I’m at the B4E Summit in Mexico City, where the early message from the panelists is that last year’s Copenhagen climate summit led to the “end of carbon fundamentalism,” in the words of Rachel Kyte of the International Finance Corporation. That means that the decades-old Rio dream that the world could look at the science of climate change and react in a communal way—through an international, binding treaty—is dead, at least for now. (That line came from another panelist, Eric Beinhocker of McKinsey.) Paradoxically that change makes the role of business—which can react so much more fluidly than global governments—all the more important. But while the summit so far has been full of stories about companies taking sustainability seriously and maximizing efficiency, it’s far from clear that will lead to reductions in carbon—which is still an externality without a price in much of the world. More on this later.
But while I’m gone, let’s do what my mother, a retired sixth-grade teacher, would do on those last June days of the school year: show a video! It’s called No Pressure, and it’s a short film—written by the Richard Curtis, the man behind the cute British stuttering comedies Four Weddings and a Funeral and Love Actually—meant to promote the 10:10 movement, a British campaign to get citizens and businesses to pledge to reduce their carbon emissions by 10% in a year. It’s… well… maybe you should just watch it:
Right. The film was greeted by an almost immediate backlash, and was quickly retracted by the backers of the 10:10 movement. (The Guardian has the story here.) Andrew Revkin at Dot Earth sums it up well:
The opening scene shows a school teacher cheerily tallying hands of those in her class agreeing to cut their carbon, then pushing a red button, bursting two naysayers like balloons filled with fruit punch. Other scenes repeat the spattery process in an office and on a soccer field. The video makes last year’s “polar bears falling from the sky” film clip fighting frequent flying look like Teletubbies.
Lovely. As Revkin points out, it’s as if the film had been designed to confirm conservatives’ worst prejudices about environmentalists: that they don’t really like people, that they are extremists and that they’re intolerant to criticism. I know lots of environmentalists, and very, very few of them are actually like this—I don’t think they even know how to use explosives—but it only takes one mistake to set back a movement.
