We need new models of development for Africa in an age of climate change, says Wangari Maathai

Professor Wangari Maathai is a Nobel Peace Prize winner, founder of the Green Belt Movement and author of The Challenge for Africa.

Members of the Green Belt Movement plant trees on an eroding hillside in Kenya.

In Other Worlds are Possible, the latest report from the Working Group on Climate Change and Development, the the coalition asks how the global economy should be reshaped to enable human development in a carbon constrained future. A post-carbon society and addressing climate change mean much more than constraining carbon usage. While Africa is rich in resources, her people are poor; to counter this poverty, Africa needs to develop. For development in Africa to be successful, we need to ensure the right conditions in society that facilitate respect, equity and sustainability.

Current economic models create wealth at the expense of the environment and so we need to rethink how we develop. The current model from the industrialised countries which develops through the use of fossil fuels as the driving source of energy cannot be sustained. We must find a balance to improving our quality of life while not undermining the environment, and therefore the capacity of our species and other forms of life to continue. This can be controlled by investing in renewable sources of energy low in carbon – solar, wind, hydropower; sources of energy that will help us to develop without sacrificing the environment.

I wrote The Challenge for Africa to encourage Africans and others to think beyond the current economic model which is dependent on resources from the rest of the planet. The fact that humanity’s current use of resources is outstripping the planet’s ecological capacity should give all of us a reason to pause. It is simply not sustainable for the rest of the world to mine, log, drill, build, dam, drain and pave in a rush to achieve the standards of living of the industrialised countries, which themselves depend on massive resource extraction in the global South. In so doing, they could encourage the growth of sustainable industries that provide good employment in well-managed cities and towns – not crowded filthy slums with virtually no infrastructure that blot too many African cities and too many African lives. Africans, like citizens in other regions of the world, can also work to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels and to harness renewable energy sources to industrialise in a way that provides work for the millions of Africans migrating to cities, and allows some of those currently practising subsistence agriculture to move off the land.

The challenges facing agricultural communities throughout Kenya are mirrored throughout Africa and many of the poor countries in the global South. In these regions, concern for environmental issues is treated as a luxury. But it is not: protecting and restoring ecosystems and slowing or reversing climate change are matters of life and death. The equation is simple: whatever we do, we have an impact on the environment; if we destroy it, we will undermine our own ways of life and ultimately destroy ourselves. This is why the environment needs to be at the centre of domestic and international policy and practice. If it is not, we don’t stand a chance of alleviating poverty in any significant way. Nor will we create for the African people a continent where security and progress can be realised.
For the many reasons that have been articulated, there is a real need to develop a funding mechanism that will not only help industrialised and developed countries to address climate change, but also developing ones.

As major polluters, the industrialised countries have a responsibility to deal with climate change at home, but also to assist Africa and the rest of the developing world to address climate change. They are in a position to share their technical know-how to reduce vulnerability and address adaptive capacities. Mechanisms ought to be established – quickly – to raise steady and reliable funds for the prime victims of the climate crisis, who will be poor and rural, very young, and, more often than not, female. And many of them will be African.

One way to ensure that African countries are more self-reliant and competitive is for industrialised nations to transfer technology – with a priority on green technologies – to those nations that are technologically less advanced. Industrialised countries should accept the moral duty to assist Africa and other poor regions to find alternative and renewable sources of energy – such as biomass, wind, hydropower, and solar – and enable the global south to participate in the carbon market so Africa can develop industries based on renewable energy sources. But African countries themselves should also invest in science and technology. Global investors have ploughed billions into new wind, solar, and other alternative energy initiatives. But those funds were almost wholly concentrated in the industrialised countries, along with some in China, India, and Brazil. Almost none of this investment is coming to Africa, despite the continent’s vast energy poverty and abundant sun and wind. Africa’s challenge lies in making herself a relevant beneficiary of these resources.

This is an edited extract from Wangari Maathai’s essay in Other Worlds are Possible, the sixth report from the Working Group on Climate Change and Development.

Climate change is the symptom of a much deeper economic malady, says Professor Herman Daly

Professor Herman E. Daly is Ecological Economist at the School of Public Policy, University of Maryland and Author of Steady-State Economics

Climate change, important as it is, is nevertheless a symptom of a deeper malady, namely our fixation on unlimited growth of the economy as the solution to nearly all problems. Apply an anodyne to climate and, if growth continues, something else will soon burst through limits of past adaptation and finitude, thereby becoming the new crisis on which to focus our worries.

