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Delivering The New Green Economy
Julian Darley, blog
… It certainly feels very hard to know what, if anything, will successfully get a nation or the world out of this self-induced catastrophe.
What all of the stimulus plans have in common is that they all desperately want to create jobs. Undoubtedly, if enough money is spent in the right ways then jobs will be created. Whether they will be enduring jobs is another and very important matter, but it is not the point of this piece. In the short run, then, we’ll be able to measure the success of job creation quite simply by following the statistics on employment issued by nations. What is much harder to measure is how effective any of the ‘green’ measures will have been.
The problem comes in at least three parts: despite years of effort, it has proven difficult both to develop and to deliver green programs and policies and to measure their outcomes. If social scientists like Tim Jackson and Doug McKenzie-Mohr are right, there is something quite simple that we can start doing about this suite of problems, and if we don’t, it is quite likely that we’ll get the same dismal results that many others have had when they have tried to green the economy or even just small parts of it.
There is a lot of literature from social psychologists going back more than thirty years about how individuals and groups react to different methods of ‘green’ persuasion. Some techniques are quite effective and other techniques are so ineffective that they make a bad situation worse. For instance, just giving people more information, which is the most common strategy employed by both government and many green groups, very often falls into the latter category.
(9 February 2009)
Why most of us aren’t doing much about climate change – and what could change that
Momoko Price, Toronto Star
If you’re reading this, chances are you think climate change is a problem and you want to know more about it.
But if you own two cars, blast the heat in your house and use incandescent light bulbs, George Marshall would call you a climate-change denier, perhaps even more so than those who don’t believe in it.
“The people who outright say, `This thing isn’t happening, this is an international conspiracy, the science is all wrong’… they at least have an internal coherence between what they say and what they do,” says Marshall, the U.K.-based activist and author of Carbon Detox.
“The real denial, the definition of denial, is the disconnect between what you know and what you do. In other words, denial isn’t not knowing something; denial is much more knowing something but not letting that in any way affect what you do.”
By this definition, the majority of us look like a bunch of Armageddon-inviting hypocrites. And yet even after reading this article, even after a twinge of guilt, we will still leave the heat on, grab our keys, and drive an empty car to work.
… “The assumption has always been that all that we have is an information deficit,” Marshall says. “That assumption has underlined climate-change communication and the entire way we speak about it for 20 years. And still does.”
… Social psychologists know what motivates us to change. In fact, we sound a lot like children, and spoiled ones at that.
People are programmed to want results right away – clear, immediate indications that what they’re doing matters. Unfortunately, we will never see ecological “results” from our carbon-cutting efforts. The best-case scenario is that we manage to ward off the apocalypse – someday.
This is exactly why we have to change how we think and talk about climate change, says Ed Maibach, director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University in Virginia. “If I want you to change your behaviour, I probably should spend a lot less time scaring you about the enormity of the global problem. I should spend more time helping you think about what you as an individual can do to reduce your own personal footprint.”
(8 February 2009)
Mass media ‘screwing up’ global warming reporting says renowned climatologist
Jeremy Hance, Mongabay
Stanford scientist and climate-specialist Stephen Schneider has called out media organizations for the quality of reporting on climate change and other scientific issues.
“Business managers of media organizations,” he said, “you are screwing up your responsibility by firing science and environment reporters who are frankly the only ones competent to do this.”
Schneider points to CNN, which in December fired all of its science and technology reporters. “Why didn’t they fire their economics team or their sports team?” asks Schneider. “Why don’t they send their general assignment reporters out to cover the Superbowl?”
… Schneider believes that coverage lacking scientifically-trained reporters and producers lose credibility and insightfulness.
“Science is not politics. You can’t just get two opposing viewpoints and think you’ve done due diligence. You’ve got to cover the multiple views and the relative credibility of each view,” said Schneider. “But that is not usually the problem of the well-trained reporters, who understand what is credible.”
Schneider’s frustration doesn’t stop at the media. He believes scientists are not living up to their responsibility to actively participate in scientific discussions with the mainstream media.
(15 February 2009)
