Fladshmob350

As you seemed to be in an informed position, what do you consider to be the most important thing to combat climate change? Is it a case that small things such as turning lights off, not using standby will make a difference or do we really need change on a massive scale?

I'm by no means the most informed and I'll happily accept criticism of my position. To that ends my position is that we need a range of changes. However, the answer isn't as simple as that, so here's the long version.

Probably the most important one isn't a personal physical action, it's the act of normalisation of change. As a society we don't generally like to appear to be different (hipster spice route riding, cardigan wearing tree huggers aside). It's why we support football teams, don't decorate our bathrooms in neon paisley and wear ties to funerals. The team we support, the colour of our bathroom and the pattern of our ties is where our personality kicks in, the rest is peer pressure. What we need to do is normalise environmentally friendly actions. Examples inlcude thinking that it's better to use low energy lightbulbs, wasteful to leave things on standby, silly to boil a full kettle for one cup of tea and OK to have wind turbines on some parts of our countryside. The alternatives and more importantly their effects are not an acceptable future course of action. To touch on flashmobs briefly here, their presence is awkward. For every person that wants to take part, there will be at least one person (probably more) who feels pushed out of their comfort zone by their presence and will want to avoid being allied with the motivational factor behind them. Potentially that's quite damaging. Upthread Ajax says that influencing 20 people makes it worthwhile. This would be true if the risk weren't there that in the same stroke counter-influencing 20 other people. The reason the so called flashmob action in the mobile phone ads worked so well was the use of literally hundreds of paid participants, limited background association and non-existent future expectation on voluntary participants. So really the first and best thing that I think that people can do is to say, when appropriate, that they believe that climate change is happening and that they're making efforts to do their bit. People hearing this will be more likely to follow suit.

Moving on to physical actions. We need a combination of both big and small. We the lowly public (excluding any politicians and policy makers here) can't change the world, the country, the town or even the street we live on. But all of those small things are important. Firstly lots of small bits add up to a big impact and without our contribution it wouldn't be as big. It doesn't matter that our contribution is infitessimal, it's still there and we should take pride in our virtue. Secondly by doing these things we normalise them. Interesting aside (interesting to me at least), at a training session earlier on this year a representative of the home entertainment industry was present and in accordance with the industries line said that digital boxes should be left on standby when not in use, even if they won't be used for recording. The argument being that modern boxes only use about 1 watt on standby and they allow for updating. Prior to that he had stated that 8m households had purchased a box in the previous year. A quick bit of math showed that for each household the standby cost would amount to roughly 6.5kWh energy use (92p on your energy bill). However, across the 8m households this is 5.3m Kwh which is about 28,000 tonnes of CO2 per year. For that environmental cost I propose that no one needs their TV so urgently that they can't wait for it to update when it's turned on or withstand a little clipping in the first few minutes of use.

As for big actions. We definitely need these. Not only for climate change but for the unrelated approaching energy gap. This needs to be overriding national policy. By no means should we sacrifice essential services but we shouldn't be taking action at the expense of the future. The motoring industry, the housing industry and the industrial sector should not be allowed to preserve the status quo on flimsy arguments. I don't want to see massive unemployment from these areas driven by escalating costs, but I also want to see a world worth living in ten years on. Politicians and policy makers need to start serving the public, not telling how we should be served.

How I think we should bring this about is longer even still. I'll spare you the blethering.