Please note that this is BBC copyright and may not be reproduced or copied for any other purpose. RADIO 4 CURRENT AFFAIRS ANALYSIS GO GREEN, OR ELSE! TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY Presenter: Camilla Cavendish Producer: Ingrid Hassler Editor: Nicola Meyrick BBC White City 201 Wood Lane London W12 7TS 020 8752 7279 Broadcast Date: 19.07.07 2030-2100 Repeat Date: 22.07.07 2130-2200 CD Number: PLN728/07VT1029 Duration: 27’38” Taking part in order of appearance: David Miliband, formerly Environment Secretary, now Foreign Secretary Ruth Lea Director of the Centre for Policy Studies Andrew Simms Policy Director, New Economics Foundation Solitaire Townsend Director of Futerra John Leaman Director of Environmental Research, ‘Ipsos Mori’ Andrew Cooper Director of the polling organisation ‘Populus’ David Madden Campaign Coordinator for The Rising Tide Coalition Miranda Lewis Associate Director, Institute for Public Policy Research Tim Jackson Professor of Sustainable Development, University of Surrey CAVENDISH: Earlier this month, a hundred rock bands played what was billed as the world’s biggest concert – or was it the world’s biggest conceit? As Live Earth played on seven continents, Al Gore told citizens to urge their governments to reduce carbon emissions by 90%. We have yet to see whether pop can rock governments. But the British government has already set ambitious targets on climate change: to reduce emissions to 60% of their 1990 level by 2050. In little more than the time it took to stigmatise drink-driving, politicians hope to shift us to low-carbon living. Can they do it? And what kind of mood music will they need to play? MILIBAND: We need you, the people of Britain responsible for 44% of the UK’s emissions through their decisions on electricity, heat and transport, to change their behaviour. LEA: I can do something about conserving British water supplies. I can‘t do that much about actually dealing with global carbon emissions. And we know that China and India, particularly China, their carbon emissions are rising rapidly each year. So the idea that by switching the lights off perhaps in Piccadilly Circus and that’s going to save the planet - I laughed. MILIBAND: British people do have a sense of moral impulse, they do have a sense of the needs of their grandchildren, they do have a commitment to doing the right thing. What they want is to be able to do the right thing in an easy way and, if possible, be rewarded for it. If we organise that, then we’re in business. CAVENDISH: Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who was Environment Secretary until the recent reshuffle, appealing to our better natures. And Ruth Lea, Director of the right-leaning Centre for Policy Studies, sceptical about whether national exhortation can solve a global challenge. So what can government do to persuade us to act now, on a problem which will affect other nations and future generations in a country notorious for our suspicion of bossy politicians? Environmental experts disagree about how to get the messages across. Here are Andrew Simms and Solitaire Townsend: SIMMS: We might imagine that the next batch of sports utility vehicles to roll off the production line might carry messages like ‘global warming kills,’ ‘driving cars like this can endanger your children and future generations’ - leave people in no confusion about the consequences of their actions. TOWNSEND: If we’re just making people more and more scared without building their sense of agency, we’ve missed half of the equation. I’ll put it in the language that we see out there, which is: “You are all going to die … unless you change your light bulbs.” It‘s called climate porn, climate pornography. It’s that we almost enjoy the Armageddon-ness of it. It’s like picking a scab: it‘s all going to be awful. CAVENDISH: There’s certainly been a lot of Armageddon around lately. And enough billboards depicting a fragile Earth to paper the planet. Solitaire Townsend is the director of the communications consultancy ‘ Futerra’, which is running climate change campaigns for both business and government. She thinks that merely urging people to be responsible will not do the trick: TOWNSEND: It’s called the bystander effect, which is the more people that are aware of a problem, the less any one individual feels responsible to act on it. Climate change and other environmental issues are suffering from the biggest, baddest bystander effect that there’s ever been. It‘s intergenerational, it’s global. You know you can shout until you‘re blue in the face about the current generation’s responsibility to deal with this. All that does is make us feel more guilty. If I can give a clear and present advantage to taking action right now - that doesn’t have to be financial, it could be social advantage, it could be a status advantage - people will take action now. CAVENDISH: Her emphasis on clear and present advantage reflects our hard-wired human tendency to live now, pay later. We are notoriously bad at thinking long-term. But, according to John Leaman, Director of Environmental