Too many climate campaigns?
Posted on 16. Sep, 2009 by annied in DECC, Oxfam, UNEP, WWF, campaign, climate change
This morning (0:00 GMT) while all of you are reading this post your bloggess (me), annied, will be interviewing climate change psychologist Mark Brayne for the blog’s upcoming feature on “selling climate change.” Brayne isn’t the only one who’s pondered behavioral change necessary to mitigate and adapt to climate change, and survive on this planet in the future. The APA has taken a run at it. The Ecologist has featured stories at least twice this year about why we still do nothing about climate change.
Why is that? How do we change it? How do we perceive the danger from climate change? Does it have to do with lack of community? Should governments sell lifestyle changes needed to adapt to climate change like WWII austerity propaganda?
green.tv has featured campaigns by all of our partners and some non-partners soliciting action on climate change– from signing petitions to convince government leaders that they should not leave the Cop15 without a deal to individual action campaigns. And yet, we still aren’t doing enough. Lifestyle alterations have not entered the public discourse to the extent they had ought, as Caroline Lucas pointed out at the Green Party conference a few weeks ago. And the politicians are all lowering expectations in the run up to the Cop15: Ed Miliband on Newsnight, the Swedish PM, Senator John Kerry. HSBC signed up the Climate Principles for financial companies and has actually increased it’s carbon footprint in 3 years! Financial corporations have emerged from recession, many earning profits. Afterall, there’s plenty of money to be made from the new green economy. As TwilightEarth cleverly pointed out, we’ve managed to do is what Western society does well: consumerize green.
What’s the point of all these campaigns? Are there too many that we have now become saturated with climate change that we have been spurred past action to continued inaction? Has anything really changed?
Sure we signed up to 10:10, tcktcktck, Seal the Deal, 350, and probably others… we’ve promoted these and Clean Up the World, Oxfam’s Bangladesh campaign on the blog. Every NGO has an action and campaign planned to take place by December if they haven’t already.
Have we changed our behavior? Have you?
Now that we’re all aware in that “yeah, yeah I get it already” kind of way are we doing actually doing anything?
Have too many campaigns made us complacent or compliant? (These are the things that keep your bloggess up at night…) Or is it like @weirdchina says:
These aren’t rhetorical questions, we really want to know what you think. Leave a thought below:
Helen Fairman
Sep 18th, 2009
We need to combat “green fatigue” by using every tool in our belt, including:
-a commitment to opposing and exposing greenwashing
-supporting the development of the clean economy so that we’re making the economic/jobs argument, not just the “save the planet” argument (which is critically important to many of us, but less so to some). See http://www.cleaneconomy.net
-Working in coalition to make our point about the economic benefits of the clean economy to legislators. See http://www.wecanlead.org.
Jamie Potter
Sep 17th, 2009
I think there probably are too many. I consider myself quite knowledgeable about what’s going on with regards to climate change politics and activism but there are many campaigns and directives that completely pass me by. If I’m missing them, what about the man in the street who doesn’t keep up with such things? (I know that makes me sound like a know-it-all about the environment, I’m not, but I hope you see what I mean!)
Why are there too many? Undoubtedly politics comes into it a lot. Some groups differ on economic approaches to mitigation and aren’t willing to put aside these differences for the sake of the greater good. Some groups also differ on their approach – keep chipping away in the Westminster lobby or shut down the power stations ourselves?
I also think the nature of climate change makes it difficult to campaign on only a few platforms. It’s something that affects so many things in the world, be it geographically/ecologically, socially, economically, politically etc. How do campaigners maintain a narrow focus when the scope is so wide?
Also, I think the mainstream media have to take some responsibility here (in the UK at least). Some of the red top tabloids barely give the subject any coverage, never mind the campaigns. For example, the environment correspondent for The Mirror didn’t once mention the Bonn talks let alone report on them earlier this year. Some environment correspondent!
What is the solution? Hmm, let me think about that one!
William Shaw
Sep 17th, 2009
Too many campaigns? Pah. No, not at all. Ain’t no such thing.
It’s just a symptom of the asymmetrical imbalance between activists and the unconvinced.
Which begs another question: why, if there are so many activists are there so people who are taking action?
The better question is, are the activists using the right tools to convince people?
Jamie Potter
Sep 17th, 2009
This is the point I didn’t articulate very well. There are lots of different campaigns but are they all that effective?
James Smith
Sep 17th, 2009
Too many campaigns, by far. NGOs don’t seem to want to get involved with each other, preferring to go it alone with their thing. Whether it’s because everyone wants to be the “one who fixed the problem”, or what, I don’t know. Maybe it’s because everyone knows how to launch a campaign, but very few know how to keep it high impact going further forward, so you need yet another new campaign and yet another launch. And most of them say the same things to the same people, very few are innovative in their approach – see the 90% of people who still don’t care to prove that one. I don’t have a solution though, sorry
Jon
Sep 17th, 2009
Yes there are too many. They have helped me cut my carbon footprint through more information, but I feel like there should just be one huge campaign that encompasses everything. 1010, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, why can’t they all come together? It would be more effective, bigger and it would reach more people.
For example, if there was just one big protest rally instead of lots of little ones, the impact would be far greater, because more people would come!
Darren @ TckTckTck
Sep 17th, 2009
Thanks for this. I can only speak for our campaign, and I’m just a cog in the mighty Tck machine. But this issue is kind of what the TckTckTck campaign is all about–creating a big tent that lots of NGOs are under, with a broad goal and huge mandate. For example, two of the other campaigns you mention–Seal the Deal and 350–are TckTckTck partners.
That doesn’t solve the ‘too many campaigns’ issue, but it does enable us to tap all sorts of activities from all our partners to articulate one big number.