I hope that 2009 will be the year of, amongst other things, Serious Change. The tone of the campaign’s website may set some people’s teeth on edge, but:

a) I agree that the power of government can and should be used to push through planned, large-scale changes in the way we produce and consume energy (and deal with the inconvenient by-products of that production and consumption). Amongst, ahem, other things.

b) We certainly don’t have time to wait for the anarchists to do something about it.

c) Furthermore: there might not be a revolution.

d) The research-and-development aspects (of major government spending on renewable and less-unsafe-nuclear energy) are highly enticing.

My son got a toy helicopter for Christmas, one that actually flies. It cost just under fifteen quid. The key component is the rechargable battery, which is small enough and light enough and has enough capacity that it can deliver the power needed for the rotors to lift both itself and the helicopter’s body (which is made of polystyrene) off the ground for several minutes. It still seems slightly magical to me, because I’m used to the ratio between battery weight and capacity being much less forgiving - the fundamental reason why toys like that didn’t exist when I was a child. For similar reasons, I’m convinced that the iPod Nano is alien technology: if you sliced one open, I suspect it would turn out to be solid all the way through, made of some unanalysable material that sucked music out of the very fabric of creation.

Technology by itself won’t save us: like every bloody thing else, energy inefficiency and unsustainability “is a social relation”, a by-product of a drastically unequal distribution of environmental costs. A less unequal distribution of costs will be acceptable to the world’s wealthy (us) only when the costs themselves are significantly reduced. That’s where the focus of Serious Change is: it’s not as morally satisfying as the punitive scenarios in which we all have to pay, in endless spiritually-reforming drudgery, for our profligate and irresponsible lifestyles; but it has a significantly better chance of capturing the imaginations of those whose societies most need to change.