Climate Change Denial

Why do the websites of progressive civil society organisations pay virtually no attention to climate change?

Here’s an interesting experiment. You can measure how seriously an organisation takes an issue by finding how many times it mentions it on their websites. After all, a website will contain its entire public output: every report, press release and leaflet. You can do it easily on Google. All you have to do is type the word (or phrase in inverted commas) you want to search followed by the word “site” and a colon followed by the domain name.

Two years ago, out of curiosity I typed 
“climate change” site:www.amnesty.org
into Google. Absolutely nothing turned up. Amnesty International, the world’s most prestigious human rights organisation had not one single mention anywhere on its website of an issue that, a according to IPPC estimates will generate 150 million refugees by 2050 and, by the reckoning of the Pentagon and MoD, will become one of the key causes of future conflict.

The Human Rights Watch website mentioned climate change 16 times. This is slightly better until you consider the chances that any random phrase will appear on a large website. For the sake of comparison, I ran a wordsearch on two terms that have absolutely nothing to do with human rights; donkeys and ice cream. I must admit that I have had it in for donkeys ever since I discovered that the British Donkey Sanctuary raises a staggering £20 million a year to “rescue donkeys in distress”. It seems that Human Rights Watch also rates donkeys far above climate change- it mentioned them 67 times. And even ice cream received 25 mentions.

By now you see where I am going. I continued to run the same three wordsearches past a whole cluster of human rights and development organisations. The following all gave the phase “climate change” less than five mentions or less web attention that the two control terms:

Physicians for Human Rights, Oxfam US, CARE US, World Vision US, Save the Children UK, Survival International (the leading indigenous people’s campaign organisation), International Women’s Health Coalition, Womankind Worldwide, YWCA, European Council on Refugees and Exiles (the main umbrella body for refugee organisations) Refugees International, Family Health International.

Later that year I invited leading decision makers from the human rights and development sectors to explain what was going on. They came up with several cogent arguments for their lack of engagement- a belief that the issue was already being dealt with or that it was an ‘environmental issue and outside their mission; a fear of ‘mission creep’; and uncertainty about how they could usefully intervene.

But I think there were deeper reasons. The people who lead liberal organisations seem to find it just as difficult to accept climate change into their world view as people from the free market right. Their politics were molded by the issues of the 1970s and 1980s- social inequality, nuclear proliferation, neo-colonialism, gender issues, racism, homophobia. When they say that it is hard to see what their organisation can do, they are projecting their own confusion over how to absorb and respond to this vast new issue.

The end result is that progressive organisations do not merely sideline or underplay climate change: they actively censor all mention of it from their materials. Internally they argue that it is outside the area of issues relevant to their work. Publicly they do not deny the importance of climate change: they don’t say anything about it at all.

In doing this they are reflecting a wider social denial strategy, noted in several academic studies. The large majority of people, whilst noting that climate change is a serious issue, will admit to never talking about it in their daily life. They are managing the problem by actively excluding it from what sociologists call their ‘norms of attention’. Ironically this strategy mimics a common social response to human rights abuses: when asked, people admit that they heard the screams in the night or they noticed that people had disappeared, but, through  a socially negotiated compact, they never discussed what they know to be happening with each other.

Last week I repeated the wordsearch experiment. There are positive signs of change. Some major development organisations have broken ranks and are now giving climate change the attention it deserves. Oxfam UK, for example, gives it 1,700 mentions. Save the Children has finally got the message and has increased the number of mentions tenfold.

However the human rights organisations are still far from engaged. The Amnesty website now mentions “climate change” 57 times, but the control terms ‘ice cream’ and ‘donkey’ merit 71 and 141 mentions respectively.

In February, Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said that the issue of climate change is becoming of greater concern to his group, ‘particularly because of the refugee issue’ link… . But he refused to be drawn on when it might work on the issue. It is clear that the HRW website is still deliberately excluding mention of climate change. It now mentions climate change 32 times; ice cream is at 33 and donkeys are at 122. I could add that sweets are at 60 and chips are at 164.

Who knows, after another two years of climate disasters, front page news and apocalyptic research Human Rights Watch might pay more interest to the greatest threat to the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people than it does to confectionary, snack foods and cute animals with big brown eyes.

