Category: Guest post

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Guest post

Guest post – “Why Our Evolutionary Roots Can Inspire Us to Address the Climate Crisis” by @adventuwe

By: Hayven Rakotoarimanana (they/them), MS

Midsummer–the two weeks following the northern hemisphere’s summer solstice (June 21)–has traditionally been a time of celebration and festival for those living in Northern Europe, parts of North America, and Northeast Asia.These northern, temperate areas laud this season’s warm temperatures and long, often sunny days. However, in South Asia, Madagascar, and parts of East Africa, this time of year marks the beginning of monsoon season, where lifegiving rains replenish the ground, parched after the long dry season.

Unfortunately, the South Asian-East African monsoon has become unreliable in recent years, fueled by anthropogenic global warming. In 2021, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh suffered one of the worst droughts in recorded history, as warmer ocean temperatures forced the seasonal monsoonal gyre to the south. The drought was most intense in Nagaland and Assam, in northeast India, along with Odisha and Rajasthan in western India. In these places rainfall during the 2021 monsoon season measured less than 50 percent of normal totals, marking this as an exceptional drought (Shagun 2021). This drought devastated crop production, creating a famine that killed thousands of people.

A year later, in 2022, an increase in the monsoon rains (which arrived months ahead of schedule) caused a deluge across South Asia and central China, causing widespread flooding that caused significant damage to life and property. The rain damage was worst in Henan, China, where more than 300 people died and roads transformed into rivers, sending cars careening down flooded streets into homes and businesses.

These erratic tendencies in the monsoons across Asia and East Africa are likely to increase with anthropogenic climate change, according to a recent study by researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (Katzenberger, Schewe, Pongratz, & Leverman 2021). Practically, this means that the coming decades will see an increase in natural disasters, floods, and famines. This not only impacts the region’s human populations, who will experience more climate-related poverty, suffering, and death, but it will also decimate the environment and non-human animal populations, many of whom are endemic and already close to extinction.

How did we get here?

The origins of the current climate crisis lie much further back than the disasters of the past two years, or even the last century or the Industrial Revolution. The roots go back much deeper, to humanity’s fundamental relationship with the rest of Nature.

For most of Homo sapiens 300,000-year history, the species lived much like other animals do: relying on the land and what it provided for survival–food, shelter, health, connection. Population levels remained in a natural balance, with births and deaths remaining roughly equivalent, allowing for long-term resource sustainability. The vast majority of human history, in all parts of the world, was one spent in harmony with nature. There was no anthropocene, since humans did not have the ability to dominate nature in a way similar to societies today.

This began to change with the advent of agriculture approximately 12,500 years ago. Farming freed humans from reliance on natural resources for survival; they could grow their own food, trap and exploit other animals, and store resources for tough times. Domestic dogs aided in hunting and defense, leading to a surplus in meat-based food. In addition, the domestication of horses and camels gave humans easy, fast transportation (at the expense of animal suffering).

The changes brought by this agricultural revolution allowed humankind to develop a number of new innovations: writing, codified religions, cities, pyramids, irrigation systems, weapons, transportation systems, and market economies. These were the catalyst for a new relationship between humanity and (the rest of) nature: Homo sapiens was no longer just one species living on the bounty of the planet, but an overlord, exploiting the land for personal and collective gain. In the mind of most post-agricultural humans, the Earth stopped being that which sustained life, and became a mere resource to be used.

It is this attitude–which became even more pronounced with the industrial revolution and the rise of modern capitalism–that drives the anti-environmental, growth-at-any-cost ethos behind the climate crisis. 

Remember your roots to save the planet

Although our species was most in tune with the Earth before the rise of agriculture, industry, and modern economics, no one is suggesting that we return to a Stone Age lifestyle. So what can we do to address climate change, in light of current technological and social conditions?

-Stop having kids. Remember that, for the vast majority of human history, net population growth was zero. Having one fewer child reduces your personal emissions rate by 60 tons of carbon dioxide per year (Perkins 2017). National policies which disincentivize reproduction, especially in countries such as India, where population growth is most severe, would be greatly effective at curbing emissions and climate change.

