I post a video presentation that provides accessible (and hopefully entertaining) summary of current research into the psychology of climate change- in particular the key question explored by this blog: why it is so hard to accept ? It covers a lot of ground in just 20 minutes and I hope that you enjoy it.

It comes from a keynote presentation I made at the University of the West of England back in 2009 and it was never intended to be shared (I didn’t even know they were taping it). One day I would love do something on this topic that is much tighter and really well designed – maybe something as zappy and engaging as The Story of Stuff (by the wonderful Annie Leonard) but in the mean time this will just have to do.

It comes in three parts- they don’t need to be viewed sequentially…in fact I think Part Two is the most interesting section to start with:

Part One: Risk, Belief and Attention.
I argue that we do not feel threatened by climate change because  it is almost perfectly constructed to bypass our innate capacity to evaluate risk.  For this reason I suggest that the raw information and evidence is unlikely to persuade us and actual belief will need to be socially constructed. I argue that the way that we are socially negotiating climate change has some unsettling similarities to the way that we have historically denied human rights abuses- in particular the ways that we define climate change as being outside the area of legitimate social concern.

Part Two: Stories
I argue that we mediate information about climate change in a social context and make sense of it through constructed narratives or storylines.
These storylines have been under a constant state of change since the 1980s (and earlier). I argue that a historical and ideological convenience led to climate change being defined as an ‘environmental problem’ and that many of the metaphors and images we associate with it follow this definition which arbitrarily restricts the resonance of the issue.  As evidence I discuss why the websites of human rights organisations give more attention to ice cream than to climate change.

Part Three- Evasion Strategies
In part three, drawing on the social attitudes research,  I look in detail at a range of the specific strategies that people adopt to avoid dealing with climate change. These include:
Distancing – defining climate change as far away, in the future or someone else’s problem.
Compartmentalising – finding ways to resolve the dissonance between highly polluting personal behaviour and knowledge of its impacts.
Positive Framing – how we seek to turn climate change into a personal advantage.
Ethical Offsets – how we adopt the easiest behaviours as proof of our virtue.
Cynicism- the commercial appropriation of climate change images.
What happens next? - surprisingly – what happens next

Please provide your comments, share these with anyone who might like them and embed them anywhere you want.

Guest blogger, Terence Blacker decries the ‘Ozymandian’ stupidity of holding the 2022 World Cup in air conditioned stadiums in Qatar, one of the world’s hottest  countries and FIFA’s feeble greenwashing of its stupendously destructive choice of host country.

If the delegates currently attending the global climate conference in Mexico need any reminding of the magnitude of their task in the face of human stupidity and hubris, they do not have far to look. At another meeting of a distinguished international body, the decision has been made to hold the most needlessly energy-wasting sporting event that the planet has ever seen.

As a symbol of the confusion and hypocrisy which surrounds the questions of climate change and energy conservation, the Qatar World Cup of 2022 will surely take some beating.

Qatar is not only one of the hottest countries in the world, but, as was announced last week, football’s greatest tournament is to be held during its high summer in June and July, when temperatures are between 40 and 50 degrees centigrade. Any kind of outdoor activity is impossible, so that, unless you are an immigrant worker (40 Nepalese construction workers died from the heat over six months in 2006), you will need to be inside.

Qatar may be small but, when it comes to profligate use of energy, it punches well above its weight. According to the recently published Living Planet Index, its per capita consumption of the world’s energy resources is higher than that of any other country, with the exception of the United Arab Emirates. Oil and gas usage in Qatar increased by 310 per cent between 1999 and 2009.

The response to these dubious claims to fame from international football’s ruling body, Fifa, has been to invite Qatar to go on a massive energy binge. Twelve new stadia will be built. There will be training grounds. The infrastructure to support an influx of between one and two million fans will be created. The venues will all be air-conditioned, reducing the outside temperature of 40 degrees to 27 degrees, even when the roof is open to the sun. Spectators will enjoy cool air projected from the back and neck of every seat. Similar facilities will be supplied to training grounds and, one assumes, to the buildings where visitors will spend their time when football is not being played. In fact, most of the country will have to be air-conditioned.

Then, when it is over, the stadia will be dismantled and shipped to different parts of the world where they will be re-erected. The true hypocrisy here lies not in the sheer idiocy of this organised spree of wastefulness, but in the way it is presented. A month-long, air-conditioned World Cup is, we are told, good for the planet. The Qataris, knowing that there is no fool like a green-washed fool, included in their plans the promise to use photovoltaic panels, situated in the desert, to power the stadium’s cooling systems. These will be carbon-neutral venues, it is claimed.

To put it mildly, these plans have caused surprise among scientists. Air-conditioning famously requires a vast amount of energy, even in temperate climates. The idea that solar energy can power cooling systems in a number of large stadia, reducing the temperatures from 40 degrees to 27, would seem to belong in the realm of dreams.

There are other niggling little problems. Air-conditioning units do not only use an inordinate amount of energy. They emit greenhouse gases – HFCs – which are incomparably more powerful than carbon dioxide. Then there is the small question of the construction process. The stadia are built. They are air-conditioned for a month, and then taken down, shipped across the world and re-erected. What happens to the millions of solar panels sitting out in the desert remains unexplained.