The fact that the contributors to Other Worlds are Possible realise this makes this report a serious study. The fact that they seek qualitative development that is not dependent on quantitative growth makes it a hopeful study. It is a valuable collection of the specific and the general, of the grass roots details and the macroeconomic big picture regarding climate change and economic development.

The reader is told up front that, ‘This report represents the work and views of a range of individuals and civil society groups. It is a contribution to debate on what other worlds are possible. Not all the views and policies discussed are necessarily held by all the groups and individuals’. Although I did not find any contradictions among the various contributions, they differ greatly in approach and perspective—mainly between top-down and bottom-up modes of thought. Some people like to start with a big picture. They are impatient with concrete details until they can fit them into or deduce them from a framework of meaning consistent with first principles. Others are impatient with a big picture unless they first have a lot of concrete details and examples that inductively suggest a larger pattern. I confess that I belong to the first type, but that is more of a bias than a virtue. Both approaches are necessary, and are present in this collection, but the bottom-up predominates, at least in number of pages.

My advice to the top-down types is to first read Manfred Max-Neef’s fine big-picture essay. Then fit in the inspiring examples of Kenya’s Green Belt Movement, Thailand’s self sufficiency, Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness, the Happy Earthworm Project, the Happy Planet Index, etc. More inductive types should save Max-Neef for last. I do not mean to characterize Max-Neef as a top-down thinker since he has spent much of his life doing grass roots, ‘barefoot’ economics. But in this volume’s division of labour his is the big-picture essay.

To have packed so much information, inspiration, and analysis into less than 100 pages of clear prose leaves the reader grateful to the authors, the Working Group on Climate Change and Development, and nef.

This is the foreward to Other Worlds are Possible, a new report on climate change and development published today, which features contributions from a range of developing world economists and activists, including R.K. Pachauri, Wangari Maathai and Manfred Max-Neef.

How to really tackle the supermarkets

Andy Wimbush is nef’s Communications Assistant and blogmaster.

It's through legislation and effectively empowering communities that we can tackle supermarket domination, not through "moralised markets".

At the launch of his new think-tank, ResPublica, Phillip Blond suggested that a Conservative government should make moves to break up Britain’s four biggest supermarkets: Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons. “In the name of freedom,” said Blond, “we have produced economic concentration and in a number of areas monopoly dominance or something very much like it.”

Well, yes, absolutely, but this is hardly new news. Four years ago nef launched Clone Town Britain, the groundbreaking report that introduced a new term into the policy vocabulary. Amongst a long list of recommendations for Government action, we suggested:

• Introducing a retail takeover moratorium. There should be a moratorium on further takeovers of existing chains either by Tesco, or any of the other three largest multiple retailers.
• Applying a limit of eight per cent market share of grocery retailing. The four leading supermarkets should divest their interests above an eight per cent national threshold, the level above which the OFT believes that abuse of market power that is  damaging for retail can occur.

Why eight per cent market share? This was the threshold, identified by the UK Competition Commission in 2003, beyond which supermarkets had enough power to distort the market. The Commission spoke out against the practices of the supermarkets, arguing that they weren’t in the public interest and that supermarket dominance often led to “particular adverse effects of reduced investment, product development and innovation, and of lower quality and less choice for consumers.”

In the end, the Commission shied away from recommending any actual legislation, but rather a “Code of Practice” for supermarkets to follow. It was, unsurprisingly, largely ineffective. In 2005, the Office of Fair Trading did an audit of how supermarkets responded to the code and found that their practices remained largely unchanged. In many cases they were actually worse. That’s why nef recommended the very strict cap on market share.

Would Phillip Blond follow our lead and recommend using legislation to curb the supermarket power? Probably not: he’s  opposed to Government getting involved in economic affairs. Instead, he wants to see the emergence of ‘moralised markets’, where the values of individuals and companies do the job instead of state legislation.

