100 Months...and counting

Uganda: A country with no time for climate change scepticism

2011-03-07T15:20:00.000Z

First published in the New Scientist magazine

The struggle to persuade the inhabitants of industrialised nations to rein in their carbon emissions is well documented, but how is climate change viewed by people in developing countries? My research in Uganda provides some surprising insights. Opposing the scientific consensus on climate change has become something of an article of faith for the socially conservative religious right in the US. But in Uganda - a deeply religious and superstitious nation infamous for its rampant homophobia - climate change scepticism is nowhere to be seen.

The climate is a constant topic of conversation among ordinary Ugandans. More than 80 per cent of them are farmers, and people are in no doubt that the climate is changing. The seasonal rains that once arrived with precision are now erratic and unpredictable. When your living depends on the fertility of your farmland, the climate is vitally important. In an office in London or New York it is less of a big deal - and the invisibility of climate change in developed countries is a barrier to communicating the risks.

The fact that climate change is viewed through a local lens in Uganda has another important implication: there seems to be very little anger or resentment directed towards the nations that bear the historical responsibility for climate change. Instead, the national conversation focuses on the ways in which Ugandans can make their environment as resilient as possible. The stark reality is that even though Uganda has done little to cause climate change it will be forced to adapt to its effects.

The Ugandan approach poses an interesting question for communicating climate change in developed countries: are the grand narratives about moral responsibility and catastrophic climate chaos putting people off? Perhaps a more pragmatic framing of the challenge of decarbonisation would deflect the more hysterical objections of climate sceptics - but also allow climate change to break out of the eco-warrior niche that it frustratingly still occupies.

Freedom of Information and Science

2010-11-26T13:50:00.000Z

First published in the Times Higher Education magazine 25th November 2010. This is a joint article with Alice Bell.

The idea that "information" should be freely available has become a central feature of what, in the 21st century, we expect from a well-functioning democracy. Words such as "openness" and "transparency" litter the rhetoric of public policy discourse. They are also characteristics that for many define good science.
Why, then, has Freedom of Information (FoI) legislation, a key tool in facilitating openness and transparency, developed such an uncomfortable relationship with UK scientific research? Were researchers "asleep at the wheel" when FoI came calling? Or, to turn the question around, was FoI legislation ready for science?
The UK's Freedom of Information Act, which was passed in 2000 and came into force on 1 January 2005, aims to ensure that public bodies are publicly accountable. It legally obliges public authorities to provide information in response to FoI requests within 20 days.

Although some would argue that it is still not used widely enough, FoI seems to have been embraced by at least some parts of the British public, with about 30,000 requests for information flooding in each year. The majority of these requests are aimed at local and national government - with perhaps the most famous example being the publication of MPs' expenses in 2009 after a protracted legal battle fought by journalists and FoI campaigners, although ultimately, the information was leaked.

However, universities can be the target of FoI legislation too, as demonstrated by the illegal release of emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia last year, which revealed controversial correspondence between researchers on the subject of FoI requests for climate change data.
In another high-profile clash between FoI campaigners and academia in April this year, Queen's University Belfast was ordered by the Information Commissioner to hand over 40 years' worth of research data on tree rings after a three-year campaign by a climate sceptic.

At East Anglia, a seemingly endless series of inquiries has established that none of the more outlandish allegations made against the staff was true: data were not fabricated and there was no "smoking gun" that proved climate change to be a lie. But as even the staunchest supporters of the beleaguered research team at the CRU have had to admit, the way in which FoI requests were dealt with was unsatisfactory. The Independent Climate Change Email Review found this summer that the scientists did show "a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper defence of openness", particularly around FoI.

According to Fred Pearce, the environmental journalist who covered the story in most detail, an important lesson emerged from the debris of the "Climategate" debacle: science simply was not ready for FoI legislation.
"Science as a community did not see that the FoI laws would impact on science. Like many of us, they thought it was designed to uncover self-serving Whitehall secrets and our own personal files (held by public bodies). I regard the failure to see what was coming down the track as a real failure of the science community."

Similarly, an event on FoI and academia held last year by the Research Information Network noted "lethargy" when it came to researchers' approach to the legislation - not only in terms of their reactions to outside requests, but also in making use of FoI in their own work (see box, below).

At the root of all this is a profound question about the nature of scientific knowledge itself. Is a request for "information" a productive way of opening up scientific knowledge?

The sort of knowledge that can be easily extracted using FoI requests is far-reaching but also inherently limited to information that is explicit. Numbers, calculations, reference lists - and, of course, emails - can all be placed squarely in the public domain. With enough of this type of explicit information, some aspects of the scientific process can be recreated. If you have someone's raw data, you know the calculations they made and you can see their results, you are in a position to confirm or challenge their conclusions. But to what extent does this fully capture scientific knowledge?

Mike Hulme, professor of climate change at the University of East Anglia, argues that scientific knowledge is built on more than mere data, computer codes or theories.

"With complex issues like climate change, sophisticated forms of expert knowledge assessment are necessary to weigh conflicting, incomplete or ambiguous evidence. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a good example of this. Of necessity, such assessment is discursive and deliberative, and cannot be captured in data, theory or even in formalised recorded words. Here, FoI - if it is being used to reveal the foundations and construction of knowledge - reaches its limits. If scientific knowledge is to continue to warrant public trust, then expert deliberations, eg, the IPCC, should be made public events."

Hulme - who has publicly criticised the CRU researchers involved in the Climategate affair - is clearly not suggesting that the norms of scientific research provide a means of wriggling out of accountability. But at a fundamental level, the nature of scientific "knowledge" seems at odds with the "information" that can be revealed through FoI requests. FoI legislation can skim the surface of knowledge and cream off information - but to get at the heart of a scientific dispute requires scientific expertise.

Anyone can audit a list of expenses. Only someone with the right knowledge can settle a technical dispute in a satisfactory way. Expecting FoI requests to be able to arbitrate between competing knowledge claims is no more plausible than asking the social services to use FoI to uncover instances of "bad parenting" - it's the wrong tool for the job.

At a very practical level, FoI also seems unsuited to the current institutional culture of scientific research. Many scientists are uneasy about sharing their precious intellectual resources unless it is on their own terms - not least for fear that they will be misrepresented.

"I think there's certainly a tension, in that scientists see freeing their information rather differently to how FoI works," says Martin Griffiths, national coordinator for science journalism training at the Royal Statistical Society. "FoI goes beyond just the data and allows the release of correspondence between scientists. These may not make much sense to outsiders and lead to the kind of language problems we saw in Climategate - with (the word) 'tricks' (being used) and so on - that are everyday parts of science being blown out of proportion."

Gabrielle Bourke, a researcher at University College London's Constitution Unit, makes a similar point about the tensions between academic work and FoI.

"The ways in which scientists go about their work, such as peer review, don't necessarily sit very well with the FoI policy," she says. "The usual way is not to hand over your data before you have done work on it."
Martin Robbins, a science writer, posted a provocative blog post in April arguing that he "couldn't see why academic data should be covered by the FoI Act". He railed against the idea that because the public have paid for research, they should have access to it.

"We actually haven't paid for it," he wrote. "The public pay for research to be done. They do not pay for peer review, or publication, or data archiving, or indeed any sort of public dissemination of information except where it's explicitly set out in the funded proposal."

In addition, while most research is publicly funded, not all of it is - and the FoI legislation does not apply to research funded through private channels. This means industry lobbyists or other groups can use FoI as a tactic to delay publicly funded research programmes.

A great deal has already been written about the motivations of the army of bloggers who bombarded the University of East Anglia with FoI requests. Were these part of a genuine desire to find, use and share information, or designed to mess researchers around and stop them from getting on with other work?
Legislation designed to make publicly funded research open and accountable may be abused to suppress particular pieces of work - potentially for political ends. This problem was perhaps made most evident in the controversy surrounding the US' Data Quality Act. And at the University of East Anglia, it certainly seemed as if some of the FoI requests satisfied the Information Commissioner's definition of "vexatious", although other (apparently legitimate) requests do also appear to have been ignored by the scientists.

Of course, many public bodies could construct a compelling argument for why they should be exempted from the demands of FoI, but there does seem to be something special about the academic case, because of the nature of scientific knowledge. However, because the academic community did not spot the possible implications of FoI for scientific activity when the legislation was written, says Pearce, "we now have law that is so badly drafted it makes no distinction between the needs of scientific discourse and the demands of angry bloggers".

UCL's Bourke notes that in the US, there is a set of exceptions for universities, which came into effect in 1999 after a consultation process in which the universities participated.
"Maybe UK academics and academic organisations just need to have a conversation about FoI," she suggests. "Just because there is a tension doesn't mean universities and FoI can't be reconciled. Indeed, there are lots of movements to open data."

To return to the question of whether science was prepared for FoI or the other way around, the answer seems to sit somewhere in the middle. At a minimum, the bodies controlling publicly funded science were not engaged enough with the policy process. In 1999, while UK academics were ignoring FoI legislation, their US counterparts were helping to improve theirs. Since then, there is evidence that even in the political domain, FoI is not the silver bullet that its proponents envisaged.

In a review of the impact of FoI legislation on UK governance, Ben Worthy, also from UCL's Constitution Unit, argues that while FoI has achieved the core objectives of increasing transparency and accountability, it has not increased public participation in governance issues. According to Worthy, FoI is simply not a powerful enough tool to tackle the complex, deep-rooted issues that prevent increased participation, understanding or trust.

While his argument is aimed at governance, the logic applies just as well to science.
FoI legislation alone cannot be a panacea for public trust in science. A meaningful relationship between science and the world beyond the ivory tower is unlikely to be predicated on the superficial level of transparency achieved by FoI requests. At best, they will act as a useful audit of data, uncovering the odd mistake or oversight. But left alone, there is a danger that public engagement with the scientific process will be reduced to an exchange of mutually distrustful FoI correspondence, or a rather limited interaction between the public and the university PR office.

Science needs to learn to live with FoI, regardless of whether it can deliver a meaningful assessment of scientific knowledge to the public. But the key challenge is for scientists to find ways of increasing openness that are more proactive and less confrontational than the FoI process (see box, below). Dialogue-based processes of deliberation and interaction are more powerful ways to build trust between scientists and the public, and the questions that can be asked can go deeper than an acrimonious audit of a model or dataset.
The role of the public in shaping the work scientists do is critical - public engagement is vital to ensure scientific programmes are not only technically sound, but socially beneficial.

So public engagement with science is worth fighting for, but accessing science through FoI legislation is unlikely to lead to a satisfactory outcome for scientists or the public.

According to a review of FoI legislation in Canada, Australia and New Zealand in 1987, its introduction led to greater scrutiny of ministers' expenses rather than of their management of economic policy. Are we more interested in reading scientists' emails or in shaping the values that guide their work?

AC (and Alice Bell)

Climate change scepticism is about more than just science

2010-11-26T13:46:00.000Z

First published in the Environment Section of the Guardian 23rd November 2010.

A coalition of leading US climate scientists this week launched a new rapid response website aimed at closing the gap between scientific knowledge and public opinion on climate change. For those who have become exasperated rebutting the endless stream of disinformation that frustratingly still characterises the climate change debate, it seems like an idea that is long overdue.

Fronted by the embattled Prof John Abraham, the website will provide direct access to climate science expertise through a network of scientists. But the premise underlying the initiative – that climate change scepticism will be reduced through a clearer presentation of the facts – is problematic. Why? Because climate change scepticism is only superficially about science.

The basic question of human impact on the climate is no longer seriously debated in the scientific literature. Science being science, there will always be uncertainties. But if the credibility of a scientific conclusion can be judged from the weight of evidence that supports it, then climate change is a fact. The problem is that seemingly objective facts are surprisingly malleable – especially when they are perceived to have implications for policy or behaviour.

Several decades of social psychological research have shown that on any number of topics – from capital punishment, to gun control, to nanotechnologies – people squeeze new evidence through powerful social and cultural filters. Pouring facts into this filter system does not necessarily produce consensus – and it can even cause attitudes to polarise.

So it is no surprise that the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have acted as a lighting rod for disagreement. For an individual who supports co-ordinated international action to tackle climate change, what could be more compelling than a consensus statement from an international body of independent scientists? For someone inclined to perceive international regulations as a threat to trade and industry, an international report that speaks of consensus is likely to set alarm bells ringing. The facts are the same in both cases: the interpretation very different.

As Mike Hulme showed in his book Why We Disagree About Climate Change, many of the arguments that rage around climate science are not really about climate change at all: they are disputes about personal values, regulation, economic growth or the acceptable level of government intervention in our lives. Climate change just happens to cut to the heart of these red hot issues – and so it is used as a vehicle for thrashing out ancient disputes.

The gap between scientific knowledge on climate change and public attitudes is unlikely to be closed by opening up a new front of climate science dissemination. Previous experience with scientific topics such as GM crops suggests that turning up the volume on the science will not necessarily lead to greater public acceptance of climate change. So what is the alternative?

First, we have to accept that climate change scepticism is not primarily about the science. The fact that more than half of the incoming Republican politicians in the US mid-term elections dispute climate change illustrates this perfectly. These people were not driven by their rejection of climate change science to become Republicans – their conservative views have coloured their interpretation of the science, which they see as threatening to their ideology.

Second, our methods for engaging the public need to move away from the one-way dissemination of information, and towards more participatory approaches. Providing opportunities for people to deliberate with each other about climate change allows the reasons for disagreement to come to the fore. If these reasons are based on values, cultural world-views or ideology, then it makes sense to get these disagreements out into the open rather than obscuring them by fighting political battles using the language of science.

The rapid response website is an attempt to draw a line under a year marked by accusations and acrimony, and as a channel for climate scientists to provide information to the media and the public it should be welcomed. But while dispelling myths about climate change is a valuable public service to offer, the truth about climate scepticism is that it is not just a dispute over the science. The challenge for scientists and communicators is to find ways of engaging the public where the real reasons for disagreement can take centre stage – only then can the debate move forward.

AC

Geoengineering is a dilemma for scientists

2010-11-26T13:44:00.000Z

First published in the Environment Section of the Guardian 10th November 2010

For two days the hallowed halls of the Royal Society in London have been filled with uncomfortable-looking climate scientists. But this is not another "climategate" inquiry, it's a meeting on geo-engineering – proposals to deploy global-scale technologies to control the planet's climate.

For the most part, these technologies don't yet exist. But as time ticks by and greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, scientists are starting to take geo-engineering seriously. Proposals range from sunlight-reflecting mirrors in space to machines that can scrub carbon dioxide from the air to the seeding of algal blooms in the oceans, which suck carbon dioxide down to the sea bed and keep it there.

The level of scientific uncertainty around geo-engineering is formidable: fears of unintended side effects and irreversible interventions loom large in researchers' minds. Scientists being scientists, they're keen to plug the gaps in their knowledge – but they don't look all that happy about it.

The problem is that proposals to geo-engineer the climate come loaded with social and ethical concerns. Is it acceptable to intentionally intervene in the volatile climate system? How would it be governed? What would prevent the abuse of climate-controlling technologies, and whose hand would be on the global thermostat?
The growing number of scientists working on different aspects of geo-engineering research – from climate modelling, to lab experiments with reflective particles that could be injected into the stratosphere – are anxious to emphasise that they are not geo-engineering cheerleaders. They simply want to understand the pros and cons of different technologies, in case the day came when they might be needed, a day they hope will never come.

The Royal Society itself has taken great care to indicate that it does not advocate geo-engineering – and certainly not in the place of deep global cuts in greenhouse gases. But it does advocate research on geo-engineering, and that's where the dilemma for many scientists kicks in.

On the one hand, it is clearly prudent to understand more about geo-engineering – the worst of all scenarios would involve a government deploying a technology without knowing what its effects would be. Initial evidence suggests that spraying the skies with reflective particles of sulphate would have a major impact on patterns of rainfall. Surely it is better to know this sooner rather than later?

On the other hand, conducting research on geo-engineering is one of the main factors that will make the deployment of the technologies more likely. Most scientists are deeply sceptical about the use of such "remedial" action on global warming. But scientists won't be the ones to decide whether the technology is used. So are they unwittingly clearing the path for future deployment?

Of course, research should help to rule out the craziest of the geo-engineering proposals. Basic research might mean certain dangerous ideas are rejected - and already there is evidence that fertilising the oceans would be a highly risky undertaking. This is valuable knowledge. But there is a danger that the very fact that research is taking place will send out a signal to politicians: there is an alternative to cutting carbon.

For some, the process is eerily reminiscent of the race to develop nuclear weapons in the 1940s. While it might seem alarmist to compare geo-engineering to the quest for nuclear capability, the parallels are striking: both involve novel, uncertain and hugely powerful technologies deployed for the purposes of defence against a threat, both are mired in ethical controversy, and both have an undercurrent of inevitability driving them along.
The Manhattan Project co-opted science to advance military aims. Preventing dangerous climate change is a much nobler endeavour, but the social and ethical implications of geo-engineering the climate are so profound that the scientists involved are caught in an unenviable dilemma. Can this research exist independently of deployment, or is their work ushering in an era of climate intervention that they openly caution against?

AC

Spending cuts will create a climate of denial

2010-10-17T22:23:00.000+01:00

Climate change is a threat. But what sort of threat?

Generally, climate change is described as a threat to our environment and natural resources. With increased stress on already straining global resource systems, the effects of climate change on our natural environment will be measured in reduced crop yields and water shortages.

Climate change is sometimes framed as a threat to our economic prosperity. The Stern report famously argued that in order to maintain economic growth in the face of rapid climatic changes, 1% of global GDP should be spent on climate mitigation now in order to prevent much more being spent later. Although other economists are far less optimistic about the prospect of infinite economic growth on a planet with finite resources, it is now widely acknowledged that tackling climate change will have a significant financial cost.
But while the effects of climate change pose very real, measurable threats to our natural world and our economic systems, tackling climate change will also mean facing up to a less tangible but no less profound threat: the threat of climate change to our identity and self esteem.

In a paper published in the British Journal of Social Psychology last month, Paul Sparks and colleagues from the University of Sussex reported two experiments that suggest that climate change doesn’t only threaten the physical world – it threatens our mental world too.

In the first experiment, Sparks and his co-authors asked students from the University of Sussex to read six short pieces of ‘threatening’ text about climate change taken from newspapers and books. They then indicated their level of agreement with 15 statements that reflected various types of climate change denial – from denial of the severity of the problem, to denial of self-involvement.

Half of the group also completed a task designed to affirm people’s sense of their own kindness by writing a list of kind and compassionate behaviour that they have engaged in recently. The group who had completed the self-affirmation task reported a higher level of self-involvement – that is, the people who felt better about themselves were less likely to deny their personal responsibility for climate change.

In the second experiment, the researchers used a similar method but measured people’s willingness to recycle. The self-affirmed group expressed stronger intentions to increase the amount they recycled in the next month, suggesting that people’s motivation to engage in a specific pro-environmental behaviour is partly attributable to how they feel about themselves – or in other words, how well they are able to cope with the psychological threat of climate change.

It has long been known that people who feel better about themselves are more easily able to deal with threats. For people who do not feel self-affirmed, denial of the reality of the problem – or their role in solving it – is a common response. Paul Sparks’ research helps to explain why climate denial persists despite the evidence for climate change being overwhelming: it poses a psychological threat that we are often ill-equipped to deal with.
If we are to face up to challenge of climate change with a proportionate response, we will need every resource we can lay our hands on. Unfortunately, with the deepest and most extreme public sector cuts for a generation just around the corner, the national mood can hardly be described as ‘self-affirmed’.

On top of our reduced capacity to respond to climate change due to less public money being made available, are we also sapping our precious psychological resources by piling on the pressure to our collective self esteem?

AC

No Pressure: Why the 10:10 film was a disastrous piece of climate change communication

2010-10-02T23:02:00.000+01:00

No Pressure & climate communication: what does the research say?

Imagine you were part of a highly successful environmental campaign group, that had spent the best part of the last year enthusiastically building a broad coalition of organisations – from schools, to local councils, to football teams – committed to cutting their carbon footprint. How might you choose to mark such a successful 10 months?

An attention-grabbing stunt of some kind? Great idea. A controversial and challenging video? That could work, yes. A poorly executed ‘joke’ about peer pressure involving the violent deaths of children and office workers who don’t subscribe to your campaign? Err, possibly not…

But yet, bizarrely, this is precisely what the otherwise well-respected 10:10 group opted to do. If you’ve not yet seen the video No Pressure, then you can now only view bootlegged versions as the original was wisely taken down just hours after it was launched. It made the front page of the Guardian Environment section, took a predictable bashing from the far-right conspiracy theorist James Delingpole over at the Telegraph, and sent the, ahem, ‘data libertarian’ blogs into a spin.

That the video was panned by the usual suspects is unsurprising. Delingpole spluttered that “the environmental movement has revealed the snarling, wicked, homicidal misanthropy beneath its cloak of gentle, bunny-hugging righteousness.” But while Delingpole’s wilfully literal misreading of the video is unremarkable, there is a genuine reason for concern: as a piece of climate change communication, it is disastrous.
At the most general level, the video fails to address basic principles of communication. What is the message? Who are the audience? The video literally doesn’t make any sense – if it is aimed at supporters, what are we supposed to take from it? And if it is aimed at those who oppose the 10:10 campaign – or more pertinently, are not yet aware of or interested in it – then what is the video hoping to achieve?

