More Climate Communications

Friends, I have been out again in search of inspiration for how to encourage changes that will reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

In this article I am just noting down things that happened and reflecting on the interactions. It seems that there is widespread ignorance and misunderstanding of Climate Change coupled with bewilderment about what will actually make a difference.

These notes are for two quite contrasting days. As usual, a solid 99% of people just passed by. Of those who stopped, there was quite a bit of positivity, but also some bizarrely misinformed opinions.

I am still learning…

Thursday, July 28.

10:58 Set up outside CarpetRIght in Teddington.

11:05 John stopped by with many positive ideas. He suggested I put posters in the library and in the local community noticeboard on Broad Street which I could access through the library. He suggested my board should show the savings to be gleaned from using low carbon energy, such as solar power. John lived locally and his street had a WhatsApp group that could share information. It made me think that maybe the ‘Neighbourhood’ app might be useful.

11:12 When John walked back the other way he held up his fist and said “Viva La Revolution”

11:23 A mother and her two children (a boy aged 12 and a girl aged 9) stopped by. She was very supportive but the children were obviously disinterested. I asked her what things I could do to communicate better, and she suggested my box should have more colour on it. The children then suggested there should be graphics showing a healthy earth and a poorly earth. The boy suggested I should use Instagram. The mother said they were going with the children to Bordeaux in France next week, and that they would see some of the evidence of wildfires. 

11:34 Three teenagers walked by and waved. But didn’t stop to talk

11:35 A lady caught my eye and said she was in a rush for work, but wished me good luck.

11:38 Man on a bright yellow Suzuki motorbike stopped at the traffic lights, and caught my eye. He nodded.

11:45 A regular at the Sidra café where I have my morning coffee stopped by. I said I was just trying to find out what people thought, and get out of my Twitter bubble. He told me that “almost everyone will agree with me, but that almost no one knew what to do“. I said that seemed a succinct précis of what people had said

11:48 A gentleman, quite elderly, with a straw hat stopped by and asked me “What’s going on with all this weather then? Are we going to get more of it?”. I said we probably were going to get more of it, one or two days like that every year and then slowly becoming more common. I asked him if he thought there was anything we could do about it, and he told me it was “...all those gases going up in the atmosphere“, a phrase he repeated several times. As he left he said “We’ll just have to see what happens then…“.

11:54 A lady called who works in the theology department at the local University stopped by. “Air-conditioning on the buses and trains” she said “that’s the solution“. She said she was out on the 40 °C day, and that the solution was to wear damp T-shirts and trousers. I suggested that some people might think it immodest for ladies to wear a wet T-shirt but she was unabashed.

12:10 An elegantly-dressed lady pushing her mother in a wheelchair stopped by. She said it wasn’t a popular thing to say but she wasn’t sure that it wasn’t the best thing for people to just destroy themselves, leaving just a few small tribes on Earth, and then people would be forced to live sustainably.

She said that what people want is to know what is the right thing, but something which will influence others. We discussed the idea of a Personal Carbon budget. For example, people could have a lifetime budget of 100 tons of carbon emissions by flying, which they could then sell, or buy from other people. She seemed to like this idea.

Her mother intervened to say that when she was younger, flying was very expensive and so people went by boat, and she had come to England from Canada on a freighter which had just a few cabins for passengers. “Flying was very expensive. Slower is better.” she said.

The lady thought that “Human beings will pay if they have too. Raising the price of things will eliminate frivolous use of things e.g., weekend trips”.

She said that  “People are creative” and told me that in Lebanon people had rigged up makeshift solar systems with batteries to get by when there was no mains electricity and that people there cooked collectively. She said this was also done in Morocco and Algeria. 

She told me to look out for the ”The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind” a Netflix film about renewable energy in Africa

12:22 A lady carrying her lunch back to her office spoke as she passed, saying “Thank you for doing this.”, although I am not sure she knew what I was doing!

12:24 A gentleman passing by didn’t stop but looked at me, and raised his eyebrows and said “Alright!”

12:29 Colleagues from NPL passed by, and one person told me that his wife’s sister’s husband (!) had asked them if they had heard about this “Protons for Breakfast” site. So it does seem that news is travelling.

12:42 An ex-colleague from NPL stopped by. He was working on life-cycle impact assessments, and said he had done did a life-cycle assessment of the Audi E Tron (an EV) and that it was worse than petrol cars because of the massive embodied energy in the battery.

