20 Pledges for 2020: Why we’re blogging about adopting more climate-friendly ways to live

How much can any one of us do to make a difference in the climate crisis? We all know the fatalistic logic: the real power lies with the governments of countries such as China, or with the banks that fund the oil industry. What can you or I really achieve with our reusable coffee cups and vegan sausage rolls, other than occupying a rather smug patch of moral high ground, or worse still, creating a comforting illusion that masks the real problem?

But there is another point of view. If we take the climate crisis seriously, how can we not want to try, even in some small way, to be part of the solution? Can we really expect the countries and companies that produce the most carbon to change if we don’t show willing to make some small sacrifice in our own lives? And if we all do something, won’t governments and corporations be encouraged to reflect the wishes of the people, even if they are motivated just by winning our votes and taking our money?

I’ve sensed this urge to do something while speaking to colleagues recently. And it’s the desire to contribute that has prompted us to create this series of blogs, under the banner “20 Pledges for 2020”. It started on the Lifestyle desk. Did I know, asked one of our staff, that our deputy travel editor was going flight-free for a year? For someone who must receive more invitations for all-expenses-paid trips to the sun than anyone I can name, this was no casual commitment. Then I heard there was a colleague who’s going vegan, and another determined to switch to an electric car. And so the list went on.

We’re not immune to the bigger challenges and responsibilities of the media. During our recent coverage of the UK general election, we set out to make climate the most important theme for our coverage. Looking back, we led our site and our Daily Edition app on climate issues more than any other major British publisher over the same period – no small achievement – but I can’t say we managed to make it our number-one subject; it was perhaps inevitable that the NHS and Brexit dominated the political agenda even on our pages. So one of the blogs you’ll see starting over the next few weeks will be from our politics team, pledging to hold politicians to account over the climate.

As for me, I’ll be blogging about how The Independent can use its reach and influence to help fight the climate crisis. This was a challenge set for me directly by our environment columnist Donnachadh McCarthy, who is also part of the media team of Extinction Rebellion. I had always been confident that The Independent was not part of the problem. I’m proud to have worked here at the time when Michael McCarthy, our former environment editor, and the late Steve Connor, our science editor, helped to blaze a trail with their reporting and analysis. The natural world was not always such a fashionable cause back then, but you knew they were on to something from the level of pushback we received – even if sometimes it was impossible not to chuckle along.

In one episode of Armando Iannucci’s brilliant political satire The Thick of It, the fictional night editor of the Daily Mail, exhausted by constant changes to a political story, erupts: “Just tell me what the news is and I’ll put it on the front page. It’s not like we’re The Independent, we can’t just stick a headline saying ‘Cruelty’ and then stick a picture of a dolphin or a whale underneath it. I mean, that’s just cheating, that’s rubbish.” (With apologies to real fans, I’ve filtered out the fruitier adjectives.) It’s amazing to think how recently such large parts of the media were sceptical towards “climate zealots”, and still are.

But Donnachadh put a challenge to me a few months ago: when you look at the Indy, is it really clear that we’re living through a crisis? Couldn’t we be doing more? He was right, of course, and we will do more, so I’ll be blogging to keep you up to date with the changes we’re making.

There are three phases to climate journalism as far as I can see. First, journalists had a job to do to convince sceptics that the science is right: mankind’s use of fossil fuels is heating our planet. Then there was the second phase: how fast was the world warming, can we limit the rise to 1.5 degrees, 3 degrees, or more? That’s still a crucial debate, and a subject we will continue to track. But the 20 Pledges blogs belong to a third phase: what exactly are we going to do about it – from government policy, financial regulation and international treaties to our own compromises and choices?

Before someone helpfully points out the obvious, I realise that none of us writing these blogs is perfect. I’ll start by holding my hand up: for one thing, I fly from our London office to see our US-based staff, just as our reporters often take flights to report on stories around the world, so I’ll be writing more about that in a future blog post.

But this project is not about pretending to be perfect, or virtue-signalling, or being diabolically hypocritical, and we certainly aren’t setting out to preach (there’s enough climate puritanism online already). If, or when, we slip up along the way – when the trip to review a new hotel is too tempting, if the smell of a bacon sandwich catches us at a moment of weakness – we’ll write about those times too. So what are we hoping for? We hope it gives us a richer perspective on some of the more important climate stories we cover in 2020, and that by sharing our own experiences we might encourage others to share theirs too. We’ll try to use our voice to encourage change from governments too.

You may want to make a pledge yourself and write a blog through the year about it with us, in which case please do get in touch. You can email all of us writing these blogs at 20pledges@independent.co.uk, and you’ll find all the blogs, running through the year, appearing at www.independent.co.uk/news/20-pledges.

Your pledge may not exactly change the world by itself, but if you share your story, you never know whose mind you might change along the way.