It wasn’t the best time to unleash the idea of the week. My wife and teenage sons were in the kitchen making crab-apple jelly, part of a rush of late summer chores before term begins. But chances are few, so I popped the question. “What do you think of cutting our carbon dioxide emissions by 10% in 2010?” The initial indications were that it could be Christmas before I get a sensible answer.
So far, so normal. But I don’t think we should be writing off the splendid Franny Armstrong’s 10:10 campaign — launched last week on the back of her climate change film, The Age of Stupid — any time soon, despite the inconvenience of having to think about it just now, or the discovery that one of the ways of meeting her target is to go vegan three days a week. The fact is, personal responsibility does come into it when we are talking about climate change and many of us have been ducking that for too long.
The big question that Franny is right to be asking is why, after nearly two decades of knowing that, in all probability at least, some of the warming we have seen over the past 40 years or so has a human explanation, we have made such little progress with the milder measures we could be taking to mitigate the risk of climate change. As a report by McKinsey & Company, the consultant, for the Confederation of British Industry said two years ago, most of the first things you would do as individuals to reduce emissions — change lightbulbs, insulate the house, buy a more economical car, teleconference instead of fly — actually save us or our companies money.
The idea has somehow grown up that individuals are trapped in their consumption patterns and so “doing something” about climate change is a matter mostly for governments. Why? This is inconsistent with what we believe about other environmental problems — such as recycling, buying Fairtrade coffee or sustainable fishing — where we think we can change the world.
Which brings us back to Franny. If we think — and it is a matter of science rather than belief — the evidence suggests 1) that warming has occurred and 2) that it stands to reason burning 86m barrels of oil a day, plus mountains of coal, must be having some effect on the atmosphere, then doing something about it becomes a moral responsibility. And it becomes something that individuals need to get involved with if one believes that the targets likely to be entered into by the free world in Copenhagen in December will be inadequate to keep warming below 2C.
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Franny is right. Her 10:10 campaign gives its supporters back a sense of individual agency, a hope of finding their own solutions, although we may harbour a sneaking suspicion that the planeload of jet-setting celebrities she has lined up as supporters are the last people who will achieve the target she has set.
For one of the annoying things about the 10.10 campaign is its right-on antipathy to carbon offsetting which, I suspect, is the only way the arithmetic for a thespian jet-setter can be made to add up. Unless you offset your flights to Los Angeles by signing up with a credible offsetter, no amount of fiddling with your heating dials, composting, eating vegan food or leaving the car at home is going to get you to Franny’s 10%.
Trading in carbon saved is one of the few sensible things to emerge from the Kyoto treaty. So why do people have to diss offsetting and other forms of carbon trading, as 10:10 appears to do — and as the climate campers did last week by protesting insanely against Point Carbon, the FTSE of the carbon market? Listen up: being against carbon trading means you are on an anti-capitalism trip and the rest of us regard you as loopy.
Franny may at times be a little PC. But if hanging out with her scares you, I can tell you there are things that scare me more. They were dealt with in a report by the Royal Society last week about geo-engineering the climate. You know the sort of schemes we are talking about: artificial “trees” along motorways, which soak up carbon; cloud ships that roam the oceans, making clouds that reflect light back into space; mirrors in space; spraying sulphate aerosols in the stratosphere to imitate the known global cooling effects of volcanoes; and even — perhaps the scariest of all — tilting the Earth on its axis.
I turned the pages with trepidation, expecting to find some kind of faint endorsement of these bonkers schemes buried there, some suggestion that sprinkling iron filings in the Pacific might actually suck up enough carbon to let us all go on driving 4x4s. In fact, the authors, led by Professor John Shepherd, came to an opposite and immensely sane conclusion. They said that almost all the technical fixes they had examined were unproven and potentially dangerous. Used irresponsibly, they could have consequences as catastrophic as climate change itself. But if we didn’t stop emitting CO2, they could be our only hope.
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That’s the best reason for saving CO2 I have heard yet. If we don’t do it, Captain Bonkers will get up there in his spaceship and start tinkering with the planet’s axis or squirting sulphates at the ozone layer. It’s all too believable. It’s enough to drive anyone into the arms of Franny.