EcoWalktheTalk » Climate Change Asia's Environmental Community featuring Eco News, Insights, People and Living Tips Fri, 12 Dec 2014 05:25:41 +0000 en-US hourly 1 India can change the dynamics of COP20 Fri, 12 Dec 2014 05:25:05 +0000 by Avik Roy

The ongoing climate talks at Lima talks will set the broad parameters of the nature of commitments India and other countries will need to make to address the issue of climate change under a new agreement, to be signed in Paris next year and implemented from 2020.

India has two challenges facing itself in Lima — how strong an oversight the new global climate change regime could have on the path of its economy and how much of the burden of reducing greenhouse gas  emissions is to be shipped from the developed world in the pre-2020 period, to be borne by all in the post-2020 regime.

Ravi PrasadIndia’s environment minister Prakash Javadekar has been reiterating the country’s stand at international fora and his emphasis is on Common but Differentiated Responsibilities and operationalising the Green Climate Fund which has been injected with $9.7 billion for four years recently. Developed countries agreed to mobilise $100 billion per year till 2020, and the crisis of funding and technology transfer continues to plague the negotiations.

At Paris, next year, the countries will have to agree on a deal with new goals which will take the world post 2020. The Lima conference, especially after the climate deal between the United States and China last month, seeks to set the tone for the ‘Paris Protocol’ and countries will be wrangling over their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions, which they have to finalise by March 2015. While the US-China deal is low on ambition, there is nothing which is preventing India from taking on ambitious cuts and opting for a low carbon path. The key issues at Lima will centre on emission cuts and finance.

The director of Centre for Science and Environment, one of the most influential and important think-tank and CSO working on climate and environment policymaking, has recently written an Oped at Business Standard, calling the US-China climate deal as “disastrous”. She said that the US and China has operationised equity, but in a way that will take us to a path of catastrophe.

Indian experts have been saying that India should set the ground for tighter emissions cuts and ambitious national action plans and there is no need to be bound by the US-China deal. She wrote that “the United States and China have agreed to ‘equalise’ their emissions by 2030. Both countries would have ‘equal’ per capita emissions in 2030. The United States would come down marginally from its current 18 tonnes per capita and China would increase from its current seven-eight tonnes. Both the polluters would converge at 12-14 tonnes a person a year. This is when the planet can effectively absorb and naturally cleanse emissions not more than two tonnes a person a year.”  This means that that each country would occupy equal atmospheric space by 2030. The United States-China deal makes it clear that both the countries individually get 16 per cent of the atmospheric space by 2030.

However, the article reveals that going by the US-China deal, India needs to do nothing. Its current per capita emissions are 1.8 tonnes and by 2030, under the business-as-usual scenario, it will be four tonnes – nowhere close to that of the US and China. Between 2011 and 2030, China will take over 25 per cent of the remaining carbon space; the US will occupy 11 per cent more and India only seven per cent more. In other words, after the United States-China agreement, India should be accelerating its growth so that it can catch up.

Interestingly, India is likely to announce new, bigger and more effective climate change targets before US President Barack Obama’s visit in January next year. It can push the country into the same league as the US and China. Senior journalist and my colleague at Business Standard Nitin Sethi has speculated that the announcement may include an ‘aspirational’ peaking year for India’s greenhouse gas emissions. However, a key Indian negotiator in Lima has refuted the analysis, saying that “peaking of emissions is not in near-term agenda of India”. Also, key source at one of the prominent green NGO has revealed that the environment minister, in recent past, has turned downed the option of peaking of emission. So, with respect to India’s stance on emission reduction there exists a shroud of mystery.

India is said to have prepared the final brief yesterday (December 2) at the Union Cabinet in New Delhi, before Mr. Javadekar’s visit for the high-level ministerial in Lima next week.

In 2010, India had committed to a 20-25 per cent cut in its carbon intensity by 2020, compared to the levels in 2005. The process to make fresh and enhanced commitments to the international community was in the works for the past few months, with the government commissioning studies to assess and project India’s greenhouse gas emissions. The results of these studies are due in December. A joint US-China announcement has incentivised India to make an early announcement in this regard.

India has released its salvo at the West on the issue of financing of project under the GCF for developing countries. “There is a lack of clarity on Green Climate Fund. We hope Lima provide a greater transparency”, said Ravi Prasad, the lead negotiator for India. Speaking on behalf of the Like-minded Developing Countries, he further saying that “we haven’t seen any meaningful conversation on technology transfer and IPR. Until we have some kind of assurance and support, it will be difficult for the developing countries to elucidate their INDCs”.


About the writer

Avik is a journalist from India, who is working for Business Standard after leaving The Pioneer recently. A powershifter and an activist, he writes on environment & climate change issues.


This article appeared originally in


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Duane Elgin: Voluntary simplicity for a regenerative future Sun, 27 Oct 2013 12:23:42 +0000 DUANE ELGIN is a visionary writer, speaker, social scientist and educator. Born in the USA, and based in Fairfax, California, he runs an open-source collaborative project called ‘Great Transition Stories  which shares narratives from a variety of trusted sources to understand the human journey, and offer hope for pathways into a sustainable future.

Duane was described in April 2009 by the Ecologist Magazine as one of the ten leading visionaries with “big ideas for a better world“. In 2006, he received the Peace Prize of Japan, the Goi Award, in recognition of his contribution to a global “vision, consciousness, and lifestyle” that fosters a “more sustainable and spiritual culture.”

Duane is well known for championing the term Voluntary Simplicity’ with his 1981 book (now updated in 1993 and 2010) of the same name.  In this interview with Bhavani Prakash of Eco WALK the, he elaborates upon the concept, and shares his vision for a regenerative future for humanity.

EWTT: You’re best known for initiating the ‘Voluntary Simplicity’ movement in the early 80s. What is your key message around this now, and has the message itself or the way you communicate it changed in the last three decades?

Duane Elgin

DUANE ELGIN: Yes, there have been a number of major changes in how simplicity of living is viewed over the past 30 years. Here are a few:

First, the public conversation about simplicity is shifting from complacency to urgency. In the 1970s, there was little public concern about climate change, food shortages, species extinction, water shortages, and more. The majority of people were focused on the “good life” in the short run. More than thirty years later, these are no longer problems for the distant future; they represent a critical challenge to the human community now.

Second, as people’s sense of urgency has grown, interest in sustainable ways of living has soared, and simplicity has moved from the margins of society to the mainstream. Simpler or greener approaches to living are becoming part of everyday life and culture. Television programs on themes such as organic gardening, healthy cooking, and solar living are growing in popularity. Magazines with green themes for living are sprouting everywhere. College courses in green building and environmental management are blossoming.

Third, public understanding of simplicity has evolved from fantasy stereotypes to realistic examples and archetypes. In the 1980s, it was common for the mass media to characterize simplicity as a “back to the land” movement that turned away from technological progress. In recent years, the idea of simplicity has moved from being regarded as a path of regress to being seen as a path to a new kind of progress and social vitality.

Fourth, there has been a dramatic expansion in the scope of simplicity as it has moved from a personal issue to a theme vital to our collective future. Now we are seeing the rapid growth of interest in new forms of community, solar living, state-level sustainability initiatives, federal programs, and global agreements. Simplicity of living is no longer a personal issue; it is a theme being woven into our lives at every scale.

Fifth, over the decades, simplicity is increasingly being defined by what it is for (connecting with and caring for life) instead of what it is against (destructive consumerism). In the 1980s, simplicity was seen primarily as “downshifting” or pulling back from the rat race of consumer society. Several decades later, there is a growing recognition of simplicity as “upshifting”—or moving beyond the rat race to the human race.

EWTT: Asians, traditionally, have had cultures of ‘simplicity’, but this is rapidly changing with the wave of consumerism sweeping very rapidly through the continent. It’s modelled on a materialistic definition of growth and is fuelled by the twin forces of globalisation and media.  What can be done to spread the ‘Voluntary Simplicity’ movement in Asia?

DUANE ELGIN: I would suggest that it is important for Asian countries to not be seduced by the consumerist messages of the mass media and, instead, to reclaim their cultural heritage that acknowledges the value of simplicity. In Buddhist cultures, for example, there is the idea of “wabi-sabi”. This phrase describes a feeling of appreciation for things whose wear and aging reveal life’s impermanence. For example, you may have had a cup or table in your family for several generations—and this may invite you to reflect on all the people before you that held that cup or touched that table. Each chip or scratch is not an imperfection but an added memory.

So, in my home, if I happen to scratch the dining table, I’ll say, “I’ve just ‘wabi’d’ the table” —meaning, it just got a little more patina and age—a little more value. I think we are returning to an aesthetic appreciation of the organic nature of things as they age and change. In turn, we are moving toward a more organic relationship with the Earth and a more peaceful way of being with ourselves in the midst of a materialistic culture.

EWTT: The idea of ‘sacrifice’ is anathema to most people. Doesn’t a sustainable future for humanity require some kind of sacrifice by those who already have too much, in order for them to share with those who have much too little, whether it’s within a country or across nations? 

DUANE ELGIN: Simplicity does not require sacrifice. To the contrary, it is a consumerist lifestyle that requires enormous sacrifice with lifestyles that are overstressed, overbusy, and overworked. Sacrifice is investing long hours doing work that is neither meaningful nor satisfying. Sacrifice is being apart from family and community to earn a living. Sacrifice is the stress of commuting long distances and coping with traffic. Sacrifice is the white noise of civilization blotting out the subtle sounds of nature. Sacrifice is hiding nature’s beauty behind a jumble of billboard advertisements. Sacrifice is carrying more than 200 toxic chemicals in our bodies, with consequences that will cascade for generations ahead. Sacrifice is the massive extinction of plants and animals and a dramatically impoverished biosphere. Sacrifice is being cut off from nature’s wildness and wisdom. Sacrifice is global climate disruption, crop failure, famine, and forced migration. Sacrifice is the absence of feelings of neighborliness and community. Sacrifice is feeling divided among the different parts of our lives and unsure how they work together in a coherent whole.

In contrast simplicity that is voluntary—consciously chosen, deliberate, and intentional—supports a higher quality of life. Simplicity fosters a more harmonious relationship with the Earth—the land, air, and water. Simplicity promotes fairness and equity among the people of the Earth. Simplicity cuts through needless busyness, clutter, and complications. Simplicity enhances living with balance—inner and outer, work and family, family and community. Simplicity reveals the beauty and intelligence of nature’s designs. Simplicity increases the resources available for future generations. Simplicity helps save animal and plant species from extinction. Simplicity responds to global shortages of oil, water, and other vital resources. Simplicity keeps our eyes on the prize of what matters most in our lives—the quality of our relationships with family, friends, community, nature, and cosmos. Simplicity yields lasting satisfactions that more than compensate for the fleeting pleasures of consumerism. Simplicity blossoms in community and connects us to the world with a sense of belonging and common purpose. Simplicity is a lighter lifestyle that fits elegantly into the real world of the twenty-first century.

EWTT: Does a country’s definition of wellbeing and the way metrics are designed to measure this have a lot to do with either spreading or counteracting a consumerist culture?  Do you think the concept of Gross National Happiness encapsulates voluntary simplicity in its core?

There is an old saying that “we treasure what we measure.” If our measure of meaning in life is based on money (for example, GNP or gross national product) then that is what we will tend to collectively treasure. If we shift our measures from money to well-being, then that will be reflected in our cultural definition of “progress.”

Let me place this in a historical perspective. The highly regarded historian, Arnold Toynbee, invested a lifetime studying the rise and fall of civilizations throughout history. Drawing upon his vast knowledge of human history, he summarized the essence of a civilization’s growth in what he called The Law of Progressive Simplification. He wrote that the progress of a civilization was not accurately measured by its material growth or its conquest of land and people. Instead, the true measure of growth lies in a civilization’s ability to transfer increasing amounts of energy and attention from the material side of life to the non-material side—to areas such as personal growth, family relationships, contact with nature, creative expression in music, theatre, and other arts, in a rich community life, and more.

The life-cycle of an individual provides a useful insight into measures of well-being. From the time that a person is born until his or her late adolescent years, there is usually a tremendous amount of physical growth. Then, in the late teen years, physical growth stabilizes and the person can continue to develop for the rest of his or her lifetime in ways that don’t involve growing bigger physically—in empathy and compassion, in intellectual understanding, and in soulful connection. In a similar way, a portion of our species has experienced a period of extraordinary period of material growth and is now moving into a stage where further growth could be primarily of a non-physical nature. In turn, this would liberate resources for those in desperate need and foster a more peaceful world. We require measures to reflect this natural but profound transition in our collective lives.

A quote from the philosopher and feminist Simone de Beauvoir helps clarify this. She wrote: “Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.” On the one hand, if we seek only to maintain ourselves, then no matter how grand our style of living might be, we are doing little more than “only not dying.” On the other hand, if we strive only for a meaningful existence without securing the material foundation that supports our lives, then our physical existence is in jeopardy and the opportunity to surpass ourselves becomes little more than a utopian dream.  We require a new partnership where the material and the non-material aspects of life co-evolve and grow in concert with one another. Working together, they can produce ways of living that are materially sustainable, personally rewarding, and culturally rich and engaging. Returning to your question, as we mature as societies, we require measurements that go far beyond material growth to include the richness of non-material areas of development.

Voluntary Simplicity by Duane Elgin


EWTT: Isn’t it hugely challenging for the person on the street to help shape a better future for the world, when they are so much a part of a system that requires them to work long hours just to make both ends meet? What would you suggest to enable a transition?

DUANE ELGIN: Yes, it is hugely challenging for individuals to make changes when the overall system of living encourages consumerist lifestyles. Our current economic systems are not designed for lives of sustainable prosperity. We require a deep redesign of our manner of living that supports simpler ways of living and, to me, this will involve a return to valuing community and smaller scales of living.

For example, a new village movement could transform urban life around the world. A flowering of diverse, neighborhood-scale communities could replace the alienating landscape of today’s massive cities and homogeneous suburbs. “Eco-villages” and “eco-neighborhoods” of a few hundred persons could provide a practical scale and foundation for a sustainable future and become important islands of security, camaraderie, learning and innovation in a world of sweeping change. Human-sized living environments would encourage diverse experiments in cooperative living that touch the Earth lightly and are uniquely adapted to each locale.

I can imagine families living in an “eco-home” that is nested within an “eco-village,” that, in turn, is nested within an “eco-city,” and so on up to the scale of the bio-region, nation, and world. Each eco-village of 100 -200 persons could have a distinct character, architecture, and local economy. Common to many of these new villages could be a child-care facility and play area, an organic garden, a common house for community meetings, celebrations, and regular meals together, a recycling and composting area, an open space, and a crafts and shop area. As well, each could offer a variety of types of work to the local economy such as child care, aging care, organic gardening, green building, conflict resolution and other skills that provide fulfilling employment for many. New forms of community could provide places for meaningful work, raising healthy children, celebrating life and living in ways that honors the Earth and future generations.

