Posted Monday 5, February 2007 by: JJG

At the beginning of February 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published the first of three key reports due to come out on the effects of global warming. The influential group of scientists concluded that Global climate change is “very likely” to have a human cause.Ever since I can remember, brands have promised to make people feel snug, safe and sound – with a real sense of belonging. I recall with fondness, TV commercials for the cereal, ‘Ready Brek’ promising to give kids a visible warm glow as they trundled off to school on a clean and clear frosty morning. (How times and environments have changed).As a kid, returning home from school fortified by pockets stuffed with branded chocolates and cans of fizzy drinks, I occasionally paid attention to a news item about some international (we didn’t use the word ‘global’ back then) disaster or another. For sure, people were worried, but somehow their naïve faith in a system of greater powers such as brands and companies made them feel that whilst the world was imperfect, it would all turn out okay in the end. For some that may have meant causing change through communal action and protest. “The puppet on the right shares my beliefs. The puppet on the left is more to my liking. Wait a minute, there’s one guy holding both puppets!” (Bill Hicks)Successive UK governments displaced cliques of union power with the assurance of individual prosperity through growth and assertion of their consumer and individual rights. It was the era of the ‘flexible friend’. Brands like Barclaycard and MasterCard joined Visa, the international electronics payment network. Raising the standard with its slogan ‘Brand ‘choice’, corporations instated consumers as puppet kings and queens of everything they surveyed; from shopping malls to low cost skies.As with any leader initially tightly controlled by a cartel and eventually succumbing to too much autonomy, a price was levied for miss-management of funds. De-marketing methods aimed to slow the frenzy for more goods in less time. Now a power even bigger than governments has called time on credit facilities. Mother Earth simply cannot bear any more.Altering decades of consumer ‘rights’ will be an uphill struggle, potentially giving rise to increased cynicism and a backlash by groups feeling cattle herded into becoming integrated into what could be seen as the equivalent of a globally politically correct, but ultimately bland, brand experience.Yet, on the international political stage some progress is being made. Take the USA. As with encouraging bullying children that they are intrinsically good, getting the Americans to proclaim pride for their more environmentally responsible States is a clever psychological step forward. Meanwhile ominous evidence of filthy, sprawling carbon footprints left by China threatens to take everyone several strides backwards. Taxation by confession No doubt, here in the UK, brand endorsed campaigns will be launched to convince the former ‘anyone can do it if they believe in themselves’ public that they, like a Z-list Celebrity Big Brother contestant, should undergo open displays of penitence for over indulging at the dining table of consumerism. Economists will use taxes to flog the public into environmental guilt driven submission. (Tucking in some handy stealth taxes along the way).‘Rob Peter to pay Paul’ carbon-exchange token gestures will only work if emissions are sufficiently reduced to keep global warming in check – creating a market does not, by itself, lessen emissions. On the other hand, genuine socially driven taxes on corporations could make a difference at board level. Yet heavy-handed taxes on the ordinary man and woman may only lead to a once free-flying, free-parking and free-breathing public getting a touched ‘cheesed-off’.Remorseful small businesses will pass taxes on to the next group down the chain. Inevitably that group will be the least capable to shell out. Perhaps people like construction workers in India, living on little more than €2 a day as they flatten green valleys into grey slabs of environmentally devastating concrete, metal and glass. Many such groups may have faith in the West’s corporate hype of a ‘rights for all through free enterprise for the masses future’, so continue to relentlessly build towers of Babel in the belief of one day reaching a consumer utopia. Driving change As Malcolm Gladwell suggested in his classic book, ‘The Tipping Point’, to instigate sustainable change you must reach key movers within a market. Offering them a genuine sense of individual autonomy, which is mutually beneficial for themselves, their peers and environment. What wont work is a bullying brand or authority coercing a market ‘top-down’ by sheer brute force.Lexus cars have taken a healthy initiative by launching a range of Hybrid models. Yet when I recently inspected the vehicles I discovered that if I wanted to show my concern for our planet, I wouldn’t get much change from €63,000. (Hardly a mass-market incentive). Caressing the mahogany steering wheel of the GS450h model, the salesperson told me that David Cameron, leader of the UK opposition, whose party’s new logo features a environmentally-PC tree, would be picking up a € 83,000 model from the range.For a long time, both consumers and corporations have enjoyed free-market rights. Now it’s time to act on the collective individual right of altruistic choice.If brands, economists and governments act shrewdly, sincerely and responsibly; crediting markets with having commonsense for the common good, what currently bodes as an awful prospect for mankind could in fact become a seed for the good of future generationsAnd that will deliver the ideal climate of change affected by a human cause: one offering a profoundly compassionate sense of global warming that everyone deserves to enjoy and share.