Being Mean About the Green Scene

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Al Gore is promoting a pop concert to raise awareness of climate change. There'll be big name stars getting big ratings and giving the big picture on the biggest of big issues.

On face of it, it's a good idea, Most of the target audiance have a deep distrust of politicians, manifested as political defeatism, but a passion for music and celebrity.

Going a little deeper, I have to ask: Surely anyone whose awareness can be raised has already had it raised?

There are those who will always deny the inconvenient truth because it scares them so much. They'll always be able to latch on to some half-understood pseudosciene to justify their fearful complacency.

There are those who profit in the short term from environmental destruction, and these can always invent paper thin rationalisations - including the notion that it's already too late, so why bother?

There are those who see the problem as too large to solve, so reconceptualise it as vastly smaller issues around low energy lightbulbs, loft insulation and recycled coke cans.

A subtype of these are those who defer action by preaching that children must be educated into green awareness, because the children own the future and they need to ensure their children don't inherit a ruined earth blah blah blah.

There's the campaigners who think it's all about saving this or that species of fluffy animal from extinction, or making plane tickets more expensive. Or raising taxes to punish people who are too poor to move out of their old, ungreen, underclass homes.

None of these types will be persuaded by a green pop concert - or even twenty green pop concerts. They'll make some thought-terminating remark about the electricty for the event coming from burning coal. Even if they go to the concert themselves - probably driving there in an SUV.

No, such people will never listen, so there's no point in talking to them. The concert is aimed squarely at keeping the embryonic movement going. And in it's current state - small, timid, ideologically confused, composed of groups with incompatible aims and beliefs, and held together only by the vaguest of common interest - it needs all the solidarity it can generate.

So yes, it is a good idea. Just not for the stated reasons.

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As above, so below. Here in Portsmouth we have a "Climate Awareness Event", created by PCAN - the Portsmouth Climate Action Network. A day of stalls, workshops, talks and films, followed by an evening barbeque (with vegan option) and a night of live music.

One thing good socialists are good at is working with people we think are quite wrong in all ways execept the most important - especially the kind of trendy-liberal middle-class greener-than-thou hippies who inevitably dominate events like these.

Which is odd really, because working with people who disagree with them on details is something that trendy-liberal middle-class greener-than-thou hippies are extremely bad at.

And I'm not even a very good socialist. But I'll be there.

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