We made the top spot on BBC online’s education section, and also had the final spot on the BBC’s today programme with Ian Hislop.  Our combined reach was between 5% and 10% of the UK population within the first day of our research launch!

We ran a provocative media campaign to get people to start discussing the issues and prompt a conversation in the media.  On my Facebook wall alone there are almost 100 comments on the ideas, with some very vigorous debate, and we hope that this discussion will continue into the future.  We’ll be launching the organisation properly later this year, but until then check out our brand new website.

Our aim is to get people to pursue the career in which they can help the most people in the world.  We hope that this campaign will get people to at least start thinking about this question.

–

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Tom Youngman (07757577910) or Niel Bowerman (07912614541)

Ellie Hopkins, Niel Bowerman and Tom Youngman are three of the nominees short-listed for Climate Week’s Most Inspirational Young Person Award.

Today these three nominees made the following joint statement:

“As young people deeply concerned by climate change, we support the Climate Week initiative. Connecting people through positive, practical action in their communities is essential to minimise climate change. However we believe Climate Week’s choice of sponsors seriously undermines its aims.

“In the case of RBS in particular, we feel that sponsoring this event without withdrawing their heavy investment in Alberta’s massively damaging tar sands development is grossly hypocritical. We echo many others in calling on RBS to divest from this practice.

“We are pleased that the sponsors appear to want to take action on climate change.  However, businesses must know that only lasting systemic change to their operations can earn them an image of sustainability. Mere endorsement is not enough.  We hope the sponsors of Climate Week use this opportunity to reinforce their commitments to sustainable practice. As such we invite Tesco, the sponsors of the youth award, to meet with us or other young people to consider our suggestions for improving sustainability.

“The tools to create a sustainable economy already exist but what we have yet to see is the political and corporate will to use them. We will not wait for those unwilling to lead into a just, sustainable future.

“Where there is willingness to create true change, we welcome big business to join the drive towards our common goal of a better future for everyone. Young people are already shaping their own futures in a low-carbon economy, whether these companies can keep up is something we are eager to see.”

- ENDS -

Press contacts:

Notes to editors:

1. Climate Week is a national event aiming to inspire millions across the UK to combat climate change.
2. Climate Week is sponsored by Royal Bank of Scotland, which finances more fossil fuel extraction than any other UK bank.  Until recently, RBS promoted itself as the ‘Oil and Gas Bank’.  RBS is currently financing environmentally destructive tar sands mining in Alberta, Canada.
3. Ellie Hopkins is the Co-Director of, and a full-time volunteer with the UK Youth Climate Coalition (ukycc.org). Niel Bowerman is a research climate scientist at the University of Oxford. Tom Youngman is a local environmental activist from Bath, the co-founder of Green Vision: The Bath Youth Climate Movement and a member of the Department for Energy and Climate Change’s Youth Advisory Panel.

The public do not accept the ideology of some climate campaigners, and hence unconsciously reject the science of climate change

Cross-posted from Climatico

The more green groups ask us to “stop flying,” the less the public believes in man-made climate change. Niel Bowerman argues there is a link.

Today is the anniversary of “climategate”. It has damaged the credibility of the IPCC, and climate science in general, and yet scientists could not be clearer that the warming observed over the past century is largely man-made.  Is it time to ask why so many people dispute a scientific theory that the vast majority of climate scientists agree with?

Could it be that some of the public’s distrust of climate science comes not from qualms with methodologies for constructing temperature records, but rather from scepticism of the ideologies of the green groups that use climate science to reinforce their campaigns?

The UK’s recent prime-time Channel 4 documentary ‘What the Green Movement Got Wrong’ was criticised by many environmental groups, not least because it contained several inaccuracies.

Many greens rightly charged the documentary with being ideologically driven, while the documentary claimed “that by clinging to an ideology formed more than 40 years ago, the traditional green lobby has failed in its aims and is ultimately harming its own environmental cause.”  As with most debates, both arguments do contain an element of truth.

