Are we going horribly rapidly backwards? There’s a terrible feeling of panic and worry out there amongst climate campaigners, who are seeing so much hard work over so many years suddenly, and unexpectedly undone.

For the last decade we’ve moved steadily forwards, raising public awareness, getting corporations to engage, and most importantly pushing the UK government into a position where they really want to be seen as progressive on climate change and the environment (let’s not examine how much reality there is to that position
at the moment, that’s another story). If you had told green campaigners in 1999 that ten years later we’d have a climate change bill, a zero carbon new build policy, and an entire government department devoted to climate change they would probably have laughed. And then cried with joy.

But bang bang bang; at the end of 2009 three thunderbolts fell which have set the movement back on its heels. The hacking of the Climate Research Unit’s emails revealed that climate scientists had wilfully ignored Freedom of Information requests. A closer look at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s work revealed errors for which the IPCC refused to apologise. And most catastrophically of all, the conference at Copenhagen, on which such hopes had been pinned, was a dismal failure, resulting in nothing more than a flimsy ‘accord’.

So now what? While the radical activists who didn’t want an international agreement in the first place are unsurprised and cheerful, most people feel rudderless and uncertain of where the hell to go next. Amongst the general public scepticism is on the rise again, and why not? As one woman told a reporter: “If it’s so serious why don’t the politicians do anything about it?” Gemma Bone, a young campaigner who’d been out in Copenhagen with UK Youth Climate Coalition, told me that the whole thing had “knocked me for six. I feel as if we’re stranded out in the wilderness again now.”

“If it’s so serious why don’t the politicians do anything about it?”

But this is where it helps to be a little bit older. One step backwards is not the end of a campaign, it’s just part of the journey. The countries who made their promises
before Copenhagen are not taking them off the table. The scientists are not changing their minds. The challenge remains one of the most important that we have ever faced as a species. In short, there was never a more important moment to keep moving forwards.

Words: Bibi van der Zee
Photo: Flickr user Stop Climate Chaos Coalition, of the various SCCC members and their flags outside the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) in April 2009. This was shortly before Ed Miliband accepted their 85,000 strong petition to rethink UK energy strategy.