2007 was an extraordinary year in the life of the issue of climate change. It moved to the top of political, business and media agendas, with the bandwagon full to bursting by year end. Over the last decade or so I’ve spent a good chunk of my time advising media people on climate change, and the year end had me sharpening my pencil to draft some new year resolutions, including how I might stand back from this work a little more and make a more effective contribution to improving media performance.

Photograph by openDemocracy. Used under Creative Commons License.

Why a need for a new year’s resolution? Well I think all of us – both the media and the people who feed them with material and advice – have been underperforming. While news and factual media have done a pretty good job of communicating the basic facts of science and policy debates, and – crucially – have almost all moved on from portraying climate science as an ‘is it or isn’t it happening?’ story I feel there are some deep failings that need to be addressed.

I’ve got two immediate targets. The first is to ‘fill in the gaps’. Most coverage of climate change generates impossible leaps of scale that shift within a sentence from distant global processes of cause and effect that are very difficult to make sense of within daily life to a rapid distribution of responsibility to individuals and households. So a first resolution for 2008 is to work harder to encourage media people to reveal the layered responsibilities for action on climate change that live not with the householder but with, for example, the cabinet minister, the designer, the advertising executive and the energy supplier.

If we put half the effort that currently goes into getting householders to ‘do their bit’ into asking difficult questions of some of these folks then we could start dismantling and redesigning our carbon based economy pretty quickly. Mostly this has been told as a bad news story - of restricting choices and cutting down on things. But quite a few of us have been saying this for years, so why haven’t they listened? One of the reasons is that our arguments have been so grim and self-denying. So I want to spend more time pressing for a different way of approaching climate change politics.

This is reflected in the title of a book I’ve co-edited, due out at the end of this month entitled: ‘Do Good Lives Have to Cost the Earth?’ Contributors include: Anita Roddick, A C Grayling, David Cameron, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Hilary Benn, John Bird, Kevin McCloud, Oliver James, Philip Pullman and Rosie Boycott. Royalties go back into the Interdependence Day project that the book springs from. By the way the answer we collectively offer to the question in the title is a resounding ‘no’!

Second resolution: I want to convince more media people that we need to do some hard ‘cultural work’ on climate change. We underestimate the extent to which this issue reframes not just the way we think about science, energy or ‘waste’ but revises the way we think of our place in the world. With knowledge of climate change we have to recognise our place as ‘in and of nature’ not separate from it. Climate change science shows how the aggregate of individual actions reshapes the global atmosphere, and that knowledge demands that we reframe our ethics and politics. It presses us to revise the ‘who, what, where and when’ of responsibility. But that work can’t go on in the seminar room alone – it has to be part of our living culture.

That is why I’ve been excited by talking and working with artists, drama and comedy people over the last year. They are in a good position to move climate change on from being about distant science and policy and start bringing it into daily life and conversation. There’s plenty to keep us all busy in 2008.

About the author

Joe Smith is Lecturer in Environment at the Open University and chair of Interdependence Day. Joe has written books on climate change and sustainability, the media and global issues, and the green movement.