Good lives that don’t cost the Earth tantalisingly close…

Saamah Abdallah is a researcher at nef’s Centre for Well-being.

Today sees the launch of the second global Happy Planet Index, which measures how nations are faring in terms of what matters to people – having long, happy, meaningful lives – and what matters to the planet – our rate of resource consumption.  The Happy Planet Index brings these concepts together into a single indicator, a measure of the ecological efficiency with which each nation supports good lives.

Like with the first Happy Planet Index, HPI 2.0 reveals that no country is achieving the triple goals of long life, high well-being, and a sustainable ecological footprint.  Indeed Western countries, usually considered to represent the pinnacle of development, are some of the furthest away from that target.  Out of 143 countries, the highest ranking Western country is the Netherlands in 43^rd place – the USA is as low as 114^th.

And the countries that score highest?  That are closest to good lives that don’t cost the Earth?  Perhaps surprisingly, they are mostly Latin American countries.  9 out of the top 10 countries in terms of HPI are in South and Central America, or the Caribbean.  The highest HPI score belongs to Costa Rica – a nation famed for being an island of peace in troubled Central America, and which is now leading the green revolution in the developing world, producing a staggering 99% of its electricity from renewable sources.

But even Costa Rica is not quite achieving one-planet living – it’s ecological footprint of 2.3 global hectares per capita is marginally above the 2.1 global hectares per capita that one calculates if everyone on the planet was to have a fair share of the Earth’s resources.  It looks like something quite profound needs to change to achieve good lives that don’t cost the Earth for all.  The first step to doing so is the new HPI Charter which sets clear targets for where we need to get to by 2050.

On the new HPI website you can download the report, sign the charter, and explore some of the data online.  Over the next few weeks, I will be highlighting some of the stories of the HPI in this blog – countries that do particularly well, changes over time, steps we need to take to change the way things are going, and some of the things that are happening already.

Oscar Wilde said ‘a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at’.  The HPI may not tell us exactly where utopia is, but it at least tells us in which direction we need to travel.

89 months and counting

Andrew Simms is nef’s Policy Director and head of nef’s Climate Change programme.

They’re still out there, the deniers, but they become increasingly exotic. And excuses for inaction on global warming become stranger. One I found would have us believe that spending on wind farms was responsible globally for “killing millions” through the misallocation of resources. That came from a panellist at a public debate at one of the UK’s leading scientific establishments. Oddly, he cited no learned journals to back the claim. The same voice went further. There are no limits on the human use of natural resources, we were told, because when things run out on earth, we can always mine … asteroids.

OK, so the audience did laugh spontaneously at that point. But what makes people cling so tenaciously to denial that they would entertain ludicrous feats just to preserve the status quo, rather than embrace relatively simple changes – like switching the energy system away from fossil fuels – and in the process create jobs and greater energy security and (even if they don’t accept its reality) tackle climate change?

NASA climate scientist James Hansen (left) arrested after protesting a mountain-top coal mine in West Virginia, USA.

To push that simple change, this month one man took a big leap away from the security of the science laboratory that was once his home and got himself arrested for challenging the coal industry in the US. To be fair, James Hansen of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies has a track record in standing up to authority, especially Republican administrations, but getting detained by men in uniform in the cause of climate change was a first. Soon after, a new climate bill was passed in the US.

It’s encouraging that people like Hansen are upping the ante, and it’s not difficult to see why they do it. On one hand, the month brings confirmation of how warming will drive a huge human upheaval through forced migration, and how the UK will see more flooding in winter and droughts in summer. On the other, there is news that the Met Office, responsible for much of the UK’s core work on modelling global warming, is to lose one quarter of its climate research budget, about £4.3m, after the Ministry of Defence withdrew funding, and that emissions from international shipping – not covered by international agreements for reduction – are rising.

Meanwhile, the policing of climate protests appears to grow increasingly political and repressive, in direct contradiction to exhortations to mobilise and campaign from figures like the secretary of state for energy and climate change, Ed Miliband. As the evidence on warming further hardens, any kind of coherent political response seems to flounder more elaborately.

And yet, in spite of everything and in a quite unplanned and unintentional way, the beginnings of a potentially positive and self-reinforcing spiral are dimly visible.