-Go vegan. Modern animal agriculture is one of the largest contributors to carbon emissions. Switching to a plant-based diet reduces personal carbon dioxide emissions by one ton per year (Perkins 2017). On a societal level, phasing out animal agriculture has a much larger impact, reducing carbon emissions by 68 percent annually (Than 2022).

-Consume only what you need. Today’s throwaway consumer lifestyle, which is common in the West and now booming across the Global South, is a major contributing factor to carbon emissions and global warming. Growing food, knitting clothes, and collecting rainwater can have a small impact on an individual level, and a larger one on a societal level. Taking a cue from our ancestors and letting the Earth provide as much of your food, clothing, and shelter as possible disconnects us from the exploitative-capitalist cycle, and allows us to appreciate nature as a sustainer, rather than a mere resource.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments!

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Guest post Scotland United Kingdom

June 24, 2009 – Scottish Parliament passes insufficient climate legislation; claims ‘leadership’ anyway

On this day, June 24th, in 2009, the Scottish parliament unanimously passed the Climate Change (Scotland) Act. This enabled the devolved Scottish government, led by the Scottish National Party’s minority administration, to look slightly more progressive than the UK New Labour government at Westminster. This government, then led by Gordon Brown, had passed the Climate Change Act for the whole of the UK in 2008.

Some provisions in the Scottish Act went further than the UK legislation; for example a slightly higher emission reduction target for 2020. This was the result of a parliamentary bidding war (a 42% target reduction in Scotland, compared to 34% for the UK as a whole). Also, there were to be annual targets to sit within 5 year carbon budget periods (the UK Act didn’t have those annual targets).

Sarah Louise Nash has written extensively in the academic journal Environmental Politics about the alliances that were formed in Scotland to shape the Act during a period of increased activist and media attention to climate change (paywall). A key factor was the desire for Scotland to be able to position itself as a global leader at the COP19 summit held in Copenhagen later in 2009, which ended famously in acrimonious failure.

In 2019, during the latest wave of enhanced activist and media concern about the worsening climate crisis, the Climate Change (Scotland) Act was amended to set more stringent emission reduction targets. The UK Government had just altered its legislation to set a net zero target for 2050 (up from an 80% reduction target). Scotland again followed suit and positioned itself as slightly more ambitious by proposing net zero by 2045, with interim targets for 2030 and 2040. The Scottish Green Party abstained on the Bill that introduced the new targets, arguing that an 80% reduction target by 2030 is needed, instead of the Bill’s 75% target (increased from the SNP’s proposed 70%).

Just like in 2009, 2019’s legislative change came before an important global summit that failed to meet inflated expectations. COP26, scheduled to be held in Glasgow in 2020, and delayed due to Covid until 2021, involved Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon trying, with limited success, to get on stage to position Scotland as a world leader, as cringy selfies showcased by the Murdoch Press (Sunday Times) help make apparent.

Nicola Sturgeon poses in red with various leaders at COP26 in Glasgow in 2021.

Despite the talk of global leadership, the climate scientist professor Kevin Anderson noted in Scotland’s 2020 Climate Assembly that ‘when you look at Scotland’s consumption emissions, that is its total carbon footprint over the last twenty years, you will see that there has been no meaningful reduction over that twenty year period’.

The lesson to take from this history is that, despite bidding wars for the status of virtue and global leadership on climate change that help to increase legislative ambition, the numbers still fail to add up when the baseline for ‘leadership’ is so disastrously low.

Dr Robbie Watt is an academic at University of Manchester, a core group member of Climate Emergency Manchester and an all-round lovely bloke. He has another guest post on All Our Yesterdays, here.

Categories
Guest post Sweden

June 14, 1979 – the messy inclusion of climate change in energy politics

Below is a brilliant guest post, by Swedish historian Kristoffer Ekberg. If there are other folks out there who want to write guest posts – please do get in touch! drmarchudson@gmail.com

14 June 1979 and the messy inclusion of climate change in energy politics

Kristoffer Ekberg

On this date, 14 June 1979,  the Swedish government gave the state-owned utility Statens Vattenfallsverk AB or short Vattenfall (meaning water fall) the task of  undertaking a large scale investigation into ways of introducing more coal into the energy mix without harming the environment or the health of the population, Kol-Hälsa-Miljö (Coal-Health-Environment).

