On this day, November 4 in 1991, the UK Government launched a £10m campaign “Helping the earth begins at home”.
The usual guilt-tripping about energy efficiency (with no support for renters or people on low-income).
Quickly forgotten, but a good example of how little actual joined up thinking there is.
There’s a good article by Steve Hinchcliffe (1996) “Helping the earth begins at home The social construction of socio-environmental responsibilities”, Global Environmental Change Volume 6, Issue 1, Pages 53-62
To be clear, OF COURSE we need behaviour change, but not if those are going to kick bigger decisions about overall demand reduction, fuel-switching, removing fossil fuel subsidies into the long grass….
[The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 351ish ppm. At time of writing it was 416ishppm- but for what it is now,well, see here for the latest.]
The context was this –
Climate change (then called “the Greenhouse Effect” or “global warming” had burst onto the public scene in 1988. Everyone was making pledges, scratching their heads, clutching their pearls, wringing their hands. And the Thatcher government wanted to be able to play a game of pin the blame on the donkey…
Why this matters.
Blame-shifting has been going on a long time. And the same technique keeps getting re-used, again and again and again. Why change a winning game?
What happened next?
The campaign went nowhere, but got dusted off, rebranded and reused for the next few decades, until the collapse of human civilisation.