StarSportsBlog

We’re wondering when business as usual will end.

When the brackets are first established by geographic proximity, so teams cut down on their travel (as they do in other tournaments and in other NCAA divisions).

When each team will know its carbon footprint associated with tournament play and compensate for it.

When the NCAA and its sponsors will use their bully pulpit to help Americans realize the challenges and possibilities for winning the climate game.

Wednesday’s E-Day, a British campaign to raise awareness on energy saving and climate, didn’t go over so well. The campaign asked folks to switch off electrical devises they didn’t need — especially those drawing “phantom power“. It featured a website by which UK residents could see real-time changes in national energy consumption. There was no shortage of “strategic partners”. The campaign was backed by the food giant Tesco with its Greener living campaign, Greenpeace UK, Christian Aid and the RSPB (comparable to the US Audubon Society), the umbrella group Stop Climate Chaos, and from major energy companies such as EDF with its savetodaysavetomorrow.com, E.On with its FA Cup-based “carbon footprinty” campaign and Scottish Power. Several national religious leaders urged congregations to participate on moral grounds.

The final tallies show a one percent increase in energy use.

I am afraid that E-Day did not achieve the scale of public awareness or participation needed to have a measurable effect… I will do my best to learn the relevant lessons for next time.” — E-Day’s organizer Dr Matt Prescott.

BBC coverage of the disappointing day blamed poor publicity (despite all the slick websites cited above), a cold snap and a tangled on-again, off-again development history.

To hazard guesses of our own:

• A special day is just that. First, special: something “out of the ordinary”, not normal. Second, just one day. Cultural shifts take something new and make them ordinary…everyday…commonplace…”like the air“. Such change takes time and sustained effort, and the well documented march from innovators through early adopters and early and late majorities.
• A national effort might be too big. Not in the sense of an end-of-project aggregate, but in the sense of providing individual buy-in, performance and recognition. With a great big national meter, it is easy to believe that one’s individual effort doesn’t really matter. Would things have been different had the efforts of individual households or local businesses , or the neighborhoods of a city (Peterborough, in Cambridgeshire, had high hopes) been measured with a tad more granularity? That kind of performance system doesn’t happen overnight.
• Awareness-raising campaigns don’t change behavior. As previously noted, the best information predictor of behavior change is one person talking to another, backed up with ongoing performance tracking and somebody saying “good work”.