December 2009 – Environmental Heroes and Villains in 2009

Role Models both positive and negative popped up in the press every day of 2009. This is a list of the ones that stick in the Memory... may the good ones have a prosperous 2010.

2009 Climate Heroes – A broad range from those that talk the talk to them that walk aswell.

1.

Richard Briers argued that the “Good Life” isn’t building a new runway at Heathrow. He reprises his role as Tom Goode and plants fruit and veg on proposed runway site.

2.

Michelle Obama started growing vegetables in the White House and selling them locally.













3.

Captain Kirk spoke out about HP’s use of toxic materials. Boldly supporting Green Peace.

4.
Gary Numan told people to leave their cars at home on behalf of the Scottish Government.

5.

President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives repeatedly spoke out and in different creative ways communicated the impacts of Climate Change on the Maldives - like holding a cabinet meeting underwater.














6.

Justin Timberlake bought some land in Japan to stop it being developed and then opened a “green” golf course.

http://www.nme.com/news/justin-timberlake/46105

7.

The Rt Rev James Jones, Bishop of Liverpool gave up carbon for Lent, started driving a hybrid and had solar panels fitted to his house.

8.

Dame Ellen MacArthur gave up sailing to campaign on climate change.

9.

Gary Kemp from Spandau Ballet got serious about cycling.















10.

Sister Julian and her fellow Nuns from the Conventus of Our Lady of Consolation moved into the “world's first environmentally friendly nunnery”.




2009 Climate Villains – they can be the pantomime type or plain unfunny.


1.

Uri Gellar is rumored to be using his powers to prospect for the oil companies.




















2.

James Martin the celebrity chef writes about running cyclists off the road in his Mail on Sunday column:

"Knowing they wouldn't hear me coming, I stepped on the gas, waited until the split second before I overtook them, and then gave them an almighty blast on the horn at the exact same time I passed them at speed.

The look of sheer terror as they tottered into the hedge was the best thing I've ever seen in my rear-view mirror. I think this could be the car for me."









3.

Donald Trump succeeded in pushing through his plans for an “ungreen” golf course.

4.

Noel Gallagher rejects Chris Martins environmental overtures.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/showbiz/bizarre/article2315877.ece

5.

UKIP's Yorkshire MEP Godfrey Bloom blogs about climate change and gives repeated glimpses into the mind of a skeptic:

“People don’t quite understand this yet, but once all of the planned policies are in place, people who have gone to bed the night before in what they understood to be a liberal democracy will wake up in something resembling Soviet Russia. There will be shortages of expensive, low quality of food. It will be cold. There will be power cuts. You will not be allowed to travel as you wish. Jobs –if they still exist – will be make-work employment that is dull, pointless, and increasingly labour-intensive. And that's if we're lucky. At least Soviet Russia attempted to be an industrial. We might end up with something far more medieval.

If you don’t like these policies, tough luck, because none of the parties is offering you the choice. You will be green, whether you like it or not.”

6.

Sarah Palin further cemented her polar bear killing reputation when she said “The president should boycott Copenhagen”












7.

Geoff Hoon pushed through plans for a third runway at Heathrow.













8.

Michael Portillo, David Davies and Lord Lamont (A Trio of Carbon Tories) all three passed their career peaks, found press coverage in 2009 by making high-flown defenses of their respective skeptical positions on Climate Change.

9.

Václav Klaus became arguably Europe's most high-profile climate denier.

10.

Danish police

TF

December 2009 - Copenhagen: A political or personal failure?

With crushing inevitability the climate change negotiations in Copenhagen limped to a close, and precious little substantive progress was made. Understandably, developing countries were in no hurry to sign a suicide pact, but the reality was even more stark – there was no (legally binding) suicide pact to sign. The Copenhagen negotiations did not simply fail: they failed dismally.

However, the failure of the negotiations cannot be attributed solely to a lack of political leadership. As Polly Toynbee observed in the Guardian on Saturday (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/dec/18/gutless-planet-future-copenhagen-leaders), in many respects Western politicians are ‘out in front’ of their electorates, pushing for solutions to a problem that has next to zero political capital. The negotiations may have fallen victim to a political system comprised of nation states that are self-interested, reluctant to change their ways, and obsessed with the near-term consequences of their decisions. But these traits are not confined to nations – if anything, they are magnified at a personal level. The dark irony is that the ultimate ‘man-made’ existential threat seems custom built to flummox our mental machinery. At a personal as well as a political level, it feels like climate change has got us beat.

For a long time, psychologists have known that human cognition abides by some basic principles. People tend to discount risks that are far away in time and space, while simultaneously focussing on threats that have a more tangible character – it is not difficult to see why snowy driving conditions take precedence over concern for a warming world. But even among those who care deeply about climate change and the implications it will have for human suffering, learning to live a low-carbon life is hard. Our systems of production and consumption are unsustainable, yet the signals we need to make the cultural, political and behavioural shifts necessary are weak or non-existent. When an animal wanders into an electric fence, it quickly learns to avoid that behaviour. But the shocks that climate change has in store are ‘not here’ and ‘not now’. Pavlov’s dog would have never learnt to associate anything if the bell had been rung in Indonesia and his food served up in Devon – with a 30 year time gap between them.

But while these general observations about perception and learning go some way to explaining why climate change is such a perplexing psychological problem, it is our emotional architecture that finds the most powerful ways of rationalising and adapting to the threat of climate change. In a new paper published in the Journal of Social Issues and Public Policy (http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122463734/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0), the psychologists Cynthia Frantz and F. Stephan Mayer argue that when it comes to predicting how people will respond to climate change, there is a critical distinction between ‘problem focused’ and ‘emotion focused’ coping behaviour. Problem-focused coping involves taking steps to minimise the threat (i.e. reducing one’s carbon footprint). Emotion-focused coping involves ignoring or denying the threat – tackling the emotion but not the problem.
A major determinant of whether people take a problem-focused or emotion-focused approach is whether they feel in control of the threat they are facing. Previous research (http://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=2ZnKy6BMpTQC&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq=%22McKenzie-Mohr%22+%22Fostering+sustainable+behavior:+An+introduction+to+...%22+&ots=jII4JuvgQ-&sig=dnAojl-RTtU-GIqw6J1FWIk4Rys#v=onepage&q=&f=false) has found that when facing global issues like climate change, fostering a sense of community and collective action is an effective way of increasing perceived control.

Unfortunately, the notion of collective action is increasingly alien to the individualised consumers of the West. Our political leaders know this, and seem unwilling to challenge the sovereignty of the consumer – thus far, attempts at influencing public behaviour have tended to be limited to exhortations to ‘save money not just the planet’.

There is an unspoken consensus that taking action on climate change should have some immediate personal payoff, but if an individualistic outlook is inhibiting our capacity to face the scale of the problem, then we may be barking up the wrong tree. Whether one favours an ‘individualistic’ or ‘collective’ outlook is typically cast as a political judgment – the free market vs. the state. But if promoting individualism makes coping with climate change in a problem-focused way less likely, then perhaps we need to see past this distinction.

In the gloomy aftermath of Copenhagen, John Sauven of Greenpeace (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/18/copenhagen-deal) suggested that beating climate change will require a radically different model of politics than the one on display in Copenhagen. This seems unarguably true, but the political sphere is not the only place where a paradigm shift is required. Beating climate change will require radically different ways of thinking and interacting across the full spectrum of human behaviour. The ultimate shared resource is about to be carved up. Have we got what it takes to do it equitably?

AC