Year 2024 is history’s tipping point for climate change

David Callaway, The Independent

In the history of the fight to stop global warming, 2024 will go down on this list as the year the Earth reached a climate tipping point, and mankind’s efforts to mitigate it either advanced — or surrendered.

The Independent has chosen this year to salute those efforts of the people who are leading the way in the fight to save our planet. Our Climate 100 List, and a subsequent event in September during New York’s climate week, will honour those advocates, academics, celebrities, politicians, and tech entrepreneurs making a difference.

On the plus side, we’ve made huge strides in the past decade. Renewable energy is surging around the world in the form of solar, wind and battery power, and work on new technologies, such as nuclear fusion and carbon removal, continues apace.

The International Energy Agency said in its 2024 world energy report that clean energy investment will top $2 trillion (£1.5 trillion) for the first time this year, more than double that of oil and gas investment. That includes $370 billion in the European Union, $300 billion in the US, and $680 billion in China. Of that investment, the vast majority is in solar power, followed by wind power, battery power, and money spent to upgrade ageing electric grids.

The negative side is that time is running out. Unprecedented heat is baking large parts of India and Europe this summer, while in the US, city infrastructures and electric grids are buckling from New York to Houston under heat, floods and storms. Jakarta is sinking. Canada and California are burning as hundreds of wildfires rage.

Most ominously, our political leaders are moving in the wrong direction, as saving the planet descends — like so many other topics — into the cultural mud fight between left and right.

The European Union has been the world’s leading political force in taking bold climate action, but the European Parliament election results earlier this year indicated that priorities were changing as energy security in the age of Russia and Ukraine overtook efforts to reduce oil and gas development.

In the US, the presidential election race has been thrown into chaos with Joe Biden’s withdrawal over the weekend. But if vice-president Kamala Harris is the Democratic nominee, as expected, she will maintain Biden’s clean technology efforts of the last four years. By contrast, former president Donald Trump’s rousing “drill baby, drill” message to oil companies sends a green light to fossil fuel conglomerates that the age of oil and gas will continue under his administration.

The wildcard at the political climate table might be the new Labour government. Keir Starmer has pledged to reverse Tory inaction on climate, restart onshore wind power, freeze North Sea oil licences, and create a state-owned Great British Energy group, based in Scotland and dedicated to investing in clean energy projects across the UK. The intention should be applauded even if it eventually might collapse into the underfunded and ill-managed sinkhole of grand Downing Street campaigns.

None of this will be enough to stop the relentless tsunami of global warming, which some scientists say is slowing the very rotation of the earth by melting polar ice. Each time a disaster happens, it throws up a previously unheard-of scenario.

Turning our backs or ignoring it won’t stop it. That’s why The Independent wants to single out — with the help of its readers — the heroes who are at the forefront of our efforts to find the political will and scientific innovation to respond.

Momentous dates only become that way in hindsight. How will we remember 2024? It’s up to us to make sure it goes down in history as the year the world finally started to act to save our planet.