Depressing headline: - when asked what the single most important issue facing us today - 4% named the environment or climate change. Pathetic!
It suggests two things to me. Most obviously people are hugely influenced by a what is on the media - the survey was taken when the press was dominated by the credit crunch. This isn't the full story but for reasons of brevity that's all I'll say for now.
Secondly - there is a grave deficit in leadership. Our leaders are not doing much to combat climate change and this is inevitably translated into people not thinking it's all that important.
A dilemma and the beginning of a solution. The dilemma is that there is a mounting body of evidence to suggest that we mustn't focus on how grim the situation is - in the face of such cataclysmic projections people tend to give up - climate change is so mammoth people feel disempowered and don't believe they can do anything. But if only 4% recognise climate change as THE issue facing us today, what can we do? Maybe the shock horror tactics employed by the green movement in the past is needed to wake people up - and then we harness the positive aspects of change once people are listening.
The beginning of a solution? Politicians have often told me that they will do more about climate change when people clamour for more action. Afterall it's a democracy. Putting aside the woeful understanding of leadership exhibited I wonder what people politicians listen to. Maybe a loud voice in their ears is their constituency party activists. I spent a substantial amount of time in the 1990's telling Women's Rural Institutes, church groups and the like about climate change - maybe organisations like Energy Saving Scotland Advice Centres should direct more attention to constituency parties.
Horror headline. The survey was able classify respondents according to how they viewed the environment and (somewhat unhelpfully I think) classified the environmentally aware as 'deep greens'. Deep greens tend to be educated and wealthy. They have the financial power to make environmentally friendly choices and the wherewithall to understand their impact.
But check this: deep greens are the most likely to have flown for leisure purposes in the last year - because they can afford it. For Fakks Sake!
A solution to this? It must involve hitting people, very hard, in their (trouser!) pockets. And the fairest way is to have a financial system based on Carbon - with personal carbon allowances so the poorest can get what they need to live - and the rich, if they must, can pay through their noses for carbon profligate activities.
And our current financial mess is an excellent opportunity to move the system onto this basis. The 'gold standard' was introduced after the crash in the 1930's, now we can introduce the carbon standard.
Of course it wont happen - greenies, lead by the still shimmering Mr Obama, have been diverted down the 'green new deal' route, to my mind completely missing the scale of response needed. And anyway our leaders are headless chickens in the face of real crisis.
As I say in comment on the other grim environmental news story this week, It's a fact, we're fakked. Or so says my heart. My head insists we can do it, we can overcome this crisis - but only in moments of delirious optimism. Truth is the hour glass is running very very low.
3 comments:
Happily, partly due to my naivity and partly due to ignorance of all the details, I'm still positive that the environmental movement will blossom massively in the next five years.
Also, necessity will be the mother of all sorts of successful inventions like engines that run on CO2, flight by gyroscopics, ocean coolers, farming domes, transparent external home insulation, etc.
Grin like you're winning.
'cultlext'
MTB
I'm sort of hoping that a) the credit crunch will buy us some time and b) that as MTB says, human ingenuity will find a way through. Kind of like acid rain and the ozone layer - we won't act quickly enough to prevent damage, but we will get our arses into gear before it's entirely too late.
But then people say things like 'feedback loop' and 'tipping point' and I just want to crawl back under the duvet and hope it goes away
Well there's nothing wrong with optimism.
The problem with climate change is it's so complicated and the actions needed go right to the heart of our consumerist society. Both ozone and acid rain were relatively simple single issues. Acid rain was, as much as anything, alleviated by Thatchers pathological hatred of the miners, and the switch from CFCs didn't hurt business - they just had to switch from making one set of chemicals to another. The switch away from carbon will hurt many many businesses.
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