Nobel prizes and practical actions

Whatever the praise or criticism for Al Gore and his now famous powerpoint presentation that is the basis of the film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, his award of a Nobel prize has propelled awareness of environmental issues to new heights. As a scientist, this is good news as it has the effect of applying a little warming to the debate: science thrives where debate is encouraged, and results and conclusions questioned. On the other hand, we all have the responsibility to think of practical actions and follow up. The ideal is to think of practical actions that generate positive benefits in other areas, such as providing real incomes for the poor. Such actions would then satisfy Bjorn Lomborg’s criticism that our primary focus should be to tackle pressing problems in society such as disease and malnutrition.

There are many great examples of how local actions can generate environmental benefits and generate wealth that can tackle other problems (I like the charcoal from leaves solution developed by ARTI in India that won an Ashden Award: http://www.ashdenawards.org/winners/arti). It was great to see another great idea come out last month: James Lovelock’s scheme for placing pipes in the ocean to generate more plankton growth and remove some CO2 from the atmosphere (see http://environment.independent.co.uk/climate_change/article3001626.ece ). Whether it works as well as hoped is not the point; the bottom line is to create ideas that may work, test them properly and select and promote those that really do produce win-win benefits. That way society and the environment can both benefit.