Beyond these general faults, many of the pitfalls of communicating climate change are gleefully skipped into. It is now well established that using shock tactics to pressure people into caring about climate change is of limited use: while fear of a negative outcome (e.g. lung cancer) can be an effective way of promoting behavioural changes (e.g. giving up smoking), the link between the threat and the behaviour must be personal and direct. Typically, climate change is perceived as neither a direct nor a personal threat – and so shocking people into doing their recycling is probably not the way to go.

We also know that while ‘peer pressure’ can be a remarkably effective way of promoting and spreading environmentally friendly behaviour, this is a process of social comparison that cannot be controlled by ‘outsiders’ to an individual’s social group. People make their comparisons to people who are ‘like them’ – people that they respect, admire, or empathise with in some way. Observing other people engaging in pro-environmental behaviour is a fantastic way of generating a positive social norm. Blowing them up for failing to get with the programme is not…

Of course, its easy to be critical of any attempt to engage the public with climate change – it is a formidable challenge finding the right way of encouraging people to embrace low-carbon lifestyles. But gradually, social scientists and climate change communicators are starting to piece together good evidence on how to effectively communicate climate change. The recent report by the Climate Change Communication Advisory Group (CCCAG), a network of climate communication academics and practitioners, set out seven principles for communicating climate change to mass audiences:

Move Beyond Social Marketing
Be honest and forthright about the probable impacts of climate change, and the scale of the challenge we confront in avoiding these. But avoid deliberate attempts to provoke fear or guilt.
Be honest and forthright about the impacts of mitigating and adapting to climate change for current lifestyles, and the ‘loss’ — as well as the benefits — that these will entail. Narratives that focus exclusively on the ‘up-side’ of climate solutions are likely to be unconvincing.
1. Avoid emphasis upon painless, easy steps.
2. Avoid over-emphasis on the economic opportunities that mitigating, and adapting to, climate change may provide.
3. Avoid emphasis upon the opportunities of ‘green consumerism’ as a response to climate change.
Empathise with the emotional responses that will be engendered by a forthright presentation of the probable impacts of climate change.
Promote pro-environmental social norms and harness the power of social networks
Think about the language you use, but don’t rely on language alone
Encourage public demonstrations of frustration at the limited pace of government action

The 10:10 film may yet prove to be a success in terms of the level of attention that is paid to campaign – once people scratch the surface, they will find that exploding children are not actually a part of the plan, and that the aims of the 10:10 campaign are both reasonable and fair. But the danger is that more people will be persuaded that the pastiche of environmentalism that James Delingpole promotes is real.

At such a crucial juncture for campaigning on climate change, with public scepticism higher than a year ago, international negotiations tying themselves into a knot, and the British government taking enormous chunks out of the budget for tackling climate change, don’t those in the public eye have a responsibility to do a better job with their climate change communications?

AC

Climategate: passing judgment on peer review

2010-09-04T08:40:00.000+01:00

This is a reprint of a piece I wrote for the Times Higher Education magazine last month, which was the cover story for 22nd July.

With the benefit of hindsight, the firestorm of controversy created by "Climategate" - the illegal release of emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the end of 2009 - had been brewing for a very long time. In the highly politicised world of climate science, the accusative chorus of sceptical voices and the increasingly exasperated statements of defence from beleaguered climate scientists had become a deafening cacophony.

Initial media reports talked excitedly of the emails as a "smoking gun" showing climate change to be an elaborate hoax, but these were quickly exposed as completely unfounded. A House of Commons inquiry in March found no evidence of systematic deception by CRU researchers. A science panel led by Lord Oxburgh found no evidence of scientific malpractice. And finally on 7 July, after many months of gathering information, the independent inquiry led by Sir Muir Russell reported its long-awaited findings.
The inquiry examined the conduct of the scientists at the CRU and concluded that their rigour and honesty were not in doubt. Concerns were raised over the openness of CRU researchers (and university officials), and reforms of practices and procedures were identified. No evidence of subversion of the peer review or editorial process was unearthed, but the report did include a lengthy reflection on Climategate's implications for peer review by Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet. Horton argued that much of the confusion about what took place at the CRU stemmed from a misunderstanding of what the peer review process can - and cannot - do.

Drawing on Horton's analysis, the Russell report concluded: "Many who are far from the reality of the peer review process would like to believe that peer review is a firewall between truth on the one hand and error or dishonesty on the other. It is not. It is a means of sieving out evident error, currently unacceptable practices, repetition of previously published work without acknowledgement, and trivial contributions that add little to knowledge."

Reacting to the unedifying sight of science's sock drawer emptied on to the floor, however, many commentators have sought to pass judgement on peer review. The processes and practices of science are now in the dock, and non-scientists observing the private correspondence of the peers behind the peer review have found it difficult to escape the conclusion that science is not what it seems.
But for Harry Collins, distinguished research professor of sociology at the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, who has for decades studied scientific practices, Climategate told him nothing he did not know already.

"The message that a lot of people seem to have taken from Climategate is far more damaging than it ought to be, because the normal to and fro of scientific practice looks like that. Most of what happened in Climategate was business as usual. People have a misconception of what science is because they are exposed to hero worship about science - stories about Newton, stories about Einstein - it's a sort of fairy tale. But it's disadvantageous to scientists to have science presented in this way, because politicians and journalists ask them for exact answers. Even if science is exact, it's exact only in the long term."

According to Collins, the romantic idealisation of science as a neat and tidy linear path towards greater knowledge is a myth. Science is often messy, sometimes sloppy, and always more complicated than it seems. Tensions can easily arise. Policymakers schooled in the canonical view of science (and battling an electoral cycle that privileges rapid responses over considered contemplation) face enormous pressures to transform the uncertainties of science into political soundbites. Confronted with a politically filtered version of science - clear, certain and precise - it is no surprise that people sense a scandal when things do not turn out to be quite as they expected.

Scientific objectivity goes no further than the circles of expertise that comprise fields of scientific endeavour. Of course, there are any number of "facts" to be objectively recorded in the natural world through experiment or observation. In climate science, the facts unambiguously point to the influence of human activity on the climate. But as the science and environmental journalist David Adam has suggested, the process by which scientists judge each other's work as fit for publication has always been where objective science dashes on the rocks of subjective human opinion. Short of automating the peer review process, the human fallibility of peer reviewers is simply unavoidable.

Arguments such as these are potent fuel for the fire of sceptical claims that climate science has become a self-regarding consensus machine, fine-tuned to keep out the outliers and reinforce the status quo. Three inquiries into Climategate have found no evidence that this is the case. But sceptics have been eager to use the emails as a vehicle for attacking climate science and climate scientists' behaviour nonetheless.
Some have even sought to broaden their criticism to science in general. A.W. Montford, author of The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science, has grandly suggested that peer review achieves very little for society and is "not up to the job". The response of some high-profile environmental commentators has also been surprisingly visceral. Pre-empting all the inquiries, the campaigner and writer George Monbiot called for Phil Jones, who was then head of the CRU, to resign (a call he much later retracted).

The science journalist Fred Pearce - despite doing an enormous amount of work in challenging the initial media response to Climategate - has repeatedly criticised CRU researchers. "I think the emails raise questions about conflicts of interest apparently tolerated in science that would surely not be tolerated in most other professions," he said. In one email, Phil Jones expresses a desire to "keep out" two papers critical of his work from the Fourth Assessment Report of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The papers were not, in fact, excluded. But according to Pearce, "Phil Jones seemed to relish the chance to 'go to town' against those questioning his work."

In fact, it is common practice for journal editors to send papers challenging a body of work to the author responsible for that work - as experts in increasingly atomised fields, they are often in the best position to review it. The process hinges on honesty: faulty methodology is a reason to reject a paper; a personal dislike of another scientist, however, is clearly out of bounds. The appropriate criteria for making peer review judgements about another's work could - in some circumstances - include inferences about the author. "If some group of activists invent a journal, peer review it themselves, and have no intention of doing the job honestly, then of course this is relevant," states Collins, "but you'd have to set out the reasons - not just make up your mind."

Robert Evans - a colleague of Collins' at Cardiff and an expert in the sociology of knowledge and expertise - points out that these criteria are not fixed and may vary from discipline to discipline. "It depends what kind of publishing culture there is - in some fields, journals publish what are really quite daft ideas, because they feel that people have the right to take these ideas down in public; whereas in other fields, a lot of that work is done in private, in the selection process."

Of course, it is precisely these private selection processes that have come under scrutiny. There's no doubt that science up close bears little resemblance to the brave and noble empiricism of Newton and Einstein. But to claim - as Pearce and others have repeatedly - that the CRU email exchanges revealed some previously unacknowledged fault with the scientific method is hyperbole. "It might have been a good thing," suggests Evans. "Maybe all people found out was what science was actually like. It only seems as if scientists were behaving badly if you had a very idealised view of what scientists were like in the first place."

It's a strange kind of defence - innocence by appeal to mass guilt - but if Collins and Evans' analysis of what science is "really" like is accurate, then it is important to consider the implications. An uncomfortable light has been shone into the inner chambers of science's castle, and outside observers have not been impressed by what has been revealed. So is there an argument for radical reform of the institutional culture of science?
There is a movement in science towards publicly accessible data, and the archiving of databases is now common practice in many subjects. The digitisation of data and the ubiquity of the internet have ushered in a new level of expectation around public access to information - not only in science, but in global society more generally. Reflecting this, the aftermath of Climategate has seen repeated calls for climate scientists' raw data to be made available to the general public.

"I think people should be open about their data and about their methods wherever possible," says Ben Goldacre, the doctor, columnist and author of Bad Science. "If someone is making a public claim about a conclusion they have drawn from a piece of scientific research, they should be ready to be meticulous about showing their work. If someone doesn't, I find it hard to take them seriously."
The move towards open access is not only reasonable but inevitable. But for highly politicised areas of science such as climate change, there may be hidden dangers. "I'm not sure it would solve things in the way people would like," says Evans, "because the data themselves would still need to be analysed in the context of the scientific theories that give them meaning."

Collins is even more direct: "That would be a complete disaster. Analysing data and making sense of it is a very subtle business. Analysing data and getting something out of it is very easy - you can get out of it more or less what you want. There are an infinite number of ways to analyse data, and it would take an infinite amount of time to track down all the things that had gone wrong. If you allow that to happen, then you are saying goodbye to your science."

As with much of the Climategate debate, there is more at stake than climate change data. Although the perceived integrity of climate science seems to need a shot in the arm, it cannot come at the cost of a functioning scientific community. "Scientists would spend their whole lives trying to pick apart what other people had done, and the science would just grind to a halt," Collins suggests.
Throwing open complex climate science databases without due caution could amount to sacrificing climate change data on the altar of public opinion. Faced with dozens of well-publicised and smartly presented pseudo-analyses of climate change data, who other than the climate scientists themselves would be capable of sorting the wheat from the chaff?

Perhaps the answer is "citizen scientists". The notion that science should seek actively to engage with non-scientists is increasingly popular. At its best, public engagement with science can help shape the values that guide scientific enquiry, construct scientific knowledge and contribute to decisions about science funding. By determining the social and ethical implications of science, engaging with citizens can enhance the role of science in society. The movement towards more public engagement is a hugely positive development.
But are the legions of bloggers and auditors - often, but not always, ideologically motivated to find fault (real or imagined) with climate science data - really fulfilling the role of citizen scientists? Alice Bell, a lecturer in science communication at Imperial College London, has argued that successful citizen-science projects work because they offer collaborative relationships between scientists and the public - not an adversarial auditing of data on the assumption that scientists are dishonest. The bottom line is that open access can never be a panacea for a crisis of institutional trust.

Open access is based on the premise that there are those outside the inner circle of peer reviewers who are competent enough to provide a second opinion on the science. This is indisputably true. But while talk of throwing open the lab doors might be rhetorically satisfying, it would provide only an illusion of democracy. Certainly there are non-academics competent enough with statistics to find errors in a piece of published science. Correcting errors in science would be a valuable service for an auditor to offer. But if several auditors reached conflicting conclusions, then somehow a judgement would have to be made about their respective competence. And who should make that judgement? Presumably a group of suitably qualified, honest individuals with a proven track record in a relevant discipline - in other words, peer review.
Any argument for reform must contain more than just a critique of the existing system - it must also hold out the possibility of something better. Would broadening the group of people who are assigned the task of fact verification resolve the problems of peer review? Sadly, there is very little in the way of guidance for answering this question, as very few systematic studies have been conducted into the merits of peer review. Although its flaws are well documented (and have been for many years), critiques typically focus on the fact that peer review is not perfect, but struggle to identify serious alternatives.

Harry Collins' suggestions for reform include removing the anonymity of reviewers and ring-fencing a proportion of journal space for papers that generate significant controversy among reviewers (as these papers hold an interest of their own). In the Russell report, Richard Horton suggests that "the best one might hope for the future of peer review is to be able to foster an environment of continuous critique of research papers before and after publication".

There is no question that science needs to be proactive in engaging the public. There may be some role for Freedom of Information legislation to play in bringing this about. But processes of dialogue and participatory engagement seem much more promising ways for scientists and the public to interact. Citizens' juries and deliberative workshops are two tried-and-tested methods for achieving this aim.
Perhaps if any good is to come of the Climategate controversy, it will be a renewed interest in smoothing the rough edges of peer review and a greater awareness of the necessary fallibility of the scientific publishing process. However, no one seems to have any suggestions for a serious alternative. For now, like Winston Churchill's famous description of democracy, peer review is the worst option - except for all the others that have been tried.

AC

Climate change: the merchants of doubt will soon run out of steam

2010-06-28T21:11:00.000+01:00

First published on www.climatesafety.org

Last week saw the release of three university-led nationally representative surveys on public attitudes towards climate change – two in the US (1, 2) and one in the UK. In line with previous surveys from the last few years, the UK poll shows four consistent findings:

A large majority of people think the climate is changing (78%)
A large majority of people are concerned about this (71%)
A large majority support the use of tax revenue to fund low-carbon policies such as investment in renewables (68%)
A large majority of people say they are willing to reduce the amount of energy they use in order to tackle climate change (65%)

If this doesn’t sound like the findings you saw reported, or your impression of public attitudes towards climate change, then go and look up the results which are publicly available. The picture in the US is slightly different, but not drastically so, with large majorities agreeing that climate change is happening and expressing support for developing low-carbon energy infrastructure.

But what about belief in whether humans are causing climate change? Isn’t that the crucial measure of scepticism?

Intriguingly, given that the public are frequently portrayed as teetering on the brink of abandoning climate change altogether, one of the US polls recorded an increase in the number of people who believe that human activity is changing the climate (the other had no previous survey to compare with, but found that 75% acknowledged human influence on the climate).

True, the number of people who agree that climate change is largely the result of human activity is significantly lower (in the UK and the US) than it was three years ago. But given the four consistent findings outlined above, the big question has to be ‘so what’?

Consider the BBC poll conducted in February, routinely cited as the most damaging of the public opinion polls in the UK. The statistic that was widely reported and repeated was that only 26% of the public agreed that:

“Climate change is happening and is now established as largely man-made”

Seems pretty damning doesn’t it? But a further 38% agreed that:

“Climate change is happening, but not yet proven to be largely man-made”

Even in the BBC poll, at the height of everything-gate, a healthy majority accepted that the climate was changing. In the very same poll, only 11% reported being any less concerned about the risks of climate change. The BBC results are completely consistent with the fact that a majority of people are concerned about climate change – anthropogenic or not – and want something done about it.

That significant numbers of people feel confused about whether human influence is responsible for climate change is unsurprising – a great deal of effort has been expended in trying to confuse them. The parallels between the strategies of the tobacco industry in the 1960s and the tactics of ideologically driven climate sceptics today are now well documented. The tobacco companies knew that if they could create enough uncertainty around the link between smoking and lung cancer, then people would continue to consume their product. But as opinion poll after opinion poll comes in, it is starting to look like the link between belief in human-caused climate change and support for low carbon policies is nowhere near as direct.

There is no escaping the fact that there is a major disparity between the level of certainty expressed by climate scientists and by the general public about the basic facts of climate change. It seems counter-intuitive that people dispute anthropogenic climate change, but are willing to modify their behaviour to prevent it. It seems bizarre that 73% of the BBC poll respondents who had heard about ‘climategate’ and IPCC glaciers error claimed that their views about climate change had not been altered. But this is what the polls are telling us.
The merchants of doubt will soon run out of steam – for all the uncertainty they can generate about human impact on the climate, public support for mitigating climate change remains high.

AC

Pickles’ ‘big society’ recycling scheme is a nudge in the wrong direction

2010-06-28T21:08:00.000+01:00

First published on www.climatesafety.org

On the Guardian’s Comment is Free, the Communities Minister Eric Pickles has made some bold claims about ‘human nature’ in introducing the coalition’s household recycling policy. Under the new policy, householders will be rewarded for recycling with points that can be cashed in at ‘local businesses’ such as Marks and Spencer and Cineworld. Bravely summarising decades of behavioural research in just two sentences, Pickles states that:

“There are some basic truths about human nature that the previous government found hard to grasp. If you want people to do something, then it’s always much more effective to give them support and encouragement – a nudge in the right direction – than to tell them what to do and then punish them if they don’t obey.”

He later goes on to claim:

“What’s really important about this scheme is that it treats people like adults. There’s no compulsion to participate, no penalties for opting out. It works because there’s a clear incentive to get involved. You put something in, you get something back. This is the Big Society in action.”

Unfortunately, the one basic truth about human nature that Pickles overlooks is the one that seems most essential for the Big Society: people respond to what others around them are doing, and don’t just behave in a rational, individually beneficial way. If they did, far less people would play the lottery.
Much more important than any individual-level cost/benefit analysis of whether to recycle is whether a particular behaviour is seen as socially acceptable. In several psychological studies, the power of social norms has been demonstrated for environmental behaviours like recycling and home energy management. In a famous example, American researchers showed that energy-hungry households reduced their energy consumption when they had access to information about the average usage in their area. They saw their high-energy use as socially undesirable, and fell into line.
Nobody wants to be seen as the gas guzzler in a neighbourhood full of waste-watchers, so reward or punishment schemes may be missing the point if they are aimed at individuals rather than tapping into the huge potential of social comparisons to generate behaviour change. People are more likely to compete to out-do each other than they are for a few pounds off their supermarket bill, and another recent psychological study showed how important people think it is to be ‘seen to be green’. Shoppers were willing to pay a premium for products with an environmental advantage – although only if they thought that other people were watching.
But there are also deeper reasons for not creating a direct link between recycling rates and financial rewards. Studies by Tim Kasser have shown that people who are highly materialistic are the least likely to act in a pro-environmental way. Paying people to recycle promotes the very value (material gain) that is likely to inhibit more ambitious changes in behaviour, or support for policies that may in fact cost people money in low-carbon taxes.
In short, Pickles’ Big Society recycling plan has no societal component, promotes the environmentally and socially antagonistic value of individual material gain as a reason for recycling, and amounts to paying people to put out their rubbish. Is that the best the Big Society can do?

AC

Is there a “new politics” ...? and what can it do for climate change?

2010-05-31T23:56:00.000+01:00

The month of May for the UK has been dominated by the general election and arguments about the dawn of a so called “new politics.” Certainly the election results had a different look than the UK parliament has seen for a long time. A hung parliament, a new Green Party MP catch the eye as does the “new” and “historic” they tell us, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats coalition doing a policy debate, sync and regenerate exercise under the watchful gaze of the media.

And so it has gone on…this politics, that sure feels different (if you weren’t a voter in the 1970’s at least) but which hasn't proved itself yet - like a home appliance with a novel Dyson look that comes with an earnestly proffered 5 year guarantee. Post election developments fill the news agenda and the claims continue from No 10, Westminster and from some journos that we are in the grip of a New Politics of cooperation.

Do people like politicians working together? An interesting quirk of the election this time was "The Worm" the instant reaction graph that showed approval of undecided voters as the leader debates ran realtime and The Worm turned favourably for Clegg when he talked about "working together" - Obama in the US and Kevin Rudd in Australia similarly won the approval of The Worm with the same sentiments in leaders debates.

The question being asked now in the UK is what kind of working together is it? Is it a New Politics of progressive consensus building that will empower government ministers, backbench MP's, public servants and citizens or is it the old style horse trading with a layer of double gloss - blue and yellow stripes – colours for a political marriage that will fade, crack and split beyond the flashbulb honeymoon. New arrangements yes but is it a new culture? Some watching on as Cameron and Clegg share a platform will give an instinctive answer this question, others will pick through the queens speech and sit on their judgment.

However you look at this it is a sharply relevant question for action on climate change, because primarily of the policy that comes out of the coalition. It is yet also a basic conundrum of politics to which the climate change challenge more than any other needs forward progress. We need stronger consensus building, better working together to meet the challenge of climate change and straight up vested interest horse trading - the Old politics - won't do it, the lack of progress from Copenhagen showed that.

Nick Clegg is in the public gaze the embodiment of this so called “new politics” (ahead of David Laws still yet as things stand!) and his fate will probably reveal whether May has seen begun a genuinely new phase of progressive politics. And there are 2 persons whose fortunes may reveal how positive or not this new political context will be for action on climate change.

