The 10:10 campaign championed by the likes of the Guardian has got a lot of airtime recently, and today there’s a new article promoting their new campaign video on the Guardian website.
I’m not suggesting that the campaign wont have achieved anything good (after all any emissions reductions aren’t a bad thing) but the whole ethos of the campaign is something I find deeply problematic. The central idea of course is that individuals, businesses and governments cut their carbon emissions by 10% over the course of 2010. Which on the surface sounds like a good thing, surely cutting carbon emissions across the board is a good thing?
Well yes. Kind of. But what 10:10 doesn’t address is the massive inequality of emissions between different individuals and businesses. For someone who takes six flights a year, drives 15k miles in a 25mpg 4×4 and has a massive house with no insulation and incandescent light bulbs and who eats factory farmed imported meat twice a day and has an otherwise high level of consumption cutting 10% of their emissions is pretty straight forwards. Take a couple of flights less, drive 13.5k miles in their 4×4 and get some energy saving light bulbs or insulation. That individual still has a gargantuan carbon footprint, but it’s 10% smaller than it was before. Are they now sustainable, and have they ‘done their bit’ towards ‘saving the world’ (as the nauseating Guardian article describes the campaign). Of course not.
Now compare that to someone who has been eco-conscious for a number of years, who doesn’t fly, doesn’t drive, buys local produce, who pays extra for renewable-generated electricity and consequently is already has a carbon footprint way below the national average, and may well be living in a sustainable way. What are they meant to do to cut 10% of their emissions? Live without a fridge? Leave the heating off for the first half of winter? Shower only ever using cold water?
So you see the problem, 10:10 is trivial to achieve for the heaviest polluters and extremely hard to achieve for people who actually made an effort to live sustainably because it expects both groups of people to make the same percentage change. It’s the same trick that bourgeois environmentalists like Richard Heinberg have persuasively argued in favour of: a universal percentage reduction, which means that those who have done the most damage make a trivial gesture towards sustainability while those who aren’t really part of the problem have to make the same percentage cut. This has nothing to do with bringing emissions down to a sustainable level. The way to do that is to agree upon what that level should be and then to get people to work towards it, with a cap and dividend system so those who live unsustainably compensate those who are. 10% of totally unsustainable is still totally unsustainable. Accusing people who are already living sustainably of destroying the world because they aren’t going to make further cuts while most of those around them have emissions 3-5 times higher than them is just stupid.
And of course that focusses purely at the level of the individual. While governments are still happy to support costly fossil fuel extraction schemes such as deepwater oil field exploration and tar sands development while failing to adequately support renewable energy generation (Vestas being a case in point) allied with their failure to come to any kind of international agreement to supplant the soon to expire Kyoto Protocol, the actions of individuals are rendered entirely insignificant. How unsurprising then that free marketeers love the idea of 10:10, not only does it mean that the heaviest individual polluters have to take trivial action, but it also means that middle class liberals can feel good about having ‘saved the world’ without the need for any kind of national or international regulation.
And so now the campaign has a new promotional film, in which people who don’t pledge support to the campaign are blown up by figures of authority such as a schoolteacher or boss. Given that many denialist arguments centre on the alleged coercive centralised authority of the warmist movement this video is not very likely to win anyone over. On the Guardian page commentators have remarked that it’s humorous to suggest executing anyone who doesn’t agree with your position. I’m not really seeing the joke.
The video comes across as patronising and highly un-funny. It will undoubtedly offend and alienate people. The campaign itself has achieved something in terms of emissions reductions, but an optional 10% carbon emission decrease has nothing to do with the ridiculous notion of ‘saving the planet’ or even the more sensible notion of avoiding some of the worst of the predicted effects of anthropogenic climate change. Really it’s little more than a way of avoiding middle class guilt at the lack of meaningful action over climate change.
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Media Ecologies and Digital Activism 