Attention Conservation Notice:  In a hypothetical universe, here is the short speech and format-of-a-genuinely-radical-event that I would have given to the seventy or so well-meaning people who turned out on Friday afternoon for an exhibition launch (see previous post).

Hello everyone. Thank you very much for coming. It’s great that you care about the future of the city, the future of the planet.  Whatever you are doing, I beg you to do it more, to get more people doing it, to learn from your mistakes and your successes, and to press on, no matter what.

I’m not going to tell you about the sponsors of this event. You can read about them in the turgidospheric leaflet we’ve had printed. Instead, I’m going to very briefly give a score card of where we are up to. Then it will be over to you, the participants – not the audience, the participants –  to hold our two guests’ feet to the fire.

In 2009 Manchester City Council, with stakeholders, created a climate change action plan. It is, as they never tire of saying, for the city not the council. There’s a reduction target and a “low carbon culture” target.  So, pop quiz, shout out the answers if you know them.

What was their target for the number of organisations they wanted to endorse it? (That’s right, 1000).

So, how many have endorsed it? (220ish)

And how many have got their own implementation plans? (2)

And what action is the Council taking to increase those numbers? (0)

At the Greater Manchester level, there’s a Climate Strategy that calls for a 48% cut in emissions by 2020. The Implementation plan for the 2012 to 2015 setion of that plan was due to be agreed – any takers? (before April)

Anyone want to hazard a guess on when it might see the light of day?
What does this tell us?  This city has limitless supplies of boosterism. Some of it is even connected to reality. Manchester has indeed pulled in investment from elsewhere. However The city does not have limitless time to sort out its resilience and justice issues. And the city leaders do not, despite what they may think, have an unlimited and unquestioned legitimacy. Just sayin’.

I want to put forward a proposition; So much of what passes for discussion is just the recirculation of bromides. If sustainability is so inherently attractive, how come we’ve been doing it so badly? How come we are in this horrific mess?

As a trouble-making Australian says – “Sustainability is like teenage sex. Everybody says they’re doing it, very few people actually are doing it. Those that are doing it are doing it badly.”

Somebody once said that it’s the job of intellectuals to expose lies and tell the truth. Well, not all academics are intellectuals, and not all intellectual are academics. But here, today, this non-academic is going to try to expose a few lies and tell a few truths.

Here are four lies

1) We can have our cake – as uber-consuming westerners – and eat it. Technology will provide the solutions.

2) You can have infinite growth on a finite planet.

3) People who talk about sustainability and attend events like this are morally superior to those who don’t. I’m not going to ask if there’s anyone here who has given up flying, because even if there is, they are in such a tiny minority as to inspire me to slash my wrists.

4) The response by this species to climate change since that first came onto the political agenda in the late 1980s has been within a gazillion miles of adequate.

Here are some truths

1) Any vaguely intelligent eight year old should be able to see that we are in deeply trouble.

2) A lot of scientists, at least the ones who can read graphs, are terrified. Most are too scared to speak out (Link to The Onion.) Some are not. Some are telling the truth. We are lucky that some of that rare breed work right here in Manchester. Their absence at this event is noteworthy. Maybe they weren’t invited?

3) The word “sustainability” is a lullaby to soothe us while the fricking planet burns –

4) This event, where we all sit around and sing Kumbayah and witter about “sustainability”could have been held any time in the last twenty years. And there’s probably another three or four years to go until the impinging reality of the ecological debacle makes this sort of event impossible. So I suppose enjoy it while you can, eh?

5) We are radically unprepared for the unexpected. If there were seven consecutive days of heavy snow this winter, we’d be stuffed. The emergency plans are simply not in place. A decent heatwave next year, lots of people would die. We are pretending that the road ahead is a smooth ride to a slightly warmer world. It’s not. It’s full of potholes and missing bridges, and we are driving blindfold with no brakes.

So, that’s the end of my rant. Now we do the participation (airquotes with fingers and grimace.)

First the bad news. If you came here to sit and nod and be seen and then air kiss afterwards and blow smoke up each other’s asses, then well, you’re shit outa luck. If you came here to ask a sycophantic or absurdly technical question in the Q and A, it ain’t gonna happen. This is going to be genuinely participatory. If that’s outside your comfort zone, well, cry me a river. I think people in Bangladesh, and Mali and most other places in what we conveniently call the “developing world” have been outside of their comfort zones for quite some time now, thanks to our emissions. So suck it up. We’ve locked the doors, by the way.

You’re going to get into pairs, or threes, or at most fours. Please try to have at least one person in your group you don’t know. You are then going to introduce yourselves to each other, very briefly. Swap emails and business cards if that’s your thing. And then the two or three or four of you are going to come up with awkward questions. The awkwarder the better. They can be to either one of the speakers here. What hasn’t the University of Salford done that it really has no excuse not to have done, around sustainability? Why is there so little work by academia on the alternatives to growth? How can the general citizenry force Manchester City Council take faster and broader action on climate change, given that we are in a one-party state?   What sorts of pressure does Richard Leese least enjoy?  How can civil society amplify that? What about the Airport? Stuff like that. The world’s your oyster, and your responsibility.

You’ve got five minutes. And if you come up with questions so awkward you’re afraid to be seen asking them, then write them down on a bit of paper, put them in the box that will be circulated by my glamorous assistant in a few minutes, and I will ask them, without even knowing which group they come from.

During

Right, sounds like we have got ourselves some questions. Keep them short. And I won’t let the speakers “talk out the clock” by giving unnecessarily long answers as a tactic to minimise the numbers of questions they face.

By the way, we are going to video and audio record this, and put it on the web, for all the people whose “participation” in this event is limited by lousy publicity, them having jobs, or having to care for family members, or not having cash to be here.

After

Right. Thank you everyone for coming. A favour and a few final questions.

The favour is to help us out because we’ve kind of screwed up. We have what we think is a worthwhile exhibit next door. And it’s not cheap. But we have simply not publicised it adequately. Our bad, we will learn. However, if all of you went through and saw it now, and took photos and posted them to twitter and facebook, and to your blogs. And if you encouraged your friends and family and work colleagues to come, that would surely boost numbers. The alternative is periods when the staff will outnumber the punters by a factor of six. That would be a pity…

Now, the questions. Although they may seem rhetorical, I mean them sincerely.

Who here thinks that we – as a species – as a city, are responding with sufficient speed to this crisis?
Who here thinks that we can sit back and trust governments and businesses to fix it?
Who here thinks that the way we have been holding events and meetings is adequate?
Who here thinks that event organisers have the skills and the motivations to change the format from sage on the stage/ego-fodder to something that is genuinely transruptive?
Who here thinks that their children will forgive them, in twenty years time, for not getting out of their comfort zones, for colluding in ego-fodder, for not monkey-wrenching dire meetings like this one could have been, into something that at least has a snowball’s chance in hell of building the civil society we need?