Research at pollsters Ipsos Mori, many people are already convinced that climate change is not just a matter for their children, but an issue here and now: LEAMAN: We’ve got something like a third of the British public now saying that they feel personally that they’ve seen evidence of climate change - most obviously in the weather of course: recently we’ve had extreme flooding and so on and un-seasonal weather. There have also been instances such as the Buncefield oil depot fire, which was one of the things which triggered people’s concerns if you like about man’s impact on the environment, albeit unintentional. CAVENDISH: After the Buncefield fire came the Stern Report, which even made it onto the front page of The Sun. By the end of last year, 74% of people in one poll said that climate change would influence how they would vote at the next election. The shift has been dramatic. But will those who express such concerns welcome being told what to do about it? Andrew Simms is Policy Director of the New Economics Foundation in London and author of several books on climate change. He believes that the Second World War provides a useful historical precedent for the kind of changes that may be needed. SIMMS: What’s fascinating when you look back to the Second World War is that today we think everybody saw the threat and fell into line and did the things they were told to do. It wasn‘t like that. It was a struggle to get people initially to take it seriously. When they tried to introduce taxes on luxuries, it was fought tooth and nail all the way; when Keynes stood up and tried to devise a system for war savings, that was a struggle. As today we may have carbon appeasers, back then there were people who didn’t really think it was important enough to radically change their lives. But change they did and change they did for a variety of reasons. One was a comprehensive government-led, public education programme, which used the best artists and the best entertainers and performers and writers the country had. You saw peer to peer pressure. In the six year period from 1938 using a combination of public pressure and regulation, including rationing, you saw a 95% drop in the use of private vehicles, you saw an 80 plus percent drop in the use of electrical appliances in homes. There were leaflets asking you how many pairs of knickers did you have to have in your drawer. Every aspect of life was interrogated for where there might be waste. It was done with wit, it was done with humour. CAVENDISH: The power of humour seems as relevant as ever today, when environmentalists and politicians are better at moralising. But even with the best satirists to hand, a Blitz spirit would be hard to revive. The war against climate change is a strange kind of war, one in which we are each both victim and villain. Some scientists say that we have only ten years to avoid tipping points which could make climate change rapid and irreversible. But such concepts still lack the brute force of an immediate threat. There is a difference between acknowledging the problem and actually doing something about it, says Andrew Cooper, Director of the polling organisation ‘ Populus’. COOPER: To an implausible degree, people say that they are already taking every possible step. For example, 81% of people say that they only boil as much water as they need, they don‘t automatically fill the kettle; 4 out of 5 people say that they don‘t use the standby button on their television set; 76% say that they recycle everything in their house that can be recycled; two thirds of people say that they only buy low energy light bulbs. Now that‘s despite the fact that, according to the National Consumer Council, only 11% of the light bulb market is currently for low energy light bulbs and at the current growth rate they‘re projecting that it’ll only be 13% by 2020. So clearly people are over - claiming here. What it clearly tells us is that people perceive that there is now a sort of cultural norm that the right answer is to say that you are doing these things, that you are acting responsibly in respect of the environment even though they’re not. So it is also by the fact that they’re over- claiming evidence of a significant mood change in importance of the issue. CAVENDISH: The mood is changing, but not enough. So why don’t human beings who watch Al Gore’s video or worry about polar bears just get up, walk down the hall and turn down the thermostat? Solitaire Townsend points to an extensive body of research: TOWNSEND: Take, for example, a study that was done in the US with male students and young female students in a co-ed hall of residence. Now there was a laundry downstairs where there were dryers and washing machines, but there was also the ability to hang your clothes out to dry outside. Now the women were hanging their clothes out to dry outside and the men were using the dryers. Big campaigns were done with these students: “Save Money, Dry on the Line” ; “Save the Environment, Dry on the Line “. And the men continued to use the dryers. And so these researchers asked the women