action stories

Some think that what's needed is a big state-funded scientific push like the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Program that will come up with radically new technologies to help solve climate change. Others think that what we need is a moral crusade like The Abolition of Slavery to change behaviour.

In his new essay Breaking the boundaries, Fred Steward says that neither analogy is helpful. He points to the internet, where a public initiative unleashed the private sector, and to America's New Deal in the 1930s (left) where 'local investments were orientated to job creation for civic purpose'.

Both offer, he says, more 'prospects of pervasive change'.