In the Shift

Any day now it will be my organisation, the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment‘s, annual world forum: this year on the topic of low carbon mobility.  It should be a great event with prominent speakers and participants engaging on the economics and technologies of mobility in a low carbon economy.

But the challenge with events big and small about climate change and sustainability at present is that the news is not good.  Martin Chilcott of 2Degrees did a guest blog on this a couple of months ago, and one only has to look at the recent Hartwell Paper on climate change policy or Roger Pielke Jr’s new book Climate Fix to catch a sight of the latest storm clouds.  I have just come back from SE Asia and the Middle East where the economic conditions far outweigh any attempts to deal seriously with long term climate change strategies, most notably of all in Australia where one time champion of the globalwarming fight, prime minister Kevin Rudd, has had to shelve emissions trading and is locked in a battle about taxing the mining industry.

Perhaps because of the justified pessimism about where we stand in relation to meeting the transformational challenges associated with climate change, the alternatives tend to fall into the category of unbounded positivity.  When I hear some of the optimism about what can be achieved by simply replacing old energy with alternative energy, or by trumping manmade emissions with the ace of geoengineering, I feel like I’m at a meeting of positivity life coaches – you know, the kind that your company brings in to cheer up the workforce when it lays half of them off, or inhabit the halls of university positive psychology departments picking up the latest research findings on positive individuals and organisations.

Okay, I have a bone to pick with these people because, like Barbara Ehrenreich in her book Smile or Die, I believe that the big challenges of the age cannot be solved by wishing away their underlying causes – and the causes are not  a shortage of positivity or a failure to believe that all things are possible.  Mary Eddy Baker, founder of that early school of positivity, Christian Science, believed that God had gifted the world with abundance, but part of the problem today is that combating climate change seems to put us in a kickboxing cage with the notions of abundance, infinite supply, and that as humans we can have all of things we desire.

But I can perfectly understand if people say they find the challenge is overhelming, and no matter how strong the reasons for scepticism about the current state of transformation, there need to be actions we can take.  So let me take a leaf out of positivism’s innumerable books, and offer a short list of the types of contribution we can make to creating a culture of change.  But before I begin, a word of caution.  Do not try and count or measure what any of these things does by itself or in combination with others.  Right now we don’t know what’s enough: we only know that based on the size of the challenge, what we are doing is too little.  But what we do have is the experience to know what’s right and what’s wrong – or at least have a reasonable guess.  And based on that experience there are actions we can take – some tough, some easy.  I’m not asking everyone to pick an example of all of the action types listed below, but do as much as you can from as many as possible, and hopefully that will give you enough of a sense of positivism that you will feel sufficiently engaged to ward off debilitating pessimism, and sufficiently aware to ward off delusional optimism.