chris rose

While the climate is still being more and more destabilised, climate advocates are making headway.  But campaign groups should beware, because as tightening emission regulations, the encroachment of renewables into energy markets and ratcheting public demands for action on pollution, all start to combine, they threaten to strangle the market for fossil fuels. The industry may see that its very future is at stake, and react accordingly.

Having given up on transforming themselves into a benign energy industry (see below), the fossil fuel producers have nowhere to go.  Without some form of rational government intervention to plan a phase-out pathway, and to guide investment, the end game of fossil fuels could get very nasty indeed.

The current furore over the ‘Greenpeace Arctic 30’ held in Russian jails after protesting against Gazprom’s Arctic drilling, is a dramatic collision of ethics and business as usual but future conflicts may spread far wider.  The Arctic 30 have not literally been taken hostage by Russia or even Gazprom but they are hostages to an ethical imperative to restrain the growth in carbon pollution, and the failure of governments to do the same: carbon hostages.

Many more NGOs could soon find themselves in the firing line, even those who do not leave their desks.  If the industry sees all those advocating action on climate as a vital link between public opinion and political leadership which needs to be severed, campaign groups might seem one of the softer available targets.

Unfortunately, the lumbering UNFCCC process (next stop Poland) is ill equipped to deliver political custody of the carbon end game. Instead it is being left to play itself out in ways which may prove as chaotic as climate change itself.

Why The Industry Is Right to Worry

The coal industry has particular reason to be worried but oil and gas are not far behind.  Without government intervention to give investors certainty, conflicts over energy and climate may soon get a lot more acute, as profits and investments are on the line.  There are a number of reasons. Here are just seven of them.

First, coal markets are starting to close.  Despite the surge in coal production over recent years, and the current boom in gas, the fossil fuel industry has good reason to feel that the walls may be closing in.  Demand for coal in international markets is dropping with US and Australian exports both affected.   Goldman Sachs has warned that “the window to invest profitably in new thermal coal mines is closing”.

A major factor, is China’s new energy plan, driven by changing demands of the Chinese public, who want cleaner air, which means burning less coal.  As Harri Lammi has pointed out in my blog, renewables investment may end growth in coal emissions in China in the next few years.

Second, renewables are eating into the market for fossil-fuelled electricity. The costs of renewable energy, especially solar pv for electricity are plunging, itself driven by consumer demand, scaling up and ‘Moore’s Law’ type technological advances.  It is a structural reality.

In April Bloomberg New Energy Finance forecast annual investment in new renewable power capacity rising two and a half-fold to more than four and a half-fold between now and 2030, driven by improving in the cost-competitiveness of wind and solar technologies relative to fossil fuels, and, more hydro, geothermal and biomass.  IEA’s second-annual Medium-Term Renewable Energy Market Report predicts renewable generation will grow 40% in the next five years and power generation from renewables will exceed natural gas, and be twice that of nuclear energy globally by 2016. The ‘gas bridge’ then, looks much shorter than expected.

In 2011 global investment in renewables hit a record $257.5 billion, exceeding by $40 billion the amount invested in new fossil fuel capacity.  Worldwide, UNEP reported that renewables made up over half of all new electricity capacity in 2011-2.

Third, coming over the horizon, are electric cars.  Imagine the impact on the collective consciousness once ‘gas stations’ no longer sell ‘gas’ (petrol and diesel to the majority of us, living outside the US).

Fourth, while cash flows into renewables it is ebbing away from fossil fuels thanks to growing disinvestment campaigns. Damian Carrington has reported that an Oxford University study shows ‘A campaign to persuade investors to take their money out of the fossil fuel sector is growing faster than any previous divestment campaign and could cause significant damage to coal, oil and gas companies’.  The direct financial impact, most prominently associated with student lobbying of universities to delete fossil fuels from their portfolios is , as it noted, is far less than the political, social and psychological impact.  These are the decision-makers of tomorrow.

Nor is this restricted to activists and students. For example last week WWF Norway called for 5% of the $750bn Sovereign Wealth Fund of Norway to be spent on renewables and disinvested from Tar Sands.

Fifth, regulatory action is still driving a shift away from fossil fuels, especially coal.  Not just the Chinese energy plan for example but Obama’s carbon limits for new coal plants.  The World Bank has said it will now only grant finance to coal power in “rare circumstances”.

