Making low-carbon behaviours fabulous

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How does your life relate to climate change?

So Global Cool exists to encourage and enable and inspire low-carbon behaviours in the mass public in the UK and, indeed, internationally. And we specifically look at segments of the public who are not engaged by the climate debate or by the environmental issues or even by the kinds of issues that charities work on more broadly to date; the kinds of people who are core territory actually for brands to target and who are big consumers, so people who are interested in going out, looking great, having a good time, for whom the key driver of their behaviour is about their esteem and the respect of others.

And so we look at, we promote four key low-carbon behaviours that relate to the four biggest pieces of carbon that an individual can influence, and those are around alternatives to flying, alternatives to driving, energy use in the home and then reducing the carbon that’s embedded in all the stuff that we buy, so in our radios, TVs, iPods, clothes, food, all of those sorts of things. And we market those behaviours in the way that commercial marketers market products. I mean marketing in its broadest sense is about getting people to change their behaviour, and so we’re just getting people to change their behaviour in ways that save carbon.

So, for example, we did a campaign this summer which was really about promoting alternatives to driving. But we don’t talk about alternatives, and we don’t talk about driving, we just talked about the interesting, fun, quirky, zany, inspiring things that can happen to people on journeys, on trains and buses, by way of making the behaviour of taking trains and buses aspirational and providing thereby an alternative to driving. And we did that through the music industry, we did a lot of work at music festivals this summer and got a lot of the bands who were involved in the music festivals to talk to us about interesting, quirky, inspiring things that have happened to them on trains and buses, which was a fantastic set of content and a mechanism for reaching this audience that we’re trying to get to.

What are you planning over the next year?

There are two campaigns that we are planning. One is really promoting alternatives to flying and the second I’ll just mention is about improving energy efficiency and energy use in the home. The first on promoting alternatives to flying is about promoting flight-free holidays. So we will be taking a group of celebrities on flight-free holidays, which will be trips by train somewhere, you know, within sort of four or five hours train radius of where they live. So some will be in Scotland, some will be in Switzerland, some will be going kayaking in Venice, for example, looking at some really interesting holidays that you can go on, and making the train journey to get there part of the adventure. And so promoting that as a holiday mechanism, and then putting that out through a number of online media channels and doing a lot of offline PR around it. And then there’s a campaign that we will be doing looking at improving energy efficiency in the home, which will be about encouraging people to wrap up for winter.

So a lot of research shows that part of the reason people have the heating on so high at home is they all kind of expect to be at home in t-shirts and shorts in the winter, and actually that’s kind of absurd. So we’re trying to encourage people about this notion of wrapping up, wrapping up yourself properly for winter so that you can kind of go cool on the thermostat, and also wrapping up your home for winter. So, you know, why is it that we no longer change our curtains for example for winter and we have the same really thin ones in the winter as we do in the summer. Well actually there used to be a notion of wrapping up your house properly for winter, so we’ll be promoting that.

In terms of in five years where we want to be is that I think we, Global Cool will be operating at an international level, but essentially the core will be the same in terms of engaging and inspiring the mass public in the key low-carbon behaviours. The key low-carbon behaviours are different in different countries because it depends on the ways they use energy, the way they generate energy actually and the way that they travel. But I would really hope that by five years’ time we have a lot more understanding of the issues in the general public and that there is a lot more willingness to act in low-carbon ways. And that there’s also a much better mechanism for people understanding the impact of the good things that they’re doing; I think we need to do a lot more about sort of helping people celebrate the progress that they are making.

Where does the passion come from?

I came to climate change through Al Gore’s film actually, that was my road to Damascus moment, and I was horrified that until that moment I didn’t really know anything about this issue. But for me the big driver and the reason that I’m passionate about working on this issue is because of the unfairness in terms of the people who have contributed least to the problem are those that will be hit hardest by it. So there’s a fantastic advert that Christian Aid had a year or two ago, which was a full-page advert, and it had a picture of a woman, a black woman in a street. She was clearly in Sub-Saharan Africa, she had a child on her hip, and there was flood water up to kind of, up to her thighs, and she was clearly having a terrible time. And the advert just said ‘Be a love and turn off your computer at night’.

And there was something for me about the kind of massive disparity between what we in the West are in general asked to give up and the impact that this has on people in less-developed countries, and so for me that’s a good driver for me. That’s not a driver for everybody by any means, and the work that Global Cool does is about taking low-carbon behaviours and making them fabulous and beautiful and making them really attractive to people who would be motivated by a completely different set of, I don’t know what, by a different set of activities.

Optimism or pessimism?

I would say that I’m cautiously optimistic. I think we have our work cut out. I think that, there’s a colleague of mine who used to say that the answer is ‘and’. You know, we need wind and we need solar and we need carbon capture and storage, and we need behaviour change and we need policy change and we need a carbon tax, and we need all of these things. And he was saying that in relation to the kind of fights between the solar industry and the wind industry and the wave industry, and he was saying that these debates are ill-formed because actually the answer is and we need all of these things, and I think you can also expand that out, we also need behaviour change. And so I think, I see a huge amount of energy and innovation and very clever thinking in each of those areas. So I think we can get to a solution, a complete solution, but I think we have our work cut out on many fronts to do it.