The documentary struck a chord with much of the public, who are sick of a bossy, lecturing, elitist and sometimes excessively ideological environmental movement.  Unfortunately this is likely to be one of the reasons for the drop in public belief in climate change. When green groups demand that people ‘stop flying now’ instead of also working to promote viable alternatives, the public begins to reject the science of climate change outright.

If we are to tackle climate change before it is too late, the climate movement must rapidly evolve from being seen as a lefty group taking part in self-deprivation.  Green groups must become part of a larger movement for positive change that spans political boundaries and seeks to inspire and empower, not just criticise and condemn.

Younger groups are already beginning to adopt this new approach.  Ben West, Communications Coordinator at the UK Youth Climate Coalition, said: “Many of us as young people, are excited about renewing the movement and in the possibility of creating something fit and ready to overcome the big challenges of the coming decades, rather than being stuck fighting the battles and stereotypes of our parent’s generation.”

Perhaps the American climate scientists who created their ‘rapid response unit’ would have more luck convincing the public on the science if they could persuade environmental groups to say, “We’re sorry if we sometimes lecture or sound bossy, that wasn’t our intention.  We’re just trying to create green jobs, ensure energy security, and build a clean energy future; would you like to help?”

Niel Bowerman is a research climate scientist at Oxford University, and a former executive director of Climatico.

Does our communications strategy need to talk about 'climate change' more or less?

Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, has written an inspiring call to arms over at TomDispatch.com.  He argues that we need to build a much more active movement, and also that we need to change our communications strategy.  It is this latter point that I want to discuss here, as it is so fundamental to our long-term strategy. Bill McKibben wants us to start talking more about climate change, instead of avoiding the issue.

Step one involves actually talking about global warming.  For years now, the accepted wisdom in the best green circles was: talk about anything else — energy independence, oil security, beating the Chinese to renewable technology. I was at a session convened by the White House early in the Obama administration where some polling guru solemnly explained that “green jobs” polled better than “cutting carbon.”

No, really?  In the end, though, all these focus-group favorites are secondary.  The task at hand is keeping the planet from melting. We need everyone — beginning with the president — to start explaining that basic fact at every turn.

In the circles that I move in, people seem to be heading the opposite direction. After Copenhagen and Climate-gate, campaigners started talking about climate change less, not more.  We have The Great Power Race, the Energy Action Coalition, and the 10:10 campaign, which are all great projects, but aren’t built around the concept of talking about climate change.

I think that people have been focusing on changing strategy since Copenhagen, and so for groups that I’m involved in like the UK Youth Climate Coalition and the International Youth Climate Movement who have been talking climate change for a while, this means moving away from ‘climate change’ and towards ‘clean energy futures’.  Is this the right direction to be moving, or should the UKYCC be holding its ground and sticking with climate-related messaging? Could it even be argued that we youth groups are switching to a tried-and-failed tactic that was used before our time?

It’s clear that we need a movement, and that will have to be made up of groups that talk about climate change, and groups that don’t.  It must be made up of groups campaigning for high-speed rail, against road and airport expansion, for energy security, against wars for oil, as well as for cutting carbon emissions and against climate change. We need to make better links with diverse groups and ask not what these groups can do for the climate movement, but rather that the climate movement can do for them.  To do this we don’t need to stop talking about climate change, if anything we need to talk about it more and show how it relates to all of these other issues.

Let’s keep climate change as a common theme through all of our messaging, and make a better effort to reach out to diverse groups and help them out with their campaigns.

Hunter Cutting has a whole host of useful insights,  and I agree with his explanation of why the front line soldiers defending climate science in the media should not be climate scientists:

The Messenger

When audiences read news stories and attempt to make out the underlying issues, they take an important cue from the identity of the messengers. And currently, climate scientists are almost the sole messengers defending climate science. While this is problematic on a number of fronts, it is particularly challenging for the framing of the debate. Putting a scientist in the messenger role reinforces the notion that the fundamental issue is a question about the science. If scientists are doing the debating it is only natural to assume the science is debatable.

