There is today so much focus on climate change and green products, that the marked is saturated with sustainable products and tips to living a green life style that it is threatening the important messages to drown and make people either take the wrong decisions and actions, or make them paralyzed of all these complex choices.

“A myriad of suggestions of what to do and how to do it has emerged to such an extent that public as well as private space is glutted with “green messages”. […] One could however, adopt a critical stance towards this plethora of appeals to react to climate change. Not so much owing to the risk of “climate nausea” as to the risk of loosing sight of what really needs to be done in the midst of the green upheaval.” (Line Hasle)

Line Hasle writes in her article Discussing Climate Change with Marx and Spinoza about how the logic of ethical consumption addressing climate change – so-called “green consumption” or “pro-ecological consumption” – entails an ideological mode of existing. And how this new awareness might end up becoming more of a business strategy than actual concern for the environment, which can mislead and drown the users and be counter productive for the fight against climate change.
 

“The terrestrial water-cycle needs to be transformed. It is not a magic stream. It is running dry. Your role in the water-cycle is the cause and the solution.” (Tse-Hui Teh)

Tse-Hui Teh gives us, in her article RE: URGENT – You in the Water-Cycle, a fascinating insight into the water-cycle, which we in the industrialized world most often take for given, but which we none the less are a main ingredient of. Because we are the only species that has managed to find ways to transport more water than we can carry, we have manipulated the water-cycle in a non-sustainable way, leading way to much fresh, drinkable water out into the salty ocean. This doesn’t only makes us run low on drinking water in some places of the world, but the water further more crosses all kind of borders on its way, transporting and washing away as well natural minerals and human pollution and shutters and destroys our fragile eco-system.

“Knowing our role individually and collectively in assembling water-cycles and ecosystems will compel the design of new material configurations, boundaries, social values and administrative systems.” (Tse-Hui Teh)

How can we design new technologies that make us more aware of our use of water in our everyday life – that divides the use of water equally between the worlds inhabitants and between humans and other organisms? How can we make technology that connects us with the entire water-cycle, and make us understand that water is not a magic stream but a limited resource.

Is it possible to make technologies, that make us chose when and how we use water, the same way as we each day chose clothes depending on the weather? And how will such technologies effect our social lives so we for example do our laundry in the evening or washes the car when it rains anyway?



 

It is not only animal species we exterminating by letting the global temperature rise, but also tribes of indigenous people are be on the brink of extinction due to climate change. These people are often the hardest hit even though they have contributed the least to the carbon emission.

“The main concern of the report is about the livelihood of indigenous peoples who are entirely dependent on nature. Reindeer herders, in particular the Saami in the far north, already report that the thaw is setting in earlier and that further temperature rises will damage their industry. Hunting on the ice, an important source of income in Greenland, is growing increasingly dangerous.” (Felixson)

Besides negotiating for a deal at COP15, does the politicians also pass sentence on these peoples
destiny? How can they do that? Are we gonna accept the conviction?
 
Read Tryggvi Felixson’s, head of the Department for Environment and Resources at the Nordic Council of Ministers, article ‘Climate Change – the Nordic approach, which gives an overview of the Nordic initiative to reduce CO2 emissions, and with a discussion about who gets affected the worst, and could act upon the problem.

Read also the article ‘Between Weather and Climate’ where anthropologists Hannu I. Heikkinen and Mark Nuttall, based on their major research and fieldwork in indigenous people from Greenland and the north of Scandinavia, point out how a significant dissimilarity exists between the way scientists measure, perceive, talk about, and try to communicate climate change and the way local people in their social lives experience these very same changes.


 

Artist Andrea Polli records the sound of the poles melting and shares the soundscapes with scientists and the public believing that the sounds will make the effects of climate change more of an urgent and present problem in peoples minds. She believes that the direct communication can create empathy within people and make them understand the necessity of acting fast. People need to get an intimate experience with the poles and the melting ice to understand the complexity of climate change.

“In conclusion, because of the complexity of the information and the misinformation in mainstream media, there is a need for more direct public communication of weather and climate science.   Sound offers a way for scientists to bring their messages directly to the public, by speaking to the public through recordings, web and radio transmissions and by collaborating on audification and sonification of scientific data.  Listeners often respond to sound with emotion and empathy for the scientists’ messages.” (Polli).

Is the problem that the climate change problems crosses borders, that perceivable
changes happen to far away from our social lives, that we don’t see, hear or feel them? And can art projects such as Polli’s help people move closer to and realize the seriousness of climate change?

Read Andrea Polli's article: Listening to the Poles.
 

BBC allows everybody to make a short video of themselves telling the world leaders what they want them to do at COP15 and why. The best videos will be featured in a special televised debate   on BBC News, at the climax of the conference.

