Looks like the first battle in the war to control the unfolding nuclear narrative has been won by the incumbents, the nuclear lobby. If CJR is to be believed they’ve set the table from which the media is now working, in the US at least.

The term “nuclear renaissance” has been used to characterize the current state of the industry in a number of stories this week concerning U.S. policy in the wake of Japan despite this lack of construction. The suggestion of a renaissance, though, stems from the idea that loan guarantees for nuclear in the Clean Energy Act, combined with a new preference for “greener” nuclear options over greenhouse-damaging coal energy, have put a number of new nuclear reactor projects in the pipeline. Thus, the “renaissance” of this sixties/seventies favorite technology. The press is now asking if events in Japan might have changed the course of that rebirth. But they’re not necessarily questioning the nature of the rebirth itself.

What does this mean?

via Japan’s Quake and Political Fallout : CJR.

Good start to the year, lots of doing but not so much reading. Here are a few articles that I have just cleared out of my Instapaper.

No better man than Slavoj Žižek to connect the dots between Wikileaks, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight and the gentlemanly manners of the left. Really. Super essay from the London Review of Books.

From Gotham to Gotham. A little insight into one of Wall Street’s good guys (in his words – and it is Wall Street so I’m assuming masculinity), via John Cassidy’s New Yorker article.

Playing games for good, a Mashable round-up of video games for social good.

Writing of social, here is the big one. The Pew Internet report on The Social Side of the Internet. Hefty stuff and invaluable numbers for activists, campaigners and just about anyone running building community and interacting with groups online. Some standout numbers:

48% of those who are active in groups say that those groups have a page on a social networking site like Facebook

42% of those who are active in groups say those groups use text messaging

30% of those who are active in groups say those groups have their own blog

16% of those who are active in groups say the groups communicate with members through Twitter

Finally, I commented on the return of the food crisis recently and how the new hungry are recent migrants to cities. Some good news to prop up against that from Grist, China’s cities are breeding a new more environmentally aware generation, who are looking at the urban landscape surrounding them and not liking what they see. Let’s hope that’s a good thing.

If scholars of the industrial revolution are to be believed, around about 1800, for the first time, humanity probably had in its grasp all it needed to work a 20 hour week and kick back, relax the rest of the time. We had machines, automation and specialisation. Obviously things have not progressed quite like that these past 200 years, though some content we should now re-examine that concept and give it a proper going over. Either way, ever increasing (socio)technological advancements over the past couple of centuries have led to Clay Shirky’s elegantly monikered ‘cognitive surplus’. That surplus is the time left over after we are finished butchering, baking and candlestick making. From the 1950s until the turn of the millenium we put that suplus into TV. Now we have the internet. Wikipedia, Facebook, Flickr and Twitter. William Gibson’s unevenly distributed future, today; some of us have more of that time than others, but most of us in the western world have a considerable chunk of time to spend. And despite the neigh-sayers dismissing clicktivists, maybe Twitter and the tools of tomorrow really are finding a role in making the world a better place.

That’s the thing about Twitter, it helps distribute the future. But one has to want that future. Of course many come online and stay in their cultural ghettos, hanging off the words of Wossy or Kanye and broadcasting their meal choice, inebriation level or the football score, whatever, I’m not interested in being condescending here. My point is this, millions more Twitters are putting that cognitive surplus to an altogether more ghetto busting use. Exhibit A: belated happy tenth birthday Wikipedia and your 15,000 strong army of English language regular editors. Exhibit B: #UKUncut, sniping the parts other campaigns can’t reach and yes, I am about to make my point any moment now, exhibit C: Twestival, the likes of which was simply not possible ten years ago. @amanda tells the story better than I could, it’s her story to tell after all, I have just a couple of observations below.

For me, Twestival is not simply a fundraiser, but a platform, a methodology for doing what so many of us in the world of online campaigning find so hard, turning online activity, sentiment and intention, into real world relationships, action and okay yes, raising some funds. And the legacy of Twestival Local 2011 I hope will be long term sustainable connections in communities all over the planet.

Can we change the world on the web? I don’t know, but I do know we can meet and introduce fellow world changers online, switch off the power button once in a while and then go to it. Right now Twestival is organising, or more to the point, facilitating the organising, of hundreds of events around the world on March 24th. Thousand of  people who live in the neighbourhoods (online and off) that have never made eye contact are planning parties, bbqs and get-togethers because that cognitive surplus has overflowed into one glorious pot. Twestival. And I am am unbelieveably excited to be part of the the global management team. What’s more, I’d love to hear your ideas on how we continue building on Twestival’s great work and make March 24th 2011 the ultimate day of online / offline local community building, in whatever shape that looks like where you’re at.

Pic from kieranmccarthy.ie

The Shannon scheme of the 1920s was Ireland’s great leap forward. With its completion, the lights went on up and down the country. Or at least in the cities and bigger towns they did. But by the end of the second world war fully two thirds of a 3 million population were still without power to the home, the reason, good clean country living.

Rural electrification was very much down the list of political priorities. Significant forces opposed electrification, and even supporters of the scheme often had motives that were less than inclusive. A number of forces were at play here

• The Catholic Social Movement (rural fundamentalists)
• The Gaelic League (cultural fundamentalists)
• De Velera’s discourse legacy of self-sufficiency (never, ever realised IMO)
• Catholic fear of socialism and individualism (a fear not confined to the shores of Ireland).

Many of these forces, certainly during the first half of the 20th century, presented cities in Ireland as being of “foreign” culture, a local Other to be shunned. Yet despite these interests, despite a country with less than zero budget following WWII, despite the requirement of one million wooden poles (surely more wood than there were trees in the country), the job of the Rural Electrification Scheme (RES) got the go-ahead. To study how is a fascinating examination of social, technical and cultural change. Ultimately 1.75m people were served by the scheme, 2% in towns and villages, the rest in open country, illustrating just how scattered the population at the time was.

The Structure of Change

Let’s examine the organisational and geographical makeup of the the Rural Electrification Organisation (REO). Significant from the start is the fact that the REO was almost a totally independent organisation from the national electrical utility (the ESB), which itself was a semi-state profit making (in theory) enterprise. The toughest initial hurdle to overcome was the granting of subsidy from central government, but once achieved, the REO was at the races. And because it was hived off from its parent, it could make big ambitious decisions quickly. The first of these was to decentralise as much of the design and implementation process as possible. There was some central procurement, such as wood from Finland, and knowledge sharing, but little else.

Ireland was broken into ten regional hubs.

• Athlone
• Cork (rural)
• Dublin (rural)
• Dundalk
• Galway
• Limerick
• Portlaoise
• Sligo
• Tralee
• Waterford

Each of the district REO offices had three divisions, materials, technical and development The latter was essentially a consumer outreach/care department, which was to play a hugely important role on the ground. Located in each district REO office was a Rural Organisation Engineer (ROE) who supervised three to five crews. The crews were the teams of skilled workers, linesmen, engineers and between forty and one hundred hyper local casual labourers, the men who got their hands dirty. At its peak the scheme had ongoing simultaneous operations in up to fifty locations around the country.

The parish was the granular unit of geography each crew worked on, typically 25-30 square miles, containing 300-500 premises. A crew would move into a parish to start the electrification work, opening a local office, bringing with it 40 REO staff, and hiring 40-100 locals. This movement of labour, knowledge and culture for Ireland at the time was unprecedented. Not only did the crews bring with them light, heat and the ability for shops to sell ice-cream for the first time, they brought employment, an influx of men from around the country (with obvious consequences) and a power structure that up until now had centred around the local parish priest.

Typically it would take six months to wire up a parish, or at least those who had opted in. Prior to a crew moving in, advance survey work would be done to ascertain which premises in the parish wanted to be connected. Parishes with a large number of potential customers were connected first, or at least that was how it was meant to work, petty local and national corruption had a part to play too. Séan Lemass for example pushed many Gaelteacht (Irish speaking) areas to the head of the queue. And even with favours, local parish refusniks could hold up work for years creating pockets of darkness in an ever increasing quilt of light over Ireland’s landscape.

Culture and impacts

I hope to see the day that when a girl gets a proposal from a farmer, she will enquire not so much about the number of cows but rather concerning the electrical appliances she will require before she gives her consent including not merely electric light, but a water heater, an electric clothes boiler, a vacuum cleaner and even a refrigerator.

Seán Lemass, Dáil debate, March 7th 1945.

Rural Ireland was not a cash society. Farmers didn’t have bills to pay, for anything. They didn’t make money, they didn’t spend it. Electricity was the cultural intervention that was to change that forever, for the first time, farmers were being asked to make a regular payment for something initially they thought they did not need. Perhaps this shift, more than any other single impact, drew rural and urban Ireland closer together, the socio-technical co-prodution of society plain to see.

But the biggest impact overall was probably on Mná na hÉireann, the women of Ireland. No longer did they have the drudgery of fetching dozens of buckets of water from the well (Ireland at the time was renowned for its small bucket size), electricity allowed for the widespread introduction of motor powered pumps, thus water straight to the kitchen. Which meant of course that all of a sudden, women had some free time on their hands. To listen to the wireless and even, in the 60s, to watch TV.

The BBC and RTÉ broadcast their first radio services within four years during the 1920s. The BBC was churning out television by the mid thirties, yet it was not until after the bulk of the RES’s work was done, 1961, that Ireland’s first TV service was launched. And anyone who has spent time watching RTÉ’s subsequent output will admit that the state broadcaster is still someway behind its Anglo Saxon neighbour.

In 1951 73% of Ireland’s 200,000 male farmers were over 45. A quarter of these were unmarried and less than 5% had attended secondary school. There were no socio-economic development agencies for these people and outward rural migration was huge. It was these people, generally subsistence farmers who didn’t make money, but similarly had next to no outgoing costs, that the folk from the RES had to convince. And it was the bringing into the electrical fold of these farmers that was to allow Ireland enter the EEC in 1973, and finally, by the 1980s, start questioning societies power structures, that had for so long kept Ireland a small, dank, inward looking place.

Lesson 1: Organising for a new modernity

Some lessons. In my piece on capital projects at a time of empty treasuries I sought to make the point that big ambitious projects . Classic New Deal territory. I think the lessons of Irish rural electrification are slightly more subtle, but perhaps more important, certainly for campaigners. The organisation and execution of the REO was at this 66 year juncture, simply phenomenal.