Beyond the question of identity, many scientists don’t make for a good messenger when the issue is politicized, such as with climate science. They are loath to call out the politics and step into a controversy outside their area of expertise.

Climate scientists must be joined by other messengers who are willing to stand up and speak out against the attack on science: farmers whose children would inherit dust-bowl farms due to the delay urged by climate deniers, generals who understand the national security threat, and business leaders who understand that every year of delay in investing in clean energy costs the global economy hundreds of billions of dollars.

When climate scientists do find themselves giving media interviews, Susan Joy Hassol has some useful hints and tips for improving our communications skills.  As well as the more obvious comments about language and using metaphors, she explains how we need to answer more than just the question:

Reframing

Rather than accepting the premise of a poorly framed question, reframe it. When people ask if global warming can be blamed for a particular hurricane, heat wave, fire, or flood, a simple “no” does not respond to the essence of the question. What they really want to know is whether global warming is having an effect on such events, and the science suggests that it is. You can reframe such questions to explain that global warming is increasing the chances of such events occurring, and you can also explain some of the connections.

This is an ongoing discussion, and one which is by no means settled.  As someone without expertise in communications, I would love to hear more views and opinions and how we can win back the climate change debate, and I hope to post more here soon.

Niel and I were having a discussion about the carbon footprint of washing clothes. We could not find a good number for that on the web, so we just did a quick calculation ourselves. Assuming that one would do 2 washings a week, we came up with a yearly 90kg saving in CO2 emissions if the temperature is reduced from 60° to 30°.

We used the heat capacity of water to figure out the energy demand and multiplied that by the amount of water an average household washing machine would use (55l). Knowing the carbon intensity of electric energy in our college (Linacre College, Oxford) it was just another step to find the difference in associated carbon dioxide emissions.

“Unless the G8 sign up to cut emissions by at least 40% by 2020, developing countries will not commit to emissions targets” - that’s the major point of discussion between developed and developing nations, which has (as was to be expected) paralysed the outcome of the Major Economies Forum (MEF). Following yesterday’s G8 declaration, the members of the Major Economies Forum (G8, G5, Australia, EU, the Republic of Korea, Indonesia and Denmark) may not have agreed on a specific target for emissions reductions by 2050 but at least agreed to allow no more than a 2 degrees rise in global temperatures. Reading through the communiqué that was just released in l’Aguila we don’t find many surprises, neither positive nor negative. A little bit on forests, a little bit on adaptation. No doors are closed but real commitment should sound different.

A definitely positive development from yesterday’s declaration is a stronger commitment to leverage financing. Where yesterday’s document related financing for adaptation and mitigation to existing development aid, today’s communiqué stresses that: “Financial resources for mitigation and adaptation will need to be scaled up urgently and substantially and should involve mobilizing resources to support developing countries (…..) Climate financing should complement efforts to promote development in accordance with national priorities and may include both program-based and project-based approaches.”

Yet, non-governmental observers are not entirely satisfied. In the words of WWF’s Kim Carstensen “It’s all about money. Rich countries are telling poor nations: oh poor you. But they avoid commiting to pay their fair share” He adds that ["]wealthy nations should show solid financial commitments and not comforting statements and should replace the blame game with responsible and credible commitments”.

But it is not only the non-governmental sector that recognises the difficulties. President Obama who chaired the meeting, acknowledged a good start but conceded that “progress on this issue will not be easy”. He especially cautioned against cynicism, in front of the immensity of the problem. Some others like CAFOD express it more directly “The G8 could be risking the lives of millions the world’s poorest if there is no agreement on climate in December”.