what they thought of the men, and the women thought that the men who hung their clothes out to dry on the line were more likely to be poor, probably gay and just generally less sexually attractive. What they realised there was this wasn’t a rational challenge to behaviour; this was a status challenge. They had to raise the status of the behaviour. I live in an ex-council area. My residents’ association won’t let us hang our clothes out to dry on the line because it makes us look like we’re still a council area. CAVENDISH: Status has a big influence on our behaviour, in ways that are more subtle than just biggest is best. Anthropologists say that in almost every civilisation, consumption forms a fundamental part of the narrative that people construct about themselves and which is essential to their psychological well-being. TOWNSEND: If I change my light bulbs and put cavity wall insulation in my home and turn all my lights off when I go to bed and half fill my kettle, it‘s not something that’s giving me any social status, it’s not something which my neighbours can see; whereas if I put a wind turbine on my house or a solar panel on my house or park a Toyota Prius outside my front door, it’s a social proof action. Now that doesn’t necessarily mean that you did it for climate change. One of my friends has got a solar panel on the north- facing roof of her house. When I pointed out to her that’s not necessarily the best place in the UK in order to be generating energy, she pointed out to me that I wasn’t understanding why she’d done it. The north facing part of her house is the part that faces the street. CAVENDISH: What extraordinary lengths human beings will go to, to one-up each other. The woman with the solar panel is demonstrating not only that she cares, but that she’s wealthy. But why should eco-status be the preserve of the rich? What about those who don’t have the money to buy green credentials? David Madden is part of a growing international coalition called Rising Tide, which takes direct action on climate change: MADDEN: It’s the people who can’t afford technological solutions who are just scraping by, and probably the people who aren’t doing their recycling and all that kind of stuff but actually when you think about it it’s possibly the person who’s driving a four-wheel drive and flying over to Milan for the weekend but religiously doing his or her recycling; I mean they‘re having a much greater impact on the climate than a working class person who doesn’t recycle but doesn’t have a car or ever even dream of flying. It is true that those people who are emitting the comparatively tiny amounts of carbon dioxide, those who are most marginalised, most vulnerable and who have the least - and that’s true in the UK as well as internationally - are going to be hit the hardest by the climate change crisis. CAVENDISH: The current government is passionate about increasing social mobility and reducing poverty. But, says Ruth Lea, the climate change agenda carries real costs for those in society who are already disadvantaged: LEA: If you put up carbon costs, fuel costs in this country - lighting and heating and whatever - then because the lower paid groups tend to have a proportionately higher part of their expenditure on these particular items, then proportionately it tends to be regressive on them, so of course it doesn’t help them. It actually in a way reduces their standard of living more than it reduces anybody else’s standard of living. Now the way round this of course if government wishes to address this particular problem is actually look through the tax/ benefit system and help people in other ways. But if they are really serious about pushing up carbon costs much more than they are already, I suspect this is something they ought to think about. CAVENDISH: It is partly these disparities in society which makes politicians so keen to stress that tackling climate change must be a collective effort. David Miliband: MILIBAND: I think the critical thing for government is to offer a deal to people really; that the big players in society - government, business - are going to do their bit, they‘re going to get their own house in order, they’re going to provide genuine leadership both in terms of negotiating international treaties but also changing the way government works. If they do that, then I think they can say to people we can’t do it without you. And that then raises two very, very difficult problems: first, the feeling people have that them changing a light bulb isn‘t going to save the planet - which it won’t; and, secondly, the difficulty of aggregating the numbers of people who are going to change things. But that is the agenda. It’s a deal and it needs to overcome the problems of disempowerment that people feel and the fragmentation of our society. CAVENDISH: Climate change raises a fundamental issue for most people: why should I do anything unless others do too? And that question has just been given extra resonance by the finding that China has overtaken the US as the world’s biggest producer of carbon dioxide. We