•    Are you worried about climate change?
•    What deal would you strike in Copenhagen?
•    Who should cut their emissions? By how much? And      how should they make these cuts?
•    How would you improve the negotiation process?
•    How will climate change  affect you in future?
•    Is it already affecting you now?
•     Why does climate change matter to you?
•    How much are you personally willing to adapt, to live more sustainably?
•    Are you prepared to change the way you travel, the food you eat, or to have fewer children?
•    Would you pay more taxes - to invest in green energy and compensate countries hurt by climate change?
Whatever you do, we'd like to hear from you.

This is your change to tell how your social life is being changed by climate change, and how you are willing to change in the future in order to save the environment. Give the politicians an idea about how important it is for you, and that you will support their decisions.


 

Alex Steffen, founder of worldchanging.org presents his optimistic view on how radical, technological innovation will provide the best foundation for a sustainable development, and tells how this is possible also within the limited time line the scientists give us. This bright green future will not only be more sustainable and positive for our environment, but will also provide us with better lives. Steffen’s optimistic view is often being met skepticism by ‘the older generation of well-heeled white men’, who request him to be more ‘realistic’.
 
“We can build that bright green future. We have the technological prowess, the design insight and even many of the working examples we need to transform our systems and reinvent our cities. We have the money. We may even be gaining the most needed components, vision and political will.” (Steffen)

In his article Planetary Boundaries and the New Generation Gap, Steffen argues how this is possible-- how the new generation has to lead the way with optimism. We have to prevent instead of treating, he suggests, in order to make a planet that stays healthy, and this we can do with new technological developments – developments that we shall also be willing to share with the developing countries.

Read also this great <span>Interviewing Worldchanging's Alex Steffen</span>

"The big shift that I see happening is individual people starting to take responsibility for the systems around themselves. It’s not going to be everybody and it doesn’t need to be. But the people who are really aware of these issues are starting to look more at how their communities are designed and how they can influence that. What transportation choices are available to them and how can they influence that? It’s not just a matter of whether or not they own a car, but do they live in a place that supports a variety of transportation choices for everybody? Supporting businesses that offer better solutions, being more involved with politics, community-based organizing—these things that take us out of our individual abilities and limitations and allow us to re-connect in important ways."

“Climate models are impressive – despite their inherent limitations and uncertainties – but they produce simulations which are not good at capturing human experience or the complexity of social life.” (Heikkinen and Nutall)

Based on their major research and fieldwork in indigenous people from Greenland and the north of Scandinavia anthropologists Hannu I. Heikkinen and Mark Nuttall point out how a significant dissimilarity exists between the way scientists measure, perceive, talk about, and try to communicate climate change and the way local people in their social lives experience these very same changes.

“As we listen to people living in northern communities, as we sit with them in their homes or travel with them through the forests or on the sea ice, one thing that often strikes us is how they rarely mention the climate. Instead, they talk about the weather. It is a striking illustration of the differences between local and global discourses about climate change.” (Heikkinen and Nutall)

This gap between the local, social life and science illustrates how people’s experiences in their daily lives are more related to their interaction with the immediate and meaningful environment in practice. For the indigenous people the importance of climate change are not how the water in the future will rise, how species will die out, how islands will disappear, or how we will experience more extreme weather conditions. For these people, who live in a close dependence relationship with nature, what they experience and what they find crucial are rather how the good fishing spots are changing, how the spring comes earlier, how the birds are changing their routes and how the animals such as reindeer, caribou and seals are skinnier and even taste different. These are the urgent changes they need to adapt to. – Changes, which pose serious challenges to the local people’s livelihoods. While this is the way the local people experience and cope with climate change, the science is rather about abstraction, generalization and measurement.

“What is quantitatively and statistically meaningful may be meaningless for the very people who are actually worrying about how they are going to have to adapt to profound changes.” (Heikkinen and Nutall)

How can we create a connection and an understanding of these very different perspectives on climate change? How can science learn from social life? How can the global perspective become present and relevant to the local societies, and how can the scientists and politicians dealing with climate change on a global scale take these people’s lives in to account?
 

Read and discuss their article: Between Weather and Climate.

What Prof. Schnellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, writes about, in his article Three Ways of Going MAD, how the politicians and the countries have to trust each other in order to turn around the negotiations and get to act in a way that can actually save our planet, can just as well be applied to our social lives.

‘Why should I skip a flight, when my neighbor flies all the time?’ ‘Why should I pay extra for sustainable energy, when only a tiny minority does it?’ ‘Why should I recycle and clean up after my self, why should I take the bike, buy organic or chose the vegetarian dish, when the others don’t?’ However childish they sounds, when we put is like this, these are considerations we hear all the time in the discussion about what we as individuals can do against climate change.   

