In ‘In the Studio’, een programma van de BBC World Service, zei Brian Eno dat politici maar weinig doen aan de aanpak van klimaatverandering, ondanks dat die ‘quite fast’ gaat.

Vergeleken met andere problemen die de pers halen, is klimaatverandering een veel grotere bedreiging, zo vindt Eno in dat ruim 25 minuten durende vraaggesprek: ‘I notice that hardly any of our politicians are talking about the most important problem. The most important problem isn’t a few immigrants coming into the country on boats.The most important problem isn’t China developing AI.

The most important problem is that the ship is sinking, and it’s happening quite fast, and a lot of my friends and people I knew were also concerned about this issue.

What can we do about it? Those people in government aren’t doing anything about it. How can the rest of us do anything? Well, we have to somehow take it into our own hands.’

Ook had hij het over zijn liefdadigheidsorganisatie EartPercent: ‘This idea of tapping into the very many income streams that there are in music and saying to people, would you give us 1 per cent of that? Would you give us one per cent of your tour income? Would you give us one per cent of an album income?

So we want to sort of insert a little tap to that huge flow and siphon some off and put it into these good people who are doing great work all over the world, people working in the rainforests of Papua New Guinea, local people who look after the forest. It’s where they live.

Those are the people we should be giving money to. They know how it works there, and they have every reason.

So we wanted EarthPercent to be a place that sort of sucks in a little bit of all this vast amount of money that goes through the music business and feeds it back out to these people who are, in fact, the people protecting our future. It’s a very simple idea, and it’s starting to work.

 In the Studio – Brian Eno – BBC Sounds