Differently Better

Change is hard.

Climate change doubly so.

Several years ago I went to see Johnny Ball at a children’s literature festival. He was promoting a new version of his Think of a Number book, something I was particularly keen to introduce to my kids.

When I was little, his BBC TV show introduced me to the wonder and power of maths and science. The free puzzle sheets that you could write off for after each episode were something I treasured. The sense of fun and mischief it was presented with and sheer amount of energy and enthusiasm were contagious.

We sat in an aisle seat and Johnny came in and sat next to us briefly while the room filled up. He chit-chatted and signed our book. Before he moved on though he made an extremely puzzling comment about “hoping we’d still like him after the event”.

The talk started and Johnny, although suffering from a nasty cough that made me worry about whether he was going to last to the end, presented some great mathsy principles and a few mathemagical tricks, getting kids from the audience involved at every stage.

Then, about halfway through he switched away from Think of a Number and started to talk about global warming. And that it wasn’t an issue. That CO₂ was part of a natural cycle and just meant that plants would grow better and absorb it.

Which is partly true, but shows a misunderstanding (willful or otherwise) of scale. The natural growth/decay cycle is only a small part of the system and there’s a massive mismatch if you’re taking fossil fuels that accumulated over 1,000,000 years and burning them in just 100, things are going to get out of whack pretty quickly.

Needless to say, the audience went very quiet and we, like a lot of the folk there, left quickly afterwards, skipping the queue for autographs and more merchandise. We now understood what he’d meant by his earlier comment.

That day taught me what people mean when they say “you should never meet your heroes”.

However, there was one thing Johnny said during his diatribe that I did take on board. He said that by advocating low carbon living that we were “limiting our children’s outlook, ambitions and imaginations”. Ouch.

On reflection, I think he was railing against what he saw as the hairshirt forms of environmentalism. That, in an extreme interpretation, the solution to climate change is to stop doing anything. No travel, no cars, no consumption, no anything, just stay at home and pretend you don’t exist.

Looking at it from that viewpoint, I can see what he meant. However, his solution of fooling himself that climate breakdown isn’t happening despite scientific consensus and mounting personal experience of increasing weather extremes is clearly not the answer.

And worse, a society where some of the population is making sacrifices to try to offset the disproportionate indulgences of another, smaller, group is really not going to work (or even end well) either.

There is also another aspect of this, which is that cutting back personally is largely invisible to others. There’s very little gearing that you get from this, by which I mean, it’s difficult for it to be noticed by others as something to aspire to or emulate.

That is, unless you make it obvious, e.g. on social media. However, that, I think is problematic as it invites the sort of ridiculous trolling backlash from high-profile individuals reacting to a transatlantic sailing trip by saying they’ll book several long-haul flights (presumably to compensate?) while feeling ‘0% guilt’.

A similar reaction is given when climate strikers are criticised for having driven to protests. As if use of an existing product should disqualify you from advocating for a different or better one? At its extreme, saying that climate protestors have no right to use fossil-fuelled travel to demand change is as nonsensical as requiring NASA scientists to commute by space rocket.

To me, at least, it’s clear that these reactions are partly driven by guilt, at some level. And, I think, a symptom of how humans rarely respond positively (or logically) when they are feeling guilt or shame. Therefore this approach to achieving change is unlikely to be terribly fruitful.

In a previous job, I worked in a large call centre environment with a big shared kitchen. At some point a new boiler that dispensed hot water from a tap for folk to make tea with was introduced. I remember noticing that it had an ‘eco’ button with a little leaf on it that lit up green when it was pressed.

Over the next month or two I watched a battle unfold over the use of this button. It would be on, and then off, and then on, and then off, and then on again, then off. Occasionally I would spot individuals pressing it with increasing amounts of agitation.

Eventually, someone cut the plastic membrance covering the button out and disabled it – fixing it into which mode, I’m not sure.

My takeaway from this was that the choice of being ‘eco’ is seen as (a) a virtue by some folk and (b) as substandard by others.