Lib Dem Chris Huhne the new energy and climate change secretary was one of David Cameron's first coalition ministers to venture into the news agenda. He told us "There are a whole series of compromises which have been struck in this agreement which I think are obviously unpleasant for each of the parties"

A refreshingly honest characterisation of cabinet and coalition politics you could say. He expressed these sentiments in the context of his explanation of the coalition policy on Nuclear power; New nuclear power stations will be built if they are funded by the private sector and Lib Dems can continue to hold to their election manifesto position of disagreeing with nuclear power generation. Huhne reconciles himself to this policy by speaking loud the belief that the private sector hasn't and probably won’t be able to build nuclear without state support - refreshing or regressive change? Ed Miliband Labour ex energy and climate change minister came up with the memorable line Huhne in his job was like “putting a vegan in charge of MacDonald’s.”

Caroline Lucas is the First Green Party MP in the Uk parliament, cheered on by many sympathizers outside and in her constituency, how can she make a difference in Parliament? Will the coalitions new politics permeate the whole of Westminster’s benches or if she wants to be more than a pressure group with a Westminster head office should Lucas roll up her sleeves harder and faster for a old style fight. Lucas provides the answer that she will be going after change on her own terms

"I passionately hope it is possible to demonstrate that you don't have to get your hands filthy in terms of doing politics."

Climate Change has been hungry for a taste of some new politics for a long time and if a progressive partnership ethos is to burst through the left right binary and horse trading Lucas as principled advocate and Huhne as government green light monitor will have to put a shift in, get noticed by us and most importantly be allowed get things done - if they don’t it may tell us that the new politics is old and the latest dawn for big strides on climate change is false.

Why Fishermen believe in climate change (and everyone else believes in overfishing)

2010-05-05T16:10:00.001+01:00

(Originally published by Adam Corner at www.climatesafety.org)

How much of what is recorded as scepticism about the scientific reality of climate change is in fact a desire for it not to be true – or at the very least, for it not to be as bad as the scientists and politicians say? This is a question that cannot easily be answered. When people are motivated not to believe something, they are also motivated not to acknowledge that their non-belief is anything other than rational. But two fishy tales shed some light on one type of climate change scepticism, and highlight an enormous challenge for climate change communicators: how do you persuade someone to believe something that they really don’t want to believe?

Fishy Tale 1

Last month in Doha, delegates at the Washington Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species voted against a ban on fishing bluefin tuna. The decision was widely condemned by environmental groups, and in The Guardian, George Monbiot described the refusal to acknowledge the critically endangered state of the bluefin tuna as:

“Olympic-class denial, a flat refusal to look reality in the face.”

Even the most casual follower of Guardian etiquette knows what happens next – when a writer uses the ‘d’ word, the comment threads fill up with red-faced, indignant micro-treatises on the inappropriateness and offensiveness of the term ‘denial’. But on this occasion, the comments were broadly supportive of Monbiot’s stance. Yes, agreed some of the very same posters who usually follow his pieces with streams of bile (hello CheshireRed), overfishing of the bluefin tuna was a serious problem and should be stopped.

Fishy Tale 2

‘Bottomfeeder’, by Taras Grescoe is a book about the overfishing and ultimate demise of many of the world’s fisheries. Combining barely-believable statistics about the collapse of once abundant oceanic ecosystems (some estimates put European fish populations at 5% of their first-recorded levels) and interviews with countless fishermen and traders in ports and harbours around the world, Grescoe builds up a bewildering picture of the world’s seas.

While the evidence is anecdotal rather than statistical, it is striking just how many of the fishermen (and it is primarily men) that Grescoe speaks to are adamant that climate change is warming their seas and driving away their catch. Their intuition that the seas are warming is supported by sea temperature data – but by far and away the biggest impact on the number of fish they are pulling out of the sea is intensive overfishing. Far fewer of Grescoe’s interviewees acknowledge this – blaming seals, foreigners, and global warming before conceding that perhaps their methods of fishing might be having an effect.

Why fishermen believe in climate change (and everyone else believes in overfishing)

So, notorious Guardian message board climate denier CheshireRed solemnly supports the protestors who seek to prevent overfishing of the bluefin tuna, and accepts that those who are responsible for the overfishing are in denial about the cause of the problem – but does not support measures to curb greenhouse gases which would (presumably) impact on his behaviour. Conversely, the fishermen responsible for overfishing happily accept climate change but doubt that their actions have any impact on the state of the world’s fisheries.

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that CheshireRed (and his message board buddies) are not sea fishermen, with a vested interest in underplaying the impact of overfishing. However, like most of us in the developed world they have a personal stake in climate change being shown to be a scam – it would eliminate the need to change our high-consuming lifestyles. Some people – for economic or ideological reasons – have a more formal desire to reject the science of climate change.

Perhaps we need to start asking some more subtle questions about belief in climate change. Combating the increasing level of climate change scepticism is high on most campaigners’ priority lists. But without a sensible grasp of the reasons for scepticism, an awful lot of effort could be expended without any discernible effect. We urgently need a typology of scepticism.

April 2010 - Going green to be seen

2010-04-04T12:24:00.005+01:00

First published in the Ethical living section of the Guardian Environment website

For most people, there is nothing quite as interesting as other people. We are incredibly well attuned to what others are doing and thinking – especially if they might be thinking about us. The choices we make speak volumes about our likes, our hates, our personalities and our social status. New research published yesterday suggests that our environmental choices are no different. Over and above the financial or environmental benefits of making low-carbon choices, we value the boost in social status this can provide – what's important is that we are seen to be going green.

Across three studies, Vladas Griskevicius and his colleagues at the University of Minnesota examined the conditions under which people selected the "green" option when provided with a choice between a regular and environmentally beneficial product. Some participants read a story about social status and "moving up in the world" before making their choice. Displaying a phenomenon known as "competitive altruism", these people opted to "self-sacrifice" and chose the environmentally friendly product, even though it was of inferior quality.

The authors of the study argued that what these participants lost in product functionality, they gained in social status. Voluntarily engaging in altruistic behaviour sends a powerful signal that you are caring and compassionate enough to take a hit for the team – and that you have the resources to act pro-socially. Previous research has shown that we take our cues for what is "normal" from those around us, and it seems that we're even prepared to "self-sacrifice" to boost our social standing. Combine these two findings and you have a powerful tool for promoting pro-environmental behaviour. As the long decarbonisation of the transport system begins, will people start competing over the efficiency rather than the acceleration of their cars?

Interestingly, participants in the study only displayed competitive altruism when they thought that others would be made aware of their choice – or when the green products were highly priced (signalling high status wealth). Coupled with the recent finding that individuals in an experiment who bought green goodies subsequently displayed more selfish behaviour, does this undermine the seemingly selfless nature of altruistic, pro-environmental behaviour?

The study certainly provides a window on the psychological basis of greenwash. When people make a consumer decision they buy into the idea of the product as much as the product itself. Unfortunately, the "idea" of sustainability can be a remarkably effective way of shifting patently unsustainable goods, and left to their own devices, people will compete to outdo each other on whatever criteria happen to be around. Flying to an eco-trek in Peru? I'll take two please.

Confronted with a problem like climate change, our consumption-based economy responds in the only way it knows how – by selling sustainability like it sells soap. But while a desire to be "seen to be green" clearly leaves us vulnerable to the dubious motives of commercial marketing campaigns (not to mention some ribbing down the pub), harnessing the primal urge for social status is critical for promoting pro-environmental behaviours that are more substance than spin. We may currently compete through demonstrations of conspicuous material consumption, but material goods are simply a marker for social status. It's the social status that's important – and the markers we use to signify it can easily change.

Griskevicius and his colleagues suggest that visible signs, tags and badges are an important aid for signalling to others that a particular behaviour is not just common, but desirable. Several studies in America have found that rates of recycling were boosted when householders were asked to make a public commitment to recycle, rather than just get on with it quietly.

But paying attention to the social aspects of how and why people take action to protect the environment goes far deeper than displaying a pro-recycling window sticker. Many environmental messages focus on what others should be doing, but time might be better spent setting a positive example and letting the social status that comes with altruistic behaviour do the hard work.

No one likes to be told what to do, but few of us can resist the temptation to get one over on the Joneses. And if what the Joneses are doing happens to be good for the environment, then being green to be seen might not be such a bad thing after all.

AC
Photo by Michael Meiklejohn

March 2010 - Translating Science

2010-03-25T12:02:00.000Z

Earlier this year the Centre for Research on Environmental Decisions at Columbia University published a guide to The Psychology of Climate Change Communication. My favourite bit is a table of 'words with different meanings to scientists and the general public'. Here are some of them (science term first, followed by non-science interpretation):

Uncertainty = Not knowing

Error = Wrong, Incorrect

Bias = Unfair and deliberate distortion

Positive Trend = A good trend

Positive Feedback = Constructive criticism

Theory = A hunch, opinion, speculation

Manipulation = Exploitation

Values = Ethics, money

Scheme = Conspiracy

While this is probably something of a caricature of how people interpret these words, there's an important message in here for climate change communication - don't assume that people interpret specialist terminology in the same way you do!

March 2010 - Climate sceptics give scepticism a bad name

2010-03-19T18:49:00.000Z

>>>>Originally published in the Guardian Environment Blog on 22/02/10
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/feb/22/climate-change-sceptics

In January a group of self-declared "sceptics" hit the headlines with an attention-grabbing publicity stunt. If you instinctively interpret that sentence as a reference to the battle-scarred topic of climate change, then it is a mark of how successfully those opposed to the scientific consensus on climate change have appropriated the term sceptic".

In fact, the event in question is the mass homeopathy "overdose" staged by the Merseyside Skeptics. Do the Merseyside Skeptics (and hundreds of other groups like them) share much common ground with the army of Freedom of Information requesters currently swarming around climate science databases? Or could it be that climate change sceptics are giving wider scepticism a bad name?

Over the past three months climate change scepticism seems to have reached new levels. The Guardian's investigation into the emails hacked from the University of East Anglia has shone a rather uncomfortable light into the sock-drawer of science. But it has revealed nothing that challenges the fact that the climate is changing – or that human activity is responsible. Trust has been diminished, embarrassing exchanges have been revealed, but the clunking wheels of the anti-climate change lobby have gone into overdrive, falsely claiming that the case for human-caused climate change has been discredited.

Climate change sceptics often position themselves as the antidote to the hysterical, exaggerated claims of climate scientists and environmentalists, adopting the tools and language of "rational enquiry". But something is missing from this picture - where are the voices of the truly sceptical thinkers that the climate sceptics claim to represent?

The website of the long-running US magazine Skeptic describes scepticism as a method rather than a position, and one that is embodied in the scientific method. A search of the magazine's online archives reveals not one article disputing the science of climate change. However, there are several debunking unsubstantiated claims that climate change sceptics have made. The not-for-profit organisation UK Skeptics is even less welcoming to climate sceptics, with a helpful note stating:

We are nothing to do with opposition, activist, or denialist groups who wrongly refer to themselves as 'skeptics' because they adopt a position of non-belief (eg global warming skeptics, vaccine skeptics, etc).

The distinction between scepticism and non-belief is a crucial one. While scepticism is healthy, non-belief in the face of overwhelming evidence is the antipathy of scepticism. Recent climate scepticism has been characterised by a visceral mistrust of science, scientific institutions and scientific governance. Never mind that the case for climate change has been painstakingly pieced together over decades – climate change sceptics are busy writing it off on the basis of a few inconsistencies.

But embarrassingly for climate change sceptics, the people who have thought longest and hardest about what it means to be a truly sceptical thinker seem in a hurry to distance themselves from their fellow sceptics. Michael Marshall, from the Merseyside Skeptics group that organised the homeopathy overdose is clear about the legitimacy of climate change sceptics: "In our view, climate change sceptics are not sceptics. A sceptic looks at the available evidence and makes a decision, and for homeopathy the evidence is that it doesn't work. But the sceptical position on climate change is that it is happening."

John Jackson, from UK Skeptics, agreed, added: "Terms like "climate change sceptic" are very damaging to scepticism - basically because this is not what scepticism is. We often get people calling us, referring to themselves as climate sceptics, but we argue with them. We accept global warming because the evidence is overwhelming."

With trust in climate change and climate science rapidly dwindling, statements such as these could become incredibly powerful. Here are groups of intelligent, rational, scientifically literate, independent and sceptical thinkers, directly contradicting the view of the so-called climate sceptics. Debate continues about whether "denier" is an appropriate term for those who oppose the climate science consensus. But it seems clear that "sceptic" is no better – the sceptics themselves reject the climate contrarians' claim to their title.

Along with preachy eco-warriors and morally bankrupt politicians, climate scientists are in danger of being added to the list of sources that aren't trusted to communicate climate change. Perhaps it is time for the silent army of rational thinkers to stand up for the science. They could be the one authoritative group that could argue the climate change case – and all from a position of scepticism.

February 2010: Talking the Walk on climate change

2010-02-11T10:47:00.000Z

The influential think tank Green Alliance today launched a report aimed at helping politicians communicate more effectively with the electorate about climate change. Written by experts in the field of climate change communication, there are a wide range of views on display. Unfortunately, the authors are in agreement on only one thing: the way that climate change is currently communicated is not really working.

At first glance, advice on how to ‘communicate’ climate change sounds like nothing more than marketing speak – window dressing to disguise an unpopular message. But the perspectives in the Green Alliance report make clear that communicating about climate change goes much deeper than an ‘eco’ prefix. As public support for strong action on climate change becomes more fragile by the day, the way that climate change is presented is more important than ever.

One reason that climate change communication matters is because people are experts at reading between the lines. Senior political figures routinely (and accurately) refer to climate change as the greatest threat facing society. But, as Ian Christie argues in the Green Alliance report, the public often receive very mixed messages from Government. Putting on an extra jumper just doesn’t seem to square with the scale of the problem. People are not stupid. They can tell that either climate change is the greatest threat facing society or putting on an extra jumper is an appropriate response – both can’t be true. As Christie puts it, “If things are as bad as they are said to be, where are the emergency measures?”

Similarly, the campaign strategist Chris Rose argues that attempts at engaging the public on climate change suffer from a lack of clear, visual evidence that ‘something is being done’. While the British government can legitimately claim to be world-leading in terms of legislation and policy for a low-carbon future, much of the good work that has already happened has been invisible – changes to the emissions trading market and improvements in the fuel mix used to generate electricity. What is missing is high profile, high impact pictures of ordinary communities and their shiny new (cooperatively owned) wind turbine.

George Marshall, of the Climate Outreach and Information Network (COIN) suggests that who delivers a message about climate change can be as important as what they say. Politicians, environmentalists and journalists are consistently rated among the least trusted figures in society – yet they routinely dominate the public narrative on climate change. The people who are rated as most trustworthy are those that are ‘like us’. Unsurprisingly, we are far more likely to listen to our friends and our peers than a preachy eco-warrior or a morally bankrupt politician.

COIN is currently working with thousands of members of Trade Unions in England to develop a story about climate change that makes sense from a union perspective. Historically, the Trade Union movement has been a voice for the disempowered – so what role is there for Trade Unionism in empowering those under threat from climate change? Projects like these are vital for transferring ownership of climate change away from the eco-classes and the angry, red-faced sceptics. A trusted colleague using terms we understand and examples that resonate with our lives can make climate change seem less like a threat and more like a shared challenge – but it’s got to come from the right person.

Of course, there’s no hiding the fact that some actions are simply incompatible with a low-carbon future. Building a new runway at Heathrow is a clear signal to the public that there’s nothing to worry about – that climate change takes second place to economic growth. People are very sensitive to hypocrisy and inconsistency, and those hesitating about whether to make changes in their personal lives will only be put off by powerfully symbolic policies such as these. No amount of clever communication can make a new runway a sustainable transport policy, and rightly so. Communicating climate change more effectively means finding ways of making the topic of climate change more easily accessible to everyone – not employing greenwash to mask a lie.

The long, slow process of decarbonising the energy supply and reducing energy demand has already begun, and before long, oil scarcity and energy security will force our hand. Future generations may look back in bewilderment at our procrastination. But of all the barriers to a low-carbon future, it would be a dark irony if an inability to communicate climate change beyond the usual suspects was the most difficult to overcome.

January 2010: Do you believe in climate change?

2010-01-21T14:45:00.000Z

First published at http://climatesafety.org/do-you-believe-in-climate-change/

Do you believe in climate change?

It is an increasingly familiar formula – a climate poll is released, the results are interpreted and analysed, and both sides claim victory. The initial analyses are inevitably the ones that scream ‘controversy’, while more considered accounts emerge at a later date. But while the polls may tell us something about public opinion, what do they tell us about climate change?

The celebrated philosopher of language Paul Grice formulated a now famous set of rules, or ‘maxims’ to explain how people make inferences. According to Grice, sentences and conversations obey a simple set of rules that allow us to make sense of what people are saying (e.g. be informative, be relevant, say as much – but only as much – as you need). For example, if you were to receive a reference letter supporting an application for an administrative post that stated ‘Chris is polite and punctual’ but omitted to mention his administrative skills, what would you infer? Nothing negative was said about Chris, but from what wasn’t said, you infer that Chris might not be the best man for the job. Grice’s maxims dictate that if there was something else positive to say about Chris, you would say it – as it would be relevant and informative. The writer of the letter knows this, and so does the reader. Grice’s legacy is that there is an enormous amount of work going on behind the scenes when we read, speak or write a sentence. We are experts at reading between the lines.

What, then, is the implication of repeatedly asking the public, in opinion poll after opinion poll, whether they believe in climate change? Our internal inference-making machine tells us that this must be a relevant question to ask – as otherwise people would not be asking it. Almost by definition, opinion polls concern ‘controversial’ topics. Questions where there is consensus about the answer simply don’t get posed over and over again – which is why no-one solicits our opinions on whether smoking causes lung cancer. But despite an unequivocal statement of consensus from the scientific community that human activity is exacerbating and accelerating climate change, we are regularly pestered for our endorsement of this fact. The very act of asking the public whether they believe in climate change presupposes that this is a question that does not have a settled answer.

Of course, there are many questions about climate change that do not have a settled answer. What is a ‘safe’ level at which to stabilise greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? How many climate change refugees will there be in 2050? Scientists, politicians and demographers can make attempts to quantify answers to these questions, but there is not an absolute consensus. Therefore, while most of us have no particular expertise with which to answer them, they seem reasonable questions to ask. Our answers might be implausible, inaccurate or mis-informed – but at least they are questions which have not already been comprehensively answered.

For sure, there is a steady and respectable stream of academic research that seeks to understand what the public know about climate change, and how attitudes towards it are changing. Typically, this sort of research is aimed at documenting the gap between public and scientific opinion on climate change. It seeks to understand why people are sceptical about climate change, and proposes strategies for increasing people’s environmental awareness and behaviour. This kind of research is an essential tool for increasing public engagement with climate change, although too often its findings are fed into the denial industry’s fact-mangling machines. Research expressing concern about an increase in scepticism is trumpeted as ‘more evidence’ that climate change is a scam – or the researchers involved are accused of “blurring the lines between research and activism”.

It is precisely this sleight of hand that makes the reporting of climate change opinion polls so problematic. First, the public are badgered for their opinion about the climate change ‘controversy’. Their responses are then used as evidence of this controversy – but what gets lost is that these are two very different controversies. The first is false and entirely manufactured – there is no scientific controversy about whether human activity causes climate change. The second is genuine but no less manufactured – there is substantial controversy about whether people believe in climate change (although, as this article makes clear there is still a clear majority of people who understand that climate change is occurring). But is it any surprise that there is controversy when the Daily Telegraph publishes wilfully misleading articles asking “Are you a climate sceptic? Does the current cold snap have any bearing on the climate change debate?” The Telegraph team understand perfectly well the distinction between weather and climate, but they choose to blur the lines to stoke the fires of climate change denial. Just posing the question presupposes that the answer is in dispute. Manufactured evidence of public uncertainty is splattered like mud over climate change research, so that even the clearest statements of scientific fact become obscured by the dubious wisdom of message board lynch mobs.

There is much to be said about the motivations for conducting non-academic research into public opinion on climate change. Some of it is undoubtedly well-meaning, but polls commissioned by newspapers are only looking for one thing: controversy. That isn’t to say that news outlets wouldn’t be happy with the ‘controversial’ finding that 100% of people accept climate change is real. But most of the time, the controversy is found by contrasting public opinion with the claims of the IPCC, or government policy. Of course, the extent to which people support a particular policy on climate change is a completely legitimate and necessary question to ask. Politics is a popularity contest – but science is not. This is the second major distinction that is routinely blurred in discussions of attitudes towards climate change: scepticism about climate change (the process), and dispute over its implications.

What climate change will mean for our lives – for society – is completely up for grabs. Here, disputes divide down long-running ideological lines. Some distrust the very concept of a global political agreement – and perhaps with good reason. Political agreements have a habit of being ineffective and inequitable. But the fact that there is rampant distrust of politics and politicians cannot be a reason to be sceptical about climate change. How much of the reported public scepticism towards climate change is in fact simply a good old fashioned rejection of political/corporate sincerity, coupled with an unwillingness to accept lifestyle changes?

Academic research is well placed to answer these sorts of questions, and is starting to do exactly that. But the headline screaming ‘scepticism on the increase’ tells us very little – other than that whether or not climate change is ‘real’ is a question that doesn’t have a settled answer. There is no controversy about whether human activity causes climate change. So why are we still asking the question?