To my mind, that’s pretty much the same thing as the voluntary code of practice recommended by the Competition Commission. Both fail to recognise that supermarkets aren’t going to give up their interests without a fight. Terry Leahy, CEO of Tesco, said that he hopes that the chain would continue to increase its selling space in Britain by up to 7 per cent a year, and is already eyeing up domination of Asia’s retail market. Moralising the markets – which sounds a bit like sending a Victorian governess into City board rooms – isn’t going to make Sir Terry change his mind about anything.

So yes, let’s call for action to curb supermarket power, and stop their domination of our high streets, but let’s do so with the right solutions in mind: effective legislation, the introduction of local competition policies, building on the successes of the Sustainable Communities Act and extending local planning laws to protect small businesses.

 

 

Letwin: ‘We need a political licence to talk about what really matters’

Juliet Michaelson is a researcher at nef’s centre for well-being.

Central Lobby, Palace of Westminster (Parliamentary copyright images are reproduced with the permission of Parliament)

Leading members of the three main political parties addressed the second meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Wellbeing Economics yesterday, with a striking degree of consensus that well-being should urgently rise up the political agenda. Labour peer Professor Lord Richard Layard, Oliver Letwin MP, Chair of the Conservative Research Department and Policy Review and Chris Huhne MP, Liberal Democrat Shadow Home Secretary, all agreed that GDP fails as an adequate measure of welfare and pointed to the need for a new way of measuring the things that are really important. The comments of all three speakers supported the aims of the Group, for which nef acts as the secretariat, to challenge GDP as the sole indicator of wealth and promote new measures of societal progress.

The speakers agreed that policy-making should be much more focused on what well-being research tell us are the drivers of high well-being, with lots of emphasis given to the importance of supporting good relationships. But there was not unanimity on all points of policy. For example, only Chris Huhne mentioned, as a strong argument in favour of progressive taxation, the varying well-being value of an extra pound of income to people with different levels of economic wealth.

However, there was general consent to the proposition that without a strong headline measure to rival GDP, the well-being agenda would not get the attention it requires. Oliver Letwin perhaps went furthest in this direction. He spoke of the ‘terrible danger’ that the Conservatives would find themselves in government and under pressure to focus only on traditional political issues unless a ‘serious, competing measure’ of well-being could be produced. He pointed to the need for all three parties to act in step to create a ‘political licence to talk about what really matters’. As Chair Jo Swinson MP pointed out, this is exactly what the ongoing work of the All-Party Parliamentary Group will aim to bring about.

Good News, Bad News

Andy Wimbush is nef’s Communications Assistant and blogmaster.

The good news:

• An inventor has developed adjustable glasses which could bring better vision to a billion of the world’s poorest people: Josh Silver, a professor of physics at Oxford University has created glasses with lenses that can be “tuned” by the wearer using small knobs, eliminating the need for prescriptions or specialist equipment. Silver’s idea is stirring example of how simple technological interventions can sometimes be the most elegant. Small is beautiful after all.
• A campaign has been launched to encourage people in the rich world to donate 10% of their money to help the poorest people in the world. Once again proving that there are academics who venture beyond the ivory tower, moral philosopher Toby Ord (again, from Oxford University) has pledged to give away a third of his £30,000 a year salary this year, with 10% year on year after that. His new website – Giving What We Can – allows visitors to enter their post-tax earnings, to see where they rank in the global rich list, which is adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity. It then calculates the number of lives that could be saved or school hours bought with your donation, and suggests a handful of very effective and targeted aid agencies to support. Of course, at nef we believe that there won’t be a way out of global poverty unless we very quickly put a stop to climate change, and introduce fundamental changes to the global financial system. But working to change the economy shouldn’t stop us from donating to save lives here and now.
  
• There is still a chance of a climate deal at Copenhagen. Less than a day after Barack Obama announced that he didn’t think there was enough time to secure a global deal on climate change mitigation at the UN COP15 in Copenhagen, Chinese president Hu Jintao and Obama issued a joint statement promising to press for a deal next month.

