What do people think are the reasons why no effective action has been taken to restrain climate change? We are certainly monitoring and calibrating our species extinction with respectable thoroughness. But we are less dedicated in our solutions. Neither the option of keeping fossil fuels in the ground nor the very concept social change are mentioned in polite society, for example.

Here’s my three suggestions why we are not doing enough quick enough to reverse the ecological meltdown. (I’ve actually only got two but ‘three’ sounded better and I’m hoping the third will come to me while I’m writing the first two. If it doesn’t I’ll just quote some poetry.) .

1. Being prescriptive makes you look silly.

When I pull up the steel pole containing the core ice sample of what I did in 2006, the unifying element to the work is the idea that only social change halts climate change.

In the summer I did a couple of benefit gigs for this week-long Camp for Climate Action. In September the Camp for Climate Action tried to shut down Drax power station, Britain’s single largest carbon spewer. The benefit gigs were performed in autonomous social centres in the north of England.

I spoke in London’s Trafalgar Square at a Stop Climate Chaos rally ( I’ll post the text soon). There were a lot of young kids there come to see the pop bands that were on, and I’m sure most of ‘em were just thinking: ‘Why is that nasty, unshaven man so angry? Shouldn’t he be happy that we’ve saved the planet already by our judicious consumer choices? In the same way that we ended corporate rule of the Global South with Live 8?’