All Our Yesterdays

Freelance journalist Pete Watts kindly answered a few questions about his work and climate change. His work can be found at the Great Wen, and his latest book is Up In Smoke: The Failed Dreams Of Battersea Power Station (Paradise Road. 

1. Who are you/what do you do and (how) has climate change impinged on that?

I am Peter Watts, a freelance journalist, editor and author. I mainly write about arts and culture as well as architecture, but I also do a lot of copywriting for brands and companies. It’s the latter area that has mostly been affected by climate change, in the sense that almost every company I deal with now wants to foreground sustainability and highlight their environmental credentials. A couple of years ago, the emphasis was diversity and sustainability but now it is almost entirely about sustainability.

This includes a lot of self-styled “luxury” companies or organisations from across the world that trade solely on providing sustainable products such as very expensive recycled clothing or water bottles made from ocean plastic or a finance company that had developed a tool that measures how banks, insurance brokers and lenders are exposed to climate risk. Then there are all the companies that wish to celebrate carbon-saving efficiencies in traditionally dirty industries, particularly textiles and construction.

I am not always sure how much this focus on sustainability is driven by consumer trends rather than genuine fear for the planet or desire for improvement, but it’s clear that most companies now recognise the need to at least acknowledge some responsibility for the climate and want to be seen to be doing something to reduce their carbon footprint. That is something that wasn’t the case a decade ago.

There is clearly an element of greenwashing in this, but some individuals are extremely passionate, knowledgeable and committed. They recognise the urgency of the situation and believe that business is the best way to create wide-spread change.

2 Famously journalism goes through waves of interest in a topic – often quite short, and without connection to the relative importance of an issue. Where are things, in the UK, with the climate issue, compared to – say – 2018/19.

That’s tricky for me to say as when it comes to news journalism I am very much a consumer like anybody else, so can only really state what anybody might observe. So I think a lot depends on which media you consume – somebody who reads the Guardian will clearly have a different experience to the Daily Telegraph or Daily Mail.

But what seems to have changed is that even the latter newspapers, while still having climate change-denying columnists largely employed to generate rage clicks, now carry almost daily reports that demonstrate to the readers the obvious impact of climate change. So even on the right, there seems to be an acceptance that things are changing, even if there is disagreement on the causes of that change, what the eventual results of it might look like and what needs to be done to stop it.

I think this is relevant when seeing government ministers raging against net zero – even within their own constituencies, these people now represent a minority view, albeit one that unfortunately still has an outsized impact and gets way too much attention. Rather than angrily amplify their views, it might be better to simply ignore them.

I remember the first serious bump in mainstream “green” stories when David Cameron became Conservative leader as that was seen as an issue that might get him elected, so was covered sympathetically by the press. Things then went quiet again as there was no electoral value in sustainability but it started to slowly change with the annual news of unprecedented droughts, floods and fires around the world. Last year’s heatwave in the UK might have been a turning point in this country as it was something everybody could understand lay outside accepted norms and even the most sceptical seemed to accept it wasn’t an isolated event. The weight of evidence was now too large.  

I believe that the media’s incredible capacity for collective amnesia will soon completely bury all memories of climate change denial.

I guess the biggest issue is that a lot of this journalism is quite passive – reports on the weather, reports on extreme conditions, reports on climate change reports – rather than stating what needs to be done or clearly outlining the consequences of inaction. You get that in the Guardian obviously but not anywhere else.

3. More broadly, does climate change “come up” in conversations at the school gate/dinner parties “etc”?  In what ways?

Yes certainly. It seems to be a background concern for most people I speak to at school gates and in the pub (I don’t think I have ever had a dinner party I am afraid). There’s a lot of hopelessness – “what’s the point?” – and a certain amount of cognitive dissonance – “climate change is terrible and I will talk about that when I fly back from Los Angeles for this one meeting”. The problem is that the issue is so vast, the solutions are so complex or life-limiting, and the implications so terrible, that nobody really wants to delve into it too deeply beyond acknowledging it’s very frightening. I would include myself in this.

4.  What are some of your favourite books/films/radio programmes that help you think through the climate issue?

As per the above, I tend to avoid any books, films or radio programmes that are explicitly about climate change. I find factual material to be too depressing and fictitious material too frivolous. I have over the years read books, watched films and played lots and lots of video games about the apocalypse, so I guess that counts. Most of these are about zombies, but I can handle a metaphor.