December 2009 – Environmental Heroes and Villains in 2009

2009-12-31T19:45:00.000Z

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

December 2009 - Copenhagen: A political or personal failure?

2009-12-21T17:46:00.000Z

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

November 2009 - A Meaningful Numbers Game?

2009-11-29T22:31:00.000Z

Iraq is again in the UK headlines because of another Inquiry into the contentious war, and the Chilcot inquiry’s analysis of the lead up to war is a reminder of the substantial debate generated during that period and the thousands of people who took to the streets in protest. Looking back at the world-shaping events from the first half of the decade inevitably (for a blog such as this anyhow) leads to comparison with the upcoming December Copenhagen UN climate summit - a potential world shaper at the death of the 00’s. And the question arises, what will be the impact of the public and NGO pressure on the decision makers in Copenhagen?

This is of course, on the face of it, an inescapably depressing comparison to make because in the case of Iraq a worldwide mobilisation of public and political opposition didn’t stop the invasion. Yet for those who are seriously optomistic and can see a glass half full at forty paces, there maybe lessons and (fractured) shards of hope from the Iraq experience. What there was a was widespread and energetic noise on Iraq that didn’t go away and calcified into consensus (all be it too late), in light of the evidence and outcome, that “i/we/they were right after all... it was a bad idea.”

Next month on the 5th of December The Wave takes place in London with thousands of people aiming to push world leaders in Copenhagen for a fair deal that straightforwardly aims to address the problem of climate change. A week later and thousands more will be protesting on the streets of Copenhagen itself. The people protesting have to hope that the numbers are high and the numbers will count.

A lot of the press coverage of Copenhagen in November has focused on people, that is, the world leaders playing down of the likelihood of a legally binding deal and speculating which of them is going to be there. The German Media group Deutsche Welle reported 65 Leaders were coming and since then Obama (a man with impressive numbers 1.8 million people came to his inauguration) has confirmed as has Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao.

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,4917171,00.html?maca=en-en_nr-1893-xml-atom

Numbers in the room will be important. Obama says he’s going to get an “operational deal” and gain momentum from the summit, the implication of course is as reported there won’t be a legally binding deal. Numbers on the streets outside may not secure a legally binding deal (which would be a inescapably disappointing) but could influence the force of the momentum Obama says he wants to generate.

At the Chilcot inquiry this week Sir Christopher Meyer said the "unforgiving timetable" for the invasion meant that the momentum gained by public and world political pressure didn’t have time to count on Iraq. In the week that has seen Norway opening a prototype plant capable of generating power through osmosis. Here’s hoping that people in the streets and the noise has a lingering effect that counts in time.
http://www.businessgreen.com/business-green/news/2253903/norway-debuts-world-first

TF

November 2009 - TINA rides again...

2009-11-20T15:27:00.000Z

FIRST PUBLISHED ON www.climatesafety.org

A recent report by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IoME) boldly declared that the UK had already failed in its quest to prevent dangerous climate change:

“With only four decades to go, the UK is already losing the climate change mitigation battle. The greenhouse gas emission targets set by the Government require a rate of reduction that has never been achieved by even the most progressive nations in the world. If the UK is realistically going to reach an outcome equivalent to a reduction of 80% by 2050, we need to start mapping out an alternative solution using all engineering methods possible and not only relying on mitigation.” http://www.imeche.org/about/keythemes/environment/Climate+Change/MAG

Can you see where this is going yet? Yes, despite (or maybe because) of the imminent Copenhagen negotiations – still the world’s best chance at initiating a package of mitigation measures to prevent dangerous climate change – the engineers have written off the prospect of the UK achieving its targets. The only way, say the engineers, of remedying this situation is to consider ‘all engineering methods possible’. They might want to modify that to read ‘all engineering methods possible and not yet possible’, because what they mean is geoengineering, advocating what they call a Mitigation, Adaptation and Geoengineering (MAG) approach to climate change.

Geoengineering is the large scale, intentional manipulation of the earth’s climate. Several different approaches have been suggested, ranging from the blasting of trillions of tiny mirrors into space, to the depositing of nanoparticles of iron filings in the sea. The hope is that these arch-industrial strategies will reduce temperatures by deflecting sunlight (space mirrors) or absorbing CO2 (iron filings in the sea). All the technologies are as yet unproven, and there are significant and considerable concerns about the social and ethical implications of geoengineering. Who will decide what gets geoengineered and when? What about the potential for international conflict? Will it act as a giant distraction from mitigation? Is it a massively lucrative form of geopolitical dominance?

While it is no surprise to find the IoME offering a gung-ho endorsement of the prospect of a planet covered with climate change-fighting machines, what is worrying is the way in which they make their argument – we have already lost the fight against climate change, and so There Is No Alternative (TINA).

TINA was last seen adorning Margaret Thatcher’s pale blue suit like a lapel of honour. According to the free market ideology she endorsed, there was no alternative to neoliberal capitalism – and so we might as well open wide and glug it down like the well behaved non-society we were. TINA sometimes masqueraded as the Washington Consensus – the now discredited economic imperialism of the United States. In whatever guise TINA appeared, however, she had a similar effect – to draw artificial boundaries around the acceptable lines of debate. The IoME have made good use of its falsely dichotomous appeal – do you want dangerous climate change, or do you want geoengineering?

The TINA argument is all the more concerning given the outrageous back-peddling on climate policy currently being exhibited by the UK and the US. With both Miliband and Obama issuing dismissals of the possibility of legally binding agreement at Copenhagen, the TINA argument for approaches like geoengineering becomes stronger. Just like the neoliberal enthusiasts of the 1980s, advocates of geoengineering can point to the failure of the alternatives and conclude that draconian measures are needed. This is all the more reason for politicians such as Miliband and Obama not to frighten the horses by declaring the December negotiations (legally) dead in the water.

Of course, TINA was always a fallacy. But the simple act of repeating it helped to ensure that it became prophetic. Similarly, the gradual mainstreaming of the notion that ‘Copenhagen is already dead’ or the idea that ‘UK climate change targets have already failed’ will make them more likely to become true. What is ‘impossible’ is constantly and continually redefined by society. It is absurd, not two years into the UK climate change targets, to write them off as ‘impossible’. What could that possibly mean?

The engineers say that meeting the targets would require emissions reductions on a scale not yet achieved by any industrialised nation. But what did they think it was going to require? Of course preventing dangerous climate change will take us into new, uncharted, unprecedented waters: The challenge is to ensure that global and national agreements on climate change are equitable and fair. Arguing that the UK cannot possibly meet its mitigation targets without geoengineering is like refusing to stop gorging on a cake while demanding that a machine is invented that can perform colonic irrigation as we continue to eat.

We don’t have to keep eating the cake. There Is An Alternative.

AC

October 2009 - Money money money

2009-10-30T13:38:00.000Z

First published on the Climate Safety blog, on 27/09/09 http://climatesafety.org/money-money-money/

A recent report by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) asked what it would take for action on climate change to be ‘mainstreamed’ . The IPPR conducted research with ‘Now’ people – perceived as leaders of public opinion and a supposed barometer for the acceptability of behavioural norms. A key conclusion was that for these trend-setters to change their behaviour, there would have to be something in it for them. That something, according to the IPPR, was the promise of financial gain for their adventures in sustainability.

On the Climate Safety blog, Tim Holmes has already questioned some of the methodological assumptions of the study, and the predictable media response to it . But there is a further problem with the logic of the report that raises a serious communication challenge for environmental campaigners: Using money as a motivator of sustainable behaviour simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

First things first – no-one is denying that financial considerations are not an enormous influence on behaviour. They clearly are – every time you decide to get up extra-early to get a cheaper train, you are making a decision based on how much it costs you. The findings of the IPPR report back this up. Their participants expressed a desire to save money, and felt that the prospect of saving money would make them more likely to engage in sustainable behaviour.

So – people do things because of financial reasons, and would be more likely to be green if it saved them money. Why not give the people what they want? Tell the world that saving energy will save them money!

There’s only one slight problem with this insight – sustainable behaviour doesn’t always come cheap. Certainly, there are times when saving energy also saves money (in general using less means spending less). But there are plenty of green behaviours that cannot easily be packaged as financially attractive. Taking the train to the Costa Del Sol is not cheaper than flying there – the low-carbon choice is not always the low-cost option. In the future we might hope that the ‘polluter pays’ principle is accurately reflected in the prices of the world’s commodities, but for now being green isn’t necessarily the cheapest game in town. It’s a tough sell during a recession, which is what the IPPR study found. But what’s the alternative – to lie?

Of course, you might imagine that once people have started ‘going green’ (tempted into some sustainable behaviours by the prospect of saving money), a momentum will be created that will propel them into other green actions – even if they’re not so cost effective. However, as Tom Crompton at the WWF has documented in detail, this assumption is something of a myth . Some key social-psychological theories and empirical evidence simply do not support the idea that people will spontaneously progress from ‘simple and painless’ behaviour changes to less simple (and perhaps more financially painful) steps in the future. If anything, the reinforcement of the link between saving money and sustainable behaviours is likely to act as a barrier to further changes in the future – when the money saving stops, so does the behaviour.

And as if it wasn’t bad enough that the link between saving money and saving the environment was tenuous, evidence from studies conducted by Ken Sheldon in the US suggests that people with materialistic values (that is, people who value money, possessions, and power) are the least likely to engage in environmental behaviour . In an experiment where people could divide up environmental resources in whichever way they chose, highly materialistic people exhibited more environmentally destructive behaviour. Unfortunately, emphasising the link between money and sustainable behaviour fails on every level.

So – what’s the alternative? The solution advocated by Tom Crompton, Joe Brewer and other contributors to the Identity Campaigning website is to promote so-called ‘intrinsic’ motivations for engaging in environmental behaviour (such as the interconnectedness of humans and nature) – because this will lead to longer lasting and more embedded behavioural changes . This approach is appealing, as it is difficult to dispute that if more people led lives that were based on respecting the environment and valuing nature, pro-environmental behaviour would be more prevalent.

However, while this vision of value-based sustainability is a desirable goal, attempting to translate it into reality is a challenge. Governments and NGOs are wary of being seen to dictate values to the electorate (never mind that the values of consumption-based growth are promoted every second of every day – they’re so embedded in the fabric of society they’re invisible). And on a practical level, its awkward and unfamiliar for most people (campaigners or otherwise) to link mundane behaviours like driving a car to abstract concepts like ‘valuing nature’ or ‘intrinsic motivations’.

There is a compromise which acknowledges that money matters in people’s decision-making, but doesn’t constantly crank-up the link between saving money and sustainable behaviour. The fact is that people will work out for themselves whether something is in their financial interest – they don’t need campaigners to do it for them. Far better is to use money more subtly – by removing financial barriers to behaviour change (such as governments offering subsidised loft or cavity wall insulation).

The message here is not that installing insulation will save you money (although it will), or that the reason for caring about climate change is that it will be good for your wallet. It is that green intentions will be reciprocated by the government. Here the lower cost encourages participation, but doesn’t reduce sustainable behaviour to a cost-benefit analysis that in the long run is doomed to fail. The idea of reciprocation also fits in well with the sort of values that are linked with pro-environmental behaviour – people who care about fairness also tend to care about the environment.

We cant ignore the fact that money motivates behaviour, but we can approach it in a more sophisticated way. We know that people are constrained by financial concerns, but that promoting the link between saving money and saving the environment is problematic in the long run. Could the idea of reciprocation permit both of these issues to be addressed?

October 2009 - Psychology & Climate Change

2009-10-26T22:57:00.001Z

>>>>first published on the Guardian website, 26/09/09
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2009/oct/26/psychology-of-climate-change
From 10:10 to the government's Act On CO2 campaign, it is now widely accepted that tackling climate change will require tackling behaviour change too. But until now, a key piece has been missing from the puzzle – psychology. The study of human behaviour has been conspicuous by its absence from the climate change debate.

The assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have provided the scientific evidence of human impact on the climate, and a glimpse of what the future may hold if we don't act fast. But while the consensus may be growing on the need for changes in behaviour, we're no closer to understanding how we're going to do it. Attempting an unprecedented shift in human behaviour without the input of psychologists is like setting sail for a faraway land without the aid of nautical maps.

Psychological research shows that most people in the UK don't feel personally threatened by climate change because it is vague, abstract and difficult to visualise. This means that doomsday scenarios and apocalyptic language are unlikely to work – although fear can motivate behaviour change, it only works when people feel personally vulnerable. Clearly, exaggerating the threat of climate change is not an option. So how can climate change be made more relevant to people's lives?

In the dusty journals and leather-bound books of university libraries lie decades of psychological research on human behaviour. Why are habits so difficult to change? Do people make decisions based on rational criteria, or impulse and intuition? Why do people tend to unnecessarily fear some risks, yet inadvisably discount others? These are all questions that will become increasingly pertinent as the transition to a low-carbon future progresses.

Fortunately, climate change is starting to be acknowledged by social scientists on both sides of the Atlantic. Earlier this year, the American Psychological Association published an extensive review of psychology's contribution to tackling climate change. And on 27 October, the British Psychological Society will hold its inaugural meeting on the psychology of climate change. From the language used to describe climate change, to the ways in which habits are made and broken, the signs are that psychology holds the key to driving the shift to sustainability.

An American study played people recordings of actors delivering speeches about climate change. The version that people responded to the best talked about "air pollution" rather than "climate change" – because pollution is something visible that they could relate to, with strong connotations of dirtiness and poor health. Climate change is about much more than just dirty air, but finding ways of making climate change more visible is critical. People simply don't worry about things they can't see (or even imagine).

One approach that has been used to increase the amount that people use public transport breaks down habits into simple "if… then" plans. To change a habitual behaviour, a person has to identify a goal (drive less, for example), a behaviour they want to perform in pursuit of that goal (get the bus to work on Fridays) and a situation that will trigger the behaviour (having enough time to catch the bus). In this example, if it's Thursday evening, then the alarm needs to be set for a different time, and if it's Friday morning, then have a quick shower instead of a long bath. Thinking about behaviour in these terms is unfamiliar – but even the most well-intentioned goals are doomed to fail without a strategy for achieving them.

Of course, some people are wary of committing themselves to changes in their personal behaviour. They argue that political agreements and technological advances will do more to reduce greenhouse gases than anything an individual could achieve. But while it is comforting to draw sharp distinctions between politics, technology and individuals, the reality is that human behaviour underpins it all. Political parties will not pass legislation that is patently unpopular among the electorate. Technology can provide low-carbon alternatives like electric buses. But a zero-emissions bus will have zero passengers unless people decide to use it.

Household insulation has been rightly prioritised by policymakers as a key area where individual-level changes can play a significant role in reducing carbon emissions. But as Alexa Spence and Nick Pidgeon from Cardiff University argue in a forthcoming paper in the journal Environment, changes in household insulation depend on some key behavioural assumptions. In particular, the overheating of residential buildings has to become socially unacceptable, and people will have to be motivated to make changes to their home heating routines. Spence and Pidgeon suggest that periods of transition, where routines are already in flux, provide useful opportunities to develop new, more sustainable habits. In the context of home insulation, some building work already scheduled for the house might provide not only the practical opportunity for some low-carbon upgrades, but also the perfect psychological context for making some long-intended changes to habits and routines.

If the thought of psychologically informed lifestyle change campaigns sounds a bit too Big Brother for your liking, then consider the alternative: millions of pounds spent on technology that is never taken up, and a market-based system of economic coercion that penalises the poor while the rich keep polluting. Without an understanding of what drives people's environmental behaviour, the dream of a low-carbon society will remain forever out of reach.

September 2009 - 10% …but what kind? The Disconnection between Private and Public Action.

2009-09-30T13:45:00.000+01:00

10% is the figure of the moment in UK Politics. First of all Fanny Armstrong’s 10:10 campaign, which calls on individuals and organisations to cut 10% of their carbon in 2010, has caught on with the political community - On september the 3rd the Guardian reported that the cabinet, the Conservative front bench and Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg had all signed up http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/sep/03/cabinet-signs-up-10-10

Also while the Baby-kissers pledge to cut their personal carbon, that 10% figure is also the one circulating (from the mouths of MP's and the pages of leaked treasury memos) for the probable amount of public spending cuts needed in 2010 - when (as all the 3 main parties appear to see it) the current, recession-busting financial stimulus ends and the belt tightening begins.

It is fair to say both these 10 % agendas have gathered a snowball like momentum over the last few months. Back in June Tory Andrew Lansley, the Shadow Health Secretary, was first to admit (as he saw it) the necessity of 10% cuts in public spending and at the time it was reported as a big gaffe http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23705988-brown-corners-cameron-on-tory-spending-cuts-gaffe.do;jsessionid=D3B77BCC42206E3E72FFA19E4A9FCBBB.

Now at the end of september 10% cuts are promoted routinely by the Conservative front bench and if leaked treasury documents are to be believed Labour have also adopted the 10% agenda. This journey for deep (or “savage” as the Nick Clegg describes them) spending cuts from “nasty” to “necessary” Seumas Milne for one has described as a “a brilliant political manoeuvre” by the Conservative opposition. So despite Brown being elusive on his figures and public polls showing as unconvinced on the necessity of cuts the notion of 10% is still in forward motion through government westminster and local authorities. http://www.lgcplus.com/finance/recession/public-in-denial-about-spending-cuts/5006509.article.

10:10’s growth started with an idea from Fanny Armstrong the director of the Film Age of Stupid, which also has a run away momentum of its own kicking off with the UK premier back in March building to the Global Premier this month. Evidently 10:10 has penetrated the “politico-media sphere” supported as it is by the guardian and endorsed even by telegraph journalists.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthcomment/6223936/1010---why-I-have-decided-to-sign-up-and-save-the-planet.html

However importantly what has not been evident are clear links between these two “runaway’ 10% agendas. There have not been clear political and media narratives saying saving public cash can also save public carbon. For example the spectrum of views on cuts in public spending in a Five Live radio talk show this month ran across conventional right to left lines with some advocating cuts and some arguing for continued public spending - with all arguments geared to the best way to re-stimulate growth. There was no carbon aware contribution to the discussion.

We know that carbon smart policies could have been linked more fundamentally to spending policy the global fiscal stimulus while it still lasts could and should already have prioritised investment to bring about the so called “Green New Deal” (discussed many times on this blog). A Green New Deal would prepare the ground for doing the belt tightening (that our party politicians tell us is is inevitable) while making the argument for carbon sustainable economic futures.

Green New Deal or not it still appears to be an anomaly that we now accept fairly readily the notion of saving money and cutting carbon at the same time in the private sphere but not so in the public sphere. The media narratives about cutting carbon so often appear to be about spending more cash (on renewables etc). Of course this spending is essential but it can be done by diverting public money away from carbon heavy public spending items and cost saving cuts (or efficiencies as Brown and co like to call them) such as reducing carbon heavy travel and food waste. Ultimately didn’t government economist Nicholas Stern tell us that in the long term cutting carbon is a saver - he said the cost of our inaction will be more than the cost of the action.

The 10:10 campaign asks for sign ups from individuals but also business’s and organisations, and one great big sign up for them is Royal Mail. On that theme also a positive move in September was the Lib Dems passing a conference motion for Lib Dem run local councils to sign up to 10:10. The same party conference also endorsed an end to taxpayer support for investments in high-polluting fuels like tar sands extraction http://peopleandplanet.org/navid8316

Many individuals experience the sense of disconnection between the action they take at home and the carbon usage of their places of work but people at the top, middle and bottom of organisations need to start to “own” the carbon spend in their daily shared enterprise whether its an airline or a school. It follows from all of this that politicians need to account for the carbon in there departments/offices/realms of influence to always be stepping beyond personal commitments, like signing up as an individual to 10:10, which have a useful symbolic significance but are at best misleading if those politicians are not taking the required 10% action in their public roles.

TF

September 2009 - What are we going to do at Copenhagen (part II)

2009-08-31T09:39:00.001+01:00

Some possible answers:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/table/2009/aug/05/climate-change-ngo-copenhagen

August 2009 - What are we going to do at Copenhagen?

2009-08-18T10:16:00.000+01:00

Oh, to be a member of the anti-vivisection movement. OK, so standing in the rain on a Saturday afternoon handing out pictures of tortured animals is no-one's idea of fun. But at least their purposes are well defined: they want an end to animal testing. And how would they know when they had succeeded? When animal testing was banned across the world.

By comparison, to be a climate change campaigner is to gradually accept that there is no single 'goal' towards which you are aiming, and that even if there was, you would have no real way of knowing that it has been achieved. Of course, there are any number of climate change campaigns with specific targets, and at Copenhagen, campaigners will push for the United Nations Delegates to agree to keep global temperatures to less than 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels. But in general, the green movement has a problem: its not obvious what we're campaigning for.

The upcoming Copenhagen negotiations make this all too clear. Thousands of campaigners will descend on the conference. I will probably be one of them. But when we are there, what will we do? At the rarefied level of international negotiations, we find not a global problem waiting to be solved but a jumbled projection of human problems rolled into one. Powerful commercial interests will lobby for exemptions from emissions reductions. Corrupt governments will seek to leverage more power from regulatory authority. Opportunistic investors will invent financial instruments to cash in on carbon markets. These are all problems that a global cap on greenhouse gas emissions will do nothing to alleviate. So what are we fighting for - an idealised level of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations? Preventing a 2 degree rise in global temperatures means nothing without an equitable mechanism for making this happen.