feel powerless. David Miliband talks about empowerment - a favourite New Labour phrase. We are used to being told to stop smoking, to eat better, to exercise – to take control. But Miranda Lewis, associate director of the Institute for Public Policy Research and author of a new report into the government’s policies of persuasion, believes that it is wrong to apply the empowerment approach to the environment. LEWIS: The language of empowerment isn‘t terribly helpful and it’s not very empowering to stop flying, for example it’s not necessarily empowering to stop using your car. CAVENDISH: Why do you think this government has been so interventionist in some areas such as smoking or parenting classes and so coy really about climate change? LEWIS: I think the reason the government has treated different policy areas in very, very different ways is largely to do with this issue of whether the benefit comes personally or not. If I stop smoking and no-one else does, it still has a benefit to me. So there are very distinct changes about the environment. If I act and no-one else does, it’s not going to change the problem. So it’s sort of seen as much more acceptable to work with parents to prevent anti-social behaviour. Equally with smoking, there’s quite a lot of public support for that and people know that it’s something that has an impact on their own health. Whereas this question of climate change is different because people feel that it’s not something they’re really personally responsible for. As a nation, we haven’t really yet faced up to our own personal responsibility. And that’s much more politically difficult and I think you can see where this government’s intervened, it’s always been at a point at which there’s been quite a lot of public support. CAVENDISH: It is easier to get people to act when they can see a clear personal benefit. Where there is no clear benefit, we have seen fierce resistance: to road-pricing, water-metering, and compulsory recycling, for example, all of which are standard practice in some European countries but which speak to us Britons of Big Brother. The government has been wary of pressing such policies without consensus. Tim Jackson, Professor of Sustainable Development at Surrey University, who advises the Government as a member of the Sustainable Development Commission, argues that there is an even bigger problem with urging individuals to act alone. JACKSON: Asking individuals to change unilaterally is not only unfair, it’s actually morally questionable in a situation in which it’s possible for others to benefit from that change, and the kinds of changes that you’re asking will in fact disadvantage people - not only themselves but their future. A very, very good example, absolutely fascinating to me, is the school run. It’s about getting your children safely to school. And increasingly what you get there is you know a real dilemma for people who would or might like to think about getting out of the car. What they’re being asked to sacrifice in those circumstances is the surety of getting their kids to school on time, plus even the safety of those kids. For as long as you‘re the one in the big SUV, your children are safe; other children are less safe. And so as soon as you have you know two or three families driving to school in these big cars, then it is in the best interests of the security of your family to be in such a car. Fairness comes up again and again as an issue. You know that’s the bigger issue for government, I think; than is an underlying resistance to do the right thing. I don’t believe that’s there. CAVENDISH: Tim Jackson is describing what economists call the Free Rider problem: how to stop some people from shouldering less than their fair share of the burden, and so free-riding on the generosity of others. As long as the SUV seems not only safe but is also a mark of status, people taking the bus will feel hard done by. Plus they see office buildings lit up at night. They read that 11 out of 19 government departments increased their waste and energy use last year. They may be willing in principle, but they are damned if they are going to be the mugs to go first. Fairness is a critical issue in this debate and supporters of personal carbon allowances, like David Miliband and Andrew Simms, argue that they would limit consumption in an equitable way. MILIBAND: 44% percent of emissions come from the household sector. We’re trying to achieve at least a 60% reduction in UK emissions overall, so you can therefore read off what the household reduction should be. You then allocate a level of emissions to all the individuals in the country, we all have a carbon credit card, and those who are environmentally thrifty would benefit financially and those who were environmentally spendthrift would have to pay extra. Critically though the household sector would be living within a carbon cap. SIMMS: Given the flexibility that we have with modern information technology and the way that we can carry all kinds of information around in plastic cards in our wallets, I see no reason why we couldn’t have an