My original wordsearch, interviews and analysis can be found in my chapter ‘Asleep on their watch: where were the NGOs?’ in: David Cromwell and Mark Levene (eds) Surviving Climate Change: The Struggle to Avert Global Catastrophe, Pluto Press 2007.

Here’s a cracker image from the Calor Gas trade magazine - a polar bear supine in front of the technology that will exterminate it. Just to remind you: according to researchers at the University of Edmonton, the polar bear will most likely be extinct in the wild by the end of this century link… What WAS going through the heads of the staff at Calor Connection? One would like to think it is naivety, but seeing that a previous cover feature was ‘Patio Heaters setting the record straight’ I would say that it another example of the ’screw the hippies’ macho  posturing that we have found in ads before. A big pic is at link…

There has been a welcome burst of interest in this blog after the Guardian ran a feature on our regular postings of denial ads link… So just to show that I have no problem biting the band that feeds, here is a recent juxtaposition of ads from the Guardian Business web site. Fantastic- an Eco Media Player to take on my long haul flights. Hope it fits in my organic cotton ‘This is not a plastic bag’ bag.

Thank to ‘Anon employee’ for the Calor gas cover. Please keep sending me ads, posters, magazine covers that irritate you and nicely illustrate the confused and disturbed times we live in.  I will put them up when I get a good bunch together - George

Roman Krznaric is amazed that political activists are ignoring the world’s greatest social justice issue.

In the lobby of Congress House, home of Britain’s Trades Union Congress, there was a banner from the Cuba Solidarity Campaign with Che Guevara t-shirts for sale. A couple of Labour Members of Parliament, drinking tea out of plastic cups, were talking in loud voices about the great strides in social justice being made by President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Where was I? At ‘Latin America 2007’, an annual gathering in London of activists, researchers, politicians and thinkers from the Progressive Left.

The first extraordinary thing I noticed about the conference, held in December, was the number of people. Hundreds and hundreds had come to hear speeches and take part in workshops with regional experts and visiting political and community leaders from Latin America. I hadn’t seen such a big turnout at a Latin America event in Britain since the mid-1990s, when IMF-imposed neoliberal economic policies were wreaking havoc, and peace processes were being negotiated to end civil wars in Central America.

The second extraordinary thing I noticed was this: NOBODY MENTIONED CLIMATE CHANGE. Looking through the list of workshops, there were sessions on anti-poverty programmes in Venezuela, land reform in Bolivia, violence against trade unionists in Guatemala and the legacy of Che and the Cuban Revolution. But on climate change there was a deafening silence.

Clearly the organisers did not believe climate change warranted special attention, despite the mountain of evidence that it is having major effects on the region, and threatens to reverse the human development gains of the past three decades. Many of these effects and threats have recently been documented in the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report 2007/8. Link…

With respect to water scarcity, the report points out that the ‘accelerated melting of tropical glaciers will threaten water supplies for urban populations, agriculture and hydroelectricity, especially in the Andean region’. Peru and Bolivia, two of the poorest countries in the region, face the prospect of a dramatic decline in water availability, especially in the dry season. Climate change is also likely to have major effects on food security across Latin America. The report states that: ‘In Latin America, smallholder agriculture is particularly vulnerable, partly because of limited access to irrigation and partly because maize, a staple across much of the region, is highly sensitive to climate.’ The latest models predict smallholder losses for maize yields averaging around 10 percent across the region, but rising to 25 percent for Brazil.

The most disheartening moment for me was when watching a documentary about Hugo Chavez made by Che Guevera’s daughter, Aleida. Chavez was boasting about how he was using oil revenues to finance the fight against poverty in Venezuela. And then he pointed out that the future looked bright, since the state oil company had the potential to increase oil production through its access to the Orinoco Petroleum Belt, which is estimated to be the world’s largest oil reserve.

I care deeply about wealth inequality in Latin America, and understand the argument that since rich Northern countries have had the privilege of fossil fuel-based development, then developing countries should not be denied the same privilege. But shouldn’t we be at least discussing the impacts of climate change and the alternatives to fossil fuel-based economic and social development at a conference with the professed aim of helping the struggle for social justice? I can’t help concluding that the Progressive Left doesn’t yet really believe in climate change.

What explains the absence of climate change on the agenda?