Are we for or against carbon trading? Is the scheme to reduced emissions from deforestation and degredation (REDD) a way of preserving the Amazon or a land-grab? Should the world be investing in high-tech infrastructure to adapt to inevitable climate change or throwing everything we've got into stopping any more from happening? These are questions that climate change campaigners have opinions on - the problem is, our opinions often differ.

In an eye-opening piece in the Guardian earlier this week, Andy Beckett asked why the political Left had not seized the opportunity presented to them by the global recession and the exposure of laissez-faire capitalism for the cut-throat casino that it is. The conclusion he reached was depressingly familiar: there simply isn't a coherent set of ideas that can wrestle power away from growth-based capitalism. Despite being exposed as a delusional sham, it remains - for all intents and purposes - the only game in town: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/aug/17/left-politics-capitalism-recession

Beckett pondered whether the increasing political focus on climate change and environmental sustainability would provide some structure for the Left's shapeless ideas. But if the Left are looking to the Green movement for an ideological framework, then they've come to the wrong place: as Mike Hulme powerfully demonstrates in his book Why We Disagree about Climate Change, this is a place for all of humanity's previous disputes and disagreements to be played out again and again.

The NGOs are starting to mobilise support for their Copenhagen campaigns - there will be no shortage of demands made, no lack of enthusiastic pressure for a 'strong' agreement to be reached. But its difficult to shake the feeling that the Copenhagen conference will be predominantly political theatre, played out on the world's biggest stage. While some crucial milestones are yet to be passed (the final position taken by the US, for example), COP15 may be significant not because key decisions are made there, but because they are formalised there. So what role for the activists on the outside? Will we simply be playing our role in the political theatre?

Whinging that climate change is a complex and multi-faceted problem is not going to make it go away. The activists that go to Copenhagen will do so with passion and conviction, and hope for a fair and sustainable future. But with only a few months to go until supposedly the world's most important meeting begins, there is a chorus of overlapping and sometimes contradictory voices where (ideally) a coherent position should be.

Do we know what we are campaigning for at Copenhagen?

AC

July 2009 - The sky's the limit?

2009-07-16T17:25:00.000+01:00

The past seven days have seen a wave of activity from the Department for Energy and Climate Change. With the publication of the UK Low Carbon Transition plan outlining the first steps in Britain's attempted transition towards a post-carbon (well, a 20% carbon) society, Ed Miliband has provided the first glimpse of a counterpart to the Climate Change Bill. We celebrated the ambitious targets, but we always knew that what came next would be critical - the plan for how the targets would be achieved.

The Transition plan seems to revive something of the spirit of the Green New Deal, mercilessly dashed on the rocks of the recession at the g20 meeting in London. Much is made of the prospect for Green Jobs, not least in the insulation of inefficient housing stock (firmly echoing the Green New Deal call for a 'carbon army' of home insulators).

Announcements were also made about the approximate pricing of feed-in renewable energy tariffs, designed to encourage micro-generation. Combine this with the UK Climate Projections issued last month, the supposed global agreement on 2 degrees as constituting 'dangerous' climate change at the g8 in Italy and the imminent conference in Copenhagen, and its difficult not to feel vaguely optimistic that the UK government are at last getting their arse in gear on climate change.

Ed Miliband made one other announcement this week, however, that pierces this little bubble somewhat. Couching his argument as a noble struggle against the tyranny of upper class aviation, Miliband stated unequivocally that aviation would not be subject to the 80% cuts that other sectors of the economy would be making. In fact, he explicitly raised the propsect of deeper-than-80% cuts in 'other areas' in order to permit aviation to continue to be available for rich and poor alike.

In the Guardian, Leo Hickman raised asked a reasonable question: What were these frivolous non-aviation sectors of the economy that were likely to face deeper-than-80% cuts - education? Health? Council services? Despite making it sound as if reducing aviation would mean ushering in a new age of travel apartheid with only the top tier of earners able to leave Britain's drab and cloudly shores, Miliband also conceded that air travel would inevitably become more expensive as the price of oil rose. So despite pledging not to reduce aviation emissions by 80%, he also suggested that the price of flying would rise (presumably leading to a situation where only richer folk get on anyway).

Its good to see that Ed is so concerned about social justice and equality of access to the runway. So why not charge the rich more to allow the poor to fly? If only 20% of the flights that now take off will be permitted in 2080, why not ration them so that we all get an equal opportunity to use the 'freedom' of the sky? It isnt the wrath of the families heading to the Costa Del Sol Ed's fearing (after all, with plausible advances in rail travel, and accompanying reductions in cost, a trip to Spain could be done door-to-door from Manchester overnight). Its the Business class elite (Ryanair's average customer earns £47,000), whose lifestyle and networking would fall apart without the island hopping luxury they have become accustomed to.

Ed Miliband and DECC are starting to make some big strides in putting climate ambition into practice. But for now, it looks like the sky's the limit...

AC

June 2009 - Climate sceptics: Certain about Uncertainty?

2009-06-26T23:12:00.000+01:00

First published in the Environment section of the Guardian on 25/06/09:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2009/jun/25/climate-science-uncertainty

It seems the one thing climate change sceptics are certain of is uncertainty, in particular how uncertainty in the predictions of climate models fatally undermines their legitimacy.

So the recent revelation of the UK government's projections of global warming through to 2080 was met, predictably, with some cynicism by the deniers. While some commentators used the detailed projections about possible future UK climate scenarios to underscore why we must take strong action on climate change, the response of climate sceptics was to say that the error bars in the projections made them worthless.

Never mind that the level of uncertainty about mean temperature increase, sea level rise and seasonal rainfall was dealt with in painstaking and meticulous detail in the report. For some, the mere presence of uncertainty was reason enough to doubt. But uncertainty is not an enemy of science that must be conquered – it is the stimulus that drives science forward. As in economic forecasts, medical diagnoses, and policy making, uncertainty runs through climate science like the lettering in sticks of rock.

The good news is that scientists are particularly adept at acknowledging, identifying and modelling it. The Met Office team responsible for the climate projections managed to systematically indicate what they did know, what they didn't know and how confident they were about these judgments. If there's one group of people who have thought long and hard about uncertainty, its climate scientists. But Irene Lorenzoni and her colleagues at the University of East Anglia have shown that people frequently view uncertainty as a reason for inaction on climate change.

Such is the level of scepticism in some quarters that climate scientists are constantly required to apologise for what they don't know, rather than encouraged to communicate what they do. But uncertainty is not the same as ignorance – which is why the labelling of GM food became mandatory in 2004. The Food Standards Agency did not demand certainty before taking action, although the uncertainty surrounding the risks of genetic modification is far greater than the considered consensus of climate science.

One reason that so much attention is given to the uncertainty associated with climate models is that they form the basis of important and costly policy decisions. But the "precautionary principle" is a well-established method of policy making when uncertainty prevails, on the basis that it is better to be safe than sorry. Could it be that climate sceptics' obsession with uncertainty is simply an unwillingness to accept the consequences of the climate changing – that their lifestyles will have to change as well?

The UK climate projections are not a weather forecast for 3 July 2078. They are a set of scientifically rigorous probabilistic assessments of what the UK climate might be like in, say, 50 years time. But the writers of the report seemed to feel compelled to get their counter-arguments in early. Of course, it is absolutely essential that all uncertainties in climate models are made clear. But it's odd reading a scientific report where the caveats come before the take-home message.

There is one crucial uncertainty, however, that cannot be captured in any climate model: the extent to which action is taken to cut the emissions of greenhouse gases. The irony of the debate surrounding what we can and can't infer from climate models is that they sketch out possible, not inevitable futures. By giving us some idea of what lies ahead, they furnish us with a critical opportunity to change course. Rather than procrastinating about uncertainty – an inescapable fact of life – we should be taking the opportunity to get serious about climate change, and prove the climate models wrong.

AC

June 2009 - Reclaiming the language of localism from the BNP

2009-06-09T15:55:00.000+01:00

In European elections voted in by just over a third of the eligible UK population, held during a global recession, and in the wake of an unprecedented disintegration of the Labour party's remaining working-class vote, the far right British National Party obtained not one but two seats in the European Parliament. Dark days for British and European politics.

With a 'whites only' membership policy and a leader who once associated with Klu Klux Klan members, the BNP are true right-wing extremists. They present maniacal, paranoid stories about the 'liberal elite' that seeks to destroy the lives of 'ordinary white British people'. They talk openly about 'preserving the bloodline' of the country - yet they garnered over 100,000 votes in some constituencies. Can it really be true, as almost all political commentators have asserted, that the people who vote for the BNP are oblivious to the racism of this fascist party? Or does the language of the BNP tap into something that people genuinely believe in - the language of localism that has been neglected so comprehensively by the left that it has been hi-jacked by the far right?

On the face of it, there wouldn't seem to be much common ground between the xenophobia of the BNP and placard waving socialists. But yet trade union parties such as No2EU - Yes to Democracy (http://no2eu.com/) share a superficial rhetoric with Griffin's thugs: an impassioned rejection of European political structures. Even more bizarrely, the language of Transition Towns (the hippie-ish grassroots response to climate change and peak oil) seems eerily reminiscent of the BNP's. With all the talk of 'buying British', 'shopping locally' and even local currencies, could Totnes be the next Burnley?

Scratch beneath the surface, of course, and the similarities disappear completely. The BNP despise European politics because they despise Europeans. Trade Unionists despise European politics because they share a deep affinity with fellow victims of 'race to the bottom' capitalism - the workers of Europe who are treated as all-too-expendable labour, to be hired and fired as the dynamics of the common market demand. BNP supporters buy British because they distrust multi-culturalism and the produce of foreign lands. Transition Towns supporters buy British to minimise their food miles and are warmly welcoming of cultural diversity.

But the all-encompassing embrace of economic globalisation by the political
mainstream (and in particular, the centre-left) has left a void which the far-right have gleefully filled. The ruthless drive of international capitalism has plucked workers from their communities and distributed them more efficiently. Single occupancy houses are at their highest ever rate in the UK. The language of 'alienation' that the BNP use strikes a chord because people are genuinely isolated in their 'own country'. But the threat - far from being the dark-skinned immigrant or the eastern European worker - is the socially divisive menace of globalised capitalism.

That we are surprised that progressive political parties and left-leaning environmental groups talk about British Jobs and British Produce is a scathing indictment of how successfully the far-right have hi-jacked the language of localism.

That is why it is more important than ever for the left to regain a narrative that leads not inexorably to racism and xenophobia, but to equitable and sustainable solutions to social division and resource distribution. The goal of the Transition Towns movement is to create communities that are resilient in the face of climate change and resource depletion - by encouraging and recognising diversity, not denying it as the BNP would seek to do. The No2Eu Party, anguished and frustrated at being treated like a tradeable commodity, are not angry at the foreign workers taking their jobs - they are angry at the economic system that allows it to happen.

Without a voice to stand up against the perils of economic globalisation, the far-right will shout on people's behalf. With unemployment rising, and a globalised recession to blame, isn't it time the left reclaimed the language of localism from the BNP?

AC

May 2009 - Geo-engineering: Denial on a Global Scale

2009-05-22T11:32:00.000+01:00

>>>published on www.climatedenial.org<<<

In her book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein joined the dots between the commercial manufacture of military weaponry, the marketing of anti-flu pandemic drugs and the foreign construction firms drafted in to rebuild Iraq – three happy projects bound by the shared philosophy of ‘disaster capitalism’. It may be time to add another enterprising scheme to this rather opportunistic programme of panic-driven profit making: Geo-engineering – the intentional, large-scale manipulation of the earth and its ecosystems in response to human-caused climate change.

In an impressive leap from a desperate denial of the causes of climate change, to a triumphant denial of the consequences, frontier capitalism may have stumbled across its best idea yet. The loose band of technologies that offer the mouth-watering prospect of engineering our way out of the climate crisis are straight out of science fiction, yet are being taken seriously by scientists and investors alike.

Schemes vary from injecting the atmosphere with sulphate particles to induce cooling, to fertilising algal blooms with iron filings to cause increased CO2 sequestration, to chemically ‘scrubbing’ CO2 out of the air. And as the Royal Geographical Society event on geo-engineering last week showed, many are seduced by science that dangles the carrot of a technological fix to climate change in front of their noses.

The event provided a fascinating window into the way in which geo-engineering is currently perceived by the scientific community. Professor David Keith, a keen advocate (although far from an evangeliser) of geo-engineering called for a responsible, measured research programme into the possibilities of geo-engineering. The problem with this proposal, however, is that even toying with the idea of geo-engineering opens a Pandora’s Box of climatic and socio-political uncertainty. As the Greenpeace scientist Dr Paul Johnston noted at the same event, even the most elementary research into geo-engineering will involve real-world experiments with the global commons.

Jim Thomas, campaigner with the Canadian ETC Group has observed that if control over this global commons appears even remotely feasible, international conflict will inevitably ensue. Environmental scientists like David Keith are undoubtedly well-meaning in their pursuit of technological solutions to climate change, but their research does not take place in a vacuum – it is conducted in a world that is defined by a deeply unsustainable and inequitable socio-economic system.

What hope is there that geo-engineering will be benignly applied for the greater good? Will the consent of the developing world be sought when we conduct our climatic experiments with their natural resources? Will we share our new found knowledge with everyone, or only those who can afford to buy our patented designs?

As philosophers like John Gray have repeatedly observed, an unwavering faith in human progress often amounts to little more than a secular replacement of religious fervour. In response to accusations that that geo-engineering research would involve taking unprecedented risks with the planet’s fragile eco-system, Professor David Keith replied “This isn’t 1750” – the implication being that while pre-industrial revolution scientists did not foresee the consequences of their actions, today’s crop of experts are too wise to act so carelessly. But while few in the environmental science community would seek to take unquantifiable risks with the climate, there is a hardy band of disaster capitalists that would happily take the risk for them.

Worryingly, several experiments with algal blooming have been driven by commercial pressure from companies keen to sell credits into the emerging carbon-trading market. Never mind that artificial algal blooms are yet to deliver any proven CO2 reductions – large scale geo-engineering projects could be capitalism’s ultimate parlour trick: The design and manufacture of machines that we ultimately become dependent on to neutralise the waste produced by a society of consumption-driven economic growth. The lure of geo-engineering – colonic irrigation for the planet – is almost irresistible. What if it worked – what if we really could scrub the skies of carbon, and without having to reduce our carbon emissions?

Unfortunately, the question of technical proficiency is a red herring. We know we can design technologies that can alter the climate – that’s the problem we’re trying to solve. The more important issue is whether we can engineer our way out of trouble in a way that does not exacerbate existing inequalities. Tackling climate change is perhaps the most critical test of our commitment to social justice we will ever encounter – what could be more fundamental than the intentional management and division of the earth’s natural resources?

But unless significant changes in how scientific knowledge is shared and distributed are achieved, geo-engineering simply cannot address climate change in an equitable way. To believe that the unprecedented power of geo-engineering will not be wielded by the rich and the powerful at the expense of the weak and the vulnerable is more than simply wide-eyed techno-optimism: It amounts to a comprehensive denial of political reality.

AC

May 2009 - Outbreak of public anger and scrutiny helpful for Fair approach to Climate Change?

2009-05-17T23:34:00.000+01:00

“Our politics is on the edge of a cliff”

So said Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats, and I think: does he really mean his career is on the edge of a cliff teetering with the weight of his second home allowance? Clegg is of course reacting to the surge of public scrutiny of MPs expenses which has dominated the media this month. People throughout the UK have been angry at a select group of individuals claiming for themselves money and goods that the system let them have, but they weren’t morally entitled to.

two angry members of the public:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uow_pp06PRYone more angry member of the public:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqKVZXrLNzc

It would appear that the idea of fairness and having more than your fair share is very much in the public consciousness at the moment. Comparisons between MP’s and people affected by the recession have been often heard this month and the notion that everyone should make sacrifices in the face of a common challenge is aprevalent narrative in the media. It has got to be said this sounds like just the kind of debate that we need to have in the UK in order to front up to climate change.

But hang on, politicians and journalists are saying that the MPs expenses scandal has been very damaging to politics and the democratic process. This is what Party Leaders have each said this week:

David Cameron: "I understand how deep the damage goes. Our politics are reviled. Our parliament is held in scorn. Our people have had enough"

Gordon Brown: “We must show that we have the highest standards for our profession.”

Nick Clegg: “It already feels like both a cliché and an understatement to say that this has been a bad week for politics”

So they sound gravely concerned about the political process but it is hard not to feel that they are primarily gravely concerned about their own careers. There is no doubt that this scandal is hugely damaging for this particular crowd of politicians but does it automatically follow that the democratic process is damaged and that people are ‘switching off’ politics because of it? Some probably are, but some (angry people for the most part) are ‘switching on’. Right through until the end of this week the political panel show Question Time was the second most popular programme after Eastenders on the BBC iPlayer (in the programme people get very angry!) To say this scandal is good for politics might seem a contrary argument to make, but I would say it is good for public scrutiny of politics and avoid the assumption, around and about, that this is automatically damaging to public political engagement. Two thirds of people in a BBC poll this week wanted a General Election - that isn’t an apathetic response.

If there are currently the conditions for discussion of ideas like transparency and fairness, the debate on climate change can surely benefit from this, if it doesn’t carry on getting overshadowed by it (you might say). There are many people and campaigns making the argument for a fair and transparent transition to lower carbon living, like the Fair Shares, Fair Choice scheme based in Bristol
http://www.fairsharesfairchoice.com/index.asp

This month - amongst the heat of the expenses row - the leading Climate Change Scientist James Hanson again voiced his fears that the Cap-and-Trade approach (held to be the solution for distributing carbon rights by many politicians coming together for Copenhagen) isn’t a fair system:

“Cap-and-trade is fraught with opportunities for special interests, political trading, obfuscation from public scrutiny, accounting errors, and outright fraud.”
Oops this looks like he is writing about MP’s expenses! Hanson offers an alternative; a flat transparent tax on carbon use:
“A carbon tax on coal, oil and gas is simple, applied at the first point of sale or port of entry. The entire tax must be returned to the public, an equal amount to each adult, a half-share for children. This dividend can be deposited monthly in an individual’s bank account.”
And this seems like a good system for what the MP’s will get in future, a flat accountable rate, for attending the House of Commons!

http://209.85.229.132/search?q=cache:7ZbWUk8BKbUJ:yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article%3Fid%3D12371+promoting+fairness+and+climate+change+may+2009&cd=10&hl=en&ct=clnk&client=safari

If people in the UK have remembered (when MPs didn’t) that Politics is, as the maxim goes, about “who gets what, when, where and how” then there is hope that the theme’s of fairness and transparency can be translated into the debate on climate change - and we will be the better for it. A good marker for this will be how The Green Party do in the European elections next month.

TF

April 2009 - The Green contradictions in the Red briefcase

2009-04-25T19:05:00.000+01:00

The straight-to-camera monologue routine being broadcast across the nation on 22nd April 2009 could only mean one thing: Budget day. And, although the government’s renewed support for Carbon Capture Storage (CCS) was hailed by some as evidence of Britain’s commitment to climate change, Alistair Darling’s red briefcase contained many green contradictions.

Despite pledging financial support for CCS in the budget, the government’s subsequent announcement that new coal-fired power stations would only be approved once they could demonstrate substantial capture and storage of their carbon emissions confirmed only one thing – that there will be new coal-fired power stations. And, with emissions reductions targets contingent on a technology that is yet to be demonstrated on an industrial scale, the potential torrent of investment promised by a Green New Deal seems to have been reduced to a techno-fix trickle.

Alistair Darling’s take home message was that economic growth would return in 2010, but there is no bigger contradiction than the message that we can consume more, regain economic growth AND use fewer natural resources. The myth that economic growth and energy use can be decoupled is compelling, pervasive and utterly false. The government’s controversial plans to extend the capacity of Heathrow are based on an economic argument that the UK will ‘lose out’ if the mile-high custom goes elsewhere. But we will certainly lose out if we cannot reign in our burgeoning emissions. Even dyed-in-the-wool free marketeers like Nicholas Stern recognise that failing to tackle climate change now will cost us more in the long term.

But the myth of low-carbon growth runs through government policy like the lettering embedded in sticks of Brighton rock. We are exhorted to exercise personal restraint, to minimise our carbon footprint, yet every signal we receive tells us to carry on exactly as we are. Heathrow is just the most obvious example of a policy that flatly contradicts the UK’s emissions targets.

And, unsurprisingly, these contradictions are mirrored in people’s individual behaviours. We carefully select local fruit and vegetables and then drive them home in our car. We turn our televisions off standby but leave our laptops on overnight. You might imagine that whether someone ‘acts green’ in one situation would be a good indicator of whether they will act similarly across the board. But research by the social psychologist John Thogersen has shown that the ‘spillover’ of one environmental behaviour to another is notoriously unreliable.

One of the factors that influences whether one green behaviour will predict another is how similar the behaviours are. So, someone who recycles is also likely to compost their food waste, whereas someone who cycles to work may not pay any attention to the heating of their home. One of the most significant challenges of tackling environmental behaviours is that they are so dauntingly diverse. The cues and triggers that we use to judge our behaviour in one situation will be completely absent in another.

