ClimateKeys — Moving Climate Conversations Centre Stage

“The audience members really wanted to talk and learn, and the discussion lasted longer than I thought it would … for me personally, this was incredibly rewarding.” (Political Science Professor Matt Hoffmann, who collaborated with pianist Erika Crino in Toronto.)

“Helping spark discussion and lay the foundation for civic engagement among my peers tonight made me feel like I was making a tangible difference in the world.” (Caroline, performer and audience member at a Syracuse University London ClimateKeys concert.)

“It’s important to think, talk and do something for future generations. The unusual blend of music and ecology is a good environment to make the audience think about climate change, everyday local problems (plastic bags, biodiesel, heating …). Thanks to ClimateKeys we have this wonderful collaboration of our Music and Technical Schools.” (Speaker Jovanka Vicentic, Ecology teacher, who collaborated with young pianists in Serbia.)

“One audience question was on how prepared we should be to compromise. If we choose to be vegan, does that mean we can continue to fly around the world?” (Extract from description of the conversation at Cynefin’s concert in London with guest speaker Julia Marques, climate change dramatist.)

“The general manager from the venue was very happy too and was also interested in more projects with us.” (Pianist Neslihan Schmidt, who performed with Dr Andrzej Ancygier in Berlin.)

Excitingly, musicians responded in ways I hadn’t anticipated; creating inspired programmes around what climate change means to them and choosing works reflecting nature, the chaos of climate change and the constancy of the Holocene. Composer Alexander Schwarzkopf was inspired to complete and perform his work Liquid Piano, which “investigates evaporation, drought, flood, frost, birdsong and imaginary radio waves from outer space. Repetition is an important element of these compositions as it is integral to the processes of the natural and manmade world.”  Liquid Piano caught the imagination of local news media and triggered further climate change discussions.

New work is also emerging from the concerts. Florida ClimateKeys speaker, physician Dr John Strasswimmer, who collaborated with Duo Gastesi-Bezerra and artist Justin Guariglia, produced an imaginative video in response to both ClimateKeys and his research using spectroscopy.

Opportunities to imagine, to begin talking

The ClimateKeys concept grew out of my ninth suite, Significantus, for piano, a guest speaker (who gives a talk on positive response to climate change) and a conversation with the audience. Climate Outreach founder George Marshall kindly brainstormed with me and told me that “two thirds of people who are asked when they last had a conversation about climate change say they’ve never had a conversation about climate change.” This made me think that moving the conversation into the centre of whatever we do in life is vital, so I moved it into the centre of my concerts. I’ve been performing Significantus since September 2016 and have collaborated so far with nearly twenty speakers, reached around 600 audience members and possibly created over 1,500 conversations due to the ripple effect. Now that other musicians are using that same concert formula in ClimateKeys, many hundreds more climate conversations are taking place than I alone can achieve. 

ClimateKeys talks are given without projections or PowerPoint presentations, leaving the imagination free to roam. The audience may get a surge of images running through their minds, perhaps the lobster with a Pepsi logo tattoo, or the plastic islands in the seas, or the recent fire in California that burned an area larger than the size of New York City, or the millions of homeless Bangladeshis wading through floodwaters, or shrinking, low lying coastlines in the global South, or oil spills in Dakota, or Black Friday over-consumption, or Chinese smog, or children in the Democratic Republic of Congo mining minerals for our smartphones … the list goes on. Such overwhelm can create a catatonia, but the job of the guest speaker is to negotiate around our potential stupor and suggest positive directions in which to engage; for example, revising our rate of meat consumption, or re-designing our economy so that we live within nature and not at its expense, or putting renewable energy into place in developing nations to fight poverty without increasing warming emissions, or the role of digital innovation in environmental justice, or lobbying politicians around carbon pricing … The speaker synopses on the ClimateKeys website give an overview of the talks.    

In every corner of the global effort is a myriad of features, responses, ideas, solutions, proposals, foundations, experts, schemes, charities, activist groups. Each day, if we choose to seek it out, and especially by searching on social media, we see more analysis, more reports, more research papers, more conferences, more expertise, more comment. Navigating around increasing flows of information on climate change, choosing what to focus on, trying not to miss the glaringly important, attempting to marry big solutions with individual choices: it is complicated.  

ClimateKeys concerts are opportunities to practise talking — or in some cases, to begin talking — about climate change. The first wave of concerts was timed to take place during COP23, to raise public engagement with Bonn. To some extent this was successful as several concerts got local newspaper, TV and radio features, including front page coverage in Trump’s local paper, Palm Beach Daily News (I understand that he does read this one!). It was noticeable that there was no coverage by the BBC and UK press, despite numerous efforts. Two ClimateKeys speakers were COP23 delegates; Banja Luka’s Professor Goran Trbic and Berlin’s Dr Andrzej Ancygier.

