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Andy Wimbush is nef’s Communications Assistant and blogmaster.
Today, apparently, is Blog Action Day 2009. The idea? Everyone blogs about climate change! In a frenzy of web activity! (Just don’t mention the carbon footprint)
But what can blogging really do for climate change? Well, for a start, it provides a means for climate scientists to connect directly to a popular audience, without having to rely on the press and broadcast media. Ben Goldacre, doctor and author of Bad Science, has argued that more scientists should be blogging to increase public understanding. Fortunately, in the field of climate science there are some excellent blogs out there.
For dataheads, there’s no beating RealClimate, a strictly science-only blog run by five professional climate scientists, working at leading universities and scientific institutions, including the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The RealClimate guys don’t get involved in politics or economics, but they’re keen debunkers of pseudoscience nonsense that abounds in the climate denialosphere.
Then there’s Climate Progress, written by the unstoppable Joseph Fromm, who holds a Ph.D in Physics and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Joe goes beyond science to think about the political and economic solutions we need, and remains upbeat about the possibility of global climate deal at Copenhagen. His coverage of the US climate bill is second to none, and his rebuttals of climate blunders are hilarious as well as definitive. I especially recommend his take on the new book from the authors of Freakonomics. Climate Progress really is one of the best blogs around, climate-related or otherwise.
At nef, we’ve always believed that only a cultural paradigm shift will stop climate change, and deliver the economy we really need. That’s why we’ve made the arts such a vital part of The Bigger Picture: Festival of Interdependence. My final climate-related blog recommendation is that of the RSA’s Arts and Ecology project. Every book, exhibition, film or social movement relating to climate change and other environmental issues gets clocked here. Well worth a visit.
So there’s my contribution to Blog Action Day. Sending our precious readers elsewhere. Go off and explore, but be sure to come back to the nef blog. There are big plans afoot!
Andy Wimbush is nef’s Communications Assistant and blogmaster.
In the first of what may or may not be a regular ‘column’, I’d like to engage in a little bit of what humanities academics call ‘discourse analysis’: a close reading of a particular piece of text, in this case from yesterday’s leading article in The Times. The article is about the meeting of Nobel Laureates convened by the Prince of Wales to discuss solutions to climate change. The full text can be found here, but I am going to zoom in on a small part of it, take it apart and see what exactly is going on. Here goes:
We need our scientists to lay out, brutally if necessary, the scale of the problem. And we need them to apply all their ingenuity and inventiveness to the putative technological responses to the climate change. The best hope for man will be found in a laboratory, not on a soapbox.
But we also need economists. At present, it is too easy to see capitalism and environmentalism as natural enemies. Yet it is only by harnessing the power of capitalism, by finding a way of painting the age-old and inescapable laws of supply and demand green, that we will find sustainability. Man’s story is one of the pursuit of, and defence of, natural resources and riches. An economic template based solely on a self-denying frugality that goes against Man’s nature will not provide a lasting solution to the problem.
Now for the dissection. Let’s take it step by step.
1. “We need our scientists to lay out [...] the scale of the problem.”
The leader author quite rightly says that scientists – climate experts – are the people with who should give us the diagnosis of the problem we face. This is, of course, what environmentalists have been saying for decades, and I completely agree. But the author of this article then makes a jump in logic: the unspoken assumption here is that if the diagnosis of the climate problem is scientific and thus requiring complicated things like computer models, weather satellites and paleoclimatological equipment in the Arctic, then the solution must also be scientific – which this author rather dubiously sees as synonymous with “technological” – and thus requiring complicated things like carbon capture and storage, ocean fertilization and so on. But the jump from the if to the then is not a clear one.
Imagine that you go to the doctor and you are told that you are overweight. You expect that because your doctor is a trained scientist she will be able to provide you with a scientifically tried and tested technology to alleviate your condition: a pill, perhaps, or an injection. Maybe even some good old-fashioned liposuction. But to your surprise, the doctor simply tells you to get more exercise, to lay off fatty, sugary and processed foods, and to eat more fruit and vegetables. There is, she says, no magic pill which will allow you to keep consuming at your current rate. Scientific diagnosis, yes, but no technological cure. Likewise, there is no technology that can fix climate change while allowing us to continue to live Western industrialised, consumer lifestyles. We have to detox and diet, and there is no way around that.