EWTT: What is role of alternative media in creating a better future? How can we improve our messaging to create a less consumerist world? What do we say better, and how do we say it better to help encourage action? What action would make the most meaningful impact to create that better future?

DUANE ELGIN: The profound consumerist bias of contemporary mass media creates an impossible double bind: Many people use the consumption levels and patterns portrayed in TV advertising to establish their sense of identity and measure their personal well-being while those same consumption patterns are simultaneously devastating the ecological foundations on which our future depends. TV commercials are far more than a pitch for a particular product—they are also advertisements for the attitudes, values, and lifestyles that surround consumption of that product. The clothing, cars, settings, and other elements that create the context for an advertisement send strong, implicit messages about the standards of living and patterns of behavior that are the norm for society. More sustainable patterns of living and consuming seldom appear on television as these themes threaten the legitimacy and potency of the television-induced cultural hypnosis generated by mass entertainment, mass advertising, and mass consumption. By default, societies are left with programming and advertising that selectively portray and powerfully reinforce a materialistic orientation toward life. By programming television to achieve commercial success, the mind-set of entire nations is being programmed for ecological failure. How can we change this?

First, we require ecologically oriented advertising to balance the onslaught of pro-consumerist messages and to foster a mind-set of authentic choice in our consumption behavior. To balance the psychological impact of the one-sided avalanche of commercials, we need “ecological ads” or “Earth-commercials” that encourage people to consume with an appreciation of their impact on the world’s dwindling resources and deteriorating environment. Earth commercials could be 60-second mini-stories portraying some aspect of a sustainable and meaningful future and could be produced by students, non-profit organizations, and local community groups working in partnership with local television stations. These ads for the Earth could be low in cost and high in creativity, and done with playfulness, compassion, and humor. Once underway, a virtual avalanche of Earth commercials could emerge from around the world and be shared over TV and the Internet.

Second, because television teaches continuously about the lifestyles and values that are the “norm” for society, we require entertainment programming that actively explores issues of sustainability and Earth-friendly approaches to living. Television teaches by what it ignores as well as by what it addresses. If an ecological consciousness and an ethic of sustainability are missing from entertainment programming, then they are likely to be missing from our cultural consciousness as well. We could get a tremendous cultural boost to sustainability from entertainment programming that explores ecological concerns and innovative ways of living.

Third, a mature citizenry requires expanded documentaries and investigative reports describing, in depth, the global challenges we now face. Because the overwhelming majority of prime-time hours on television are devoted to programming for amusement, we are entertainment rich and knowledge poor. Our situation is like that of a long-distance runner who prepares for a marathon by eating primarily junk food. We are filling our social brain with a diet of entertainment at the very time our democracies face problems of marathon proportions. We are trivializing our species consciousness at the very time we need mature communication about our pathway into the future. This is a recipe for disaster. We need a rapid and quantum increase in the level of ecologically relevant programming and a new social commitment to investigative journalism that awakens mainstream public attention to themes of sustainability.

EWTT: Take us through your more recent work, ‘The Living Universe.’ Is the paradigm that we live in a ‘living universe’ as opposed to a ‘mechanistic’ one seen as ‘new age thinking’ or is it premised on science? What are the implications of this worldview for change agents, as well as for civil society?  In particular, what does it imply for those looking to raise ‘collective consciousness’ by advocating for positive change?

DUANE ELGIN: Regarding the universe as dead at its foundations is basic to consumer societies: It makes sense to exploit what appears dead for the benefit of what seems most alive — ourselves. However, this assumption is now being questioned by both science and the world’s wisdom traditions.

Modern science now regards our universe as:
1) almost entirely invisible (96 percent of the known universe is comprised of invisible energy and matter),
2) completely unified and able to communicate with itself instantaneously in non-local ways that transcend the limits of the speed of light,
3) sustained by the flow-through of an unimaginably vast amount of energy, and
4) free at its deepest, quantum levels.

While not proving the universe is alive, these and other attributes from science do point strongly in that direction. This is not a new understanding. More than two thousand years ago, Plato said “the universe is a single living creature that embraces all living creatures within it.” All of the world’s wisdom traditions have emerged from a similar understanding.

What difference does it make if we regard the universe as dead or alive at its foundations? When children are starving, climate is destabilizing, oil is dwindling, and population is growing, why put our attention here?

Consumerism is a rational response to living in a dead universe. In a material universe, consumerism offers a source of identity and a measure of significance and accomplishment. Where do I find pleasure in a non-living universe? In material things. How do I know that I amount to anything? By how many things I have accumulated. How should I relate to the world? By taking advantage of that which is dead on behalf of the living. Consumerism and exploitation are natural outcomes of a dead universe perspective. However, if we view the foundations of the universe as being intensely alive, then it makes sense to minimize material clutter and needless busyness and develop the areas where we feel most alive — in nurturing relationships, caring communities, creative expressions, time in nature, and service to others.

If we see the universe as mostly barren and devoid of life, then it is natural to see our time on Earth as primarily a struggle for material existence, and it makes sense that we humans would pull apart in conflict. However, if we see the universe as intensely alive and our journey here as one of discovery and learning, then it makes sense that we would pull together in cooperation in order to realize this magnificent potential.

Our view of the universe as either dead or alive creates the context within which we understand who we are and where we are going. Where a dead-universe perspective generates alienation, environmental destruction, and despair, a living-universe perspective generates feelings of communion, stewardship, and the promise of a higher pathway for humanity. Although the idea of a living universe has ancient roots in human experience, it is now radically new as the frontiers of modern science cut away superstition and reveal the authentic mystery, subtlety, and aliveness of our cosmic home.

EWTT: You often use the analogy of humanity being in its ‘teenage’ years going through the ritual of fire – metaphorically representing the serious ecological and social crises facing the planet. What gives you the confidence that this teenager won’t commit suicide and does emerge from this phase as a wise adult?  Will Nature even wait for humanity’s adulthood?

DUANE ELGIN: As you say, one way of regarding ourselves is as a maturing species that is going through the growth pains of our collective adolescence. Our self-image could therefore be that of a young species that is capable and gifted with untapped potentials. We could see ourselves as immersed in the predictable struggles and turmoil of our adolescent years and ready to move into our early adulthood where we are concerned with the well-being of the Earth and the long-term future of the human family. Therefore, despite humanity’s seeming immaturity in the past, we could be close to taking a major step forward in our evolution into early adulthood as a species.

Although many people describe our species behavior as rebellious, reckless, and shortsighted, many others also pointed out beneficial aspects of our adolescent stage of development. Adolescents have a huge amount of energy and enthusiasm and, with their courage and daring, are ready to dive into life and make a difference in the world. Many teenagers have a hidden sense of greatness and feel that, if given a chance, can accomplish wonderful things. Overall, the archetype of a maturing species explains a lot about our current behaviors and contains within it the promise of a hopeful future. As we grow into our early adulthood as a species, we can recognize we are an integral part of the living universe, consider the impact of our actions generations into the future, place meaningful work over pleasure seeking, measure ourselves by our soulful character, and patiently work to restore the Earth.


About the Interviewer: 

Bhavani Prakash is the Founder of Eco WALK the Talk .com. She is passionate about the role of individuals and communities in bringing about the much needed change we need to see in the world.  She was an economist in her previous avatar, and is now an environmental and social justice activist using social media as well as offline community participation in her advocacy of a greener, fairer and happier planet. She writes and conducts talks and workshops on sustainability and can be contacted at bhavani[at] Follow Eco WALK the Talk on Facebook, TwitterLinked IN and YouTube 


Further Links you may be interested in:

Dr Lester Brown: We’re really on the edge of some fundamental changes  

Dr Tom Crompton: Intrinsic vs Extrinsic Values in Environmental Communication 

Dr Vandana Shiva: Traditional Knowledge, Biodiversity and Sustainable Living 

Joe Brewer: An Interdisciplinary approach to understanding complex issues  


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Lester Brown: ‘We’re really on the edge of some fundamental changes…’ Thu, 06 Sep 2012 05:02:03 +0000 by John Wiseman

Lester Brown

Lester Brown is the well-renowned author of the Plan B series and recent book World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse.  His distinguished career, spanning agricultural policy, international development and environmental analysis, has seen him found two major environmental research institutes – the WorldWatch Institute in 1974 and the Earth Policy Institute in 2001 – and author or co-author 50 books. He is currently the President of the Earth Policy Institute based in Washington D.C.

He speaks to  Professor John Wiseman who is currently Professorial Fellow at the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute and Melbourne School of Population Health, on 31st July 2012.

JOHN WISEMAN: If you had just a few sentences to summarise the key messages you most wanted to get across in writing Plan B and World on the Edge, what would you say?

LESTER BROWN: The two biggest challenges, I think, that the world faces right now are the need to stabilise the climate and to stabilise population. Neither of these are easy but we’re well on our way to stabilising population. There are now 46 countries that have, essentially, zero population growth and a large part of Asia that is China, along with Korea, and Japan’s already stabilised its population. China’s going to be there in a matter of years so that’s a big chunk of the world. Then Europe,Western and Eastern Europe, have already stabilised their populations.

North America is moving in the right direction. Latin America is doing surprisingly well. Brazil’s population is projected to grow by 12% between now and 2050, only 12% which means they’re getting the brakes on pretty nicely, too. So the two big areas we have to concentrate on now are the Indian subcontinent, which has a total of 1.6 billion people. That’s India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal and so forth, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Those are the two big population growth areas. They are also the two areas where most of the poverty is concentrated so we need to really concentrate on getting the brakes on population growth in those two regions of the world.

If we can do that, and it’s a combination of, of course, making sure reproductive healthcare and family planning services are available but it’s also education, making sure that children everywhere get at least an elementary school education, girls as well as boys. Then, we can begin to bring the birth rate down in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Then, we’ll be on the way home.

JOHN WISEMAN: And in relation to climate?

LESTER BROWN: Climate is a much more difficult issue. In contrast to population where 46 countries have already stabilised populations, there aren’t too many countries that have stabilised carbon emissions yet so that’s really a global challenge for us.

The good news is that in the United States, carbon emissions are starting to drop and I think are going to continue to drop very substantially during this decade.

The two big sources of carbon emissions in the US, as in most of the world, are coal and oil. We have, currently, 492 coal-fired power plants in the United States. Of those, 109 are scheduled to close within, if not this year, next year or very soon and there are more coming. We have a national campaign now that’s led by the Sierra Club called the Beyond Coal Campaign and the goal is to close every coal-fired power plant in the United States. Sierra’s working with many local groups, health groups, environmental groups, hundreds and hundreds of them across the country to close these plants. Mayor Bloomberg of New York in July of last year gave the Sierra Club Beyond Coal Campaign $50 million. This is important, not just because it’s $50 million, although that, obviously, is important in and of itself, but it’s because Michael Bloomberg, one of the most successful businessmen of his generation, almost a household name, is the one who’s fuelling this effort. So I’m very optimistic on closing coal-fired power plants.

Now, with gasoline use, we have a number of trends coming together, some economic, some social, some political. One is that the US automobile fleet has started to shrink. In 2008, it was 248 million. 2009, it dropped to 246 million, 2010, to 242 million. That’s the last year for which we have complete data but I think it continued in 2011 and is going to continue in 2012. So in the United States, the growth of the automobile fleet’s been underway for a century now, is starting to decline.

Beyond that, the fuel efficiency of cars is increasing very fast in the US and this is partly because of the goals created by President Obama. When he was bailing out Detroit a couple of years ago, he got some commitments from them and one was to double the fuel efficiency of new cars sold by 2025 or, stated otherwise, new cars sold in this country in 2025 will use only half as much gasoline as those sold in 2010. So in 15 years, we’re cutting fuel use per car in half.

Beyond that, there’s now a cultural shift occurring in this country with young people. They are not part of the car culture in the way that my generation was and we, particularly growing up in a rural community, the car was how we socialised. When you’re 17 you’ve got a driver’s licence and you’ve got a car, or a pick-up truck, something you could drive, and that’s how you got around and got to see your friends in a rural community.

Today, we’re a largely urban society and so young people aren’t part of the car culture in the way that we were. There’s a real shift going on. They live in cities, most of them, and they use public transportation, they use bicycles. The Bike-Share Program, if you look at the people on these bikes, they’re between 20 and 40. They’re not between 60 and 80. No, it’s young people who are really taking to bikes and seeing them as their transport mode. So the combination of bikes and public transportation is where young people are today.

Two generations ago, the dream was to have a house in the suburbs and a car and so forth. That dream doesn’t exist anymore for young people. They’re not going to the suburbs. They don’t really want anything to do with the suburbs. They want to live in town.

JOHN WISEMAN: You’ve described some extremely optimistic indicators around energy efficiency and the shift from fossil fuel to renewable energy. If I was to ask you the biggest obstacles – the one or two biggest roadblocks in relation to solving the climate challenge, how would you describe them? 

LESTER BROWN: It would be the vested interests of big oil, and big coal and the influence they have, particularly in the Republican Party. They put a lot of money in political campaigns and now there are no limits on what they can put in so they’re just buying everything in sight.

Nonetheless, the trends are pretty clear and the gains in fuel efficiency, the cultural shift in young people regarding cars, is happening and it’s very difficult for them to alter that.

I saw an article about NASCAR recently…you know, automobile racing, car racing, and they’ve suddenly begun to panic because young people aren’t going to the races and so they’re seeing a shrinking audience. It’s an interesting question because I don’t think NASCAR’s going to last forever. Years, maybe, but not forever because the idea of having a powerful car with a lot of horsepower under the hood, it’s just not where young people are today. So these cultural shifts are more difficult to measure, usually, than economic shifts and they’re more difficult to anticipate as well but we’re clearly seeing a cultural shift and young people in this country are not, most of them, not part of the car culture.

JOHN WISEMAN: So do you feel, therefore, that the cultural shifts that you’ve talked about are sufficient to overcome the vested interest roadblocks that you’ve mentioned? 

LESTER BROWN: They are. The automobile industry, behind the scenes, do things… to prevent heavy investment in public transportation…they insist that we need to repair the roads and not build new transit facilities, so they’re behind the scenes and they’re doing things but the tide is pretty strong and it’s clear.

John Wiseman: Which leads me to a question about urgency. Many people will say that, yes, there are many good things happening in relation to energy efficiency and renewable energy, but we also know how quickly greenhouse gas emissions are rising and what the science tells us about the global temperature changes locked in and so on. When people say to you, “that’s all good …but it’s too late” what do you say to them? 

LESTER BROWN: When we use the term “Is it too late,” we have to say, “Is it too late for what?” Is it too late to prevent climate change from spiralling out of control? I don’t think anyone knows. We have to hope it’s not and then act accordingly with the urgency that that implies.

