My Copenhagen Letter to Dirty Kev

I used to battle depression over the climate crisis. These days I'm having more trouble with anger towards "the establishment". Obama makes me want to hope, but I'm terrified that he'll do a Kevin on the climate too.

There's just over a month to go before Copenhagen and activism is in top gear. I went to a local 350.org gathering last weekend and just now I took advantage of Greenpeace's Dirty Kev campaign to send a letter to the federal government. The form letter is nice, but I had more to say:

Above is a form letter which I support 100%. Personally I wish to also express my anger and disgust at the way your government has handled the greenhouse gas issue over the past two years. Your action has fallen appallingly short of the inspiring promises and uplifting rhetoric we heard in the months either side of the election.

Professor Garnaut gave you sound, realistic advice which you arrogantly (or is it fearfully?) discarded. Your proposed CPRS does almost exactly the opposite of what is required to make a meaningful, morally-justifiable contribution to protecting the climate for my children. Your renewable energy legislation actually undermines efforts to reduce our nation's use of fossil fuels.

My family, along with thousands of others around this country, is prepared to pay actual costs, suffer actual hardship and make actual sacrifices to help realise an actually sustainable future for humanity. And what a wonderful future it could be!

Please: have the guts to face up to the reality of this climate crisis. We need genuine leadership to inspire this country to make strong decisions as individuals and communities. We need:
- radical improvements in energy efficiency
- deep cuts to energy consumption
- rapid phase-out of coal power
- to stop wasting money on CCS
- real investment in appropriate cost-effective renewable energy
- an actual debate on nuclear options (Gen4 designs, especially thorium-powered ones, and yes I'd have one in my back yard in preference to coal)
- a national decision to get off our arses and do something worthwhile

In closing, it's only fair to also thank you for your investment in education and internet infrastructure. I am in absolute agreement that building a sustainable, prosperous future requires the best possible education culture and world-class information technology infrastructure. But it will all be futile if we fail to turn around the global GHG emissions trend and get back into safe territory (currently estimated to be sub-350ppm) in the next several decades.

If you have even a mild concern about the climate and global warming etc, please make yourself heard now. There are lots of ways you can express yourself - sending Dirty Kev a letter is quick and easy.

Water efficiency has become a lifestyle

It's a significant day for my part of the world: for the first time in a hundred months our regional water storage capacity is above 50%. At its lowest in 2007 we had only 16.7% and the government was seriously considering the need to truck or ship drinking water in to sustain the roughly two million people in the immediate area.

Thankfully that worst-case scenario never eventuated, and there have been a number of rain events that have brought the levels up bit by bit. Most interesting, though, has been the success of water conservation programs.

Under the most severe restrictions residents were urged to target an average per-capita water use of 140 litres each day - an enormous reduction from previous norms of around 300. By the time dam levels rose to 40% in July last year, we had stayed below "Target 140" for 52 consecutive weeks. Consumption dropped to as low as 112 litres per person today in one week near the end of that period.

Reaching the 40% storage level was the trigger for easing of restrictions and the revision of our target to 170 instead of 140. And what do you suppose happened to our water consumption?



I've trawled through the weekly press releases to obtain the reported usage stats since Target 140 was introduced almost exactly two years ago and graphed them against the target at the time. Blue line shows water consumption per person per day against the red line which is the target in place at the time: 140 and 170 respectively. There are 66 weeks reported for Target 140 and 32 for Target 170, both with a couple of weeks gap over the New Year breaks.

Visually, you might think that with the relaxed restrictions our water use went up dramatically. But in fact, the averages for each target period are 131.8 and 138.3 respectively - still under 140 even with the higher target!

Very shortly we'll be operating under a Target 200 regime. It's my hope that Brisbane residents have taken the water conservation message to heart and will continue to keep their consumption well under the nominal targets.

Because despite all the good news, our State Government still wants to dam the Mary River and is building desalination plants that will be powered by burning coal.