One factor concerns hope. For the first time in years there is a sense of hope about Latin America amongst the Progressive Left. Neoliberalism is in retreat and left-leaning governments are being elected throughout the region. Chavez is challenging the US and the multinationals, and having an impact on poverty reduction. Bolivia has its first indigenous President. But none of this, I believe, is an excuse for ignoring climate change.

A second factor is that many activists and policy-makers continue to keep human development issues separate from what they think of as ‘environmental’ issues. If you are interested in tackling poverty in the favelas of Rio, it is quite normal not even to consider that climate change is a related issue. I think there is a real need for development agencies and activists on the one hand, and environmentally-oriented organisations and campaigners on the other, to merge their thinking to create a new Ecological Humanism, so that climate change and social justice are considered interdependent issues.

A third, possibly deeper factor, is psychological denial. As individuals, we have an extraordinary capacity to shut our minds to the realities of issues that we think are frightening or insurmountable. Climate change is one of them. The good news is that people in rich countries are starting to overcome their denial and accept that climate change is not only happening, but will change their own lives, and that they have to adapt to and embrace the changes. The bad news is that most of them remain in denial when it comes to the world’s poorest countries. As a recent Oxfam report points out, the rich world is sorely lagging behind in its response to the need for developing countries to adapt to the impacts of climate change link..

The time has come for us to take our struggle against denial a stage further, and recognise that climate change is a reality not only for ourselves, but for the world’s poorest people in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa and other developing regions.

Go to Roman’s website, www.romankrznaric.com, for his latest reports on climate change written for the United Nations Development Programme’s ‘Human Development Report 2007/8’, and for his essays on the Art of Living.

The mustn’t-have 2007 Christmas gift is a ‘global-warming mug’ that shows the world slowly drowning under a one hundred metre sea level rise. This mug for mugs sums up many of the themes of this past years’ blog postings.

Let’s face it- this is an intriguing product. It is a map of the world when cold, but as soon as you fill it with hot water the poles start to shrink and low lying areas are lost to encroaching seas. You can see a video…

Cute? Well not really. No one would want a stocking filler that slowly revealed war zones, starving babies, or piles of bodies- and, to be honest, that is what I see when I see these coastlines retreat

Educational? No, not really. The figure of 100 metres was chosen by a graphic designer not a climate scientist. Even if all of Antarctica, Greenland ice sheet and the world’s glaciers melted it would still only add 80 metres to sea levels (more info…). This misinformation plays to a form of voyeuristic climate alarmism that the Institute of Public Policy Research calls ‘climate porn’ (see my posting…)

What is really interesting, though, is that the salespitch surrounding the mug on the novelty websites reflects many of the wider currents of public opinion that I have covered on this blog during the last year. Here are four examples:

1. Ironic black humour- what the IPPR calls ‘British comic nihilism”:

I wantoneofthose.com. “There’s nothing wrong with smiling in the face of adversity”.
Gizmodo UK “Watch Florida get swamped by the Atlantic [makes a change from it being blown away in hurricanes]. Guffaw loudly as valuable California real-estate imitates Atlantis and look on in horror as Central America drowns to become just a few islands”.

2. ‘Save the planet’ sloganeering (or ironic piss take of it):

Find-me-a-gift.co.uk. “You’ve got the whole world in your hands with the Global Warming Mug and you’re the only one that can save us from extinction! Slowly sip and watch each part of the map gradually grow smaller and smaller before the sea gobbles it all up! Or be a quick-sipper and restore the faith of the human race! Your planet needs you!”

3. marginalising personal action as an environmentalist sub cult:

Firebox.com “So unless you use renewable energy, cycle to work, recycle at home and spend your spare time planting trees, you’d better get ordering before our entire shipment melts away. It’s the end of the world as we know it! Pass the biscuits.”

4. Passive ‘it’s all easy’ self-deception.

Gizmodo UK “Once you’ve finished drinking that coffee, or if you just leave it sitting there to cool off, all goes back to normal, and all is right with the world.”

And if you don’t fancy a trite mug, how about one of the eco- gifts profiled in Dixon’s Greenshop (where, it tells us, we can ‘start making a difference today’): a wooden widescreen tv link….Apart from being framed in beech it uses just as much juice as any other model. Literally a green veneer on business as usual.