We’re seeing evidence now, almost every day, that the climate system is changing and this is obviously affecting the food prospects because agriculture, as it exists today, evolved over an 11,000 year period of rather remarkable climate stability. I mean, there were a few blips here and there and a mini ice age in the 13th century, but basically 11,000 years of pretty stable climate. So agriculture systems are designed to maximise production with that climate system but that climate system is now changing so with each passing year, the climate system and the agricultural system are more and more out of sync with each other and that is a very difficult thing to analyse and anticipate.

We know it’s happening. It’s inevitable and the question is can we get carbon emissions coming down soon enough to avert the worst consequences of climate change? We’re not going to avert all of them. We’re already experiencing them. I guess the question is, can we keep climate change from spiralling out of control? I don’t know the answer to that question but we certainly have to try.

JOHN WISEMAN: Returning to the point you’ve made about energy efficiency and the transition from fossil fuels to renewables, how much do you also think that the third element in that transition that needs to change is a reduction in the aggregate growth of the consumption of goods and services? How important is that in the mix? 

LESTER BROWN: Well, another interesting thing about the cultural shift is that the idea of acquiring property…starting with a small house and getting a bigger one and so forth, that acquisition of material things doesn’t exist with young people in the way it did with an earlier generation; the generations that were shaped by the Depression and World War Two, for example.

There was a period when growth was everything and more material possessions was everything but I think we’re beginning to leave that behind now. Values and attitudes are changing. The acquisition of material wealth is not something that looms very high in the minds of young people today. They don’t want to be bothered with it.

JOHN WISEMAN: How much of that is true, do you think, outside of the developed world – in China, Korea and India, where there is still considerable poverty and – many people would say – considerable need to expand material consumption?

LESTER BROWN: Well, the interesting question is what these countries are facing. I mean, their desire is to be like us and so they’re trying to adopt a 20th century economic model in the 21st century. Now, what if we sat back and said, “If you were designing an economy for the world today or some component like a transport system, if you were designing that for the 21st century, what would it look like and how would it be different from the one we’ve inherited from the 20th century?” The answer is it would be very different. If you were developing a new economy today, you’d have to take into account land scarcity, water scarcity, carbon emissions, a whole series of things that were not of particular importance in decades past but now they are.

So the question is how fast that rethinking will come.I remember doing a seminar for graduate students at Tsinghua University which is sometimes referred to as the MIT of China. It’s located in Beijing, and we were talking about cars and the future and I said, “Well, you know, you’re not going to be able to do what we did.” One student said, “But that’s our dream. That’s what we want, we want to do that,” and I said, “You know, in the United States, we have three cars for every four people. If you get three cars for every four people in China, you will have nine hundred million cars. If you get all the cars in the world today squeezed into one country, one third of one country because two thirds of China is uninhabitable,” I said, “that will not be a dream. That will be a nightmare.”

These are engineers, they should be thinking about how you design a transportation system for the 21st century, not how do you copy one that evolved during the 20th century. Forget the imitation. Be original. Be yourselves. Ask the relevant questions for today. Don’t ask how could we do what they did in the last century. That’s not where you want to be.

JOHN WISEMAN: I’m interested in your views about theories of change – how change happens. Can you talk a bit more about your view about the importance of cultural and social change as opposed to the importance of technological innovation? 

LESTER BROWN: Well, Malcolm Gladwell pioneered the concept of social tipping points, of political tipping points, and the interesting thing about tipping points is almost by definition, they’re difficult to anticipate, at least to anticipate accurately. Sometimes we don’t even see them coming. I mean, who saw the Berlin Wall coming down, you know, until it actually went down or I look at the Arab Spring of 2010 and it changed the government in almost every country in a large part of the Arab world and it happened in sort of several countries simultaneously.

These weren’t sort of random events. They’d reached a kind of tipping point suddenly. Things began to change. Partly it’s political, part of it is demographic; a lot of young people in the 15 to 30 age group. It’s technological; they have the internet now so they can organise, they can exchange information. It changes the whole ballgame. It’s not just a few adjustments here and there. It really fundamentally changes things.

We have an effort in Italy right now, led by a comedian, Beppe Grillo, to challenge the existing political structures, not of any particular party, just the traditional political structures, and they’ve begun running candidates for office just a week ago, two weeks ago. A 31-year old was elected Mayor of Palma, for example. They’re running candidates for all the local elections and everything. I mean, it’s amazing to see it happen and we’re going to see more of that.

We’re really on the edge of some fundamental changes that we can’t anticipate associated with the internet and information moving on the internet. It will override some of the traditional constraints of the systems but in ways that we cannot now easily imagine.

JOHN WISEMAN: So, given that, I’d like to ask you to put on your most optimistic hat and imagine we are sitting here in 2030 and we are discussing a world in which a really serious shift has begun towards the kind of changes which would have a real chance of preventing runaway climate change. Bearing in mind your point about how unpredictable the future can be, can you tell me how that change has occurred? 

LESTER BROWN: Most of us don’t like to change. I don’t like to change and I’ll go to great lengths to avoid changing sometimes but you reach these tipping points and then everything changes.

The United States before World War Two, if you’d conducted a poll on December 6th 1941, the day before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour, and said, you know, “Should we go to war?” probably 90% would have said, “No, we don’t want to get involved in another world war.” If you’d conducted that poll on Monday, December 8th, probably 90% would have said, “Yes, we’ve got to go,” and so it was just one event, that surprise attack. It was very successful from a military point of view on Pearl Harbour. I mean, the Japanese sunk half our Pacific fleet there in just one fell sweep but everything changed and we mobilised, we totally restructured the US industrial economy, not in decades, not in years but in a matter of months. Part of the key to that was banning the sale of automobiles.

President Roosevelt, early 1942, I think it was April 1st, and it wasn’t April Fool’s Day, I mean, it wasn’t an April Fool’s joke, he said, “We ought to ban the sale of automobiles in the United States.” Then the car companies realised that they weren’t going to be making cars for a long time; they were going to be making tanks and planes. It created an extraordinary military machine and turned the tide in the process.

So it’s these tipping points that are difficult to anticipate but I think within the next five years, we’re going to be surprised at how fast things have changed and how fast we have changed, whether it’s in response to climate change and recognising the need to stabilise climate. I mean, up until now, climate change has mostly been someone else. You know, we see it on TV. It’s a flood or a heatwave in Moscow but suddenly this past summer was sort of like that.

In this country, we started with a drought and then the wildfires in Texas and then flooding in the Mississippi and then Hurricane Irene and so forth; the tornado in Tuscaloosa and then in Joplin. I mean, it largely destroyed two middle-sized towns. I realised that the news channels were becoming weather channels. set aside on a Saturday afternoon, 1.30 to 3.00, to watch the world track and field championships in Korea on NBC. This was on a Saturday. I turned on NBC channel at 1.30 and I didn’t get the track and field championships. I got Hurricane Irene. This is a major news network that had gone into around-the-clock coverage of the hurricane. It was a huge hurricane and it affected a lot of people on the East Coast. That, I think, is a sign of the times when news channels become weather channels and if you look at channels now and sort of think about it, they spend a lot more time on weather than they used to and people are interested in it. They’re concerned about that.

JOHN WISEMAN: Although the challenge then becomes how to join the dots between the weather and climate. Do you think people are starting to join those dots?

LESTER BROWN: They are. I liken it to recognising the link between smoking and health 20 years ago and the tobacco company CEOs are under oath saying, “There’s no proof of a link between smoking and health,” and get away with it. Then, within a year or two, everything had changed and they couldn’t say anything because no one would listen to them and no elected member of Congress would be seen in public with a tobacco company CEO. It just changed that fast. The Tobacco Institute used to be here in town, staffed by 300 people. Totally dismantled; forced to dismantle by NGOs and public opinion. I mean, it was amazing to see it happen. It happened very quickly…it had reached the tipping point and suddenly it was an entirely new ball game.

JOHN WISEMANBearing in mind everything you’ve said about tipping points and given that at the end of the day tipping points are, by definition, to some extent, unpredictable, what’s your view about the highest priorities for action by people who would like to ensure, that when the tipping points occur, that responses can be as effective as possible? What are the most important things to be doing at the moment?

LESTER BROWN: The question I get most often as I travel around the world is, people ask me, “What can I do, what can I do?” and I think they expect me to say, “Recycle your newspapers, change your light bulbs,” and so on. Those lifestyle changes are important but we now have to change the system and that means becoming politically active, not for one party or another but to support the Beyond Coal campaign, for example. And be prepared to write letters to your Congressman to lobby, to demonstrate, you know, in front of a coal-fired power plant if necessary or in front of a utilities office. It can embarrass companies. There are banks in New York, investment banks, that if you threaten them with a demonstration, they’ll almost certainly think twice about going ahead on something because whether it’s Goldman Sachs or Bank of America or whoever, they don’t want their image smirched.

Having demonstrations and people with signs walking around creates that image that something is wrong and for people to start thinking something is wrong with a bank is not healthy for the bank. So we see environmental groups getting investment banks to agree not to invest in coal or any company that supports the development of coal. These things can become important and the coal-mining companies can’t raise capital as easily as they used to. No one wants to be associated with it. So those are the kinds of things that have happened and they happen quickly and they can have extraordinary consequences.

My bottom line feeling is things are going to change much faster than we realise and I think that change is probably more evident here in the United States right now where carbon emissions are dropping very fast as coal-fired power plants are closed and as gasoline use drops. Another interesting linkage between the two…42% of the diesel fuel used in the freight sector, rail freight sector, is used to move coal. If we’re not moving coal anymore, suddenly the demand for diesel is going to drop markedly.

JOHN WISEMAN: I’m very interested in what you’ve been saying about the United States because, certainly in the Australian media and to some extent in Europe, the story is sometimes told that, “Well, look, you’ve got a congress that’s controlled by very conservative forces, Tea Party Republicans and so on. There’s no sign of Cap and Trade coming back…the United States is not in a leadership position.” You’re telling, to some extent, a different story there, at least about the level of cultural change and, indeed, the harder indicators of shifts in energy usage and so on.

LESTER BROWN: Yeah, and the interesting thing is it’s happening because of a mix of things. If I were to pick the two most important things underway right now, one would be reducing gasoline use by cars, of new cars sold, by half, between 2010 and 2025. That’s the US government-designed policy.

The other is the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, closing coal-fired power plants. Now, there’s some overlap because EPA issues, restrictions on mercury emissions from coal plants, what-have-you, that makes it more difficult for them to stay in business. So we have two major initiatives, one primarily government, the other primarily in the NGO sector.

John Wiseman: If you had a minute or two with the world’s key decision-makers and you had two or three sentences in which you really wanted to convey very sharply, the most important priorities in relation to climate and ecological challenges, what would you say to them in two or three sentences?

LESTER BROWN: I’d say the biggest challenge we face is stabilising climate and that means closing coal-fired power plants, replacing the coal with wind and solar and geothermal energy.

The second big challenge we face is stabilising population and that’s a challenge that’s really concentrated in the Indian sub-continent and Sub-Saharan Africa and what we need to do there is to eradicate poverty, which we have the resources to do now, eradicate poverty and make sure that women everywhere have access to reproductive healthcare and family planning services.

John Wiseman: Thank you very much.



Professor John Wiseman is currently Professorial Fellow at the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute and Melbourne School of Population Health.

This interview originally appeared in Post Carbon Pathways, a website which aims to strengthen the understanding of the actions needed to create rapid, large-scale transitions to a just and sustainable post carbon future. 

Photo Courtesy: Lester Brown from Wikipedia/Creative Commons



EWTT: Dr Tom Crompton: Intrinsic vs Extrinsic Values in Environmental Communication
EWTT: Joe Brewer: An interdisciplinary approach to understanding complex issues
EWTT: Aubrey Meyer: Contraction & Convergence: An urgent global imperative to tackle climate change
EWTT: Pen Hadow: Melting Arctic Ice and How it will affect Asia
Whither Go Climate Refugees?
EWTT: Who cares If Bangalesh drowns?






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Dr Tom Crompton: Intrinsic vs Extrinsic Values in Environmental Communication Mon, 28 May 2012 05:48:29 +0000

Dr Tom Crompton

By Bhavani Prakash

Dr. Tom Crompton is a Change Strategist at World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) UK, and if you’re intrigued by his job description, suffice it to say he has been involved in some cutting-edge research on going to the heart of what should be the approach of communication campaigns – of environmental organisations and those of the non-profit sector in general.

Dr. Crompton stresses the importance of engaging people’s intrinsic or non-materialistic values, versus extrinsic or materialistic ones, to achieve lasting and positive behaviour change. He is one the people behind the project called Common Cause: The Case for Working with Cultural Values.  Much of his work can be found on the thought-provoking website called Values and

EWTT: How did your interest in human psychology and environmentalism evolve?

Dr. Tom Crompton: I have worked at WWF-UK for ten years .The first five years, I worked on international trade and investment policy – for example, World Trade Organisation (WTO) law. I was convinced then and am still convinced now that the international trade regime is crucially important from the sustainability perspective to ensure that we are producing and trading in more sustainable products with lower carbon footprints. Several senior negotiators were themselves deeply convinced for the need for more fundamental change to the trade regime on a sustainability basis but they’d say, “look, our hands are tied, we don’t enjoy the political space, we don’t experience public political pressure for more proportional change” and as a result the change that we saw was small.

I think that forced us really to reflect on what is it that creates  political space and pressure for more proportional change, what is it that motivates people to engage with the political process, whether it is to lobby with members of parliament or to demonstrate on the streets or however else they may express their political frustration. Some social psychologists came back to us and said that one of the things they see as missing at the moment from environmental campaigning or indeed third sector campaigning generally, is an understanding of values and the importance of values in underpinning people’s commitment to engage in political process and to express concern about social and environmental issues.

EWTT: In this context can you introduce the work you do with the Common Cause Project

Dr. Tom Crompton: We’re working to open debate with a wide range of third sector organizations – not just environmental organizations but also development and disability organizations, children’s charities and animal welfare charities – about the cultural values that seem to consistently underpin expression of concern about a wide range of social and environmental issues.

One implication of this work is that we should be designing or shaping our campaigns and communications, and indeed our entire external engagement, in a way which helps to engage and strengthen those values. These are values which almost everybody seems to hold already. It’s a question of bringing them to the fore, because they underpin not just our concern about environmental issues,  but also the concern about a wide range of other social issues.

It seems that when we activate what psychologists call extrinsic values -which are concerns about things like wealth or social status or image, those values tend to suppress the importance that  people attach to intrinsic values, or values associated with social and environmental concerns.