Necessary, desirable and achievable

Ancygier is a policy analyst and a contributor to a new report, 2020 The Climate Turning Point, which took centre stage at COP23. I watched the livestream from the session, 2020: The necessary, desirable and achievable turning point to safeguard our climate. Chaired by Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland, heavyweight panelists Christiana Figueres (former UNFCCC Executive Secretary), Johan  Rockström (Director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre), Hans Joachim Schnellnhuber (founding director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research), and Kevin Anderson (Chair of Energy and Climate Change at the Tyndall Centre), made presentations on how, if global CO₂ emissions continue to rise beyond 2020, or even remain level, the temperature commitments set in Paris and the Sustainable Development Goals the world agreed to in 2015 become unattainable. The speakers agreed on outcomes although there was some disagreement on methodology. Good questions came from the audience and online viewers.

• Figueres spoke of 2020 being a critical turning point in which we reach peak emissions and thereafter drive emissions into a steadily descending curve to avoid a much steeper rate of reductions later on. In this latter scenario, the curve will look more like a cliff edge and in such a speedy transition society would not be able to support citizens; numerous, sudden job losses would make for social upheaval and unrest. Although she actively engages with an increasing number of corporations, not enough businesses currently work from this perspective.  
• Anderson argued for mitigation (emissions reduction) to become a COP focus through the top 10% of individual emitters in the world (climatologists are in this 10%) reducing their emissions to the level of the average European and thereby lowering global carbon emissions by 33% straight away. He believes COP itself should “lead by example” and reduce its own footprint. Anderson suggested that the requirement of a zero carbon energy system is a lower total energy consumption (or ‘smart 21st Century energy use’ as Zero Carbon Britain describes this), and so fundamental systemic change is needed in which we all must start playing our part now.
• Rockström detailed clear technological steps to keeping within the 1.5°C limit, and argued for the removal of fossil fuel subsidies as an immediate priority.
• Schnellnhuber suggested new private-public partnerships to fund the transition away from employment in dirty energy, proposing that money in tax havens be put to better use and liberated into new investments in clean energy. Schnellnhuber is an adviser to Chancellor Angela Merkel and so it’s revealing to think that this type of debate might be happening in the German government.

Repeated themes ran through the session; “it’s all about Time”, “don’t be late”, “we’ve known what it is we must do”, “we’re saying we must start doing this by 2020”, and “the procrastination must stop.” So, what will happen if, despite COP outcomes, the procrastination does not stop?

Taking on procrastination

Shortly after signing the Paris Agreement in 2015, in a gut-wrenching moment, British Prime Minister David Cameron slashed subsidies for solar panels. In the Budget right after this year’s COP and its focus on the year 2020, Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond announced tax incentives prolonging North Sea oil and gas investment. A month earlier, Brazil announced it was proposing a bill to give subsidies worth $300 billion to oil companies to drill off its shores. Given that the clear message from Bonn is that emissions need to peak two years from now and then go into a steady decline of 6% per year to stay under the carbon budget and have the chance of meeting the 1.5°C limit by mid-century, we don’t have time to sit around just in case, miraculously, in the next twenty-four months, the required amount of political will somehow shows up.  

When political processes fail, the next step is to turn to the law. Perhaps that next step has already arrived. More and more, we see litigation around the world: the UK government being sued for illegal pollution levels; the US government for stealing a stable climate from American teenagers; 47 countries for not protecting Portuguese schoolchildren from climate change. In a brand new case, Plan B (co-founded by a former government lawyer) is suing the UK government for climate inaction, in a move that has recently drawn support from leading doctors who published a letter in the British Medical Journal on 7th December 2017. Helpfully, Plan B has also made its website into a source of litigation information for the international community. And at the Cambridge Literary Festival in November, ClientEarth founder James Thornton spoke of how the Chinese government is currently training lawyers to sue the Chinese government (yes, you read that correctly!) if it doesn’t meet its own targets.   

The day after the M2020 presentation in Bonn, climatologist and founder of the innovative televised Global Weirding series Katharine Hayhoe was in conversation with George Marshall at University Church of St Mary in Oxford. Hayhoe was there to talk about her work communicating climate change to ‘dismissers’ (her preferred term for deniers) in the heartland of Republican Texas. I attended and was glad to bump into fellow ClimateCultures member, author Deborah Tomkins, as well as Cardiff ClimateKeys speaker, environmental psychologist Dr Stuart Capstick. Deborah and I had a conversation a few days later. We discovered we’d both been inspired by Hayhoe’s account of having been invited to present a one-hour talk to an oil company in Texas; after two and a half hours they still didn’t want to let her go, asking what they should do to become part of the solution rather than remain part of the problem.