First, the environment comes riding in to save the economy, through various initiatives like support for wind power and home energy efficiency, that one day, added up, might look like a Green New Deal. Then the economy accidentally returns the gesture.

In 2008, a combination of high oil prices and the financial crisis saw the global economy slow down and the rate of growth of greenhouse gas emissions fall by half. They still went up, but slowed significantly.

Rich and poor countries experience such trends very differently. But the effect in some rich countries, where emissions cuts are needed first and deepest, has been interesting. Far from there being universal wailing and mortification, many have embraced the chance to work shorter weeks and take unpaid holiday. They’ve accepted cuts in disposable income because the gift of extra time has opened up new opportunities elsewhere.

In reclaiming part of their lives to do anything from spend more time with family, learn a new skill, volunteer, start a campaign or enterprise, take a walk in the woods or, indeed, study stars and asteroids, people are discovering that there is a big payback in added wellbeing. For some people at least, the recession has taught them that less really is more. As the clock ticks down to the point when, in 89 months’ time, it will no longer be “likely” that we’ll keep below the critical two-degree temperature rise, lets hope we are all quick learners.

Some of the Drax 29 at work, complete with canary. Their trial started on Monday.

Finally, its not just world-famous scientists who are putting themselves on the line legally or, indeed, literally. Last summer 29 people stopped a train containing 1,000 tonnes of coal on its way to Drax power station in Yorkshire. They stopped the train with a red flag, following standard railway safety rules, boarded it and began shovelling the coal on to the line. One was dressed as a canary – the traditional warning of dangerous pollution down a coal mine. They dropped a banner saying “Leave It in the ground”.

Like Hansen, they saw coal as the biggest danger when it came to climate change, and Drax is the biggest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the UK. All 29 were arrested and are now standing trial. They’re charged with “obstructing the railway” and they face up to two years in prison. Their trial started on Monday, but what is really on trial is whether we have the wit as a society to save ourselves from death by carbon-addled inertia.

Britain’s supplicant state

David Boyle is a nef fellow, a writer and the editor of nef’s newspaper, Radical Economics.

The Building Britain's Future initiative won't work – we have to find ways of handing real power and responsibility downwards.

It is hard to tell, because the new Building Britain’s Future website says, as I write, “Error 404: Page not found”. But judging by the prime minister’s statement today, it doesn’t represent a meaningful shift towards localism.

That was the rhetoric – a shift from top-down targets to individual entitlements – but when it comes to localism, Gordon Brown is the victim of a huge misunderstanding. Targets are targets, Mr Brown: you don’t escape the huge inefficiencies they produce by having fewer of them, or by dressing them up as entitlements that people can enforce. And certainly not, as in the case of the NHS 18-week waiting list, by turning them into an obligation.

Quite the reverse. It will mean more administrators employed to shift people through the system and find creative ways of avoiding the various definitions, and it will reduce the money available for just doing the work. Targets are top-down, by their very nature. It doesn’t matter what you call them.

But the real problem is that politicians of all parties are very confused about localism. They gargle with the ideas, but believe it is something about giving people a little bit more, having fewer targets and setting up local committees. They get marooned in the narrow question of where each function of government should take place – a kind of parlour game for politicians before they lose the will to live. They miss the point.

The real problem is that centralisation is far more insidious than they realise. Not only does it make government and public services intensely ineffective, creating vast inhuman institutions – factory hospitals and monster schools – where professionals are constrained from using their human skills to make a difference. But it also reduces us from citizens to supplicants to vast organisations, public and private.

Westminster politicians still don’t get it. Their localism means lots of local administration, while the tentacles of economic centralisation stay intact. Local parish mayors are still supplicants to Tesco or vast hospitals, schools and distant mega-police forces. It means intricate webs of individual entitlements, when the public services we need still don’t work properly. They still treat us as units to be packaged, as potential legal minefields, as one-off bundles of need to be processed, without giving us the individual attention – via long-term relationships with professionals – that will actually make change happen.

Politicians urgently need to understand that localism also means devolving power to frontline public service staff, to give them back the initiative to make things happen. Or devolving responsibility to public service clients, delivering broader services alongside professionals, tackling our distant, burgeoning monster institutions, the huge schools, hospitals and jobcentres that manage us, and tackling the monopolistic centralisation of business.