The bad news:

• Peak oil is closer than we thought, due to deliberately distorted figures, according to a senior official at the International Energy Association. The Guardian reports that the whistleblower has accused the USA of forcing the IEA to “underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves”.
• The average global temperature is likely rise by 6°C by 2100 if no action is taken according to an international study from the Global Carbon Project. Mark Lynas, who compiled scientific research on this subject for his Royal Society prize-winning book Six Degrees, writes that amount of warming would “cause a mass extinction of almost all life and probably reduce humanity to a few struggling groups of embattled survivors clinging to life near the poles.”
• Lord Griffiths perpetuates the myth that inequality is somehow ‘good’ for us.The Conservative peer – who is also the vice-chair of investment bank Goldman Sachs – tried to justify the bonus culture of the City by telling an audience that “inequality is a way of achieving greater opportunity and prosperity for all”. Richard Wilkinson, of the Equality Trust, provided a rebuttal, while nef’s own research in The Great Transition shows that inequality could cost the UK alone up to £4.5 trillion over the next forty years, because of the social problems it causes.

Ration Me Up #4: To flush or to surf?

Andy Wimbush is nef’s Communications Assistant and blogmaster.

 

The world's data servers are having an increasingly large carbon footprint | Image via TreeHugger

After my last post, there was a bit of confusion about the number of carbon ration coupons you’d need to set aside for using a computer at work. Admittedly, the ration book isn’t entirely clear about this – there’s only a certain amount of text that you can squeeze into one of those tiny squares – so I’ll clarify.

On the Energy page of the ration book, there are ten coupons, each labelled “PC use 1/2hr /day”. The “/day” means “per day”, so you need to start by working out your average daily computer use. I sit in front of a screen for at least seven hours a day when I’m in the office, but at the weekends I try to have digital detox. So my average use per day, is about five hours. Which means I need between three and four coupons over the course of a month.

If your computer use doesn’t extend beyond spreadsheets and word processors, you can stop there. But if, like me, your work involves the internet, you’ll need yet more coupons. Why? Because the internet doesn’t just rely on your computer, but also on the huge data servers that fling videos, images and text around the world. In 2006, US data centres used the same amount of power as the whole of the UK does in two months.

Since I run nef’s blog and manage our website, I probably use the internet for maybe five out of my seven hours at work. So let’s say that’s about four hours a day average. Which means four more coupons.

All in all then, to run my computer and use the internet, I need about seven coupons a month, out of my forty allotted carbon rations.

Perhaps that seems like a lot. It’s certainly a hefty chunk out of my overall ration. Perhaps in a low-carbon economy, where we’re all working a little bit less and operating a bit more locally – so that we wouldn’t necessarily need to be in constant communication with the rest of the world – I could use fewer coupons.

But then again, why should high-tech energy usage be the first to be cut? The beauty of the carbon ration book is that it shows us that sometimes, it’s the more mundane or seemingly low-tech activities that are real climate offenders.

Take flushing the toilet. If you’ve looked at the ration book, you’ll see that water usage gets a full two pages of coupons. Why? Because the whole process of treating water – and especially sewage – emits a lot of carbon dioxide. According to Rob Hopkins at Transition Culture, it’s about  177g of CO2 for every 1,000 litres for normal water usage, with and another 322 g per 1,000 litres for sewage processing.

I rent an old and creaky flat in a probably-Georgian house in South London. We definitely don’t have an eco loo of any description. If I estimate about six flushes a day, that’s a total of 186 flushes a month. With a non-efficient loo, that means I need nine coupons.

We don’t need to dwell too much on the specifics to realise just how ridiculous this is. That’s two more rations than I need to power a computer and use the internet. If it came to the crunch and I had to decide between an elaborate system to dispose of human waste on the one hand, and Borgesian library of information, books, images, films and music, which also doubles as a communications system, on the other, I know which one I’d rather lose.

Staff at Wimpole Hall try out straw bale urinals | Photo via National Trust

The fact is that toilets don’t really need flushes. There, I’ve said it. I’m not a Luddite or a back-to-nature obsessive (I’m defending the internet!), it’s just that I’ve seen systems which work perfectly well with no water, and a tiny fraction of the carbon emissions: compost loos.

Unlike the portaloo toilets you get at festivals and outdoor events, compost loos don’t smell, they’re completely hygienic and you can recycle the waste afterwards as fertiliser. Left for a couple of years in a contained place, human waste becomes completely safe, to be used just like normal manure. All the details on how to build and maintain compost toilets can be found in the brilliant and amusingly written Humanure Handbook, by Joseph Jenkins, which has recently been made available to download as a free PDF.