Sixth, although media commentary still tends to paint the opposite picture, an avalanche of polling data shows the public believes climate change is real, happening, a bad thing and that renewable energy is preferable to fossil fuels.  Moreover, despite great anxiety amongst climate-advocates in advance of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report released in September that sceptic lobbyists and their media allies would spin the idea that climate change was no longer such a threat, overall the media coverage focused on growing scientific certainty.  If the sceptics were going to win a major battle for public perceptions, that was probably it.  They failed.

Seventh, with oil increasingly hard to find more of, the prospects for making money from fossil fuels increasingly rely on gas, which in many applications (eg power generation) is also in direct competition with renewables.

In his essay ‘Collision of Climate and Carbon’ for Montrose Journal in September, Tom Burke of E3G noted that because solar and wind are at grid parity with fossil fuels,

“This led a recent report from UBS to talk about an ‘unsubsidised power revolution’. This is a prospect that was previously unthinkable for the electricity generation. In 2012, renewable power in Germany took a 22% share of consumption. This sparked an 11% fall in natural gas fuelled electricity and a steep fall in the share price of German utilities RWE and EoN, both of whom were forced to mothball gas fired plants that had become uneconomic to operate”.

Then there is fracking. In large scale development in some places, ‘fracking’ to get at ‘unconventional gas’ is also proving highly controversial and often unpopular in affected regions.  And in countries like the UK, rising gas prices are widely resented.  Gas has gone from being unobtrusive, and often seen as a relatively clean and benign fuel, to an expensive and controversial one. Many politicians are wary.

Nowhere to Go

It used to be good, if you were concerned that industry transitioned to sustianability, if the fossil fuel industry was worried about its future, because it could turn to green energy production. Now the industry is not in a position to exploit the growth in the renewables market, because for practical purposes it has abandoned green energy.  It has nowhere to go but to continue down the fossil route and to fight for it like a cornered dinosaur.

Many campaigners may never have believed it but back in the 1990s, in some oil companies at least, there were serious attempts to explore alternatives.  I took part in a ‘futures’ strategy exercise with Shell, where their planners spoke openly about their assumption that fossil fuels were going to be replaced by electrical energy, well before they ‘ran out’.  On another occasion a Shell executive told me “at least we are not in Tar Sands” (or at the time, not in them very much).  BP also became the world’s biggest solar pv maker.  But, as I wrote in a blog earlier this summer, the fiscal signal that they expected from governments – making investment in renewables more rewarding than looking for new oil or gas – never came.  The industry reverted to ‘business as usual’.

So Shell withdrew from investing in wind and solar in 2009.  BP, which had once rebranded itself as “Beyond Petroleum”, abandoned solar in 2011, and dropped wind power in 2013.  The picture is much the same for other oil majors: none make any significant investment in renewable energy, although many still heavily feature renewables in their advertising.

Consequently, in the end game for fossil fuels, Arctic oil and gas, fracking for gas, and Tar Sands (which require those pipelines), are vital last resorts for the industry.  Tax breaks and other political support for new reserves, are necessary for the industry to keep profitable.  Which means in turn that public opinion is critical, and that means in turn, that public perceptions of campaigns to disinvest, to oppose new oil and gas, or to stop using coal, are crucial.

Unfortunately, when that signal failed to materialise and then politicians tried to distance themselves from the failure of the Copenhagen political climate talks, the fossil fuel industry plunged into investments in new fossil fuel developments.  It will feel more and more cornered if they see the chances to convert geological resources into marketable ‘reserves’, slipping away. Carbon Tracker has pointed out that last year the industry spent $674billion to find and develop new potentially stranded assets.  Earlier this year HSBC Global Research calculated that if carbon emissions are cut so as to limit climate change to 2.C, it could wipe 60% off their share value.

That’s quite an incentive, and is a reason why it would be better for governments to give investors certainty, by regulating to create phase out pathways so that money could be used most effectively, rather than encouraging an increasingly urgent conflict between those trying to save the climate and those trying to develop fossil fuels.

Some weeks ago I had the privilege of spending some time with Harri Lammi, one of Greenpeace’s campaigners who works in China. A few days after I saw Harri, the Chinese Government revealed its new air pollution action plan designed  to cut fine particle PM2.5 pollution which is damaging to health,  and clear the skies above the country.  Harri has posted a detailed commentary on that, and the campaigning which Greenpeace did on the subject,  here. Although the blog below is mine, many of the insights are his.

