By Jay Godwin – https://www.flickr.com/photos/lbjlibrarynow/49029146546/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=83786575

Reading the obituaries of pioneering feminist Gloria Steinem this weekend, one quote stuck out to me:

“The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”

As someone whose career is largely focussed on fostering change, I found myself grinning in acknowledgement at this. Just this weekend I saw someone online resolutely defending temperatures measured Fahrenheit against someone who argued that a system that had 0° as the freezing point of water and 100° as boiling was clearly better. The former just kept saying “it was idiotic to change [to Centigrade].” My instinct was to sneer, but then I remembered that, when cycling or hiking, I think of distance in miles but elevation in metres. Both my sports watch and cycle computer are set to read kilometres, but I always convert to imperial in my head – and I can’t explain why. We all have ruts we are stuck in.

The news that Jaguar Landrover, like Volkswagen in Germany, are going to make a large number of workers redundant, was blamed on Net Zero in many quarters – either energy costs, EV mandates or both. This is despite OEM energy costs being just 1% of the ticket price of a car (so removing Net Zero would cut prices by a fraction of a per cent, if at all). And the main competition is coming from cheap Chinese EV imports, so, if anything, the EV mandate is making UK manufacturers more competitive rather than less by incentivising them to meet the challenge head on. If you lay these truths out, people get pissed off, but they won’t change their tune.

We have to accept that change is hard for people, and playing the anti-change card is all too tempting for many, no matter how preposterous the argument. Think back to ‘smokers’ rights’ campaigns, anti-seat belt sentiment (one of my teachers said he’d rather be “thrown clear” in the event of an accident), the psychosomatic ‘wind turbine syndrome’, claims that collecting household rubbish every two weeks would expose you to deadly diseases and the classic “you can’t transport a wardrobe by bicycle” in response to cycle lanes, as if every car on the highway has (or could have) a wardrobe in the boot.

The answer? There is always a temptation to call out stupidity and I occasionally do, particularly if I’m feeling mischievous, but it does just set up an antagonistic stand off – and does pissing people off actually change anything? When we want/need to get people to change their minds, think about the old joke “How many psychologists does it take to change a lightbulb? One, but the light bulb has to want to change.” This is the basis of my Green Jujitsu approach and basically everything I do – when I’m being serious.