I was going to blog about kitchens of the future, and the fact that people’s dream futures are often ecologically-friendly without primarily being driven by environmental concerns. But how could I not blog about 10:10’s new film? If you haven’t seen it, take a moment, take a pinch of salt and have a watch.

Did they go too far? I’d say you have to measure it against the issue in hand. If people were showing pictures of starved, beaten dogs in order to sell a particularly healthy brand dog food, viewers would probably feel that the emotional response elicited by the advert wasn’t justified by the objective importance of the message. But animal charities regularly use such images to highlight the objectively cruel and unnecessary plight of animals that are genuinely neglected and abused by their owners. We think, and the Advertising Standards Authority tends to agree, that that is justified.

As messages go, there are scarcely any more important than climate change. Commentators have said that the film gives a negative, doomsday view of climate change. James Delingpole goes so far as to say that the film shows, “the snarling, wicked, homicidal misanthropy beneath its cloak of gentle, bunny-hugging righteousness.” Entertainingly, this is as big an over-exaggeration as the film itself. I won’t bore you with a deconstruction of Delingpole’s adjectival mish-mash, but suffice to say it mainly reveals fear. He doesn’t both to engage with the reasons behind the film, he simply rails against it as ‘eco-propaganda.’

Now arguably it is propaganda, but in its true sense: ‘the organised promotion of information to assist or damage the cause of a government or movement.’ Delingpole suggests that it is mis-information, but of course the film is based on solid, peer-reviewed scientific fact. This is what Delingpole is scared of, and this is what he fails to engage with. When people say that this is a doomsday scenario, they are right: this is the alternative to action to reduce carbon emissions. As Fanny Armstrong says, 300,000 people are dying from climate change every year – this year, next year, and every year after that unless we change the way we act. Is this film more or less offensive than real life footage of children starving to death because of crop failure in sub-Saharan Africa? I leave you to judge.