The aim was to increase the use of coal. The task might not seem strange given the fear of volatile oil prices during the 1970s and the fact that in the beginning of the 1970s up to 75% of Sweden’s energy consumption came from imported oil. Transitioning to a source of energy that was seen as more secure due to the possibility to source it from the proximity in northern Germany seems like a rational choice when only looking at this development.

But understanding this as a strategic move based on solely energy security shows only part of the picture and obscures the dubious enterprise, given the already-existing knowledge of climate change present among the political elites.

Famously hosting the first UN meeting on the human environment in 1972 the issue of climate change was already present among the leadership of the Social democratic party and Swedish political leadership. Bert Bolin (who would later become the first chairman of IPCC), had the year before also convened with the world’s leading climate scientists in Sweden.

In 1974 the Swedish prime minister Olof Palme publicly stated that climate change was one of the most pressing issues in the period up to the year 2000. In 1975 climate change was mentioned in the energy plan that would guide Sweden’s actions the coming years, clearly influenced by Bolin’s work. Climate change science was not unanimous but the Swedish leadership nonetheless engaged with the threat.

Olof Palme, Swedish Prime Minister (source: Wikipedia)

In these years, climate change became a useful argument for a Social Democratic leadership wanting to push for nuclear power. As opposition to nuclear grew larger and more forceful every year, partly resulting in the loss in the election of 1976 ending a 40 year period in power, nuclear became a problem but so was oil.

In governmental reports in 1978, climate change, which had initially been framed as a concern in relation to national energy production and consumption became associated solely with future threats on a global scale.

Even though the coal investigation was tasked with incorporating all available knowledge, the issue of climate change and CO2 was in most parts excluded, despite the previous reports from Bolin and others. Further, during the investigation the issue of CO2 came to the fore through trips to – for example – the Department on Energy, in the US but was deemed a problem not for Sweden but for high emitters like USA, Soviet Union and China.

When finished in 1983, the report mentioned climate change but these formulations were critiqued by the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI) arguing that the investigation had failed to account for the impact on CO2 emissions from introducing more coal.

Why this matters

The episode told here speaks to the messy ways in which climate change entered discussions and speaks to the different strategies that have been used to keep climate change of the table in periods when energy issues are highly debated. The construction of delaying arguments is not new in contemporary society but is something that has happened constantly since climate change entered on the political arena.

*The above text is based on the research conducted by Kristoffer Ekberg and Martin Hultman for the article “A Question of Utter Importance: The Early History of Climate Change and Energy Policy in
Sweden, 1974–1983″ in Environment and History.
https://doi.org/10.3197/096734021X16245313030028

Biography-

Kristoffer Ekberg is an historian working at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. His research focuses on the political history of climate change and the environment, corporate anti-environmentalism as well as social movements and utopian thought. 

Categories
Environmental Racism, Guest post Social Movements

Environmental Racism – then and now… Guest post by @SakshiAravind

Sakshi Aravind is a PhD student at University of Cambridge. (see her review of Andreas Malm’s book “How to blow up a pipeline” here, and see an interview here) reflects on the 32 years since this-

1990 Shabecoff, P. 1990. Environmental Groups Told They Are Racists in Hiring. New York Times, 1 February. WASHINGTON, Jan. 31— Several members of civil rights and minority groups have written to eight major national environmental organizations charging them with racism in their hiring practices

After thirty-two years, it is a small relief that we do not have to write letters about discriminatory hiring practices in environmental organisations. We have traversed some distance. Let us make past this momentary sense of satisfaction. We can sit down for a hard-headed debriefing about whether this ‘distance’ was noticeably significant in any particular direction or just self-congratulatory posturing about having made it past our front yards. Since I am writing about a small but exceedingly significant letter written in the year I was born, I cannot dismiss all that peoples’ persistence has achieved in these years. The concept of ‘environmental justice’ has found a strong foothold and bided its time in the social, political, and juridical spheres. Social movements for environmental justice, fair and equitable environmental policies, and opportunities for democratic participation are very vibrant. The environmental organisations do not have visible and impenetrable walls obstructing BIPOC members. The phrases ‘diversity’ and ‘equality’ seem boundlessly desired even by vampiric corporations. While it is easy to pin down ‘what changed’, ‘what did not’ is worrying. What have we done with the achievements, transformations, and progresses of the last 32 years as the nature of planetary collapse worsens?