Bottomline: the outcome probably meets realistic expectations: whoever thought the MEF would do anything more than keeping the door open, i.e. whoever hoped that any substantial progress was to be made without the pressure of the last minute in Copenhagen is probably too optimistic. We also have to consider that without China’s presence moving negotiations towards a more definite outcome was next to impossible. No matter which perspective we take, it is pretty obvious that all sides are trying to push out a definite commitment and to keep the game open until the negotiations at the end of the year. The game continues…..

By Niel Bowerman, Ruth Brandt, Radhika Viswanathan and Marie Karaisl

Cross-posted from Climatico

… but doesn’t agree on when to turn down the heat. This is Oxfam’s resumé on the freshly released G8 climate change communiqué. Leaders could not improve on last year’s commitment of “a 50% reduction of global emissions by 2050”. They did however agree that to reach such a global reduction, developed countries will have to reduce their emissions by 80% by 2050. There was no agreement on a specific year as a baseline, and the final wording - “compared to 1990 or more recent years” - reflects the disagreement between the EU who pushed for a 1990 baseline and the USA and Japan who want future emissions to be compared to a more recent reference year.

As hoped and expected, it was agreed, however, that “the increase in global average temperature above pre-industrial levels ought not to exceed 2°C.” This is the first time that the US has officially agreed to such a target, something that would have been unimaginable under George W. Bush. The Canadians were opposed to this statement earlier this week, but after long negotiations and NGO campaigns from the likes of Avaaz, Canada accepted the language.

Like last year, no interim goal has been agreed on, though the EU’s push for a 2020 goal is reflected in the statement that a 50% reduction by 2050 “implies that global emissions need to peak as soon as possible and decline thereafter”. This lack of an interim target does not sit well with a 2°C target as Kim Carstensen, leader of the WWF Global Climate Initiative, puts it: “What are [world leaders] going to do between now and 2020? If they don’t outline a path to reach the announced goal, the 2 degree statement will just join a long list of broken promises.”

In the short term, they will be working on their economic recovery. The deterioration of the economic climate is noticeable throughout the document. Yet, positively, the trend to “green” individual stimulus packages (at least rhetorically) has been picked up in the communiqué: “We must seize the opportunity to build on synergies between actions to combat climate change and economic recovery initiatives, and encourage growth and sustainable development worldwide.”

For those interested in adaptation and forestry, the document seems to have something on offer.  The document mentions the “possible security implications of the adverse impact of climate change and the potential for increased conflicts over scarcer resources.” It goes on to discuss not only deforestation but also land degradation and the importance of biodiversity.

The bottom line is that apart from the lack of interim targets, most NGOs and other observers agree that the communique is adequate. Or as John Kirton, of the G8 Research Group, put it - “It met my standards.”

The G8 leaders will now take this communique to the Major Economies Forum tomorrow.  There Obama will chair a difficult meeting in which he will attempt to reverse China and India’s longstanding opposition to adopting quantitative emissions targets.

By Ruth Brandt, Niel Bowerman and Marie Karaisl

Paul Hawken’s Commencement Address to the Class of 2009
University of Portland, May 3rd, 2009
by Paul Hawken

When I was invited to give this speech, I was asked if I could give a simple short talk that was “direct, naked, taut, honest, passionate, lean, shivering, startling, and graceful.” Boy, no pressure there.

But let’s begin with the startling part. Hey, Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation — but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement.

Basically, the earth needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.

This planet came with a set of operating instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water, soil, or air, and don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch the thermostat have been broken. Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food — but all that is changing.

There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn’t bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: YOU ARE BRILLIANT, AND THE EARTH IS HIRING. The earth couldn’t afford to send any recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here’s the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “So much has been destroyed I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.” There could be no better description. Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refuge camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums.

You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen.

Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement. It provides hope, support, and meaning to billions of people in the world. Its clout resides in idea, not in force. It is made up of teachers, children, peasants, businesspeople, rappers, organic farmers, nuns, artists, government workers, fisherfolk, engineers, students, incorrigible writers, weeping Muslims, concerned mothers, poets, doctors without borders, grieving Christians, street musicians, the President of the United States of America, and as the writer David James Duncan would say, the Creator, the One who loves us all in such a huge way.