Happy Christmas everyone

ps with thanks to Alastair McIntosh and Chris Shaw for tipping me off about these.

Four more spectacularly idiotic adverts that will have future generations boggled eyed with astonishment.

Here’s a cracker: the two page promotional ad for the Indian Ford Endeavour which appears to have demolished the arctic single handed. Look closely and you will see the polar bears round the back stranded on a shrinking scrap of ice sheet

No doubt the sight of all that ice- well any ice actually- goes down well in India, but it is a remarkable piece of hubris to use the symbol of the international climate change campaign to publicise a gas guzzler SUV, especially given the legitimate concerns about the climate impact of India emissions if it follows a high carbon development path – such as gas guzzling status symbols

Manu Sharma, who lives in New Delhi, writes a long complaint about this ad in his excellent blog Orange Hues (link.. ).  He concludes that ‘it’s probably the work of an ignorant graphic designer approved by some equally dim executives at Ford’. I am not so sure. The choice of imagery is so inappropriate that it feels like a deliberate choice to me, especially as the byline of the ad, as it appeared in the Indian media, is ‘Freedom’. It either says ‘we don’t believe’ or it says ‘we know, we know, but we really don’t give a stuff’.

And here’s more of the same. After the melting arctic, the next best known poster images for climate change are the melting mountain snow caps. So what better backdrop for the Ford Freelander? We know that Kilamanjaro is heading to be snow free and the British Mount Snowdon will be Snowgone by 2030. This mountain looks like Mount Fuji to me. I have no idea what is happening to Fuji’s snow cover, but I understand was snow free all last winter. Of course this need not be climate change – it could be a sign that it is about to blow. What a great place to park your tank.

By the way, that little ‘offset’ logo in the corner says that its emissions have been ‘offset’ for the first 45,000 miles. Oh good. That’s all alright then

Which leads nicely into this UK ad that is meant to make us all feel good about solutions to climate change. The small text reads “Save energy while you sleep. You don’t have to be an eco-warrior to help the environment. It can be easy”.

Apparently the Sky digital boxes don’t sit around on standby but turn themselves off at night. All well and good. But the amount of energy saved is extremely small in the overall context of what we need to do. This is another of those ‘it’s easy peasy’ denial strategies I whinge about regularly (see my 18th September posting).

 Any emissions that are saved are far outweighed by the damage caused by this kind of advert: It’s a kind of reverse offset. It sends a double-page spread message through the lifestyle magazines that climate change is trivial, the solutions are ‘easy’ and that ‘sexy people’ (as the readers no doubt aspire to be) can legitimately sleep through it all.

And finally, the abject horror of this pro-coal propaganda ad by General Electric that uses anorexic models to sex up the world’s filthiest and most dangerous industry.

Well, it’s meant to be sexy but it looks to me like the poor skinny waifs are being worked to death. And how sexy can coal be? I’ll bet that whoever made this ‘ironic’ ad has never been any closer to a coal pit than his electric toaster. My grandfather worked his whole life down a pit until his back was broken in a roof collapse. His lungs rattled with phlegm and coal dust all the way to his premature death . Now that would make a sexy ad.

This is a hard core denial ad. It’s aim is to undermine environmental concerns. Its core message is: “don’t believe those whingeing (ugly) greenies- coal is great and will never be banned’’.

Did not General Electric and Ford also endorse a ‘Global Roundtable on Climate Change position that stated “climate change, caused by the burning of fossil fuels,  is an urgent problem that requires global action”? No contradictions there.

Please- I beg you- if you care about climate change forget about ‘saving the planet’: this wretched phrase sums up everything that is wrong about the way we think about climate change.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not arguing that you shake off all environmental concerns, chuck your bike in a hedge and hurtle off for Heathrow in your 4×4. The exact opposite. I want everyone to feel excited and motivated about the huge joint project to slash our emissions in a very short time.

The problem is that this phrase- and all the concepts it embodies- is guaranteed to have the exact opposite effect. Let me unravel it and I hope you will agree.

First of all, it is a sad tired phrase forever associated with a historically important but now dated campaign culture. The banner to ‘save the whale/bear/rainforest/’ is now the cartoon cliché of environmental pressure groups. Given that their supporters were- and still are - overwhelmingly white, liberal and middle class, this is not an association that reaches deep into mainstream society.