When the racist hiring practices were seemingly remedied, how did the people responsible for those changes define the problem? What did they imagine they were solving when they hired a more representative workforce and opened their membership for all? It is important to document and assess the changes we have witnessed in the last three decades to classify what problems are fully addressed and what others have shapeshifted into another version of themselves. Whilst environmental movements and groups appear to be more representative, ‘representation’ does not fill the shoes of ‘recognition’. Even ‘recognition’ can be a lopsided concept if it is not constructive and does not allow for a plurality of voices across race, class, gender, etc. The big question of what changed between then and now should be: whether the change of heart in environmentalism confronted the entrenched whiteness (and consequently coloniality) that underlies the collective understanding of environmental injustices, policy choices, and the general direction of environmental movements. The problem of racism and coloniality in environmental movements is also structural. Hence, cosmetic changes in representation can only have incremental benefits and not the epistemic shift we need to counter the rapid destruction of the planet. Mercifully, we did not regress. However, environmental organisations also did not build on their knowledge on a required scale. There are no visible and invisible forms of environmental racism and environmental colonialism. There are either visible aspects that are hard to deny or the aspects that are wilfully ignored and diminished without any accountability—through entrenched knowledge and epistemologies that are vital to the sustenance and reproduction of colonial, white supremacist, capitalist nations.      

If environmental movements and organisations had understood how ‘spaces’ (emphasis on structures as opposed to a handful of institutions) exclude BIPOC workers, activists, members, and environmentalisms, our responsibilities at the moment would have been lighter despite the number of challenges regarding environmental destruction and climate change. Something as simple as how wilderness is defined, what opportunities are available to benefit from the environment—even simple pleasures such as birdwatching—and what autonomy does BIPOC have on controlling and governing land, natural resources are steeped in relationships of expropriation and elimination. Therefore, it is still easy to please many people with Don’t Look Up as if it were the pinnacle of artistic expression. At the same time, Global South prepares for the worst of climate crises that have been building up due to imperialist plunder. In 1990, they were concerned about the absence of People of Colour in key organisations. Now, we are concerned about the absence of constructive voices that would define climate change as anything but a specific event; dismantle structures of accumulation, theft, and exploitation; demand reparations and imagine world-making practices in terms of kinship, care, cooperation, and justice.

If we think long and hard, a lot changed for the good. Nevertheless, the ways in which environmental injustices have been defined are still largely in the clutches of those who command the resources—social, political, capital et al. Effectively, the epistemic resources need redistribution along with material redistribution. Moreover, epistemic justice must follow environmental justice close at hand. Meanwhile, we keep writing and conversing in the hope that we might have done a little more towards the things we care for than what we inherited thirty years later. 

Categories
Activism Guest post Manchester United Kingdom

January 28, 1993: Parliament protest – “Wake Up, the World is Dying” – Guest Post by Hugh Warwick

On this day in 1993, a demonstration took place outside Parliament around the destruction of the Amazonian rain forest. According to the Press Association 

“Police today dramatically foiled a bid by save-the-rainforest protesters to force a lorry laden with a mixture of sawdust and sand into the House of Commons. When police saw the lorry bearing down on them in Parliament Square they closed one part of Carriage Gates. An eye-witness said: “The driver spotted that just in time and swerved across the pavement to the other part of Carriage Gates which were still open.” But he bungled the angle across the pavement and couldn’t get in. He then started to raise the rear of the lorry to dump the load on the pavement outside. “Within seconds the police discovered that the driver had locked himself in the cab. An officer smashed a cab window and switched off the engine, thus stopping the unloading process. Hardly any of it reached the pavement. Scores of people – who had threatened to chain themselves to the railings – demonstrated outside the Commons distributing leaflets bearing the warning: “Wake Up The World is Dying.”