1. Follow a vision, and you can affect real societal change.
2. Local counts. Change does not have to come from the centre. It can and often does come from the dispersed bottom. The REO harnessed this in hundreds of Irish communities, it showed off a better tomorrow individually at local level and millions bought in. There was no nationwide advertising campaign, or celebrity endorsements. The work was done on the ground, parish by parish.
3. Be incessant, go where change is actually wanted first, then return to the neigh-sayers.
4. This future probably exists somewhere right now. Find it, bring it home.
5. This is going to take a while. So what. Arguments at the time that this would be a 70-80 year project. These weren’t actually ridiculous, the final offshore island to be turned on finally got the electrics only as recently as 2002. But the majority of the work was done in a 15 time scale. But 15 years seems like an eternity in the lifecycle of a campaign, but if we’re to think big, we’re going to have to start thinking long.
6. Values, beliefs and getting the job done. If someone has some MSc or PhD time to spare maybe they could go find out whether it was Common Cause type belief interventions or Maslovian needs selling that did it for the REO. The rest of us can just get on with getting the job done.

Lesson 2: The history of cities

Maybe its time we looked again at distributed dwelling patterns in rural communities. This deserves a full post but here’s the quick overview. The telling of the story of the flight to the city is for the most part painted as a straight forward march of progress. Since the industrial revolution all roads have led to the metropolis. That billions have walked this road is presented as a fait acompli. It’s not. Three articles over the last month give some insight.

• Casaubon’s Book on scienceblogs reminds us that the food crisis hasn’t gone away, is getting worse, and that 175m new starving people are living in cities, having left the country only a generation ago, or less.
• The Guardian yesterday painted a colour piece of Delhi, a small government town literally cracking up because the infrastructure of the city can’t handle the population.
• And the New York Times ran an incredibly thought provoking piece just before Christmas. Entropy, biology and the growth of the city are all linked with some scary hypothesising; “After a city doubles in size, it also experiences a 15 percent per capita increase in violent crimes, traffic and AIDS cases”.

So maybe, the lessons of rural electrification need to be retold, maybe this race to urbanity that we are running is treadmill going nowhere. It certainly cannot be any harm in exploring the alternatives, which may well begin with a new form of electrification.

Photo cc jaxxon

Just back. Big improvement from 2010 if still a few too many dyed-in-the-wool tribal Labour flag wavers for my liking. But at least they had something to wave about this year. Amazing what a few months in opposition and cuts to services will do to raise morale.

Quality of the speakers was up considerably, couple of good contributions from Blue State Digital who have a mountain to climb over the next 22 months in the US one would think. Though they did have the good grace to admit as much. Sharing success, sharing setbacks and honest, intelligent, if very pointed, communication with one’s audience was the not exactly earth-shattering central message coming from them, but that’s okay. We need to be reminded sometimes.

Ari Rabin-Havt of MediaMatters.org was the clear standout presentation of the day, particular in light of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting which happened in the time it took me to get from central London, home (by way of an outrageously good potato and panzone pizza in Pizza East). MediaMatters was set up six of seven years ago to start righting the wrongs broadcast by Fox News. Big job. Rabin-Havt was on a mission to make sure we knew what we were in for if we let the Dirty Digger turn Sky News into Fox News East. He accused Glenn Beck and company of having blood on their hands already and insisted more was likely. Scary. And a good point well made.

Final thought, remarkable by its absense from a 600 person conference of online activist types was the coupling of the words ‘climate’ and ‘change’. I heard it said only once from the lectern, and then merely as part of a list which included health cuts, education cuts and lots more. These are pressing, and the time to strike against them is now, but let’s hope that debate on climate change action, not to mind action itself has not become taboo as the likes of Netroots and the new left blogosphere in the UK find their voice.

Ardnacrusha: The 1920's biggest Irish tourist attraction

The country can’t afford it, it will take too long and what is more, there simply is not the demand. All excuses used to knock back, initially, Ireland’s first national power generation scheme, Ardnacrusha, in the 1920s and then the Rural Electrification Scheme in the forties.

Ardnacrusha was a monument to modernity, a huge concrete hydro plant built on Ireland’s largest waterway, the Shannon. And this in a country that had barely emerged from the fogs of Victorian colonialism. In fact, even that seems far too grand a concept for Saorstát Éireann in 1925, a newly forged country run by “young men standing amongst the ruins of one administration with the foundations of another not yet laid and with wild men screaming through the key-hole” to re-hash Kevin O’Higgins famous description of early government.

Ireland was a country with zero industry, zero money and outside of Dublin, zero electricity. And yet with the help of some vorsprung durch Siemens, it had the imagination and the willpower to sign off a nation changing capital project. The cost, £5m, 20% of the government’s annual budget at the time. What’s more, the project came in on time and went over-budget by a mere £150,000.

With memories of Ardnacrusha still alive, the Rural Electrification Scheme was conceived in 1945 to bring light to the majority of Ireland’s two million rural dwellers. Again, the scheme was described as madness. It took already 2,000 miles of line to supply Ireland’s towns and cities, it would take a further 75,000 miles to reach the parts other electricity schemes could not. 1,200 transformers existed in the country in 1945. Another 100,000 would be required to finish the job. And roughly one million wooden poles would have to be found somewhere (Finland!). Ireland was still an agrarian nation, the war had destroyed trade with its only market, the UK, and as in the 20s, it had not a pot to piss in. Yet 15 years later the scheme was nearly done, Ireland’s dispersed population had at last running water in their kitchens, lightbulbs in their hallways and the ability to serve Guinness Extra Cold in the local.

I recall all of this for two reasons, the first, I’ve spend the week reading the history of electricity in Ireland. It makes for a tidy case study of local and national identity, technology and politics. But more than that, it illustrates how the identity of Ireland was produced (indeed reflexively co-produced) in the mix of nationalism, ambition, engineering feat and civic pride that went into these crazy big projects. And maybe that pot needs to be stirred again.

The second reason, the week begun with a pair of regressive statements from leading members of Ireland’s commentariat, Myers and O’Toole. Myers produced an unusually il-informed libertarian monolgoue on the foolishness of investment in wind energy in light of this harshest of winters. O’Toole meanwhile would be the Hugo Chavez of Western Europe, bemoaning foreign ownership and low extraction taxes of hydrocarbons beneath Irish waters. Nationalise them all he didn’t quite say but was certainly well on the road. But in that he missed the big point, as did Myers. Ireland is in a position not entirely dissimilar to that of the 1920s. A tired old administration hasn’t even bothered ordering 2011 diaries, its work is done. The new government is going to be faced with some big choices, propping up banks, endorsing the EU-IMF deal, and as O’Toole alludes to, the hegemonic kowtowing to Big Oil engaged by their predecessors.

They will likely claim, as will governments elsewhere in Europe, that big capital projects are off the table for now. The rules of our new austerity prevent such dreaming. But that’s the thing about dreams, they’re usually the events of our histories re-imagined. And as oil heads back to $100 per barrel, if we were to bring out our pencil and squared paper, what would an energy-secure Ireland (or UK for that matter) look like now I wonder. Maybe, if their number can be found, it’s time to call back those nice men from Siemens.

Pic: Cheerio Maps (c) Stamen Design

Fun things and not so fun things from the past few days.

>>>>1.

Cheerio Maps. Let’s start with breakfast. Real estate in the San Francisco Bay area generally doesn’t do it for me, but pretty map overlays do. Some amazing data mapping here from Stamen Design. My friend Tomás does pretty things with circles. I bet he’d like this. Real estate is boring but there are lots of useful applications for this approach I bet.

>>>>2.

Cancún wrap: IPCC scientists still stuck in the same dumb groove. This is super frustrating. Mildly optimistic reports came out of COP16. That’s fine, well done all. Kate Sheppard wraps up the fortnight with an interview with IPCC vice-chair Jean-Pascal van Ypersele who displays a sense of naivete not seen since the Milky Bar kid last rode into town.

[KS]: What is the role of scientists in pushing back against this skepticism and the ongoing anti-science campaign?

JV: The results of all the scientific analysis are almost all going in the same direction. I think if scientists remain calm, stick with science, and explain, and re-explain, if needed, the basis for their conclusions, at some point their honesty will go through any cloud of other arguments that some are trying to put in between them and the public. (my italics)

Seriously. W! T! F! If scientists keeps explaining the truth to all of those not so bright sceptics they’ll see the light and change their minds? Yeah, and X-Factor is a meritocratic talent show where if you try hard enough, dreams really do come true. Van Ypersele is the vice-chair of an organisation which has been put through the cheese grater over the last year by a well funded and extremely well strategised campaign to protect Big Energy and other interests. And right now those interests are presenting a far more palatable truth than the IPCC can muster. Let’s hope 2011 is wakey-wakey year and the IPCC gets a clue.

>>>>3.

Localism and renewables – opportunities and challenges. Speaking of 2011, the localism bill was released this week with a promise to cede more power to (ostensibly local) people. I suspect people in the main do not want power, they want schools, libraries and services that just work, but I’ll save the next chapter of my social contract lecture for another day. One area the bill will impact is the UK’s slowly growing renewables and community energy sector. So check out the link above for a very brief rundown of where the issue may emerge.

>>>>4.

Finally, a thought piece from a man who since sometime before the last election all of a sudden became the UK’s smartest political commentator, John Harris, writing with Neal Lawson. It’s from a few weeks ago but I forgot to mention it. So, who’s up for a New Socialism, and is it any different from the last one.

Some things I’ve been looking at this week…

>>>>1

Two good round-ups on what’s gone down in the world of climate science this year. Climate Progress has a top-10 rundown of natural science stories.  Mike Hulme does some framing analysis. Neither mentions their favourite YouTube video from the past year. It’s very obviously this from the Bonnie Prince and his Hot Chip friends:

>>>>2

Some of these themes are picked up well in a ClimateWire piece in the NY Times. The thesis: it’s time for a few more university sociology departments to open up research groups on climate science and just as importantly, climate scepticism. Obvs!

>>>>3

I came across action-town.eu during my travels this week. Action Town is a super serious pan-European resource for civil society organisations promoting sustainable consumption and production that seems to take its outreach cues from the Teletubbies. See it. Believe it.

>>>>4

Last thing: fancy your very own Northwest European Island? €900bn ono.

Full planning permission for 300,000 homes, 8 prisons, 5 public hospitals, one city metro system, 10,000 schools with extensions as well as hundreds of unfinished road developments ranging in size from national primary roads to larger motorway systems.
In need of some refurbishing, is quite dated but lies to the north west of continental Europe and is surrounded by hundreds of stunning islands and islets.
Neighbours are ****s but can be quite helpful. Generally a nice area. Also comes with a variety of weather, nationalities and political opinions.