China, Coal and ‘The West’

For decades, the easy resort of those in the ‘West’ who looked for an excuse not to take action to reduce global pollution (eg to protect the ozone layer or climate) was to cite “China”.  Such a large population, such economic growth: surely, until “they do something” there’s “no point in us acting ?”.  Perhaps those of us in “the West” don’t hear it so much now, as the environmental case is more widely accepted and many aspects of modern China confound preconceptions.  For example, although Chinese air pollution is disastrous, it leads the world in production of solar panels and has a huge wind turbine industry.  Growth in solar and wind is so rapid that it may be able to stop growth in China’s coal emissions in the next three to five years or so. The timeline depends on growth of electricity demand, and of course, how fast solar would be growing in the next years.

I’m no expert on China and have never even visited but I recently heard someone who has worked there for several years who made several interesting points.

* Power politics in China goes on inside the Communist Party, and the huge Chinese social media is a way for those expressing various opinions as to how to move forwards, to build or undermine public support for options and to gauge public acceptability of ideas and policies but without any formal public plebiscites.  Of course there is hardly any conventional ‘civil society’ (NGOs etc) as would be recognizable throughout most of the developing and developed world.  Social media is an ever more important factor in maintaining a connection between the Party and public opinion, especially the burgeoning Middle Class.

* Censorship is measured and not always absolute, and in the case of channels such as the microblogging platform Sina Weibo, can be adjusted over minutes or hours, sometimes allowing comments to spread for a while before being taken down.  In this way the Chinese Government, or parts of it, sense public opinion.

Sometimes critical issues are allowed an airing while not causing too much disturbance. On the other hand,  once a ‘Weibo storm’ starts they can become effectively un-stoppable. In the environmental field this is sometimes catalysed by the fact that China still has an appetite for ‘facts’ which has been progressively eroded in the Western media in favour of ‘communication ghettoes’ dominated by shared values outlooks, so that (especially in the US) many people live their communication lives in exclusive, closed communities, each with its own independent reality, in which ‘facts’ are selected to reinforce existing views.

* Senior leadership and international corporations operating in China, and even global market analysts, look to the few groups like Greenpeace, and some independently minded Chinese academic researchers who are sometimes able to provide independent information on matters such as harmful pm2.5 air pollution, or toxic content of food or water, to obtain facts that are not reliably available through official sources.

Harri says: “During a 2013 ‘Weibo storm’ on air pollution, a Greenpeace Weibo post got retweeted so much so that Greenpeace’s top 10 posts received a total 36 million readers, on average 3.6 million per tweet. Greenpeace blogs have much smaller readership but its campaign publications, such as a water and coal publication done together with a China Academy of Sciences research team, are reportedly read regularly by the very highest leadership in China.  They are also read by bank analysts, and companies which the organisation targets in campaigns”.

He adds: “Greenpeace was approached by a top energy company asking for more copies of our water report. Rarely in the West would we see a major energy company approaching an NGO, asking for more copies of  their research report, saying it contains important facts about environmental challenges they will be facing, and asking for cooperation on the issue.  This shows the interest in facts in China”

How Much Do People Link Coal to Air Pollution in China ?

When we conducted survey of 2,000 people in China’s major cities, we found overwhelming belief in climate change and support for a switch towards renewable energy systems. Asked if they agreed with the statement:

“I support China reducing coal burning and increasing clean renewable energy such as wind power or solar power as the main source of electricity”, some 56.8% of the national sample “strongly” agreed and over 30% slightly agreed”.  Harri points out that many Chinese people you meet on the street blame traffic emissions rather than coal from power stations, for air pollution which directly affects them.  However the poll certainly shows support for renewables, and of course the Chinese Government is well aware that huge amounts of particulates in fact come from power stations burning coal.

One reason for the demand for change has undoubtedly been that an enormous number of Chinese middle class people now visit western countries where they experience much cleaner air and bluer skies.  There is a high demand for a similar quality of environment in China, not just comparable goods and esteemed foreign brands.

“Yet”, says Harri “while seeing that westerners are wealthy and live in relatively nice environment, your average Chinese would not recognize a high commitment in the West to solve the fundamental environmental problems of our times. As many of previously western environmental problems are now exported to China, together with the global manufacturing industry, the Chinese are increasingly seeing the downsides our material culture, coming together with the demand for ever more stuff. What they fail to see is readiness to start solving our common problems by those who already got rich in the West”

In China in the internal arguments about how much to spend on reducing air pollution, the ‘China Card’ gets played in reverse: “if they (US, Europeans) are not really serious about climate change – why should we be ?”

So for anyone in the ‘West’ where you can pretty much say what you like (although often with no local effect) , to take the easy option and paint China as ‘the problem’, even if you believe that, is a doubly bad idea.  Not only does it play into the hands of western laggards but it helps those in China, who are tempted to tolerate more pollution because they think it is a cheaper route to more stuff.

In How to Win Campaigns, I promote the idea that every campaign needs the Three Stories.  These don’t usually win the campaign for you but are an explanation of why you are doing it.  Useful in your ‘elevator pitch’ situations.  Each has a test.  (I think I originally got this from Ed Gyde).

The Popular story – understandable (test it out) by your relatives, neighbours etc.. The default story to use if in any doubt, and the only one to use with ‘the public’.  No jargon.

The Professional story – the way the policy community see it.  Jargon usually required here.  This is the default internal campaign language but must not be allowed into the general public or media domain except maybe with trade/ professional press or policy community blogs etc.

The Political story – what’s in it for me as a politician (or CEO etc).  This is not to be confused with the Professional story.  Top decision makers are not interested in your campaign goals (that only annoys them), they are interested in the benefits to them and their organisation in terms of profits, career prospects, gaining advantage, being popular, not losing their job, and so on.  These are your ‘benefit’ selling points.  See also Bryceson’s Political Checklist.

Below is a case study in this, contributed by Nikki Williams at the UK charity The Woodland Trust, which combines practical conservation with campaigning.   Thanks Nikki.

Dear Danny – a case study from the Woodland Trust

Early in 2013 the Woodland Trust decided to break out of its mould. Instead of the usual ancient woodland threat or woodland policy campaigning, we decided to hit the big guys at the Treasury. We knew that with a Spending Review looming and all the noise that would build up around it, we needed to remind the Treasury of the huge value for money, trees and woods provide.

Having been able to share the idea with Chris at the E Campaigning Forum, he had given me a top tip that we had never really put in place before – write 3 stories for the campaign: a public, a political and a professional one.

Now, the Woodland Trust places itself as a conservation charity first, with a campaigning ‘arm’ rather than calling itself a campaigning organisation. As a result we usually have a bit of a bun fight when everyone tries to get their audience’s point into the single narrative, each trying not to undercut the other. This, quite frankly just forced compromise that often reduced the strength of our message.

Using the 3 stories approach created a much more productive way of working across the teams. People felt they could place their key issues for their audience better, rather than trying to make a ‘one size delivers for all’ narrative. The 3 narratives positively influenced across each final draft and tweak, keeping them relevant to their audience starting point but clearly showing the golden thread of our issue running through all three. I don’t think we have achieved quite such clarity before.

As a result, our energy was able to be put into the creative interpretation of the campaign which resulted in us producing a play on our iconic banknote for supporters to send to the Treasury.

On the side of the note designed to engage the public was their narrative, aimed to inspire them to be the voice for woods and trees during the spending review. It worked a treat! The public responded fantastically by posting over 5,500 Bank of Woodland notes with Danny Alexander’s face on, to the Treasury in 2 weeks.

The message they sent reminded Government that woods contribute £4.7 billion to the English economy every year and that if every household in Britain had access to quality green space it could save £2.1 billion in health care costs – or in other words, the political narrative!

And on the back of the campaign we got a thirty minute meeting with George Osborne’s Special Adviser at the Treasury and Danny Alexander recorded a message to Woodland Trust supporters from one of our woods in Scotland.

But our favorite anecdote was the Treasury advisor who told us he loved the campaign so much, he’d taken hard copies home for his mother in law to send back in to the Treasury!

Links – http://wtcampaigns.wordpress.com/2013/08/02/dear-danny-chief-secretary-responds-to-your-note/

Original call to action with full messaging http://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/en/campaigning/our-campaigns/Documents/sr-download-full.pdf

Here’s an uber-simple campaign planner that might be of use.  I made it for working with  a client who was trying to compare proposals for a ‘major campaign’ but it seems to work in a lot of situations. For example when you want to:

• convert an issue statement or campaign proposal into something that can yield a brief for audience research, or for communication creatives
• quickly communicate a campaign idea to colleagues or funders
• take a very Pioneer idea and make it real and actionable for Settlers or Prospectors (or indeed, Pioneers)
• interrogate a very Pioneer campaign idea (all big picture) to see if there’s actually anything actionable (little picture)  in there at all
• not get stuck in a conversation about “theories of change”

The inside box is what you’d see in the campaign. What you’d see happening.  Real stuff – apply the photo test.  Can you take a picture.  If not, it’s not real.  Real things which can involve real people can be put into testing, eg focus groups, or presented to potential “engagement” or “mobilisation” targets.  By and large Settlers and Prospectors mainly focus on the real things – the “little picture”.  Start here with them (and probably stay here, or at least return here).  These are the activities.

The next box, the ‘connector’ is the effect of the activities.  Why we do them.  This is where your critical path comes in (if you are good), or your theory of change (if you are theoretical …).  At any event it’s why you’re asking people to do the activities.  Or asking them to get others to do so.  But only rarely is it a good idea to make this your selling point for the activities, on its own.  Eg as John Scott put it to me “confectioners don’t say ‘buy this chocolate bar because we’ve had a worrying dip in sales of chocolate recently …'”.

Finally on the outside are all those reasons why we need to get that change.  Aims, “goals”, missions etc.   Save the planet, make the world a better place, and so forth.  Pioneers love this big picture stuff.  But most other people don’t.  And on its own, it’s not a campaign.

Tip: draw stick man or cartoony pictures in, starting in the middle. It’s quicker and better than words.  Use bubbles and ” ” marks where you need to add words.  Go on until the paper is full, then stop.

I am often asked for ‘case studies’ of campaigns and they are hard to find.  Not so much because campaigns don’t work but because campaign groups tend to be terrible at keeping a record of what they’ve done, or spending any time documenting and sharing it.  All history is decided by whoever writes it down but all too often the only record of campaigns is in the fragmentary echoes of media coverage or the retrospective self-justifications of the campaign targets once a campaign succeeds.

Here’s one you can download – the ‘Down to Zero’ story of the 2001 – 2013 campaign by Greenpeace in Indonesia and in distant markets to stop deforestation for pulp & paper and palm oil products. The Greenpeace campaign was to make governments enforce their own policies and to change the supply chain of major multi-national corporations.

At 110 pages it’s pretty comprehensive and campaigners (and corporate PRs and Public Affairs advisers) can see the range of tactics that Greenpeace employed along the way, not just to leverage the brand sensitivity of household names like Unilever, KFC and Nestle but to make little known paper and forest giants like the Sinar Mas group and Asia Pulp and Paper (APP) into household names.

It’s the story of what became visible, ‘above the campaign line’, not the research and strategy that went on behind the scenes but you can imagine some of that.   So it’s not a how-to manual and looks more like a coffee table book of destruction, beauty and activism. But it has some happy endings and should give a lot of campaigners a lot of ideas.  The principles behind the kit-kat video, targeting Barbie and the simple but effective creation of turning campaigners into ‘tigers’ – make some tiger-striped ‘Onesies’ (like jump suits) – are tactics that could be used on almost any scale.

So well done to John Sauven, Executive Director of Greenpeace UK and the Greenpeace global forest team who brought it about.   Sauven says:

“If there’s one lesson I’d draw from what we did it is to be creative and fun. All campaigns need humour. To get Mattel to stop buying their packaging from companies destroying the rainforests we produced a short film of a camp Ken splitting up from Barbie. It went viral very quickly with 1.75 million views.  But the moment that will forever stick in my mind was when Nestle decided to ban our campaign on the fan site of their facebook page. Fans of Nestle products are only allowed to say nice things about chocolate bars. It backfired on them and helped us win our campaign”.

(See  http://www.guardian.co.uk/sustainable-business/nestle-facebook  Nestlé hit by Facebook “anti-social” media surge. Angry fans swarm Nestle’s Facebook page in response to Greenpeace palm oil campaign).

* * *

If you’ve got a similarly accessible campaign case study you’d like me to mention, please let me know.  chris@campaignstrategy.co.uk

or … A Simple Unifying Tax Demand to End Fossil Fuels

Today the UK Government has set out (see BBC) to incentivise fracking through massive tax breaks, just as the Arctic plunges further into meltdown, the ‘globe bakes’ (see Washington Post) and the UK is wrapped in extreme heat.  How should environmentalists, indeed any sane member of the public, respond when we should be in an end game for fossil fuels but our politicians are digging us deeper into the hole  ?

As UK Chancellor George Osborne’s mad policy makes plain, the key is tax.  Last week the London Evening Standard invited me to write a letter commenting on Greenpeace’s epic climb of The Shard, Western Europe’s tallest building, which they did to protest against Arctic oil exploration by Shell and others.  Here’s the piece they published.

Here’s what I originally wrote (similar)

So there’s a simple demand that we could all make of politicians: that they should use tax policies to make it more profitable to invest in renewables than in fossil fuels.  That would make investors move the money.  In the UK the LibDem-Tory coalition is doing the exact opposite.  The natural target with a General election coming up, is therefore the Labour Party, the main Opposition.

I’ve just spent a week or so analysing another three values segmented national surveys for Greenpeace – this time in SE Asia: Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines.  We see the same picture that we have before in the US, India, Brazil, China and Argentina.  Most people ‘believe in climate change’.  Even more say ‘it’s happening’.  And most want less investment in fossil fuels and more in renewables.  So it should be natural to demand that tax policies should be used to make it more profitable to invest in renewables rather than oil, coal or gas.  It’s a straightforward, universally applicable demand.

Why would it work ?  Because energy companies,  invest in the highest return, lowest risk projects.  There is project competition for finance inside energy companies, including renewables v oil, coal, gas etc.  Their share price depends upon the future value of those projects, and CEOs are held to account by the markets on the quarterly results.  If oil and gas look more profitable  in the portfolio then that’s where CEOs will want the investment to go.  Much more of this regime of risk and profitability is in the hands of government politicians than they may like to admit, which means it is potentially in the hands of their voters.

PS – the World Bank seems to have finally got the point (after years of work by  handful of campaigners).

Update 24 July 13:  The woman has done as much or probably more than anyone to bring the World Bank to this point is Daphne Wysham.  Read her remarkable story of persistence and 16 years of campaigning here –  http://www.ips-dc.org/blog/shift_from_coal_financing

Obama’s recent climate speech is important.  Not just because the juggernaut of US Government may at last be seriously rolling forward on climate but because he has a new ‘narrative’,  to use a much over-worked term.

When he was a Presidential Candidate, G W Bush pledged to cut carbon dioxide pollution.  Numerous qualitative research studies have shown that Americans (especially Republicans) are more likely to support ‘cutting pollution’ than ‘action on climate change’ .  It’s because of framing, past polarisation,  identity, beliefs and the consistency effect.

Some good analyses have been written of Obama’s speech (for example Gareth Kane) and Americans have naturally tended to focus on what happens to the Keystone Pipeline but for me what is more important is that Obama has (or his team have) framed the problem as about ‘Carbon Pollution’.    It’s no accident: he used the term 30 times in that speech.  And the more anyone denounces it, the more they use a framing that once hooked G W Bush into pledging climate action, before someone, or something, got to him and  as President, he reneged.

If Obama’s speech works and he gets some practical measures through the US political system, expect to hear a lot more people, especially politicians, following his lead.  He stands a reasonable chance because he put forward a set of measures which are largely inside the envelope of his powers, rather than requiring a major change of heart in Congress.

And taking off that jacket – no accident surely.  When Jim Hansen’s testified to Congress on 23 June 1988 and announced human made climate change had pretty much arrived, the temperature outside hit 37.C.  His message literally felt credible.  In 2013 Obama gave his speech, again in Washington DC, on a day the temperature hit an almost-as-sweltering 34.C.    The pictures tell the story.  The jacket comes off, the President mops his brow.  Time to cool it.

There are plenty of petitions against dredging as it can be environmentally damaging but this one is for it – for pretty much the opposite reason – and it comes from from Wells Next The Sea in North Norfolk (UK) where I live.

Here’s the issue:  offshore there is a large, new windfarm, Sheringham Shoal which has brought great community benefits and prospects, that are now at risk, mainly because of objections from a small number of local recreational sailors.

To allow boats servicing the wind farm to operate in and out of Wells, dredging is needed because access to the Harbour depends on a shallow sandy channel.  Dredging is currently on hold as the Marine Management Organisation, a government licensing agency, considers objections to a dredging licence application [see MLA/2012/00257 here] by Wells Harbour Commissioners.    So members of the community (led by a postman who is also a Town Councillor) have started a petition to the MMO to support the dredging.

Dull Stuff ?

Well it’s hyper-local but it is a microcosm of the issues faced to be thousands of times over if societies are to embrace sustainable forms of energy.  It’s a case where ‘causes’ long associated with campaigns, for example for renewable energy, are now being implemented in the mainstream from the EU to Australia, and running up against anti-change protests.   If you’re interested, here’s a bit of background.

Scira (partly Norwegian oil and gas giant Statoil) got the licence to develop the 88 turbine 317MW Sheringham Shoal in the mid 2000s and quickly worked out that if there was better access (more time across more states of tide) at Wells, this was the most economic (closest – 20 nm) location for its Operation and Maintenance Base.  This meant dredging.

But Wells, an ancient Port which has seen many twists and turns of fortune in its history of over 1000 years, is set in an environmentally sensitive coastline, (rightly) festooned with conservation designations.  Our Harbour Master Robert Smith had seen the community benefits which flowed from a similar project at Brightingsea Port in Essex and we decided to try and build an Outer Harbour to accommodate the wind farm development.  In 2009 we signed a long term agreement with Scira to finance the project but this meant finding the most environmentally benign way possible of dredging to give a minimum metre depth of water.  After a lot of studies, and emulating Dutch systems, we adopted a way of dredging which primarily uses natural channel water flows and minimal, GPS-controlled digging at low water.  We were granted a licence to do this in 2009 and the Outer Harbour began operating in 2010 – some details are here.

The Benefits

Back in 2008-9 there were plenty in the small Wells community (permanent population 2000, with summer visitors 10,000+) who felt disquiet at the thought of ‘industrial development’.  But not only has there been no evidence of environmental damage, for example to sensitive eel grass beds or mussel lays, the globally-rare Little Terns have started using the new Outer harbour shingle bank to nest on, and  in the three years it took to build the windfarm, huge economic benefits flowed to Wells.  A dozen or more ships worked daily from the Port and 650 workers accommodated offshore were fed and supplied with goods sourced locally.  It created jobs from engineering to ship crewing to taxi driving, and boosted business for butchers, greengrocers, hotels and B + Bs and many more.

The Norwegian windfarm developers Scira, have  a deliberate policy of investing in local training, education and recruitment and have built an Operations and Maintenance base creating 60 jobs which may be needed for more than  40 years.  Young people have prospects of training and careers in a green and high-tech industry, rather than just the mostly low-paid and seasonal work offered by a tourism-dominated economy.

The RNLI (lifeboats) and fishermen have found the new outer Harbour offers them operational benefits too, with the result that fishermen have been writing to the MMO to demand return of the dredging.  Scira supplies bursaries to local High School students going on the study engineering at colleges in the region, trains its own locally recruited staff, and gives £100,000 a year in support to community projects.   These numbers may not sound much but in a small community the effect is significant.

Benefits That Count

By my calculation Sheringham Shoal supplies as much electricity as is used by all the homes in Norfolk – it’s a lot anyway.  It’s part of decarbonizing Britain’s energy system and as an environmentalist, that matters to me, and some others.

But as a lady said in a focus group we ran in Cambridge a few years ago “I know we’ve got to save the planet, but there’s more important things as well”, and not everyone has the global environment as a high personal priority (see What Makes People Tick).

What’s swung the community behind the wind-farm, and left people hoping that another wind project will soon make its home in Wells, is that until very recently, there were few job opportunities for young people.   More than £7m has flowed into the community over the past few years as a result not just of the windfarm’s existence but because of Scira’s policy, encouraged by the Harbour Commissioners, of investing locally.  We’ve been able to expand the Harbour staff from four jobs to fourteen, and in a community naturally wary of change, seeing people you know get a job, makes benefits feel real.

Once 6,000 people lived in Wells and it had a thriving shipbuilding industry but the railways changed that, then came and went, and coasters grew too large to visit, leaving Wells in the early 21^st Century with a small but much valued fishing fleet, lots of yachts, a lot of second homes and retirees whose influence has pushed house prices to three times what the average working family can afford, and an economy based on seasonal, mainly very low paid related jobs related to tourism, and care work.

Now that has changed, and the underlying reason Is renewable energy. Wells is enjoying something of an economic boom, and just as important, a boom in optimism and prospects for younger people and their families, the sort of young people who until recently, would have had often to move away if they wanted to ‘better themselves’.   It’s a success story built on harnessing wind energy.

The lesson for advocates of renewable energy is that it’s not what global or national benefits flow from green energy schemes that count – it’s where they fall, and who gets to benefit.

So Why Oppose It ?

If you read through the documentation about the dredging issue you’ll find that the Royal Yachting Association and a few recreational boat users are the principal source of objections to the dredging application, on grounds that it may restrict where they can sail.  (Wells Sailing Club, which represents far more sailors, does not agree).    While this is the sand in the works of the licence granting machinery, it’s probably not the only reason, or the real reason.

I read once, or someone told me (I wish I knew where), that when in the Eighteenth Century, Dutch-style windmills started to be built in Norfolk for grinding corn, there were riots of opposition, encouraged by local water-mill owners, and incited with the thought that these were an alien technology, a foreign threat.  Much the same Settler-pivoted dynamic applies in England today, with opposition to onshore windfarms whipped up on grounds of alien intrusion, and leading the governing right-wing Conservatives to try and outflank the even more right-wing UKIP by ‘getting tough’ on wind power.

After a while the water-mill owners realised they too could build the more powerful windmills, resistance disappeared and they are now largely used as homes, and conserved as a ‘treasured piece of England’s heritage’.  Even offshore, for some (including some Pioneers), modern wind turbines offend the eye.  As one person put it locally, looking out to sea he can now see the twinkling safety lights of Sheringham Shoal at night and “I miss the sense of infinity”.

