Editorial to EST by president Peter Droege: Our fight begins anew

Welcome to the first edition of our digital journal, the birth of EUROSOLARTIMES - EST.  The name stresses ‘time’ as an important dimension, a challenge for sustainable action now, here and everywhere.  EST serves four aims:
  • Improve our interaction with readers and member
  • Enhance speed, effectiveness and efficiency of our communication
  • Embrace all of our fellow movements and organizations in the fight for a regenerative world
  • Multiply our readership and increase our membership

EST also signifies means ‘it is’ in Latin. We celebrate our existence, that of the planet – but also acknowledge the pragmatic reality we are working to overcome, transform. EST is also ‘to be’ in the present tense. The present is fleeting: and time is usually forgotten in the drive for energy transition.  It has become a statistical abstract in climate science – projections as if we were able to bend the global climate to our will, our needs. Meanwhile, our scientists discover, shock and disbelief, that their projections are off by 80 years or more. Over these last 50 years – the cataclysmic fossil fuel frenzy we still live with today – the population size of animals has dropped by almost 70%: fish, birds, amphibians, reptiles and mammals. It is not surprising to us. Greenland, the Arctic, Antarctic and every glacier large and small around the world is being de-iced – not in 2100 but now. Our oceans scream in heat pain now. Our forests are burning now. People around the world are on climate migrations now. What time is it? Now.

We call for a new alliance with sustainable agricultural, forestry, biodiversity and social empowerment and sufficiency movements. We call for working together in this Regenerative Earth Decade (RED). Carbon dioxide concentrations in our atmosphere are now 150% above sustainable levels.  Methane levels 300 %. Both are rising exponentially. Both excess bubbles are still blown out by the blind drive to a collective demise committed by our ‘leaders’. Gas, oil, coal – while in dire economic straits – are still not being brought to a sufficiently rapid halt. Soybean, palm oil and beef consumption is not being curbed – while rainforests – the Garden of Eden – are being bulldozed and incinerated for ‘commodity productive’ land. This hellish system is still being subsidised in a game for financial and political profit. And as if this was not enough: missile, gun and drone manufacturers and dealers profit more than ever before from our fossil fuel quagmire, while children, families and hopes die in aerial bombardment for fossil superiority.

But now, a shift is in the wings. As organization, we see our ethical responisibility to strive for the preservation and regeneration of our common livelihood on earth. Therefore, we will call for an shift that is political, financial, economic, local as well as global. This historical shift includes the introduction of a climate defence budget for the rapid phase-out of fossil fuels and a switch to renewable energies – this should amount to at least 5 to 10 percent of the gross national product, a generous multiple our current defence budget.

This shift will target the destructuring of fossil industries through corporate adjustment and re-employment programmes, and the phasing out of fossil and nuclear subsidies. It will include the rapid dismantling of outdated regulations blocking renewable networks, storage and distribution systems. This shift also entails the redefinition of emission targets, for not even climate neutrality is now enough to save our planet. We now go further, and combine our call for 100% renewables here and now with the equally critical calls to rescue the biosphere’s ability to reabsorb excess atmospheric carbon.

Support EUROSOLARs RED ALERT. Call for an unprecedented and urgently needed Renewable Decade, in which the complete supply of renewable energies is the minimum requirement. It will make our economy more resilient and our society more sustainable. With citizen-oriented publications, legal and institutional innovations, policy instruments and events, EUROSOLAR has been committed to the rapid transition into the solar age since 1988 – and we are only getting started. Our fight begins a new, now.

Don’t hesitate, join us. Become a member, now.

Professor Peter Droege
President, EUROSOLAR