Climate change: do we have the wrong perspective?
On Friday the coalition government released the initial results of the posted responses made by the public to their 38-page policy programme.
The figures released are to me, even as an environmental campaigner, interesting;
“The Cabinet Office said particular effort would be focused on those sections which received the most comments, which at the moment are energy and climate change, with 709 comments, and deficit reduction, with 538 comments.
Less high-profile subjects such as transport and local government have also attracted lots of comments.” [1]
Climate change got the most comments?! Now not having seen the comments myself I guess they could have all been from sceptics who believed that climate change shouldn’t/doesn’t need to feature on the radar of government at all.
But the fact that climate change was the strongest blip on the radar is interesting. What I found more interesting, however, was the way the topics were categorised.
When I read the above quote on the BBC website I was confused – why are ‘energy and climate change’ and ‘deficit reduction’ two different things? When I think about deficit reduction I think about the potential for investment in green technology, industry and jobs – the ‘green sector’ – as an answer to the triple crunch of the financial crisis, the energy crisis and climate change. An investment in the green economy has the potential to take millions out of the category of ‘job seekers’ or ‘not in education, employment or training’ (also known as ‘NEET’, a term often applied to our millions of unemployed young people).
For that matter, when I think about transport – one of the ‘less high-profile subjects’ which ‘attracted lots of comments’ (isn’t that a contradiction of terms?), I think about how, with a little investment, affordable and usable public transport could take millions of cars off the road, thousands of planes out of the sky, and would mean that I could get out of my village without having to make the choice between taking the car or risking my life on a bike on country roads for lack of a bus service. Again, climate change comes into the picture.
And the trend can be extrapolated. Talk about peace in the Middle East, wanting your granny to be warm in her home, or where the contents of your ham and salad sandwich comes from (admittedly probably not one of the topics that got many posts on the government website) – energy and climate change will probably fit in there somewhere.
So where has this culture of making energy and climate change separate issue, interest area or topic of learning come from? It’s hard to say, and is probably down to a mixture of things including it having it’s own department in the government, being taught in schools as a responsibility of the geography department alone and being cast as a single issue in the media.
But what is important is that we tackle this perspective head on. For those who resent energy and climate change because its full of hippy, tree loving, lecturing and proselytizing lefties we need one clear message.
“You don’t have to be an environmentalist!”
You don’t have to be an environmentalist to want to know that the meat you are eating didn’t come from an animal that suffered great pain, or to want to be able to get into town on a bus that doesn’t require you to re-mortgage your house to buy the fare (an exaggeration granted, but it sure feels that way sometimes!). You don’t have to be an environmentalist to want to be able to buy something or do something without having to worry that someone, somewhere in the world, is suffering because of it.
Whilst I can’t lay claim to coming up with the slogan*, maybe it’s a mindset that we as the environmental movement need to adopt in order that others will start to do the same. Let’s stop taking energy and climate change as a separate topic, let’s make it accessible to everyone, let’s make tackling this most pressing issue common sense.
* All credit must go to Ben West, UKYCC’s communications coordinator (and all round guru) for coming up with it!
[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/politics/10288313.stm