Manar Alsaif

A call to the creative industry

‘More deadly floods and hurricanes expected if we do not change our ways’

Or

‘Millions expected to have better quality of life with the solar energy revolution, here’s how’

Which of these headlines is more likely to grab your attention, inspire you, and maybe even influence you?

It may be that the first headline instills a sense of fear in you, which gets you to feel the urgency of the situation and inspires you to act now. Or it might just put you off because you can’t handle any more doom and gloom, especially after the covid pandemic. Or because you can’t relate to the risk of a flood or hurricane somewhere far far away. Or because negativity simply makes you shut down, and you need something positive to inspire you, particularly if that will lead to action. 

Different people will undoubtedly respond to the different headlines, but I would argue that there are many many more people who would respond to the positively framed message rather than the scary one, otherwise everyone would be an activist and they clearly are not. Despite this, we usually talk about the green transition as a response to the climate emergency and how we are destroying our habitat. While this is true, the green transition could also significantly improve our collective lives, particularly if we do it right. It could alleviate some of the energy injustice imposed on the developing world. For example, such nations could leapfrog straight to using clean solar energy (which is now cheap enough for them to do so) in a just way rather than have to go through the slow and dirty cycle of developing hydrocarbon infrastructure starting with coal. As for the developed world, the green transition would not be a step backwards in terms of our comfort as some fear, but it would launch us forward into the next age of our development. Think beyond an electric car versus a fuel car, and imagine, for example, a future where you could easily get around using a green public network of autonomous vehicles. If done right, the green transition could improve quality of life across the globe, and we desperately need to communicate this vision. At the moment, there are a few visionaries who can see this future and are trying to build it, but the truth is that we need everyone on board for a transformation of this scale, and so we need to communicate the vision more broadly. We need to show both people and governments what a just green future looks like, and we need help from the creative industry to do this.

If you are a writer or film maker or game maker or artist, can you help us? I’m always disappointed that futuristic films and books tend to be dystopian, can we start normalising what a green future would look like? Can we show what energy justice would look like? There are plenty of researchers working on this (get in touch to connect!), but we need the help of the creatives to communicate this vision and tap into people’s positive emotions, those that inspire action. The topic doesn’t even need to be the green transition, can we have more dramas or games set to a backdrop of a world that has gone through a just green transition?  We need people to get used to the idea that the green transition will improve our lives, not just our environment. Maybe then the task will not seem so insurmountable, and people will want to achieve it.