So there is an antagonistic relationship between these two sets of values.  From that we suggest it is important that NGOs think carefully about the occasions in which they may be drawn to appeal to extrinsic values in the course of pursuing a particular campaign outcome. For example, drawing attention to the money that might be saved through increased energy conservation measures like turning down the central heating thermostat or drawing attention to the social image or status that might be achieved through buying a luxury hybrid car. These are messages that may be effective in encouraging uptake of that particular behavior but are likely to have collateral damages.

This work also points to the possibility of beginning to work across a wide range of NGOs in new coalitions, with groups which hitherto have not really collaborated. Many NGOs can find common cause to engage those more intrinsic values and begin to tackle and remove those things which tend to engage and strengthen extrinsic values.

For example, we might find common cause in tackling an influence which currently serves to strengthen unhelpful extrinsic values at a cultural level, namely, the impact of advertising. We have begun to build a coalition of NGOs working again on a very wide set of issues to ask what’s the role of advertising in potentially frustrating emergence of greater public engagements and more  stronger expressions of public concern on all of our issues. But we might also work to help strengthen intrinsic values – for example, working with those who set the standards for teacher-training to introduce work to help children reflect on the importance of kindness in their lives.

Image Courtesy:

EWTT: Our society has become so materialistic. Is there a danger that there may be no common ground if we don’t address the ‘what’s in it for me?’ Are people going to listen to messages for less materialistic values?

Dr. Tom Crompton: There are several dimensions to that question and it is a very critical question.  You wouldn’t embark on what we are suggesting unless you are convinced that the problems we confront are really quite immense and will require really fundamental changes in terms of the level of ambition we show to respond to those problems.

If you really believed that a few behavioural changes in the private sphere in terms of domestic energy efficiency savings or a bit of green consumption were going to be sufficient to tackle a problem like climate change, or if you believe that increasing people’s willingness to donate to development charities was really going to be sufficient to tackle the problem of global poverty, then you probably look at what we are proposing and suggest that it is too ambitious.

So the first thing to say is that the scale of challenge that we are confronting at the moment would require an ambitious response and at the moment we are not seeing that level of ambition.

The second thing to say is that whilst it’s true that on some indicators, it seems that some cultures are becoming more materialistic, and are holding those extrinsic values to be more important, in most nations, people still hold intrinsic values to be more important. In the UK, if you ask people what’s important to them they first and foremost mention those intrinsic values. They voice the importance of the connection to friends and family, they talk about self- direction, the importance of self -determination and creativity, they talk about sense of social justice and the sense of environmental concern. Extrinsic values such as wealth or power rate less importantly.  The evidence also seems very clear that these intrinsic values are there in everybody to be engaged.

We recently conducted a study with psychologists from University of Cardiff where we took 750 ordinary citizens from the Cardiff community, and asked them what values were important to them, we gave them a value survey and we picked the top 10% for whom the extrinsic or materialistic values were most important.

We then asked half of these people to reflect for a few minutes on the importance of affiliation to friends and family, the importance of  broad-mindedness. We made no mention of the environment. We asked the other half to reflect on the importance of wealth or popularity. Then we interviewed each participant about climate change, amongst other things.  We transcribed the interviews and sent them a linguist who analysed the interviews without knowing whether a participant had been asked to think about intrinsic or extrinsic values.

We found  that even though these people were by disposition more inclined towards extrinsic values, simply asking them to pause for a few minutes  to reflect on the importance of affiliation towards  friends and family or broadmindedness led to a statistically significant increase in the extent to which they saw climate change as being something that they felt they had some personal responsibility to address and something that they wanted to see addressed because of its importance for a wider society and not just for their own self- interest.

What we take from an experiment like that, and it corroborates several other lines of evidence, is that those intrinsic values matter for a lot for people and that it’s possible to engage them even in the short term. We are not necessarily talking here about changing in values. It’s more about thinking carefully about which values people already hold, which of these underpin a greater commitment to express social or environmental concern, and engaging with these in the course of our campaigns or communications.

EWTT:  Companies often say they are bound by short-term results, such as sales targets or increasing shareholder returns, which relate to the extrinsic values you talk about. They tend to initiate sustainability initiatives only if it makes financial sense. How do you convince them to undertake them because it’s the right thing to do?

Dr. Tom Crompton: It is a challenge certainly. What we are suggesting goes beyond the business case for sustainability. It goes beyond simply pointing to those things that it’s in a business’s short-term economic interests  to do, for example increasing energy efficiency or supply chain efficiency in a way which will simultaneously save money. We need to move to a situation where the responsibility that companies have to the societies in which they operate is seen to extend beyond simply making money.

Many companies are already demonstrating willingness to go beyond the business case for sustainable development and are taking unilateral action. It is of course easier for family owned companies or cooperatives to do that than it is for publicly owned companies, but even in the case of publically owned companies there are examples where at the very least they come together and demand a regulatory intervention or legislative intervention in order to shift the level of the playing field.  In the UK, The Prince of Wales’ Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change calls of government to enact new and longer-term policies to tackle climate change. Members of this group recognise that some steps to tackle climate change incur economic costs. But if together they can change the level of the playing field then these competitive costs could be equally shared across the competitors.

The other thing is to widen our concept of what corporate social responsibility means, to recognize that companies have a responsibility not just with immediate material foot prints of their activities –  how much carbon do they produce, how much tropical rainforest is cut down in the course of them sourcing their raw materials – but also with what you might call mindprint. Mindprint includes impacts on cultural values, and that’s affected in a whole range of ways: the way in which a company advertises, the values that are activated in the course of using the products it manufactures, or how a company manages decision making processes. These include their HR practices and internally recognizing that many people work for business and that it is an important part of their lives. When you spend 40 hours a week in a business, the culture of that business is likely to impact your values as an individual. So there is a whole range of ways in which we are arguing businesses have a responsibility to look at not only their footprints but also their mindprint, which may be even greater than the impact that they have through their direct environment impacts – their footprint.

EWTT: Can businesses exploit intrinsic values in their advertising, and can this cause harm?

Dr. Tom Crompton: Many businesses are well aware of the importance of intrinsic values in building a loyal customer base and clearly those intrinsic values are the ones often reflected in terms of a company’s brand or its advertising. A lot of advertising appeals to intrinsic values in terms of strength of family relationships or connection to nature. The report we produced last year called ‘Think of Me as Evil’ was an attempt to open some of these ethical debates as they relate to advertising. Nobody knows for sure what the cultural or social impact of advertising that appeals to intrinsic values are, but some of the social psychologists we have worked with constructed quite persuasive arguments that actually such ads may be unhelpful. What these ads may actually serve to do is to increase people’s cynicism about intrinsic values or to create the impression that those values, when they come from elsewhere, are being deployed manipulatively in order to get them to do something; whether that’s to buy a product or to show some act of kindness.  So it seems that there are dangers in deploying intrinsic values in pursuit of commercial interest.

EWTT: What about the behaviour or governments? How do you convince governments to look for alternative indicators of growth outside of GDP or overcome their fear of losing competitive advantage?

Dr. Tom Crompton: I agree with you fully on this. Those were precisely the constraints we hear from senior policy makers or decision makers in the trade regime. We would be arguing that at least for us in the UK we should be taking a unilateral stand in multilateral negotiations in order to help change the regime. What we hear constantly is that, “Oh well, we don’t have the political capital”,  or “there would be competitiveness costs to the industry”: exactly the arguments which you have just been advancing. I suppose I just come back again to our starting point. One of our responses to that degree of political paralysis is that the change we need isn’t going to occur without far more vocal and powerful citizen engagement. It isn’t going to happen unless more people are writing to their MPs, or unless more people are out in the streets demonstrating; unless it is made clear to the political leaders that their own political future depends upon being more ambitious in responding to these things – even though there are economic costs. So our question at the outset was: What is it that underpins increased citizen engagement? What is it that underpins citizen concern? And this brings us back to values.  If a diversity of third sector organizations come together to ask how it is that our cultural values influence our collective responses to social and environmental problems, they could have a profound impact on public debate.

Policy makers don’t enjoy the political space and public pressure for more ambitious change. So this whole work from the outset has been premised on the grounds that we need to find ways to increase public engagement on these issues. I don’t think governments are ready to embrace the scale of response that is necessary to respond to the challenges. But that said, there are certainly opportunities for governments within this and we have been engaging several governments on precisely this agenda.

The Welsh government is, for example, currently asking what are the narratives they have set down nationally within Wales around sustainable development?  They have recognized that they have adopted a series of environmental policies in a piecemeal fashion, so we have a charge on plastic bags, for example, but they recognize as  well that there are some fundamental limitations to what you can achieve by picking individual actions which are often quite modest in terms of their environmental impacts. They see the need for some sort of national narrative around sustainable development. Should this be constructed around the economic opportunities early investment in green technologies such as wind provides, that might give a country a competitive edge? Or should it be built around a sense that Wales has something important to contribute to the world as a small country that is light on its feet and has a strong sense of community and social justice? Clearly, I would argue for the latter.

In the case of the UK government, we are hearing that they too are frustrated by the limitations of a piecemeal approach to reducing individual’s carbon footprint for example. So they are confronting the fact that whilst they may urge people to insulate their loft on the basis that they will save money, they are finding at the same time that if people are insulating their loft solely to save money, there is no particular reason why the money that they save shouldn’t be spent in turning the central heating thermostat up and enjoying a warmer house or flying off to enjoy a weekend break: all of which are more carbon intensive activities. We have to look carefully at the values we are appealing to in trying to change private-sphere behaviours.

EWTT: What do you have to say about the way one should engage on social media?

Dr. Tom Crompton:  Social media is only one way in which third sector organizations impact on cultural values, albeit an important one, and the most easily changed. I think that there are many others, including policies that they are campaigning for, the way in which they campaign, the way in which they organize their own organizations and their own internal policies.

Online groups might begin to look at the values that they appeal to in the course of constructing their online requests for people to sign petitions: what’s the impact of these values on the longevity of people’s engagement, and the success with which they encourage people to actually sign the petition?

My expectation would be that they would be likely to build a more loyal relationship with their supporters when that relationship is premised on connecting with people’s intrinsic rather than their extrinsic values. There may be instances where you can successfully encourage large numbers of people to sign a petition on the basis of their self- interest, but I would argue that those supporters are likely to express a less general, or less systemic concern about a wide range of social and environmental issues,  particularly where those depart from their immediate self- interest, and they are likely to make for less durable relationships. They are likely to be more fickle.

EWTT: How do you intend to take your studies forward? What’s the broader vision for the kind of work you do?

Dr. Tom Crompton:  Our aim is to engage in the first instance a wider swathe of NGOs in this debate. In the UK at least, there is a huge appetite for this at the moment. We have already run over 60 workshops for different NGOs in UK from a very wide range of different issue groups and interest groups. That work will continue in terms of engaging third sector organizations in this conversation. It’s increasingly becoming an international conversation. We recently ran a series of workshops in a number of Scandinavian countries as there is an appetite there to begin to put together hubs of NGOs who are working on these issues and building a conversation in those countries. We are going to be running workshops soon in Australia; we have got workshops in Brussels, possibly in Canada so there is an increasing international interest which we haven’t really gone out to court, this is interest which has come to us really.

Part of what we are doing is deepening our already extensive relationship with academics on the evidence. Hitherto that evidence base has been drawn largely from social psychology but we are aware that social psychology represents only one route into this discussion. So we want to increasingly work with people from other disciplines, political science, psychotherapy, anthropology, and neurosciences and we are beginning that process. We are doing more research ourselves in terms of taking real NGO communications and asking what the impacts of those are. For example, we have put together a consortium of all the main UK conservation groups and we will be working with a psychologist and a linguist to analyse our entire external communication over a 6 month period to ask “what are the values that we are activating at the moment in the course of those communications”.


About the Interviewer:



Further links you may be interested in:

WWF: Common Cause Report

Values and 

Video link here

EWTT: Joe Brewer: An Interdisciplinary approach to understanding complex issues


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Joe Brewer: An interdisciplinary approach to understanding complex issues Wed, 08 Feb 2012 14:34:50 +0000 By Bhavani Prakash

Joe Brewer

Seattle based JOE BREWER is one amongst a rare and emerging breed of interdisciplinary experts around the world. In an era of specialisations, what’s missing is a holistic view that cuts across various discipines, whether it comes to addressing climate change or societal change.  Brewer steps in with his unique perspectives on ‘cognitive policy.’ As Founder and Director of Cognitive Policy Works, he paints a sweeping and fascinating canvas covering the human mind, human behaviour, public policy, social media and societal change. 

EWTT: Tell us about how you came to be an interdisciplinary expert?

Joe Brewer: Even from a very young age I was fascinated by two things. One was patterns in the world, and the other was people.  As a people watcher, I was always interested in how the world works.  I was brought up on a farm in the country, so I didn’t have access to broad education, but when I went to college, I had a full right scholarship so I could study anything that I wanted.  Now, I actually have degrees in philosophy, physics and applied mathematics. While I was studying those things, I got very interested in complexity, which is basically the study of how unexpected things happen, and how they can arise from very simple inputs.

When I was starting to study complexity, I entered a collateral program in atmospheric sciences. I got exposed to global warming and what’s called anthropogenic climate change, which is changes in climate patterns caused by human activities. Somehow in the midst of it all, I realised that another physical scientist (I was working as a physicist at the time) studying climate change wasn’t really going to be the critical factor in helping us address our global ecological problems.

EWTT: What did you realise to be the critical factor?

Joe Brewer: I realised that the big problem was human behaviour that is prominent in culture, values and norms of society, the way our institutions are set up, our politics and economics – all the things that have to do with how people make decisions every day. When I left the university with a Masters degree in Atmospheric Sciences, and a strong interest in learning about human behaviour, I started taking in what is called cognitive science. It’s a cross-cutting set of approaches to understanding the human mind, human thought and behaviour. It includes psychology, brain research, linguistics, anthropology, computer science and several other fields.

Universities are mostly set up around disciplines, so you might be a professor or study a program in history or economics or political science, chemistry or biology – always within a field of knowledge. I wasn’t in academia. I was out in the world, trying to solve a very complex problem. My focus was on asking, ‘what do I need to solve this problem?’  This had me moving across many different disciplines to pull together insights, analytic techniques and tools toward explaining how human behaviour works, always with an eye towards sustainability.

EWTT:  What have we learnt about human beings in the last couple of decades about our mind and emotions, especially if we’re not the calculating, rational individuals that economic models assume?

Joe Brewer: We have learnt an incredible amount. Before the 1970s, every time a person made claims about the human mind, they were basing it more on philosophical assumptions than on observations and science. What happened from the 1970s onward is that we had got specific enough about different parts of the mind to be able to study them with rigour using scientific method, as a result of which a huge amount has been learnt about the mind and about human behaviour.