But Thogersen’s research also identified another factor that determines spillover – whether seemingly green actions are taken for the same underlying reason. Someone who insulates their home only to save money will be unlikely to pay more for a train ride instead of a plane – because although their home insulation produced significant carbon savings, their motives were financial. According to Thogersen, significant spillover in environmental behaviours will only be achieved if a clear and consistent environmental message is used to motivate change. The contradictory messages emanating from the government are ensuring that this spillover will not be achieved.

As long as the myth of decoupling growth and resource use continues, even the most well-intentioned message will fall on deaf ears. Our sacred economic growth has been predicated on an almost limitless supply of cheap energy – a supply that is rapidly dwindling. While increasing financial wealth is a necessity for the world’s poor, the rich countries chase further prosperity even while the fossil-fuelled engine of the growth economy starts to splutter out. Darling’s sums may have balanced the financial books for another year. But the ecological debt can’t be dealt with by consuming our way out of trouble.

AC

April 2009 - Celebrities: Get them out of here?

2009-04-06T11:17:00.000+01:00

Sulking about the fact that his earnings might be reduced in the 'witch hunt' against bankers and their bonuses, Matthew Prest, the managing director at Close Brothers investment bank whinged:

"I don't hear anybody calling for Hollywood star salary caps. This is a trendy, fashionable thing to do, it will have bad consequences."

Prest's astute analogy overlooks the minor difference between actors and investment bankers - specifically that actors do not possess the capacity to bring the global economy to its knees, are unlikely to play poker with our savings and mortgages, and have never (Tom Cruise aside) declared themselves 'masters of the universe'. But does the moody MD have a point? Should we be asking questions about big salaries outside the banking sector - especially if the fame and fortune of our prized celebrities seems at odds with their forays into political advocacy?

Marina Hyde, the nemesis of vaccuous celebrities who venture into politics, published a book this week railing against the increasing number of famous folk who seem to be suffering from baffling cases of mission creep. Sharon Stone famously declared that she would kiss 'almost anyone' for peace in the Middle East. Angelina Jolie patrolled Afghanistan in a green flak jacket and 'attended' the World Economic Forum in Davos with husband Brad Pitt. Bob Geldof took his rightful place alongside the leaders of the world's most powerful nations on the fringe of the g20 meeting in London last week. Its easy to sneer at these glitzy people outside of their comfort zone. But its also difficult not to feel angered by the incongruity between the high earning, high consuming lifestyles of these uber-capitalists, and the political causes they champion. So when is it OK for celebrities to endorse 'good causes'? And are climate celebrities a help or a hinderance?

Bono is a very rich and very famous celebrity who regularly appears at high profile political events and meetings - most notably during the Jubilee campaign to drag the developed nations towards meeting their Millenium Development Goals. However, despite imploring the British and Irish Governments do to more to meet the Development Goals, Bono does not pay tax in his home country of Ireland. Rather, he keeps his substantial sums of money in the (lower taxing) Netherlands. Considering that tax paying is the primary means of generating government income - to be spent on matters such as meeting the Millenium Development Goals - Bono's offshore accounting flatly contradicts his political campaigning. The choices that Bono makes regarding his personal finances undermine so thoroughly his moral stance on poverty reduction, that even the mention of his name raises the heckles of any charitable tax payer. Why should we listen to a man who wants more money spent on eradicating world poverty, when he will not even contribute from his own (immense) income?

Bono's case illustrates an important point - that 'practicing what you preach' is a principle with almost universal appeal. For some political causes, it isnt obvious what the 'practice' bit might be - we can march against Israel's occupation of Gaza, but aside from some boycotting of produce, how can we 'practice' what we preach?

When it comes to tackling climate change, however, consistency between our principles and our behaviour is paramount. No-one wants to be lectured about driving less by a woman in a Chelsea Tractor. The UK cannot murmour darkly about the proliferation of Chinese coal-fired power stations whilst simultaneously erecting them at home. And despite being one of the slimiest creatures to have emerged from New Labour's trigger happy, city-slicker regime, Geoff Hoon might just have had a point when he questioned whether Emma Thompson's opposition to a third runway at Heathrow was compromised by the number of international awards ceremonies she attends.

Almost by definition, celebrities are likely to have high-carbon existences. Wealth is one of the biggest determinants of an individual's carbon footprint, and most modern celebs have a globalised lifestyle to match their image. Even celebrities that 'mean it' are likely to use more carbon than the average person (just ask Thom Yorke). So are there any celebrities who can claim to be genuinely green?

March 2009 – “Plans are nothing; planning is everything.”

2009-03-30T22:36:00.000+01:00

This month I watched the premier of the film The Age of Stupid simulcast into a cinema in Cardiff, it was a good-heartedly organised low carbon event with a green carpet to greet the film goers which included people like Vivian Westwood, Ken Livingstone and Ed Miliband. The film makes an overwhelming case for taking action now and planning to avoid runaway climate change, presenting a doomsday scenario in the future made more and more plausible, as the film goes on, by documentary and news stories from weather events and human activity from our real life present. After the film Ed Miliband spoke and what was most striking about what he said were his assertions about the absolute necessity of developing clean coal technology - something that doesn’t yet exist.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5RCHXLW93E

Dwight D. Eisenhower apparently said “Plans are nothing; planning is everything” and i don’t think Ed and the government are following Dwight’s maxim because they have a target (80% reduction in emissions by 2050) and they have a plan (maybe like baldrick once had a cunning plan – a plan for something that doesn’t exist) but their isn’t too much evidence of planning. The decision on the third runway at heathrow actually suggests that the governments short and medium term planning is working against their own target and the decision on Kingsnorth’s coal powerstation in the autumn will be a further test of government planning - as flagged up by Pete Postlethwaite at the premier saying he will give his OBE back if they give the go-ahead on Kingsnorth.

One person with the ear of this particular government in the past is Anthothy Giddens and he has a new book out this month called The Politics of Climate Change. And Giddens has been talking up a new politics-of-planning for a number of months saying that longer term planning and consensus building around a ‘green state’ is essential to correct the failings of our current culture of short term politics. The big problems he indentifies to be addressed by better planning include; the chicken game (who goes first on the hard choices) between citizens and government, achieving worldwide collective action and overcoming what he modestly called “Giddens’ Paradox.” These big issues are clear enough though it remains to be seen how racial his advocacy for “active planning” will prove to be.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0Gm4Glqf7s

Plan to make some green custard? The Hackney Post have got a recipe famous as of this month.
http://hackneypost.co.uk/?p=1168
Currently there is an opportunity to influence government planning through a consultation on planning for low carbon business and industry the consultation was kicked off by a green custarded Peter Mandelson early in the month. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7927668.stm.
http://interactive.berr.gov.uk/lowcarbon/

So back to The Age of Stupid which shows that planning is necessary at all levels of society – way beyond the political realm. The battle to get planning permission for a wind farm in the film, against local people who don’t want it on their doorstep, highlights the problem of ‘free riders’ in a system (the general term Gidden’s uses for people benefiting, without contribution, from others acting collectively) and the challenge for climate change of planning at the local level. The Planning Act November 2008 placed a duty on local authorities to consider climate change but it remains to be seen whether it is it having a big impact. The Act appears to move in two directions at once, with “National Policy Statements” to be developed by government departments in consultation with interested parties to move decision making more effectively to the local level and a body called the “Infrastructure Planning Commission” which should take some major decisions away from the local authorities. In any case a glance at the Act suggests that local planning is still contingent on good National and UK wide planning. Major social change often goes hand-in-hand with land reform and organisations like Lammas are campaigning for more radical approaches to planning to allow the social change they want for themselves to live a lower carbon lifestyle. http://www.foe.co.uk/campaigns/fair_future/news/planningbill_law_17248.html

http://www.lammas.org.uk/lowimpact/index.htm#campaign

I have also been learning the hard way this month that more planning at the personal level is needed, for example, to get reasonable price train tickets (to not drive), stop buying bottled water and other things that are better but not necessarily quicker solutions. There are loads of tools for measuring personal emissions and setting personal targets but there doesn’t feel like as many tools around (though there are some good ones I know and some I don’t I‘m sure) for day to day personal planning. It would be a shame if as individuals we had the will to act and our targets but were scuppered by our planning.

So yes more planning (not just plans) from government to match targets, local government planning executing that duty to consider climate change (with well judged government support on the big decisions) and more planning at the personal level all would be helpful. Of course April brings an international focus to plans made on climate change with the G20 in London, before come December pressure for a master plan in Copenhagen.

TF

March 2009 - Steady as She Goes

2009-03-17T18:19:00.000Z

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2009/mar/17/climate-change-denial?
commentpage=1

(published 17/03/09 in the Environment section of the Guardian)

February 2009 - The right behaviour, for the wrong reasons?

2009-02-25T10:02:00.000Z

Sam Whimster, Professor of Sociology at the Global Policy Institute, commented on 20th February in the Guardian that if we are to stand any chance of navigating our way out of the financial crisis, we need to reassert human values as superior to those of the market. It is a mark of just how hegemonic the pursuit of financial wealth has become that this statement even has to be made at all - after all, an economic system is nothing if not an expression of human value. Yet, after several hundred years of industrial capitalism, we are somehow faced with a widening gap between the rich and poor, and an eco-system that is on the brink of collapse. Now, more than ever, a reassertion of human value is critical to an equitable, sustainable future.

Indeed, Professor Whimster's comments resonate far beyond models of economic development and financial regulation. While many people now accept that changes in our behaviour will be necessary to prevent dangerous climate change - at every level from political treaties to individual habits - it is less clear how these changes should be brought about. Investment! Revolution! Technological advances! A carbon market! In the UK, however, a surprising consensus between government, industry, and environmental NGOs has emerged - a consensus which is captured suspiciously well by the Tesco mantra 'every little helps'.

Most of us will have been implored to change our light bulbs to energy efficient ones, to unplug our phone chargers, to re-use our plastic bags. The 'every little helps' approach is intended to offer a way-in to environmental behaviour change, a 'foot-in-the-door' that sets the stage for greater changes in the future. The only problem, as Tom Crompton points out in the seminal WWF report 'Weathercocks & Signposts: The Envionmental Movement at a Crossroads', is that we are yet to progress beyond the little changes. Given the obvious urgency of the situation, this constitutes a serious challenge to the piecemeal approach to behaviour change.

Part of the problem, as activists like George Marshall from Climate Outreach and Information Network have pointed out, is that advice on 'saving the planet' tends not to differentiate between changes that have major impacts (e.g. not flying) and changes that have minimal effects (e.g. turning items off standby). Until there is a clear sense of what the priorities are, there is little hope of targeting the right behaviours.

The more profound problem lies, however, not with the actual changes themselves, but with the reasons for the changes. As Tom Crompton observes, the 'every little helps' approach typically avoids asking people to consider the reasons for their behaviours too deeply. In fact, energy saving advice is often couched in terms of saving money, while companies are more than happy to sell new versions of old products that offer a marginal improvement in energy efficiency. Fearful of being branded idealists, the values underlying pro-environmental behaviours (sustainability, justice, equality) are kept out of the equation - even by some environmental NGOs.

The upshot of this approach is that when environmental concerns dovetail with money saving measures, or the opportunity to invest in a new product, emissions are likely to be saved. But when these 'beautiful coincidences' do not occur - as when pro-environmental behaviour change involves personal inconvenience, or incurring a financial loss, the motivation for acting is removed. Not focussing on the values that underlie behaviour change can lead to a dead-end.

So, while the cumulative effect of lots of small changes is nothing to be sniffed at, they must be the beginning, rather than the end, of the story. The fundamental premise of 'foot-in-the-door' strategies is that bigger changes are likely to be accepted once smaller changes have been consented to - but if the bigger changes do not coincide quite so happily with personal convenience or financial incentives, will they ever be made?

In tackling climate change, just like navigating out of the financial crisis, a reassertion of human values is essential. We are not trying to 'save the planet' out of a puritan desire for austerity. In fact, we are not trying to save the 'planet' at all. The planet will be just fine long after we're gone. What we are fighting for is the equitable and sustainable distribution of the natural resources essential to our continued survival. What else, other than human values, could possibly be the reason for tackling climate change?

AC

February 2009 - Are we a nation of liars?

2009-02-23T11:31:00.000Z

In terms of ‘doing your bit’, it’s hardly a bold statement. But most of us have managed to get our heads around re-useable bags. They’re stronger! They’re slightly nicer to hold! Whether its 100 % cotton sophistication or basket-woven chic you’re after, no-one wants to be caught holding the plastic bag.

The only problem is that plastic bag use is barely down. The Waste and Resources Action Programme claim that businesses distributed 8% fewer bags in 2008 than 2007, but Defra estimates that about 88% of shoppers currently put all their shopping into free carrier bags, taking 3-4 bags at every shopping trip.

That our meagre environmental actions don’t always match up to our ambitious words is hardly breaking news – when 500 people were interviewed in the 1970s regarding their personal responsibility for picking up litter, 94% acknowledged responsibility. After leaving the interview room, however, only 2% of the people picked up the litter that the researchers had planted near outside the door. Tackling environmental behaviour is more important now than it ever was. Why don’t people do the things they say they do?

Perhaps we are simply a nation of liars. Alternatively, we may be deluded – deluded, but honest. Psychologists have shown that married couples systematically overestimate their own contribution to household chores, while simultaneously underestimating the effort that their other half puts in (the ‘ego-centric’ bias). So, we may be naturally inclined to believe our own distorted memory of how much we recycle, how little we drive, or how often we turn the thermostat on the heating down.

In addition, we tend to think about ourselves and others’ failures in different ways. When something goes wrong – an increase in the quarterly heating bill for example – we do not conclude that our clever new strategy of thermostat monitoring hasn’t worked after all. When things go awry, there are always situational factors to help explain it away. The cold weather, a new-found leak in the bathroom window, or an absent-minded family member are all viable alternatives to accepting responsibility, yet when other people fail, the blame falls squarely on them. In short, we seem psychologically programmed to misperceive our own behaviour. And when it comes to changing our environmental habits, we’re all guilty of a bit of creative accounting.

Worse still, short term commercial interests and fossil fuelled policy-making frequently collude to exacerbate our plight. In the past twelve months, we have been prescribed airport expansion, cheap flights and a new generation of coal-fired power stations for our carbon habit. Like a group of recovering alcoholics we need help staying on the wagon. But dangling carbon-temptations in front of our noses makes it next to impossible for us to change – even if we wanted to.

So what can be done? First and foremost, the non-psychological barriers have to be removed so that it’s easy for people to change if they want to. Public transport is more expensive than private travel. Our bosses expect us to fly to Holland for training at Head Office. Our cities are designed for car owning suburbanites rather than city dwellers on public transport. There are very real limits on what individuals can do – so while transformative power lies in every single one of us, our hands are tied until the structural constraints on our behaviour are removed.

We must also move ‘beyond information’. Switching the TV off standby doesn’t justify an extra flight to the Canary Isles, but most lists of tips for saving the planet don’t distinguish between important and inconsequential ways of reducing emissions. Information is necessary, but not sufficient to bring about change. We are not passive learning machines, and our behaviours will not change until we decide that we want them to. It isn’t enough to take a few plastic bags out of circulation – we have to start asking tougher questions about what the causes and the consequences of our unsustainable patterns of behaviour are.

Happily, decades of social and psychological research has furnished us with a detailed understanding of many aspects of human behaviour. But while Defra have commissioned multiple reviews of sustainable behaviour change, they have primarily relied on advertising agencies, environmental consultancies and social marketing teams. Correspondingly, the government seem unwilling or unable to move beyond meekly reminding us to buy energy efficient light bulbs. The discrepancy between the magnitude of the problem and the timidity of the solution would be funny if the stakes weren’t so high.

We desperately need some evidence-based leadership on changing our environmental habits and behaviours. There is now a solid scientific basis for understanding climate change, but what we really need is a social-scientific basis for understanding the cause of climate change – namely, us.

February 2009 - What are legitimate actions in the (public) face of climate change?

2009-02-04T00:20:00.000Z

In December Ed Miliband said there needed to be a New Social Movement behind climate change:

"When you think about all the big historic movements, from the suffragettes, to anti-apartheid, to sexual equality in the 1960s, all the big political movements had popular mobilisation," said Miliband. "There will be some people saying 'we can't go ahead with an agreement on climate change, it's not the biggest priority'. And, therefore, what you need is countervailing forces. Some of those countervailing forces come from popular mobilisation."

Ok then, Ed suggests that it is hard for elected politicians (even the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change) to make tough decisions when there isn’t popular support to legitimate them.

In January Geoff Hoon also revealed this line of thinking in his public slanging match with Emma Thompson over the third runway at Heaththrow, he said: "I worry about people who I assume travel by air quite a lot and don't see the logic of their position, not least because the reason we have got this problem in relation to Heathrow is that more and more people want to travel more and more.” Interesting that Geoff calls the heathrow issue in these comments “the problem” a departure in language from his usual line about it being a wealth consolidating/creating opportunity for Britain. Also Geoff is, in actual fact, wrong to suggest the public are tacitly legitimating the governments action because a Government Consultation reported back to him a vast majority are against it. (http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/hoon-accused-of-ignoring-public-with-unpopular-heathrow-plans-1418247.html)

Thompson for her part came up with the baffling line, right back at Hoon “Get a grip Geoff this is not about Flying”!

To add to this heady mix, as the heathrow issue was debated John McDonnell took an action deemed unjustified (by his fellow MPs) in the course of his arguments against the runway (on behalf of his constituents who are directly affected) and FOR a vote on the issue picked up the ceremonial mace in protest (Heseltine style) and was told he had “Conducted himself in a grossly disorderly manner” and was suspended from parliament for 5 days. (http://uk.news.yahoo.com/4/20090115/video/vuk-rebel-mp-john-mcdonnell-grabs-mace-49bfa63.html)

Meanwhile in January while the Government implored and then ignored the public the majority of the scientific community was reportedly set to do the very same. The Independent ran a front page saying that scientists (including James Lovelock) were ready to prepare a “Plan B” a geo-engineering solution to use if the political and social effort to reduce emissions doesn’t show results soon. (http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/climate-scientists-its-time-for-plan-b-1221092.html)

We know science can act unilaterally and take extraordinary risks on behalf of people that are not always aware or in agreement with scientific actions - the Atomic Bomb for instance! Also right now Richard Posner senior US judge believes this is the case in respect of the Large Hadron Collider experiment, in relation to the (disputed) claim that the experiment has a 1 in 50 million chance of creating a black hole that could swallow the universe! The ‘Plan B’ response to Climate Change may lead us more frequently down this risky road.

In January the Japanese launched a CLIMATE CHANGE ROCKET!(http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090123/ap_on_sc/as_japan_rocket)

There has been continued consideration of the legitimacy of direct action on climate change especially following the Plane Stupid action at Stanstead in December and of course the ground breaking (public!) jury decision on the Kingsnorth protestors. Shockingly in December the Attorney General Baroness Scotland was reported to be looking at barring public juries from climate change protest cases and appealing against the kingsnorth protestors. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/audio/2008/dec/18/1)

Lets take Ed at his word and UP the participation of the general public... to continue to have public Jury trials for principled climate change protestors - what better way to judge the legitimacy of the protests. And for those Plan B experiments let us use citizen referenda to decide on the legitimacy of those actions which may be of massive benefit but may also present massive risk. In any case if politicians and scientists show faith in the citizen then a New Social Movement may grow UP that starts to tackle Plan A.

TF

January 2009 - God's Green Earth

2009-01-25T12:49:00.000Z

As the dishevelled figure of George W Bush was helicoptered off the White house lawn on January 20th, 2009, the world breathed a sigh of relief. With outgoing approval ratings of less than 22%, this was truly a failed President. Famously simplistic in his rhetoric and policy, George Bush had overseen a period of American history that began with an illegal war and ended in an economic crisis that enveloped the world. Nestling between these two bastardised bookends was regular torture of 'foreign combatants', the aggressive undermining of the UN, and a complete disregard for national or international climate policy. Bush had many undesirable traits, but his stubborn commitment to an authoritarian Christian sense of 'right and wrong' must rank among them. The oppressive, sexist and brutal principles of Iranian Ayatollahs, or the fundamentalist fervour of violent Islamic movements such as Al Qaeda are roundly and deservedly condemned. But here, in charge of the United States of America, was a man who believed he was carrying out God's will on earth (and frequently said as much in speeches). Combine this with a political ideology that favoured pre-emptive military action over multilateral negotiation, and it isn't difficult to understand why so many in the Arab world perceive George Bush as having led an Imperialist Crusade against Islam in the name of Christianity.

His religious zeal impacted on more than his approach to the Middle East, however. His distrust of 'science' was often cited as one of the reasons that he clung so doggedly to a belief that climate change was not America's problem to deal with. It is well documented that many on the Christian Right in America believe Darwin's Theory of Evolution should be taught 'alongside' Creationism in school science classes. Bush was one of them. Infamously refusing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, Bush can reasonably be said to have put the fight against climate change back by about a decade.

But if Bush's disregard for evolutionary science stemmed from his religious upbringing, it seems unfair to blame his unwillingness to engage with climate change on his Christianity. In the UK at least, NGOs like Christian Aid have been at the forefront of the environmental movement, holding high-profile demos and events (http://www.christianaid.org.uk/issues/climatechange/march/index.aspx) and endorsing models for international climate change mitigation that blow the EU's farcical Emissions Trading System (essentially a cap-and-trade market with no cap) out of the water (http://www.ecoequity.org/GDRs/).

