Pathways and obstacles on the way to a green revolution.

Pathways and obstacles on the way to a green revolution. Rob Scott 5/7/11

In the absence of convincing proof that governments the world round are capable of achieving the necessary reductions in global greenhouse emissions that are urgently required, it becomes necessary to consider the alternatives.

As I have argued recently, the only real way to be sure that change will occur is to begin it oneself, hoping that the reluctant and recalcitrant will follow in one’s wake.

I wish to explore that notion further and also to explore the practical measures being undertaken across the world to mitigate climate change, to change behaviour and to create catalysts for further change.

This is prompted in part by PHD research being undertaken in Adelaide on the question of changing environmental behaviours in corporations and through them in the behaviours of their staff and their families and communities.

In response to that PHD research, I wish to ask what can we do to change our behaviours towards a positive outcome to the challenge of climate change?

I also want to explore what is already being done, and what are the likely effects of such undertakings? Will they be sufficient to bring about the necessary rapid change required?

Are there historical examples which may provide clues to the probable success or failure of any attempt to bring about mass changes in consumption patterns?

Rapid mass changes in behaviour

Obvious examples of rapid mass changes in behaviour may come from several sources. One is the industrial revolution itself, the birthplace of our current carbon pollution dilemma. If one defines a century of massive change as  a rapid development, then the Industrial Revolution is itself a valid object of research and of insight into societal and economic change.

The next obvious example is a much more rapid revolution. It has been said that we are still being driven by the effects of the massive and incredibly rapid change brought about by  World War II. Many of the main streams of development, including atomic energy, electronics, the oil industry, synthetics, communications etc were vastly increased in pace and scope during the hothouse of war development. Even the rapid change we are currently undergoing fails to diminish the scale of that war driven achievement

Examples of rapid changes in public attitudes abound. A very early one was the way that public support for the Cold War was aroused in the US in a very brief period immediately after the end of World War II. The public was manipulated and scared into an almost complete about face with regards to its attitude to the former ally the USSR in a remarkably rapid time.

The events of September 11 2001 were also of sufficient scale to permit the US government to enact sweeping changes to US laws and wipe out a large swathe of civil liberties through legislation such as the Patriot Act. A single day’s events were sufficient to do away with some principles which had been purportedly held inviolate for over 200 years.

It is obvious that large scale, rapid change in real world conditions and in public attitudes is possible and achievable. Some possible methodologies of change may be discerned in part from the historical examples I have suggested, and many others which are probably as obvious.

Close examination of such examples is therefore of use in considering ways to change current attitudes and behaviours. I will undertake that close examination over time as I further explore the issues I am introducing in this essay.

Of particular interest to me is the way in which the solutions we need already exist within the larger matrix of society, in many cases just waiting for an opportunity to manifest themselves as real world change. One example is something as simple as car sharing.

Car sharing, like many other behaviours in contemporary society may be seen as primarily an economic  decision. In hard times, such as those currently being experienced in Britain, such ‘sharing’ may be seen to be merely a way to save a quid.

It has been often noted that environmental concerns, which consistently rate very highly in public opinion polling, are buried by economic concerns when times are tough. This ’anxiety index’, created by short term financial considerations is often used as a driver to those who wish to impede the imposition of sensible environmental laws and measures.

The processof playing on the underlying level of public anxiety  is at work every time that ‘jobs’ are pitted against the environment when vested interests see their wealth and profits threatened. This accounts for the strange proposition of Transport Unions arguing against a carbon tax on diesel trucks.  In Australia recently a union official said that his industry was a`sweatshop on wheels’ and that a carbon tax would be the last straw for his oppressed members. One is prompted to ask why the union exists if it has permitted such a sweatshop to be established on its watch?

The question of jobs, is in essence one of power. It revolves around the fact that many sectors of the workforce in polluting industries have hitched their personal and family wagons to unsustainable and destructive apocalyptic horses and they don’t want to uncouple if it means a loss in their ‘right’ to consume like there is no tomorrow and destroy the planet.

Those who employ these people know they can be manipulated and led by the nose to create problems for governments, especially in outlying and marginal electorates.

It is extremely unlikely that these unholy alliances can be decoupled by governments. The answer to jobs that pollute must be to establish ‘Green ‘ jobs.  If sustainability is one of the answers to the threat of global disaster, then sustainable Green jobs are a key to the whole situation.

What would a sustainable Green job look like? Every suggestion for change carries with it its own need to analyse what is sustainability, what is a holistically Green job like, what are the conditions required to make it sustainable?

These questions begin to have an answer if we look at the basic tasks which underlie human society. Initially we need, as Maslow’s hierarchy explains, to have food and shelter. As there are a lot of us we need transport of some kind, and that requires corridors, roads, rail lines and similar. We have a need for energy, to power transport and communications. We need resources to keep alive individually and as a society.

The answer to these needs is not however to increase or even to try and maintain the existing structures. That only benefits those who already have the control over those structures and increasingly that is a smaller and smaller group of companies and investment structures. Wealth throughout the world is becoming increasingly ill distributed and with that goes a increased concentration of power and therefore a diminution of Democracy and of the impetus for socially beneficial  change.

Therefore any attempt to overcome the environmental catastrophe facing us is also one which will be faced with political, economic and social obstacles, all related to the process which created the crisis in the first place.

The answer to this accumulating series of threats to environmental, economic, social and political well-being is therefore to be found in an holistic analysis of the existing power and wealth structures, in a close examination of what may be implemented to replace them, and in a determination to replace these outmoded structures, jobs and economic values with a considered, practical and achievable alternative.

The simple’ car-share’, the local community garden, the localised community struggles against coal seam gas extraction, or against a desalination plant that will destroy a marine environment, are all therefore linked as part of what will develop as a broader, society wide political struggle.

I will revisit these emerging social environmental changes and their impact later. Along the way I will also explore some simple but relevant and less portentious ideas, such as setting up a new kind of finance package for people who want to share cars. Have an app which charges each driver for time used, fuel, maintenance etc. on a pro rata basis. Perhaps they can be paid for directly, from an i-phone or tablet. Such ideas only reflect the notion that change has to begin where we are now, even if it is  major change.

Climate change deniers, deluded self -seeking union officials,  mining magnates, environmental vandals on land and sea will all band together to see that their reality prevails. As I pursue these issues of how we can change the world for the better by our own actions as producers, and consumers,  we shall see what responses the current real world attempts to create a sustainable future elicit from those whose snouts are too deeply in the trough to stop and sniff the air.

Such alternatives have to begin with what exists, to alter it where achievable and to replace it over time where necessary. The pace and scale of change can be simultaneously rapid and slow, evolutionary and revolutionary, in the same way that industrial and post-industrial capitalism has itself created contemporary social and economic reality.

This must be kept in mind when examining the social impetus to resolve the crisis and retain an environment which will sustain humans for millennia to come, not sacrifice the future to the demand for ‘growth’ inherent in contemporary, globalised capitalism.