A perfect, tragic example of man’s arrogant belief that he can build his way out of trouble – save energy by accelerating his use of it – the Qatar World Cup is the global equivalent of someone leaving all the lights and heating appliances blazing away in a house, and claiming to be green because there is a wind turbine on the roof.

It is a mad Ozymandian desert folly. In Mexico, they should look on the works of Fifa, and despair.

Terence Blacker is an author, critic, social commentator and tree planter. He writes a twice weekly column for The Independent

This article was originally published in The Independent link and has been reproduced with the permission of Terence Blacker.

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George Marshall adds- I wrote a piece for Climate Denial back in 2006 (see Football Pants) observing that the declaration that the 2006 World Cup in Germany would be ‘carbon neutral’ conveniently ignored the thousands of tonnes of carbon dioxide emitted by people flying to attend. I suggested that, like addicts, FIFA had a remarkable capacity to create self serving definitions of their own problem behaviour.

The same criticism can be made of this event but, try as hard as I can, I can’t find any metaphor that adequately describes how insane this new ‘green’ World Cup seems seems at a time when scientists  are confirming that their worst case climate predictions  may have been too low. So what next, the world ski championships in Brunei (which, let’s not forget, has the world’s largest indoor ski slope)?

I must admit that I got a slight wry smile when  found that the company installing the solar panels is Albert Speer & Partner founded by the son of Hitler’s favourite architect. I fear that you have to look at Papa Speer’s plans to flatten Berln to build a vast capital for the Nazi empire to find hubris on a similar scale.

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A further comment: according to a FIFA consultant’s report, the total carbon footprint for the 2010 World Cup came to 2,753,250 tons of CO2 equivalent, an eight-fold increase over the previous World Cup in Germany. As noted above, the vast majority of this was due to air travel. So the footprint of a ‘green’ sporting event exceeds the entire emissions of many small developing countries  including Burundi, Congo, Djibouti,  Mauritius, Bhutan Bahamas,  Grenada and Guyana.

How does one scientific report generate two entirely contradictory stories and headlines? This is a perfect example of how information on climate change is filtered by the newsmedia and distorted to fit the politics and worldview of their readers.

The report on temperature data was released by the UK Meteorological Office on 26th November to try and generate some discussion during the disastrously muted Cancun climate negotiations.

This is how The Guardian, the UK’s leading liberal environmentalist newspaper reported it:

I cropped the website image to include a typical juxtaphotisian (see my last post). Above the headline is a banner advert  promoting the Barclays ‘Fantasy Investment Portfolio’- as ever the climate news is enveloped with messaging reassuring us that everything is fine with the growth economy.

The Guardian based its headline on just one aspect of the report:  “that sea surface temperatures were higher than initially thought because of a change in the way the temperatures were measured”.

And here is how the Daily Mail, a right leaning anti-environmentalist newspaper reported exactly the same  Met Office report on the same day.

The Daily Mail does not deny that temperatures are still increasing (though it hardly goes out of its way to point this out) so draws solace and a headline from evidence that there has been a slight decline in the rate of temperature increase- it then labels this an ‘admission’ (as though wrung out of the Met Office through interrogation) that “will be seized upon by climate sceptics as evidence that man-made global warming has been overstated”

The stories are so different because the newspapers had already prepared their storylines before they even opened the report. The Guardian enthusiastically embraces catastrophic climate change stories, especially when framed as “you thought it was bad- actually it’s even worse”.  The Daily Mail’s stance is that climate change is being exagerated for political ends. It does not deny the problem but actively seeks out storylines that emphasise distortion and unreliability of the data.

The different editorial lines of the newspapers show the fragility of human belief in climate change and the way that people’s pre-existing worldviews intervene and mediate in their processing of information about climate change.

Thank you Jack Pritchard and Clayton Lavallin for sending me these.

As noted in my posting before last (‘Up in Lights”) it is the juxtapositions of images and messages that are often most enlightening about our mass confusion and denial – I call them juxtaphotisions. Here are three crackers that really require little additional comment.

These two posters were sitting alongside each other outside Bristol Parkway station in June (Many thanks to Phil Insall of Sustrans for sending me this. Click on the photo to see it in full detail). It reminds me of that famous depression era photograph of unemployed black people queuing for soup under the poster of a smug white family in a car and the caption “there’s no way like the American Way).

I have a particular loathing for this Ford Galaxy poster in any context  – how pathetic that kids are plugged into video monitors whilst the countryside rolls by outside.  Could someone please subvert this poster and paste images of countryside onto the tv screens to highlight the full irony?

Next: magazine racks in which different worldviews and versions of reality come into direct and vivid contrast. (This is from a magazine stall in Mid Wales earlier this year and nicely contrasts an apocalyptic image from a climate change special issue of Geographic with adjacent magazines that droolingly promote high carbon living (click on the photo to see more detail). In this case I find the different images of drought and water particularly striking – the world can bake whilst the rich bathe in their penthouse pools  (echos of Solyent Green).