“In a novel spirit of trust, each country [could be exchanged with ‘individual’] needs to commit to the most ambitious targets and measures that are technologically and economically feasible, on the firm assumption that all other countries will do the same.” (Schnellnhuber).

As Schnellnhuber writes about the global perspective, we won’t get anywhere if we all continue to think like this. We have to trust that our neighbors and every other person, family and society does whatever is in their power, as well economically as physically and timewise, to reduce their  co2 emission. We can only fullfil the necessary changes, if “the logic of MAD [mutually assured destruction] is turned upside down, transforming it into “mutually assured decarbonisation” (Schnellnhuber). If we all did our best, we would also create competition between people in search of being the best and most innovative in creating carbon-low lifestyle.
   
How can we actually get to trust each other more, so we all dare to do our very best to save the climate and not just let us self being driven by the short-sighted fear of economic losses and of declining competitive abilities?

Read also: POLITICIANS, TRUST EACH OTHER AND GO MAD

“[F]ighting for the world in a different form has almost disappeared. This is what Eric Swyngedouw addresses when he talks about fighting for the ‘impossible possibilities’.” (Freuendal-Pedersen)

To deal with climate change we have to strive for an utopia and believe in the ‘impossible possibilities’, Malene Freudendal-Pedersen states. In her article Re-conquering the lived city Malene Freudendal-Pedersen explains how there in our late modern everyday lives are so many opportunities and choices to take in order to make a good life for as well ourselves as for our climate. We don’t have the time and the energy to deal with all theses complex choices, and instead of becoming a fundament for the good life, the reflective life and the ambivalence paralyzes us. This is where utopia and communities comes into the picture, Freuendal-Pedersen argues. Not being able to cope with all these individualized questions creates a negative approach to climate, but instead we should use our abilities to get together in societies, where we can corporate about finding the best solutions and together dare to believe in the impossible possibilities and built an utopia. Utopias normally generate sociality and a hope, whereas our individualized lives generate fear and paralyzation.

"We have the right to re-make our cities creating and re-conquering spaces for lived life and, though it may bring about conflict, debate and discussion, this should all be welcomed. We have to fight taken for granted knowledge on what makes good (economic) sense, remembering that also politicians, planners and practitioners has an everyday life dependent on security, safety and hopes for the future." (Freuendal-Pedersen)

Once the ‘impossible impossibilities’ were free health care and education, which is now taken for granted (at least here in Scandinavia), today’s ‘impossible impossibilities’ are to claim for our rights to have cities where there is space for the lived life, where the cars doesn’t dominate the picture and the city’s planning and policy discourse.

Are no-cars and a city build on community structures the way to sustainable cities and a green life style? Or is it something else we need? An utopias is classically understood as something unreachable—is a city without cars and a life style build on communities realistic ‘impossible impossibilities’? Or are we just dreaming?
 

“When we are offered to “protect the climate with carbon neutral bananas”, “take a share in the responsibility towards climate change by drinking a climate friendly beer” or even “saving the world by buying a carbon neutral sausage”, these commodities appear as concrete subjects operating as the starting point of action towards climate change.” (Hasle).

But those are not actual actions, but rather passions we (maybe unintentionally) produce to prevent ourselves from confronting our lack of knowledge of climate change and the lack in our knowledge of the appropriate measures to be taken. The ignorance we try to protect ourselves from, has been produced by the very same “green consumption” as we believe to be the action that will save the planet. This is how cand.merc.(fil.) Line Hasle characterizes “green consumption” in her essay Discussing Climate Change with Marx and Spinoza. The rhetoric used around this “pro-ecological consumption”, she argues, hides our lack of power to take action in relation to climate change by making us believe that we take action by consuming. By bringing Spinoza and Marx into the picture, Hasle claims that the difficulty of understanding the complex affects of climate change makes us long for simplified modes of taking action, but in this constallation “abstract relations and concrete entities are confused”, so that we might believe that buying a carbon neutral sausage has the power to prevent climate change. Thereby green consumption actually ends up getting the opposite effect and be detrimental to the fight against climate change, by making us “[loose] sight of what really needs to be done in the midst of the green upheaval”.

So, does it make sense to buy green? To consume environmentally? Can I go to bed feeling good about myself because I have been driven my hybrid car, eaten vegetarian and washed my clothes with environmentally friendly soap in my energy-saving laundry machine? If not, how do I make sure, that I can sleep calm at night? How do we develop this new language and new “modes of thinking, being and acting that qualitatively can escape the logic of consumption”, that Hasle here suggests as necessary to take real action in the realm of climate change? How do we move out of the haven of ignorance produced in green consumption?
 