Oh well, it's a start.

Earth Hour? Try Earth Lifestyle

Awareness is the first step, I suppose, towards effecting a change in behaviour. So I probably should keep my inclination to pooh-pooh the whole "Earth Hour" thing in check.

Suffice to say: the amount of energy saved by switching off lights for one hour a year is going to make no noticable difference to the Earth or our continued existence on it, and giving people the idea that caring for the Earth requires us to give up electric light could backfire badly.

I pretty much ignored Earth Hour last night. Continued playing chess with my daughter, listening to some music. Our household energy meter said we were using around 200W total power - though admittedly the meter is rather inaccurate at those low levels.

My point? Conserving energy needs to be a core value that drives behaviour each and every day, not a once-a-year stunt.

Too much to say

Ironically, it's been quiet here because there's too much to talk about. Or maybe it's because there's been too much talk about.

Since I started doing this the world's attention has been brought quite sharply to bear on most of the issues that concern me. There's so much high profile discussion and activity going on that my little blog seems rather superfluous. Which is great!

I just want to highlight a couple of local bits of good news.

1. Brisbane folk are now habitually conservative with their water. We managed to meet the 140L/person/day target under extreme restrictions and even now that the dams are heading towards 50% capacity we're still sitting well under the 170L revised target. I just read my water meter for the first time in 201 days, and our total household usage over that period averaged only 194L per day - actually less than the previous six months when we were watching like a hawk.

2. Politics is (generally) swinging in the right direction for sustainable civilisation. The election of Obama is of course globally significant, but even here at home we've seen the Traveston Dam project put on hold, willingness to regulate agriculture in order to protect the Great Barrier Reef, plans for floating desalination plants shelved, proactive measures from government to promote energy efficiency and GHG reductions, community gardens... heaps of stuff.

3. The combination of environmental/sustainability concerns and the economic crisis is driving a swing away from "consumerism". I so hate being thought of as a "consumer". I want to be a "contributor". But anyway, it seems that I'm far from alone in my back yard garden tinkering, chook raising, material recycling and "waste not, want not" attitude. Newspaper articles are even using words like "frugality" in a positive lifestyle sense!

So here's hoping that 2009 continues in this trend. There will certainly be bad news this year (I predict a sudden resurgence in the price of oil at some stage, going even higher than the peaks of last year) but there is also an atmosphere of hope. As I heard it said on a BBC radio interview yesterday, a crisis is an opportunity for change.

Meter matters

Two real-life examples of why meters are your friend and reading them is a good idea.

1. "Where did our water go?"

We've had a lot of rain this month. Following a two month stretch during which a total of 26mm fell at our place, we had over 220mm in just five days. That's enough to fill our tanks four times over. With no room for more water, I decided to let any further showers flush out the internal dirty water diverters and opened up the valves. Then promptly forgot about it.

It rained twice more in the following three days: falls of just a few mm but enough that I expected to see the new inflows make up for the water we'd pumped out for the laundry and toilet. But for some reason the gauge didn't go up. In fact it was heading downwards at a surprising rate - around 10cm (800L) in two days. I figured we must have been catching up on a lot of washing.

Two days later we were down another 800L. Something finally triggered my memory - the diverter valves were open! I suddenly recalled that the internal hose which allows the diverter to drain to the outside is not watertight, which means that water from the main chamber can slowly leak out when the drain valve is opened. We must have wasted well over a thousand litres this way.

If I hadn't put a gauge on the tanks and made a habit of checking it, we'd have lost half our supply (the valves are about halfway up the tank wall) within a few more days.

2. "The bill is for how much?!"

A week ago as I sat here working in my home office I noticed somebody briefly inspecting our electrical meter box. "Ah," I thought, "our quarterly electricity bill will be turning up soon." Well turn up it certainly did!