We are even seeing the emergence of organisations like 'Operation Noah', a faith-based organisation which campaigns exclusively on the climate change issue. In Cardiff, a boat owned by one of Cardiff's Christian groups is being transformed into a 'Noah's Ark'. Under the slogan: "Save Creation At Copenhagen", local children will process on to the 'Ark' wearing animal masks, costumes and bearing images of human communities who will be most at risk from climate change. Intriguingly, Operation Noah manages to seamlessly combine a rejection of evolutionary science with a forthright conviction for securing the Earth's future based on climate science:

"It is more than fitting that Cardiff's young children are at the
forefront of this event. The decisions taken this year at Copenhagen
will determine whether the Earth , their home, will be a safe place or
not in the decades ahead. We have an obligation to them, to worldwide
humanity and to God's marvellously complex and diverse creation to act
now. We need nothing less than an industrial revolution for
sustainability and we look to our leaders to act like Noah – to listen
and to lead." (Mark Dowd, Operation Noah Campaign Strategist)

While many climate change campaigners would probably rather jump on board the Atheist Bus than the Creationism Boat, environmentalism is also a movement that takes its supporters where it can find 'em. "Tackle climate change first - and argue about Creationism another day" captures the prevailing sentiment.

It isn't clear, however, whether Operation Noah's admirable commitment to preventing dangerous climate change is matched by the practicality of their proposed solutions:

"Good for Noah, the first Biblical environmentalist, who read the
signs of the times and inspired by God, found a way to save humanity
and all creatures. As the real significance of climate change is
appreciated, jump aboard Operation Noah's climate campaign as together
we seek to be an ark to the future!" (Minister David Pickering, Chair of Operation Noah)

Whether a big wooden boat ends up being the most appropriate means of tackling climate change of not, the underlying message is clear: In the eyes of evangelical Christians, Creationism and Environmentalism are not incompatible. George W's Christian dogma is implicated in many of his worst policies - but his disregard for climate science probably wasn't one of them.

AC

January 2009 - Smash the system! (or just vote Tory)

2009-01-15T12:27:00.000Z

On 15th January, 2009, some five months into the one hundred month countdown, Geoff Hoon made the announcement no-one was surprised to hear: there will be a third runway built at Heathrow. The runway will require the demolition of seven hundred houses and a primary school, and will expand the capacity of what is already the busiest airport in Europe by a third. Despite years of campaigning and direct action from local residents and environmentalists, the expansion will go ahead - the stupidity of the decision matched only by the hypocrisy of Labour environmental policy, which claims to be aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It doesn't take a genius to realise that building a new runway at Heathrow cannot possibly be commensurate with this goal.

So, is this the end of the story? Clearly, the people whose houses are to be knocked down, the children whose school is to be razed to the ground, and campaigners across the world who want to see climate change taken seriously will not stop fighting. But reversing a decision of this magnitude becomes increasingly difficult once the legislative cogs start turning. One remaining option, voiced by the increasingly exasperated John Stewart, Chair of the anti-runway action group Hacan Clearskies, is to ensure that the cogs don't actually get the chance to clunk into action:

"The people of west London will be very angry indeed and their anger could spill over into direct action. Despite today's decision, we do not believe ultimately that this is a done deal. Unless Labour wins the next election these plans will never see the light of day"

Stewart's admission that even 'normal' people (like the Sispon residents) could be provoked to take part in direct action reflects a wider trend across the country in 2008. From Plane Stupid's well-to-do members reaching the roof of the Houses of Parliament, to the Greenpeace protesters who were not prosecuted for spray-painting 'Gordon' on the Kingsnorth power station smokestack, green direct action has been high profile and generally well received.

It also suggests that wherever the 'support' for building a third runway at Heathrow is coming from, it isn't primarily from the electorate. Other than BAA bods with an obvious investment in seeing the runway built, has there been any public support for the runway? Of course, ask people whether they like cheap flights and they will say yes. One of the key tactics used by proponents of the runway has been to position the third runway as the 'people's runway', where all the bargain flights will take off from. How dare we oppose the expansion of poor people's foreign fun?

As George Monbiot recently pointed out, however, the majority of cheap flights are taken not by people on low incomes, but by richer folk keen to get away for the weekend (airlines handily collect demographic information on their customers, for the purposes of 'market research'). The product of their market research is their advertising budget: no Ryanair adverts in The Sun, or The Mirror, plenty in The Telegraph .

Sadly, despite the increasing support for green direct action, the second half of John Stewart's suggestion is likely to be more prescient: the most reliable way of preventing the runway, would be to boot Labour out at the next election, and hope they haven't managed to get the ball rolling by then. Enticing as this sounds, the alternative is scarcely a reason to be cheerful - the return of a Conservative government.

David Cameron has vocally opposed the runway, in an attempt to curry favour with those who perceive Labour's environmental policy to be irrevocably rotten. And shadow transport secretary Theresa Villers, claimed that the Heathrow plans would be scrapped under a Conservative government:

"If a Conservative government is elected at the next general election there will not be a third runway at Heathrow. There is no chance of the planning process being completed before the date of the next election."

Perhaps the Conservatives truly believe that climate change is more important than short term economic gain for the South East - but is it just possible that the strength of Tory opposition might have been linked to the inevitability of the decision? No-one, not even the most committed anti-runway campaigner, seriously believed that Hoon would opt-out of a project this profitable. Might Cameron just be gambling on the possibility that as-and-when he gets his crack at the whip, the cogs will have started to clunk anyway? He would then find himself in the win-win position of presiding over the economic benefits of a project he opposed.

We all hope that there is still more to be done to derail the third runway. But pinning our hopes on a change of face at No 10 is unlikely to be the way to achieve it.

AC

December 2008 - Overselling their models, or underselling our values?

2008-12-17T15:38:00.000Z

As the UN climate change negotiations kicked off in Poznan, the New Scientist ran an attention grabbing headline asking whether climate scientists were “over-selling their models”. In an interview with the weekly science magazine, Lenny Smith, a statistician at the London School of Economics claimed that some climate scientists were too hasty in making firm and detailed predictions about the precise nature of the future climate (http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026851.900-are-climate-scientists-overselling-their-models.html?full=true).

While clearly designed to be provocative, a thorough reading of the interview reveals not a climate change sceptic, but a statistician extolling that most cherished of scientific values: conservatism and caution in the face of uncertainty. In expressing his concern that climate scientists should not over-sell their data, Smith was careful not to over-sell his own claim, suggesting that the picture that climate models paint is a broadly accurate one. But while over-interpreting data can never be a sensible path for a scientist to take, is it really true that scientists too often get ahead of themselves?

A consideration of the rather timid relationship between science and policy in the UK would suggest otherwise. The standard approach to maintaining scientific integrity is loosely based on the legal concept of a ‘separation of powers’ – where judges don’t legislate and legislators do not judge. In theory, scientists do not get embroiled in policy making, and policy makers don’t meddle in the science. The intended benefits of this split are clear: scientific data are not moulded by partisan interests, and the credibility of independent research is ensured.

In practice, however, this scientific separation of powers is a somewhat one-way affair. Research councils, the primary providers of University research funding, are public sector bodies. The projects the research councils fund (and perhaps more importantly, the ones that they don’t) inevitably reflect the prevailing political winds – and rightly so, given that university academics are ultimately providing a public service. While some climate sceptics have insinuated that climate change has been cooked up by researchers eager to cash in on a wave of climate change research grants, figures from the reform group Scientists for Global Responsibility tell a different story. In the industrialised nations, the budget for government-funded military research is twice that for health and environmental issues combined, and nearly 100 times bigger than the budget for research into renewable energy. If climate scientists are over-selling their research with a view to being awarded extra funding, then it clearly isn’t working.

Of course, science can be immensely profitable – its just that it typically isn’t the scientists that pick up the big bucks. And, perhaps more importantly, the trajectory of scientific innovation is often guided primarily by commercial profit. New scientific findings are funnelled into a socio-economic system that is radically skewed in favour of acute concentrations of corporate wealth, where the interests of the rich and the powerful are inevitably privileged over the needs of the poor and the weak.

The emerging discipline of nanotechnology, where scientists are able to manufacture tiny particles with novel physical and chemical properties, provides a good example. Sun creams containing ultra-fine nanoparticles that are transparent but block ultraviolet light are profitable. Mass water purification programmes using nano-filters, for rural communities in central Africa are not. No prizes for guessing which application has been commercially realised, and which has been left to gather dust in the pages of academic journals. Nanoscience may be the study of the very small, but nanotechnology is already big business.

In fact, the powerful influence of commercialisation, and the institutionalised reluctance of scientists to ‘speak out’ about the applications of their research risks creating what ethicist Geoffrey Hunt refers to as a ‘nano-divide’ between the scientific ‘haves’ and the scientific ‘have-nots’. Rather than saving the world, the transformational power of this new technology could simply buttress existing socioeconomic inequality.

But from the researchers at the frontier of this leading-edge science there is a deafening silence – a silence that is replicated across scientific disciplines. Save for medically oriented NGOs such as Medicins Sans Frontieres, or the reform group Scientists for Global Responsibility, practising scientists keep a fairly low profile about what happens to their research once it has left the ivory tower. Why? Because scientists are discouraged from stepping outside of their remit as value-neutral, apolitical, knowledge gatherers. With values safely banned from the scientific arena, and few incentives for becoming involved in public engagement work, scientists must watch from the sidelines as sun cream becomes ever more translucent.

It is patents and profit margins, not a lack of medical expertise, which prevents essential medical treatments from reaching the people who need them most. Similarly, it is political feasibility, rather than scientific reality that dominates climate policy.

Climate scientists are likely to be concerned about climate change as much if not more than other people – hardly surprising given that they are on the frontline of climate change research. It’s scary stuff. Should they be prevented from expressing their worries in public?

Lenny Smith is right that scientists shouldn’t over-interpret their data. Science occupies its privileged position in the world precisely because of its softly-softly approach to fact finding. But while over-selling models might be a scientific sin, the underselling of ethical values in the application of science is a far greater concern.

AC

December 2008 - Re-branding Christmas

2008-12-09T17:53:00.000Z

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/07/greenchristmas-greenbusiness

(Published on Comment is Free, 07/12/08)

December 2008 - Don’t stop for the Green Cross Code Man

2008-12-09T09:14:00.000Z

In the UK in November there was a debate on the Internet and Video Games in the House of Commons, to give you a flavour of the debate I quote MP John Hayes concluding remarks “We will all be brutalised, because those who are malign or malevolent have access to a different kind of media” - Yeah pretty strong stuff. Actually the point of agreement among MP’s arising out of the discussion was a suggestion that the Green Cross Code Man, the road safety character from 1975, should be used to warn people about dangerous Video Games. Yes looking at Hansard on what was said in Parliament on this issue leaves the impression that the dialogue was largely backwards looking (Green Cross Code Man!) and negative about an area that should be treated more as opportunity than threat by our politicians.
Compare this conservative attitude by UK MP’s with American Congressman Ed Markey who in order to save fuel emissions spoke to delegates of the 2007 United Nations climate change conference in Bali using his avatar from the Virtual World Second Life.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2ZFBu31Dho&feature=related

Makey’s intervention, however effective, sure shows willingness to embrace new media and use it positively in particular in connection with climate change. A key sign to people in the UK parliament that confident steps into virtual worlds can help communication and leadership on real world climate change issues.
Second Life is an example of a Collaborative Virtual Environment and another example of what they can do in respect of social issues is provided by Jim Purbrick’s Carbon Goggles initiative which allows avatars to view the emissions they would be emitting in the real world as they go about their virtual day.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tbX_6NE7To
Carbon Goggles aims to deliver information about emissions from AMEE (http://www.amee.cc/about) in a different way and projects like this – another example is the BBC game Climate Challenge, there are many more - have the potential be educative on climate change with added accessibility and participation.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/hottopics/climatechange/climate_challenge/aboutgame.shtml

The “other reality” media I discuss here can be seen to have three functions in relation to the 100 month effort to avoid dangerous climate change: Firstly education and changing real world behaviour (see Carbon Goggles), secondly Makey’s Second Life foray is about discharging real world tasks by virtual means, in this case communication other examples are planning and prototyping. The third function is other reality as fantasy outlet, doing what is unsustainable in the real world. The video games MPs are concerned about because they don’t reflect real life values, thought about from a different perspective, may be useful as virtual outlets for stuff you can know longer do… not Grand but Green Theft Auto!
Virtual reality is perhaps most conspicuously connected with climate change through the laptop presentations of people like Al Gore and Mark Lynas showing the consequences of not doing enough. It would be nice for other reality media to be used more, in these 100 months, to do what is necessary to avoid those consequences.

TF

November 2008 - Stop doing (what everyone else is doing)

2008-11-28T11:32:00.000Z

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/nov/27/climate-change-carbon-emissions

(published 27/11/08 in The Guardian)

AC

November 2008 - What's so great about saving the planet?

2008-11-25T13:43:00.000Z

"Those who struggle to change the world see themselves as noble, even tragic figures. Yet most of those who work for world betterment are not rebels against the scheme of things. They seek consolation for a truth they are too weak to bear. At bottom, their faith that the world can be transformed by human will is a denial of their own mortality"
(John Gray - Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals)

In Straw Dogs, John Gray issues a scathing attack on humanism - the widely held belief that we can, through the considered application of their own abilities, manipulate the world such that the our species progresses beyond the evolutionary chain that produced us: through conscious will, humans can become something more than simply an efficiently destructive animal. Gray argues that the secular humanist perspective is little more than an extension of Cristian dogma, with humans at the centre of a shared illusion of 'progress'. This time, however, instead of redemption in the afterlife, salvation through self-improvement and species-immortality is the preferred focus of the mutual hallucination.

Gray's attack is aimed at an unsettlingly broad range of popular belief systems, from Fascist regimes that seek purification via ethnic cleansing, to the modern faith in markets and technology as liberators of human development. Both, he argues, are little more than tweaks of the same dial - a knob marked 'intentional human progress' - when in fact, that dial does little to alter the eventual outcomes of human lives. Try as we might, claims Gray, we are no more able to escape the biological determinants of our fates (primitive drives for food, power and reproduction) than the non-human animals we are so quick to distant ourselves from.

In light of the rug being pulled out from under human endeavour, how does the Green movement fare? If humans are just animals, impotent in the face of evolutionary restrictions, deluded by a shared vision of progress that is destined to elude us, and obsessed with creating an environment where we can 'live forever', what's so great about saving the earth?

Its a good question, and one that should have any serious environmentalist quivering over their quinoa. Its important to note that this isn't just a re-hash of the 'how can you be so arrogant to assume that humans are causing climate change' argument, that seeks to duck-out of responsibility to future generations by proclaiming innocence in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence. The claim isn't that humans are not causing climate change - it is that causing climate change is just a symptom of the inevitable destruction that resides deep in our genetic code. Humans, as a species, are very good at rapidly expanding our numbers, rapidly exploiting our resources, and rapidly dying out. This story has been repeated since homosapien first evolved. Ultimately, therefore, the dream of 'saving the planet' is precisely that - a dream, and grandiose one at that.

Worse still is the realisation that 'saving the planet' is so often a proxy for 'saving humans' in most people's eyes. The emerging political acceptance that climate change is real and should be prevented is not borne out of some Gaian concern for the earth system. It is borne out of the very species-centric realisation that a malfunctioning environment will soon spell the end for human life. If the everlasting propagation of human life is what we're fighting for, is it really worth our while?

Environmentalists are not a coherent group. Many people want to prevent dangerous climate change, for many different reasons. Some undoubtedly feel a strong urge to preserve the earth for centuries to come, supporting human life in abundance. Others perhaps, wish for a world with less people (although justly engineering this would be next to impossible). Most feel a commitment to immediate future generations. But for some, preventing dangerous climate change is primarily a social justice issue - one that concerns the current world population, not some imagined future group that might retrospectively regret our decisions made 1000 years previously. 100 months takes us to 2016. Advocating immediate and radical action on climate change is not a grandiose scheme for human immortality, it is a practical response to the indisputable fact that unmitigated climate change will greatly exacerbate the current inequitable distribution of global resources.

Tackling climate change requires a solution that simultaneously tackles global inequality, whether this be financial, medical, educational or environmental. The principle of fairness does not crumble in the face of John Gray's dismissal of human progress. On this view, the human race could start dying out in its millions tomorrow, but so long as this extinction was random, and unsystematic, then the principle of fairness would be preserved (of course, in reality, even 'random' events like natural disasters claim over 90% of their victims in poor countries). Whether humans 'survive' or not is irrelevant - so long as they stand and fall together.

So what's so great about saving the planet? Nothing, really. But so long as the world is carved up as it is - with the richest 2% owning 50% of the wealth - preserving it in the best possible state is simply an intervention for addressing (current) poverty and inequality. And that's something that John Gray's (straw) attack dogs cant devour.

AC

November 2008 - Big Ask: Big Deal?

2008-11-11T13:55:00.000Z

Amidst the financial crisis that has enveloped the media, if not yet the average British citizen, Energy & Climate Change Minister Ed Miliband quietly conceded that the target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 would be increased from 60 to 80%. Two weeks later, Barack Obama swept to victory in the US elections running on a campaign promise of reducing American emissions by the same amount. The target of an 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions has been a central target of the successful and well-publicised Big Ask campaign, led by the environmental pressure group Friends of the Earth.

High profile supporters (including Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke) and a substantial amount of postcard-pressure from the electorate clearly had an impact on Government thinking. So, has the political mainstream finally woken up to the scientific reality of climate change? Well, maybe. But the relative ease with which both British and American politicians were persuaded that 80% reduction targets were necessary raises the possibility that perhaps the Big Ask wasn’t such a Big Deal after all.

While there is much to celebrate about the adoption of a stronger climate law (the Climate Change Bill will now also include shipping and aviation in emissions targets), there are some voices who can’t quite find the enthusiasm to join the party. The Big Question on their minds is whether an 80% reduction in greenhouse gas by 2050 in two of the richest and most industrialised countries is really enough.

Strangely enough, Friends of the Earth Australia provide an answer in a report published earlier this year, ominously entitled Code Red. In the document, climate science since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2007) report is reviewed, with a particular focus on the work of James Hansen, Chief Climate Scientist at NASA. Hansen made the news earlier in the year for testifying in the case of the ‘Kingsnorth Six’, where a group of Greenpeace protestors used climate change as a defence to beat charges of criminal damage for spraying the word ‘Gordon’ in rather large letters on the side of a certain coal-fired power station’s chimney stack. Hansen has also, however, spent a great many number of years studying the effects of climatic change on Arctic ice, and has repeatedly reported that the melting of the Arctic ice is about 100 years ahead of schedule – that is, about 100 years ahead of the IPCC predictions.

Code Red reviews an enormous amount of post-IPCC peer reviewed climate science, and reaches a staggering conclusion: We do not need to reduce our emissions, we need to stop, then reverse them. If we do not, then avoiding the infamous tipping points and positive feedback mechanisms (typically the central goal of climate change legislation) will simply not be possible. All the horrific consequences of runaway climate change will become distinct possibilities, rather than vague future scenarios. Avoiding the tipping points means developing methods of sequestering carbon that is already in the atmosphere, at the same time as completely overhauling the global energy economy. Now that’s a Big Ask.

Unsurprisingly, analyses like these are nowhere to be seen in the political mainstream. This could be, of course, because Code Red is a puritanical manifesto for destroying civilisation and all the values it holds dear. Or, it could be that the scientific reality of climate change – as distinct from the politically feasible and ‘reasonable’ options that now define the boundaries of acceptable political debate on climate change – are just too much to bear.

What if preventing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in developing countries meant sacrificing our standards of living? Would we do it? What if preserving ecosystems and biodiversity meant giving up fossil fuels altogether? Could we manage? An 80% reduction in the greenhouse gas emissions of two highly developed and polluting countries is genuine progress. But lurking in the background, some even Bigger Questions remain…

October 2008 - Green New Deal and a (Potential) Political Super-Fight to Save the World.

2008-10-31T20:09:00.000Z

You think on first thoughts the financial crisis and recession should harm the chances of (cash backed) government action on climate change, however, the change dynamic that the financial crisis has brought is spinning attractive narratives which speak of the opportunities that these times offer. Perhaps the most compelling of these stories is the idea of a Green New Deal.
The reference to Roosevelt’s New Deal, the prescription that cured America’s Great Depression, is deliberate and proponents of the concept argue for a blue print for recovery much like the Old New Deal promoting industrial reform and job creation... but of course privileging green investment, green jobs, building green infrastructure . The potency of this idea is such that the United Nations are backing it calling for a "Global Green New Deal" what they call a “Environmentally-Focused Investment Historic Opportunity for 21st Century Prosperity and Job Generation”
http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=548&ArticleID=5957&l=en

If this idea becomes a real prospect, will we have ourselves a Green-Roosevelt and who might that be? Well it is true the Green New Deal presents Gordon Brown with an opportunity to build on his World Saving! image following his bail out plan and Paul Krugman’s nobel prize winning endorsement. http://article.wn.com/view/2008/10/13/Guardian_Daily_Brown_saves_the_world/?section=LatestInternationalNews&template=worldnews%2Findex.txthis
A world class Green New Deal put together in the UK and taken on round the world could secure Gordon a slice of political legacy that he might be interested in.

