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.

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.

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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.