You can read an article in the Magpie, the newsletter of the Manchester Wildlife Group, in the lead-up to the event, by one… Hugh Warwick.


Hugh has kindly agreed to do a guest post about this, which you can read below-

I have just read this entry from the January 1993 Magpie. I am pretty sure this was the first piece of writing I ever had published and goodness me, I was angry! I had already been to the Twyford Down protests and joined the newly formed Manchester Earth First! My work life was centred around the One World Centre, a peace and environmental justice resource centre near Piccadilly Station – it was cold, damp and filled with some of the most amazing people I have ever met. The campaign against the trade in weapons of war and torture was innovative and at times terrifying. CND, Friends of the Earth, Tools for Self Reliance – busy, active, passionate people. The cooperative required I speak at meetings – I helped manage the shop – and this is where I overcame my fear of presenting in public (and have hardly shut up since!)

Just around the corner, unknown to the me who wrote this piece, life was about to change. I was about to get a call to head to Devon to radio-track hedgehogs, which led to directly to me writing a feature for the BBC Wildlife Magazine and recording a piece for BBC Radio 4’s Natural History Programme … which in turn resulted in me getting my one and only ever job, a year as a researcher at the Natural History Unit in Bristol.

You will have to forgive the rambling nature of this, I have just remembered that I had borrowed a Professional Walkman and microphone to take on the protest to London. I imagine I had been spurred into action Phil Korbel, who has remained on the media/communication/activist scene in Manchester ever since. I sent the tape to Radio 4’s Costing the Earth – having not really thought through what I could do with the material. The producer called me and asked me how I managed to make it sound like I was right in the middle of the protest, sat on the streets outside parliament … not sure my answer filled her with confidence as I said it was because I was sat in the middle of the protest!

So that got me started making radio programmes, and why I took a tape recorder out while stalking hedgehogs … which ended up on Pick of the Week and Pick of the Year … probably the best radio I ever made, and one of the first.

Since then I have become more entangled with hedgehogs, and also started writing books – have two to finish this year. But the campaigning heart still beats … maybe not quite so angrily though! I started a petition to get a tiny change in planning law enacted that would help hedgehogs (I remember when change.org asked me what I wanted to call for, to help return hedgehogs to their former glory … I suggested we call for the dismantling of industrial capitalism and the replacing of it with something nicer. They laughed.) The petition has become quite exciting – with over a million signatures now, each of whom gets an update every couple of weeks from me. [https://www.change.org/p/help-save-britain-s-hedgehogs-with-hedgehog-highways]

Reading the piece from nearly 30 years ago was initially quite a thrill – feeling that energy and desire for change, linking local and global action – but now, 500 new words on – there is a degree of despondency creeping in. What has changed? Damn, this is like an elongated version of the film ‘Don’t Look Up’ – so much of what we were campaigning against 30 years ago we are still campaigning against.

Well, it is not like any of us entered this world expecting an easy ride. I keep hopeful because the only guarantee of failure is to lose hope.

www.hughwarwick.com

@hedgehoghugh

Categories
Guest post Religion

January 17th – A religious perspective on climate action

Guest post by Reverend Grace Thomas (bio below)

On January 17th 2007, fifteen years ago today, a joint letter was penned and signed by scientists and evangelical leaders in the US, in which they stated ‘We declare that every sector of our nation’s leadership—religious, scientific, business, political, and educational—must act now to work toward the fundamental change in values, lifestyles, and public policies required to address these worsening problems before it is too late. There is no excuse for further delays.’

In the autumn of last year, the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Anglican Communion, came together for the first time to make a joint statement.  In their statement, they warned of the urgency of environmental sustainability, its impact on poverty, and the importance of global cooperation. Pope Francis, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and the Archbishop of Canterbury together asked people to pray, stating ‘We call on everyone to endeavour to listen to the cry of the earth and of people who are poor, examining their behaviour and pledging meaningful sacrifices for the sake of the earth which God has given us.’

What does a faith perspective offer in a climate emergency? What should Christians be saying and doing? 

