Just been interviewed on Al Jazeera TV, as part of its coverage of climate issues in the run up to Copenhagen. And it made me realise how the old journalistic cliches around green issues (“ask environmentalist onto show so they can slag off business / the government”) still prevail.

Al Jazeera (based in Qatar) has a huge audience in the Arab and Islamic world, and pitches itself as offering an alternative to the CNN-consensus of global (Americanised) media.

They wanted to interview me about the role of technology in tackling climate change – a nice, wide open subject, very Green Futures. And on the surface, a refreshing change from the adversarial ding-dong which many producers imagine constitutes informed (and informative) debate.

It started promisingly. Immediately before I came on, they ran a video from Kenya on the ‘Kyoto Box’ – the solar cookstove which won this year’s Climate Change Challenge Award, run jointly by Forum for the Future and the Financial Times.

So there I was, all geared up to enthuse about low-carbon innovation and entrepreneurial ingenuity. But the presenter had other ideas, and ran through a series of questions inviting me to criticise governments for not doing enough; politicians for not taking climate change seriously, and so on.

Now I’m no apologist for governments single or collective, and there’s no doubt they could do a whole lot more to shove climate change up the agenda. But environmentalists have been stuck in the trenches hurling grenades at government for decades now, and things are still getting worse.

Coincidentally, on the same day I was being interviewed, The Times published a poll showing a clear majority of Britons now class themselves as ‘climate change sceptics’, god help us. So it’s hardly surprising if politicians aren’t exactly feeling cheered on by the voters to ever more ambitious carbon targets. Au contraire…

So instead of sticking the knife in to our hapless politicos, I enthused about the wonders of smokeless cookstoves saving African women money and time, not to mention their health. About the joys of solar power bringing clean bright light and mobile phones to Bangladeshi fishing families previously dependent on smoky kerosene. About the pecuniary pleasures of energy efficiency. About all those things, in other words, that are worth doing anyway – and which just happen to tackle climate change, too. Which surely has to be a much more persuasive message to a government struggling to sustain public interest as scepticism grows and Copenhagen fatigue kicks in. And to viewers of Al-Jazeera, come to that.

Anyway, I don’t think I was quite the central casting environmentalist the presenter had been hoping for. But then they weren’t quite the ‘refreshingly different’ TV channel I’d been expecting, either. Still, it was fun and I hope they’ll ask me back…