One of the basic things, if you’re familiar with the works of the philosopher in the late 1600s, Rene Descartes, is the problem he articulated that is now known as mind-body dualism. It’s a problem of saying that if our bodies are physical but our minds (related to the intellectual and mental) are not physical, how can the mind and body connect with each other?

One of the big realisations that has come out of many of the fields of research is that the minds that we have are not separate from our bodies, they actually emerge from the physical world, and are continuous within our planet. The general name for that is the philosophy of ‘embodiment’.  Embodiment means that our minds are part of our bodily experience. They arise from the kinds of bodies that we have and the kind of brains that we have, the kinds of physical and cultural environments that we have evolved in as well as develop in throughout our lifespans.

EWTT:  How do you link this understanding to something as large-scale as public policy, or what you call ‘cognitive policy?’

Joe Brewer: I call it ‘cognitive policy’ –  cognitive referring to the way people understand.  I was working a few years ago at a thinktank in Berkeley, California called the Rockridge Institute with a famous cognitive scientist called George Laykoff.  He and I were looking at the language that people use and the ways that people think about environmental policy and our goal was to improve the way in which climate legislation is developed.  We were working with members of Congress, members of environmental organisations and in the midst of our attempts to explain why the human mind is so important for policy, we found that the language people were using to talk about policy was too limited. We needed to distinguish between different parts of policy. The way that we ended up breaking it down was that we separated policy into the material component and what we call the cognitive component.

The material component is the nuts and bolts of how the policy works and the material consequences of the policy.  Let’s say we’re talking about healthcare policy. The nuts and bolts might be something like if a person makes a certain amount of money, he qualifies for a certain service, and there might be a policy mechanism that says what that is. The consequence may be that people who make less money are getting greater benefits because they can’t afford health care.

What we call the cognitive component of policy is the values, the moral perspective that motivated people to hear about the issue in the first place and the ways that they understand the situation, how they characterise what the issues and concerns are, and how that reflects a deeper set of assumptions about the problems and what the solutions should be.

The difference is that the cognitive component of policy has to do with how people think about the world, what their concerns are, what they are motivated toward, what they consider to be right and wrong and good or bad in any situation – so basically the deeper motivations for a particular policy context.

Let’s take another example of climate legislation. One of things that climate legislation needs to be is popular, by which the majority of citizens, at least in a democratic country, need to support it. They need to want the policy to stay in place. The reason for that is that dealing with climate change is a long term problem. So when the policy is put in place, it has to last not just for several years but several decades.  It needs to be popular enough that it can’t be dismantled by an uprising of citizens nodding in a different way that call for it to be repealed. For them to find it appealing it has to align with their values and concerns.

EWTT: What happens if the public perceives it as a short term sacrifice even though there may be a long term benefit? Let’s take for example a carbon tax, as in Australia. What if the public sees it as a burden?

Joe Brewer: An important discovery made by George Laykoff and Mark Johnson in the late 1970s, is when you look at the way human beings use language we don’t see the world in a literal way. We understand the world through metaphors.  So if you look at carbon tax, the important thing to think about is what metaphors are used to think about taxes.

I’ll give you two examples of metaphors that could shape whether a tax is popular or not. One would be that a tax is a burden, and you don’t want to be burdened. So a tax is something you want to minimise or get rid of.

Alternatively if you use the metaphor that taxes are an investment then it’s a different way of thinking of taxes. Then people might see that there are benefits that they get from society that only come about because everyone is investing in the infrastructure of society.  You may say you have an educated workforce if you invest in public education.  You may say you have public safety if you invest in medical science and hospitals.   You have a safe and fair society if citizens invest in courts, and law and contracts.

So thinking about what makes a policy popular is partly about which metaphor people understand the policies around.  Do they understand tax policy as a burden or do they understand it as an investment? In one sense it’s negative and in another sense it’s positive.   It’s an important way of thinking about the carbon tax in Australia , whether it’s popular or not will probably depend on whether the citizens of Australia are feeling that they are investing in their future to make their economy and environment more resilient and robust in a time of change and uncertainty, or do they see it as needing all the money they can get now. If they see the taxes as a burden to them now, then it is taking away their ability to get what they need.

You can imagine the significance now of media and of advocacy where there will be groups that will advocate for people to think about taxes as a burden , and another group for people to think about taxes as an investment.  An important thing to keep in mind is that taxes are simply not one or the other, but how people think about them shapes their appeal. The advocacy for one way of thinking versus the other will have significant impact on whether people support the policy or not.

EWTT:  Is it possible to make a tax or the removal of a subsidy, sound like an investment, especially in a developing country like India where there are huge inequalities of income and where there are millions of poor people can’t think beyond making both ends meet?

Joe Brewer:  There are two important observations that are helpful in addressing that issue. One observation is that people have a hierarchy of needs.  They are only going to be able to think of new wants and ideas and take time to build perspective if they have full bellies and safe environments. If someone is starving and is immersed in danger including the danger of sickness or the danger of violence, he or she is going to have a very hard time thinking about larger, more nuanced issues. So one challenge in addressing the tremendous social injustices that come about with sustainability is that many of the people, are also in a position that they are least capable of doing long term planning that is strategic, as their basic circumstances is about very hard survival.

Another challenge is that we are hardwired in a way that makes it easier for us to see simple relationships better than complex relationships, which are sometimes called systemic relationships. To be able to change fossil fuel systems and energy systems, as well as address tremendous inequities in society and deal with the political ramifications along the way, one of the big challenges is that we need to be able to see the nuances of the system and then redesign them so that they begin to work better.  That’s a difficult challenge – as human beings have a very hard time seeing systems.  We tend to simplify systems – in what is called a metonomy.

A metonomy is where a part of something stands for the whole thing. For example, if you’re at a restaurant where the waitress says, ‘the ham sandwich didn’t leave a tip’ it doesn’t literally mean a ham sandwich, but the person who ordered and ate it and left without leaving a tip. That’s just using the word, ‘ham sandwich’  to represents a person. Or when one says Delhi talks to Calcutta, it’s not the cities talking to each other but the leaders. In each case we use a simplification to represent something more complex. So when we’re dealing with these very complex problems, we have to basically counter our tendency to oversimplify. When we talk about poor people , who don’t have access to quality education, who don’t have the emotional resilience that comes with safe environments, they don’t know whether they’re going to sleep tomorrow, these are complicating questions if we are going to approach the kind of issues you raised.

EWTT: Politics and economics go hand in hand, and powerful interest groups and lobbies create resistance to change. What then is going to bring about change?

Joe Brewer: At first pass, changes in society are always lead by culture, so if you change the culture, you change the politics, you change the economics. It’s actually much harder to use politics to change culture.  One good example is how in 1865, all of the slaves were freed. It was a hundred years later that in 1965 that the Civil Rights Act was passed. There was a legal change, but the culture hadn’t changed yet. And then it took a hundred years to change the culture enough to accept a change in policy that would secure the rights, that would make it legally defensible to protect the rights of minority citizens. We only started dealing with racial inequalities in a systematic way since the 1960s onward, so the culture changed first then the politics followed.

So one thing that is very important for us to think about when we talk about changing behaviour is that ultimately yes, we have to change our politics, we have to change our economic systems because the way they are set up now cannot lead to sustainable outcomes, but to make those changes in political and economic systems we have to look at culture, we have to look at the stories that people tell themselves about where they come from, and what it means to lead a good life.

There has been a major global trend in the last century which has been the rise of global consumerism and consumer marketing.  Consumerism tells us stories of opulence and material success as measures of meaning and quality and happiness. So those stories are antithetical, they are the opposite of what we need to have to lead to a sustainable outcome. So we need to change consumer culture, that’s something that gets deep into the lives of people. When we talk on a global scale, it doesn’t mean we need one big monoculture that’s the same everywhere, but we can celebrate the unique features of different cultures that are resonant with sustainability.

India, I discovered during my visit, is an incredibly diverse country with so many different subcultures and languages and religions. Biodiversity is actually very healthy for sustainability because one thing we need is resilience. We need to be able to adapt to changing circumstances and if all of the cultures of the world are too similar to each other and if the way they all align is not healthy, then we are more at risk, and global civilisation could collapse completely.  When we talk about cultural change driving change in economics and politics, then we can find the strength of culture at different places and bring them together and drive innovation by plugging into places where cultures come into contact with each other.

We’re seeing that now in this global social movement, that firstly has been called the Arab Spring and then Occupy Wall Street, people from different cultures are describing it in a local way. Members of this movement in Spain are dealing with issues that have to do with Spanish culture, people in Greece are dealing with Greek culture, people in Lebanon are dealing with Lebanese culture, people in the US dealing with US culture. At a deep level, they are taking the paradigm of the global economy and they are suggesting a different way that people can come together to solve their problems, which means they’re suggesting an evolution of culture.

EWTT:  You enjoy studying deep history, and since you’ve mentioned Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, do you think change comes about in a disruptive way, or is it a gradual process that leads to a tipping point?  How do you think change is going to come about now when we most need it, in the face of the climate crisis?

Joe Brewer: Well, the way that big change always happens is there are periods when it doesn’t seem like things are changing very much, and then are short periods of time when things change very quickly. You could think of it as a ‘preparation’ stage and a ‘release’ stage.

Looking at globalisation as a process that goes back to the 1500s, and even the 1400s, there was global trade and then in the 1600s, we saw the global rise of corporations and in the 1600s and 1700s we had the creation of nation states. We had these big structural changes over several hundred years. And then we had the rise of market economies – they’ve only been around a few hundred years. There have been markets, there have been bazaars, the bazaar in Delhi has been around for much longer than a few hundred years, but the idea of a global market economy has been fairly new, it’s maybe only four hundred years old.

Given this deeper context, what we’re looking at now is a big change that has been coming for quite some time. I actually go deeper than that, and I like to think of it as three major periods of human cultural evolution. There was the period before agriculture, where we mostly lived in hunter-gatherer societies, and then we had the period where people learnt to domesticate plants and grow food, and that allowed human settlements to form and to grow. An interesting thing about human settlements is that if you have more food than you need, then you can grow your population. And if you can grow your population, you need more land, and that is the dynamics of empire and conquest. So empire emerged from agriculture.

About 10,000 years into the age of empire is coming to an end in one of two ways. Either it is going to end by collapse of human civilisation, that we basically wipe ourselves out and there will be an Easter Island kind of story. Or we change to a different paradigm that is not conquest. Now conquest and empire is now called ‘economic growth.’  It’s the same thing. We have an economic model that requires that the value of the currency for the economy must grow. And then if it doesn’t grow it becomes static and collapses just like when your heart – your heart has two dynamic modes – it’s either beating regularly or you’re dead, and there’s nothing in between.  Once your heart stops beating regularly it or it becomes rheumatic. You have a heart attack. Either it starts beating again or you’re dead. For a growth economy it’s the same thing, it keeps growing at an exponential rate, or it collapses.

So the changes that have to happen have to happen at a very deep level, at the level of a paradigm.  An interesting thing that can make us hopeful is that a paradigm level change happens very quicky. It’s like an earthquake. There’s a slow buildup and then an unpredictable release, and that change, that dynamic of slow build-up of pressure and release is how all physical systems change their state of matter. It’s just like when you start heating up water, the temperature continuously rises to a level  where it very quickly goes from a liquid to a gas and vaporises the water. That time of change happens over a very small change of temperature, in a short period of time.

So what we’re seeing now with these global social movements, is an acceleration of change that goes back at least 3 decades. In a global sense, we can see the rise of the environmental movement, which started about a hundred years ago and catapulted in the 1960s with Rachel Carson, and what’s called the modern environmental movement. We’ve seen the beginning of the collapse of the empire with post colonialism, from the independence of India, the rise of nation states, and social democracies. Going back 70 or 80 years, fairly quick and big changes have been happening. Now it’s much faster still.

Let’s take ‘Occupy Wall Street’ – it has been incredibly successful, in a short period of time. It has been only with us for a few months and it has already changed the way that people talk about the economy and social issues all around the world. Now maybe Occupy Wall Street won’t lead to the changes that we need, but the scale of impact would have been very difficult to predict. Imagine you were sitting and watching the world  in the beginning of August 2011, you probably wouldn’t have anticipated that something like Occupy Wall Street would have come into being and have such an effect in the last few months.

That is an indicator of how quickly change is coming and the fact that change is coming quickly tells us that we are in the middle of one of those phased transitions.  Change is happening very quickly because the entire system is reorienting itself. I think there’ll be a much bigger, deeper change in the next few years.

EWTT: Do you think that social media has played a role in this?

Brewer:  Absolutely, social media plays many roles. Even one step deeper than social media is the global digital communications system-  the internet, satellite communication systems, mobile phones – the whole system, and in all of that, the software that lets people in creative ways – facebook or twitter or email or whatever else you’re  thinking of in terms of technology.

What that digital communication system does is it democratises information. If you go back and look at what the printing press did to organised religion in the 1600s and 1700s, where prior to that the Catholic Church in Europe did everything in Latin. All the information was kept secret from people as they didn’t know Latin. They were only told what the leaders of the church wanted them to know. With the printing press it became possible for a lot of people to learn how to read, and share information. That automatically changed the way that organised religion worked.

A similar change is now happening with the digital communication system, social media and the internet. Information is now being democratised just as profoundly as the rise of the printing press. The fact that we can have instantaneous communication and that we can organise ourselves at effectively zero economic cost really helps –  it takes very little time, money and energy to send a tweet, or post a link on facebook, and people can organise themselves around what they are concerned or passionate about.  That ability changes the fundamentals of the economy, as now the economy is now driven by what is called pull marketing instead of push marketing. It means that people are able to seek out what they find desirable, rather than selecting amongst the choices that are presented to them.  It’s much easier to find like-minded people and we’re seeing that in social movements, that people are able to organise themselves very quickly, in real time, sometimes with hundreds of thousands of people organising themselves over small periods of time, like a few hours.  Social media is allowing that to happen, and the organised powers in the political and economic system are not that fast , they’re not able to keep up. The pace of change in that dynamic is faster than they can control, that is what is causing the breakdown of the systems under control  – it is allowing change to happen.

EWTT:  What are your suggestions to become more effective at a community level?

Joe Brewer: One of the frameworks that I was honoured to get to be a part of was “Identity Campaigning.”  The basic idea of identity campaigning is that people’s collective behaviour in society is shaped by their social identities. Social identities are in two forms. One form is the way that individuals see themselves as good or bad, and the other is at a community level, where there are shared identities, and where there are role models.

It is important to consider social identities, because they include emotions. Think about the social identity of what it means to be a good parent. It’s going to change from one culture to another, one community to another. But the social identity is understood collectively by the people in the community. So as you’re thinking about how to be an effective advocate, be mindful of the social identities that you select, that you want to highlight, and want to draw attention to, both in terms of the social identities that are positive , that people will resonate with, that you think people will want to be like, and also the identities that are negative, the ones that they don’t want to be, that they would be against. In order to be effective, you need to orient people around a different set of social identities than they had before.