I can understand that but it comes down to a trade-off.  Do you want to sustain what is in essence an illusion of unspoilt infinite natural landscape, or help conversion to a sustainable economy and a sfer climate for us and our children ?  More locally yet, in Wells it comes down to competing visions: a working port with jobs, or one which becomes ever more just a playground for those with the time and money to go sailing.

That’s something which people with a range of world views can unite around, although some, once they are committed to opposition, some may never change.

* * *

Sample of comments by those signing online:

“Because Wells is a community, not a museum, and communities only work if there is work”

“Because its good for Wells and good for the environment”

“I work in the windfarm industry and am a local to Wells and realise how vital the dredging of the channel is to the commercial viability of Wells”

“I was raised in Wells and know that the port is the heart of the town” (from Hong Kong)

“We need to keep the fishing going, Wells without fisherman would never be the same, providing employment and interest for both holidaymakers and local people”

“It gives the town / region another means of income, not just tourism”

Note:  I’m a Harbour Commissioner for Wells Harbour (a voluntary role, although recently I have done some paid work for the Harbour), a ‘Trust Port’ operating a bit like a social enterprise but under ancient rules that go back 350 years.

You can join the petition here (many more have also signed in hard copy offline)

A new paper posted here – Beware The Siren Songs Of Opinion Polling  – argues that campaigns drawn into trying to navigate by what the polls say, or seduced into trying to win by changing ‘public opinion’, risk running aground and becoming stuck fast, just as ancient sailors were lured onto rocks by the songs of Sirens.

Winston Churchill said:  “There is no such thing as public opinion. There is only published opinion”.   Any opinion poll, or a report of a poll, is not a reality of raw public opinion but a processed, manufactured product.  The polling process, the publication process, the reporting process and even the process of subsequent debate and word of mouth, all manufacture the meaning that we think an opinion poll shows us.

The report notes how back in 2002 Pollster Frank Luntz successfully lured climate campaigners into trying to win the argument over climate change – in which ‘climate polls’ play a pivotal role – and even today, more than a decade later, many fall for his ploy, when all the fossil fuel lobby needed to succeed, was to keep the debate going.

It gives examples of how many poll results are driven by Daniel Kahnemans’ “System 1” intuitive decision making process, loaded with cognitive biases such as consistency, social proof and anchoring, whereas the authority of polling depends on us accepting that they depict an objective reality arrived at by analytical thinking and rationality. It shows how the results of polling are often more to do with the effects of heuristics and substitution, WYSIATI, values and framing, than knowledge or understanding.  For instance salience effects mean that ‘concern’ is driven upwards by media coverage, and downwards by the lack of it, while consistency effects mean that behaviour, not analysis or logic, drive answers.

Meanwhile selective reporting, choice-architecture, confirmation bias, group-think and herd-behaviour in the media, political gaming and commercial self-interest in attention to conventional wisdoms, add to the mix and make polling a dangerous, unreliable and trixy guide to what you should do in campaigns.

It argues that, while not completely ignoring polls, campaigners should focus on outcomes, not changing opinion,  and it offers ‘ten rules’ for campaigners needing to interpret opinion polling.

It concludes: “To chase the chimera of changing opinion rather than changing outcomes, risks leading you round in circles, like A A Milne’s Pooh Bear who ends up walking round and round a tree in pursuit of a Woozle, before he realises he is following his own foot-steps.

“Tracks,” said Piglet. “Paw-marks.” He gave a little squeak of excitement. “Oh, Pooh! Do you think it’s a — a — a Woozle?”

“It may be,” said Pooh. “Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t. You never can tell with paw-marks.”

‘I see now,’ said Winnie-the-Pooh ..’I have been Foolish and Deluded, and I am a Bear of no Brain at All.”

So if you are going to follow opinion polls, be sure to engage the brain first.”

What could seriously help deal with climate changing emissions but only moves at 89 metres a day ? One answer is Negawatts.  Instead of paying utilities to build more power stations to meet rising demand, or exhorting consumers to use less, we pay them for saving energy. The idea was first proven http://tinyurl.com/pj3x9qe at least as long ago as 1990, in Kiel, Germany.  Today (22 May 2013) it was announced that the UK Government has finally accepted it as policy.http://tinyurl.com/p2x3u8s  Partly at least.  By my reckoning that’s 23 years for a good idea to travel 755 km, or about 33 km a year, or 89 metres a day … a speed of 0.004km/hr.