Taken together, the implications of centralisation are that we have become supplicants to a combination of increasingly distant government systems, working with increasingly distant and monopolistic private corporations. That is the Supplicant State and one look at the key points in Building Britain’s Future shows that we still live there. This is all about what they are going to give us. Keeping us as supplicants isn’t going to work – we have to find ways of handing real power and responsibility downwards.

David’s new pamphlet, Localism: Unravelling the Supplicant State, is available to download from the nef website.

Numbers to remember

Andy Wimbush is nef’s Communications Assistant and blogmaster.

The first number is 350. If you haven’t memorised the number 350 yet, then you probably should. Write it on your hand. Scribble it on every surface you can find. Put it in your phone. Paint pictures of it. Hell, tattoo it to yourself if need be. Three hundred and fifty is, according to NASA climate scientist James Hansen, the number which represents the safe amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere: 350 parts per million (ppm). If we exceed 350, we’re heading towards dangerous climate change. The fact that we’re currently at over 380 ppm is all the more reason to start doing something.

The second number is 24.10.09, which stands for 24th October 2009.  That’s when the ‘doing something’ part really kicks off. Our friends at 350.org – the campaign headed up by Dr Hansen and Bill McKibben – have chosen 24th October as a day of global action on climate change. nef has some exciting plans for this day already (more of which to be revealed in due course), but for now, check out this little trailer and start dreaming up some actions of your own:

Back from a permaculture siesta

Andy Wimbush is nef’s Communications Assistant and blogmaster.

Regular readers will have no doubt wondered what has happened to the nef blog in recent weeks. Truth is I’ve been on holiday. Although perhaps ‘holiday’ is too strong a word, given that my colleagues have teased me for giving up my hard-earned annual leave to do a course in environmentally-friendly land management. Perhaps I should take it as a compliment: getting mocked for being too much of a greenie at nef of all places shows that I must be doing something right.

I mentioned a while back that the practice of permaculture might hold some answers to our present predicaments around energy, climate change and looming food scarcity. Now, having spent two weeks in the Forest of Dean actually studying the thing, I feel knowledgeable – or foolhardy – enough to attempt to explain it here.

Permaculture was first developed during the energy crisis of the mid-seventies by two Australian scientists, David Holmgren and Bill Mollison. Its name stands for both permanent agriculture and permanent culture: a way of growing food and organising human life in a manner that is genuinely sustainable. Permaculture seeks to be fossil fuel free: while organic agriculture dispenses with pesticides and fertilizers, it still relies on diesel to run farm machinery and operates on a similar scale to conventional agriculture. When oil becomes expensive and scarce, even organic farms will feel the pinch. To many, it is hard to imagine how we could even grow food without the help of oil. We certainly wouldn’t be able to return to a life of hard physical labour to get our daily bread: most of the knowledge and physical strength simply isn’t with us anymore.

Ducks on slug patrol in a permaculture garden

Permaculture’s answer is a fairly simply one: rather than struggling against nature, either by hard labour or with big energy input, aim to work with it by designing food growing systems which mimic natural ecosystems. This means creating more or less closed systems, where human input is kept to a minimum (read: less work) and all outputs are used in a productive way (read: no waste). Permaculturists always avoids monocultures. Diversity – an important aspect of natural ecosystems – is used to create beneficial relationships between different plants, people, animals and other aspects of the land and living space.

Imagine you have a house at the top of a slope. You dig a pond beside it, because this will reflect light into the house, meaning you need to use less energy. And because the pond is at the top of the slope, you can use its water to irrigate vegetable gardens and orchards at the bottom of the slope. The pond will provide a habitat for ducks, who you will periodically invite into your vegetable garden so that they can go on slug patrol. You can also dig a trench coming out of the pond and fill it with reeds. This can be used to filter gray water (waste water from sinks, showers and baths), cleaning it for later use.  In the pond you might also have some carp, who feed on tiny animals in the water, turning unusable protein into a human food (fish). On one side of the pond you grow willow, which can be used for fencing, decoration, craft materials and firewood, while on the other you dig out “chinampas” – fingers of land that jut into the pond. Here you can grow yet more vegetables, particularly those which need lots of water. Note how inputs such as water for the garden and food for the ducks and fish have been removed or minimised, and otherwise unused outputs such as light from the pond, waste water from the house and slugs in the garden become useful parts of the system.

