Editorial

 LISTENING TO TOMORROW

There’s no direct stock market link to the Oscars, as the Dow Jones MarketWatch service drily noted. But Al Gore’s recent anointment as Hollywood’s hottest media celebrity, and the award of the Best Documentary prize to his climate change wake-up film, sparked a flurry of action among market analysts. Clean technology was flavour of the moment once again.

In two high profile bouts of by-play at the Oscars ceremony, Gore even contrived simultaneously to pooh-pooh and promote the (fanciful?) notion that he might yet mount a late bid for the presidency. All in all, it was quite symbolic. Attention spans may be notoriously short, but here were the worlds of showbiz, the markets and politics all tuning in at once to the implications (for them) of climate change. In the 18 months since Katrina, Americans have come a long way.

Our US guest correspondent Gil Friend takes up that theme in ‘American Eye’. Here in the UK, it’s the retail sector that’s making the early running in the wake of the Stern review, with both Tesco and Marks & Spencer setting themselves challenging programmes for change [‘Checkout revolution’]. Our politicians, on the other hand, do seem to be making a ham fist of the climate change bill, turning what should be an unequivocal statement into a decidedly uninspiring squabble over procedure. Maybe that’s because it’s a road the government never really wanted to go down, until it was pushed down it.

As for e-petitions, on the other hand, you’d have to say they asked for it. How very switched-on to tomorrow this idea must have felt. Encourage dialogue, find innovative solutions, open up Downing Street to public participation via its website. And what happened? Well, 1.8 million people signed up to say they didn’t want road pricing. That does not take us anywhere - rather the opposite. But now it’s a political fact. Even as London’s congestion charge was being extended, the problem was becoming harder to tackle nationwide. It’s reminiscent of the scuppering of the road fuel tax escalator by the hauliers’ protest back in the year 2000. It puts the clock back - some would say by several years.

Meanwhile, the Doomsday Clock, which for 60 years has warned of the imminence of nuclear destruction, has been moved forward by two minutes. It’s now five minutes to midnight, say the Chicago-based atomic scientists who are the custodians of the symbolic clock. They made the change amid worsening fears of nuclear conflict, but also because, for the first time, they now explicitly rank climate change alongside nuclear war as the greatest threats to human civilisation.

But our future leaders aren’t immobilised by fear; they’re getting on with their lives. And, as James Goodman spells out in our cover feature story [‘The future in their eyes’], most of the UK university students embarking on their courses expect human civilisation to last into the next century - they just recognise that some big changes need to be made.

It’s not hectoring from others that brings lasting change, but shifting peer perceptions about hopes, priorities - and what’s possible. This coming generation has something to say on those subjects. So do the Muslim communities of Britain today, as Fareena Alam and Abdul-Rehman Malik explain in ‘Green jihad’.

Talking about tomorrow means listening hard.

ROGER EAST

12 March 2007

Roger East