individual carbon income which would act a little bit like a basic income scheme, a salary. It would guarantee a modicum of energy security to everybody, but if you wanted to consume above that level then you’d have to buy somebody else’s spare capacity. MILIBAND: Essentially at the moment environmentally thrifty individuals are subsidising the environmentally spendthrift. It’s a hidden subsidy, but it’s going on. SIMMS: Ultimately people should have an equitable quota of carbon and decide for themselves how to spend it. If they decide they want to fly, they fly and take the consequences. It may mean that they can’t turn the kettle on for a few years. We have to get real. CAVENDISH: What would you prefer? A hot holiday in Majorca or a year’s supply of hot tea? The choice would certainly concentrate the mind. And that is the point. A carbon credit card could be a dramatic demonstration of how far we are living beyond our planetary means. But could it work in practice? Ruth Lea: LEA: I think all these allowances are frankly quite absurd, but the problem with quotas of course is they’re extremely hard to impose on people. Quotas are actually an administrative nightmare. What are you going to do with 60 million people? Are you going to follow them as they walk down the street? I mean I think the whole thing is frankly absurd and I really don’t think it will take off. Moreover, I do think there’s a freedom issue as well. If you price something, then people can make their own decisions; but if you actually start talking about quotas, that’s pretty draconian. That’s like rationing in the war. MILIBAND: I don’t accept that a personal carbon allowance is about restricting choice. Actually it’s about revealing and promoting choice and rewarding choice. The history over the last hundred and fifty years is that we failed to put a price on pollution. That has environmental and economic costs. I think it’s right to explore where across our economy and society we can ensure that that price is visible and the polluter pays principle is a good one. CAVENDISH: Imagine: a Stasi-style police force spying on kettles and paying neighbours to inform on those seen sipping a cuppa after their holiday. At the moment, government puts a price on pollution in two ways. Taxes are not a terribly effective way to change behaviour, because the rich can afford to pay them and keep on driving or flying. They hit the poor hardest who probably pollute the least. Emissions trading is more efficient. By putting a cap on industrial carbon emissions and letting companies trade permits to pollute, the emissions trading schemes of Europe and America will soon start to force businesses to reduce pollution in their operations. And If business is doing its bit, it should be easier to get individuals to play along. But David Madden, the campaigner from the Rising Tide Coalition, is not happy with this approach: MADDEN: There is a new market now in carbon and the carbon trading system is being touted by certainly the UK government and other governments as being one of the key solutions to the climate crisis. What it does is it perpetuates a system of inequality that has caused the problem in the first place. So we would argue that to hand over control of the problem to governments and to business is something that the public can’t afford to do because this is a government that is committed to massive aviation expansion in this country. It’s committed to building more roads, it’s committed to building ever greater infrastructure to facilitate every greater economic growth. There is a degree of insanity at the heart of the system that tells us that the solution to most of our problems is to buy our way out of them. CAVENDISH: But is it realistic to directly penalise economic growth? The Climate change levy is a tax on the amount of energy that UK businesses use. Ruth Lea: LEA: The climate change levy obviously is not a genuine carbon tax, but we know how it’s working. We know how this one’s working. It‘s pushing up the costs of energy usage in businesses already and this is obviously particularly the case where you’re dealing with big energy consumers, not least all of manufacturing industry. Their costs go up, their international competitiveness tends to fall away, and of course in so far as their businesses are mobile, internationally mobile, then their businesses could actually go overseas. We know that’s happening. Now I think the truth is that unless you can think of a package of taxes, so you might increase carbon taxes but reduce other corporate taxes - unless you sort of think along those lines, then really what you’re going to be doing is pushing up the costs on business. CAVENDISH: And what would happen if some of those manufacturing industries did move abroad? LEA: Well if for example manufacturing moved to say India or China where actually they’re probably much less efficient at using energy than we are and so per unit of output, they’re more likely to be actually emitting more carbon emissions than we would, then clearly the overall effect on carbon emissions, on