By clever design and a keen understanding of the kinds of ecological relationships which animals and plants need to survive, permaculturists have been able to do some remarkable things. According to a documentary we watched on the course, the self-dubbed ‘rebel farmer’ Sepp Holzer has managed to grow figs, cherries and even kiwi fruits at an altitude of over 4,000 feet in the Austrian mountains, all by using permaculture principles.

Corn and squash, growing together

Permaculture is satisfying because its solutions are so elegant, so simple and yet also so ingeniously thought out. We tend to have the notion that “technology” must mean something complex, and yet we forget that some of the best technologies, the ones we use everyday without even noticing, are perfected in simplicity and need no further work. Witness the button, the stairs, the pencil. You reach the end of a permaculture course armed less with a host of facts than a way of thinking which informs a huge range of decisions you might take in your life.

And contrary to my colleagues’ jibes, the course did manage to hold its own as a holiday. Staying on an organic farm, with beautiful scenery, fantastic food, good company and regular camp fires, it hardly felt like I was doing any work at all. And that is a crucial permaculture principle. As permaculturist Andy Langford put it: “Ask yourself, as a permaculture designer, how many siestas can I easily take this week? If its less than three or four, be worried.”

Resources

• Patrick Whitefield – a pioneer of British permaculture, and the brilliant teacher of my course
• The Permaculture Association of Britain
• Permaculture Magazine
• The Agroforestry Research Trust – if its hard facts and practical research you want, you’d do no better than see the work of Martin Crawford.
• “High time agriculture got back to its healthy roots” – veteran environmental journalist John Gibbons, who recently completed a permaculture design course, writing in the Irish Times.

Who needs a hair shirt?

Sam Thompson is a researcher and a consultant at nef’s centre for well-being.

Not the sustainably-minded folk at The Naturist Society, that’s for sure. And if that whets your appetite, here’s a list of 30 green things naturists can do in the course of their naked lives.

Of course, here at nef we long since abandoned the wasteful, environmentally damaging practice of wearing clothes in the office. It’s good to see the rest of the world beginning to catch-up.

Self report scales

Sam Thompson is a researcher and a consultant at nef’s centre for well-being.

Much of the happiness and well-being research that you read about is based on answers to very simple self-report questions: How satisfied are you with your life overall? How happy have you been recently? How often have you felt miserable in the last two weeks? and so on.

Reliance on these kinds of measures has sometimes led to criticism. But there has always been plenty of evidence that even such apparently simplistic self-report questions can be potent indicators of physical and psychological well-being. A striking example is this new study, which tracked older adults over a five year period.

Those with self-reported depression [rating of agreement with the statement: "I felt depressed"]  had a 5-year mortality of 30.2% versus 19.7% in those without self-reported depression [...] . This association persisted after adjustment for age, sex, education, functional status, and cognition

Subjective indicators will never tell the whole story and, as we set-out at some length in our National Accounts of Well-being, policy makers need to use multiple measures to truly understand how people feel and function in their lives and so make better decisions. But every now and again it’s nice to reconfirm that self-reported measures of well-being really do map-on to “hard” outcomes, and in a useful way.

Civil liberties in a changing climate

Andy Wimbush is nef’s Communications Assistant and blogmaster.

Once again, civil liberties and climate change are crossing paths in the news. This morning, the Guardian released footage showing two activists being brutally manhandled by police at last year’s climate camp at E.on’s coal-fired power station in Kingsnorth, Kent. The film shows two female protestors, Emily Apple and Val Swain, asking unmarked police officers why they aren’t wearing their numbers. When the pair start taking details and photos of these anonymous coppers, they find themselves wrestled to the floor, trodden on and even throttled. Apple and Swain, both single mothers with young children, were then arrested and held behind bars for four days, despite having made a perfectly legal request for police to identify themselves. Reports suggested the women were targeted because they are active members of Fit Watch, a group which attempts to monitor the activities of the Met’s Forward Intelligence Team (F.I.T.), a police unit whose sole job at demonstrations is to gather photographs and video of activists to contribute to a vast database which can later be used to drum up charges of conspiracy against arrestees.

