A silver lining in the snow?

Let’s face it, the weather gods must be climate sceptics. Why else would they choose the start of the Cancun summit to smother half of Europe in snow?

Remember that campaign ‘Stop Climate Chaos’? It was meant to scare the hell out of us with threats of heatwaves, droughts, rising tides... Now it just sounds like a Daily Mail headline castigating the Government for not gritting the roads.

It’s bad enough getting gloomy at the glacial rate of progress over in Cancun. Now that’s compounded by the sense that the public aren’t – how shall we put it? – exactly with us on this one. My cab driver the other night summed it up: “What are they doing trying to stop this global warming, eh mate? Bring it on!” I didn’t have the heart to disagree. And even if I did, my breath would have frozen on the window.

So if all that leaves you searching for a silver lining in the snow clouds, here’s one: this might just teach us, once and for all, that relying purely on apocalyptic doom and gloom to get people to take climate change seriously is a busted flush.

First, it clearly doesn’t work. Witness my cabbie. Second, it plays straight into the hands of people who argue that we can’t tackle carbon emissions without neglecting other pressing human needs. People like Frederick Palmer, the ‘Senior Vice President’ (I’ve yet to meet a junior one) of US coal giant, Peabody Energy.
“We believe”, said Palmer the other day, “that energy poverty is the world’s top priority: [we believe in] putting people first, not climate change.”

Now that is what philosophers call a false dichotomy (you can either have this – or that – but not both…). It’s clever, it’s pernicious – and it’s complete nonsense. There’s absolutely no reason why you can’t simultaneously tackle climate change and energy poverty. Indeed, you will struggle to do one without the other. Pretty much every energy technology which helps lift people out of poverty – clean, efficient cookstoves; clear, bright solar lights; and, in the developed North, a crash programme of energy efficiency for vulnerable homes – will also cut carbon emissions. Done right, they’ll make money for savvy entrepreneurs, too.

Palmer, of course, was arguing the case for coal – and lots of it. His company exports growing quantities to China, where it’s used, for the most part, to power the factories which churn out vast quantities of consumer goods for the West. All grist to the mill of the global economy, perhaps, but hardly a direct assault on energy poverty. Indeed, it’s a rather delicious irony that, even as Palmer flies the flag for the black stuff, some poorer Chinese households are starting to move away from coal fuel in favour of briquettes made from crop waste. Which are cheaper, cleaner, more convenient – and carbon neutral.

What this illustrates, for me, is the case for stressing, time and again, the ‘co-benefits’ of cutting carbon. Sure, you need to emphasise the solid science behind climate change, too. Forum for the Future’s Iain Watt just pointed me to a study by the University of California-Berkeley, which found that people respond best to a message which combines chilling scientific warnings with ‘bright green’ solutions. But it’s the latter which can best excite not only people’s concern – but their entrepreneurial instincts too. And we sure as hell need those if we’re going to shovel our way out of the snowdrifts of inertia.

Remember that cartoon we featured in GF earlier this year? The one with the climate sceptic pointing in horror at a flipchart listing all the positives of a low-carbon economy (‘energy security...cleaner cities...healthier homes...restored rainforests...’)?

“Yes, yes, that’s all very well”, the sceptic’s saying. “But what if it’s all a hoax, and we’ve created a better world for nothing?!”

Once I’d defrosted enough to speak, I tried it on my cab driver. I’m not sure he was convinced, but it did make him laugh – at half past eight on a frozen Monday night on a gridlocked Euston Road. And that has to count for something.

Martin Wright is Editor in Chief of Green Futures at Forum for the Future.