Information about climate change exists in our society as little oases of truth surrounded by a vast sea of lifestyle marketing and counter messaging. Is it any surprise that it is so hard to develop and then maintain a belief in this issue? These magazines present climate change as just another lifestyle and consumption choice, and, when presented like this, is it any surprise  which version of reality people choose ? Be honest, which version of reality would you prefer to live in?

Finally- one I’ve posted before, but it’s so good that it can stand a repeat. It’s from The Guardian website and illustrates the deep confusion of the liberal media. Normally they keep issues compartmentalised- climate disaster on the environmental pages, electronic gadgets on the lifestyle pages, luxury travel in the  travel supplement (and where more apt for a denial break than Dubai?)  and economic growth on the business pages. But ads ,  driven solely by the need to grab attention, have little time for such pleasantries.

We see so many of these juxtapositions in our daily lives that we take them for granted. We need to have them taken out of context to see their dissonance clearly. Art often selects images from the wider world and, by isolating them in a neutral gallery space, creates new meaning and interpretations. If I was an installation artist, I would see this as a very rich seam of inspiration.

PLEASE SEND ME YOUR OWN IMAGES OF BIZARRE JUXTAPOSITIONS TO GEORGE (-AT-) COINET>ORG>UK WHEN I HAVE A GOOD SET I WILL POST UP A NEW ITEM

Even with the results still coming in, it already clear that the US elections have been a disaster for climate change. From the perspective of the psychology of denial, the elections contained two important lessons: one concerning the failures of the past, the other concerning the potential failures of the future.

The first is that the mass Republican rejection of climate science was entirely predictable and possibly avoidable. Annual polls conducted by the Pew Research Centre reveal a steady decline in belief in climate change among Republican voters – a process undoubtedly helped by an extremely adept misinformation campaign by libertarian think tanks. Back in 2007 nearly two thirds of Republican voters believed that there was clear evidence of climate change. By the following year, the proportion of believers fell below half for the first time.

This tipped the balance. Despite the overwhelming scientific evidence, climate change is actually a socially held belief like any other, that people adopt or reject according to the views of their peers and the people around them. Just as melting accelerates in the arctic, once believers became a minority there are powerful social feedbacks that diminish their influence further. People who accept the science start to keep their views to themselves. Those who are still unsure soon pick up the social cues that it is no longer appropriate for people like themselves to believe in climate change.

So the process accelerated and, by 2009, only 35% of Republican voters still declared a belief in climate change. This shift was exacerbated by a growing political polarisation that has pushed Democrats and Republicans to take opposing positions on all issues. Climate change was not originally an inherently left wing or right wing issue. As recently as 2003 it was the Republican Senator John McCain who was sponsoring a cap and trade Climate Stewardship Act. His cross party co-sponsor was Joe Lieberman, a far right Democrat who regularly votes against his own party.

In retrospect it may have been the involvement of Al Gore, his powerpoint documentary in 2006 and his Nobel Prize in 2007 that tipped the balance and decisively stamped this as a liberal, intellectual and international issue- and therefore the property of the other side.  It was deeply unfortunate that such partisanship occurred at exactly the time when it was vital that the issue was seen to have broad, and ideally home grown conservative,  ownership.

From this point on it was only a small step to the next stage: that, for many politically active Republicans, an active disbelief in climate change became a required mark of their social identity. The New Tork Times notes that, among Tea Party members, climate change denial has now become “an article of faith”. At this election the transformation of denial into a core Republican doctrine was complete. Mike Castle, the only Republican candidate for Senate still prepared to support action on climate change was ousted in Delaware by the borderline insane Tea party favourite, Christine O’Donnell.

It is hard to see how this can shift any time soon. An attitude can be shifted by evidence, but identity markers – especially those held with such aggression as this- are impervious to straight logic and will be bitterly defended. This is a sad and deeply dangerous development.

The second lesson of the mid-term elections is a warning from the climate change future. The tide of public opinion that turned against Barrack Obama is an expression of public anger, frustration and despair over the state of the US economy. This was not of Obama’s doing. Indeed, cyclical economic cycles are a consistent feature of capitalism and are largely beyond the control of any politician. Nonetheless, when the mob is angry it looks for a scapegoat.

A tendency to project emotions onto a scapegoat lies deep in the heart of the human psyche. Despite the generosity of spirit and openness of many North Americans this is culture with Manichean instincts. Scapegoating has been a constant and recurring theme and will, I predict, re-emerge as a key response to future climate impacts when people, feeling powerless and disoriented will be looking for a way to reassert their power and focus their collective despair.

It is hard to predict who the scapegoats will be: a class, an ethnic group, a geographical group, or a foreign country. Perversely it may well be people who have nothing at all to do with climate change, or may even  be its victims. But there’s one thing of which we can be certain: that, when confronted with the clear and irrefutable evidence that they have been wrong about climate change, the American right will feel challenged, defensive and guilty. And that is never a good place for people to practice co-operation and express humility.