Numberless: a police officer with something to hide

The police don’t like protestors to hide their identities. If you turn up at demonstration wearing a hoodie and have a hankerchief tied over your face, you can be sure they’ll make you reveal yourself. Some activists have given up trying to hide their identities from the ubiquitous eyes of the FIT, and actively court the coppers’ lens.  But when protestors ask police to reveal themselves, it’s a very different matter. Although it is illegal for police to go unnumbered, empty shoulders are an increasingly common sight at high-stakes demonstrations.

But intimidation, secrecy and even violence on the part of the police is rarely enough to deter the most stalwart of activists, as the following story shows. A good friend of mine locked herself onto a biofuel refinery during the week of the Kingsnorth camp. The police ripped her violently from her chains as quickly as they could, leaving her hands and wrists bleeding and her neck sore. She was promptly served an injunction and told not to go anywhere near a powerstation or the camp. I’d been shocked by the photos of what happened, but nothing surprised me more than finding her behind the counter at one of the camp’s kitchens, serving up soup with a smile only hours later. It takes extraordinary courage, passion and, dare I say it, love to keep on going like this.

But keep on going we must. That’s why it’s so fitting that, in the same day as the news of Apple and Swain’s Kingsnorth ordeal makes headlines, yet more activists are back at the plant, causing trouble for E.on. Greenpeace protestors have boarded a ship bringing coal to Kingsnorth and are preventing it from unloading its cargo.

Civil disobedience has achieved some extraordinary things in our history, and with climate change the stakes have never been higher. You can pledge to take direct action against climate change by signing up at beyondtalk.net or at Greenpeace’s Big If page. And if scaling chimneys or boarding boats isn’t your cup of tea, there’s still a fantastic way to show that you’re not going to let coal power wreck our climate by joining the “Mili-Band”, a huge human chain around Kingsnorth, with a village fete afterwards. It’s being organised by nef’s friends and colleagues at the World Development Movement, Christian Aid, Oxfam, the RSPB, the Women’s Institute and a host of other groups. Book your place in the Mili-Band today!

Green shoots and radical reform withering in tandem

Josh Ryan-Collins is a researcher in the Business, Finance and Economics team at nef.

The expenses scandal may not have cost Gordon Brown his job, but it has done a good job of helping everyone forget about the fact that the world is facing the most serious economic downturn since the Great Depression.  

The recent talk of ‘Green shoots’ is now looking distinctly optimistic.  A recent analysis by economists Barry Eichengreen and Kevin O’Rourke suggests that the world economy is following a worryingly similar pattern to the Great Depression.  One year in, global output is declining at roughly the same rate as it was in the 1929-30 downturn (Chart 1). 

Chart 1: Global GDP, 1929 and 2009 (www.voxeu.org)

However, in terms of global trade, things are looking a lot worse than 1929-30 (Chart 2).

You may remember all the talk of how important it was to avoid protectionist policies for fear they would lead to another Great Depression. Well, there has hardly been a whiff of a trade tariff yet global trade has collapsed anyway.  

This has resulted in the interesting phenomenon, as Paul Krugman recently suggested in his series of lectures at the London School of Economics, of major exporting countries such as Japan, Brazil and Germany, who had very little in the way of housing or other asset-bubbles, suffering more than the Anglo-Saxon bubble economies of the UK and the US.   Meanwhile, developing countries dependent on foreign investment flows have been hit even harder.  The Great Depression was global and global financial deregulation has made this one equally so.

Chart 2: World trade, 1929 and 2009 (www.voxeu.org)

Governments have been much more active in stimulating demand – through slashing interest rates and pumping money in the economy – than in the Great Depression of course, so things may pick up. 

On the other hand interest rates can’t be lowered much further and there remains massive questions over the amount ‘de-leveraging’ still required by the major banks (and shadow banks) before credit lines can really be freed up.  Germany still refuses to go public with the results of its banks’ stress tests, no doubt for fear of the resulting stock market collapse.  As long as US house prices and the mortgage-backed securities dependent on them continue to lose value, counting chickens remains ill advised.  And then then there is the possibility of another oil shock of course.

