TalkClimateChange

“I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes  planning my day difficult,” wrote Elwyn Brooks White, the American writer and champion of the freedom of the individual.

White sums up how I have generally approached life, and I have always had an inquisitive mind and a desire to share what I learn. My high-school chemistry teacher wrote “Never stop questioning” in my yearbook, and I like to think I never have… although my friends and family sometimes wish I had, and my girlfriend has recently taken to burning my soapboxes.

After finishing a degree in chemical engineering, a fascination with the world and a need for a roof over my head took me to a large engineering firm, where I would spend four years working as part of a global environmental consultancy, before leaving to help start a company. I studied for a second degree, which changed just about everything I thought I knew, and I was full of ideas of how to change the world.

The publication of James Lovelock’s “The Revenge of Gaia” in 2006 marks a time in which I began to get confused. The gloominess of this book, joined later that year by An Inconvenient Truth, seemed to take environmental concerns out of the hands of experts and into the hands of the media and armchair activists. Suddenly everyone had an opinion about nuclear power, but no-one knew anything at all about CHP or district heating.

DEFRA now (Oct 2007) estimates that CHP can save 159881GWh of energy per year, enough to meet the UK government CO2 reduction targets and electricity generation requirements without needing to build nuclear. This information, not exactly unavailable already as the Royal Academy of Engineering had published “The Costs of Generating Electricity” in 2003, seems to have reached the public and government a little late, and resulting hysteria has put nuclear firmly back on the agenda (fortunately, practicalities around building nuclear may delay things for a while).

The IPCC choosing to publish the Summary for Policy Makers of the Fourth Assessment Report fully five months before publishing the main report didn’t help my state of mind, nor did it do much for the public’s understanding of climate change. Indeed, it seems to have confused many experts in their field, as evidenced by the recent debates at CIBSE regarding changing its name so it has more “sex appeal”. The message was also a goldmine for the media and other institutions: “the planet is in peril, and it’s all your fault”. I particularly like the Vatican’s recent list of evils… “morally debatable experiments” surely include rushing out to harvest biofuels before we know if using them actually reduces carbon emissions? Again, there are those that know that many of our troubles have been caused by changing land use in the first place.

Another example where demand for government to respond has led us to collectively pat ourselves on the back is taxing plastic bags. Not a new idea, and not a bad thing in itself, but few people seem to know or care about coltan, or that paint causes a far bigger problem, or that domestic waste in the UK accounts for around 7% of what goes to landfill (10% if you include that taken to civic waste disposal sites). Meanwhile much of industry carries on as usual, and the 5% VAT discount on demolitions remains in place.

At an international level, misplaced allegiance and hysteria can affect economic and political decisions taken by organisations that few people understand or pay attention to. The detrimental effect this can have on the lives of real people is often overlooked in the rush to ban plastic bags and install wind turbines, and to point a finger and shout “sceptic! denier! blasphemer!” at anyone that suggests they might not be such a good thing after all.

Demanding biofuel at a time when La Niña and economic crises are already devastating lives has caused not unpredictable problems, even in the UK where pig farmers are finding themselves in all sorts of trouble as a result of grain shortage. And Brazil should stop cutting down the rainforest, even though there are rumours that the intention was to become a breadbasket for Africa and Asia. Because “forests are CO2 sinks,” even though nature emits ten times the CO2 mankind emits, much of which is from rotting vegetation on the floors of forests. We demand action and spend huge sums on a topic that may or may not cause people problems in 100 years, when every month today thousands of children die from diarrhoea, an easily preventable and treatable disease (to name but one).

Stephen Jay Gould said, “The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best – and therefore never scrutinize or question”. We all know this is true, but too many people don’t, can’t or simply won’t scrutinise and question before making grandiose claims and demands. I am so frustrated by this situation that I was recently moved to speculate that it might be a conspiracy!

So, a call to environmentalists, activists and concerned citizens: if someone presents an opinion that differs from yours, think about why they have formed that opinion, even if they are from a big corporation – some of them are trying to help. Have a bit more faith in our ability to evolve naturally as a society. And please, don’t ever stop questioning.

Further reading:

http://rehydrate.org/index.html