Comment & Analysis
I tend not to watch much television, preferring leisure pursuits such as drinking and table tennis. Occasionally something quality slips on to the radar such as The Thick of It or The Apprentice and inspires me to fire up the box, but in the main I find television disturbing and offensive.
This proved to be the case one day last week. Things started innocently enough. My workmate Ben Sampson and I were pootling away on treadmill and exercise bike in the gym the IMechE kindly provides its staff in the bowels of Birdcage Walk. We had Channel 5 on in the background, when, in a break in the news, a government “infomercial” sponsored by DECC on climate change as part of an “Act on CO2” campaign slinked across the airwaves.
Bear in mind the context: last week was also the week when Ed Miliband, the recently appointed minister of state of the fledgling department, announced in Parliament plans to build four new coal-fired power stations in the UK. Not, then, perhaps, an opportune time for DECC to be rapping the knuckles of consumers and telling them to remember to switch off the telly, take the iPod off charge and stop the hot tap dripping.
The end of the ad, which had the good grace to mournfully inform us that – and I quote – “energy dependent appliances are part of modern life but much of the energy they use depends on burning oil, gas and coal” (coal, eh?) even had an image of a red-hot Earth segueing, with what the producers probably thought was an apocalyptic gravitas, into a red standby LED.
Does anyone really believe, at this point in the game, that citizens dutifully playing less Playstation and turning their taps off is going to avert catastrophic climate change? And does it not show an all-too-familiar lack of “joined-up thinking” (in this case, within one department) that ordinary people are being told to mend their ways while the government cheerfully announces plans for more coal-fired power stations? Further, consumers not consuming is hardly going to get us out of this economic mess.
As with the details of the bodged plans to incentivise us to buy green cars, there is a real sense that some of the government’s recent schemes – CCS is unproven technology in the case of the new coal-fired plants – have not been thought through. The ad certainly hasn’t been. Ben and I turned the air blue in astonishment. Then we turned the telly off.