Boring Boring Climate

Photo by Ben Garney

I've been pondering something over the last couple of days, and I'm not quite sure how to put it into coherent words but I'm going to try.

There seems to my mind to be a disconnect between what people currently think on the environment, what the media think that people think, and how they vote.

Let me give you an example - this story in The Independent this week claims that Britons are less environmentally conscious than they were five years ago, that they're "bored" of climate change. They reckon that four out of ten people don't do anything to reduce their carbon footprint.

You could put it another way, of course - six out of ten people now actively try to reduce their carbon footprint. I would imagine that's an astonishing leap over ten and even five years ago.

Could it be that "green" has become commonplace? Could it be that people say they're bored talking about climate change because they get it, they know it, they're willing to do a bit?

Politically, green is on the rise. Caroline Lucas being elected to the UK parliament was no mean feat in a first-past-the-post electoral system. If the polling for Holyrood next year is to be believed then the Scottish Greens are on course to whip some LibDem butt.

Does that mean voters now see Green politicians as the mainstream, rather than some weird hippy types with wild ideas that you should pat on the head every now and then to keep them happy?

I don't like these opinion polls where you're asked to rank issues in order of how worried you are by them, or what motivates you to vote. The environment always does badly out of them, but it's perfectly possible to be concerned about five or six things equally - something that reporters don't like because then there's no focus to the story.

Perhaps this is why the media thinks that there's a "backlash", when in fact the whole issue of climate change has just become mainstream and therefore, well, boring.