And worse still, following the drift of old hippies into jobs in the media and marketing, this particular phrase has now been appropriated for the worst kind of consumerist eco-dilettantism. A car review in the Telegraph tells of cars that will ‘save the planet’.  The Daily Mail urges us to ‘buy towels to save the planet’. The Hard Rock Café, that epitome of global leisure branding, uses the phrase as its byline and even sticks little ‘Save the Planet’ flags into its burgers.

But there are deeper issues with this precise choice of words that reflect wider and more interesting problems with climate change communication. One psychological response to climate change is to find language and images that create distance– to suggest that it will affect someone else in the future. So the talk and images are of ‘climate’ not ‘weather’, polar bears not hedgehogs, African children not our own.

‘The Planet’ is about as distant as one can get- I am not being called on to save my family, my community, my country, my world or even my Earth. It is The Planet- a lump of cold rock seen from space.  I’ll be honest- I don’t give a damn about ‘The Planet’- it means nothing to me.

If the word ‘Planet’ reflects the problems with communicating the problem, the word ‘save’ word is symptomatic of a failed strategy to communicate solutions.

The wider associations of the word ‘save’ speak of struggle, abstinence and sacrifice, It is no surprise that the we are invariably told that the way to ‘save the planet’ is by giving something up- usually heat or travel or lighting.

Telling people that they have to give something up is an extremely unproductive way to change their behaviour. Advertisers, those experts in motivation, rarely use the word ’save’. Even if a product saves time or money they still avoid the word and highlight the wonderful things you could do with that extra money or time.

But people are not told about the wonderful things they could do with this planet if they ’save’ it. They are told - endlessly - of the appalling things that will happen if they don’t. This form of emotional blackmail may work for the guilty inwardly directed greens that created the phrase, but it leaves everyone else cold.

And the biggest problem with ‘save the planet’ lies with the underlying concept that people can be motivated to make personal changes by a gentle appeal to a vast collective goal. Why should anyone be told that it is their personal responsibility to ‘save the planet’ any more than it is their responsibility to ‘end global poverty’ or ‘stop war’?

A few people may be satisfied by the argument that if everyone made those small efforts it would create the desired change. However I fear that most people know only too well that the tiny contribution of their own efforts will immediately be overwhelmed by the indifferent high carbon behaviour of their neighbour. And who can blame them?

So, I say, as the strategy is not working let’s chuck out all of the tired old phrases and start again from first principles.

People want to make things better. No one feels motivated to do something that simply makes things less bad than they would be otherwise. They need a positive vision.
People want personal gain. That gain need not be financial; it could be an improvement in their health, happiness or status.
People never want to live with less. But people are quite prepared to live differently and they are happy to make the change if they are persuaded that this will bring other benefits.
 
Now let’s throw in a bunch of other high appeal words- choice, freedom, smart- and replace the term ‘low carbon’ with ‘light living’. Even if you hate this kind of ad-marketing language, read this and seriously tell me that it doesn’t work better than pleading with people to ‘give it all up and save’.

A lighter lifestyle is the smart, cool, intelligent and healthy way to live. Don’t be tied to outdated and dangerous 20th century ways of living. Live light because it will make you feel complete and free.

When you choose to live light you are setting the pace for the 21st century. You will see the people all around you trying to catch up. And when they do we can all work together to build a world that is cleaner, fairer and happier and that you will be proud to leave to your children.

Oh, and by the way, I might add, if we all do this we might avoid global meltdown too. Now isn’t that a better way to look at it?

A shorter versions of article originally appeared on the Guardian website link.. where you can read a clutch or inspired, confused or downright irritating responses.

Carbon Detox is the first popular mass market book on climate change to suggest that we might have a major problem actually believing in the problem, and the first to suggest that the before we can take action we will need to come to terms with our own denial.

Compared with two years ago (when climate change was less interesting to publishers than feng shui and sodoku) there has been a flood of popular climate change books. They fall into two basic categories. One type methodically spells out the problem and the threat to the world. The other type skips the science and presents personal solutions as fun and possible. These books are usually very engaging with lots of big graphics and titles like ‘1,000 easy-peasy, funky things you can do to save the planet before tea’.

