Thank you Alice Harrison for this beautiful and poignant post. We feel every single word and we are with you.
To the CEOs of Exxon, Shell, BP, TotalEnergies and Chevron, I’ve just drafted a letter to my daughters. They’re three and five now – I want them to open this letter in 2050, when they’ll be 28 and 30. In it I wrote about their love for nature – how we sit together and watch the goldfinches peck at our bird feeder; how my eldest loves swinging from the branches of trees; I remind them of the gladioli we planted that burst into bloom last spring. I also tell them about my choice of career – how I became a climate campaigner because I wanted more than anything to protect this beautiful world of ours against the destruction that humanity has unleashed on it via climate breakdown. I did this as part of the DearTomorrow project. Have you heard of it Darren Woods, Wael Sawan, Murray Auchincloss, Patrick Pouyanné and Mike Wirth? It’s a project that encourages people to write letters to their children, their grandchildren, or other young people in their lives, documenting their feelings about climate change and what they’re doing to tackle it. What would you write in these letters, I wonder? As I wrote mine much of Los Angeles was ablaze. My social feeds are full of terrifying images of flames lapping at people’s windows. My feeds are often full of terrifying images these days – of the carnage of extreme floods, storms and droughts. I’m lucky – I’ve never been hurt by extreme weather. Increasingly it’ll be luck that spares us – any other guarantees are doomed. I know that you all have children. Do you fear for their future? Does this keep you up at night too? I ask because the companies you run have a lot to answer for when it comes to climate breakdown. ExxonMobil, Shell, bp, TotalEnergies and Chevron continue to make tens of billions in profits every year from selling oil, gas and coal - products that account for almost 90% of all carbon dioxide emissions globally. Fossil fuels are cooking the planet and super-charging extreme weather and the sorts of droughts that are making wildfires in Los Angeles and countless other places more frequent and more intense. I’m trying really hard to understand how you can know all of this (the fossil fuel industry has known this for decades) and still show up to work every day. Perhaps if you sat down and wrote a letter to your kids you might feel differently? Maybe give it a try? Photo credit: Ethan Swope/ Associated Press