Blog Action Day: is climate change the new rock'n'roll?

It’s Blog Action Day*, and thousands of people around the world are blogging about climate change.

Is it being green the new rock’n’roll? I’d like to think so, but I suspect it’s not. Not yet anyway.


It ought to be cool that Caroline Lucas (older than Elvis) is the first female leader of a political party in this country to talk sense. It ought to be cool that Franny Armstrong gave up being a **rock drummer to campaign against climate change. It ought to be cool that these are women and they are daring to disagree and they are ready to make a difference.

But in the real world, outside the Guardian Environment pages, people don’t think like that.

Politics has never been very rock’n’roll. Red Wedge? Live Aid? Definitely not cool. And even Live Earth failed to break that mould.

Like a good punk rocker, I prefer my campaigning with a bit of situationism. Most of what Greenpeace does is pretty cool. As was Christian Aid’s ‘visual trespass’. Not to mention a Twitter storm sending Gordon Brown to Copenhagen.

What worries me is that too many people don’t know or care about these things; or pretend not to know and not to care.

I do care. Even if that makes me a joke. If the alternative is being too cool to care, then I’m too old to care about being cool.

And one day soon, I hope, it’ll turn out that we are not a misguided minority. We are actually the vanguard: in marketing terms, ‘early adopters’. Which definitely makes us cool.

I hope it won’t be too late.


*It’s also Chocolate Week. Who decides these things?
**If you’ve never heard Band of Holy Joy I urge you to do so.