With all that rainy weather I mentioned just before, we had to use the electric booster on our hot water system for a couple of days. Imagine my surprise when the total bill came in at well over twice what I'd been expecting, with an off peak consumption for the quarter of one thousand, five hundred and twenty six kilowatt-hours! The charge for that was almost as much as I'd budgeted for the whole bill.

I hadn't read the meters since a few days before it rained, so I rushed out to check them. After sitting on 90615.3 for about eight months, the off-peak meter today reads... 90638.1. A grand total of 22.8kWh difference.

That's actually more than I'd been hoping to see given how little we used the booster, but it's rather insignificant compared to the matter of the invoice. The meter for the constant supply had also been recorded incorrectly - even today, a week after the reading, I'm still 157kWh short of what they're claiming. It'll take us another 20 days to reach that point.

The lady on the phone conceded that it was a bit odd to have such a spike, although for some reason this bill is recorded as being an "estimated" value. She spent a long time conferring with a supervisor before agreeing that the meter should be re-read. The soonest they could get somebody here would be the 20th (I told them not to rush on my account - I'm in no hurry to get a bill). And she made it sound like she was doing me a favour not charging me the customary $24 fee for a repeat reading (like hell I'm going to pay for them to fix their screw-up).

Ah well, I probably won't be paying too many more bills to that company anyway. I was already looking into switching retailers to get a better rate for the energy my PV panels will produce - 20c instead of 14c per kWh. And once that gear's installed you can bet I'll be watching the new meter closely indeed.

Solar Tariff Tiff

There's a lot of noise being made at the moment about "feed-in tariffs", or bonus money paid to folks like me for energy that my new solar panels will feed in to the electricity grid. The debate centres around how to measure and price that energy. Here's my take.

There are two main kinds of benefit that large-scale distributed PV electric generation can potentially deliver to the community as a whole: environmental and financial.

The long-term environmental vision, which I'm sure most people would agree is the right idea, is for future society to be powered with cheap, clean, renewable energy instead of being dependent on the burning of coal or the fission of uranium which - even if the technology can be made "clean" - will both eventually run out. An essential feature of this vision is that we must become far more efficient in our use of the energy that is available.

And while it's obvious to most people that harvesting sunlight is sustainable and much cleaner than digging up and burning coal, not everybody is aware that having solar energy generation located nice and close to all our air conditioners is a great way to minimise infrastructure costs associated with peak demand and long-distance power transmission on hot afternoons.

A good feed-in tariff scheme for solar electricity would help to realise both kinds of benefit.

The Queensland Government appears to be following the South Australian lead in proposing a model under which I would only be paid a bonus for producing energy that was not simultaneously consumed within my own home. Just to be clear, that's excess energy which I produce but somebody else gets to use. This is broadly referred to as a "net tariff" scheme.

A number of groups, including the Local Power group through which I've ordered my panels, the Alternative Technology Association, Queensland Conservation, the Queensland Consumers Association and reportedly even BP (who make panels) are expressing disappointment in this and arguing instead for a "gross tariff" scheme whereby I would be paid a premium rate for all the energy produced by my panels regardless of how much energy I consume within my own home, or when. This is reportedly the model implemented in Germany, a world leader in terms of solar electricity generation capacity.

The motivation of the "gross tariff" advocates is fairly simple to understand.

Firstly, most of them genuinely want to see our society move as quickly as possible from fossil-fuel dependency to clean, renewable energy sources - which of course I agree with. Secondly, there's the financial self-interest: panel buyers want faster payback on their "investment" and higher long-term profitability while manufacturers like BP want to sell more panels. And thirdly we have an environmental loopback effect where making panels more financially attractive encourages greater adoption which takes us one step closer to having a clean, renewable energy infrastructure.

However, despite being both an "environmentalist" and a purchaser of solar panels, I don't agree that a gross tariff scheme is an obviously right choice for Queensland as a whole community.

