10:10 is great but what has really changed?

September 1, 2009 by
Filed under: Credit crunch, The RSA 

I’m delighted to say that the RSA has today signed up to 10:10, the new initiative to persuade organisations and individuals to cut their use of energy. The campaign, backed by a sparkling array of celebrities. is the brainchild of Franny Armstrong who was behind the film Age of Stupid which we launched here at the RSA.

The campaign is based on the simple idea that we all have a responsibility to help the nation meet its ambitious carbon reduction targets, and that it really isn’t that hard for us to make a cut in our own energy consumption of 10% by the end of 2010.

It won’t be easy for the RSA to meet our target as we have already done a lot in this area and the age and listed status of the House limits our room for manoeuvre, but we can’t bang on about ‘pro-social’ behaviour if we are not willing to do our bit on what is arguably the most important issue facing humanity.

Today’s 10:10 launch coincides with news that personal debt levels are falling for the first time in more than 15 years. A few months ago many commentators – including me – were suggesting that the global financial meltdown would lead to a fundamental questioning of the values that lay behind the debt bubble. The crisis would be a catalyst for a critique of a society that condoned greed and excess, that suffered from a range of social pathologies including falling levels of general well-being, and that was failing to grasp the scale of the environmental emergency. 

But now we are clearly past the low point of the recession the question is: what has really changed?  Bonuses are back in the City, house prices are picking up and we never stopped shopping even when it looked like things could be much worse. So is the only impact of the crisis to be on the direct victims – the unemployed and those who have lost their businesses?  Is talk of a broader change of social values misplaced? I want to ponder this myself some time over the next few days, but I am, as always, interested to hear other people’s thoughts.

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Comments

12 Comments on 10:10 is great but what has really changed?

  1. carl allen on Tue, 1st Sep 2009 9:02 pm

    2. There are less jobs than before, more permanently unemployable people over the age of 50, considerably less money for public services, an increase in underemployment, a slowdown in housebuilding which means more overcrowding, more poor people of pensionable age. I could go on.

    The point is that we can expect large scale social crisis manifesting itself as what … riots, a higher and more vicious level of crime, larger areas of urban decay?

  2. DaveGorman on Tue, 1st Sep 2009 9:51 pm

    3. Matthew,

    I remember debating this at the ‘peak’ of the crisis, with a colleague who thought fundamental changes would occur. I disagreed, thinking we’d get some regulatory and other improvements, but that pretty much 2 years after it would all be forgotten- in terms of spending, growth, speculation and finance at least.

    I think change is needed, but the crisis wasnt really severe enough or sustained enough to provoke the scale of change needed, not sure what would be?

  3. Marbury on Tue, 1st Sep 2009 10:11 pm

    4. The kind of fundamental change in social values you describe doesn’t happen over the course of a year, does it? I think we may start thinking about ourselves differently as a result of this crash and its long aftermath, but the change won’t be apparent for a while. The next five years are likely to be fairly bleak and involve some painful readjustments at all levels of society. We’ll emerge a different country. But that doesn’t mean we’ll emerge as the country you describe – which is to say, crudely speaking, more left wing.

  4. Dan Hill on Tue, 1st Sep 2009 11:13 pm

    5. It feels like a recession wasted to me. Not that I’d want total social breakdown in order to reconstruct values. We can surely find a way of doing it without that.

    However this is all broadly in line with Jacques Attali’s thesis in ‘A Brief History of the Future’, which sees the pre-recession trajectory continuing until the middle part of this century i.e. things will get a lot worse, then they get better. Attali’s book is worth a read – a bit patchy, and odd in places, but a brilliant history and interesting conjectures.

  5. Anand on Wed, 2nd Sep 2009 11:01 am

    6. Where has the political leadership been on this? Why is Adair Turner further to the left of a Labour government when it comes to regulating City bonuses for the wider social good? Or Mervyn King in pointing out that the rewards in the financial sector have limited the pool of talent available in all other sectors of the UK economy?

    The question of what is required to bring about social change is a complex one – and the actions and words of politicians are only a small part of the story.

    But when the government of the day will not take on a socially damaging vested interest and preaches business as usual (which, a few tweaks aside, is essentially the position of the other main political parties), it doesn’t help.

  6. Joe Nutt on Wed, 2nd Sep 2009 11:15 am

    7. Matthew, you should investigate the Cradle to Cradle sustainability initiative created by Prof Michael Braungart. It has attracted some major international companies and having heard him speak, a few months ago, I could see why. He’s an international research chemist who has developed a really seductive narrative for anyone wishing to behave in a more eco-friendly way. He manages to expose the negative, punitive and guilt-ridden thinking underlying the Al Gore approach and replaces it with a counter intuitive, but fascinatingly positive narrative.

    His approach is genuinely holistic and he has some lovely examples of where the accepted thinking or approach to what is considered green behaviour, is woefully misguided or just plain wrong. For example, you can feel as smug as you like for buying a new, greener car, but if it really is green and not black, then you can wipe that smile straight off your face because the copper in the pigment will have far more deleterious effects on the environment than anything to do with the engine or emissions.

    His entire approach to green business and efficiency, struck me as extremely clever and makes current practice and language about eco-friendly business sound both false and redundant. His organisation is called EPEA.

  7. matthewtaylor on Wed, 2nd Sep 2009 11:20 am

    8. Maybe Carl. But these are simply bad effects. What about the positive effects some people predicted in terms, for example, of making us less materialistic or tolerant of greed?

  8. matthewtaylor on Wed, 2nd Sep 2009 11:21 am

    9. Thanks Dave. Dan Hill’s point about change not happening until the middle of the century is interesting.

  9. matthewtaylor on Wed, 2nd Sep 2009 11:27 am

    10. Thanks Ian. This chimes with the point made by Dan Hill. Very interesting.

  10. Duncan Lawie FRSA on Wed, 2nd Sep 2009 11:35 am

    11. Perhaps we aren’t past the low point of the recession at all – or this is going to be a recession with a long, fat tail.

  11. carl allen on Wed, 2nd Sep 2009 11:50 am

    12. Positive effects are simply not happening or are isolated events.

    And those that you name, and of course the list is far from complete, do not look likely to address the adverse effects.

    It looks like a slow start to the decline but perhaps increasing in pace, unless bodies includes the RSA, intervenes strongly and consistently.

    Intervene is not just participation or engagement.

  12. Michaela Crimmin on Wed, 2nd Sep 2009 12:32 pm

    13. I’ve just borrowed Slovoj Zizek’s new book (at this stage a proof) ‘First as Tragedy, Then as Farce’. He is commenting on how we prioritised global warming before the crash but without any significant action. However a gynormous amount was done and very fast when capitalism was threatened. My take on this is to be optimistic that we have the wherewithall to build the momentum to alleviate the causes and effects of global warming, but at the heart are big moral questions of course. These in turn break down into a zillion more choices and contradictory values and these we are only just beginning to face. Great if this could be included in the moral architecture thinking!

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