Five hopeful signs global energy is getting cleaner

Earth's population is only growing. Can we rein in energy usage and greenhouse emissions while supporting more and more people?

2. City of Light

Osama Faisal/AP/File
United Nations Convention on Climate Change Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres addresses the opening of the high-level segment of the annual U.N. climate talks involving environment ministers and climate officials from nearly 200 countries, in Doha, Qatar, in 2012.

Climate change is a global challenge that requires global solutions, and many hope that international talks in Paris this December could foster global collaboration toward reining in greenhouse-gas emissions.

“[T]oday we have 500 laws in 60 countries covering 80 percent of global emissions [and] over 200 cities actually taking action on climate change,” Christiana Figueres, the UN climate chief, said in an interview with the Monitor last year. “That doesn’t happen just coincidentally. No country can solve this individually.”

For its part, the US has promised to cut its emissions 26 to 28 percent from 2005 levels by 2025. President Obama is counting on the fact that an ambitious US target will prod other major polluters like India and China to post equally bold targets.

2 of 5

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.