With the “rational actor” theory in economics we are taught that being selfish is good,  because if you’re selfish you’re being productive, and as a trickle down effect, it brings wealth to other people.  Now we’ve figured out, that doesn’t actually work, but unfortunately that idea is still very common. When people aspire to serve themselves,  the social identities they are elevating is individualism, and suppressing identities that have to do with their communities.

One way that comes out is that they feel responsibility to themselves but they don’t feel responsibility to others. To get people to feel responsibility to others, we need to remind them that they have identities that they consider to be already a part of themselves, like being a good parent. A lot of people will recognise that as being a part of their identity, that has a social responsibility component, that is responsive to the needs of others around them.

I think in a deep way, it’s all about activating empathy and compassion in people. The more that they feel compassion and the responsibility to act in compassion towards others around them, the more they will work together to solve collective problems.  As you’re thinking about social identity, one way to answer yourself is, out of the identities that I am elevating in conversations, which ones are increasing compassion and responsibility toward others and which ones are decreasing the same? Just asking that question will orientate your thinking quite a lot, and help you become more effective.

EWTT:  People have good intentions but they seem to be too preoccupied. The general refrain is, “we’d love to do more for others and the world, but we’re too busy.”  How does one respond to that?

Joe Brewer: One thing is a lot of it has to do with design.  We’ve designed a global economic system that treats workers like gears in a machine. Machines tend to get faster with each passing generation. We’ve seen people find themselves working more and more, and find themselves engaged in activities more and more which keep them very busy. One thing to remember is that systems change on their own time scale, and one thing we’re seeing that a lot of people are busy working, doing all the things they’re doing in their lives, and they don’t have time for others.  It’s difficult to come out of those patterns.

They often have really good reasons to be busy. Someone might be working two jobs as he wants to send their child to college.  What we’re seeing with a lot of the global social movements that are successful right now like the Arab Spring, is that capable, educated people can’t find employment and there’s a telling observation that these are people who would be too busy to save the world, except that the economy is not serving them.

One thing we have to recognise is that change will happen when the systems are ready to change. Our economic systems at a very deep level have been poorly designed.  They perpetuate injustice. They make gaps between the wealthy and the poor larger with time.  They eventually come to a point when they become unstable and break down.

If we want to influence the behaviour of people, we need to engage people proactively when they are paying attention.  But they may not pay attention if they are overwhelmed with information and they’re already busy. Our strategies may not be able to operate at a system level scale to be able to change what their choices are, but when the system starts to stall and change, and the old dynamics are no longer stable and people are looking for different ways to be, then there will be tremendous opportunity to engage with them in meaningful conversations about deep change.


Joe Brewer can be contacted via info[at]  Follow Brewer’s works through his website Cognitive Policy Works.

About the Interviewer:




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Climate Change Negotiations: Some Inconvenient Truths Fri, 11 Nov 2011 10:10:16 +0000 By Bhavani Prakash

This has been a week of climate pessimism.  First, The Guardian on Wednesday, 9 Nov 2011 quoted the International Energy Association (IEA)’s warning that the world is headed for irreversible climate change in only 5 years. The article says:

If the world is to stay below 2C of warming, which scientists regard as the limit of safety, then emissions must be held to no more than 450 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; the level is currently around 390ppm. But the world’s existing infrastructure is already producing 80% of that “carbon budget”, according to the IEA’s analysis, published on Wednesday. This gives an ever-narrowing gap in which to reform the global economy on to a low-carbon footing.

If current trends continue, and we go on building high-carbon energy generation, then by 2015 at least 90% of the available “carbon budget” will be swallowed up by our energy and industrial infrastructure. By 2017, there will be no room for manoeuvre at all – the whole of the carbon budget will be spoken for, according to the IEA’s calculations.”

Prof Surya Sethi at ISEAS

The lecture at the Institute of South East Asian Studies (ISEAS) yesterday by Professor Surya Sethi compounded the gloom.  Prof. Sethi served on the Indian Prime Minister’s Energy Coordination Committee and wrote the Integrated Policy of India (2006) and also assisted in the development of India’s National Action Plan on Climate Change (2008). He is currently Visiting Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (LKYPP).

Prof. Sethi said that developments after the 2010 COP 16 Climate Change Conference in Cancun, Mexico do not give much hope that a comprehensive and binding agreement will be reached at COP17 in Durban, South Africa later this month.  He also pointed to several ‘inconvenient truths’.

Inconvenient Truth #1

Markets do not have the solution to climate change or to the mindless exploitation of the world’s finite capital of water, land, minerals, other resources, or to the global commons itself.  If all externalities are included, such as the environmental cost of rearing cattle, impact on water, carbon emissions associated with transportation, the cost of a hamburger, for example, would be between US$20 to US$25.   However, it is sold for only 99 cents in the US and for US$3 in the rest of the world. Markets are therefore grossly underpricing natural capital which inevitably leads to resource exploitation.

Yet paradoxically, we look to the same markets which failed to keep the books straight on asset backed securities and mortgages that led to the financial crises of 2008 and the European Debt crisis this year, to deliver solutions to climate change.

The world is facing potentially disruptive and irreversible climate change triggered through rising temperatures, and non-linear positive feedback. Markets driven by greed and mathematical judgement cannot solve these irreversible effects or substitute value based decisions, which are required for equitable solutions.

If one looks at energy intensity of OECD countries, it varies from country to country a factor of 2.3 times. Even though there are no market barriers, the market is not equalising energy intensity. The financial bailout shows that politics plays a key role in deciding where funds flow.

Markets may allocate scarce resources, but they are not distributors of equity and justice. If we want to limit how much natural capital is to be used, we need to make ethical choices, which requires strong value based leadership. This was emphasised time and again by Prof Sethi.

Inconvenient Truth #2

Global carbon emissions are not coming down, and continue to rise.

  • Most global projections show fossil fuel consumption as growing till 2030. There was a slight dip in 2008 due to slower economic growth because of the financial crisis, but it has picked up again in 2010.  The total estimated  30.6 gigatonnes carbon (GtC) emitted in 2010 is estimated to grow to 54 to 58 GtC in the coming years. The 2 degree pathway requires a  reduction to 44 GtC per annum globally by 2020. There will be an overshoot of 10-14 GtC on an annual basis.
  •  The absolute level of consumption of fossil fuels is still rising in developed world. If you exclude the 2008 blip, consumption of fossil fuels during the 8 years from 1999 to 2007 of OECD countries grew 2.6 times than the rate of fossil fuel consumption growth in India. The OCED has a population of 0.9 billion, only slightly less than that of India, and hence comparable in size. In China fossil fuel consumption during the 8 year period grew 7.1 times than that of India.

What this underscores, according to Prof Sethi, is that all the talk about lowering energy and emissions intensity, and delivering the next more efficient car or light bulb (which is definitely important) only means growing GDP by a larger amount with marginally less energy intensity. So even if the same barrel of oil goes longer and energy security is increased;  as long as we are consuming more fossil fuels in absolute terms, we are not addressing climate change.

  •  If one examines the claim that Annexe 1 (developed) countries have reduced emissions from GDP over 1990 levels, this is largely because as economies in transition, they have outsourced some of their pollution overseas.If you look at emissions from consumption by Annexe 1 countries,  the figures are even worse. Take the 15 EU countries – on a consumption bass, emissions have gone up by 40% over 1990 with 33% of emissions coming from imports. Gross emissions of the EU 15 countries amount to 10-12 tons per capita in addition to 3 tons per capita from imported embedded emissions, which by itself is more than the total per capita emissions of India at 1.9 tons.  The 4 tons carbon emissions per capita embedded in US imports alone is more than 2 times of India total per capita emissions. China is often blamed for becoming the biggest polluter, yet 26% of all China’s emissions are in embedded emissions from exports.  Yet, nobody is addressing these unsustainable patterns of consumption.
  •  Pledges made in Cancun by Annexe 1 countries are actually lower than pledges by non-Annexe 1 countries.  So far, all pledges of Annexe 1 countries add up to 5% to 17% below 1990 levels, which compares poorly to what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) expects, i.e., at least between 25 to 40% emissions reductions below 1990 levels are required to keep within 2 degree C temperature rise.

The non-binding pledges in Cancun puts the world on an auto-pilot mode of 3.5 to 5 degree C temperature increase.

Inconvenient Truth #3

The lack of equity in talking about climate emissions reductions is the third issue.

  • If the world has to remain bound to a 2 degree temperature rise, then going forward the Annexe 1 countries between 2010 to 2050 must have a negative carbon emissions of 1.5 GtC.  For the 350 GtC total carbon budget to be equitably distributed, richer nations have a climate debt owed to the developing world of  US$ 10 to 13 trillion, depending on the price of carbon.  The developed world does not accept historical responsibility of carbon emitted over the last century to fuel its economic growth. However the common and differentiated responsibility principle which underpins the UNFCCC negotiations is built upon the bedrock of historical responsibility.
  • We live in a world with extreme inequality. The top 20% of the world, and some live in India and China too, are today responsible for 85% of private global consumption while the bottom 20% live on less than 1 dollar ppp(purchasing power parity) per day. 40% of the population is below the poverty line in India earning below the threshold of 70 nominal Singapore cents in cities and 55 Singapore cents in villages. This kind of inequality which will lead to greater instability in the world in terms of social and political unrest.

The huge transfer of international funds required to pay for climate debt is as much a question of equity for the bottom 20%.

Inconvenient Truth #4

The final inconvenient truth is that there is very little climate finance being made available to developing countries for mitigation and adaptation.

The scale of funding required is to the tune of more than a trillion dollars, but Cancun’s Green Climate Fund is only for $100 billion.*  The reality is that the developing world is spending a higher and higher portion of its GDP on adaptation and lowering energy intensity e.g., India is spending 2.3 to 2.4% of its GDP on adaptation, though it is doing it for gaining energy security than for climate change.

* At the COP15 Copenhagen Climate Change Summit in December 2009, the proposal was to mobilise US$10 billion per year between 2010 and 2012, and up to US$100 billion by 2020 annually – which represents only 0.8% to 8% of developed countries’ national defence budgets”

Climate finance requires massive resource transfers from the developed to the developing world. The existing multilateral agencies like the World Bank do not have the instruments or capacities for these. According to Prof. Sethi, the World Bank’s net disbursements between 2002 and 2008 were between minus 0.8 billion to minus 4.8 billion without IDA (International Development Association).  With IDA the disbursments were between to minus 2.9 bn to +5.4 bn US dollars. These agencies are at best equipped to do project lending, and not to deliver the scale of funds transfer required for climate finance.

According to Prof. Sethi, unless there is some disruptive technology in the coming decade, the climate change challenge cannot be tackled in time.


What will wake up the world to the climate reality? Prof Michael Quah, Deputy Director, Energy Office at the National University of Singapore who chaired the ISEAS event, quoted the former International Energy Agency director, Nobuo Tanaka who spoke in the CNBC energy opportunities brainstorming session held in Singapore recently. Tanaka had said, half jestingly, that perhaps we need another tsunami, another Katrina, and other similar disasters to rouse the world to action.  Stark as this may sound, it looks as if the world is headed that way, unless collection and drastic action is taken steered by strong global leadership.

The theoretical model and practical framework exists to create solutions with equity and justice, as Prof Sethi acknowledged after the event when I raised the Contraction & Convergence model  by the Global Commons Institute. It is a science based model to allocate emissions reductions to different countries, and also allow for compensation to nations which emit less than their allocations. As far back as 2003, Janos Pasztor (who is now with the Climate Change Task Force), had mentioned as a member of the UNFCCC Secretariat that “Stabilisation inevitably requires ‘Contraction and Convergence” .

The challenge as Prof Sethi pointed out is the lack of political will to agree to the scale of emissions reduction envisaged and large scale transfer of funds to the developing world to deal with mitigation and adaptation.

To conclude, a world that has US levels of consumption can only house 1.4 billion people and not 9 billion people as we are projecting by 2050. Prof Sethi came back to the profound wisdom of Gandhi for what we need for a truly sustainable world:

Gandhi's wisdom


About the Writer:

Bhavani Prakash is the Founder of Eco WALK the Talk .com. Despite the climate pessimism in this article, she believes individuals and communities can play an active role in changing behaviour, and also in influencing policy decisions as well as industry action required to tackle climate and biodiversity issues. She writes and conducts talks and workshops on sustainability and can be contacted at bhavani[at] Follow Eco WALK the Talk on Facebook,TwitterLinked IN and YouTube


Further links you may be interested in:


EWTT: Whither Go Climate Refugees?

EWTT:  Pen Hadow: Melting Arctic Sea Ice and How It Will Affect Asia

EWTT:  Wikileaks: Carving Up the Arctic Sea

EWTT:  Everything you need to know about Climate Change from a Top Hedge Fund Manager

EWTT:  Who cares If Bangalesh drowns?

EWTT:  Climate Challenge: The Voices from Pakistan

EWTT:  Global Corruption Report: Climate Change

EWTT:  Climate Change in Southeast Asia And Why We Can’t Afford Not to Act



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Vandana Shiva: Traditional Knowledge, Biodiversity and Sustainable Living Thu, 31 Mar 2011 10:40:02 +0000 By Bhavani Prakash


In the following interview, she explains the work done at the organisation she founded in 1987 – Navdanya Biodiversity Conservation Farm and Bija Vidyapeeth, the research and training arm. She reiterates that ecological farming is  pro-peace, pro- biodiversity, pro-culture and pro-livelihood for the poor.

Dr Vandana Shiva

Dr Vandana Shiva

She spoke to us recently during “Grandmother’s University” at Navdanya, Dehradun, India.  The three day course was intended to celebrate Traditional knowledge, Biodiversity and Sustainable livelihoods in an era of globalisation where these are coming under increasing pressure. Not only is this traditional knowledge disappearing, knowledge as a commons is being appropriated and patented by corporations to be sold for abnormal profit.

The participants of the course interacted with the Garhwali women of the Himalayan hills, who had travelled far to teach us some of their wisdom.

The wisdom of grandmothers is in Dr Shiva’s words, “our capacity to love, unconditionally. In our society of competition, of insecurity and fear, that steadiness of love and compassion is brought to the next generation. Just because they are grandmothers, they have a long view. It’s called sustainability in today’s jargon. It’s really a thinking about future generations – not just of me, myself, today.”

Dr Shiva answers here questions about the myth of GM, how to feed cities, the shadows of growth and development, and the role of civil society.

Video link here

The importance of saving seeds:

Seed list at Navdanya

We visited the seed bank within Navdanya Biodiversity Conservation Farm, which distributes valuable traditional seeds to farmers.  By interacting with the co-ordinators of Navdanya – Rukmini who oversees about 100 villages in the Garhwal region (Uttarakhand district, N. India), and Jumana who works with farmers in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra, which has the maximum number of suicides in the country due to the economic hardships caused by Bt Cotton; the importance of saving traditional seed varieties against the onslaught of hybrid and GM seeds became amply clear.