The desire to stir a debate around climate change is not an excuse for sensationalist images and language that demean immigrants.

The effects of climate change are so hard to imagine that we should welcome an exhibition of Postcards from the Future’ that promises “Images that bring ideas to life and frame the climate debate in a way that everyone can understand”. Unfortunately the debate it frames is dangerous and the main reason that it can be readily understood is that it fits all too easily with existing prejudices.

Cut-and-paste monkeys: an insulting analogy for the "equatorial immigrants" who would swamp British culture.

The pictures are artfully composed photomontages that juxtapose iconic London landmarks with eye-catching climate impacts – for example the Household Cavalry ride down a sand-strewn Whitehall on camels; an oil palm plantation grows in Hyde Park; and people skate on the Thames after the Gulf Stream packs in.

The creators, Robert Graves and Didier Madoc-Jones, assure us that they “researched different scientific projections”. Really? Not one of these images reflects any real climate scenario for London. They are pure science-fiction.

Certainly they are striking and win attention, but at a price. Public acceptance of climate change is still weak and 55% of people believe that climate change has been exaggerated for political ends. Fantasy images actively feed that public denial and with it the widespread assumption that climate change is conjectural and without firm basis in fact.

However the greatest concern with this show is not that it parts with reality, but that it speaks all too well to real prejudices against immigrants “swamping” British culture. This is a recurring theme. One postcard shows Asian peasants working in paddy fields in the shadow of Big Ben.

Two other postcards in the series show shantytowns around Nelson’s Column and Buckingham Palace.

These images cause deep disquiet for those who work with refugees and immigrants. Jonathan Ellis, policy director at the Refugee Council, calls them “lazy and unhelpful” at a time when “we need fresh and creative messages, and a fair and rational debate based on the facts”.

“Producing sensationalist pictures which fall back on cheap stereotypes of refugees do not help anyone’s cause,” says Vaughan Jones, the chief executive of Praxis, a London-based charity that provides practical support for refugees and asylum seekers. “The issue is too serious for this inaccurate treatment.”

Hannah Smith from the Climate Outreach Information Network runs a programme that brings together over 30 refugee, human rights and environment organisations. She argues that the images give an entirely erroneous impression and that “the actual patterns of migration are far more likely to be the movement of people inside existing national borders, or, in the case of the UK, from within the European Union. To suggest that there will be mass migration from the [global] south is misleading and feeds xenophobia.”

These criticism are exacerbated by the language used in the captions. The caption for the Buckingham Palace shantytown talks of the royal family being surrounded by “overwhelming numbers of immigrants”. Another caption, for a picture of monkeys on the balustrade of St Paul’s Cathedral describes them as “a new breed of tropical immigrants reminiscing about equatorial days”. This is a misapplication of language that Hannah Smith regards as deeply insulting.

Any representations of climate change enter a complex psychological, social and political landscape created by over twenty years of confusion, denial and anger.  An aspect of this is that the perpetrators of climate change are constantly seekijng to absolve themselves of their ethical responsibility for the historical problem or the failure to take collective action. I predict that we are heading for a bitter blame game and, judging by the usual human response, the most consistent mechanism for dealing with collective guilt is to blame the victim. The racist right are already sniffing round the issue  of climate migration and will try to take hold of this agenda.

When I look at the postcards from the perspective of refugee organisations (indeed with any kind of progressive politics at all) these concerns seem so sensible and self-evident that I wonder why no-one involved with commissioning, producing, or promoting these images thought to raise them.  The entire approach of the postcards is provocative: taking symbols of British cultural identify and contrasting them with caricatures of Third World poverty. The impression that they give is that we have been invaded by an alien horde, and that we are the victims, not them.

Imagine that this approach had been taken with the climate change context: Westminster Abbey covered with Arabic signs and flanked by minarets, camels racing in the Derby,  Beefeaters are replaced by Romani…etc etc. Would this be accepted for public display anywhere, not least the usually extremely sensitive Museum of London.

So this raises a fascinating question: why did the cover story of “climate change” permit the enthusiastic promotion of images and language that would be normally be considered unacceptable in a public exhibition?

One reason is that we have already come to “frame” climate change in this way. Impacts are invariably presented as the crude data of square kilometres flooded or numbers of people displaced. There is still a painful lack of elaboration or analysis of the real political and social impacts of these changes – who will be affected, how will they adapt and where will they go.

This in turn reflects the disturbingly limited range of voices that can be heard talking about climate change. While environmentalists have dominated the public discourse from the outset, it has only been in the past five years that development organisations and unions have become involved.

Human rights and refugee organisations are only now fully recognising the importance of climate change and they are struggling to find their niche and be heard on the issue. “We operate under such constant pressures, both internally and externally, that we have been in the bunker for far too long”, says Jonathan Ellis.

Even the core term “climate refugee”, used universally by environmental organisations and throughout the postcard captions, is inaccurate, argues Vaughan Jones. It took decades of hard campaigning to get refugees protected under international law and “the term must be preserved as a legal status for those fleeing persecution”.

