Climate change has, if you will pardon the pun, been 2007’s hottest issue. It has seemed at times that every newspaper, every supermarket, every charity and every political party has rushed to proclaim its concern about the effect of greenhouse gases on our climate.
In the last few weeks we have seen massive floods across England, thousands dead and millions displaced in the Indian Subcontinent and the first ever man to swim at the North Pole as the artic ice recedes. This week sees the second Camp for Climate Action at Heathrow. BAA were so fearful of the coming of the protesters that they sought an injunction which would apparently have banned up to 5 million people not only from the airport and its surrounds but also from large parts of London’s public transport network.
There is now very little doubt that human behaviour is changing the climate. Even the oil companies and their paid scientists have shifted from denying climate change is happening to a position of recognising the problem but arguing that it would be too expensive to do anything about.
There is also a growing recognition that climate change is a class issue – as ever, it will be the global poor who bear the brunt of climate chaos. Tewksbury is rich enough to afford flood defences to avoid floods in the future – the future for Bangladeshis looks grim indeed. Ultimately tackling climate change means that we in the west will have to massively reduce our consumption of fossil fuels.
But given all the hoopla about climate change, why is there still often little public appetite for action on climate change? Here in Scotland air passenger numbers are at their highest ever levels, and it is predicted that they will treble by 2030.
Last year was a poor year for used car sales, but the only cars to see an increase in sales are MPVs, sports cars, SUVs and luxury models – despite all the publicity about their high CO2 emissions. Attempts to introduce a congestion charge in Edinburgh in 2005 failed after 75% of the voters in a city-wide referendum rejected the proposed £2 charge.
I find myself with a lot to think about after the Scottish Greens’ poor performance in the recent Scottish Parliament election, where we lost 5 of our 7 seats. There were many other factors at work – the ballot paper was redesigned to disadvantage smaller parties, the SNP surged on an anti-Labour tide – but as we tried to fight the election on a climate change ticket, it does appear that this message failed to resonate with the voting public.
So, given the seriousness of the challenge to humanity, it is worth reflecting on how effectively the climate change message is getting through. I think there is a major problem in the way it has been framed. Climate change is presented as a very big, but also very distant problem. It is also effectively invisible – even the recent bad weather can at best be described as “the kind of phenomenon that will be more likely as climate change increases”. When faced with other problems that seem small, local and visible it is no wonder that politicians and the public alike take these more seriously. So during the Scottish election campaign the Greens were worrying about a global temperature rise of more than 2 degrees centigrade by 2050, while the SNP were campaigning to save local hospitals.
It is also worth examining solutions proposed to tackle climate change. These tend to fall into three main categories – the banal, the jargonistic and the scary. For the last few months there have been waves of TV adverts exhorting us to use energy efficient light bulbs, wash clothes at 30 degrees and not leave the TV on standby. The banality of these messages means they do not ring true in the face of the scale of changes we need to make to tackle climate change.
There is also a new layer of climate change jargon – Kyoto, carbon footprinting, offsetting, energy descent, carbon capture and sequestration. This is an almost impenetrable set of new concepts, still bitterly argued over. There are still plenty of companies that will take your money and plant a tree to ‘offset’ your carbon emissions, while most environmental organisations reject it as a solution.
Finally there are the scary solutions – no new roads, no more cheap flights, carbon rationing and so on. While some people in Scotland could see the logic in not holidaying in warmer climes to help save the polar bear, this appeals only to a small minority of the population. The climate change movement has allowed itself to become boxed in to a very negative set of responses that do not resonate with people’s aspirations for a better life.
Films like Al Gore’s ‘An inconvenient truth’ have also contributed to this. As a piece of climate propaganda it is long on scary statistics but short on examining why capitalism has got us into this mess and what can be done about it.
So what should be done? It is time we reframed the debate. Instead of talking about the big, distant and invisible we need to be talking about the small, the local and visible. Many of the things that need to be done in a society like Scotland to tackle climate change would have much more direct and appealing virtues. Instead of presenting dealing with climate change as an act of self-sacrifice, the idea of giving up the things that make life worth living, it needs to be linked to positive things. Sometimes this will mean not mentioning tackling climate change as a motivation at all.
For example, in the campaign for congestion charging in Edinburgh, climate change was stressed as one of the major issues tackled by the proposal. I even posed next to a polar bear with a placard saying “Polar bears say no to climate change and yes to congestion charging”. It might as well have said, “Repent, sinners, repent”, for all the impact it had. If I was fighting that campaign again I wouldn’t mention climate change. Instead I would campaign on a proposition that the charge would mean better public transport and reduce childhood asthma.
Equally, are power stations, airports and banks really good targets for climate protests? They may be massive polluters, but are generally quite positively regarded. Wouldn’t it be better to go for targets that most people dislike, and then try to convince people that they are doubly bad because not only is the opencast mine an unsightly, noisy and dirty scar on the landscape, it’s also a climate criminal…
The left was once very effective at selling a better vision of the future. Tackling climate change will mean massive changes in society. If we continue to use the politics of fear and promote CO2 reduction as worthy altruism, not as a positive choice, we will never be able to challenge the fossil fuel addiction that remains at the heart of the problem.