These books cover a huge range, but they all share one basic premise: that information leads to action. They assume that if they can spell out the problem and then make the solutions attractive then action will follow.

But this doesn’t work. We’ve known about climate change for forty years now and the evidence and predictions become worse and worse every year. We’ve known for just as long what we will need to do- on both a personal and collective level. And I see very little real change.

So when I wrote Carbon Detox I tried to do something different. Taking my cue from self-help books (especially those on smoking and alcohol) I propose that before we can do anything we have to really believe that we have a problem. The first step has to be to overcome our personal denial and to confront the excuses we adopt for routinely pushing climate change away - its someone else, somewhere else, in the future and may not even happen.

Our second step has to be to find new ways to visualize the problem. I ask readers to reconstruct their thinking. For example to stop thinking of climate change as a future problem and think of it as a roller coaster ride that they are already on and cannot get off. I criticise the ‘environmental’ language and images (the first chapter is called ‘oh no not another bloody polar bears’) and argue that these prevent us from seeing that climate change relates to our real lives and concerns. Detox suggests instead that people create their own arguments and metaphors based on their own world view, politics and life experience.

And when it comes to solutions I argue that we set ourselves up for failure is we taking personal action out of guilt in the face of a huge global problem. Instead I suggest something deeper and harder – re-writing the story we tell ourselves about who we are. So forget about ‘saving the planet’, the reason for going through the ‘detox’ and living a lighter carbon life is because you are smart, honest and want to live in the present.

The only thing that counts is the carbon bottom line. Carbon Detox points out that many of the ‘easy tips’ such as recycling plastic bags and turning off tv standby make little difference to this bottom line. Instead it urges people to stop sweating the small stuff and focus in on the big ticket items- flying, house heating and commuting.

After these big items are addressed, I argue that how readers wish to spend their carbon budget is entirely their business – of course they can embrace a deep green vision but there is also room for occasional high carbon treats such as whizzing around a race track or luxury travel. The light carbon world is not one in which things are taken away- it is one that is richer, more meaningful, healthier and fairer. And that is the goal around which we can mobilize.

So, I think, a new take on climate change speaking to an entirely new audience. Oh, and I should mention- it’s also really entertaining, easy to read and funny as hell (or so other people tell me !)

Carbon Detox- published October 2007 £7.99
Author: George Marshall      Gaia Books Ltd  ISBN: 1856752887
RRP £7.99

PLEASE TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK OF IT

We heard this week that the government wants us to drink long life UHT milk because it is better for the climate. The reporting of this trivial proposal says much the denial strategies we are adopting to avoid real action.

This is the source. In a leaked report the Department of Food, Environment and Rural Affairs (Defra) proposes that British consumers should be encouraged to follow other Europeans in choosing heat-treated UHT milk. It alleges that there could be a substantial  environmental gain because UHT milk does not require refrigeration.

This is all tosh. Supermarket fridges are already chock full of things that don’t need to be there. Ten years ago Proctor and Gamble set a precedent by insisting that supermarkets had to stock Sunny D, a goopy allegedly-orange kids drink, in the chill cabinets even though it was so sterile you could use it to dress wounds. The rocketing sales proved that consumers associated coolness with freshness. Now supermarkets cool anything they can including fruit, potatoes and pasteurised fruit juices. You’d better believe they’d put the UHT in there too.

And I’d bet that UHT is way worse that fresh milk in loads of other ways. Once something can be preserved it can be shipped in from wherever in the world offers the lowest wholesale price. Once again small British family farms will be unable to compete with huge agribusiness estates on the other side of the world. None of this sounds environmental to me and I’ll bet that the total emissions prove it.

But none of this is particularly relevant to climate change anyway. The emissions involved in trucking or cooling milk may be large in aggregate but are tiny in terms of an average person’s emissions. And, in any case, they are dwarfed by the methane emissions from the cows.

Not that you would ever guess this from the milky froth generated in the British newspapers. Regardless of their editorial leaning all newspapers and columnists took the same line- don’t lecture us about what to do. So the leader of the right wing Daily Mail warns the government “Don’t Nanny Us”. Philip Hensher in the liberal Independent says “People are always going to weigh up saving the planet against the benefits of their ordinary pleasures.”