None of this is to doubt the sincerity of the photo-artists or those organising the exhibition. Nor does it imply that climate change is so complex that it cannot be communicated to the general public.  All it shows is that climate change is a challenging area, framed by denial, guilt and discrimination, that requires the same intelligence and sensitivity as any exhibition on gender, race or class.

These  images deliberately chose to create a reaction use extreme and sometimes ludicrous contrast. But they could have shown many different scenarios that would have been far more realistic and engaging- images of adaptation and co-operation and real impacts that were well referenced by the science.  The history of immigration in Britain has always been one of immigrants adding new ideas, energy and diversity to Britain, so could not images of climate migrants have shown them dding to British culture and our capacity to adapt and change.

This is a longer version of the article that appears on The Guardian Blog

When campaign organisations put their climate change messages up in lights alongside commercial neon advertising the result is a bizarre dissonance that does nothing for their message but says a lot more about our collective confusion and denial.

Last week 10:10, the global campaign to reduce emissions by 10% this year, proudly announced that its name was up among the bright lights in Piccadilly Circus. The tweet promoting the sign said “in amongst it all, you really can see the glimmers of a movement building”.

Piccadilly Lights from Londonlime on Vimeo.

Glimmers indeed. Watch carefully or you may miss it- yes 10:10 really is there, alternating with a gambling website and engulfed by the vastly greater signs of TDK, Sanyo and Sony.

Piccadilly Circus is not just a fancy illuminated sign, it is, and has always been, a totem pole of corporate advertising. To place a climate change message there implies that there is no conflict of interest between action on climate change and the growth economics of globalised corporations. Even if you accept this – and personally I don’t – is it not bizarre nonetheless to publicise a climate change campaign that has urged people to turn their televisions off standby and unplug their mobile phone charger on a flashing sign alongside the world’s largest electronics corporations? It would be like the National Cycle Network putting its logo on the side of Fernando Alonso’s Ferrari.

Much as I respect what 10:10 has achieved, I have come to expect their communications to be, shall we say, eccentric. 2 weeks ago they enthusiastically launched a promo movie that showed dissenters being blown apart with high explosive. See my last post.. But I do expect more coherence from the World Wide Fund for Nature and its large and experienced communications team.  However the WWF is just as excited by the thought of being up in lights. In March this year it persuaded its partners Coca Cola to give over its prime Piccadilly Circus spot for an advert for its Earth Hour – a global call for people to turn out their lights in solidarity with the climate crisis.

Hold it there for a moment – an environmental organisation, teamed up with a global soft drinks manufacturer (reknowned for its dubious expansion tactics and links with obesity), takes out a huge illuminated sign to encourage people to save energy and turn off their lights.

WWF’s justification was that the sign would go out at 8.30 pm as part of the Earth Hour. If you turn a blind eye to the extremely mixed messaging you can also conveniently ignore the fact that it did not actually go off at all, but went a kind of bright grey colour like a laptop screen on the blink.Link…

It seems that environmentalists, like moths, are so dazzled by the bright lights that they lose all sense of where they are and what they are trying to say. And if Piccadilly Circus, a rather mediocre display, is so attractive to campaigners, Times Square drives us nuts.

In 2008 the Climate Group chose the middle of Times Square for the launch of its Together campaign- once again, a programme aimed at persuading people to adopt small changes in energy saving behaviour. The launch was a strange affair of celebrities, laptop information screens and potted plants- and above them all a huge LED sign with a pulsing orange circle logo. Link, go to June 2008 tab and click on ‘launch video’

Earth Day 2009 was launched when an illuminated ‘Earth Ball’ (sponsored by Philips Electrics) was dropped in Times Square. They came back for their 40th anniversary this year with “personal greetings from renowned leaders of the environmental movement” aired on screens around the square.

And even the admirable and usually right-on-message Bill McKibben, the founder of the grassroots 350.org movement, chose to launch the 2009 Climate Day of Action there under their huge illuminated arrow logo. Could anyone actually guess what the Blue Arrow or the Earth Ball or the Yellow Circle were advertising? Mobile phones? Soft drinks? Trainers? They all seem to mulch down to pretty much the same in the bold coloured big graphiced sans serif logo world.

It is not hard to see why environmental groups are so excited about having their name in lights. They clearly love the idea of being a player among the other global brands and having a foothold in an iconic and exciting location. Green groups are painfully aware of their stereotype as judgmental backward looking puritans, so they willingly embrace any image that portrays them as cool, exciting, forward looking and part of the modern consumer world. And, to be fair, when we are all trying so damned hard to get people engaged, can we really blame anyone who sees a chance to get some attention?

But my concern is not so much about the medium as the way that the adjacency of messages urging activist action and consumerist inaction contributes to our collective denial. Such jarring juxtapositions are now so common that we take them for granted. A dire scientific report on the impacts of flying will appear in a newspaper adjacent to a full page advert for cheap flights, or a website will have a banner for a competition to win a tropical holiday above a climate change report on the burning of the Amazon.