global carbon emissions would actually be negative. So when people just talk about bringing in carbon taxes to sort of solve our carbon targets, you could actually end up in a worse position globally. CAVENDISH: It would be a terrible irony if taxes were to push British companies into the arms of polluting regimes. Taxes can be counter-productive. They are also highly visible, and unpopular. Andrew Cooper from Populus: COOPER: People are very suspicious of politicians. About three quarters of people think the only reason that any politician talks about the environment is because they know it’s a popular issue and they‘re trying to get elected, not because they actually care about it. When they hear a green tax coming, they think it’s just a politician thinking of another sneaky way to take my money, exploiting the public mood and public anxiety to do so rather than that that will actually be done in order to help the environment. CAVENDISH: People don’t want to be exploited. Nor do they want to exploit others. There are fears that concerns about food miles – how far your food has travelled to reach your plate - could end up devastating the livelihoods of poor farmers. But David Miliband believes it is not so simple: MILIBAND: Half of all food miles are our journeys to the supermarket, not the flights of green beans from Kenya, so we‘ve got to get some perspective into this. Furthermore, the debate about roses on Valentine’s Day showed clearly that the high- energy greenhouse in Holland where roses are grown has greater carbon emissions than the sun -sponsored growth of roses in Africa even though they’re flown in. And it’s not just about fly or not fly; it‘s about what’s your overall carbon footprint. So I think it is very, very good that the retailers are now working with us, all the retailers, to develop a carbon labelling system and make sure that consumers are able to make carbon- friendly choices. CAVENDISH: But how much choice do people actually want? Do we really want to read the small print on every label? Or would we rather that all the products on offer meet a minimum standard? John Leaman from Ipsos Mori: LEAMAN: Certainly over the years we’ve asked questions about people’s willingness to pay extra for specific products, which are environmentally friendly. The willingness to pay extra has actually declined, but the expectation is increasingly that the green credentials are part of the package. They are taken for granted. CAVENDISH: That’s very interesting. Does that mean that actually government policy has to be more about regulation - i.e. regulating some of the bad products out of the market? LEAMAN: Well in so far as governments can do that. The free market, you might say, had a rapid effect in the late 80s. We had CFC free aerosols appearing and very quickly it was very difficult, if not impossible, to buy anything but. So it’s a combination I think of the market having its effect with of course legislation and regulation along the way. CAVENDISH: Let’s just stop and remember what happened with CFCs. The discovery that these chemicals were damaging the ozone layer led rapidly to action. First, consumers were discouraged from buying aerosols – and the social pressure was so successful that it helped to prompt a new fashion for hair gel over hairspray. Then, in 1987, CFCs were banned outright. The analogy with climate change is not exact. Relatively few companies were involved and one had developed an alternative. But at the time, both governments and consumers were willing to act fast on a problem when the science was still speculative. The British government will soon be outlawing stand-by buttons on televisions and promises to make new cars more fuel efficient within five years. But so far, this government has largely presented the climate change problem as a matter of private consumer choice. Andrew Simms says that is not good enough. SIMMS: There is a real problem about a lack of equity within the wider global scheme and for all the finger pointing at China we overlook two huge things: A lot of the emissions coming out of China are to do with the manufacture of goods that we are consuming her in the UK. We also overlook that per person their emissions are radically lower than our own. So when you’re trying to design a global system, unless you address the fact that we have historically massively over- polluted and continue to do so on a day by day basis, you will never win the trust of countries like India and China and Brazil to design a safe and sealed global system. CAVENDISH: A month ago, the Chinese government banned air conditioning in some of its major cities. Two weeks ago, it ordered government cars to stay parked. That dictatorship is taking the kind of action that democracies can only dream of. But if our government cannot dictate, it does have another weapon: status. The woman who put her solar panel on the wrong side of her roof holds an important message for politicians. Make it fashionable to be truly green, separate green status from wealth, and you could find that habits change dramatically.