Sam Thompson is a researcher and a consultant at nef’s centre for well-being.
Today sees the launch of the government’s Foresight Project on Mental Capital and Wellbeing. nef’s Centre for Well-being contributed two significant discussion papers to this project, which are also published today.
In Five Ways to Well-being, we reviewed the empirical evidence collected by Foresight from hundreds of research studies across the world. The outcome is a set of five different kinds of daily activity that, according to the latest and best evidence available, promote well-being and help to buffer against mental health difficulties.
With the people around you. With family, friends, colleagues and neighbours. At home, work, school or in your local community. Think of these as the cornerstones of your life and invest time in developing them. building these connections will support and enrich you every day.
Go for a walk or run. Step outside. Cycle. Play a game. Garden. Dance. Exercising makes you feel good. Most importantly, discover a phsyical activity you enjoy and one that suits your level of mobility and fitness.
Be curious. Catch sight of the beautiful. Remark on the unusual. Notice the changing seasons. Savour the moment, whether you are walking to work, eating lunch or talking to friends. Be aware of the world around you and what you are feeling. Reflecting on your experiences will help you appreciate what matters to you.
Try something new. Rediscover an old interest. Sign up for that course. Take on a different responsibility at work. Fix a bike. Learn to play an instrument or how to cook your favourite food. Set a challenge you will enjoy achieving. Learning new things will make you more confident as well as being fun.
Do something nice for a friend, or a stranger. Thanks someone. Smile. Volunteer your time. Join a community group. Look out as well as in. Seeing yourself, and your happiness, linked to the wider community can be incredibly rewarding and creates connections with the people around you.
Our second discussion paper, somewhat less glamorous but no less worthy, explored the applications of well-being research to policy. If we are to take well-being seriously as a policy goal, we need to have a robust understanding of what it is and how to go about measuring it. In the paper we describe a new, policy-relevant schematic model of well-being that we are delighted to see has found its may into the main Foresight report.
Andrew Simms is nef’s Policy Director and head of nef’s Climate Change programme.
We should design a system in which we worship the invisible heart of society rather the invisible hand of the market economy.
Instead of worshipping the invisible, and usually remote, hand of the market economy (which too often can be caught picking the pockets of the poor), you design an economic system in which resources flow and circulate effectively to serve the invisible heart of the core economy – made up of family, neighbourhood, community and civil society.
Andy Wimbush is nef’s Communications Assistant and blogmaster.
Orthodox free market economists often like to portray their discipline as being as objective and impartial as any of the natural sciences. Milton Friedman once argued that economics should be considered an ‘exact science’, like chemistry, physics or medicine.
But when free market principles have pushed us into financial meltdown and are stoking the fires of global climate change, practitioners of those ‘exact sciences’ are rejecting the Friedmanite orthodoxies of deregulation and unrestricted growth. This week’s NewScientist is a case in point. It features a special report on the economy, with contributions from the likes of Herman Daly, David Suzuki and nef’s own Andrew Simms.
The conclusion? We need a steady-state economy, with upper limits on wages and a drastically reduced financial sector. If we want the planet to continue sustaining human life, then we must steer the economy away from growth and ever-increasing production of consumer goods.
Much of this is in line with the recommendations of A Green New Deal and nef’s back-catalogue, particularly Growth Isn’t Working.
Susan George’s article will be of particular interest to Green New Deal fans. She calls for a Roosevelt-style reshaping of the economy along the lines of ‘ecological Keynesianism’.
Perhaps it’s worth remembering that history is littered with human pursuits which failed to qualify as real science. Alchemy. Phrenology. Astrology. If the ‘dismal science‘ doesn’t change quickly, it’ll be the next on the list.
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