Now this story is not news by any definition- it is, after all, a tentative and irrelevant suggestion hidden inside a minor internal report. The newsworthiness has been generated because it fits so neatly into a powerful and familiar trope: ‘zealots’ under the pretext of ‘saving the planet’ want to take away our ‘little luxuries’.

People are now being offered a range of ready formed and well constructed arguments to avoid (or at least stave off) taking any action on climate change.  They are offered evidence that it is a lie, that it is politically motivated scare, that it has been exaggerated, and that it might be a good thing. 

But this argument is, I fear, the most dangerous. It does not refute the reality or seriousness of the problem. Only a fool would. Nor does it deny that we should take action to reduce emissions. But by trivialising the solutions and presenting them as impositions by do-gooders it helps to reject the need to change.

Like so many of our denial strategies it is the defense of an addict. I knew an alcoholic once who used to rail with indignation at the self righteous po-faced party-pooping do-gooders who were trying to take away the little pleasures that made his life such fun.

Of course he’s dead now.

We are constantly being told that easy personal actions will ‘save the climate’. The problem is that most of these “top ten tips” are ineffectual and play directly to our denial tendencies.

Take plastic bags for example. Live Earth, green groups and lifestyle features have constantly told us that we can ‘save the climate’ by re-using them or using designer “Bags for Life” instead. People get very worked up about this topic. There are eight petitions on the number 10 Website calling for them to be banned or taxed, Ireland has imposed a special bag tax, and a town in Devon has banned them outright.

Granted, plastic bags are ugly, wasteful and deadly to turtles. But their contribution to climate change is vanishingly small. The average Brit consumes 134 plastic bags a year, resulting in just two kilos of the typical 11 tonnes of carbon dioxide he or she will emit in a year. That is one five thousandth of their overall climate impact.

And then there are the electronics on standby. They are an attractive example of the waste of consumer culture but are hardly a major source of emissions. The electricity to keep a television in standby mode for a whole year leads to 25 kilogrammes of carbon dioxide. It’s more than plastic bags, but still very marginal: one fifth of one percent of average emissions.

Here’s another tip that sounds more substantial: fill your kettle with the right amount of water. The UK government made this one of the core messages of its 1999  “Are You Doing Your Bit?” campaign. A very small bit as it turns out. According to the government’s own figures even if you are constantly boiling full kettles this will save all of 100 kilos of carbon dioxide a year, less than one percent of average emissions.

Now please don’t misunderstand me. All of these actions are worth doing as part of a green lifestyle. But it is a serious distortion to imply, as the top ten lists usually do, that there is any equivalence between these lifestyle preferences and the serious decisions that really reduce emissions –stopping flying, living close to work and living in a well insulated house.

Judging by the latest MORI poll data link…. , people have already acquired a severely distorted sense of priorities. 40% of people now believe that recycling domestic waste, which is a relatively small contributor to emissions, is the most important thing they can do to prevent climate change. Only 10% mention the far more important goals of reducing foreign holidays or using public transport.   

This easy tips undermine the wider message on the seriousness of climate change.  In its report on climate change messaging, “Warm Words”, the Institute of Public Policy Research argues that simple actions “easily lapse into ‘wallpaper’– the domestic, the routine, the boring, the too-easily understood and ignorable”. The IPPR is especially critical of headlines such as ‘20 things you can do to save the planet from destruction’ and said that putting trivial measures alongside alarmist warnings can lead people to “deflate, mock and reject” the very notion of climate change”.

And there is a greater danger that people might adopt the simple measures as a way to avoid making more challenging lifestyle changes. In regards of recycling MORI concluded that it was becoming “a ‘totem behaviour” and that  “individuals use recycling as a means of discharging their responsibility to undertake wider changes in lifestyle”. In other words, people can adopt the simplest solutions as a part of a deliberate denial strategy that enables them to feel virtuous without changing their real behaviour.

Imagine that we converted this approach into another intractable problem: smoking. Suppose a new campaign against smoking showed graphic images of people dying of lung cancer followed by the punchline: It’s Easy to Be Healthy- Smoke One Less Cigarette a Month.

We know without a moment’s reflection that this campaign would fail. The target is so ludicrous, and the disconnection between the images and the message is so great, that most smokers would just laugh it off. 

So why then do well intentioned schools, councils and green groups – and let’s face it, Live Earth was an eight hour tip-fest - persist in promoting such ineffectual actions?

