John Ashton was the UK Government lead negotiator in global climate talks for six years. He just gave this speech to an energy industry conference in Paris. He addressed it to Ben van Beurden, CEO of Shell, urging him and his industry to heed the global crisis of climate change.

There are, essentially, two grand narratives about these times we live in. We can think of each as a kind of foundational logic, invoked as a way to frame the vastly complex reality we see all around us, and therefore help determine how we understand and respond to it.

There is a real push going on right now to move the debate about climate change into a “solutions” space. Be it Naomi Kleins’ Beautiful solutions initiative, the debate triggered by the Rockefeller Foundation’s decision to divest from fossil fuels, or that lots of people are talking solutions.

Right now, a long and complicated process is underway to replace the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which expire in 2015, with new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

It’s about time we called out the great myth that mass poverty just is, as if it were a natural part of some universal moral order. Such thinking is both profoundly untrue and disastrously misleading.

The UN REDD program obscures the realities experienced by local communities through its representations to the public. They employ words with environmentally-friendly connotations to describe what includes environmentally-damaging activities.