No time for anger over climate change

A young inventor at the global climate summit inspires the crowd to see ingenuity in everyone.

|
AP
Earthshot Prize finalist Vinisha Umashankar speaks during the World Leaders' Summit at the COP26 Summit in Glasgow, Scotland, Nov. 2.

Of all the speakers so far at this month’s climate summit in Scotland, one has drawn an enthusiastic standing ovation. It was 15-year-old Vinisha Umashankar who told the crowd:

“I’ve no time for anger. I want to act. I’m not just a girl from India. ... I’m a student, innovator, environmentalist, and entrepreneur but most importantly, an optimist.”

She was invited to speak because she was a finalist in a global contest aimed at turning back doomism about climate change by finding individuals who have invented the best market-ready solutions to repair the planet.

Vinisha’s invention was a solar-powered iron that could be used by the 10 million street vendors in India who now steam-press people’s clothes with irons heated by air-polluting charcoal. She was 14 when she came up with the idea. She was also the youngest contestant for the first Earthshot Prize and one of the 15 finalists.

Vinisha says that all of the winners and finalists for the prize “chose not to complain” about climate change. Rather the contestants’ inventions show “the greatest challenge in the history of our Earth is also the greatest opportunity. We lead the greatest wave of innovation humanity has ever known.”

The Earthshot Prize, named after President Kennedy’s “Moonshot” space program of the 1960s, was set up last year by Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge and second in line to the British throne. The contest drew 750 nominations from 86 countries. The first five prizes, announced last month, came with a $1.37 million award and access to participating companies eager to invest in new eco-solutions. 

The future king says the prize’s purpose is to highlight ingenuity around environmental problems in order to prevent “a real risk that people would switch off, that they would feel so despondent, so fearful and so powerless.” In the spirit of including everyone in dealing with climate change, he wants to show that anyone has the potential to discover solutions.

This fits with a new study by researchers at Rand Corp. that looked at the results of another innovation-spurring prize. Between 1996 and 2019, the Lemelson Foundation and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology awarded an annual $500,000 prize to 26 young inventors. Their innovations led to the startup of more than 140 companies.

The economist who led the study, Benjamin Miller, drew this conclusion: “If you want to maximize the benefits to society, you need everybody to have a chance to be the best inventor they can be. There’s a whole pool of people we’re missing out on because they’re not being engaged.”

Or as Paul Romer, winner of the 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, once wrote: “Every generation has underestimated the potential for finding new ... ideas.”

The audience clapping for Vinisha’s speech probably admired her certainty about finding fresh solutions for a difficult challenge. “You are never too young to make a difference,” she said. Nor too old or cynical to keep on trying.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

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.

QR Code to No time for anger over climate change
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2021/1103/No-time-for-anger-over-climate-change
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe