my name is mwd

Most of you will know me as a quiet nerdy type who doesn’t go much in for politics. However, last Saturday found me stood in Parliament Square, outside the Houses of Parliament, holding one end of a twelve foot banner. Certainly it’s not something I’d have expected to do in 2008 had you asked me this time last year!

(Picture thanks to Helen Brimmer – see below for link to more pictures!)

So, what’s happened? Well, I’ve become part of Serious Change – a group dedicated to putting pressure on the UK Government to help secure our future from the various threats of climate change and our dwindling energy supplies. We want to ensure that we can all lead a similar level of lifestyle to that we have now, but our current dependance on fossil fuels is not inline with that. Now the government is great at setting far away targets, but is low on doing things now. Sure, we’re encouraged not to use shopping bags and to use energy efficient light bulbs, but these are small token gestures and in no way make any significant difference. Turning off your mobile phone charger for a day will save the same amount of energy as running a car for one second.

What Serious Change things is that the Government needs to both create an economic structure to move the country to sustainable energy models, and indeed to invest in that direction too. At the moment green issues have gone from the agenda during the current financial turmoil. The Government plan to spend to stimulate the economy – so why not kill two birds with one stone and fund sustainable energy solutions?

There are facts out there – for example, I’ve just got David Mackay’s book Without Hot Air (which you can get for free from his website). In this book Mackay doesn’t care about the emotional issues of a sustainable energy solution – he just does the maths, and does it in a way most people could understand. He lays out the many ways we could achieve the reductions in carbon emissions that the world governments predicts we need, and at the same time keep our lifestyle. It’s not cheap, and it’ll require an end to the (understandable but unsustainable) NIMBY attitude to infrastructure projects we have in this country. (The phone charger fact is one of David’s)

So that’s what Serious Change plan to do – apply pressure to make the Government look at the facts out there and start making the decisions now. If you feel like this would be a good thing then I encourage you to sign up on our website. Doing so helps us demonstrate that the public want and expect the Government to take a lead in the issue, and it means we can tell you when things are happening in your area that you could get involved in.

And to be all Web 2.0, we even have a YouTube video explaining things:

And the banner? On Saturday there was a climate change awareness march in London. We went along to provide an alternative view to those saying that capitalism needs to die for the planet to be saved. We say the opposite – we need the Government to set the laws such that the market can deliver the solutions we know can make it happen – capitalism will save it. Thus our banner – “Save Our Economy” and “Laws Not Lightbulbs” .

You can see the pictures from the event by me here and some more by another Serious Changer Helen Brimmer here. It was a good day – although it’s very unlikely we achieved much, it’s a start for us trying to get our message out.