December 2009 – Environmental Heroes and Villains in 2009

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

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

1.

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

2.

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













3.

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

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

5.

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














6.

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

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

7.

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

8.

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

9.

Gary Kemp from Spandau Ballet got serious about cycling.















10.

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




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


1.

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




















2.

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

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

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









3.

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

4.

Noel Gallagher rejects Chris Martins environmental overtures.

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

5.

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

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

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

6.

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












7.

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













8.

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

9.

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

10.

Danish police

TF

December 2009 - Copenhagen: A political or personal failure?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AC

November 2009 - A Meaningful Numbers Game?

 
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...

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

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

>>>>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.

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