Why don't we call it pollution?

Just asking...

When we are talking about climate change we call the gasses that come out of the exhaust pipes and chimneys carbon ‘emissions’. Why do we do that? Why don’t we call it ‘pollution’?

The word emissions is so tame, the word pollution is cutting and devastating. I don’t suppose anyone set out to deliberately re-brand this sort of pollution as carbon emissions, but once it started to be used, it stuck. Now this is probably because ‘carbon emissions’ is much less offensive than ‘pollution’. There is a precedent here. The Grandfather of Madison Avenue, Edward Bernays, consciously dropped the word ‘propaganda’ in favour of the more palatable ‘public relations’. He did this because of the negative mind control connotations associated with the word propaganda but later admitted that public relations was essentially the same thing.

When you frame marketing and advertising as ‘propaganda’ - a psychological technique that plays on your deep subconscious anxieties and emotions to manipulate you into buying a good or service - it sounds sinister and deeply unethical. If, however, marketing and advertising is framed as a profession practised by creative, cool and sexy ‘agents’ who show you how their product or service can fulfil your wildest dreams it seems clever, interesting and harmless. You know you’ve been tricked, but you don’t mind because you were tricked by Don Draper and you want to be him/sleep with him /drink bourbon over ice in a seedy New York jazz club with him.

When you frame the climate altering gasses that we each create in huge proportions every day as Carbon emissions, they sound a lot less devastating than when you call them what they are: pollution.

Tony Juniper looking forward to Copenhagen?

I'm interviewing a few people for my book at the moment, perhaps this is why I'm not getting much put up on this blog! Here is an extract from the interview I did with Tony Juniper last month. I asked him if he is going to Copenhagen this December, what his aims are and what he thinks might happen.

I’m going to watch, that will be my main aim, find out what happened and to have that as an important piece of information. It is always best to be there I find. I mean if you look at the media coverage it is inevitable that the stuff that comes out the day after the thing finishes is always instructive in that you look at 10 articles and you’ll get 10 completely different versions of what happened depending on who the journalist spoke to just as the meeting was closing. Did they speak to Eva De Burgh, the head of Greenpeace, the Americans, the EU or the Chinese? You get a different version from all of them... absolute success, complete disaster, mixed kind of wins, no wins at all. You have to be there really to form your own views because the media... it’s too complicated for a news story, that’s part of the trouble.

But, what’s going to happen there? I don’t know. The countries are still divided, there does not seem to be a lot of sweetness and light between different blocks, the Africans and the Europeans and the Chinese and the Americans, never-mind the Indians, the Russians and the Brazilians. So the chances of a deal that is going to do what is needed, i.e. a 40% cut by 2020, 80-90% cut by 2050, I don’t think there is a very big chance that is going to be done at Copenhagen. What we might get is some modest commitments in outline, probably not a very detailed deal at Copenhagen but maybe, at best, an agreement that countries need to work towards some framework that will include adaptation, cuts, money, forests, whatever and maybe that will get some flesh put on it during 2010 with any luck.

Some people say that the worse thing that could happen in Copenhagen is half of a crap deal that can be presented as a good one and the mistake then is that governments in the West, in particular, believe that they‘ve done the job when actually what they’ve committed to is like a 5% cut by 2020 and they think that is good. That could be the worst case scenario. In some ways a complete collapse in Copenhagen, on the grounds that it is crap might not be the worst outcome if it means they have to come back again and the political anti is lifted. But, yes there is a real danger that there could be something weak coming from there that is seen as the answer. I think what will probably happen is that there will be half a deal and it will get signed off in 2010. But, you know, it is still going to be one that does the job really, this is kind of last chance. I mean everyone has said it, but it’s true, you know the more the science comes through with new runs on the modelling and observations on what is happening to the seas and the oceans and everything else, you can see that this is actually worse than anyone thought, in terms of scale and speed that it is going at. So, you know four degrees temperature increase plausible by 2100, complete catastrophe for life on Earth including humankind, this is the last chance to avoid it really... [wry laugh]

So there you have it, what must not happen is 'half a crap deal' lets hope it doesn't!

A 'chance' to escape

This was the scene at Liverpool St Station today at 5.15pm. About 20 people were queing up for a chance to win a pair of flights to Asia couertesy of Air Asia. The queue was moving pretty slowly, these people were in no rush to get home, the chance to escape the monotony of city life was worth the wait even if the odds of winning were extremly thin. The engine type thing was actually a giant tombola which these lucky entrants were putting a boarding pass into in the hope that theirs might be the one drawn out at the end... or something like that!

The drudgery of everyday life fuels our longing to escape, airplanes are so often the cheap and easy means to that escape, but it begs the question of why we live lives that we are so keen to escape for a couple of weeks every year? Are 50 weeks of 'work, work, work' in exchange for 2 weeks of 'me, me, me' in some exotic location (plus a few days at home with the folks at Christmas) really worth it? Surely those hours from 9 til 5 everyday should be spent doing something enjoyable, rewarding, stimulating and socially useful? They are the hours of the day when we are most awake and productive (we spend them chained to desks while the sun shines outside.) At the very least we can get a sense of wellbeing if we know we are doing something that is collectively good, even if it is tiring and stressful.

As for the environmental battle to keep people out of the air for the sake of 'Climate Change' this just shows how keen people are to fly, they would rather spend fifteen minutes in a queue getting heavily marketed to by an airline for the tiniest chance of winning a flight than get themselves home to their families, their books, thier hobbies, their friends, thier 'life'. The need to escape is both created by and catered for by consumer culture, holidays are a key product. If you asked those pictured below whether they thought a new runway to make Heathrow more efficient was a good idea, they would probably answer: 'Yes!' I asked one man this question and he answered: 'Yes mate!' I also asked him 'do you think you'll win?' He answered 'Probably not.'