In order to deliver on the environmental potential, the installation of solar panels must succeed in reducing the overall demand for energy from non-renewable sources. And in order to reduce costs associated with the grid infrastructure itelf, that energy must be delivered at times of peak demand. As I see it, the gross tariff schemes being proposed would actually erode both of those benefits from the inside, because it reduces the incentive for the owners of the panels to minimise their own energy consumption. Taken to the extreme, it provides an avenue for wealthy high energy users (and especially those addicted to their air conditioning) to cheaply maintain or even increase their energy consumption. I have actually had conversations with somebody who sees that kind of thing as an opportunity.

(Related post: Does energy efficiency encourage greater consumption?)

In contrast, the net tariff scheme put forward by the state is designed to reward those who find ways to minimise their consumption (delivering the environmental benefit), especially during those hot, sunny times when their panels are producing the most power (delivering the peak load infrastructure cost benefit).

Australian taxpayers are already contributing $8,000 towards my panels through a federal scheme to stimulate growth in the PV industry. Why should my fellow Queenslanders pay me even more in a subsidy which I could squander by simply using more energy and defeating the purpose of all that investment in the first place?

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Speaking of the bigger picture, I believe that the actual core problem here is that current retail energy prices are much, much lower than the true cost of the energy. Government subsidies to the coal industry, myopic belief in unlimited growth and a very bad habit of completely ignoring "externalities" have made it so. Gross tariff proposals make a certain amount of sense in that they come closer to recognising the complete value of the energy, but the proper objectives of such a scheme would be continually undermined by the disincentive to reduce consumption.

Maybe as a kind of middle-ground policy it would make sense for panel owners to be paid a modest flat rate for their gross production on the proviso that they sourced at least the same quantity of energy (or 100% of their consumption, whichever is lower) from GreenPower-accredited providers. That would help to direct funding into renewable energy projects. Mind you, panel owners could achieve almost exactly the same thing by simply not selling their RECs at the time of installation. (See my earlier post on that topic.)

Perhaps surprisingly, I'm leaning towards opposing "time-of-day" metering for retail electricity consumption at this point. The idea behind it is to charge consumers more for energy consumed during peak periods. Sounds sensible enough, but apart from smoothing the load on the distribution grid it actually favours the coal generators and erodes the benefit of having a substantial PV capacity. However if it could be shown that time-of-day metering reduced overall energy consumption and especially consumption of fossil fuels then it might be worth doing.

But the "elephant in the room" (to borrow a phrase I once heard used by Andrew McNamara) which apparently nobody is talking about is that over the lifetime of any new solar panel installation the retail price of energy is likely to go up dramatically. You can thank climate change, carbon trading, peak oil and population growth for that. Even without any kind of tariffs, that rise should significantly shorten the effective payback time for a PV installation through avoided energy costs in the future.

Fad or Fundament?

Have you noticed that the world is changing fast? For once I'm not talking about the biosphere - it's human society and politics I mean. Words based on "environment" and "sustainable" are starting to pervade the mass media, turning up in just about every political message at all levels of government and peppered through corporate communications. Advertising budgets are increasingly being spent on pointing out the "green" attributes of some product or service.

It seems that environmental groups have succeeded in using the greenhouse effect as a kind of lever to shift the massive inertia of social consciousness and direct it towards the long-term liveability of this planet. And the result has not just been all talk.

There are some great local examples, starting with the response to the water shortage of recent years. Not only have the residents of south-east Queensland succeeded in reducing their average per-capita consumption to one of the lowest rates in the developed world, we've maintained that discipline even with the rain of the past two months more than doubling the amount of water in our dams. Moreover, the sentiment of the majority of people I've spoken to is in line with official policy which says that conservative water use has become a permanent feature of life in this region!

Continuing with the theme of sustainable water use, one of the two main candidates standing for election to the office of Lord Mayor of Brisbane in a few weeks time is making a very big deal of his policies for minimising water wastage from leaking pipes and increasing the rebates for people who connect rainwater tanks for internal use in the home.

