Obviously, lots of publicity. But has all the public hype around climate change really made a great difference? Is it a case of any publicity being good publicity?

The idea of fighting climate change has been embraced thoroughly – this year green is everyone’s favourite colour. And I like to think I’m as green as the next person. When I buy my plane ticket to South America next year, I will probably get one of the STA flights with carbon offsets. I turned my lights out with Sydney during Earth Hour and I take my Coles shopping bags to the supermarket instead of using plastic bags. Before Earth Hour, I had an argument with a friend who likes to think of himself as a bit of a hippie. I mean the traditional type of hippie. Not the urban-dwelling, organic-banana-bread-eating, “I drive my dad’s hybrid car to uni” kind. My friend was not participating in Earth Hour because he saw it as nothing more than a product of “mainstream media”. Part of the problem with any sort of issue like this is that once it becomes popular, a certain percentage of die-hard supporters disassociate themselves from the cause. He jumped off the bandwagon the moment it turned down Mainstream Boulevard.

There are a lot of things that you can criticise about the popularised version of the green movement. One is that it reduces stopping climate change to a series of choices about what you spend your money on; saving the environment is a new industry in itself. Consuming more, even if the products are ‘green’, is not helping anything except making smart business men richer. But returning to a time when green was a dirty word and hippies even dirtier, is not practical either. Part of the reason that the eco-friendly buzz has come so far is that consuming green products is something easy and fun for Western society that doesn’t involve too much sacrifice from the cushy comforts we all love.

Another part of the problem is that some people believe individuals cannot solve the problem alone. Most of the key causes of climate change derive from lax government policies and big business. This is where the bandwagon has its uses. By participating in environmentalism at a local level, we can make an impact on influencing the so-called big people to do something. With a brand new government and the KYOTO protocol finally ratified by Australia, the people we vote for are compelled to listen to us right now more than any other time. Maybe the urban hippie doesn’t need to be an oxymoron.

What this calls for is a healthy amount of cynicism. Saying that there is no such thing as global warming is plain stupidity, but taking a shorter shower full-stop is probably more useful than buying that organically-grown-strawberry-flavoured body wash in a bio-degradable bottle in the first place.

Whether we like it or not, addressing the issue of climate change will result in sacrifices. But surely the more people we can get on the bandwagon, the sooner we will see that some sacrifices can go a long way.

Image by Woodleywonderworks licensed by Creative Commons