Dear Fellow Contemporary Human Beings,

The terrestrial water-cycle needs to be transformed. It is not a magic stream. It is running dry. Your role in the water-cycle is the cause and the solution.”

With this call to find our role in the global water-cycle Tse-Hui Teh gives us a fascinating insight into the water-cycle, which we in the industrialized world most often take for given, but which we none the less are a main ingredient of. Because we are the only species that has managed to find ways to transport more water than we can carry, we have manipulated the water-cycle in a non-sustainable way, leading way to much fresh, drinkable water out into the salty ocean. This doesn’t only makes us run low on drinking water in some places of the world, but the water further more crosses all kind of borders on its way, transporting and washing away as well natural minerals and human pollution and shutters and destroys our fragile eco-system.

“Knowing our role individually and collectively in assembling water-cycles and ecosystems will compel the design of new material configurations, boundaries, social values and administrative systems.”

How can we get more aware of our role and our effect in the global water-cycle, and how will this awareness possibly change the way we live our everyday lives using water from we get out of bed till when we go to sleep? How can we co-create water-cycles and ecosystems that continue supporting us?

“We have two choices. We can learn to develop social, technological and ecological systems that support our vast numbers. Or we can allow our vast numbers to exhaust resources and thus give rise to new ecological systems that favour other species.”
“I think our ways of interacting with water-cycles and creating new ecosystems will be a continual co-evolution. It can begin today. How could you transform your water-cycle?
From,
Tse-Hui The”

Read the whole ‘letter’ here: RE: URGENT – You in the Water-Cycle
 

Iceland has the cleanest and cheapest energy in the form of geo-thermal heat, but this doesn’t necessarily mean the most sustainable ecology or the most secure financial system. Here author, Andri Snær Magnason, tells the story of the rise and fall of Iceland: Rethinking Dreamland. It is a tale about how Iceland, due to their lack of money, in record time established an infrastructure based on clean energy, which, on the top of the ‘ice cake’, made them wealthy through the big corporations from the aluminum industry, claiming to make ‘clean aluminum’. However, the other side of aluminum coin presented problems: the very same geo-thermal energy that promised Iceland a rich, sustainable and clean life ended up leading to a very CO2 unfriendly lifestyle on the island in north and has some very sad, ecological, devastating effects around the world.

“We are suddenly not an island anymore - we have been connected to huge global conveyor belt - giving us huge responsibility of corporate business ethics. So again - the energy utopia in Iceland – had become a dystopia in the hands of our leaders. The beautiful nature having the potential of becoming a resource curse.” (Magnason)

Magnason starts his tale by illustrating how Iceland is an interesting phenomenon to look at when trying to understand bigger mechanisms and developments in the world. Because Iceland is so distinct and isolated from the rest of the world, it can be seen as a microcosmos representing the macrocosmos. “what happens in Iceland on a small scale can reflect far bigger forces in this world.” (Magnason).

Iceland is often being enhanced as pioneers in the crusade towards a CO2 neutral future, but the question is if we, in this case, can learn something from Iceland—and if Iceland can learn something from their own history? How do we make sure, that we build a society and a culture, where we get the best out of our clean and renewable energy sources so these doesn’t turn out to have serious drawbacks? 

 

Welcome to the debate forum for rethinking and discussing how climate change will affect our social lives – both the affects of the changes we will have to make to slow down global warming, and the changes that will automatically happen when the climate is changing. The debate forum is still in its initial phase but more content will soon be added.

We have heard it so many times, and here it comes again: we, in the western world, emit way too much CO2 and within the next 40 years we will have to reduce our CO2 emission by 80-90% (depending on where we are from), to save the planet. To achieve this, our social lives will, no matter how we look at it, change a lot in the future – but this does not have to be for the worse.

Through a number of articles on different aspects of our social life, I will encourage you as a reader, as a writer, and as interested in your future life to engage in the discussion and share ideas and opinions concerning how we can structure our lives differently and organize society otherwise so we will produce less CO2.

How can we design an everyday life where we become more aware of our use and consumption of gas, heat, water, electricity, foot, goods etc.? How will our social lives look different in 40 years? How can we make sure that the necessary changes do not affect the quality of our social lives, but that the changes can bring something positive with them – also on a personal level? What does the awareness of climate change demand from the user? What can we do to as consumers do to change our habits, and what are our chances to see through and deal with this complex matter? How can we organize people to make an active difference? How do we help everybody on Earth to achieve an acceptable life style? How much of the change should come from political regulations and how much is our own private responsibility? And how should the politicians at COP15 include our social lives and structures when negotiating and making decisions?

These questions and many more will be on this blog for you to read about and debate.