Full disclosure – I am a CofE priest in England. My response to these statements comes unapologetically from this perspective. The first statement is from the US, which is a very different faith context to here in the UK. So, this is a personal reflection on what faithful response to climate issues can be. It won’t be to everyone’s cup of tea. But it’s all I have to give. 

I mentioned in a recent book (1) that I’d had a conversation with a minister who expressed reticence about engaging with ‘green issues’ as they were worried about the time this would take away from mission and evangelism – from the work of getting people into church. It is a fundamental calling of Christians to reach out and grow disciples, but it is also a fundamental calling to steward creation. The former seems to take precedence in a way that sounds dangerously close to a capitalist approach at times – grow quick, numbers matter, income is key and so on. Prioritising growth has, in the secular world, led to a lot of the issues we now face in the climate crisis. In Church, we are now given statistics and targets to meet regarding congregational growth. This, I fear, leads to the very discussion I had with the minister – where creation care is seen as an additional burden, rather than integral to our calling.

This is a complex issue. I am friends with some wonderful Christian activists who, whilst the wider Church has seemed slow and silent, have taken action and raised the profile of the climate emergency and pushed the conversation into the wider sphere. They have been jailed and risked much in their activism and I deeply admire them. But I also know that, sometimes, the rush to activism has left people behind, has antagonised others, and has spoken from too narrow a perspective, and revealed white western privilege and bias. And, my own rush to ‘do’ has pushed me close to burnout.

When I read the two statements above – the one from fifteen years ago, and the one from last year and my gut reaction was – well, nothing much has changed, has it? We have said a lot, but what have we actually done? But, then, I noticed something. A fundamental difference between the two statements, that caused me to pause. The first statement calls, unequivocally, for action. The second, however, calls for us to listen, to reflect and then to respond. 

Maybe, what we should be doing, as a Church is much more listening. We need to listen with our whole heart to the earth as it groans and feel that within our soul. We need to stop and give our full attention to the cries of our siblings across the world. We need to put our hands in the soil, inhale the air, wade into the waters, and remember our place within creation and our intrinsic connection to the land, the seas, and to each other. 

Alastair McIntosh, a quaker and environmentalist, writes a lot about this and acknowledges that such contemplation, such reconnection with our deeper selves and the earth, will not impact immediately on climate change (2). Indeed, it may be very frustrating for people who see the urgency of the climate emergency and hear this call to listen as another way of pushing action further down the line whilst the earth and many of our neighbours suffer. I understand that and feel it. The Church is very good at talking about things and not taking the radical action that is often needed. I can’t pretend I have all the answers to any of this. 

Intentional listening and discernment, however, is not inaction. And, through it may emerge a deeper understanding of what it means to live in a world on the precipice of ecological breakdown. With this, words from the Church may be less weighed down by soundbites and hold greater integrity, and faithful action may become more inclusive, more compassionate, more meaningful and more sustainable.

References

(1) Thomas, G and Coleman, M (2021). Climate action as mission. Cambridge: Grove Books

(2) McIntosh, A (2020) Riders on the Storm. Edinburgh: Berlinn ltd

Biography

Grace Thomas is an Anglican priest in Manchester Diocese, where she is also a Diocesan Environment Officer. She is also a programme lead and tutor at Luther King Centre Theological College. Grace has co-authored the Grove book ‘Climate Action as Mission’ and has also contributed a chapter to Hannah Malcolm’s book ‘Words for a Dying World’. She regularly appears on BBC Radio Four as a Daily Service presenter and on Radio Two as a Pause for Thought contributor. Grace is currently a doctoral student looking at pastoral responses to the climate emergency

Categories
Activism Guest post Manchester

2023, Jan 4: can green groups survive abeyance?

On this day, next year,… no wait, what? Yes 2023.  I thought it worth discussing what I used to call the “January 4 2023 problem”, since we’re almost there.

On  June 12 of 2019, near the beginning of the latest wave of concern about climate change, I wrote an article which you can read here. 

The TL:DR. Sustaining social movement organizations is really difficult, and especially so around climate change. Has Climate Emergency Manchester, the group I was until recently  involved in, solved the January 4 2023 problem? 