People would immediately observe, and probably protest, such associations around other topics where they already have a strong moral compass. Just imagine the complaints if fast food companies ran adverts in the middle of a documentary on childhood obesity. And on very sensitive topics people notice even minor and accidental associations. I recall a complaint against a Polaroid advert during a commercial break in the 1980’s mini-series Holocaust –it appeared, entirely by coincidence, just after SS officers have been flicking through photos of concentration camps.

Advertisers (and the advertising departments in the media) usually invest a lot of attention to make sure that adverts are put alongside copy and visuals that do not challenge their brand and put it in the most flattering context. In the case of climate change they clearly see no contradictions. If they think about it at all, and I doubt that they do, they probably reckon that the appeal of their product can overcome any adjacent warning about climate change. I suspect that they are right and that the climate message is subtly and subconsciously weakened in the mind of the viewer as a result (a postulate that I freely offer for a tasty social science research topic).

But surely, one would think, environmental campaigners would be alert to such conflicts and would actively avoid any contamination of their message. Most green groups have policies against taking funding from oil and aviation companies for exactly this reason. Some of the largest mainstream green groups work with corporations that contribute to climate change but usually do so under carefully controlled conditions where the partnership is well defined and the corporation is not allowed free reign to promote itself.

But all that falls apart in the glorious hypnotic world of flashing NEON.

Really, for me, the test is this:  when someone looks at this footage in 2100, amidst the  chaos of a dangerously overheated world, what will he or she make of it ? Will it seem like a valiant attempt to engage people? Or will it seem disturbing and  incoherent?

Last week 10:10, an international network of individuals, organisations and businesses pledging to reducing their emissions by 10% in the year 2010, released a promotion video that has turned out to be a public relations and communications disaster. It showed three different groups – schoolchildren, staff and a football team- discussing what they would do to reduce their emissions. In each case those people who said they were not interested were told “No pressure, you don’t have to get involved”, and were then blown up by high explosives, splattering blood all over the set. Ho ho!

I know the 10:10 team well and respect their commitment and dedication. Clearly their aim was to avoid the usual worthy moralism of green campaigns and produce something cool, funny and edgy. Unfortunately, with unerring skill, the video played directly to a range of current denial tropes about climate change being a fanatic belief system that aggressively silences dissent. The emerging compound ‘eco-fascist’ has appeared regularly in the feverish commentary on denier blogs. Especially maladroit was the metaphorical association with Islamic fundamentalism (one of the parodies currently circulating has the teacher dubbed into Arabic blowing up the school kids for refusing to believe in Allah).

There are lots that could be said here- not least that climate change has now become so polarised and accrued such a range of associations and meanings that all communications must be carefully thought through and, above all, thoroughly tested before release.

And in that spirit I pass to Annie Levy who invites readers to advance the discussion surrounding this film by asking: what would a really good ad have looked like?- over to you Annie

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I spent the weekend, as many of us did, with a pit in our collective stomachs about the egregious mistake 10:10 allowed in releasing the mini-film No Pressure.  How it all went wrong, all the various ways the message was disturbing and damaging—oh, we’ve talked and written reams among ourselves.

But it’s a sunny Monday morning and I’m thinking the opportunity in this crisis is that we can open a discussion about communication and how to do it better.

• We agree with the 10:10 team that the ante needs to be upped, and that perhaps our polite, consensus- seeking methods have been effective in educating but limited in inspiring rapid change.
  We feel urgency, but we know emergency-talk (“climate-porn”) turns many people off.
  We know that people who don’t identify as green don’t take on “green” issues.
  We know that putting climate change into the future or across oceans delays immediate, local response.
  We know that climate science has been politicized across the ideological divide, and it’s tiring battling deniers.
  Essentially, we know that different messages speak to different people.

So let’s say we were well-resourced in talent, as is 10:10, and could ask top-professionals to produce and distribute messages with high–production values (or not maybe?)—what stories would we tell, how might we do it better? How can we be effective climate communicators and agents of change?  We agree that we want to push the discourse further, shake off the science-deniers, get effective action from government, create rapid social transformation at all the necessary levels. How are we going to do it?

Having set an agenda, I will write the first comment:

“One thing I disliked about No Pressure was that it directed anger at individuals when in fact we are all collectively culpable, even when we take our carbon-reducing baby-steps such as 10:10.  And yet, small steps and sacrifices, often at the level of consumption, are presented as our only power.   I would like to see a film that pushes the issue of personal responsibility for climate forward by making heros of ordinary people who put themselves on the line facing politicians and corporations, whether through verbal challenge or non-violent direct action, so that we are all emboldened to demand change not just in our own lives but in wider social and economic realms.” — Annie Levy

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So send in your ideas. I would like to  keep the discussion focused, so please keep on topic and provide positive messaging ideas.

A movie that is now being launched in the UK called Collapse shows Michael Ruppert chainsmoking his way through visions of social and economic disaster. It is symptomic of the utterly self defeating way that peak oil  and climate change are typically communicated

Ruppert is a media generated phenomenon who brings together a cluster of conspiracy theories under one house brand. His endlessly promoted back story- as the LAPD cop who faced dismissal for revealing the CIA supply of drugs- is the stuff of a hundred good-cop movies . His highest profile accusation, that Dick Cheney personally ordered the 9-11 attacks, is downright nuts.  It is directly descended from the  conspiracy theories that the CIA ordered the shooting of J F and Bobby Kennedy. No big surprise- Ruppert promotes these myths too.