On the other side of politics, the incumbent mayor is earning a rare cheer from me for the spirit behind his latest announcement of funding to assist residents equip their homes with instantaneous energy meters of the type I've written about here in the past. I'm not totally thrilled with that particular approach (I'd rather see a loan/rent scheme) but I am thrilled with the stated objective of reducing the city's electricity consumption.

Both candidates are straining to one-up each other when it comes to public transport. Brisbane isn't large enough to have any direct control over railways but the next few years appear certain to see a very large number of new natural-gas powered buses on the city's roads and an expansion of the CityCat ferry fleet. Mr Incumbent is also touting a spending spree on bicycle paths and facilities.

I offer these examples as evidence of a major and accelerating shift in the public awareness of and concern for sustainability. I've written in the past about my belief that changing values is what brings about changes in behaviour, and I'm starting to become hopeful that values are indeed shifting in the right direction. Heck, I've even listened to speeches from federal parliament this week exhorting the nation to embrace the aboriginal peoples' attitude towards "the land", seeing oneself as literally a part of the environment and being always mindful of the need to care for it.

The question is whether this "trend" will continue. Are we really witnessing the early stages of the transformation of our wasteful, destructive, economically and ecologically irrational society into a responsible, efficient, ecologically-integrated civilisation with advanced culture and traditional wisdom as well as high technology? Well I hope so... because that's what it's probably going to take to avoid catastrophe.


So here's a litmus test for us to monitor our progress as a nation. The Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE) published a report in December 2007 which predicts that, on the basis of the policies and trends in effect at that time, Australia's energy use will grow by 1.6% per year through to 2030 (that's up about 44% compared to today) with around 92% of that energy being sourced from fossil fuels. Let me suggest that if these projections match our future reality, then we're in very big trouble. But...

If society is in fact changing, embracing values of sustainability, we will necessarily see our energy use grow by a smaller amount than predicted and possibly even declining by 2030. We must also see an major decrease in the proportion of our energy derived from fossil fuels. I'll be keep an eye out for future releases like this one from ABARE to see where we're headed.

In the meantime, we all need to support those politicians who are promoting reduced energy consumption, increased efficiency and a transition to renewable energy sources.

Imagine (not quite) all the people

A really, really long post but one which means a lot to me.

There are a whole litany of serious environmental and resource-depletion crises besetting this amazing Earth. We're fairly well aware of Climate Change and Peak Oil because of media exposure and their direct impacts on us, but there's also the destruction of habitats and the resulting mass extinctions, the over-exploitation of fisheries leading to ecosystem collapses... and on and on it goes. At some level we can frequently find links between these issues and purely human problems like war, poverty and disease.

Everybody in the developed world knows all of this. Most of us care to some degree but are generally too involved in our immediate, day-to-day concerns to try and do anything serious about alleviating these problems. Most of the time it all just seems overwhelming. But in the backs of our minds lurks one simple, indisputable, dangerous fact which offers a solution to all of these woes and at the same time is almost anathema:

The Earth would be far better off if there were not so many people living on it.

It doesn't sound so scary on the surface, but let's scratch at it a little. Arbitrarily, let's say we think that three billion of us would be a nice sustainable number. That's a bit less than half the number of people living today. How do we get from here to there?

If it would save the world, would it be justifiable to deliberately kill off half of humanity? I don't think so. But not everybody would agree with me. White supremacists, for example, would be very quick to suggest which half of the population should inherit the Earth. Still, simply halving the population is a foolish notion anyway because the real long-term problem is with population growth.

Pretend that our current world population of six-odd billion is sustainable in environmental and resource availability terms. Then ponder for a moment (a long moment, preferably) how we might keep the population at that level and no higher.

