“[Other parties] want you to think climate change is your fault. They make it hard for you to be green, and then they make you feel guilty about it. They give you no help to make changes, and then penalise you when you don’t revolutionise your life.”
This is the key to the problem. People need to see leadership and they are not seeing it from today’s crop of politicians. Public concern over climate change has been higher than ever before for some time, but real changes in policy are needed before people can build greener ways of doing things into their daily lives.
It is politicians’ role to give us the tools to do the job. As eco-psychologist Kristina Murrin says elsewhere in the Observer, “about 20% of people respond immediately to rational arguments, about 20% cannot be moved with a tank, and about 60% need an alternative spelled out.”
We all need to feel part of the solution and we need to see a pattern of changes happening in society at large, rather than feeling that we are being asked to make small, isolated gestures (like changing our lightbulbs) that are out of proportion with the threat.
These requests from on high for personal changes in lifestyle are in stark contrast to the lack of change from government and industry which people instinctively know are much more important in dealing with this threat.
Hilary Benn in a comment piece next to the main Observer article goes on to say that political will is needed to deal with climate change. This type of observation from Benn makes me very angry. What he says is quite right, but Benn is Environment Minister in a government which has failed to show any real leadership on this issue, missing its own targets and making a complete mess of renewables policy, to name but two aspects of its ten year record. Simply put, Benn needs to stop telling us about the political will needed and exercise some of it.
For the rest of us, who don’t think Benn or the Tories are likely to show us some leadership rather than fine words, the answer is simpler: join the Green Party and help build it into a mass movement that can challenge this nonsense, and take and exercise political power to answer these very urgent challenges.