Three things to cover. First off Andrew Jamison’s essay in the latest issue of WIREs Climate Change, which has just dropped. Second, values versus behavious and a little bit of Common Cause versus Chris Rose. Third up, networked society yo. From policy nudges to policy change through network effects.

>>>>1

Andrew Jamison, where were you and your history paper on the history of climate change in the context of social movements six months ago? No really, I spent the summer trying to connect the dots between della Porta, Touraine and Beck. Jamison’s done the job in a manner more elegant and readable than I could ever manage. And something that immediately that tallies with my own experience is Jamison’s contention that there is a serious dearth of academic study out there on climate change and social movements. Jamison does a good job rounding up what is available and bringing in some relevant literature from the more general social movement field. It’s invaluable for anyone working in this area right now right now. We’re an an impasse between the social sciences (read Mike Hulme in yesterday’s Guardian) and the ongoing and seemingly hardening stance of the natural sciences (great round-up of important papers in Climate Progress).

Jamison outlines three waves of social movement. The traditional 19th and 20th century movement that worked on big ticket issues, such as women’s rights or the labour movement. Then post ’68 there were the New Social Movements (NSMs), in the North these were “lifestyle” movements, you choose feminism, I choose the environment etc. Emerging at the turn of the millennium are a new wave of movement focussed on the negatives of globalisation and perhaps even technology. Environmental justice fits in here too, as do anti-GMO, airports and roads.

Jamison identifies some important issues:

1. The intellectual tensions between the traditional social movements (such as labour movements) and the New Social Movements of the seventies and eighties. Despite some progress, environmental NSMs still regard climate change primarily as an environmental issue. Ee-k-er!!!
2. Progressives have misread some of the skeptics concerns. People like Al Gore, essentially neo-liberals, are commodifying science/academia. They are taking techno-social solutions to climate change and attempting to make a buck out of them and they are dragging universities along with them. Jamison’s point: let’s admit this and understand why skeptics get wound up by it. I know I get wound up by it.
3. To not only “solve” (ha!) climate change, but to start tackling fairness in society, we need to not only cross pollinate scientific disciplines (particularly as Hulme suggests between the social and natural), but we need also to cross fertilise activist and academic knowledge. To create a commonly shared theoretical and conceptual framework.

Sounds great right? Of course, there’s a catch, the reason suggests Jamison is cash money. There simply is not the funding in universities, or more to the point, into universities, to get this done (Jamison would have it that this is because of expedient commercial demands).

But all of this begs the question more generally of progressive movements and institutions. Are we cooperating as best we can? Do we have a common cause. Funny you should ask, onto part two.

>>>>2

Beliefs versus values. Y-fronts versus boxers. Chickens versus eggs. Tom versus Chris. Right yeah, boring. The point is, both are important. Obvs.

Tom Crompton and the merry band of NGOs behind Common Cause would have it, (after George Lakoff mostly), that the way to take on societies BIG problems is through value interventions. Emotion trumps fact in judgements runs the arguement, so change the emotional levers, through framing, and you change the outcome. Deep frames define one’s overall common sense and if we can redefine common sense, then we have a powerful underlying tool for change on our side. QED.

Chris in his lengthy smack down of Common Cause almost takes offence that a campaign would attempt to “alter” an individual’s value system. As if a person was normatively outside of a social network (of the original kind), in which value altering vectors were not assailing her every waking minute. My contention is this. As mostly rational beings we feel our (capital ‘v’) Values are important. We feel these Values will lead to a happier, more productive life for the majority. Well you know what, if that’s the case I’m going to try and share (note Chris, not “force”) my values with my friends down the pub on a Friday night. Hopefully they’ll pick up a few of them. And maybe buy me a drink. Chris in fairness to him sees this argument coming way down the track.

“And most obviously but apparently ignored by Common Cause , no decent campaign strategy should set out simply to convert an entire population, one by one, as in the manner of government social marketing schemes.” Why? Because who amongst us has the resources to possibly succeed at this.”

Now Chris is right, of course we don’t have the time or resources to stop people one by one in the street and . It’s taken the neocons 40 years, from Goldwater to Fox News, to establish their platform (Lakoff lays this out nicely). Maybe if we get our act together it takes us a decade or two. That’s no good for climate change though right. But pleaase, hold that thought for one minute, I will come back to why that may be changing presently.

For the most part I agree with Chris, show people change, show them success, and they will follow. And dealing with climate change, we know that we need to get results now. But to move on and not learn the lessons that Lakoff through Common Cause can teach us would be folly. For connected to climate change are issues of fairness and social justice have have always been with us. Crompton et al. offer a caveat ignored by Chris that allows us to examine each campaign opportunity and assign a weighting to the value intervention / behaviour adjustment ratio intinsic within. That surely offers us a place to start. And whilst we are doing this, surely creating a common progressive epistemological and resource infrastructure á la Jamison 3 makes total sense.

>>>>3

Last night I saw Paul Ormerod talk at the RSA. Policy change by increments is over claims Ormerod. David Cameron’s Nudge-based initiative is its last hurrah. Offering incentives (e.g. tax breaks to encourage low-carbon behaviour) to society’s actors has only so much road left. The future is much more uncertain affair, where networked society takes over and has the potential to create social interventions in big steps. Ormerod’s bottom line: society is now more networked than it has ever been. Using network effects, we just may be able to instigate cascading change through networks, thus society, at a faster and more ambitious scale than ever before. And to do this we need to spend far more time identifying those most likely to adopt change (whether that’s value or behavioural change is not important according to Ormerod).

Okay, that’s the very very condensed version. As an example, Ormerod said that if he was IDS right now looking to alter the welfare state, he’d be trying to throw policy grenades into networks. Sure, the hit rate is going to be low (lots of these grenades come without fuses) but when it does blow, it’s going to be a whopper. Right now policy drives in general are big and risk averse, Whitehall policy wonks don’t like taking chances. And these initiatives cost a lot for only marginal gains. Ormerod’s suggestions are the opposite on all counts.

Why is this important? Well look at one of Rose’s main points I’ve highlighted. Given limited resources, we cannot hope to create widespread value interventions. Well not by traditonal means no. But working to a network paradigm, and working with those with access to these networks (IDS?!?!) maybe we see before us the beginning of a new strategy.

I would contend the level of influence bouncing around online networks has taken a marked step up over the past month with the launch of Facebook’s new messaging system and Path, the highly-influential-friends-only network. As such the ability to measure and track influence through networks of all types is perhaps growing and opens up opportunities unimaginable to the likes of Greenpeace and WWF 10, 15, 20 years ago. Opportunities to impact values faster whilst simultaneously showing as real behaviour changes. Surely this approach, and not a tired black and white debate over values versus behaviour should be central to our common cause.

UPDATE:

My friend Shilpa just sent me this link to a rebuttal of Rose’s newsletter by Martin Kirk, Oxfam’s Head of Campaigns, UK. Shame it’s the same tedious pdf style that Chris uses, but maybe that’s the point. Anyway, Martin rightly takes issue with the fact that Chris could find no common ground in Common Cause. Real shame. Go read it.

Here’s what we did yesterday. A very amazing day. Very amazing people.

More than 14 million it would seem. It’s silly season, a particularly riveting one at that given we have Naomi Campbell coming live from the dock at the Hague*. So when a flood hits Pakistan, affecting 14,000,000 people, one would expect a few column inches devoted to drowning people and big numbers.  At the very least it’s an excuse of foreign correspondents to ride in helicopters without getting shot at. But it would seem all our action-hero reporters (bar the brilliant Orla Guerin) are on staycation this summer. Oh well.

Look, I’m not naive enough to think this sort of story is going to get airplay over the start of the football season or meditating toddlers. But, when a weather event affects more people that the Haiti earthquake and the 2004 Tsunami combined, well thats maybe an opportunity for the environmental, science or development editors in these news organisations to stick up a hand in the morning editorial meeting and say “hey, maybe there’s a story here”. Whether that story is climate change, population led resource issues or simply piss-poor local government, when the number on the other side is 14,000,000, it’s a big story.

Okay, since it is silly season, here’s a game you can play. See if you can find references to either Pakistan or flood in the oven-fresh homepages I’ve just baked below.

!!EDIT 12 August!!
Good meta-piece from CJR pulling together the coverage of this summer’s weather from around the world. This subject is being covered, is some good quality and depth, but not it would appear on the front-pages and in quantity.

* Big BTW, WTF was Nelson doing inviting Chuckie Taylor and Naomi Campbell around for dinner. Nelson Mandela! He can invite anyone on the planet over for a slap up meal and he chooses these goons. Another strike like that and it’s time for the Nobel recall time.

I thought it time I’d better start getting on with this 10:10 thing. So here’s my first step this year. Bottling my own water. At source.

Cian’s 10:10 Summer Tip: Source your water from Cian O’Donovan on Vimeo.

Every day on planet Earth we burn a whole gulf load of oil up to make plastic bottles so firstworlders like myself can drink water just about anywhere we fancy. No longer!

Cross-posted from 1010uk.org.
10:10's Lighter Later campaign held a day of high-profile activity on Monday, the summer solstice, including a specially organised conference for MPs, peers and policy makers in Portcullis House, Westminster.

The event, on the lightest evening of the year, saw energy academics, road safety campaigners, representatives from the tourism industry and experts on crime and other social research areas come together to press the case for a change to the UK's clocks to GMT+2 in summer and GMT+1 in winter.

This weekend just gone, 10:10 launched quite possibly the most unique and inspirational climate change campaign the UK has seen for many many years; Lighter Later. Okay, I would say that, but think about it. By focusing solely on making life noticeably better for the vast majority of the UK’s citizens, 10:10 has taken the climate change debate to a whole new dimension. So pay close attention. The idea is ingenious in its simplicity. We shift our clocks to match better the hours we work. Wintertime in the UK would now run at BST, or GMT +1. And Summertime would be an hour ahead, GMT +2. So we would still change the clocks twice per year but it would mean that we’d spend more of our day in light, in evening sunshine in fact. Right now as you can see from these graphs we “waste” a lot of that light by sleeping right through it.