Preserving Biodiversity

Navdanya is now a network of seed keepers and organic producers across 16 states in India. It has helped set up 54 community seed banks across the country, and has trained half a million farmers in sustainable agriculture. It is also actively involved in reviving indigenous knowledge, creating awareness about the problems of GM foods and the rights of people against biopiracy in the face of globalisation and climate change.

Here’s a recording in part, of a session by Dr Vandana Shiva at Navdanya, where she clearly explains four kinds of seeds – open pollination, green revolution varieties, hybrid varieties and GM seeds. This distinction is fundamentally important to understand the arguments against genetic engineering.  She also describes how the cost of GM seeds and pesticide use soar astronomically, which are major factors behind the indebtedness and consequent suicide of farmers.   (Kindly excuse the poor lighting conditions in the room, which is more than made up by Dr Shiva’s articulate discourse)

Video link here

About the Writer:


Further links you may be interested in:

EWTT: Dr Vandana Shiva’s Sydney Peace Prize Lecture: Time to End War on Earth

EWTT: Vimla Bahuguna: Treehugger of the Chipko Movement


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Pen Hadow: Melting Arctic Sea Ice and How It Will Affect Asia Tue, 01 Feb 2011 07:07:16 +0000 by Bhavani Prakash

Pen Hadow in Singapore

It is not every day that one bumps into a polar explorer in sunny, tropical Singapore. Pen Hadow, Project Leader of the Catlin Arctic Survey team was in town recently as a speaker, at the first ever Climate Change Seminar for the Asian Insurance Industry. He talked about how the rapidly disappearing Arctic sea ice will change the way our planet looks and behaves in future.

Acknowledged by Time Magazine as one of the Heroes of the Environment in 2009 along with Martin Hartley and Ann Daniels,  Hadow is part of the team which has been involved in cutting edge science, providing critical information to scientists on the thickness of Arctic ice. This enables more accurate predictions on how long the white polar cover will last.

He shares with us the incredible challenges of polar exploration, and at the same time, the profound implications of the data collected during the process and its findings, especially for Asia.

I managed to catch up with Hadow as he left the seminar for his next appointment. We got a bit lost finding the building and he quipped that you could never get lost in the North Pole, as there is only one direction in which to keep walking.

BP: How did you get interested in polar exploration?

PH: Our family has a strong connection with Captain Robert Falcon Scott who was the first person to explore Antarctica extensively by land. Captain Scott’s dying wish was for his wife to get their son interested in the natural world. Peter went on to set up WWF, the world’s largest environmental organisation.

Pen Hadow in the Arctic

Young Peter was brought up in a particular way, had a spartan regime and was left out in the cold in Britain with fewer and fewer clothes for longer and longer periods. This nanny looked after my dad when he was a young boy. The same nanny who was now in her 80s looked after me as a boy, with a similar regime of induction to the cold. I grew up on the stories of Scott and Shackleton who were my heroes.

BP: How did polar exploration and science come together?

PH: There’s been a transition in polar exploration from it being merely an adventurous activity for fulfilling one’s personal ambitions, to something beyond.

The north and south poles were reached in the first decade of the 1900s. Traditional explorers went about finding resources for their monarchs, courts, governments and so on. In the process of discovering these resources such as gold and spices, they mapped where everything was, all the major features of the planet – the river systems , mountain ranges, coastlines, icesheets and deserts.

The role of modern exploration is to gather data not resources, to help scientists understand how the natural world works. This has become more urgent than ever. There are so many of us now and our combined impact cannot be accommodated by the natural processes. We need to understand how the planet works if we are going to manage our relationship more effectively with it.

A lot of it can be done by regular scientific fieldwork, but at the sharp, scary end of fieldwork is exploration, and that’s where people like us come in and do things that no one else can.

BP: How do you prepare for such expeditions mentally and physically?

PH: I consider team selection to be very important. Very few people in the world have sufficient experience, skills and willingness to go through the extremity of working in the Arctic ocean and sea ice. So our potential pool of explorers is very small.

What we look for is people who can not only operate technically but have the commitment deep within and passion to do the science.

Anne Daniels, Pen Hadow & Martin Hadley

Just to be able to survive and travel is what most expeditions do, but then to add another layer of surveying all the time as you’re travelling at night and when you’ve got the camp up – there are very few people who can do that.

People often ask, how much of it is physical and how much of it is mental? I’d say that when you put in the months over many years, 70% to 80% of whether you achieve your objectives is because of what goes on in your head and what sort of person you are.

Most people don’t realise that the main challenge in a polar expedition is that we have to operate in winter-spring which is the coldest period of the year. It’s important to recognise and deal with the fact that the cold affects the brain function. You behave as if you’re drunk and you’re drunk for 70 days in a hazardous environment, following a policy of zero tolerance to any mistakes of any scale, while performing at a level of physicality that has never been done before. That’s a pretty ambitious and difficult cocktail.

BP: What were the physical challenges you faced during your expeditions?

PH: The physical challenges are immense. We lose about half a pound in weight every day so we have to put on extra weight before we set off. After about two weeks, we need our muscles to pull these very heavy sledges which weigh about 120 to 150 kgs, full of our fuel, food, tent, communication equipment and so on.

The trouble after about two weeks is that you’re not able to drag enough food in the sledge, to replace all the energy you have burnt. We average about 7,500 calories a day, but can only eat about 6,000 calories, so after the second week the body says its in crisis and breaks down muscle to reduce its metabolic rate. So you’re losing the very part of the body that you need the most, and there’s nothing you can do about that.

Arctic Polar Bears - threatened by melting ice

I’ve had 35 encounters with polar bears over the last 18 years, during the 15 or so expeditions that I’ve done. The closest I’ve been to a bear was just outside my tent. There wasn’t enough time to pick up a gun to shoot or scare it off. The first thing I could grab was a saucepan which I threw at the it. The pan hit the bear near the eyebrow, and it was really surprised and ran off. Polar bears assume you’re a seal, you probably smell like one without a shower for months, so for a seal to attack a bear was a novel experience. But it was the noise of the saucepan that freaked it out!

The real challenge is what goes on in your head. It’s critical to keep calm, sensible, mature and not panic when your progress is not as good as you need it to be or when the conditions of the weather or the sea ice surface are difficult. There are good days and bad days. So you tell yourself, “It’s OK to have a few bad days.”

I’ve often said polar exploration is really about putting one foot in front of the other, and an awful lot of times, interspersed with cups of tea.

BP: What is the objective of the Catlin Arctic Survey?

PH: It is to advance the public understanding of climate change. Each year we have a focus. In 2009, it was to help scientists to understand better, and forecast more precisely how long it would be before there was no sea ice in summer time on the Arctic ocean.

What we’re doing as explorers is to try and help the scientists with raw data, because only we can access the particular kind of information they need. A satellite can help measure thickness of the ice but it uses compromised data sets, as it uses secondary information to estimates the volume of ice.

KEY FACTS from the first Catlin Atlantic Survey done in 2009

Distance trekked: 270 miles (435 km)
Days on the ice: 73 days
Coordinates: Drop off: 81°83’N 129°97’W, Pick-Up: 85°45’N 124°84’W
Dates: 1 March – 7 May 2009
Average temperature during the first two weeks at Ice Base: -32 deg C
Explorers: Pen Hadow, Ann Daniels and Martin Hartley
Information on the Science :  Sea Ice Thickness (2009), Ocean Acidification (2010) , Thermohaline Circulation (2011)

BP: How did you go about collecting the data and what did you find?

PH: We started on the 1st of March 2009 at 81 degrees North, 270 nautical miles to the North Pole which took us over 70 days to cover. The sun didn’t come up for the first two weeks, and we had to use our head torches for visibility. Sometimes we had to swim with our sledges.

Ann Daniels and Pen Hadow taking measurements

Every night when we set up camp, we went out and actually measured the thickness of the ice. We’d call up the people crunching the data for us, give them the location and ask, “How thick do you expect the ice to be?” So they might say, “2 and a half metres thick.” We’d find that it would be about 1 ½ metres thick. This happened for about 90% of the journey – the ice we found was much thinner than expected.

We had taken about 6000 observations and measured every single surface feature. The sea ice in the area was traditionally thought to be composed of older and thicker ice, but we found that the ice on the ridges was newer, and more prone to summertime melting.

BP: What are the implications of the findings?

PH: It put on block, hard evidence that supported unpublished work of the sea ice community. It made the IPCC 2007 work seriously out of whack – it was too conservative and out of date. The IPCC predicted that the first ice free summer would be between 2050 and 2100. Prof. Peter Wadham from the University of Cambridge’s Polar Oceans Physics Group revised the date of Arctic ice free summer, nearer to between 2030 and 2040. There will come a time where we will no longer have a year round cover of ice on the Arctic ocean, perhaps in 100 to 300 years.

Polar ice cap melt : NRDC

When you’re in outer space and look back at the earth, you can recognise the green of the landmass, the blue of the oceans and the white top and bottom of the poles. It is a rare visual cue to what global climate change is doing to our planet.

It would be foolish to think that this white lid going away in summer time will not have implications. The polar ice is a white layer reflecting about 80% percent of solar radiation. When the layer is gone there will be a net gain of 70% percent in energy absorption.

That implies a major environmental state change – the polar caps that provide a cooling service to the planet, especially to the northern hemisphere, is being removed by the carbon emissions that we are generating.

It’s not the melting sea ice itself which will push up sea levels. The upper levels of the Arctic ocean expands as the waters get warmer and this raises sea levels. About 30% of sea level rise over the last 200 years is because of warming of the upper layer of the oceans.

Also, the warmer waters that are accumulating in the Arctic oceans around the North Pole are making the huge amounts of ice currently on the land of Greenland slip into the sea. This is what is really going to push up sea levels.

When the IPCC report estimated that sea levels will rise by 20- 60 cm by 2100, it didn’t take into account Greenland ice and Antarctic ice sheet. When sea ice melts, there is no net rise in sea level, but when land ice melts, that’s new water entering the oceans. If you start adding what they are now observing with Greenland, this could be nearer a 1 metre estimated sea level rise by 2100.

The weather patterns in the northern hemisphere are driven substantially by the temperature difference or gradient between the relatively cold north and the warmer tropical waters. With the disappearing Arctic ice, this temperature gradient is reduced, and the engine that drives the weather system is weakened. So there will be weather changes, big and small.

BP: What does this imply for Asia?

PH: We need to make the most of this warning of what is happening. Not having this protective white lid has big implications for the northern hemisphere right down to the equator where you are at Singapore.  For Asia, the consequences of this sea ice disappearing, will be an accelerated sea level rise.

IPCC 2007 mentioned that low lying coastal communities are going to be impacted by this rising sea level. This is not a ‘maybe it’ll happen, maybe it won’t’ phenomenon. Sea levels are rising, and accelerating in their rising. The 5 nations with the most people – the low lying coastal areas are in Asia – China, India, Vietnam, Bangladesh and Indonesia. This is one big consequence of climate change in Asia.

In and around Eastern Asia, 2009-2010 was relatively cold and snowy in winter. This weather system was a result of changed wind patterns which in turn was a response to the warming of air around the North Pole – where we are seeing temperature rises happening at 2-3 times the average global rate. We can only expect more cold and snowy winters in East Asia.

Another consequence is that ocean currents are starting to change. This has an impact for the timing of monsoons in Asia and the weather that’s associated with the monsoons. People can’t be specific at the moment and scientists are working really hard to forecast this to the best of their ability. What is going to happen and where, how big are the changes going to be, is hard to tell as it’s a massively complex thing. But one thing is for sure – it is going to impact a lot of people.

Video link here

BP: How do you engage business and industry with all these findings?

PH: Climate change is about risk management. And as I told the insurance industry at the seminar, I know all about risk management. If I don’t manage risk, I don’t come back alive.

Everyone knows about sports sponsorship, art and music sponsorship. A new sector is environmental sponsorship. Almost every businesses need to improve its environmental credentials and to communicate to all its key stakeholders what it is doing. An increasing number of businesses have surged ahead in their industry sector to becoming more sustainable. Sometimes they find it hard to get a return on investment with some of the stakeholders particularly from their customers and clients.

The problem we have identified is that what they are doing ‘less bad’ which is not really inspiration. There is opportunity for business to do ‘more good’. Get on the front foot. Do not necessarily look for an environmental program that is very relevant to your business alone – but for the greater good of the environment. That sort of indirect dislocation from your business, can really enhance the perception of how people see your business.

BP: What action needs to be taken immediately to avert a catastrophe?

PH: Individuals, households, businesses and government – we all in our own way need to share and increase people’s understanding, believe that these things are really happening and we are bringing them about.

Even if we are not – and I believe they are – the changes are happening, and are going to happen. Let’s start working out how we are going to deal with it, don’t wait till it has happened in a big bad way. Get organised now for coping with the situation.


About the interviewer:


Further links you may be interested in:

1. Catlin Atlantic Survey will be conducting its next expedition in 2011. To find out more, please visit their website at The objective of the 2011 expedition is to collect data on Thermohaline circulation. According to the website, “ The Arctic plays a crucial role in driving thermohaline circulation – powerful ocean currents that circulate warm and cold water around the world’s oceans. These currents have a major impact on Earth’s climate and weather patterns.  While a number of processes drive thermohaline circulation, there are a few that are unique to the Arctic. Further data on these will help scientists determine how important the Arctic is to thermohaline circulation, and what changes are taking place.”

2. EWTT: Climate Change in Southeast Asia And Why We Can’t Afford Not to Act

3. New York Times: Arctic Waters Warmer in 2000 Years

4. BBC: Arctic Diary: Explorer’s Ice Quest

5. BBC: Polar bear’s epic nine day swim in search of sea ice

5. YouTube: Arctic Changes: The Big Picture

Photo Courtesy:

Polar Bears:

Other photos are copyrighted to Catlin Atlantic Survey and found here:

Catlin Arctic Survey Team 2009 : BBC

Explorer swimming in Sea Ice: MSNBC

Explorer pulling a sledge: Guardian UK

Ann Daniels and Pen Hadow taking sea ice measurements: WWF UK


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Thomas L. Friedman in Singapore: Why We Need A Green Revolution Tue, 25 Jan 2011 06:53:23 +0000 by Bhavani Prakash

Thomas Friedman, one of the world’s most influential columnists with The New York Times, with a following of over 20 million readers, and best-selling author of “Hot, Flat and Crowded” was in town (Singapore) yesterday to give an interesting lecture on “Why We Need a Green Revolution.”

