#33 The Green Avalanche

It is impossible to escape the issue of climate change in the media today. Green issues central to political and cultural debate are everywhere now, in a way so vast and banal, it has almost escaped comment. Al Gore has been transformed into an international star with An Inconvenient Truth; David Cameron of the Conservative Party in the UK has made green issues a central plank of the Party’s manifesto, and has even changed the party symbol to reflect it; the recent Paris conference on climate change has clearly laid the blame at man’s feet, and President Chirac has demanded that the world pick up the gauntlet. Even President Bush has finally acknowledged both the reality and seriousness of climate change in the State of the Union address, whilst celebrities clamour over one another to demonstrate their green credentials. Following the tough, no nonsense Stern Report on the huge costs of inaction on climate change, the Economist recently reported that it is now global businesses leaders who are the ones demanding that action be taken, and fast, for hard nosed financial reasons. Unbelievable as it is, Arnie the Governator stands as an unlikely green champion with his initiatives on emissions and solar panels.

This is a remarkable change from even just one year ago. Of course, there has been plenty of doom and gloom too - meaning that many have effortlessly crossed from denial to hopeless resignation, and hence conveniently squaring the circle to write off any guilt for inaction or a sway some lingering sense of social responsibility whilst they blithely continue their carbon heavy lives. Even though Americans may be the ‘least concerned’ about climate change in the world (according to AcNielsen, just 42% considered it ‘very serious’), an amazing 91% of 25,000 people globally surveyed considered it a ‘very serious’ or ‘serious’ problem. With 1.5 billion people and growth projections indicating it will overtake the US as the world’s top CO2 emitter by 2009, the fact that China considers the problem both very serous and clearly man made counts for a lot, and cannot be ignored.

What is more, let us contemplate just one single momentous fact – whoever wins the US Presidential elections in 2008, from either party, they will almost certainly push America to take global leadership in tackling climate change. The forerunners, McCain, Obama and Clinton, have all pledged to bring the issue to the centre of their policies. And that’s not even touching on the impressive environmental measures that the newly Democratic controlled Houses have launched, starting with the repeal of Big Oil’s massive tax breaks (with the money going to a green fuels fund), and the Waxman investigation into Bush administration manipulation and suppression of scientific information on climate change. Even Dick Cheney’s own fund manager says he is "certain" that "oil substitution, energy conservation, and related environment issues will be the biggest investment issue of at least the next several decades," in a letter in which he blasted 20 years of political cowardice, inaction and greed in the face of mounting energy problems in the US.

The writing is on the wall, and people are finally starting to read it. How on earth did we reach this apparent tipping point so rapidly? A host of immediate issues spring to mind: the devastation of Hurricane Katrina; the looming conflict with Iran; the price of oil; the unsettling and disturbing weather patterns across the Northern Hemisphere; celebrity sound bites and tabloid hysteria; not to mention of course the mountains of solid scientific data. All have played a part. And yet, the current debate and momentum for rapid, dramatic change has snowballed so fast, that it is clearly far greater than the sum of these parts alone.

For, underlying these immediate causal factors, I suspect, lies a much deeper driving force – the maturing and development of the information revolution, the much vaulted ‘Web 2.0.’ Whilst hype is dangerous (Dot Com bubble anyone), and although one can legitimately question Time’s choice of ‘you’ as person of the year, something really significant has happened – and it isn’t so simple as the labels ‘user driven content,’ ‘amateur journalism’ or ‘new media’ imply. This is because these things are only facets of a much more profound democratising change that is occurring in the nature of information, and our relationship with it. The evidence, acceptance and debate on the reality of climate change (and the profoundly negative consequences associated with it) has spread and become commonplace in a grassroots virtual exchange that illustrates the fundamental dynamism of information. Data, in all its multifarious forms, has an independent, boundless and relentless desire to replicate and spread itself as far and as wide as possible. This is what we really need to be looking at to understand this rapid, complex weaving together of factors and forces.

Blogs, podcasts, video phones, YouTube, Google, P2P and all the rest, are all forming the infrastructure and tools to articulate this inherent dynamic of information to expand, replicate, network and generate. The Green Avalanche is just one byproduct of this new era we are moving towards. The information on climate change is ‘out there,’ in this new virtual civic space, and it wants to get out, irrespective of politics or business. The truth has a boundless desire to be set free, to operate in the market place of ideas, and Web 2.0 will increasingly make that manifestation real. Where does this end? A radical rethinking of just about everything from ownership, equality, relationships, intellectual property rights, are only a few things that come to mind…

- This article was written for and provided to the Weekend Economist by Stuart Reeve