Here are the numbers and reasons just why this is such a good move (there are some more at LeftFootForward):

1. Cut at least 447,000 tonnes of CO2 pollution – equivalent to more than 50,000 cars driving all the way around the world – each year [1]
2. Save 100 lives each year and prevent hundreds of serious injuries by making the roads safer [2]
3. Lower our electricity bills by maximising the available daylight and reducing peak power demand [3]
4. Create 60,000–80,000 new jobs in leisure and tourism, bringing an extra £2.5–3.5 billion into the economy each year [4]
5. Reduce crime and the fear of crime [5]
6. Help make people healthier and tackle obesity by giving people more time to exercise and play sport outside in the evening [6]
7. Save the NHS around £138 million a year through reducing road casualties [7]
8. Improve quality of life for older people [8]
9. Make the nation happier – including reducing the effects of Seasonal Affective Disorder [9]
10. Demonstrate that dealing with climate change can be good for the economy, good for people and good for society as a whole

Full list of references for the above are here http://www.lighterlater.org/benefits.html.

In much of his work (certainly in World at Risk, 2007) Ulrich Beck discusses the the need for civil society organisations to start working together in a genuinely constructive manner in order to tackle some of the planet’s major risks, climate change paramount amongst the usual lineup of global terror, GM and nuclear. At Christmas I wrote of what I thought was the most exciting and progressive aspect of the 10:10 campaign, its intention to do just that. To work with already existing organisations in society, from the bastions of neo-liberal capital such as Sony and Microsoft, to traditional CSOs like Action Aid and People and Planet. Here then is the perfect example of that strategy in action. Incidentally, Beck writes also of the importance of the relations of definition. These relations play a crucial role in the ultimate success or failure of a campaign like Lighter Later, one could argue that the campaign is in fact solely about these relations, but that’s a much longer post, perhaps for a night with a little more light.

Amongst a host of partners, 10:10 is working with RoSPA, the royal society for the prevention of accidents. Has a climate change campaign ever before worked like this with what is primarily a road and society safety group in this manner? Unlikely. But why wouldn’t we work with as many different CSOs as possible, the co-benefits of the switch to a low carbon economy are simply too big to keep to a single climate change campaign.

I’m just back from a talk with Jonathon Porritt, at a BrighterFuture event in London.  Porritt gets it. The time for positive messages, for societal change that uses a carrot, not a stick, is now he stated. The time for the likes of 10:10 and Transitions Towns to get out on the ground, keep an eye on the big picture but all the time keeping two eyes on local, immediate, tangible action has come. Whether you agree with Porritt that all three mainstream parties in the UK are institutionally incapable now of adhering to that most basic of sustainability tenets, the notion of inter-generational equity, is irrelevant. If coalitions of societal groups like the one Lighter Later is building can be intelligently consolidated, around issues that are important, and importantly, tangible, then we have a chance.

So if you back one campaign this year, ask one request of your politician as she or he canvasses on the streets of the UK in the coming weeks, make it an ask for evenings that are Lighter, Later.

Oh, and join the facebook.com/lighterlater group right here. That would make me very happy.

Keepfaking.it’s good friend Wouter asked us today for a few blogs and websites he might be interested in as part of some digital research he is engaged in. Far be it for us to get in the way of academic pursuit, and may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb as they say. Here’s a dump of relevant sections from our Google Reader account. Excuse errors and omissions. There are tons of stuff missing but seriously, don’t sweat it, if your website is absent it probably means we check it the old fashioned way. Anyways, who reads RSS anymore.

Stuff That Matters — General News

• [RSS] A Smarter Planet
• [RSS] BBC NEWS | Richard Black’s blog
• [RSS] CleanSkies.com – The Energy and Environment Network
• [RSS] Demos Greenhouse
• [RSS] Dot Earth
• [RSS] Earth2Tech
• [RSS] environmentalresearchweb: all content
• [RSS] Future:Media:Change
• [RSS] Greener Design
• [RSS] Grist Magazine
• [RSS] guardian.co.uk Environment: Environment blog
• [RSS] SmartPlanet News
• [RSS] The Oil Drum – Discussions about Energy and Our Future
• [RSS] The Yale Forum on Climate Change and The Media
• [RSS] TheEnergyCollective
• [RSS] WSJ.com: Environmental Capital – WSJ.com

Stuff That Matters — Green Blogs + Opinion

• [RSS] AMEE – The world’s energy meter
• [RSS] Arts and Ecology
• [RSS] Casaubon’s Book
• [RSS] children of the end of History, and other tales
• [RSS] CleanTechnica
• [RSS] Crane and Matten blog
• [RSS] e-IR
• [RSS] CarbonOutreach
• [RSS] EcoGeek.org
• [RSS] EcoLabs
• [RSS] Ecology without Nature
• [RSS] Forum For The Future & Green Futures
• [RSS] Greenbang
• [RSS] Greenmonk: the blog
• [RSS] INHABITAT
• [RSS] It’s Getting Hot In Here
• [RSS] Kate’s Comment
• [RSS] Know Your Place
• [RSS] Mark Lynas
• [RSS] Monbiot.com
• [RSS] ParkHowell.com
• [RSS] Post Carbon Institute Publications
• [RSS] RealClimate
• [RSS] ReGeneration
• [RSS] SANDBAG blogs
• [RSS] Stoat
• [RSS] Sustainablog
• [RSS] The Climate Group
• [RSS] The End of Something..
• [RSS] The Lazy Environmentalist
• [RSS] Transformational Logistics
• [RSS] TreeHugger
• [RSS] Watts Up With That?
• [RSS] Worldchanging: Bright Green

Stuff That Matters — Activism|Climate Change

• [RSS] 350 Updates
• [RSS] Blog Entries
• [RSS] Climate Change Action
• [RSS] Climate Progress
• [RSS] DeSmogBlog – Clearing the PR Pollution that Clouds Climate Science
• [RSS] Greenpeace UK
• [RSS] Jamie Andrews
• [RSS] Jamie Potter
• [RSS] Leo’s blog
• [RSS] Low Carbon Communities
• [RSS] Lower (Carbon) Footprint
• [RSS] News
• [RSS] Stop Heathrow Expansion
• [RSS] The Pew Charitable Trusts – Newsroom
• [RSS] UK Youth Delegation

Stuff That Matters — Env Orgs + Corps

• [RSS] Social Innovation Camp
• [RSS] The Carbon Trust – Press Releases

Stuff That Matters — Social | Activism

• [RSS] Change.org’s Blog Network
• [RSS] http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheIdler
• [RSS] Next Left
• [RSS] Open Source Giving
• [RSS] Rewired State
• [RSS] Socialreporter
• [RSS] Welcome to the Fabian Society – Fabian Society – the UK’s oldest think-tank

Stuff That Matters — COP 15

• [RSS] Art Threat
• [RSS] cop15.dk News
• [RSS] Everyones Blog Posts – Arts for COP15
• [RSS] Latest Activity on Arts for COP15
• [RSS] Road To Copenhagen 2009 | News
• [RSS] TckTckTck

Ah yes, Spring is in the air, and it may even be found in the step of keepfaking.it right now. We wrote up this short piece on Guerrilla Gardening for 1010uk.org on Friday, but wanted to re-publish the interview with Richard Reynolds here as he was such an inspirational gent. A man with 110% the right idea.

Welcome to the world of guerrilla gardening, where just about any patch of soil in a lay-by or traffic island can become a prime spot to grow some veg.

Guerrilla gardening has sprung up in cities around the world over the last decade, and has turned out to be one of the few things that anarchists and Sunday Telegraph readers can agree on. Sounds good to us.

To get started all you need is a patch disused land, some seeds or bulbs and a fertile imagination. But if you need a bit of advice or even some experienced guerrilla gardeners for your first dig, help is at hand. Guerrillagardening.org is a favourite resource and one of the original catalysts for the trend in the UK. On it you’ll find plenty of community advice on what to grow, where to grow it with and invitations to join existing digs that are planned for the coming months. They even have instructions on how to make your own seed bombs, a must-have in any guerrilla gardener’s arsenal. We interviewed founder Richard Reynolds on Twitter this afternoon, you can see the transcript below.

Pictures tell the story of Guerrilla Gardening better than we possibly could so here’s a selection from the Pimp Your Pavement Flickr group.

Here’s the transcript of our Twitter interview with Guerrillagardening.org founder Richard Reynolds.

I know I’m sick of seeing Gerry’s beard every time I load up keepfaking.it. So here’s something much more disturbing. But it looks so pretty.

“Successfully employed by the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss in the nineteenth century to describe deviations in astronomical measurements, the Bell curve or Gauss model has permeated our scientific culture, the economy and the self-image of modern society in general. It is more than a technical description. It shapes our thoughts. We think in terms of Gaussian distributions. The problem, however, is that measurements of uncertainty using the bell curve fail to take into account or attach any importance to the possibility of abrupt peaks or discontinuities. Employing such a measurement procedure in world risk society would be like concentrating completely on the grass and ignoring the (gigantic) trees. But in fact the occasional and unpredictable large deviations, even though they are seldom, cannot be dismissed as ‘outliers’ because their cumulative effects are dramatic.
“Traditional instruments of risk management concentrate on normal procedures and regard extremes as inconsequential. This approach is misleading in world risk society, which necessitates a turn towards a non-linear approach: the exceptions that only apparently confirm the rule must be the primary focus of attention.”

- Ulrich Beck in Risk Society

(a big up for discrete mathematicians everywhere)

Re-photo (cc) Anthony Mayfield

Within the climate change mitigation discourse, a war effort is often called for. WWII is cited by some as the only time during the history of industrialization that a societal/productivity shift of the order of magnitude now required has happened. But we want to look at a slightly different point in history. Just like post-punk was an altogether better sound than punk itself, the post-war effort (in both Germany and Japan) has plenty of interesting lessons for us when it comes to the subject of societal change.

Let us consider for a brief moment the issue of social capital in post-war Germany and Japan. These countries had just been whooped ten shades of blue, millions dead, and in Japan, two nuclear craters. Understandable if the local populaces felt a bit put out and distrustful of the Allies restructuring plans. Yet the economic turnaround in each country was nothing short of miraculous. Now, we’re not going to get totally reductionist on this, there are plenty of reasons, common and independent, why the original Axis of Evil managed to get back on its feet, but one nugget provided here by Francis Fukuyama stands out in this decade old paper originally written for those friendly folk at the IMF.

Apart from religion, shared historical experience can shape informal norms and produce social capital. Both Germany and Japan experienced considerable labor unrest and conflict between workers, managers, and the state in the 1920s and 30s. The Nazis and Japan’s military rulers ultimately suppressed independent labor unions and replaced them with “yellow” ones. After their defeat in World War II, the democratic successor regimes opted for a much more consensual approach to management-labor relations that produced Germany’s postwar Sozialmarktwirtschaft and Japan’s lifetime employment system. Whatever their current dysfunctions, these institutions played a critical role in allowing the two societies to return to growth after the war, and constituted a form of social capital.

