Walls do come down

Celebrations at the Brandenburg gateMost of the Irish papers today carried pictures of the Brandenburg gate in Berlin on their front pages. The photo is of celebrations marking the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, that day that few had dared to imagine and less had believed would happen. These pictures buoyed me as I had been feeling a little pessimistic of late.

The state of the UN climate negotiations is one source of my pessimism. Last week at the negotiating session in Barcelona, things were so bad that a block of African countries walked out. The 50 countries who walked out were angry that Western nations are refusing to agree concrete targets for reducing their emissions. The boycott was led by Algeria, Ethiopia and Gambia. They were eventually coaxed back after emergency talks and an agreement to devote more negotiating time to discussing emissions reductions. I can only really begin to imagine how frustrated the African delegates must feel at this lack of movement from developed countries. It is exactly these kind of deadlocks and breakdowns at international level that can be avoided by strong national climate laws. There would be no need for anyone to walk out over lack of commitments to reduce emissions if developed countries like ours had in place legally binding science based targets. With such high tensions over such a fundamental issue as emissions reductions, my hopes for Copenhagen are low.

In the last few days I did two pieces of national media work that left me feeling constrained. The first was a short piece for RTE about biofuels. It was in response to the announcement from minister Eamon Ryan that he will push for a target that means at least 4% of fuel in Ireland sold must be from biofuels. There have been wide reaching concerns about the environmental integrity of biofuels especially when their production can put pressure on rainforests in places like Brazil. So I was giving a very cautious welcome to this news and outlining how certain we need to be about where these biofuels come from.

The other piece was this morning on Highland radio talking about nuclear energy. The UK government plans to build 10 new nuclear power plants. I was on the radio to say that we must not resort to nuclear energy simply because we now realise that we must move away from fossil fuels. The presenter was very savvy and asked me if we don't have nuclear, how were we to meet our energy needs now that oil is running out. Of course I mentioned that much better value for money would come from investing in renewables rather than in nuclear. I hope I managed as well to get across what I really wanted to say, which was that we need to use less energy.

We seem to keep hitting the wall of unquenchable energy thirst. In our panic at the approaching end of cheap oil energy, we're getting tangled up in false solutions like nuclear and biofuels. Cutting down rainforest to meet a 4% biofuels target is not going to solve the problem of our transport emissions. Getting out of our cars is going to solve it. And we don't need to buy nuclear power from the UK. We need to turn off our lights, and playstations and hair straighteners and waffle makers. Think of people living in countries that took part in the walk out in Barcelona. I wonder how many waffle irons and hair straighteners there are per capita in Ethiopia. Most people in the world don't have access to the amounts of energy that we use.

So I'm sick of being asked how we are going to meet our current and increasing energy demands. You're asking me the wrong question. My answers to it can only be "This isn't the answer" or "We need to be very careful here".

I want to tell how much better our world can be without fossil fuels. We will all be healthier and happier when we walk and cycle to work and school. We will have more friends and better communities when we don't sit in metal boxes for several hours a day. We can have stronger, better relationships with the peopl we live with if we share a cup of tea and discuss the day instead of watching a TV telling us to buy things we don't need. I want to say how much I like playing, playing board games, word games and new games invented on the spot. Lets imagine a world with less pressure and more time and simpler pleasures.

It is cold these mornings as I cycle to work. The crisp fresh air and the cold tingle in my ears makes me feel alive. And I've been buoyed by the stories from twenty years ago in Berlin. I'm struck by reminiscences from journalist who were there of how things changed drastically, very suddenly and yet how at the same time some people had been waiting for that change for a long time. Some of us now are waiting for a drastic change. Some of us have been waiting for a long time. Sometimes it feels easier to imagine a different world than to believe it is possible. But paradigms do shift. Walls do come down.

So lets keep imagining.