Monday, November 21, 2011

No one raindrop thinks it's responsible for the flood


Over the last couple of weeks there have been some worrying headlines in the environmental ghettos sections of the various newspapers. For those of us paying attention it has been fascinating. Most of these are appearing now because Durban and the climate change talks are coming up. I’ll link to these shortly but first I want to talk about attitudes and ways of thinking.

The headline that had me thinking was not about ‘the end of the world as we know it’, as so many seem to be, but on a much more prosaic topic, local air quality. The headline in the Guardian is ‘UK government puts thousands of lives at risk over air pollution failures’. It’s an interesting article, one in a long line of news items I’ve seen over the years that have warned that lives are being shortened due to local air pollution, mainly caused by traffic congestion.

What this highlights is a problem of perception and power. It isn’t members of the government who are causing the pollution, although each will play their part, but all of us. It is all of us who drive, particularly in busy cities, who are putting thousands of lives at risk. None of us would intentionally harm anyone but our cumulative actions are doing this. There is a disconnect between our day to day decisions and the effects these have and it is difficult to see how the government, in our democratic country, can make us change. In fact, one of the interesting things to come out of this article is that under the localism bill central government will be passing the responsibility for paying the fines imposed by the EU to the local authorities. In effect our council taxes will pay the fines imposed in an effort to stop air pollution harming us. This doesn’t seem to be the best way of protecting us. The suggestions made by the environmental audit committee are ‘a new national framework of low-emissions zones and a public awareness campaign.’ Both of these are, of course, good suggestions but I’m fairly sure that most of us are aware that we contribute to air pollution by our driving and don’t change our behaviour despite that knowledge.

If we can’t deal with local air pollution where the evidence is obvious and the damage happening to people here and now the effect of trying to get people to take responsibility for their contribution for climate change is even more difficult. There have been concerted ‘marketing’ efforts to discredit the science behind climate change and it has become a divisive and polarised debate. To see this just look in the comments section following any environmental story. It tends to the level of playground ‘debate’. We continue to bicker about whether it is happening, who is to blame and who should deal with it.

The following stories have appeared in the last couple of weeks:
The small island states, whose land will be inundated by the sea, watch with a mixture of despair and anger as countries with higher land seek to put off coming to an agreement on what to do until 2018 or later. Perhaps Norway and Australia can take the refugees when it comes time.

Recent readings of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have jumped by a record amount. ‘The figures for 2010 mean that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago.’

The International Energy Agency (IEA) warns that the world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels, and the last chance of combating dangerous climate change will be ‘lost forever’. What gives this further power is that the IEA has always been a very conservative organization.

I am not totally despairing. I spend a lot of time speaking to companies and organisations that are working very hard to minimise their energy use and their waste production, not because of a green sensibility, although they have that too, but because cutting energy use and waste cuts costs and makes them more competitive. With the advent of BS EN 16001 and ISO50001, the energy management standards, the BSi did a survey and discovered that almost a quarter of businesses they asked did not know what their energy costs were as a proportion of their total costs. The government has recently consulted on a proposed requirement for more organisations to report on their energy use/carbon emissions. I hope that this will play a small part in improving our energy efficiency. As it is small repeated thoughtless actions that are causing the problems I am hopeful that many small positive actions will start to make a difference.

In the meantime, my personal actions are the only ones I can fully control and I do my utmost to minimise my carbon footprint, not least because it saves me money too.