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People should confront their family members who read news from “nefarious” sources, suggests the environmentalist Mike Berners-Lee.
“Challenge your friends and family and colleagues who are getting their information from sources that have got nefarious roots or a track record of being careless – or worse – with the truth, because we need to make this sort of thing socially embarrassing to be involved in,” said Berners-Lee, the brother of the World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee.
Speaking at Hay festival on Saturday about his most recent book, A Climate of Truth, the writer encouraged people to ask themselves “really discerning questions” about their basis for trusting the media they consume.
Berners-Lee, 61, said that lack of progress on climate issues comes down to political “deceit”, which he likened to abuse.
If a media personality “is found to have groped someone even once, that’s the end of their career, because we’ve decided collectively that that’s abuse, and it’s disgusting, and we’re not having it”, he said. “If a politician abuses us” by being deceitful, “we need to start screaming about that” too.
Though there have been 29 Cop conferences in the past 30 years, there is “no evidence whatsoever that those Cops have made any difference” to the rising trajectory of the global emissions from fossil fuel use, he said.
“Those 29 Cops have been totally corrupted and destroyed by the very cynical, very well-funded, very calculating, very sophisticated efforts of the fossil fuel industry to make sure those Cops don’t get where they need to get to,” he said.
While energy companies argue they are helping the world meet rising energy needs, Berners-Lee said: “We don’t have rising energy needs, not at the global level.”
Technology is not the obstacle to solving the climate crisis, he said. “We’ve got all the technology we need, for example, for an energy transition and vast improvements to our food system.”
The “simplest mechanic by a mile” for “helping the fossil fuel to stay in the ground” is a carbon price, he suggested.
This creates a revenue stream which can be used for “all kinds of great things” including relieving poverty and supporting “all the technologies that we need”.
He said that humanity’s “time is going to be up” if we carry on business as usual.
“We’ve got all this energy and technology at our fingertips, and we don’t yet have the wisdom and care to be able to wield it,” he said.
“We’re like children running around the playground with machine guns, and we’ve got to put that straight, otherwise we’re going to be in for a very, very, very nasty time, and I don’t think it’s too far away.”
