Pirate's Cove

But there is something that can save us all

Technology will not save us from climate change, but imagining new forms of society will

Citizen action on climate change has reached a new intensity: school children by the thousands regularly skip school to protest and Extinction Rebellion’s civil disobedience recently caused widespread disruption in cities around the world. Challenge and disruption is important in prompting change. But it’s also key that we consider—and show—how a zero carbon future could work in practice. This is where the field of social innovation – the development of new ideas that meet social needs—is coming of age.

When climate change was last so prominent, at the time of Kyoto, 1997, and again in the mid-2000s, most of the emphasis was on targets and treaties on the one hand, and big R&D budgets for clean tech on the other. Now there is a much better understanding that if these aren’t combined with social innovation from the bottom up, they’re unlikely to stick.

One reason for this is that cutting carbon use depends on changing social norms and behavior as much as technology—whether local food sourcing or reducing fast fashion. Another reason is the urgent need to show the skeptics that they won’t necessarily be harmed by things like higher petrol prices or shrinking traditional industries like coal mining. A low carbon economy can mean many more jobs, for example in refurbishment or recycling e-waste.

But this requires a very different approach to innovation, in which investment in new technology is matched by investment in new ways of organizing society. And investment in technology alone has dominated the last century.

See? It’s very easy! All we need to do is put government in charge of organizing our society and forcing us to behavior in a specific manner.

These tools are now becoming more mainstream, alongside the more traditional support for science and technology. They include, for example, experiments to find out what works best in persuading people to insulate their lofts, to go vegetarian or switch from a car commute to cycling. They include new kinds of social organization—from new neighborhoods designed for low carbon (like London’s BEDZed) to action by whole communities to cut their emissions.

President Obama and California’s new governor, Gavin Newsom, both set up social innovation offices, and countries as varied as Malaysia and Canada have had national strategies for social innovation. Carlos Moedas, the EU’s commission of research, commented late in 2018 that the EU would put more money into social innovation “not because it’s trendy, but because we believe that the future of innovation is about social innovation.”

So, it’s pretty much Modern Socialists who are pushing for “social change”, which is forced compliance to rulings of people who rarely practice what they preach.

The key message of social innovation is that the scale of change needed in the next few years simply can’t be achieved just by top-down government policy or by grassroots action. This will become ever more apparent as the world grapples with implementing the Paris agreements, and hopefully goes further than their modest targets. Social innovation has a central role to play in mobilizing society as a partner in this work.

For the next decade, this is where energy now needs to be directed. Change must be accelerated, not just in the organization of our physical systems, but also in the way in which we live and relate to each other.

Anyone getting the idea that this isn’t about science, but about forcing people to live a certain lifestyle and be completely dependent, and under the thumb of, government?