What did these institutions do? They bound society. They allowed trust to develop, crucially between workers, so that an honest day’s pay was not going to be wiped out by either hyper-inflation or schemes dreamt up by the occupying powers. An honest day’s work was rewarded and society could get back to rescuing cats from trees and whatever else they do on the banks of the Rhine.

Of course that’s not all Frankie has to say but he goes and ruins his nice ideas with a little apology for Globalisation right at the end, that’s to be expected we suppose. And while we’re on the subject, it’s 2010 and you know what, we’re still not at the end of history buddy!

Back to climate change. Post COP15, there’s a big argument that with the failure of our governments, it is time civil society, and business, stepped up to the mitigation plate. The job they have to do is huge and in order to do it they’re going to have to create even more social capital than was mobilized during the late forties and fifties in Germany and Japan, for without this social capital, the job for CSOs will be next to impossible. But the great thing about social capital is that much like economic capital (i.e. cash), surplus capital can be banked and transferred to those that need it most. Think about a trusted NGO. Let’s say the Red Cross. Over the last century the Red Cross has done a big job in warzones and natural catastrophe areas. On a whole, the world trusts them. When they come looking for money (and trust) in times of peace we happily supply. And when the shit hits the fan they’re ready financially, and in terms of trust, to get to the heart of the action.

Enter the likes of 10:10, a concept keepfakingit endorses so much we went and joined the company. If civil society organisations like 10:10 are to win the day in this battle, you had better believe they are going to have to become the Goldman Sachs of social capital, using every trick in the book to first-off generate that capital, then bank it, and have it spent in the most efficient way possible to cut emissions. Organisations are going to have to work together, and use additively created radii of trust to bring more and more people under their umbrellas of social action. This means building layers and layers of trust (thus social capital) across real life social networks, both horizontally and vertically. Horizontally from nuclear family to nuclear family, through communities, schools, businesses and clubs. Vertically through neighbourhood watch schemes, councils, religious orders and up and over international borders.
This is hugely ambitious, it has to be. And here at keepfakingit we think there’s a chance it may work.

One of the strands of thought coming from Copenhagen lays the blame of a lack of fair and binding deal at the feet of the internal US political system, namely the US Senate.

This has brought keepfakingit right back to March and a speech we saw one of our academic heroes, Larry Lessig, deliver to the SXSW interactive festival in Austin, Texas. Lessig, who has worked for a decade on copyright law in the US, speaks of classic tobacco science as it now applies to climate change and in particular the health industries in the US. His thesis is that money poisons trust. But that the cesspool of corruption is not the same as it ever was. The dynamics of money and access have changed dramatically in the past 15 years.

He believes legislators’ integrity is actually higher today than any time in the Senate’s history. The corruption he speaks of is a ‘good souls’ corruption that has come from systemic faults . Senators are spending 30-70% of their time on raising money for their own, or their party’s re-election. And this opens up the cracks for the lobby industry.

Some stats. Since Bill Clinton left office the number of lobbyists has doubled and their daily rate has doubled. Using the laws of simple economics, Lessig notes that if the number and value of lobbyists is rising, they must be becoming more effective. He also notes how nobody, on the right or the left, has any interest in changing this system.

Whether you want to blame the EU, China, Obama or indeed the Senate on the failure of Copenhagen, Lessig’s points here are eminently valid. To keepfakingit’s mind this is the biggest, most important political issue in the US today. Lessig does a simple cost benefit analysis on the lobbying industry and the cost here is trust. Ultimately Lessig calls for a ‘Declaration for Independence’. How? Through citizens funding.

Pascal’s Wager is ofter referred to by climate change activists; if we’re right we save the planet, if we’re wrong, we change society for the good anyway, win-win. The situation is exactly the same in the US Senate. To take on big coal, big oil and all the other big lobby groups funding tobacco science we need institutional change. And if we get it there are a lot more benefits, for both the right and left of the political spectrum, than simply a chance to ‘meaningfully’ tackle climate change.

I can’t find a video but here’s some audio that turned up on mediatedhumanities.org.

If you have 45 minutes at all this Christmas, listen to this.

Here’s the audio of the Q&A:

There’s more info on Lessig’s campaign at http://change-congress.org.

This is one of the best interviews Franny did all week. We grabed Mark Lynas as he was leaving at a huge all night session. And Tony Juniper is in there too with his analysis of a long and depressing COP15.

Too busy working on the #stupidshow today to post any reaction or analysis on this morning’s non-agreement.

Here’s a screenshot that sums up some of the issues we’re facing as a society, and one of the many reasons COP15 has been so spectacularly unsuccessful at putting a binding agreement on the table.

BTW, tonight’s StupidShow has some great analysis from Ed Miliband, Prez Nasheed, Vicky Pope, Tony Juniper and Mark Lynas, who hadn’t slept in three days, and spent most of the night in the war room with Obama, Brown, Merkel and 20-something other world leaders.

‘Don’t buy clothes for six months. Then you can buy some of mine.’

It’s always refreshing, but all too rare to hear an A-List fashion icon say something sensible, and be anyway self aware, but Vivienne manages to just about pull it off. Brilliant.

That’s not quite true, but never letting fact get in the way of alliteration is one of keepfakingit’s most closely held maxims. The artists of course were two of the Stupid Show’s guests this evening. Thom Yorke and Vivienne Westwood. While neither have the capacity to gets us the FAB (fair, ambitious and binding y’all) treaty we need, we think both represented to the max.

We’ll have some YouTube here just as soon as its ready.

In other news from around the town, here’s Hillary Clinton’s speech from earlier.

Whatever.

Keepfakingit’s good friend @jamieandrews had this to say, hard to disagree.

Two other issues. First off, it looks like we’re making some progress on REDD. The forestry expert, Stupid Show pundit and 100% hero that is Danilo Mollicone looked like a pretty happy man this evening. If all goes well he believes he has a $25bn per annum commitment on the table. You go D! Of course that’s contingent on the larger scale deal getting done.

Unfortunately that’s about it on the good news stakes. We’re down to only 300 civil society representatives left in the Bella Center meaning NGOs and CSOs are now all but totally locked out. We had a leaked UNFCCC doc that probably wasn’t as big news as the bloggosphere thought it was. It simply stated that if we go ahead and sign what Annex 1 wants us to, we’re looking at 550ppm carbon dioxide and 3 degree warming by 2100. But you know what, we already knew that.

No, the real issue here is that with just over 24 hours to go, this is where we’re at yo.
On the show tomorrow we’re going to have a couple of pieces on the inequality that’s been on display the last fortnight. Despite the optimism and hope shown by our guy Thom earlier, keepfakingit would contend that this conference of the parties is over, and we’re going home. However, once we get over ourselves, we absolutely need to examine, from a science, activist and civil society perspective, how we step up to the plate in the next 6 months. It’s damage limitation time. It looks like we’ve lost a battle here. And while we can blame our politicians and accuse them of not being leaders, you know what, one gets the feeling more people give a shit about Tiger Woods. Let’s think about that one over the next 24. It’s going to be a late night tomorrow so we’re getting some rest. And maybe a drink.

Just in from cycling, metro-ing and running around Copenhagen with the #stupidshow team (BTW we have Vivienne Westwood and George Monbiot on the show tonight, 8pm CET). We took in most of the march, until it got to Bella, and I’ll post some photos here. It was just kicking off when keepfakingit had to move so not much to report. We did see a very professional ‘snatch’ of an activist from the middle of the crowd by some local police. But other than that not much had happened up until we had to leave to get footage back to the the studio.

Lots going on now though, both inside and out. The NGO access issue has truly fallen apart. We received a mail from Nick Berning of FOE US in the last hour. It’s published in full below and is quite upsetting.

We’ve also this morning seen the mass walkout by the people’s assembly. This was the first big non-sanctioned action of the COPinside the Bella Centre and timed to coincide with the action out side the conference centre. It illustrates the total frustration being felt by those on the insiders right now.

Just in case keepfakingit’s mother is reading this we won’t say that Canada are still acting like total fucking c***s. But they are. Seriously Canada, you have elected some bad people, and have not elected some even worse oil lobbyists. Sort your shit out.

Targets and financing are still the big two issues. But they always have been, so that’s telling you nothing at all. There are some sideshows going on that have produced some interesting initiatives, the sub-national governmental meetings, The E20, the Billion Trees campaign. But these mean absolutely compared with what’s on the table downtown at the Bella Centre.

Finally, if there are signs in the mainstream media that this thing can be pulled out of the fire at the last minute, don’t believe a word of it. This isn’t the World Cup final. There’s not going to be a last minute goal. Our reading of the situation right now is that as the prime ministers and presidents get into town tomorrow and Friday the priority for delegates, or certainly those from the developed world, is posturing.

***** UPDATE 15:20 from Steve Kretzman, Executive Director, Oil Change International at the TckTckTck FreshAir Bloggers Center in Copenhagen

• No real emissions targets being talked about inside centre.
• The Danish PM parachuted in new text today. All developing world nations inc. China are majorly pissed off. Including people who worked until 5am this morning.
• They’re feeling their work is useless and voices simply aren’t being heard.
• G20 agreed they’d phase out fossil fuel subsidies (a good thing).
• About 100 countries coming together around the 1.5 degrees (AOSIS & other small nations but good nevertheless).

Okay, here’s that FOE mail

We’ve been sitting here for two hours now, about 50 Friends of the Earth representatives, all with accreditation and secondary badges, who have been refused admission to the conference. We are sitting in the registration area, between the registration/credentials desks and the photo desks.

UN climate chief Yvo de Boer came out and spoke to us awhile ago and said he wanted to resolve the situation. A few of our representatives have gone to talk to UN officials while we sit here, but our lack of access remains unresolved.

Initially there were a lot of reporters, but the UN has now cordoned us off and closed access to media.

The UN still has yet to give us a coherent reason for our having been denied access. We have been given different explanations by different officials: (1) we are a security threat or (2) there was no more room inside. It’s hard to see how the “no room” explanation makes sense, as they continued to allow other NGO observers to enter even as we were denied access. And as for the security threat, we’re a bunch of policy wonks and youth activists who have been participating in the negotiations every day for two weeks.