But never mind Ruppert, what is interesting for the Climate Denial blog is the appearance of this film at this time and the way that it presents its case. I have not yet had a chance to see the entire film though have seen long extracts. Here is the trailer – judge for yourself.

I have several observations on this film that relate directly to climate change and the way that these issues are communicated.

The first is that this is not a minor film. The director, Chris Smith has made several excellent progressive documentaries including The Yes Men. Collapse received positive reviews from across the mainstream US media and has a powerful afterlife in the blogosphere and campaign networks.

The second is that it does not speak directly about climate change- its concern is peak oil. Both issues are conflated in the mind of many activists and networks (the Transition Movement most notably). The public as a whole sees them as part of the same world view.

In terms of the documentary form we are clearly in the footsteps of Al Gore who established the box office potential of a feature length lecture by a charismatic (older man) presenter. What is interesting is the way that footage of Ruppert is interwoven with a rolling news format of economic and social collapse. Recent documentaries and disaster movies now frequently use  a collage of rapidly edited random footage taken out of context. This slick style aestheticises  images of destruction and objectifies the suffering of the people who appear, all too briefly, as bodies being blown up or swept away.

Four years ago an excellent report by the Institute of Public Policy Research identified alarmism in words and images as one of the dominant narratives about climate change. Gill Ereaut wrote:

The sensationalism of alarmism and its connection with the ultimate unreality of the movies also serve to create a sense of distance from the issue. What is more, in this ‘unreal’ and awesome form, alarmism might even become secretly thrilling – effectively a form of ‘climate porn’ rather than a constructive message. Alarmism potentially positions climate change as yet another apocalyptic construction that is perhaps a figment of our cultural imaginations. All of this serves to undermine the ability of this discourse

By this analysis ‘Collapse’ is an 82 minute long apocalypse pornfest that further reinforces the association between the visual aesthetics of disaster and concerns about resource shortages, peak oil, and, by association, climate change.

In terms of public motivation this is very bad news. Repeated research has shown that apocalyptic language and images create a sense of powerlessness and actively undermine peoples’ capacity to act.  They can also directly feed a range of associated denial strategies including a short term hedonism and nihilistic cynicism that can be very appealing to young people.

Increasingly- as we are seeing with the political polarisation in the US and Australia- people are not weighing up climate change or other resource issues on the strength of the solid evidence but are choosing between competing worldviews that deliver a package of lifestyle, political and ethical decisions.

On the one side people are presented with a cornucopialist future of endless expansion, built on technical ingenuity and personal freedom. This has now become absorbed into a wider right wing narrative of globalisation, corporatism, minimal government and free markets.

On the other side the apocalyptists promote a future of decline, conflict, corruption, personal guilt, and collapse.  This worldview has become deeply associated in the public mind with climate change and peak oil and this movie reinforces it in every way.

So if Ruppert is right he is following the worst possible strategy for raising concern about Peak Oil. By emphasising and reinforcing the existing worldview divides he is following a script that could have been written for him by those  opposing action.

That is if he is right. But I think he is wrong. I think that capitalism is, for all the reasons that its defenders use, far more resilient than most apocalyptists believe and has repeatedly shown its capacity to postpone the impacts of resource shortages. What is more, there is overwhelming evidence that even when people do face problems they are far more likely to work together and seek collective solutions than to panic and riot. The images in this film of looting and rioting are rooted in a very American fear of the underclass.

This does not mean that I do not think that we are running into severe problems. There is no doubt that our resource use is insanely short sighted and we are already seeing the first shortages. However I do not agree with the timeline of this film or the wider peak oil community.

And the timeline is everything. The boy who cried wolf was not wrong about the wolves- in fact his flock was eaten by the wolf in the end. But he was wrong about the timeline and  he exhausted the capacity of the nearby villagers to listen or trust his judgment.

So every time a film like this comes out and the world does not collapse- as indeed it will not- great harm is done to our interests. In the false dichotomy of competing worldviews, people’s support for the dominant worldview will have been reinforced and future attempts to raise concern will have been damaged.The real issues (climate change, resources depletion,food scarcity) become conflated in peoples minds with  the false panics like Y2K which made similar predictions about the collapse of law and order.

Of all resources, the most precious is the willingness of people to listen and change. This too is finite and only changes between generations. We only get one shot at this and we’re really blowing it.

A footnote

Caspar Henderson, who writes the Grains of Sand blog, just pointed me to the recent book State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain, 1970-1974 by Dominic Sandbrook. It quotes a personal ad in the Ecologist from March 1974 from a young man seeking a girlfriend to “share the remaining years of industrial civilisation” and experience the “end catastrophe”. Teddy Goldsmith, founder of the Ecologist, had just published the bestselling A Blueprint for Survival two years later, prophesying that food and essential minerals would run out within a few decades and “the breakdown of society and the irreversible disruption of the life-support systems on this planet” would occur “within the lifetimes of our children”. Source..] Teddy Goldsmith died two years ago and, as far as I am aware, his many children are all fit and well. His book “5000 days to save the planet” is sitting on a shelf behind me . It was published in October 1990, over 7,000 days ago.

