Rio+20: Stephen Fry, Robert Redford and others join global Twitter push to end fossil fuel subsidies : Hippyshopper

Ahead of the Rio+20 - the United Nations conference on sustainable development - the push to end fossil fuel subsidies became the second most talked about topic worldwide on Twitter yesterday.

The #endfossilfuelsubsidies hashtag was introduced to the micro-blogging site, which has over 100 million active users, by 350.org, a global climate campaign and it is estimated that the hashtag was tweeted once a second. We certainly saw it show up in our Hippyshopper and personal feeds throughout the day!

Taking part in the campaign were active Tweeters, from politicians and journalists, to high-profile activists and celebrities such as Stephen Fry and Robert Redford.

The EU Commissioner for Climate Action Connie Hedegaard, who is expected to play a key role at the Rio+20 negotiations, tweeted, "Fossil fuels subsidies have no place in today's world. They must be phased out as the G20 pledged. #EndFossilFuelSubsidies #Rioplus20."

According to figures by Oil Change International, countries are combined spending as much as $1 trillion dollars annually on fossil fuel subsidies. That is twelve times as much in subsidies as the world is providing to clean energy, like wind and solar. The International Energy Agency estimates that by cutting these subsides the world can reduce global warming causing emissions by 50%. This will significantly contribute to preventing a 2 degree temperature rise, the number most scientists say is needed to prevent runaway climate change and the destruction on our planet.

As part of the campaign, tweets were projected onto famous landmarks around the world, including London's Marble Arch, St Paul's, Battersea Power Station and the Houses of Parliament.

The current draft of the Rio+20 agreement released on Saturday includes a paragraph on ending fossil fuel subsidies, but negotiations now hang in the balance as oil exporting countries led by Saudi Arabia and Venezuela attempt to delete any references to the proposal.

Follow the Twitterstorm at endfossilfuelsubsidies.org and take part by tweeting #endfossilfuelsubsidies.

All images by Stephen Brown.

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David Hill

Although only a part of the Rio+20 conference, the oceans have the solution to some of our most pressing global problems such as energy generation and food security. But what it cannot do is to change the fixed mindsets of our political masters and world industrialists. Both of these change-masters have different agendas to that of humanity. One lives for controlling power and the other for great wealth for the few (shareholders and themselves).

That is why Rio+20 will fail the world's people in a catastrophic way in the long-term

Over the last 300 years we have built a false and unsustainable world for humanity. Indeed we now live in an artificial world order that can never survive and eventually humankind will cease to live as an intelligent species. Since the term MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) was expressed, our world has been living on borrowed time. Indeed the world is now more than ever dividing itself on the altar of nationalism and self-interest. I give no more than five years for the EC to break up and nations in the West to go their own way. But I also see on the other side of the coin, as Europe and the West disintegrate, that the East and nations like Russia will come ever closer together. This will create a formidable economic block and where a weakened western civilization will be more prone in the future to lead to conflict. History shows that global wars are economic and this will not change in the future. This is not based upon unsound expectations, but the sheer fact that the world’s economic power is transferring eastward and that we shall have around 10 billion humans by 2050, all struggling for natural resources to preserve their way of life. Increasingly what is deteriorating constantly between western nations is communication, cooperation and collaboration but where due to these facts, we should be coming closer together to preserve our planet. Indeed the latest Rio+ 20 Conference decisions by the world’s nations (decisions predominantly made by the richest nations as they own the UN to all intents and purposes) will simply be another nail in the coffin of human sustainability and existence, as nations dilute what was already agreed in 1992.

Pointers to why Rio+20 will fail is because big business will not want to deviate from a global strategy that puts great wealth into the hands of the few (shareholders and main board directors) and poverty into the hands of over 60% of the world’s population. For global concerns consistently act covertly, only think of the bottom-line and at times act totally against humanity's very existence.

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For no longer can we sustain ourselves with the prophesy of wealth for all through globalization and capitalist economics. How this has now been shown to be a sham for over 90% of the seven billion human inhabitants living on planet Earth. Therefore considering where we are heading and the dire consequences for humanity we simply have to start working as one planet as Einstein and others determined, but where our political masters took no heed before. It is also becoming very clear that the price of our present economic systems will eventually be the extinction of the human experience. Are we therefore really as intelligent as we think?

Dr David Hill
Chief Executive
World Innovation Foundation