12:52 A lady was walking slowly past with a stick. I caught her eye and commented that it was warm now. She nodded and said “As long as it doesn’t get too warm…”

12:58 A man who worked at a local e-bike shop stopped and suggested I should get a giant banner and block the entire road. He said he had heard that the materials mined for batteries involved child labour. I told him I was pretty sure that involved the cobalt and not the lithium and that modern batteries use no cobalt or nickel. 

13:00 An expert in Climate Change science and an ex-colleague from NPL stopped by – remember this is Teddington!. She told me she’d read a book of random facts about climate change, but had had to stop because it was too depressing.

13:15 A lady passed by without stopping but said she had had lots of conversations about climate change with friends. I told her to keep talking.

13:17. E-bike man passed  by again having bought his lunch, and he said that he had seen an article on associated press that morning about fugitive methane

13:26. Stopped

Tuesday, August 2nd.

11:03 I ventured away from Teddington to nearby Hampton Hill and set up outside a parade of shops near a local Tesco.

11:25 Interesting interaction with two air-conditioning servicing engineers who had just emerged from Tesco with their lunch.

The younger one engaged me and said “We’re part of the problem mate”. he said, “We’re 7% of emissions.”.  I said he was also part of the solution. We’re all going to need air-conditioning in the future, and installing heat pumps is going to be a big business. He acknowledged that, but said that the refrigerant was harmful, and the less harmful it was, the worse it was as a refrigerant.

Then his older and fatter colleague came out. He said “I’m not going to get drawn into this because we’ll end up having an argument.” And then he got drawn into it. He said there may be some emissions he said, but there is also a natural cycle. I told him that actually it’s all human emissions.

He then went on about ice ages, and the massive emissions in the Victorian era when there was no global warming. I told him emissions in the Victorian era were low: around 1 billion tonnes of CO2 per year and that now emissions are 36 billion tonnes per year.

He then went on to say “Anyway it’s not us, 72% of emissions come from China”. I pointed out that it wasn’t that high and that the US and China pollute similarly. He wandered off saying “I knew we’d have an argument.”

After that interaction, two people at the bus stop spoke to me and said “Sorry you had to have that, he was like that in Tesco!”. Then they said “Good luck!”

11:35 A man about 60 years of age with long hair approached me and asked me what I was an expert in. I said I was an expert in measurements of temperature and explained how I had made the most accurate temperature measurements ever made. He said he had studied particle physics so I included some slightly more technical details. He told me he was in the film and graphics business but didn’t do much these days, just built websites.

I asked him his take on the climate crisis and he said he wasn’t concerned. He said global warming was 0.2°C, and that NASA had edited the data for specific years. I told him that wasn’t true but he insisted and named the individual years in question. Then he had to get on the bus   

11:41 A young man with a ponytail and some over-ear headphones nodded to me. Then an elderly man with smart grey hair and wearing cool summer shorts said good morning. 

11:51 A black man stopped by and said “He didn’t know what to say because things may get political”. He said first he was from Africa and then changed his mind – he sounded very English to me, like he came from Henley or similar – but he did trade with Africa. He said that the UK was exporting polluting old cars to Africa. I said that was shameful and then I asked what he thought we should do about the climate crisis. 

He said that heating has always been terrible in the UK, and that when he was a child (he said he was 61) he would go out to the library to get warm during the day, and when he was at home they would wear cardigans and pullovers. Now he said his children want to wash a T-shirt then put it in the dryer so they can wear that same day. He thought the price rises that are happening at the moment, although they were very hard on people, might help people value energy more.

He said he couldn’t understand how people in Africa, Nigeria in particular were still using diesel generators so much, when Solar is so cheap. Then he had to go and catch a bus. 

11:59  An elderly man called stopped by, he said it was really warming up. I said yes, but that you had to be something like our age to understand just how different the climate was now to how it was when we were young. He said the government needed to sort it out, and I said I didn’t think the government would be able to sort out their own bedroom, and he laughed and agreed.

I asked him what he thought could be done. He asked me “What could we do?” And I told him that our house in Teddington had been off-grid for a quarter of a year. I said there were things that people could do, but it would take the people who had the money to do them first. He said he was really impressed by news of my house and he would tell his friends. As he left he said good luck to me.

12:35 A lady was just waiting for a bus, but caught my eye and said she hoped I was getting lots of interest. I said I”n fact No, most people just didn’t want to think about it” She said that she had just joined Extinction Rebellion and was waiting to go on the first training course.

13:00  After 25 minutes with no interactions I thought it was time to call it a day.