This is the really hard bit. Remember my recent post about how values drive behaviour? (Here) As far as I can recall, Maslov didn't explicitly talk about humans having a "need" to have children. Perhaps he should have, or perhaps it's just so obvious it didn't need to be mentioned. But I believe that as clever and "evolved" as we are, we are still deeply driven by instinctive, natural forces to go forth and multiply. Every single one of your ancestors, right back to Adam or the Amoeba (depending on your world view) did exactly that. It's who you are. It's intrinsic to the nature of every living thing.

Over time that instinct has been reinforced by the natural law of strength in numbers. Species which have more offspring tend to have a survival advantage whether it be through simply playing the numbers game (like sea turtles) or through group behaviours (like ants or bees).

Getting back to that simple, indisputable, dangerous idea... I think we find the notion of population limits so troubling because it's unnatural.

My wife and I have three children, each of them deliberately conceived and dearly loved. It's natural and wonderful and I delight in my family. But in choosing to have a third child I have become part of the overpopulation problem.

(In my defense let me note that Michelle was about five months pregnant already when I had the emotional breakdown which resulted in me taking up the cause of sustainability. We won't be having a fourth.)

I get to wondering about what possible hope there might be for the future. It seems obvious to me that if we continue on our present and entirely natural track we're going to repeat the Easter Island story on a global scale, or something similarly catastrophic. Somehow we must become self-limiting not only in our consumption of resources (which we are actually starting to do!) but also in our reproduction.

Pause there and take a breather before I try and condense all of the above into a single paragraph...

We're bringing calamity upon ourselves and the rest of the world as a result of us simply doing what comes naturally. It's not ethical (or in any way practical) to try and cull the existing population. Saving the world will require nothing less than all six billion of us agreeing to deliberately limit the number of descendants we have, in direct defiance of nature itself. Failure to do this could result in the extinction of humanity and possibly of most or all life on Earth.

It's an impossibly daunting idea.

But just imagine if it could be done. What would such a society be like to live in? If we're going to succeed in the long term I suspect we'll see well-established pockets of this kind of society by 2050.

By definition I'm not talking about a "one child policy" such as exists in China. That's a strategy for reducing population rather than maintaining a steady one. In a steady-state population each adult would have exactly two children, on average.

Perhaps a "two child policy" will form the basis of our future civilisation. For the sake of human rights I don't think it's something which should be in any way enforceable by law - if a couple wanted fourteen children I feel it would be morally wrong to forceably prevent them from having them (assuming that the children would be properly cared for). But at the same time if birth numbers were carefully monitored then a system of "voluntary allocation" could be devised to help keep the population steady.

Start with the notion that beyond the inherent right to reproduce, it's reasonable for every person to have two children. Of course you need two people to make a child so this is not a doubling process. Each child represents two combined "rights" from two parents.

I suspect that in a society with a strong philosophy of sustainable population there would be an increased number of people who would choose to remain childless. It may be that they wish to live a life of rich experience without parental responsibility. Or they may feel that the best way for them to contribute to society would be by devoting themselves to professional or philanthrophic endeavours. Such a person could notionally "give up" their right to have two children and in doing so make it reasonable that another couple somewhere might have one more. (Remember that individuals don't have children - couples do. Making one child requires two "rights" to come together.)

It's almost certain that there will always be premature deaths. If an adult dies before having produced any offspring then "their" children could reasonably be had by somebody else. Should a child die, I imagine the bereaved parents would be considered to have the right to bear another should they so desire - but if they chose not to then it seems reasonable that another couple might have an additional child to make up for the one lost.

On the other side of the equation there are those who become parents of more than two children by accident or who simply desire a larger family. In a voluntary steady-state population there would ideally be enough people making deliberate family planning decisions on the basis of the overall population balance that a zero growth rate could be maintained.

I reckon I could live in a world like that. One more thing before I wrap this up: could it possibly work in real life on a global scale?

Honestly, I have no idea. On the positive side I do know that people can choose to alter their behaviour if their values demand they do something other than what's "natural". Witness suicide bombers...

