Viewpoint, Ann Pettifor BBC Green Room 6 May 08;
Organisations campaigning on climate change need to learn the lessons of the anti-slavery and anti-apartheid movements, says Ann Pettifor. By focusing on individuals rather than governments, initiatives such as the recent Energy Saving Day are bound to fail in their bid to reduce emissions, she argues.
Climate change is the issue of the day.
Scientists finally agree on the threat to the planet posed by rising temperatures. Books on the subject proliferate.
Campaigners, like those at Plane Stupid, do amazing things to bring it to public attention.
Big business frets too. The world's giant investment funds join green groups in demanding drastic action.
Paul Hawken, author of Blessed Unrest - How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being, writes that "there are over one - maybe even two - million organisations (worldwide) working toward ecological sustainability and social justice".
And yet... and yet... there is no real climate change movement.
There is no organised effort leading society towards a legislative framework that would urgently drive down greenhouse gas emissions across the board, and begin to sequester carbon dioxide.
Not in the UK, or in the US, or internationally. The "movement" that Hawken refers to is, he notes, "atomised" and "largely ignored".
Yet in September 2007, a public opinion survey from Yale University (in conjunction with Gallup) found that "nearly half of Americans now believe that global warming is either already having dangerous impacts on people around the world or will in the next 10 years".
The authors noted that this was "a 20-percentage-point increase since 2004", representing "a sea change in public opinion... and a growing sense of urgency".
If there is a "growing sense of urgency", why isn't there a climate change movement in the US?
Low level lighting
The reason is that green organisations focus on individual ("change your lightbulbs") or community ("recycle, reuse, reduce, localise") action.
They fail to highlight the need for the kind of structural change that can only be brought about by governmental action.
Governments helpfully collude in this atomisation and fragmentation of action and reaction.
Throughout history, social movements have focused on the need for government action.
The anti-slavery movement sought to change laws that permitted slavery.
The suffragette movement only ensured votes for women once discriminatory laws had been displaced; the anti-apartheid movement was only successful once apartheid laws had been removed.
In the US, the black civil rights movement campaigned from 1947 until the introduction of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act to end discrimination in certain spheres.
Today, as the UK government's hesitancy in dealing with Northern Rock reveals, governmental action is unpopular and out of fashion.
Not just with big business and neo-liberal economists, but also with anarchists and many green campaigners. Minimal government is now ideologically dominant.
The failure of anti-war demonstrations to halt the Iraq war is often cited as evidence of the failure of governments to respond to such popular pressure.
However, as the civil rights movement demonstrated, a successful campaign does not stop at one defeat. It moves forward inexorably over time, in pursuit of its legislative goal.
Fair shares
The population at large instinctively understands that they alone, or even in community, cannot deal with the threat of climate change.
They are acutely aware that while individuals may take action, others may become "freeriders".
They know a fair legislative framework is required to share the burden of adjusting to climate change equitably between rich and poor.
Burden-sharing has several dimensions; between those who live in Bangladesh and those who live in Zurich, those who drive 4x4s and those who cycle, those who take foreign holidays and those who do not.
In the UK, Ipsos Mori polled public attitudes to climate change in July 2007.
Seventy percent "strongly agreed" or "tended to agree" that "the government should take the lead in combating climate change, even if it means using the law to change people's behaviour".
Green organisations in the UK support the government's very cautious climate change bill by lobbying for a stronger legal framework - but not much stronger.
The call by UK NGOs for 80% cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 - now accepted by government - lacks ambition, and underestimates the urgency.
Furthermore, the call for action by 2050 is so distant that the government feels under no pressure.
Switching off
Growing scientific evidence of accelerating greenhouse gas emissions, melting icecaps and the shrinking capacity of "sinks" to absorb emissions means we need bold, urgent action by government to drive down emissions to zero.
Britain's only Christian campaign dedicated exclusively to climate change, Operation Noah, pressures government to take much more radical action - to cut emissions by 90% by 2030, not 2050.
We may not have got it right, but we are trying to pressure government to act urgently, and to mobilise society in the way that Jubilee 2000 mobilised millions of people to cancel third world debt.
In other words, we are pressing for governmental action by a deadline.
To succeed, climate change campaigns first need first to unite - at both national and international levels.
Secondly, they must unite behind a radical goal that requires structural change, regulation and enforcement that will urgently drive down emissions and sequester carbon dioxide.
Thirdly, they need to exercise leadership by mobilising society in a concerted way behind this goal. This will intensify pressure on politicians and governments.
It ain't easy, but it has been done before; witness the Jubilee 2000 global campaign.
As things stand, the movement remains disparate, atomised and marginalised.
This frees politicians to expand airports and increase road capacity.
Parliaments fiddle while the planet burns, and individuals are pressured to take responsibility for global climate change by "switching off at the wall".
And so, inevitably, the Titanic's deck chairs are rearranged - and energy use goes up, rather than down, on Energy Saving Day.
Ann Pettifor is executive director of Advocacy International and campaigns adviser to Operation Noah
The Green Room is a series of opinion articles on environmental topics running weekly on the BBC News website