While we wait and hope for Brown to make a substantial move, a longer established Superhero has already been playing at the role. Governor Schwarzenegger’s has been saying this month that in these times he wants to go “faster not slower” on the measures needed to grow the green economy in California - and makes like he’s got the Roosevelt Job nailed on seeing as he has already been asked to speak at the UN once.
http://gov.ca.gov/press-release/10777/

Arnie argues the benefits of front running on climate change he claims half of US venture capital is coming into California because of the green economy there. The incentives are there for Brown too if his proposals for a Green New Deal are competitive, the present reliance in the UK on financial services is one such incentive to find a way to a growing (greener) economy. In 2007 financial services accounted for 10.1 per cent of UK GDP and Financial services made up one in 30 jobs in the UK.

Old Roosevelt for his New Deal had a ‘Brains Trust’ to help and Gordon Brown should be buoyed by the New Economics Foundations helpful proposals made by a substantial ‘Brains Trust’ of concerned and competent people who give Brown and the government a heads up and if taken on a chance to overtake Arnie as the New New Deal Superhero saving the world.

“the Green New Deal Group challenges government to go away, do its homework, and come back in the Autumn with a comprehensive legislative programme equivalent to that implemented by Roosevelt 75 years ago – a ‘Green New Deal’.”
http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/greennewdealneededforuk210708.aspx

TF

October 2008 - When Good News is Really Only Less Bad News

2008-10-07T10:50:00.000+01:00

As bankers across the world did their best to look innocent and surprised as the fiscal black hole created by their arrogance and greed swallowed savings, investments and metaphors for really bad things, British and European climate change policy moved quietly forward.

In the UK, the Independent Climate Change Committee advised the British government that it should be aiming for 80%, rather than 60% reductions in greenhouse gases by 2050, also recommending that aviation be included in these targets. These are targets that have played a big role in the campaigning strategy of environmental NGOs. If these recommendations were to become law when the Climate Change Bill receives its Royal Ascent, Britain would have exactly the moral authority it needs to boss others around in the fight against climate change - and we all love a bit of moral high ground.

In Europe, MEPs voted for an emissions reduction plan modelled on California's ambitious climate change strategy, whereby greenhouse gas emissions are restricted by an 'amount per kilowatt hour' system, that places absolute limits on how much CO2 can be emitted from any one place at any one time. Prime targets for this new legislation are coal-fired power stations - at least, ones built after 2015.

So are Britain and Europe finally taking the fight against climate change seriously? Well, perhaps.

Environmental NGOs must play a continuous game of carrot and stick with the public perception of government action on climate change. On the one hand, positive developments must be flagged as such - and so any legislation that makes E.On's plans to dig up more of the black stuff less likely will be cautiously applauded. On the other hand, mainstream political views are so far away from the scientific reality of climate change that baby-steps away from the shimmering mirage of 'business as usual' cannot be championed as bold strides towards climate change mitigation.

Lest we forget, the 100 months countdown is for dangerous global climate change. Countries such as the UK, which jauntily kicked off the industrial revolution, are already in the red in terms of carbon emissions. That is, if climate change is to be tackled effectively and equitably (using, for example, the contraction and convergence framework), the most polluting of the industrialised nations (us, USA, Australia) will need to find ways of sequestering carbon that is already in the atmosphere. If we do not, then either the burden of combatting climate change will fall unfairly on the shoulders of less industrialised nations, or dangerous climate change will not be avoided. Neither of these outcomes seems much of a reason for celebration.

The inconvenient truth at the centre of environmental campaigning reveals itself at moments like these: We beg for small concessions, knowing all the while that small concessions will simply delay dangerous climate change - not prevent it. Of course, the small concessions must be rewarded - if they were not, the gap between scientific reality and political feasibility would never close. But 80% reduction targets, and no new coal, is the beginning, rather than the end of the story.

AC

September 2008 - Cultural responses to Climate Change, based on Science or (Pop) Art?

2008-10-06T23:39:00.000+01:00

At the start of September, Powai a northern suburb of Mumbai, India had a contest to honour the greenest woman they could find and launched the title “Mrs Green”. Take a look at the full details on the Planet Powai community website (http://www.planetpowai.com/news/0709200805.htm). Elsie Gabriel who had the original idea for the contest reckons:

“Ladies across the nation are energized about issues concerning environmental habits, global warming, garbage, alternative fuels, and other environmental topics. Home makers, grand moms or even working women, all are driving the sustainability movement, studying related topics, encouraging people to recycle, and proclaiming the green word!”

What appears online as a charming but culturally-specific event for “Green Ladies” also shows the outside viewer that “the green word” travels and people round the world, want to be involved, they Wannabe* Green.

* I should explain, I mean Wannabe as in; want to with passion the term coined by the Spice Girls, the Pop Group who in the video Wannabe (1996) gave a glimpse of the possibilities of radical change (honestly) as they are seen storming the establishment, running around shaking things up and then getting the bus out again with their integrity in tact – for those Girls it was not Wannabe like them, but Wannabe like US for not being like them! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3wgaWAHo2Q).

For the record, when you scour the internet looking for leadership and inspiration for Wannabe greens in 2008 (98 Months to go), the results are disappointing. You get… Geri Halliwell at last year’s Live Earth. If you have 2 minutes to waste, watch Geri ‘talking’ about the environment (I won’t give it away by telling you if she does say something profound or not, have a bet with yourself… in your own head http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=aw3gRT0U8Vc)

You know, taking a September look at the Indian “Mrs Green” and the brilliant yet flawed Geri does draw, interesting question marks about Green Identity Politics and our cultural readiness in Britain to do the necessary in 100 months. We know that we have to MOVE TO a lower carbon economy so a broad based cultural MOVEMENT is vital, and Spice Girl chutzpah and “Mrs Greens’” will be needed to achieve it, but it has to be focused as well and free of self publicity and green wash. There was less than positive news on this question from research written up in the media in September, a study found (from a small sample) people that recycle and save energy are more likely to fly so rendering themselves carbon big foot’s, not the green hero’s they appear – to themselves maybe and others. (http://www.exeter.ac.uk/news/newsjetsetters.shtml)

This suggests that your Wannabe Greener needs information, a Movement means shared objectives, and I should remind myself that Climate Change has a fundamental basis in science – and its vital, smart people say to keep the science in mind along the way. To inform the MOVE way beyond the acceptance moment, where an individual decides on the balance of science that yes Climate Change is happening. There are frameworks for doing this of course including Footprints, Planets and the Carbon Bottom Line (George Marshall).

If we should measure our Greenness individually, the next step perhaps is having it monitored by others- as it was mooted in September that eco town residents could:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/sep/26/ecotowns.ethicalliving

If eco town monitoring is done purely on the Carbon Bottom Line I have no problem, but to be too prescriptive about how people meet the Carbon Bottom Line, would be to ignore the power in people and groups facing the challenges in their own way. The pursuance of a monoculture based on oil and driven by consumption is the reason that Climate Change is on us so quickly, so we shouldn’t try to solve the problem with that same way of thinking, a diversity of culturally appropriate responses to Climate Change (with eyes on the Bottom Line) may prove the most effective and sustainable direction of travel – with the option of some Girl Power as well.

TF

September 2008 - Planes, (no) trains and automobiles

2008-09-28T11:38:00.000+01:00

The European parliament surprised eager environmental pressure groups and bullish BMW lobbyists this week by voting in favour of a legal framework that will ensure the greenhouse gas emissions of new cars across Europe will be reduced. Any vehicles made after 2012 will have to be (on average) 17% more efficient, with deeper reductions in emissions required by 2020. Fines will be levied against manufacturers that flout the legislation - the higher the emissions, the harsher the fine. Environmentalists could hardly contain their excitement, with Greenpeace claiming that "climate change campaigning works" and Lib Dem environment spokesman Chris Davies declaring "this is a good day for democracy".

And, after years of vacuous greenwash from the motor industry, concrete emissions reduction targets, a firm but fair time frame within which to enact them, and punitive measures for those who choose to keep on truckin', are small reasons to be cheerful. Despite the economic muscle of the automobile industry, environmental values seem to have taken precedence on this occasion.

What the EU giveth, however, the UK does its best to taketh away. Leaked documents from the European council (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/sep/26/biofuels.climatechange) suggest that Britain is determined to push for aviation to be excluded from European targets on renewable energy use. This mirrors the current domestic agenda of the British Government, who are simultaneously expanding the capacity of the world's busiest airport by a third AND leaving aviation out of the doesn't-do-quite-what-it-says-on-the-tin Climate Change Bill.

This deference to the increasingly profitable airline industry is not entirely surprising. Despite the death of a few ropey budget operators (so long Zoom, you will not be sadly missed), civil aviation is a growing market. It is also sufficiently disassociated in the mind of the public from the suddenly villainous financial wheelers and dealers. Hence, aviation is likely to weather the threat of a recession for now, and cement its place as the fastest growing source of carbon dioxide emissions.

And the apparent ease with which restrictions were slapped on the automobile industry demonstrates that the problem is not primarily one of regulatory ability, but of political desire. Cars are profitable in Germany, and noticeably, it was Germany's Chancellor Merkel who lead the call to water down the EU legislation. It was in Germany's short-term economic interests to avoid regulating their powerful car industry too stiffly. So, despite the imminent threat of environmental tipping points being reached within the next 99 months, Chancellor Merkel chose to place economic prosperity before ecological welfare, as if the former were not contingent on the latter.

But it is not just the natural environment that contains tipping points - as the events of the past few weeks have shown, markets too respond abruptly to cumulative sequences of small changes, reacting in extreme and unpredictable ways. In the same way that positive feedback mechanisms will, unchecked, ensure that dangerous climatic change is locked into place without urgent ameliorative action, so too can changes in markets be difficult to reverse.

Unlike environmental changes, however, this is a feature of markets that cuts both ways. The EU legislation that will financially penalise car manufacturers that emit more than they should, will create a powerful driver for a market in genuine efficiency: there is now a definite cost associated with over-emitting, rather than vague consumer brownie points based on appearing as green as possible.

When manufacturers compete with each other on grounds of fuel efficiency, we are starting to harness the much-celebrated ability of markets to grope their way towards the 'best' solution. Only this time, they are not groping in the dark; the path is lit by legislation that ensures that profit is contingent on environmental efficiency. And that's a small step towards an economic model that values people and planet.

AC

September 2008 - The DANGERS of over-insulating the energy providers

2008-09-27T00:03:00.000+01:00

Those people shouting loud in September (John Cruddas, Michael Meacher and Tony Woodley have been!) for a windfall tax on the big energy providers were, I imagine, bitterly disappointed by Gordon Brown’s domestic energy announcement.

The NEW interest in the announcement was Brown promising to SWITCH ON “a sea-change in energy efficiency and consumption” by legislating to require the big power companies to pay for £910 million worth of domestic energy saving measures (full costs for older people and the lower waged and half costs for everyone else). So it isn’t a windfall tax but is this a fudged policy alternative or a “sea-change” approach to rolling out loft insulation?

Compass argued for a windfall tax as such:
“We believe that the moment is right for the government to levy a sensible one off windfall tax to guarantee social and environmental justice both now and in the future.”
http://www.compassonline.org.uk/campaigns/campaign.asp?n=2773

It’s true a one off tax would give government the means to extend exponentially the government Warm Front scheme and encourage people to insulate their homes - probably alongside transferring money to help with utility bills (the primary objective of many of the tax’s supporters). If such a windfall tax produced turbo-tangible outcomes on home energy efficiency then it would be a robust move showing strong government leadership on the issue. However it would also be bad for three reasons:

1. It is just a one off
2. The power companies sadly are probably better at ‘selling’ the take up
of insulation
3. Companies would NOT be paying the carbon costs UPFRONT and
BUILT-IN to their business models

Doing TAX and GRANT means the Power companies can leave it to the public sector to ‘think’ whilst they remain insulated and operating to a pre Climate-Change-Conscious Logic.

What Chancellor Darling says of the proposal
"I suspect that we have got rather more out of the energy companies than we might have done out of a windfall tax."
Remains to be seen! And the OUTCOMES have to judged but the intention has to be right that these Companies have got to bear a much larger share of Carbon Costs Up Front – and Built-In to their Business models. Corporate responsibility too often has meant corporate minimum standards. The Global Financial Crisis that shows deeper wounds the longer September runs, shows profoundly, that Business can no longer assume that PROFIT is their only responsibility.

TF

September 2008 - carbon offsetting and 'being reasonable'

2008-09-21T20:42:00.000+01:00

In the September copy of the Co-operative's Re:act magazine, there was a debate between Tom Picken, Friends of the Earth International Climate Campaigner, and Paul Monaghan, Head of Social Goals & Sustainability for the Co-operative group, on carbon offsetting. Making all the key arguments against offsetting was Tom Picken, who accurately observed that a) we only have a few years to reduce global carbon emissions, and b) an offset is an offest - not a reduction.

It is not, perhaps, surprising to find the Co-op, despite the admirable ethical credentials, supporting carbon offsetting. After all, one part of their business is a travel company, and they make income from selling flights. Paul Monaghan's stance, however, was disappointing - not so much because of his support for the carbon offset concept, but because of the disparaging and misleading way he characterised those in the environmental movement who believe that carbon offsetting is simply not an appropriate response to the urgency of tackling climate change.

Monaghan claimed that disliking carbon offsetting was a badge of honour that some environmentalists wore to indicate their 'greener' credentials. He even claimed that taking such a stance was 'dangerous'. In painting those who do not share his views about carbon offsetting as a lunatic fringe with a point to prove, however, Monaghan is doing something far more dangerous: placing boundaries on the 'acceptable' limits of the debate.

Most environmentalists oppose carbon offsetting not because they wish to appear 'greener than thou', but because it fails in contributing to the most basic aim of the fight against climate change - reducing carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere. Global carbon dioxide emissions must be reduced rapidly to avoid dangerous climate change - that much is now uncontroversial. Aviation is the fastest growing source of carbon dioxide emissions, yet carbon offsetting does noting to reduce this - if anything, it encourages it. That comforting feeling you get when you carbon offset is the the wool being pulled over your eyes - it is not enough to simply carry on as we are, and making the tough changes to our behaviour is only made harder by pseudo-solutions like carbon offsetting.

So, while there are serious objections to carbon offsetting that arise from a uncompromising assessment of the harsh reality of climate change, 'reasonable' people like Monaghan make a shameless plunge for the 'reasonable' middle ground and designate all dissenting views as 'dangerous' and 'anti-development'. In a high profile position, working for an organisation supposedly at the forefront of environmentally responsible business practice, Monaghan should know better.There is perhaps nothing quite so dangerous as an attempt to curtail genuine debate - especially when the stakes are so high.

For a far more creative critique of carbon offsetting, see http://www.cheatneutral.com/

AC

August 2008 - Kingsnorth Climate Camp

2008-09-17T17:45:00.000+01:00

The third annual Climate Camp (http://www.climatecamp.org.uk/home) took place between 4th-11th August at the site of a proposed new coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth, in Kent. There is already a coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth, but it is soon to come to the end of its sooty little life, and energy behemoth E.On have kindly offered to build a brand new one in its place. All that stands between Kent and a shiny new power station is government go-ahead...and several hundred committed climate campers.

The aim of the camp was to highlight the dangerous absurdity of building new coal-fired power stations whilst simultaneously trying to reduce one's carbon emissions. The UK government look likely to pass legislation that will commit Britain to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 60% by 2050 (a scientifically unjustified and pitifully inadequate target, but a target nonetheless). Coal, being the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, must necessarily be phased out if emissions are to be reduced, but the proposed power station at Kingsnorth alone would belch out as much carbon dioxide as a country like Zambia does in a year.

Malcom Wicks, the Energy Minister, displayed a criminally glib attitude towards the camp, declaring that "The real prize is to develop technologies so that the CCS technology can be retro-fitted onto coal-fired plants in countries like China. Our decisions about any one application for a coal plant in Britain are pretty small fry compared to the risk of global CO2 emissions in coming years."

Wicks' barely disguised drooling for the 'real prize' of Carbon Capture & Storage (CCS) technology is a clue to the solution that the British Government favours to the problem of climate change - and guess what? It involves lots of lucrative contracts for new coal-fired power stations, but with the proviso that an as-yet unproven technology will, at some yet to be specified time, be fitted to these new power stations. CCS may prove itself to be a viable way of capturing emissions from existing coal-fired power stations. But it's primary use at the present is as a justification for coal new-builds.

His assertion that any one planning application is 'small fry' is also terrifyingly disingenuous - if Kingsnorth is given the go-ahead, it is likely to be the first of seven new coal-fired power stations in Britain. While the climate camp succeeded in grabbing some media attention for a short time, the real work to prevent Kingsnorth being built is likely to be played out over years, not days. the camp organisers have declared that a rolling blockade, and peaceful, direct action, will be deployed if the new plant is given the green light (which looks highly likely).

As the 100 month countdown begins, things are not off to a good start - in order to prevent dangerous climate change, fossil fuels must ultimately be phased out altogether. They will run out of their own accord, of course, but this will be too late for millions of people in low-lying settlements, and the eco-systems they depend on. Plus, the quicker we start making the transition out of a fossil-fueled economy, the softer the landing on the other side of the oil peak will be.

Sadly, the short term interests of a government that has firmly hitched its cart to the kamikaze horse of globalised capitalism are not easily reconciled with an end to the age of fossil fuels.

AC

August 2008 - The 'energy gap'

2008-09-16T14:12:00.000+01:00

It has become commonplace for proponents of new fossil fuel power stations to refer to the 'energy gap' - that is, the gap between our energy demands and the capacity of a renewable energy sector to meet them. Indeed, one of the arguments routinely wheeled out in support of E.On's application to build a new coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth is that new coal is necessary to 'keep the lights on'. Of course, it goes without saying that this gap must be closed by meeting the increasing energy demands of a growing capitalist economy - not by attempting to reduce our energy consumption and live within our ecological means.

There is, however, another notable gap - that between the scientific reality of dangerous climate change (conservatively estimated as requiring atmospheric concentrations of CO2e to not exceed 400 ppm - or approximately 2 degrees of climatic warming above pre-industrial levels) and the political feasibility of taking drastic and urgent action to prevent it. In the same week that the 100 months report appeared, the British Government demonstrated precisely how large this gap had become, as the chief scientific advisor to DEFRA Bob Watson warned that we should 'prepare to adapt to 4 degrees of warming', becuase 2 degrees was an 'ambitious target'

At 4 degrees above pre-industrial levels, "between 7 million and 300 million more people would be affected by coastal flooding each year, there would be a 30-50% reduction in water availability in Southern Africa and the Mediterranean, agricultural yields would decline 15 to 35% in Africa and 20 to 50% of animal and plant species would face extinction." (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/aug/06/climatechange.scienceofclimatechange)
The idea that we could somehow 'adapt' to 4 degrees of warming is, as medialens pointed out, deeply irrational (http://www.medialens.org/alerts/08/080909_hawking_the_technofix.php). Of course, any discussion of 'dangerous' climate change is of course a value judgement about how many people we are prepared to sacrifice for the sake of our 'ambitious' targets. As James Hansen, the chief scientist of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies is keen to remind people, climate change is already dangerous.

But where there should be debate about the most effective methods of mitigating climate change, and averting ecological and humanitarian disaster, there are instead thinly veiled threats from corporate energy providers about 'keeping the lights on'. Where vast sums should be invested in decentralised and community based renewable energy generation, millions are poured into building infrastructure that will commit the country to a fossil fueled energy economy for decades to come.

The real gap, it would seem, is between the imminent reality of runaway climate change, and its savage human cost, and the weak, compromised clunking of a political system that openly concedes that a 50% reduction in water availability in Southern Africa is something that we just have to 'adapt' to.

AC

100 months...and counting

2008-09-16T13:47:00.001+01:00

"By using the best estimates of current greenhouse gas emission growth rates, conservative estimates for the potentially damaging environmental feedbacks that accelerate global warming, and the maximum concentration of greenhouse gases that might prevent irreversible climate change, it is possible to estimate the length of time until this threshold is passed" (New Economics Foundation '100 Months', 2008)

On 1st August, 2008, the New Economics Foundation (http://www.neweconomicsfoundation.org/) issued a report stating that in order to avoid 'dangerous' climate change, the world had 100 months to take collective action (http://www.onehundredmonths.org/). That is, if things continue as they are, dangerous atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will occur in less than nine years time. For the purposes of the report, 'dangerous' climate change was defined as an atmospheric concentration of Carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) of above 400 parts per million (ppm), which means an above average chance of keeping global temperatures 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels.

It is worth noting that even 2 degrees of warming will have negative ecological and humanitarian consequences. However, stabilising the global average temperature at less than 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels gives a decent chance of avoiding the 'tipping points' - the positive feedback mechanisms - that spell disaster for the environment as we know it.

100 months takes us to December 2016. This will be a monthly record of how, in the UK, we measure up to the challenge of drastically reducing global carbon emissions. Will we bury our heads in the sand and desperately put our faith in free markets, techno-fixes, and 'business as usual'? Will we wring our hands, sigh dejectedly and evade responsibility? Or will we take decisive action and acknowledge that the economic model of globalised capitalism is dragging us kicking and screaming into ecological destruction and humanitarian disaster on an unprecedented scale?

100 months...and counting.