We’ve had both a member of the Norweigan and a member of the Canadian parliament come speak to us to lend us their support while we’ve been sitting here

One of the key roles Friends of the Earth has played at the conference has been to advocate for climate justice and the interests of the poor countries that have done the least to cause the climate crisis but will feel some of its strongest impacts. Negotiators from those countries are tremendously under-resourced here. For example, I’ve worked with negotiators who have no media officers (I do media work) to help them communicate their position. They are totally outgunned by the massive delegations of the rich countries, and now thanks to the UN’s decision to exclude us, they will have even less support inside the Bella Center to fight for a fair agreement. It’s really shameful.

Also –

Re the entry way more generally: appears that access to the conference has been almost completely shut down. We have a very clear view of the front doors and the security area, and people come through only very sporadically.’

Best,

Nick Berning
Friends of the Earth U.S.

Our French here at keepfakingit isn’t nuanced enough to give you a full word for word translation of the end of his Klimaforum speech. But we don’t think it’s needed. José Bové (MEP!) clearly leaves nothing on the table during a typically fiery delivery. And we have no doubts he had a tractor load of cow shit in the green room just in case he needed to illustrate his point a little further.

After arguements over the text of any potential agreement itself, physical access to the Bella Centre is becoming a key issue on the ground here in Copenhagen. As they say, if you’re not in, you can’t win. And it’s not the big guns who aren’t in, it’s you and me, civil society. More to the point, the NGOs whom the UN have deigned to represent us.

At this point you may be saying to yourself, ‘ah, but why do all these civil society orgs need to be there anyway, just let the political delegates get on with it.’ The answer to that is enshrined in the text of the Rio Declaration. Go check Principle 10:

Environmental issues are best handled with the participation of all concerned citizens, at the relevant level. At the national level, each individual shall have appropriate access to information concerning the environment that is held by public authorities, including information on hazardous materials and activities in their communities, and the opportunity to participate in decision-making processes. States shall facilitate and encourage public awareness and participation by making information widely available. Effective access to judicial and administrative proceedings,
including redress and remedy, shall be provided.

The role civil society has to play here is immense. And we’re being cynically and structurally locked out. Yvo de Boer has today taken responsibility here (trying to track down reference), but that’s not a lot of good to the scores of people who have traveled around the world to take part in proceedings.

Here’s a YouTube clip of yesterday’s queue. It took four minutes to shoot, walking the full length of the queue. We had members of the Stupid Show team wait seven hours in temperatures that fell to zero degrees.

The most galling part of this situation is that it’s going to get worse as the week progresses.

Here’s an overview from @ApolloGonzales:

1) Number of passes
- Tuesday and Wednesday 7000 observers will be allowed in the building as per the current allocation of secondary passes
- On Thursday the allocation will be reduced to 1000 observers only.
It is not yet decided whether this will be done on a tertiary pass system, or by stopping anyone else coming in once 1/7 of any
organizational accreditation has been reached
- On Friday the allocation will be 90 in total

2) Access to the plenary room
- On Tuesday 450 people will be allowed access to the plenary room
- On Wednesday and Thursday it will be 300
- On Friday it will be the 90 accredited people The allocations will be decided by the constituency focal points. [keepfakingit: 90 people! This is going beyond a joke]

3) Booths
At some point all booths in the NGO area will have to come down. It is not yet decided when that will be but likely Wednesday or Thursday [keepfakingit: What the fuck!!! The UNFCCC has had years to plan this. How can they not have this figured out yet]

4) Other space
- The secretariat is speaking to Danish Radio which has big offices nearby the Bella Centre about possible use of their space to transmit what is happening in the meetings

Here’s the state of play after yesterday’s sessions in the Bella Centre.

President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives. Photo (cc) Matthew McDermott

Keepfaking it just about caught the end of the 350 / Bill McKibben / Mohamed Nasheed rally at Klimaforum last night. Wow. Nasheed is now being talked of as a true rock star of the green movement and it’s easy to see why. He has a personal political biography that’s straight out of a Disney movie, he knows how to work a crowd and he’s got some great speech writers on his team. Big thanks to 350 from where I’ve lifted the transcript below. It’s worth noting the relative simplicity of the language, yet the complexity of the issues Nasheed is clearly not afraid to confront head on.  Any why should he be, along with Tuvalu and Bangladesh, the Maldives are first under the climate change bus.

Keepfakingit is always a little weary of the reductionism that leads us to turn numbers such as 350ppm and two degrees into sacrosanct targets. The reality is that the societal change we need is way beyond digestible pseudo-scientific soundbites. But in the hands of a leader like Nasheed maybe these numbers work. If they are used to construct a larger, more inclusive framework. More on this thought a little later in the week.

Mr McKibben, fellow environmentalists, ladies and gentlemen,

Four years ago myself, and many fellow activists, sat in solitary confinement in Maldivian prison cells. We sat in those jail cells not because we had committed any wrong. We sat in those cells because we had deliberately broken the unjust laws of dictatorship. We had spoken out for a cause in which we believed. That cause was freedom and democracy.
There were times, sitting in that prison, when I felt more alone than you can imagine. There were times when I started to believe the doubters, who said the Maldives would never become free.  Sometimes it felt like the doubters were right. The dictatorship had the guns, bombs and tanks. We had no weapons other than the power of our words, and the moral clarity of our cause. Many democracy activists like us had vanished, forgotten by history, their struggle a failure.
But, in spite of the odds, we refused to give up hope.We refused to listen to the voices of doubt and discouragement. We refused to be swayed by those who could not see that change was on the way. And we were right to stand up for what we believed.
We won our battle for democracy in the Maldives.  I stand before you today as the first democratically elected President in the history of my country.
The path to democracy in the Maldives was not straight-forward. It was bumpy and full of turns. But we were determined that no matter how difficult the terrain, we would reach the end of the road. And we succeeded in our cause.
Four years later and a continent away, we meet here to confront another seemingly impossible task. We are here to save our planet from the silent, patient and invisible enemy that is climate change.
And just as there were doubters in the Maldives, so there are doubters in Copenhagen. There are those who tell us that solving climate change is impossible. There are those who tell us taking radical action is too difficult. There are those who tell us to give up hope.
Well, I am here to tell you that we refuse to give up hope. We refuse to be quiet.We refuse to believe that a better world isn’t possible.
I have three words to say to the doubters and deniers. Three words with which to win this battle. Just three words are all I need. You may already have heard them. Three – Five – Oh. Three – Five – Oh.
Three – Five – Oh, saves the coral reefs. Three – Five – Oh, keeps the Arctic frozen. Three – Five – Oh, ensures my country survives. Three – Five – Oh, makes a better world possible.
I am here to tell you that down the road in the Bella Center the Maldives team is fighting to keep Three – Five – Oh in the negotiating text.
They need all the help they can get from you. Please keep supporting them.

And the good news is that we are now part of a growing bloc of nations, all committed to keeping Three – Five – Oh as the central guiding goal of our global survival plan.
These nations need your help and support too.

I am not a scientist, but I know that one of the laws of physics, is that you cannot negotiate with the laws of physics. Three – Five – Oh is a law of atmospheric physics. You cannot cut a deal with Mother Nature. And we don’t intend to try.
This is why, in March, the Maldives announced plans to become the first carbon neutral country in the world. We intend to become carbon neutral in ten years. We will switch from oil to 100% renewable energy. And we will offset aviation pollution, until a way can be found to decarbonise air transport too.

For us, going carbon neutral is not just the right thing to do. We believe it is also in our economic self-interest. Countries that have the foresight to green their economies today, will be the winners of tomorrow. These pioneering countries will free themselves from the unpredictable price of foreign oil. They will capitalize on the new, green economy of the future. And they will enhance their moral standing, giving them greater political influence on the world stage. In the Maldives, we have relinquished our claim to high-carbon growth.

After all, it is not carbon we want, but development. It is not coal we want, but electricity. It is not oil we want, but transport. Low-carbon technologies now exist, to deliver all the goods and services we need. Let us make the goal of using them.

Let us make the goal of reaching that all-important number: three – five – oh.
We believe that if the Maldives can become carbon neutral; richer, larger countries can follow. But if there is one thing I know about politicians, it’s that they won’t act until their electorates act first. This is where you come in.
History shows us the power of peaceful protest. From the civil rights movement, to Gandhi’s Quit India campaign; non-violent protest can create change. Protest worked in the struggle for democracy in the Maldives. And on 24 October, we saw how protests across the world put Three – Five – Oh firmly on the Copenhagen agenda.
My message to you is to continue the protests. Continue after Copenhagen. Continue despite the odds. And eventually, together, we will reach that crucial number: Three – five – oh.

In all political agreements, you have to be prepared to negotiate. You have to be prepared to compromise; to give and take. That is the nature of politics. But physics isn’t politics. On climate change, there are things on which we cannot negotiate. There are scientific bottom lines that we have to respect. We know what the laws of physics say. And I think you know too.
The most important number in the world. The most important number you’ll ever hear. The most important number you’ll ever say. These three words: Three – five – oh. (Three – five – oh) (Three – five – oh).

Treehugger have a good write-up here.

One of the jobs Keepfakingit is doing here in Copenhagen is assisting on The Stupid Show, a nightly news and opinion programme coming live from inside the Bella Centre. And on it there’s a segment that goes by the name of Piece of the Action. That’s the bit I’m involved in, scouring the streets of Copenhagen looking attempting to bring you a picture of the unbelievably diverse crowd that’s in town for the COP.

Here are some pics from the shoots.

Certainly the theme for Saturday in Copenhagen, if not Sunday as well, was mobilization. 100,000 marching from the city centre to the Bella Centre, location of the climate change conference, was impressive. More impressive was the diversity of the crowd. Both the international mix and range of organizations represented was phenomenal and in our experience unprecedented (we deal with this particular issue elsewhere).

While it led the mainstream news, to concentrate on the Copenhagen march is to miss the point of what is occuring around the world. According to the wonderful people at 350.org, over 3,000 actions took place globally. Take a couple of minutes to check out some of the media on their site. It’s easy for passionate NGO types to overplay these kinds of actions; 50,000 people marched in London last week for The Wave, In isolation that represents a medium sized UK demo. But add that to what’s going on in 100 or so countries within the past seven days though and a scale emerges. A scale that because of its distribution is easy to miss and easier still to ignore.