George Marshall argues that the carefully stage managed involvement of civil society in Copenhagen fails to speak in any meaningful way to the people who really hold the balance of power.

For many of us Brits the journey to Copenhagen has required the trials of true carbon penitence. We eschewed the £12.50 flight in favour of a far more circuitous and exhausting trawl through the Low Countries with regular tests of faith. Our Eurostar train broke down. At the Danish border we were forced to stand in the cold for hours whilst police frisked, groped and poked their way through every part of our bags and underpants.

When we got to Copenhagen we crawled between the various performance and exhibition venues like the Stations of the Cross before standing in the snow for over 3 hours – and horror stories abound of people waiting for five hours only to be told to come back the next day– for an accreditation to enter the actual COP15 holy of holies. As it set over our line of supplicants, the midwinter sun was in perfect alignment with the conference centre, a Potemkin windmill, and, on the horizon, a vast coal burning power plant.

Shivering in the dark in this slow shuffling queue I was reminded of how nightclubs will engineer a long queue outside (even when the club is half empty) to persuade people that this really must be the place to be. The UN has performed a similar stunt- deliberately offering vastly more accreditations than the venue can contain to anyone who applies including planeloads of American sophomores in various gap-experience youth delegations who mill about and perform lame stunts in Polar Bear costumes.  (To be fair, there were  parallel conferences and events that displayed all the freshness, vigour and inspiring vision that the official summit so clearly lacked.  This was also the largest ever international gathering of climate change activists and progressive organisations and the new connections they formed will be a lasting legacy).

Another lame protest in Polar Bear costumes

This open invitation to the world is part of an overall campaign of impression management that this is an open and accountable process conducted in full view of civil society. And, of course, it is nothing of the kind; the official negotiations invariably take place behind closed doors, and the real negotiations – the ones required for the self-serving compromise that will appear magically in the very last hour – take place in hotel rooms.

Our presence as invited delegates from civil society makes us complicit in this deceit- a ten thousand strong Greek Chorus circling the real action, and augmented by the thousands of participants from the ‘global south’ and indigenous groups invited by Northern Non-Government Organisations. More disturbingly, as I observed time and again in strategy meetings, the NGOs replicate the same inequalities as the larger process- the key decisions are made by a small clique of white specialists and presented to the unconsulted global representatives in the audience (effectively muted by the obligation they feel to their hosts for their free flight bed and board).

Outside the convention centre, the entire city of Copenhagen has morphed into a corporation sponsored climate change theme park. Every subway station and bus stop carries the slogan ‘Hopenhagen’ sponsored by Siemens or Coke. In the main town square, competing with the  adjacent Tivoli Gardens funfair, a 15 metre wide illuminated globe projects energy saving tips alternating with the logos of the sponsors. Hey kids, don’t forget to unplug your mobile phone….and don’t forget who made it.

Right On Banner Clutter in Kongens Nytorv

Circled by six vast banners asking ‘Where Do We Go From Here?’ (sponsored by BMW) or exhorting us to Bend the Trend, the  Kongens Nytorv Square is cluttered with climate kitsch- a shiny climate satellite, fiberglass eco-globes by local artists, giant blow up faces of Colors-of-Benneton style indigenous people, a photo display of ‘100 places to remember before they disappear’ and a bizarre structure of scaffolding and flapping bed sheets which, on closer investigation I see are scribbled with pleas for political action. It is funded by the United Nations Environment Programme and is yet another example of the whole-world-is-here-and watching-trope.

Outside society may be permitted to speak in the streets around  the conference- albeit in a suitably stage managed and marginal fashion – but the conference has absolutely no interest in how it speaks back.  Not one of the official side events or briefings concerns the means for communicating the science or building public support for the decisions it makes. The one event I found concerned with ‘engaging the public’ could think no further than how to explain the official political process. As with all UN style public engagement it involved being lectured and powerpointed by a panel of bureaucrats before being allowed to ask a short and respectful question.

Nonetheless one member of the audience went tearing off-road with a question about how they would deal with the UEA e-mail hacking. It was a googly question from the real world where public trust in the science is in precipitous decline and self-promoting deniers roam the chatshows.

The panel looked dumbfounded and could provide no answer: these conferences occur in a constructed reality of concerned global citizenship and have no comprehension that the future of the world’s climate depends on winning over the voters of Oklahoma.

And so, looking back on Copenhagen, I have to ask:  who were all those banners, posters, photo exhibits, polar bears, melting ice statues, video installations really talking to? Did they persuade the doubting heartlands that this was their issue, or did they reinforce the widespread suspicion that this is an inward looking and irrelevant faith? And why are we too absorbed by the pilgrimage to ever ask this question?

And finally a word from our sponsors….

Polluters and financial speculators promote their worldview