Rather than looking vainly for green shoots, governments should be getting on with the job of creating a Green New Deal with reform of the financial system at it heart.  Some progress has been made on tax havens, yet other structural reforms have lost momentum, or not even got going.  There is little evidence of the UK or European governments seriously looking at separating retail from investment banking for example, or re-mutualising financial institutions, as proposed recently by nef.   And there is a danger that stronger reforms issued by the EU – for instance stricter regulation of mortgage credit limits - will be blocked by an increasingly euro-sceptic Britain.  

A Labour MP I quizzed last weekend suggested it was rather hard for Britain to take the lead on financial regulation ‘because we live in a globalised world and might lose out to other countries’.   Funny how this doesn’t work the other way around – Britain has always been very happy to be the first to de-regulate. 

As the FT suggested in its editorial on Monday, a return to ‘business as usual’ in the financial sector is simply not a viable option.  Its time to get the financial crisis (or perhaps we should call it the depression), and what to do about it, back on the agenda.

Money matters: beyond banking status quo

David Boyle is a nef fellow, a writer and the editor of nef’s newspaper, Radical Economics.

“Future students of history will be shocked and angered by the fact that in 1945 the same monetary system that had driven the world to despair and disaster [in the Great Depression], and had almost destroyed the civilisation it was supposed to stand for, was revived on a much wider scope.”

So wrote the French economist Jacques Rueff in 1964.  It feels much the same now: we would be insane to go back to the same disastrous banking pattern we had before the bail-out, but – thanks to the government – we probably will.

Only a miserable 0.6 per cent of the government’s stimulus package is going on green measures, to genuinely shift the way the economy works.

Lord Mandelson has come out as a born again defender of the financial status quo.

But worst of all, the latest Bank of England assessment shows that, despite everything, business lending to small and medium-sized businesses is down again.  Differential interest rates and fees are both still rising.

Local bank managers who know their community well are largely a thing of the past.

It has become a lot more expensive to borrow money, even for the lucky few who make it through the approval stage.

One of the many tragedies about the Westminster expenses scandal, as Vince Cable pointed out last week, is that it robs MPs of the moral authority to tackle our dysfunctional banking system.

Ministers daren’t say anything too interesting, or too bold, in case heir colleagues assume they are throwing their hand into the ring for the Labour leadership.  It is a miserable prospect, and it may guarantee a swift return to banking business-as-usual.

To start with, it is time we broke the all-party consensus that somehow the government can use their holdings in the big banks to kick-start local lending again.  It hasn’t worked, and seems unlikely to work any time soon.

This is not only because banks won’t lend, but because they can’t lend using their current infrastructure and systems.

They have been consolidated to the point where they point towards the speculative economy and have little local lending infrastructure left.  Their lending decisions are taken by computerised systems which, because we are in a recession, naturally recommend against.

There are no longer bank managers, or local staff with the authority to pick out the success stories, using their knowledge of their local economy.

Our businesses are now in a far weaker position than American or German competitors, and potential competitors, because we have no equivalent lending infrastructure.  There are only 170 branches per million people in the UK, compared to 520 in Germany and 960 in France.

Now that the elections are over, this is what politicians need to do immediately:

• Break up the banks in government ownership, not just by dividing domestic high street banks from risky investment banks, but to rebuild an effective local lending infrastructure to kick-start local enterprise.
• Launch a new bank based in post office branches, along the lines of the successful postbanks on the continent and in New Zealand, using the latest mobile phone technology.
• Invest in a new generation of community financial institutions, funded by the big banks, as they are in the USA, under a British version of the Jimmy Carter’s Community Reinvestment Act.

Why is this still not top of the agenda?  I think this is partly because, in this country at least, people don’t understand the money system.  Their mental map of it is nearly a century old: safe reliable Captain Mainwaring and vaults full of money.

I was assured some years ago by the Washington correspondent of a national newspaper (admittedly it was the Sun) that all money is based on gold.  It hasn’t actually been since 1931.

This is my excuse for writing an accessible guide to the way money works: Money Matters: Putting the Eco into Economics.

I hope (no small ambition this) that it might help dispel some of the bizarre mystique that bankers continue to exercise over the minds of the English.  Because what we really need to do is abandon the idea that our current useless system was somehow placed there by God, and demand the new local banking infrastructure we need.