Wednesday and went into effect immediately. It is the latest step in the Guardian Media Group's effort to reduce its carbon footprint, according to The Guardian. The Guardian has pledged to get its emissions down to net zero by 2030.
The new policy extends to all its publications, including the newspaper's British edition digital versions in the U.S. and Australia, print editions of The Observer and The Guardian Weekly, and The Guardian's digital apps, as The Hill reported.
"Our decision is based on the decades-long efforts by many in that industry to prevent meaningful climate action by governments around the world," said Anna Bateson, the acting chief executive, and Hamish Nicklin, the chief revenue officer, in a statement on Wednesday.
The Guardian has some of the most robust and comprehensive policies regarding the climate crisis in the newspaper industry. It was one of the first to challenge the nebulous term "climate change" and replace it with language that expresses the urgency of the topic: "climate crisis" and "climate urgency."
"We need to tackle it now, and every day matters," Katharine Viner, the editor in chief, said when the policy on their language became official, as The New York Times reported.
To date, only a handful of small newspapers have stopped accepting money from the fossil fuel industry. The Guardian's move may force other large papers to rethink its revenue stream and activists have used the announcement to gather momentum to petition other news sources to stop from taking fossil fuel money.
The group 350.org, which asks for divestment from fossil fuels, has started an online petition to ask Reuters to follow The Guardian. It asks people who sign their petition to tweet out:
"Call on @Reuters to drop all fossil fuel advertising, following the @guardian's groundbreaking announcement! Sign the petition now:"
Environmental groups have argued that fossil fuel companies "green wash" their activities through expensive advertising campaigns that highlight their fairly small investments in renewable energies, according to The Guardian.
"For too long fossil fuel giants like BP and Shell, who are causing our climate emergency, have been able to get away with green wash advertising while investing 97 percent of their business in oil and gas," said Mel Evans, a senior climate campaigner for Greenpeace UK, in a statement, as The New York Times reported. "Oil and gas firms now find themselves alongside tobacco companies as businesses that threaten the health and well-being of everyone on this planet."
Greenpeace had petitioned for an end to advertising in the media by oil companies. The activist group said other media, arts and sports organizations should follow suit.
Advertising makes up 40 percent of the Guardian Media Group's revenue. The fossil fuel industry's contribution to that is about $655,000. BP, Shell, Chevron, Exxon Mobil and Total spent about $4.9 million on print advertising in Britain in 2019, according to Nielsen AdIntel, as The New York Times reported.
"It's true that rejecting some adverts might make our lives a tiny bit tougher in the very short term," the company said, as The Hill reported. "Nonetheless, we believe building a more purposeful organization and remaining financially sustainable have to go hand in hand."
The statement also added an optimistic note that some companies will be drawn to advertise with The Guardian because of their policy.
"We believe many brands will agree with our stance, and might be persuaded to choose to work with us more as a result. The future of advertising lies in building trust with consumers, and demonstrating a real commitment to values and purpose," as The Guardian reported.
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By Peter Giger
The speed and scale of the response to COVID-19 by governments, businesses and individuals seems to provide hope that we can react to the climate change crisis in a similarly decisive manner - but history tells us that humans do not react to slow-moving and distant threats.
A Game of Jenga
<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
<p>As well as devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world, melting polar ice could set off another tipping point: a disablement to the AMOC.</p><p>This circulation system drives a northward flow of warm, salty water on the upper layers of the ocean from the tropics to the northeast Atlantic region, and a southward flow of cold water deep in the ocean.</p><p>The ocean conveyor belt has a major effect on the climate, seasonal cycles and temperature in western and northern Europe. It means the region is warmer than other areas of similar latitude.</p><p>But melting ice from the Greenland ice sheet could threaten the AMOC system. It would dilute the salty sea water in the north Atlantic, making the water lighter and less able or unable to sink. This would slow the engine that drives this ocean circulation.</p><p><a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/atlantic-conveyor-belt-has-slowed-15-per-cent-since-mid-twentieth-century" target="_blank">Recent research</a> suggests the AMOC has already weakened by around 15% since the middle of the 20th century. If this continues, it could have a major impact on the climate of the northern hemisphere, but particularly Europe. It may even lead to the <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/39731?show=full" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cessation of arable farming</a> in the UK, for instance.</p><p>It may also reduce rainfall over the Amazon basin, impact the monsoon systems in Asia and, by bringing warm waters into the Southern Ocean, further destabilize ice in Antarctica and accelerate global sea level rise.</p>The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation has a major effect on the climate. Praetorius (2018)
Is it Time to Declare a Climate Emergency?
<p>At what stage, and at what rise in global temperatures, will these tipping points be reached? No one is entirely sure. It may take centuries, millennia or it could be imminent.</p><p>But as COVID-19 taught us, we need to prepare for the expected. We were aware of the risk of a pandemic. We also knew that we were not sufficiently prepared. But we didn't act in a meaningful manner. Thankfully, we have been able to fast-track the production of vaccines to combat COVID-19. But there is no vaccine for climate change once we have passed these tipping points.</p><p><a href="https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021" target="_blank">We need to act now on our climate</a>. Act like these tipping points are imminent. And stop thinking of climate change as a slow-moving, long-term threat that enables us to kick the problem down the road and let future generations deal with it. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and fulfill our commitments to the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paris Agreement</a>, and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.</p><p>We need to plan now to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but we also need to plan for the impacts, such as the ability to feed everyone on the planet, develop plans to manage flood risk, as well as manage the social and geopolitical impacts of human migrations that will be a consequence of fight or flight decisions.</p><p>Breaching these tipping points would be cataclysmic and potentially far more devastating than COVID-19. Some may not enjoy hearing these messages, or consider them to be in the realm of science fiction. But if it injects a sense of urgency to make us respond to climate change like we have done to the pandemic, then we must talk more about what has happened before and will happen again.</p><p>Otherwise we will continue playing Jenga with our planet. And ultimately, there will only be one loser – us.</p>By John R. Platt
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