Twitter – @ClimateEmergMcr

It’s too early to say, obviously, but the signs are encouraging. And here’s what Chloe Jeffries had to say 

From January 4 2022 through to January 4 2023 CEM has a clear vision of what it is trying to do but will be faced with its toughest challenges yet. You might think that setting up a group would be the most difficult stage. Or that our momentum stalled as the pandemic first hit. But CEM was founded at the start of an upswing in attention to the climate crisis. That cycle is over. We can debate when it next picks up, and from what baseline. But in 2022 we have to sustain a social movement organisation as much public and media interest drifts elsewhere.

This is why the ‘4th January problem’ is important over the next 12 months. It will keep us focused, or help us to reset when tasks slip or a mistake is made. Or, when a piece we put out sinks without trace. We have several things in our favour; a strong core group, bolstered by two new members who worked closely with us for over a year before joining the inner sanctum; a healthy cohort of new volunteers who became involved in the final stretch of the last attention cycle (COP26) and who have already cut their teeth on concrete tasks. We have good relationships with a wider group of supporters and organisations and must use this effectively in the coming year. It will be difficult for them too. CEM also ended 2021 on a high, with a strong piece of research (on Manchester’s airport hypocrisy). December outputs have the potential to tie us through the Christmas and New Year torpor.

Solving the 4th January 2023 problem will remain the goal, but that does not mean that our tactics will stay the same right through, that we march on regardless (if anything we will do even less marching, and we never did much). I’m conscious that some of CEM’s 2019 / 2020 repertoire no longer works as well as it once did, even if innovative when first trialled. To give an example, in our reporting of Manchester City Council’s scrutiny committees, the format of one volunteer assigned to one committee has peaked. Volunteers whose committees never discuss climate get disillusioned sharp; others go native on their patch. Meanwhile, we tie up resources covering 2.5hr meetings with little or no implications for the climate emergency and then cannot cover a damning report put out by the Manchester Climate Change Agency or (likely in 2022) a fuzzy statement by the new council leader. With the 4th January problem in sight, we should be able to spot issues around functioning and effectiveness sooner and adapt (in the example above, this will be through re-assigning volunteers and giving individuals a different brief, to follow an issue rather than a committee). Already a fresh programme of work we have begun on climate change and health inequalities is shaking up the kaleidoscope pieces, bringing some different names (both from the council and civil society) into play. 

What happens after 4th January 2023? Even once this date is passed, I can see the value in setting a new date to backcast from and for this to again fall early in the calendar year. Invariably those first few weeks prove tough for sustaining morale, for all the recurring reasons that the original 2019 article points out. Since then, the cost of living crisis has only worsened. The coming years will see rising inflation and energy bills that bite hard in winter and make it hard to start work with folk we don’t already know. 

On the surface, it may look like little is happening with policymakers or government at this time of year too, slumping back after the seasonal break. But is that entirely true? I hope the other entries in this series provide some evidence to the contrary. A gap in public meetings might remind us that plenty goes on behind closed doors. Local authorities have budgets to sign off. And you can usually bury bad news under a snowdrift. On my Christmas walks in 2021/2, I have been listening to Obama’s account of his first term in office (all politicians and political memoirs are flawed, but at 29hrs it gives great insight into the workings of government). The response to the financial crisis is a revealing episode (or three). Much was hammered out with the banks in early January 2009, before the inauguration. Not all the negotiations were reported in the press. Yet it struck me that many at the time might have seen what they wanted to see. If you remained wedded to the notion that January is all about easing back in, and looking far out on the horizon at the year ahead, you could have filled your boots on long reads about the new family at the White House, who might sing at the swearing in and What This All Meant for America. But if you maintained what we in CEM call ‘situational awareness’, you might have recognised that crucial decisions about the economy were being made day-by-day. In 2009, we got a competent tinkering of capitalism. In Manchester 2022, we also have a new leader who will make roughly the right public noises (including on climate) but not overhaul the system. Alongside the 4 January 2023 problem of sustenance / abeyance, we have the problem that comes with every new year (heightened in Manchester in 2022) of not letting power off the hook. Don’t start unsustainably, but don’t go gently into the new year.

See also emotacycle, smugosphere