We saw Dieter Helm this November in London claim, perhaps correctly, that climate change had yet to produce a real political movement, that traditional politicians had yet to be given a mandate by their constituents. Reasons for this are legion, and it’s more than we have time for tonight to go into. However, around COP15 a light is being lit, and that light is illuminating individuals, communities and even whole nations (Tuvalu, the Maldives et al), who previous to now have not had a mainstream media cycle to jump onto. So a question for us in the NGO and media world is this: how do we turn this spotlight into that mandate Helm referred to? What do we do, and what to we tell Tuvalu to do between now the end of COP15 and Bonn, the next time we can reasonably expect international climate change negotiations to figure on front pages.

Another question then emerges. Yes we can keep shining the light, but sooner, not later, we have to throw the torch to our policy makers and let them run with the lamp. I’m recalling here a recent late night dicussion wiht @jamieandrews and @danielvockins. On whom, we asked ourselves, do we concentrate our efforts. Who are the tradionally invisible policy advisors to government and opposition we need to get to. And crucially, what do we give them for the win. For the language we need to communicate with is that of winning and losing in policy and media cycles. That’s what’s going to get the attention of the latter day Alastair Campbell’s, particularly in the UK and particularly five months from an election.

Back to COP15. 350.org and their like have done a huge job connecting the disparate dots all around the world. Using Copenhagen as the center of a web which brings in strands from all over. We all need to keep joining these. This isn’t about Copenhagen. It’s about giving all those who took part in actions over the past 48 hours the ability to mandate their leaders.

BTW, Keepfakingit will be moving on to the numbers beat Monday as the negotiations start to intensify.

[I'll link this up later, too much to do now]

Keepfakingit has been in Copenhagen roughly 36 hours now. It’s the weekend and certainly today, Sunday, there seems to be an intake of breath and an easing off of negotiations ahead of the oncoming storm of the final few days. Will we get a deal? Probably. Will we get a deal that puts us on that gold paved pavement towards a low carbon future? Your guess at this stage is as good as ours. Whether we do or not though there are some seismic shifts taking place in the way civil society’s representatives are tackling climate change.

This is exemplified perfectly by the choice of Mary Robinson as one of the lead speakers at the vigil outside the Bella Centre Saturday. Robinson as former Uachtaráin na h’Éireann (president of Ireland), represents, to some small degree, the world of politics. Robinson as former UN High Commissioner for Refugees represents a UN insider who knows how the system works and climbed to a top level post. And here’s the interesting part. Robinson as Honourary President of Oxfam represents not only a huge NGO, but a social development NGO that now recognizes climate change as the biggest issue facing it and its ilk today.

In Mary Robinson we have someone who spans three hugely important stakeholder groups at COP15. Politics, civil society and those mysterious people in the middle who are trying to tie it all together and broker a deal. The convergence of these groupings is more than timely, it is vital. That the likes of Oxfam, ActionAid and others are now focusing their collective attention on climate change in such a manner represents a big boost to that process.

However, this isn’t enough. Without meaning to be cynical, Oxfam have not eradicated developing world hunger. So as well as smarter NGOs working in unison we need more cross-over figures like Robinson. Imagine the like of Tony Blair or Gordon Brown leaving Downing street and shunning the JP Morgan directorship for an international role running , who surely has lots of time on his hands that he isn’t

And speaking of former politicians who have seen the (green) light, here’s a poem from Al Gore. Good man yourself Al.

This was shot yesterday, not a great interview, Klein looks bored at times, but good points at the top and bottom. First on NGOs’ lack of realism. Klein makes a good point on NGOs as well as politicians having reason to upsell successful negotiations.
Second, on a more interesting note, what is becoming apparent at the gathering in Copenhagen is that NGOs that have traditionally focused on social development and aid, really are starting to embrace climate change as the most important issue on their collective tables.

The 15th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15) kicks off in Denmark’s capital city tomorrow. And I won’t be there. Until Friday. Here’s some background as to why keepingitfake.com will be in town, and what we’ll be doing when we’re there. And before you ask, yes, we’re going by train.

There will be 15,000 delegates at the ‘Glastonbury of Climate Change’¹ with a straightforward mission: save the world from ourselves. Well that’s the idea. No doubt there will be plenty of coal lobbyists, developed world special interest groups and lots of other nefarious characters there trying to spoil everyone’s fun. But let’s pay attention to the good stuff.

First off the KFI itinerary. We get into town late on Friday and we’ll be staying across the water in Malmö*. Mornings we’re going to be pounding Copenhagen pavement with @danielvockins filming segments for The Stupid Show, a daily internet TV show brought to you the Age of Stupid team. More details on that later in the week. Providing we manage to stay out of harm’s way there’s a tonne of things to be doing in the afternoon. We’re still trying to sort accreditation for the Bella Centre where the actual negotiations are taking place. TckTckTck are running a bloggers/media centre nearby in any event so that’s going to be HQ for the week.We’ve also promised a colleague a short video for kids. That scares us more than the toughest Danish police tactics (YouTube).

KlimaForum is the global civil society fringe event running in parallel to the main event. It will seek to influence proceedings across town. Whether it does or not it has some big hitters in attendance and be a focal point for non-delegates in town for the 12 days. Timetable here.

It’s impossible to say at this stage what the day-to-day mix is going to be at the Bella Centre. We know the world leaders fly into town on the 18th but what, if anything, they’ll have to talk about remains unclear. Provisional negotiating are supposed to be finished by the 15th but we’re a long way from getting a short form document ready for high level debate so that’s unlikely.

Future:Media:Change lists four media hubs on which you can follow all the action. As if Keepfakingit.com won’t be able to keep up.

Special shoutout to oneclimate.net. The full social/multi media experience.

Here’s some background on the science which should in theory be supporting the whole thing. If it wasn’t for clowns like this.

Lots of talk about numbers. Remember folks, some of these countries will try to confuse the issue by comparing carbon apples with carbon intensity oranges. So if you want to see how 17% reductions against 2005 levels compares with 20% on 1990 check out this great tool from Sandbag. And if you don’t know your IEA from Perfluorocarbons check this out.

Nick Stern, when asked last week by Dr. Mary Dengler what the two greatest barriers to a real deal at COP15 were, replied succinctly; trust and finances (video here). Let’s see how that pans out. He’s probably right.

With that in mind Nelson Mandela and his crew of oldies but goldies, the Elders, have sent letters to 192 heads of state laying down some serious smack. The Elders team includes Desmond Tutu, Kofi Annan, Gro Brundtland, Jimmy Carter and Mary Robinson [big KFI shoutout and RESPECT to Mrs. R!!!]. Here’s the press release.

Lots of art and culture going on over the 12 days. Rethink Climate is doing a great job of pulling a lot of it together, short review with with photos here.  Arts4COP15, put together by the RSA’s Arts and Ecology team, is also doing a great job. As mentioned right here a couple of weeks ago, Ghost Forest will be in town. With any luck keepfakingit will get in front of all of this stuff and blog it up.

The scale of Twitter activity coming from the Bella Centre and environs is going to be truly epic. Here’s some a nice handy list I’ve put together. If you want to be added to this list gimme a shout.

Okay, that’s the brief overview. We’ll be back during the week with more detail on the negotiations themselves.

* Big shout out to Billy and Cecilia who are opening their home to KFI for the duration. Thanks!

¹ Anonymous RHUL Lecturer

Reading books cover to cover is something I’m not getting done at the moment. I may however persist with Ulrich Beck’s ‘World at Risk’. Handily enough Ulrich gets straight to the point on page one. Handy because I’ve not progressed much further yet.

A suicide bomber attack in which terrorists with British passports planned to blow up several passenger aircraft en route from Heathrow to the United States with liquid explosives did not occur during the summer of 2006… because British police, in cooperation with international colleagues, managed to intervene on time and arrest the suspected perpetrators. On 6 November, barely three months after the thwarted attack, a new EU-wide regulation came into force that imposes severe restrictions on the transport of liquids…

Beck’s points:

• New security clamp downs have restricted the freedoms of millions of passengers.
• The restrictions are to anticipated attacks, the likes of which have never happened.
• Like total dopes, these millions of passengers have accepted in their minds these terrorist threats and haven’t uttered a word. Clowns.

It seems our politicians, their policy advisers and the special interests who keep the whole show on the road can at a turn twist a threat, a risk, into a full risk discourse. With little debate and even less implementation friction. For the love of god. I’ll spell this out. A blown up plane takes down maybe 500 people. Do 10 simultaneously and maybe you nail 5k. That’s hardly a Book of Revelations style threat to the species. Like climate change.

Okay, here’s my point; Stern, Hansen, Gore, the IPCC, the clowns at the UEA and everyone else on the anthropocentric side of climate change are going to have to get real. We’ve got more science that we know what to do with. We’ve got millions of people around the world ‘campaigning’ on the issue. And we’ve got a big conference called COP-15 next week that is bringing just about everybody in the world with a say on climate change to the table. Yet never has there been the sudden and unilateral action on climate change mitigation equal in scale to that the small cell of potential bombmakers have had on the personal freedoms of airline travelers*. WTF!

Scientists can continue churning out data. It can be great data. It can be peer-reviewed by the finest peers in the land. Hell, we’ll even get Piers Morgan in to give it some showbiz sexing up. But unless someone (metaphorically) distills it into explosive matter capable of being hidden in shoe heels, it’s going to come to not a lot. At least not anytime soon.

It’s time to push this thing up a notch. How exactly may come to me when I get to page two of ‘World at Risk’. I’ll let you know.

–

A quick BTW, here’s the other Beck (and Hansen) in my life. I’ll take the sociology over the scientology every time but great tune nevertheless.

* I appreciate we should be making flying more expensive and uncomfortable an experience, but let’s just ignore that for the sake of this small blog.

A really good post by Andrew Revkin on his NY Times Blog on the reaction of the scientific community to the UEA email story.

There’s two good sources here, the first an open letter from Judith Curry and the second some thoughts from Mike Hulme of UEA.

Both have been getting lots of reactions on blogs over the past 24 hours. Hulme’s comments in particular are worth noting:

“the very practices of scientific enquiry must also be publicly owned, in the sense of being open and trusted.”

Clearly there has developed a gulf between the public space and even legitimate scientific study. And it’s becoming clear that it is this gap that is being exploited very successfully by skeptics of all sorts of hues. Of course, the PR disaster of a response by UEA to the whole ordeal has not helped.

Over a burrito last night on Brick Lane, a couple of non-climate scientists agreed. As long as the researchers at the big climate labs continue to even appear to be locking themselves and their data away, there is going to continue be distrust. That’s sure to lead to more trouble. I’m not sure what the answer is but there’s got to be a space between responding to every dumb request for models and data and ignoring skeptics altogether. Climate scientists must get back on the front foot in dealing with this issue.