The negatives are pretty big though. Avoiding pregnancy requires either contraception or sexual restraint - already a big challenge in the developing world for several reasons. As far as I know the world's system of economics considers population growth to be necessary thing. And in strategic military terms a larger population is generally more powerful than a smaller one (the old strength in numbers thing) and there's more than enough national, racial and religious tension in the world to make that a current concern.

Yet again for me it comes down to a question of values. If humanity wanted to maintain a sustainable population, I believe it certainly could do so.

What do you think? If you agree with me, what can we do to bring about this kind of change in the world?

Thanks so much for reading.

Tell me what you want, what you really really want

This is something I've been struggling to write for a couple of weeks now. I'm not entirely happy with it but it's hopefully better than nothing. With the caveat that I'm not trained in psychology or sociology or anything like that, let's dive right in...

The basic idea is this: all of the greenies, the conservationists, the environmentalists, the reduce/reuse/recyclers, the peak oilers, everybody who wants everybody else to voluntarily change their behaviour in some way, has to understand that their struggle is not primarily with behaviours but with values.

Value decisions drive behaviours. I wrote this about six weeks ago:

It seems to me that the primary driver for personal behaviour must surely be personal values. If so, that would imply that my failure to change behaviour in personal matters (such as limiting my Ice Break consumption as I had committed to do) comes down to a question of my own values. That I value the experience of drinking coffee-flavoured milk more highly than the environmental benefits gained by reducing my consumption. And that would probably be because the benefits of drinking it are personal, immediate and known whereas the benefits of reducing consumption are dispersed, delayed and unknown.

There's a famous TV psychologist who nailed the issue with his often-repeated question, "What's in it for you?" People don't just do random things. They tend do the things which they believe will meet the needs or desires which are most pressing within them.

Needs and desires is a tricky subject. Another famous guy by the name of Jeremiah is purported to have written, "The heart is deceitful above all things... who can understand it?" Well, a bloke called Maslov took a good stab at it with A Theory Of Human Motivation (here) from which is derived his Hierarchy of Needs (here with illustration).

We get even more complicated when we consider that we can, with varying degrees of effectiveness, redefine and reprioritise our needs and desires by adopting just about any other moral, ethical or value principle you could possibly conceive of.

The majority of these are older than we are and are imparted to us through our family, friends and broader society. Sometimes a new or derivative principle comes along, like the famous "land rights for gay whales" slogan, which we might see fit to adopt.

Some of these ideas - especially religious ones - become almost as deeply ingrained as the needs which Maslov described, and can take such a high priority that people are literally willing to die for a cause.

Let's get visual here for all you right-brainers with a diagram I just whipped up...

I hope that's making some kind of sense. People do stuff because of what they care about. If you want people to do different stuff you need to either get them to care about the same things you do, or convince them that what you want them to do is somehow aligned with their own most pressing needs and desires.

Now to bring this all back into context and finish up...

I started with a statement about attempts to bring about voluntary changes in behaviour. That's really directed at anybody (myself included) who wishes to inspire "grassroots" or community-based action regarding climate change or sustainability. It's a really tough job and we need to be clear what we're up against.

The other aspect to bringing about widespread change is the use of the law. The law is (supposed to be) a codification of the agreed values of a society and has a couple of unique strengths in regarding to upholding values:
- laws can be designed to counteract our bias towards personal, immediate and known benefits
- any value written into law is reinforced by Maslov's safety needs which incline most people towards civil obedience

Changing laws in a democratic society is generally achieved by demonstrating that a certain set of values is held in common by a majority (or an influential minority) of the people. It's a different fight.

As I think about the year 2050 and what kind of civilisation I hope we will have, I see a society in which the core values associated with environmentally sustainable (or even beneficial!) human society are broadly accepted and expressed in law so as to guide individuals as well as commerce and industry in behaviours which will meet our most important needs not only today but for the very long term.


And maybe a world in which I never ever ever quote the Spice Girls again.