Their logic is as follows. Simple actions capture people’s attention and provide an entry level activity. Present people with the daunting big ticket items and they turn away. Give them something easy and possible and you have them moving in the right direction and, in theory, ready for the next level.

Well that is the theory but, as plentiful social research confirms, it doesn’t work. For one thing making the solutions easy is no guarantee that anyone will do them. The government spent £22 million on the ‘Do Your Bit’ campaign and has subsequently admitted that it produced no measurable change in personal behaviour.

And the argument that small actions are the automatic route to larger ones seems daft to my mind – like the old argument that cannabis leads to heroin. The people who do big actions were probably on that trajectory anyway, and most people get stuck on the small ones, happy to fool themselves that they have fulfilled their obligations.

Of course the real reason that the small steps approach is backed with government money is that it appears to be non-political. It is safe, domestic and non-threatening. It provides the appearance of action without challenging any powerful interests.

But no major social or economic change has ever arisen from volunteerism and the suggestion that it can is a deliberate strategy to prevent any real challenge to business as usual. 
 
Take Ireland for example- a country where emissions have risen a quarter since 1990– double the generous increase allowed under Kyoto. The response of the Irish government? A multi-million euro PR campaign called The Power of One link… which offers ‘ten top tips’ to ‘make a difference’. The tips include such earth shattering proposals as: unplug your mobile charger, fully fill your dishwasher and don’t overfill your kettle.  That sounds much nicer than curtailing roadbuilding or industrial growth. They are not called ‘easy tips’ for nothing. 

So let’s start again from first principle. We have to rethink the way we talk about climate change. It is insulting to assume that people can only be energized with the pint sized options. We need to present all lifestyle changes as part of a radical vision for a smart, healthy and just 21^st century.

Let’s be clear that voluntary action will never be enough- we will need radical political economic and social change. So let’s start with that wretched phrase ‘you can save the planet’. Who wants to be the first town to ban it?  

This is a revamped and more opinionated version of an article that was published in The Guardian on September 13th 2007 Link…  The Guardian also commissioned a counter piece which led to a discussion of the merits of ’small actions’ link…

Mike Tidwell has also written a great critique of small steps for Grist magazine which led to an intense debate link…

In another of my irregular postings on climate denial in adverts here is a selection of French press ads for gas-gourmand SUVs and energy companies that combine arrogance with racism in the quest for new frontiers to destroy.

In this advert a subservient bear is bringing the keys to the Jeep in his teeth. The slogan is “Man has always dreamt of taming nature”. Those Jeep emissions lead to increased temperatures lead to increased range of the pine beetle, destroying entire forests of Whitebark Pines the seeds of which are a crucial source of winter food for Grizzlies in the US northwest. Taming is just another word for exterminating.

The frontier is also evoked by the ‘savage primative’. The ads follow the lead of generations of French intellectuals in romanticizing and patronizing indigenous peoples. In this advert a model is daubed in war paint under the slogan ‘Savage Dream’ to promote the Jeep Cherokee. One might think that after 500 years of smallpox, syphilis, tuberculosis, and state sanctioned massacres the Cherokee Nation might be allowed a little respect. 

The Amazonian peoples have undoubtedly fared even worse, but are still portrayed as idiot savants in these ads. The copy for the Citroen C3 tells us “when Héyoka came back to his tribe, he brought together his people in order to tell them about his vision: it was the new C3 X-TR. In his vision, Héyoka felt first much robustness and security - then much comfort and adaptability - and also a true pleasure in driving …Even the oldest people in the tribe had never had such a vision’.

And finally here is another piece of tribal wisdom. This advert for EDF, the largest power company in France and the world’s largest nuclear operator carries the slogan: “We develop tomorrow’s energies for future generations”. But what kind of extraordinary logic uses the Easter Island statues as a progressive image? The Easter Island civilization collapsed from deforestation and overpopulation. The statues are a symbol of hubris and denial in the face of an impending environmental disaster. What staggering stupidity to use them to promote nuclear power.

The adverts and analysis can be found on the website of the French ‘Alliance pour La Planete’ link…   and I am indebted to  Laurence Ledoux for drawing them to my attention and providing translations. Please everyone, keep sending me absurd and disturbing adverts.