Some sections of a website carry more weight than others. On 14 August, one of those went up quietly on our About page: Founding Voices — people willing to put their names, in their own words, to an institution that does not yet exist. The first of those voices belongs to Sir David King.
For seven years — 2000 to 2007 — he was Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government: the scientist two Prime Ministers turned to when the evidence had to survive contact with power. He later carried that evidence into the world's negotiating rooms as the Foreign Secretary's Special Representative for Climate Change, founded the Centre for Climate Repair at the University of Cambridge, and today chairs the Climate Crisis Advisory Group, the independent group of scientists from around the world he convened to tell governments — and the rest of us — the truth at the speed the crisis demands. Few living scientists have spent longer saying difficult, true things to powerful audiences. Fewer still have been proven right so consistently, at such cost to everyone's comfort.
So when this man lends his name, the words matter. His begin where honesty requires: “I warned in 2016 that we, the people of this planet, had just 10 years to manage the climate crisis. That decade has now gone.” Sit with that for a moment. The scientist who issued the ten-year warning is telling you, plainly, that it has expired.
What follows is not despair — it is arithmetic. “Reducing emissions is now no longer enough: we must also remove vast quantities of excess greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere, and repair the climate systems we have broken — interventions at a scale humanity has never attempted, and which no existing institution is able to mobilise.” Read that last clause again. In his diagnosis, the missing piece is no longer the science, and it is not the will. It is the institution.
UnitedPeoples is a serious attempt to build precisely that missing mechanism — scaffolding for the necessary ‘impossible’.
And he is precise about what earns that sentence: “What they propose — the holistic mobilisation of people and capital, across every domain at once — is what is now required.” Not one cause. Not one country. Every domain at once — which is exactly the design you will find explained across this site.
He keeps the hard question on the table too, which is one reason his support means what it does: “Whether it can be built fast enough is the right question, and it is exactly why it must begin now.” This diary exists to answer that question in public — month by month, graves as well as ribbon-cuttings — and his closing line is the one we intend to be worthy of: “I am pleased to help and to lend it my support.”
He has not stood alone for long. Five more voices already share the page — Kees van der Graaf, Peter Johnson, Guus Loomans, Helen Mason and Nikolet Zwart — and in the weeks ahead each will get this page's full attention: who they are, what they have built, and why they chose to stand this early.
That is the road to launch, and you can read it here first: the Founding Voices, one by one; then the people leading the build, in their own words, as we approach the full public launch in mid-September; and UP Convenes — the open sessions where you can meet the work, and the people doing it, directly. UP FRONT carries all of it before anywhere else. The signup is below — and bring a sceptic.
Sources — every external claim on this site is cited and dated at /sources.