He was invited by the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (LKYSPP),  one of Asia’s leading thinktanks, and introduced to the audience by the Dean of the School, Dr Kishore Mahbubani.  Dr Mahbubani himself is a well known public figure in the region, and author of books such as “Can Asians Think” and “Beyond the Age of Innocence.”  He commenced the night with a sober note, “We are facing the biggest challenge in human history. The Earth is in distress. We don’t know what to do, and how to do it.”

Friedman asserted that though Hot, Flat and Crowded prima facie talks of energy and the environment, it is essentially about America rediscovering its ‘groove’ as a global leader by addressing the major and pressing problems of the world.

Hot is the planet warming up with increasing human made greenhouse gas emissions in the thin atmosphere that blankets it.  Flat is a globalised and interconnected world, where rising middle classes aspire for higher “America –like’” consumption standards. Crowded is because our population is going to balloon to 9 billion by 2050, with higher per capita consumption, and more pressure on the finite resources of the earth.

Here are some of the main points he brought out in his talk to an audience of about a thousand invited by the LKYSPP.

  • The environmental crisis and the financial crisis are flip sides of the same problem.  2007-2010 was when the markets and Mother Nature hit the wall, an early warning heart attack that we are growing unsustainably -financially and ecologically.
  • The world is seeing a never ending growth loop which is clearly unsustainable and has to be broken. Friedman explained it thus:

More and more factories built in China –> More and more stuff produced –> More and more coal used (with emissions) –>More and more dollars for China  –>More and more Treasury Bills issued by the US –>More and more factories in China…and back again to the loop.

  • The fundamental problems in both financial markets and in Mother Nature are due to three fold reasons. We are
  1. Underpricing Risk (such as credit risk in subprime mortgage or the risk of carbon molecules in fossil fuel emissions)
  2. Privatising Gain ( Profits accrue to owners of capital who benefit from financial markets, or due to cheap oil and coal)
  3. Socialising Losses ( If things blow up, the taxpayer bears the losses through bailouts, and our children and future generations pay the consequences of disruptive climate change)
  • There is a larger ‘values breakdown’ in society.  We have moved from sustainable values that used to be the basis for relationships, communities, business and politics, to situational values of the baby boomer generation. Ploughing up hundreds of acres of biodiverse Amazon rainforest to plant soyabean, is an example of situational value which places financial gain over long term sustainable value – which would dictate that this is the wrong thing to do.This is dangerous, because both markets and Mother Nature are fiercesome, cruel and unemotional when it comes to excesses. According to Friedman, if we don’t find a more sustainable way we will be ‘less free than if the Soviet Union had won the cold war.’
  • Friedman sees five megatrends that impact the world tremendously:

-          Supply and Demand of Energy and Natural Resources. Demand is increasing at a mind boggling rate, with the rise of new consumerist middle classes in China and India and other nations. In two cities he had visited – Doha in Qatar and Dalian in China, another ‘Manhattan’ had sprung up in a span of only three years.  This kind of development has staggering implications for resource and energy use. Friedman calls this the problem as ‘Too Many Americans.’ If the whole world caught up with American consumption rates, it would mean an equivalent of 72 billion people on this planet.

-          The impact on Petropolitics is the clear inverse relationship between the price of oil and the political freedom in the major oil exporting nations – which is graphed by the ‘Freedom Index’ By increasing our demand for fossil fuels, we are indirectly supporting petrodictatorships in these countries.

-          Climate Change as an issue is so polluted by climate deniers, he prefers not to use the term Global Warming using ‘Global Wierding’ instead. This is because the result of increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is going to be increasingly extreme, frequent, and violent weather patterns.

In a tongue-in-cheek way, Friedman says he prefers to be like “Dick Cheney” during the Iraq war, who said “if there is 1% chance that nuclear weapons are found in Iraq, it would irreversible and catastrophic.”
Likewise he says, “If there is even 1% chance that what climate scientists say is true, it would be irreversible and catastrophic for the planet.”

-          Energy Poverty is something 1.6 billion people on this planet face as they are not connected to electric grid. This is going to leave behind a vast part of the population behind, as they have inadequate access to water, education, and technology.

-          Biodiversity Loss is happening at an unprecedented rate. We are facing the fastest rate of extinction since the age of the dinosaurs – about 1 new species every 20 minutes disappears, which is about 1000 times the background rate of extinction.

Friedman asserts that all these 5 problems can be solved by the “Green Revolution” by finding a way to produce “abundant, cheap, clean and reliable electrons” and the country which does that will get the most global respect. He wants that country to be America, as he thinks this is the only way that clean technology and energy will scale up with the speed required to solve the global crisis.  It’s not going to be ‘easy’ – a revolution implies suffering and radical change. At the moment, the world is seeing is only incremental and small scale change – or to put it more cynically, “we’re all having a big green party.”

According to Friedman, “We’ll know when we are really having a Green Revolution and that is when the word “green’ disappears. There won’t be a ‘green’ building. You simply won’t be able to build something that doesn’t adhere to the highest energy and resource efficient standards. There won’t be a ‘green’ car, only a car which is built to highest mileage and environmental standards. “

Friedman lays more faith on engineers and entrepreneurs than on regulators or “192 countries trying to agree on reduction in emissions” as in the COP meetings, for change to happen. Price matters in the Green Revolution, and a durable, long term price system for carbon is critical. He also favours subsidy support to renewables especially in the intial take-off stages, as well as a carbon and gasoline tax to reduce the price advantage on fossil fuels.

For systemic change to happen that supports ‘an ecosystem of innovation’, one requires firm leadership and Friedman wishes America could be China for a day, just to be able to impose all the rules and regulations to support the green revolution, and let the system take over.

My thoughts on Friedman’s call for a green revolution:

-          It looks increasingly like it may not be America’s call to take leadership on Climate Change. China for good or bad, does have the political advantange of firm leadership (or dictatorship) to make swift decisions on green technology.  Friedman himself admitted during the Q & A that necessity is the “mother of innovation” and that China is moving faster toward clean technology, as it discovers the downsides of  environmental pollution.

(According to BNEF, new global investment in clean energy reached $243 billion in 2010, up from $186.5 billion in 2009. Last year’s investment figures double those from 2006. The main factors in this growth were the massive Chinese market, the expansion of offshore wind, hot European solar markets and global R&D.

Investment in China was up 30% to $51.1bn in 2010, by far the largest figure for any country. In 2009 Asia and Oceania overtook the Americas, and in 2010 it narrowed the gap further on Europe, Middle East and Africa as the leading region of the world for clean energy investment. Facts from Renewable Energy World )

-          My question to Friedman during the Q & A was that though removal of fossil fuel subsidies is one key step in giving the right price signals to the market, political leaders do get ‘wobbly knees’ when actually taking action on this front. I wanted to know if there are case studies of countries who have been successful with this.  Look at India where the price of onions is enough to give politicians the jitters.  (I also had at the back of my mind the reversal of Bolivian President Eva Morales’ decision to raise fuel prices over the new year.  India too had deregulated petrol prices in June 2010 but not diesel prices because it was too sensitive an issue. )

Friedman didn’t answer my question directly, but he did give an interesting perspective about what fossil fuel subsidies really mean to an economy. If you don’t tax fuel in your country, you are simply handing that money over to the oil cartel, instead of using it for education, health and green tech within your own economy. Even though the per unit price of oil goes up, the total bill goes down leading to a more efficient system. Yes, it’s a difficult decision, but it has to be done, and all it may take is one gutsy polician to bring about that change.

-          Friedman doesn’t really mention a role for civic society, in fact he dismisses all the small, green actions that individuals take, without a larger systemic, macroeconomic change happening.  My take on this is yes, we absolutely need systemic change, but more often than not, it happens when millions of individuals start demanding that change, and no matter what level it is – at an individual level (as a consumer, employee or neighbour), at a community level, at a national or international level – it is at the end of the day,  individuals and groups of ‘thoughtful citizens’ who will change the world.

We can’t hang around and wait much longer for that change to happen, as there is no “later” in Friedman’s sober conclusion. I share his cautious optimism in these words, “We have exactly enough time – starting now.”

About the writer:


Further links you may be interested in:

NYT: Serious in Singapore by Thomas L. Friedman


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Why We Need A Law On Ecocide Fri, 07 Jan 2011 01:39:25 +0000

Until we have a law to prosecute those who destroy the planet, corporations will never be called to account for their crimes

by Polly Higgins

Sophie Scholl, a Munich University student, was executed for revealing the truth about the activities of the Nazi authorities; today 20 brave Ratcliffe whistleblowers have been sentenced at Nottingham crown court for plotting to draw attention to the truth of the activities of another German entity. This time, replace the tyranny of the Nazis with the tyranny of the energy giant E.ON.

Scholl and 20 others stood up and took direct non-violent action. Their crime was the dissemination of leaflets highlighting and decrying the tyranny of the Nazi dictatorship. It was a decision to undertake something unlawful – an act that they believed was a necessity – to halt a greater but unnamed crime, a crime that cost many lives. That crime did not, at the time, have a name. But it soon did: genocide.

The Ratcliffe 20 did the same in April 2009. They too were prepared to stand up and take action. Their crime was planning to shut down Ratcliffe-on-Soar, a coal-powered station that is one of Britain’s largest greenhouse gas emitters. The state was failing to prevent a greater injury from taking place; the loss of life. This time it is not only human life, but all life.

Like Scholl and her fellow activists, the Ratcliffe 20 were motivated to take non-violent direct action. They, along with 124 others, decided to undertake something unlawful: conspiring to close down the offending emitter. It was an act that they believed was a necessity; to halt a greater but unnamed crime, a crime that is already costing many lives.

Their defence was that they were acting to prevent a greater crime, of death and serious injury caused by climate change. We do not currently have a legal crime in place that fits this description but there is one fast looming on the horizon and that crime is ecocide.

Currently there is no law to prosecute those who are destroying the planet. Instead, climate campaigners do not have the support of the judiciary in preventing the corporate ecocide that is daily occurring under our very noses. Ecocide is permitted (as genocide was in Nazi Germany) by the government and, by dint of the global reach of modern-day transnational business, every government in the world. Corporate ecocide has now reached a point where we stand on the brink of collapse of our ecosystems, triggering the death of many millions in the face of human-aggravated cataclysmic tragedies.

Over the passage of time, tyranny revisits. Tyranny is the cruel, unacceptable, or arbitrary use of power that is oblivious to consequence. While the use of coal stations may not be deemed an intentional cruelty, it is certainly an unacceptable use of corporate power. Our governments collude by encouraging excess emissions, contrary to their UN commitment to stabilise “greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”.

Sixty years ago the tyranny was Nazism. Today it is pursuit of profit without moral compass or responsibility. Despite the planned Ratcliffe protests, it is one that the majority of humanity accepts regardless of the known consequences. We look the other way from the daily reports of destruction of our world by those who are in a position of superior responsibility; the master controllers of our fates are those who determine how we live our lives. It is the heads of the top corporations who gamble with the fate of our planet; those who produce and supply our energy are the most culpable of all.

The failure rests with our governments who are unwilling to intervene to make the destruction of our world a crime. Our police are disempowered and our justice system is unable to protect our greater interests when faced with the superior silent right of corporations to cause injury to persons and planet. Those who stand up and speak out are thereby treated as criminals.

Prior to the Ratcliffe trial, the judge ruled: “the defendants must have the opportunity of putting that contention (that the emissions from the power station do pose an immediate threat) before the jury, no doubt backed by expert evidence.” Expert evidence was heard, from James Hansen, the former head of Nasa’s Goddard Institute, on the immediacy of the threat to life caused by escalation of emissions, to MPs who confirmed government inertia. All of which the jury failed to accept. What will it take for that dense sea fog to dissipate and for the truth to be revealed?

Unlike the Ratcliffe 20, Scholl and her co-conspirators were denied the right to defend themselves in their trial. They too were convicted for resorting to unlawful acts, which they believed to be necessary to expose the truth. At the very end of her trial, she spoke out. It is just matter of time, she said, before the true destroyers are put in the dock. The very same can be said today.

About the Writer

Polly Higgins is a barrister, author and international environmental lawyer advocating a different approach to preventing the destruction of our planet.  Instead of our laws protecting the property rights of the few, we can shift to laws that impose responsibilities, duties and obligations for the benefit of the many.

Voted by the Ecologist as one of the “Worlds Top 10 Visionary Thinkers” for her earlier work advancing the Universal Declaration of Planetary Rights, Polly has submitted a second proposal to the United Nations: the Crime of Ecocide.  Ecocide is a 5th Crime Against Peace, yet to be recognised alongside Genocide, Crimes Against Humanity, War Crimes and Crimes of Aggression. Polly was nominated “The Planet’s Lawyer” by the 2010 Performance Awards, has been named one of the top “unreasonable people” in the world by the cult US online magazine Planet Green for refusing to accept the norm and hailed by the Guardian as one of their Green Heroes working for the right kind of environmental change.

In April 2010 Polly submitted a legal proposal to the United Nations to create a 5th Crime Against Peace – that crime is the crime of Ecocide.

Polly Higgins’  websites are: ThisIsEcocide ,  TreesHaveRightsToo ,  WiseWomen and TheLazyEnvironmentalist . She can be followed on Facebook via EcocideIsACrime and on Twitter via @PollyHiggins and @ThisIsEcocide

This article was originally published in The Guardian on 5 January 2011 and has been reprinted with the permission of the writer.

Further links you may be interested in:

1. YouTube: What is Ecocide?

Video series by Polly Higgins outling a “Proposal to the United Nations to make Ecocide a crime, by Polly Higgins, barrister and international environmental lawyer: Ecocide is proposed as the 5th Crime Against Peace to stand alongside Genocide in the International Criminal Court. Ecocide is defined as the “damage, destruction to or loss of ecocsystems…”.

Part 1

Watch remaining parts: Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 and Part 6 (for the summary)

2.  Eradicating Ecocide: Laws and Governance to Prevent the Destruction of our Planet by Polly Higgins

Eradicating Ecocide highlights the need for enforceable, legally binding mechanisms in national and international law to hold to account perpetrators of long term severe damage to the environment. At this critical juncture in history it is vital that we set global standards of accountability for corporations, in order to put an end to the culture of impunity and double standards that pervade the international legal system. Polly Higgins illustrates how this can be achieved in her invaluable new book.”
BIANCA JAGGER, Founder and Chair of Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation, advocate for Crimes Against Present and Future Generations

Read a review of the book on TreeHugger ” The only way are going to truly stop ecocide is to make it a serious crime”

3. Other related links:

TreeHugger: India’s First Environmental Tribunal Opens: ‘Anyone and Everyone Can Bring Cases Before Court’

The Ecologist: COP16 Cancun – Colonialism by the Sea

EWTT: Bolivia Climate Change Conference and The Rights of Mother Earth

Movie : The Corporation and on YouTube


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