There is a rabbinical teaching that says if the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, first plant a tree, and then see if the story is true. Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. “One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice,” is Mary Oliver’s description of moving away from the profane toward a deep sense of connectedness to the living world.

The founders of this movement were largely unknown — Granville Clark, Thomas Clarkson, Josiah Wedgwood — and their goal was ridiculous on the face of it: at that time three out of four people in the world were enslaved. Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages. And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity. Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and activists. They were told they would ruin the economy and drive England into poverty. But for the first time in history a group of people organized themselves to help people they would never know, from whom they would never receive direct or indirect benefit. And today tens of millions of people do this every day. It is called the world of non-profits, civil society, schools, social entrepreneurship, and non-governmental organizations, of companies who place social and environmental justice at the top of their strategic goals. The scope and scale of this effort is unparalleled inhistory.Millions of people are working on behalf of strangers, even if the evening news is usually about the death of strangers. This kindness of strangers has religious, even mythic origins, and very specific eighteenth-century roots. Abolitionists were the first people to create a national and global movement to defend the rights of those they did not know. Until that time, no group had filed a grievance except on behalf of itself.

The living world is not “out there” somewhere, but in your heart. What do we know about life? In the words of biologist Janine Benyus, life creates the conditions that are conducive to life. I can think of no better motto for a future economy. We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets. Think about this: we are the only species on this planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time than to renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.

The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams. Literally you are breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by Moses, Mother Teresa, and Bono. We are vastly interconnected. Our fates are inseparable. We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells. In each of you are one quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells. Your body is a community, and without those other microorganisms you would perish in hours. Each human cell has 400 billion molecules conducting millions of processes between trillions of atoms. The total cellular activity in one human body is staggering: one septillion actions at any one moment, a one with twenty-four zeros after it. In a millisecond, our body has undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the universe — exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science would discover that each living creature was a “little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven.”

So I have two questions for you all: First, can you feel your body? Stop for a moment. Feel your body. One septillion activities going on simultaneously, and your body does this so well you are free to ignore it, and wonder instead when this speech will end. Second question: who is in charge of your body? Who is managing those molecules? Hopefully not a political party. Life is creating the conditions that are conducive to life inside you, just as in all of nature. What I want you to imagine is that collectively humanity is evincing a deep innate wisdom in coming together to heal the wounds and insults of the past.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would become religious overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch television.

This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation. You are graduating to the most amazing, challenging, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn’t stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn’t ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hopefulness only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.

Hat tip to my Grandma for flagging his one up!

Cross-posted from Climatico.

In a much-anticipated vote on Capitol Hill today, The House of Representatives passed the Waxman-Markey Climate Bill, which lays the foundations for a cap-and-trade system in the US. The vote was narrowly passed with 219 for and 212 against.

In the run up to the vote today some pundits said that the vote would pass, while others said it would fail.  Conventional wisdom, however, suggests that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would not have put it to a floor vote unless she knew she had the votes in the bag.  In a vote this tight, those that fall on the dividing line can have a disproportionally-large influence on the Bill.  This phenomenon was well illustrated by the extra 0.25% of permits that were allocated to refineries at the last minute in order to win over Rep. Harry Teague.

The reception has been mixed in the US, with House Republican leader John Boehner calling it “the biggest job-killing bill that has ever been on the floor of the House of Representatives.”  On the other hand the response internationally has been largely positive.  In a meeting with Obama earlier today, German Chancellor Angela Merkel praised the bill: “This is, indeed, a sea change that I see [...] this really points to the fact that the United States are very serious on climate.”  Although the bill has been widely supported by environmental groups, some say it does not go far enough.

The vote today does not guaruntee the passage of the bill into law, as it must first face the daunting task of passing the Senate.  Nonetheless, Obama’s victory today gives him some important extra cards to play in the run up to the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this December.