A 10 Year Window of Hope and Power
Excerpt from the Durham Energy Manifesto
The Durham Energy Manifesto is a beautiful document prepared by volunteer members of the Durham Energy Council – regular folk from across Durham who have come together to learn about and shape our energy futures. This excerpt of the Manifesto was written by Threads Director, Adam, following discussions with the Durham Energy Councillors.
An early draft of the Durham Energy Manifesto
A 10 year window of hope and power
We happen to live during what may be the most important 10 years of human history.
And you, dear reader, may be one of the most powerful people who will ever live.
Let me explain why.
In 2026 there is no sensible debate, at all, on the existence and urgency of climate change. This just isn’t a controversial thing to say anymore. We have reached the point where our bodies can tell us what scientists have for decades.
What does David Attenborough have in common with Shell, Chevron, The UK Trades Union Congress, The National Trust, the Church of England, the UK and Chinese governments (among many others)?
All have publicly stated that climate change is real, human driven, and very, very serious. Much of this discussion (but for Sir David) lags decades behind the advice of scientists.
Our species burns huge quantities of fossilised stuff that has been under the ground and seas for hundreds of millions of years. At the same time we cut down unimaginably massive chunks of forest and jungle all over the world every day. We are deliberately filling the atmosphere with gases that catch the heat of the sun.
We have built a greenhouse, and it’s getting hotter. And the hotter it gets, the more people and life will die. This will happen in lots of different ways, but those ways include crops failing, oceans dying, and crazy weather events the like of which no one alive today has seen.
We have built a greenhouse, and it’s getting hotter. And here is a crucial idea: when you switch off the heat, it takes many decades for things to stop warming. Much of the warming our world is heading to is already ‘baked in’. Our descendants will inherit from us a changed, difficult world. This cannot be undone. It is scientific fact, not up for debate.
This is how you are powerful. More powerful than any generation who came before or will come after: there is scientific consensus that we have a window of hope and power fewer than 10 years wide. In that window the new systems we set in motion will determine the level of damage we pass to all future humans. Anything done outside that window has diminishing returns.
You cannot catch up on a slow start in this race.
This means that the action you take right now determines how liveable a world will be inherited by every human to come after you. It took us just a couple of hundred years to gouge up and burn enough material to release trillions of tonnes of greenhouse gases into our atmosphere – it’ll be the work of hundreds of generations to mitigate that damage. But none of them will have the opportunity that our generation has – that you have.
We live in a 10 year window of hope and power.
What will you do with it?
