It was only last year, but it seems like an age ago. When The Times interviewed the neo-baggy aspirants the Twang, the concept of a carbon footprint had to be explained to them. “What’s one of them?” blurted frontman Phil Etheridge, before asking if he could offset his by drinking more smoothies.

In times of uncertainty, however, pop educates, agitates and organises. As you read this, KT Tunstall, Jarvis Cocker, Feist, Laurie Anderson and Martha Wainwright are somewhere off the coast of Greenland, among the participants in this year’s project by Cape Farewell, an ongoing coalition of scientists and artists to form a “cultural response” to climate change.

Closer to home, members of Reverend & the Makers, Arctic Monkeys and Babyshambles have formed Mongrel – “an attempt to return to an era when indie wasn’t short for indifference, and musicians had an opinion on what was going on,” according to frontman Jon McClure. In America, Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst is living up to his “new Dylan” billing by electioneering for Barack Obama.

It all boils down to a single unavoidable dichotomy. In a perfect world pop stars behave as though there’s no tomorrow. But when it actually looks as though there might be no tomorrow, pop stars write songs about it. Is that a good thing, though? Do we need the Human League to rewrite The Lebanon? Can Lee Ryan from Blue finally make the antiwar record he threatened five years ago? The recession and environmental challenges that lie ahead will undoubtedly trigger a new wave of political pop. Here are five do’s and don’ ts to bear in mind.

Don’t expect too much from the Government you lobbied to get elected

Within a year of the Labour Government’s election, NME put a picture of Tony Blair on its cover, with the headline “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” Pop stars such as the Charlatans and Ian Brown came forward to express disappointment that trains had not magically started running on time, homeless people were still on the streets and there was still no chocolate milk on tap.

Instead, musicians rallied against the injustice of the New Deal, in which aspiring bands would have to convince DSS officers that their talent was so mountainous that they needed to stay on the dole to nurture it properly. If anything the subsequent rise of the Pigeon Detectives, the Courteeners and the Wombats suggests that the clampdown wasn’t draconian enough.

Some idioms are better suited to moaning than others. Rap, for example

When Grandmaster Flash released The Message it sounded like a lone cry of exasperation from a neglected Bronx outpost.

And yet, if you listened to what he was saying, it didn’t sound so different from what a pensioner at a bus stop in Surbiton might be overheard moaning about to her friends. As if to prove the point, this is precisely what happened on an inspired cover of the song in 1995 by the British septuagenarian Georgina Dobson. Suddenly lines such as “Rats in the front room, roaches in the back/ Junkies in the alley with a baseball bat” sounded like a letter to the local paper. Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin’ On isn’t dissimilar in that respect.

Be judged by your actions

These days, Thom Yorke may write lyrics with little explicit political content, but his band assiduously track and offset their carbon emissions and get them independently adjudicated before posting the results on their website. Furthermore, they have scaled down their touring and no longer use air travel. Other bands, however, may take a while to follow suit.

Asked about his plans to become carbon neutral, Kaiser Chiefs’ Ricky Wilson said: “It would be worse for the environment if all our fans from all over the world came to Leeds to see us.”

Try to temper your idealism with pragmatism

In the wake of his 1997 album Black Woman & Child, I asked the rising reggae star Sizzla about his Rastafarian ideals. All black people had to repatriate to Ethiopia, he said. “What if some of them don’t want to?” I asked. He sort of shrugged while pulling a “You tell me” sort of a face – at which point I chose not to press him on the possible infrastructure problems that mass repatriation might exact upon the already beleaguered African nation.

Avoid being literal

Happily, no one is expecting the Cape Farewell crew to return from the Arctic with lots of songs that tell us not to leave our TVs on standby. In this case, the “cultural response” to climate change is altogether more lateral. Laurie Anderson has been busy looking into the “sonic possibilities” of the melting Arctic, while Ryuichi Sakamoto has been “putting his hydro-phone in the water”, obtaining digital copies of the data gathered by the Cape Farewell scientists and looking to turn it into music. “This is the sort of interface between the arts and science that Cape Farewell is here to promote,” explains the geoscientist Carol Cotterill. Whatever results from this year’s expedition, you suspect that it won’t sound very much like Saltwater, by Julian Lennon.

Go to www.capefarewell.com for updates and blogs from the expedition to Disko Bay

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