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“But people just don’t get how urgent it is, Jonathon!” This from a harassed Government Minister looking at the latest survey of public opinion on climate change, with all the usual disturbing data about people’s uncertainty, confusion, ambivalence (saying one thing and doing another) and continuing denial of the now incontrovertible fact that addressing climate change effectively will literally transform all our lives.

Tons of reasons for the continuing confusion, of course – the Clarkson/Daily Mail effect; an army of denialists filling the blogosphere with a combination of vitriol and errant rubbish; a tendency not to believe politicians on anything, let alone climate change, and so on.

But the upshot of all this is that politicians (and this government in particular) feel unable to intervene as decisively and substantively as they need to – for fear of getting punished electorally. The gap between the rhetoric on climate change (world class) and the programme of measures in place to address it (bog-standard) is still very large.

So it was good to see the latest publication from the Green Alliance on The New Politics of Climate Change. The basic thrust of it is that individual action by the “converted” is never going to be sufficient, and that we now need to mobilise the whole of the so-called Third Sector (voluntary organisations, local community groups, trade unions and co-ops, NGOs beyond the environment world, faith communities and so on) to enable a collective shift in both attitudes and actions. Without this, we will never generate a sufficient momentum to encourage/compel our politicians to do what they know they should be doing but still feel they can’t get away with.

“So the critical issue is not simply our behaviour, but the impact of our activism, behaviour and attitudes on political action. The political effect of this action depends not simply on the numbers of people involved but on who those people are and their political influence.”

This makes a lot of sense to me. The Third Sector in the UK is hugely influential. Tot up the income of all those different groups and it exceeds £100 billion, with a massive multiplier effect throughout society. But in terms of climate change, it’s a great slumbering monster, largely sitting on the sidelines of the debate on the grounds that its “not my issue”, leaving it to the transparently inadequate green groups to keep battling away on their behalf. As Stephen Hale (the author of “The New Politics of Climate Change” and Director of Green Alliance) says: “we need to mobilise action networks that influence individual and community behaviour, and build the social foundations for success.”

But how best to mobilise this slumbering monster? I think we will be seeing a lot more action on that front throughout 2009 from many different angles – hopefully with a correspondingly large impact on our political parties.