Another interesting point by Hulme concerns the politicization of science and structures under which we are tackling climate change:

It is also possible that the institutional innovation that has been the I.P.C.C. has run its course. Yes, there will be an AR5 but for what purpose? The I.P.C.C. itself, through its structural tendency to politicize climate change science, has perhaps helped to foster a more authoritarian and exclusive form of knowledge production – just at a time when a globalizing and wired cosmopolitan culture is demanding of science something much more open and inclusive.

This isn’t the first call for a more well-rounded successor to the I.P.C.C. It will be interesting to see where this argument goes post Copenhagen.

I was at Angela Porter’s Ghost Forest installation outside of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square this afternoon. Brilliant. The 10 Ghanaian tree stumps really made an impression, not easy in such a space. Here are some photos and I’ve copied the official blurb below. Show’s over now but it moves on to Copenhagen in time for COP-15.

[BTW, hit the full screen on the bottom of the player below, they look a lot better that way.]

Ghost Forest is an original and ambitious project by Angela Palmer that seeks to raise public awareness of the connections between deforestation and climate change. It involves taking a series of 10 rainforest tree stumps, most with their buttress roots still attached, from a regulated, commercially logged tropical rainforest in Ghana.

The tree stumps will be presented as a “ghost forest” firstly in Trafalgar Square in London, and then in Copenhagen to coincide with the UN Cop15 Climate Change Conference in December.

Ghost Forest is a carbon neutral project – following input from Climate Care, Ghost Forest’s carbon footprint will be offset, see here for details.

Ghost Forest Art Installation – Trafalgar Square, London, U.K. 16-22 November 2009

Ghost Forest Art Installation – Thorvaldsens Plads, Copenhagen, Denmark 7-18 December 2009

Some consensus building and optimism from the editorial in today’s Financial Times [registration wall].
They go on to wade in on the carbon tax vs emissions trading debate. No surprise where our neo-liberal friends come out in that debate:

In theory, a global carbon tax could do this. In the actual world, a global scheme of tradeable emissions quotas is the best solution. To work, such a scheme, which must form the core of any Copenhagen deal, has to meet three conditions: it must lay down a time-path for emissions cuts over several decades (to let businesses and households predict the net costs of such long-term investments as houses and power plants); allow for adjustments if – but only if – the science changes; and impose binding limits on all countries.

There’s a bit about the fairness of developing countries catching a carbon break and then some big numbers:

Selling unused quotas would, moreover, be hugely lucrative for poorer countries. At today’s European carbon price, yearly carbon emissions have a market value of more than €500bn, a figure which could increase significantly as the global ceiling took effect. The potential transfers from rich countries resulting from quota trading could easily swamp the €100bn per year the European Commission has estimated poor countries will need to tackle climate change.

Most countries seem to grasp the gravity of the challenge. If they can also see what is in it for them, a deal may yet be within reach.

It’s a bit late this evening for me to jump into the Stern Report to see if these numbers stack up but it’s a lot of money either way. I also think that last paragraph is crucial. We have a lot of heavy hitting economists on these issues right now. I have my doubts as to whether runaway CO2 levels in the atmosphere can be halted, not to mind lowered within a traditional western capitalism framework but it sure looks like these guys are going to make an effort.

Wow. Just out of a Prof Dieter Helm lecture at LSE. “Climate Change Policy, and why has so little been achieved”. To paraphrase Ted Theodore Logan, Dude laid down the smacketh in a most bodacious way. I didn’t see Nick Stern in the audience. He must have had advance warning of what was coming. Helm started with a growing tribute to his Lordship, how could he not, he was on enemy territory after all. But after calling him the most important economist in the UK right now, alongside Mervyn King, he proceeded to calmly, and very eloquently dismember Nick’s very own Stern Report.
This was no Hallowe’en slasher. Helm is more expert a surgeon. He took aim only at crucial organs and arteries. He chose his spots and cut with the finest of Japanese steel.

For the second time in a week I listed as a speaker told his audience that we are now in the post-science phase of dealing with climate change. The science they have argued is good. Beyond repute in fact. Helm made the point that practically every university on the planet is currently contributing to climate change discourse, and there is remarkable consensus. We’ve passed 350ppm CO2 and are approaching 400 and 500. We all know what comes next. His point here was that the ‘we’ includes our politicians. A politician who now rejects the science of climate change finds himself on the lunatic fringe.

“So why the fuck has there been NO major policy advances in the past 20 years” Helm didn’t say. But that’s what he meant. If we can answer that question maybe we can start to chart a policy course through Copenhagen and beyond.

This begs the question from the Oxford prof, “what bits of economics are painful to policy process”. He spent the rest of the lecture laying some of these out.

–
Now for a word from standard economic orthodoxy.

GDP, given a growth rate of 3% per annum, will be 4x today’s GDP by 2100.
=> We’ll all be 4x “wealthier”
=> 2100 consumption will be 4x today’s consumption
Coal as a % of our energy source goes something like
25% today
28%
30% 2100
Ee-KKKKKK-er!!!!!!

And now back to our scheduled programming.
–

Paraphrasing Prof Helm:
PEAK HYDRO CARBONS IS A BULLSHIT PROPOSITION
We’re not running out of coal. Gas is ok. Oil will continue to be found, as the Arctic melts this gets even easier. Certainly we’re good for at least a century.

Ok, let’s fly through some more points.

Economists mix up manmade vs. natural capital.
There’s a one:one replacement value put on them
Sure there might be no more swallows flying north for the summer, but hey, I’ve got my iPod.

There’s a political truism. Tell your electorate a policy can be achieved cheaply. Fail. When the electorate realise the ruse you’re in trouble Mr. Politician. This is about to happen. Example: the argument that mitigation can be achieved for ~1% GDP.

The utility of tomorrow.
Is the utility of a person in 2100 equal to that of a person living today?
Sure about that?
How about people in 3100?

Fuck that. How about people today?
Does, for a politician/economist, a person in their own constituency have the same utility as some dude hanging in Jo’berg?

Stern argues yes to the above and uses those assumptions in his Economic Review. Bad Economist says Helm. You’re changing the game. While nobody would argue with the virtue of the model, around here, “shit ain’t like that. It’s all fucked up” (Ice-T). Modern society simply does not value us as equal. So why should modern economics.

Onwards. All our leaders are quoting the 1% GDP cost of climate change mitigation. Guys. GET REAL. It cannot be done for that low low price. Pay peanuts, get monkeys. Get me?

[Sidenote here for the RHUL massive: Sustainable development is still playing this GDP/Policy game. It's not the rules of the game that need to change. It's the game itself.]

Helm at this juncture takes us on a history lesson, and in the process flattens the Kyoto framework. Framework?!?, what he meant to say was house of cards. An EU joint in the biggest of ways. The whole deal was setup to make the EU look good, and the “cuts” already achieved by Euroland are a mere sleight of hand. This analysis merely backs up postings made right here on Keepfakingit.com earlier this month.

Helm doesn’t leave it at that though. He contends that by signing up to Kyoto, the EU may have made matters worse than doing anything at all! The logic being that by offshoring CO2 to the dev world via dubious CDM deals, more hot air has actually been created than would have been in existence if, for example, all our coal was still made in Wales. As opposed to making it in China, where coal fired electricity is of a higher CO2 intensity, and it then has to be shipped all the way back to Llandudno for that great new PPP housing deal. To make a point here, and he was up front in saying he has no numbers to back it up, Helm puts it out there that G.W. Bush may have done more good than harm by keeping the US of A out of Kyoto. Big statement.

So where is Helm going with this? Well he’s about to flatten the EU ETS calling it a lobbyists dream and rent capture and rent seeking of the highest, or is that lowest order. The volatile prices produced are good for the traders (here that Clark?) but bad for long term investors as there is no long view on carbon price produced. The simple fact is the incentive to cheat here is Massive.

After offloading on his audience about ETS, 2020-20-20 is never going to get the time of day. And it doesn’t. Easy target for an economics prof though so no points there.

So finally to where we all want to get to. Copenhagen. Zero optimism here. Bottom line forecast:
US do nothing on 1990 levels
EU keep on keeping on. That is dress up dubious cuts as real progress.
India gets 4x emissions permissions.
China sets its stall out for 40% US, 40% EU and 1% GDP acquisition from each of the EU and the US. Think they’re going to get it? No. But that’s not really the point.

The only solution’s another revolution
I’m not sure how much of the above makes sense out of context but my notes look good to me. In summary, here’s what went down:

If Helm were at the helm…

• COAL is the BIG ISSUE – Need to start cutting it NOW.
• Energy demand is going up with GDP. This has to stop.
• We need Nukes and we need CCS and we need them now.
• Sorry guys, 1% GDP is not going to take our problems all away.
• Biodiversity is bigger than climate change. We might solve climate change, but by then 50% of all species on the planet will be KIA.
• Why the fuck are politicians BORROWING money to support unsustainable GDP growth. Stop N.O.W.
• Carbon taxes, all EU countries will have them within five years.
• And while they’re at it they’ll be taxing carbon on the borders too. Take that China-import-export market.

Now, if you’re still interested, go read the good professor’s book.

Frank McDonald writes in the Irish Times that as the EU has grown, its moral strength on environmental issues has weakened. Our friends in the east it seems want to retain their “hot air”. Seems like it’s not the Polish plumbers we should be worried about, but rather the Polish plumbing.

[Hot air] refers to the tradeable bank of credits built up by Poland and others as a result of the collapse of their Soviet-style economies in the early 1990s. Potentially, these assigned amount units (AAUs) – also held in abundance by Russia – are worth a fortune. But they could seriously undermine the international carbon market.

The compromise agreed by EU environment ministers at their meeting in Luxembourg on Wednesday said the unrestricted “banking” and use of AAUs at their full value to comply with commitments on emission reductions beyond 2012 would have to be “addressed appropriately” to ensure the environmental integrity of a Copenhagen deal.

Frankie Frankie also mentions poorer EU states’ unwillingness to pay for original members’ polluting past (that’s since ~1750 for those of you in the UK):

Poland, together with other former Soviet satellites, sees no reason why it should have to dig deeply into its own coffers to help other countries combat climate change. (It also wants to hang onto its carbon-intensive coal-fired power stations as long as possible).

Heads of state meet in Brussels to get this sorted. They then have some last minute talks in Barcelona in November. If they can’t find a solution by then it’s tough to see one coming in the pressure cooker that will be COP-15. And ff the EU can’t get their own yard into shape it’s hard to see what leverage they can assert over the US or China.