Gideon Coolin on the lack of originality of celebrity environmentalists and the Earthshot prize.
From the point that The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge left their car, an electric Audi rather than their usual Range Rover, and stepped onto the red carpet wearing clothes “recycled” from when they were last worn ten years ago, it was clear that the “Earthshot Prize” was an intellectually vapid vanity project. However, the haut en bas exuding from the roster of A-list attendees – from KSI to Dermot O’Leary – who, we are reminded, nobly didn’t take internal flights to the awards ceremony in London, is evermore grating when considering the actual recipients of the awards.
The most revealing recipient of the six prizes on offer, each consisting of £1million partly funded by the UAE’s state-owned shipping logistics firm, and advice from leading environmentalist luminaries such as Mike Bloomberg; financial firm Deloitte; and supermarket multinational Walmart, is a coral reef restoration project in The Bahamas.
In a 2021 report on Global Climate Risk by NGO reliefweb, The Bahamas ranked as the third-most affected country by climate change. Extreme weather events in The Bahamas – particularly the devastating Hurricane Dorian – killed 14.7 people per 100,000 and caused economic damage equivalent to nearly a third of GDP in 2019. In recent years, The Bahamian government – in concert with other Small Island Developing States – has adopted the mantra “1.5 to stay alive”, referring to their unique vulnerability to the effects of 1.5 degrees of warming above pre-industrial global temperature levels. The threat of rising temperatures, along with the sea level increases and extreme weather events they bring, is existential to The Bahamas.
Therefore, it is against this backdrop that mind-bogglingly an Earthshot Prize was awarded not to aid the development of levees, sea defences and extreme weather-resilient infrastructure to protect Bahamian lives against the intensifications in the climate crisis that are already “baked in” by current temperature rises. Nor was it pledged in service of the ongoing reconstruction efforts from the 2019 hurricane – something that has been complicated further by rises in COVID-19 cases. Instead, the winner was the “Coral Vita Conservancy” – a Bahamas coral reef restoration organisation founded by two Yale graduates.
This is not to say that Coral Vita’s goals are not important – coral reefs are tragicly collaterally damaged by the acidification and warming of the planet’s oceans, and restoring them is a worthy pursuit. However, restoring a coral reef does not contribute at all towards allowing The Bahamas to “stay alive” by limiting the impacts of climate change. Coral Vita’s partnerships with resorts suggests that their ultimate goal is to restore coral reefs for Western “eco-tourists” to appreciate when they stay in their balmy 5* resorts over the Northern Hemisphere’s winter. This reflects the intellectual shallowness and banality of “celebrity environmentalism”, and demonstrates a condescending ‘we know best’ approach to environmental funding. Surely, the money and recognition awarded by the Earthshot Prize would be better allocated to the government of the Bahamas – where democratic accountability could ensure that it is spent to benefit Bahamians and shield them from the effects of climate change, for which the industrialised West is overwhelmingly responsible.
The Earthshot Prize was never going to be revelatory – with the judging panel including Queen Rania of Jordan, someone who has called prolific petrostate the UAE a “pioneer in renewables”, and the CEO of PepsiCo. However, its piecemeal approach to environmentalism is indicative of a wider trend in establishment environmentalism, where the only ‘worthy’ schemes and organisations are those that appear to directly benefit global elites, such as Coral Vita, and where the onus for decarbonisation is shifted onto developing economies. This narrative is perpetuated by Earthshot’s nominations of small-scale emissions reduction projects in Nigeria and Bangladesh – countries that comprise 370.8 million people, yet taken together contribute a meagre 1.32% of annual CO2 emissions.
Rather than confront the actual challenge of climate change mitigation in the run-up to COP26, including promoting hard and accountable emissions reductions commitments from rich nations alongside a comprehensive programme of climate reparations that recognises where responsibility for emissions past and present lies, the Earthshot Prize is a cosy group of elite celebrities assuaging their own guilt about climate change without doing anything that may compromise their own carbon-intensive lifestyles. To this end, the banality of Prince William’s “celebrity environmentalism” is nothing more than a self-serving distraction.
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