There was clearly a strong feeling that somehow having that button pressed made ‘worse’ hot water. As I understand it, heating water takes pretty much the same amount of energy however you do it, so you either want to heat only the amount you actually need, or maybe to a lower temperature.

Nonetheless, I have absolutely no idea what the button actually did, other than switch on a green LED. Regardless, it evoked some large emotional responses and, I suspect, this was more to do with the button than the quality of the resulting mugs of tea.

I think that, probably, it would either’ve been better to be clear about what the button did (“standby mode uses less energy, and takes slightly longer to warm up at the start of the day”) or simply just to have a single mode that was as efficient as it could be.

However, the overriding lesson that ‘eco’ meant ‘not as good’ to some people stuck.

I’m lucky enough to’ve been able to invest in some PV solar panels. And the interesting thing is that, when you have a teeny tiny power station on your roof, you start to pay attention to what it’s doing.

The first thing you notice, if you install it in November, is that it frequently doesn’t produce very much energy in the depths of the winter months. Nonetheless, a few sunny days and you quickly see its potential, and then in the summer it produces way more than you can use for days at a time.

So, yes, solar energy is ‘not as good’ as more traditional forms of electricity generation in the winter. But hang on, on summer days it’s ‘way better’ – I have electricity to spare. What? Yes, electricity to spare.

That’s bonkers isn’t it? Our household energy consumption is predicated on an on-demand energy system that provides when we ask. We look to ways to increase the energy efficiency of the buildings (in terms of controlling heat loss) and appliances (in terms of minimising their baseload demands or amount used to achieve an outcome). But we don’t look at what they could do with ‘spare’ electricity.

Solar power’s not ‘worse’ than non-renewable energy generation, it’s just different. And in one way it’s ‘better’: it can produce an energy surplus at no extra cost.

This is what smart grid developments are all about, aiming to initially balance the supply and demand across the electricity grid, including initiatives that will allow that energy to be stored for later use too. But at some point we will get to the stage where we regularly have ‘spare’ energy, and on a national scale.

That’s exciting. I’m not sure I know what we’ll do with that, but I’m sure that there are plenty of folk thinking of amazing possibilities.

So what am I trying to say?

I think I’m trying to describe my philosophy for an approach to achieving the change that is required (and required quickly) if we are to stave off the worst effects of the climate crisis.

Firstly, that change is difficult for everyone. We all have comfort zones that we’ve built to be able to cope with life. We’ve all taken the best decisions that we thought we could, given our knowledge at the time, that have brought us to where we are. When these are challenged it can seem like a threat or a criticism and can make us defensive.

This is especially true when trying to absorb messages about what we need to ‘stop’ doing to make the planet liveable for everyone. Yes, if you enjoy regular short-haul flights to a holiday destination, then you might see this as a personal attack. However, the message isn’t that you don’t deserve or shouldn’t have a holiday – just make a change and try taking a long distance train instead.

Trains are ‘worse’ in that they take longer to get there, but they have their strengths too. I guarantee you’ll arrive having switched off from your day-to-day life, something that short-haul flights never give you time to do. And the benefits of being able to appreciate the scenery, walk about and break your journey are obvious, especially to nervous flyers or anyone who’s been stuck in an airport for any length of time. It’s just a whole host of better differences.

Secondly, approaching change with the improv mindset of ‘yes’ we need to massively shift the way we live ‘and’ it’ll be differently better, opens up our imagination to the possibilities. We know that consumerism doesn’t make us happy, we know that spending time with friends and with nature does. There are huge opportunities to replace some of our unthinking habits with rewarding and fulfilling activities that are good for us and the planet. Ditto for the infrastructure, industries and environment that support us.

I think Rob Wilson of Toast Ale, who brew beer from leftover crusts from the sandwich packaging industry, summed this up very neatly: to change the world, you have to throw a better party than those that are destroying it.

I’m inviting you to help organise our post-carbon party.

It’ll be different, yes, but better.

Much, much better.