This Texan tale, along with the need to stop the political procrastination and immediately remove fossil fuel subsidies described by the panel at COP23, and the role of litigation are four guides to lead my development of ClimateKeys into 2018.

Moving out of the concert hall

After such a strong start, courtesy of the many musicians and speakers who gave concerts in October and November, ClimateKeys is set to carry on initiating more such collaborations in 2018. However it was always the plan, once ClimateKeys was established, to add new types of concerts. Inviting musicians with portable instruments means that concerts can be performed anywhere, not just in music spaces. This has started to happen quite naturally, for example with musicians such as Fran & Flora performing ClimateKeys in an art gallery. So, why not follow Hayhoe’s lead and aim for a concert in the Shell Building in collaboration with their Chief Climate Change Advisor, perhaps with a performance by a string quartet? Or in Tesco’s head office with their packaging planners? Or at the British Museum in partnership with board members to discuss fossil fuel subsidies, their own link with the industry, and climate change? Perhaps such cultural events are opportunities for new leaders to emerge within companies, and this will inspire new collaborations with ClimateKeys.

It’s widely recognised how the activities of the high carbon world cause climate change and how the impacts are greater on the low carbon world. Tragically, recent statistics suggest that around four environmental defenders in indigenous regions are killed each week. When Pope Francis states in his Encyclical that we “have to save Creation”, he is surely including those courageous activists standing up to the causes of climate change and being killed in the process. All who are standing up, from the indigenous defenders, to the Pope, to treehouse dwellers in Germany preventing an expansion of lignite mining, to Mary Robinson and the M2020 panelists, to school children taking governments to court, to authors of climate change novels, to climatologists speaking to communities, all are in the same wide mass movement I increasingly see as a form of international service (that I, for one, wish was compulsory). ClimateKeys hopes to play a part in bringing more corporations to this service. They are urgently needed.

Find out more

You can catch up with the speaker synopses and other news from the performances so far, and with new developments, at the ClimateKeys site.

There is a video from the ClimateKeys concert in Istanbul on 14th November, where guest speaker Ömer Madra, former lecturer of humanitarian law and co-founder of Açık Radyo” (Open Radio), said “As an academic, a writer, a broadcaster and a grandfather, I humbly feel that it is my utmost duty to ‘take arms against a sea of troubles’ and fight with this ‘ultimate absurdity’ to the end. This is the demand which originates from the responsibility of the intellectual.” Pianist Birsen Ulucan said “The people who surround me in Istanbul, where I will perform ClimateKeys, are not actually aware of the consequences of climate change.” 

You can read about the Truth about Zane campaign, which is calling for an Independent Panel Inquiry into the death of 7 year old Zane during the February 2014 floods in Surrey, UK, and to protect the public.

You can watch the video of the COP23 seminar, 2020: the necessary, desirable and achievable turning point to safeguard our climate, on the Uppsala Centre for Sustainable Development website – and read about and download the 2020: The Climate Turning Point report at the M2020 site.

You can read about Plan B and their actions to sue the UK government, as well as other legal actions and resources, at the Plan B site. There is an article, Leading doctors back legal action to force UK government to cut carbon emission, at the website of the British Medical Journal.

Katharine Hayhoe’s TV series is available on the Global Weirding YouTube channel, and you can watch a film of Katharine talking with George Marshall at the ClimateOutreach site – where, of course, there is loads more about COP23 and communicating climate change.

Visit the Palm Beach Daily News site for their coverage of ClimateKeys – as possibly read by Donald Trump. The article states that “the concert ties in with Earth Works: Mapping the Anthropocene, an exhibition featuring works that evolved from artist Justin Brice Guariglia’s flights over Greenland with NASA scientists studying the effect of melting glaciers on sea level rise” and that local ClimateKeys presenter Dr John Strasswimmer “is a dermatologist who is researching a tool that could be used to detect skin cancer using spectroscopy, a technology employed by NASA to measure the contents of the Earth’s atmosphere.”

The Guardian reports on Environmental defenders being killed in record numbers globally and you can watch a film, “Keep It in the Ground”: As COP23 Ends, Activists Protest at Europe’s Largest Open-Pit Coal Mine, at the Democracy Now website.

The full text of Pope Francis’ Encyclical, Laudato ‘Si, is available at the Vatican site.

Lola Perrin 

A composer, pianist and collaborator on keyboard conversations about climate change with economists, lawyers, scientists, artists and other thinkers across the world.

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Questioning Venue? Space for creative thinking...  

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