For the more liquid kind of waste, the process is even simpler. Urine is full of nutrients that plants love, and, if your kidneys are healthy, it’s virtually sterile. The Centre for Alternative Technology actually advises diluting it a bit before pouring it on your veg patch, using one parts urine to ten parts water. And if this is starting to sound a bit too radical for you, you might take comfort in the knowledge that the National Trust – surely a beacon of English respectability and etiquette – has just started providing straw bales for its male gardeners to use as urinals. The bales are then added to the compost heap, which increases its efficiency. In your own garden, you can cut out the middle man and pee right onto the heap. Once again, some enterprising soul has written a book about this. Check out Liquid Gold by Carol Stenfield.

All this should completely eliminate the need for flushing the loo, saving you nine wonderful carbon rations for more interesting things. And your garden (even if it’s just plants on a balcony, like mine) will flourish as a result!

Of course, I can’t rip out my landlord’s loo and stick a compost toilet in there instead. But, I will install a Hippo, a very simple water-saving device that works in any toilet. Stick it in your cistern and save three litres of water per flush. It’ll pay for itself in less than four months. Best of all, it’ll mean I can use the “efficient” water coupons in my ration book, shrinking the number of rations needed from nine to four.

Which leaves all the more rations to spend on the internet…

 

Having it large

Written by Aleksi Knuutila and Eilis Lawlor from the Valuing What Matters team

It does exist after all. Apparently it has been broken for a while and now requires enlargement. Delivering the 2009 Hugo Young lecture at the Guardian, David Cameron stated that he wanted a “big society”, in place of Labour’s “big state”. He believes that the “growth of the state has promoted not social solidarity, but selfishness and individualism”. The alternative is to “help families, individuals, charities and communities come together to solve problems”.

Cameron’s calls for cuts in the scale of government are obviously pandering towards the fiscal conservative wing of his party. To some extent he continues the tradition of earlier conservatism, defined by Thatcher, in which the state was blamed for the moral degradation of society. The state fosters a dependency culture, discharges people from their responsibilities, and displaces families as the proper purveyor of moral values.

Cameron’s true volte face is in coming up with new victims for the state’s malice. Cameron blames government for worsening many of the themes that have traditionally been the concern of the left: the gap between the rich and the poor and material deprivation. The large size of the state, he claims, is “inhibiting, not advancing, the progressive aims of reducing poverty, fighting inequality, and increasing general wellbeing”.

This appears to be a canny political move. Issues such as poverty and particularly inequality would traditionally be far from the conservative agenda. Cameron believes that by naming big government the culprit, he can mobilise conservative support even for traditionally lefty topics. He can move into Labour’s territory without losing his party’s base, as long as a smaller state is presented as the solution. So far his political gambit seems successful.

In Cameron’s view, society consists of individuals, families and communities. Government is external to society and engaged in a zero-sum game with it: The expansion of the state can only be to the detriment of society.

Third sector organizations and social enterprise are put forward as the vehicle for delivering on social goals. Cameron believes these institutions to be almost like an extension of communities, accountable to their will and able to engage them in “self-improvement, mutuality and responsibility”.

The premise that third sector organizations would be representative of community is often false. Many charities that have been tasked with delivering public services have grown so large they are as unresponsive to the needs of their clients as state departments but devoid of any formal accountability. With a large size they also acquire monopoly-like power over the services that they deliver, and can begin to work for an interest of their own. In that sense they have more in common with large corporations. The opening up of competitive markets in public services to third sector organisations has explicitly encouraged this development.

Conversely, the government providing things need not be opposed to citizens taking responsibility. Ideas of design such co-production can make sure that the clients have an active role in the delivery of services. The interface between government and civil society is what matters. Cameron forgets that the state is a part of society too, and that a good society requires strong public investment to maintain public goods and collective solutions. This philosophy makes no provision for preventative services, or long-term solutions of the kind that we now need. In spite of the rhetoric about outcomes, he has reverted with the Conservative obsession with the mode of delivery.

Cameron’s emphasis on decentralization and active citizenship is commendable. Who would not want people holding power and being actively engaged in shaping their lives? As means for delivering the changes in society the “progressive conservatives” are after – social mobility and reductions in poverty – they are blatantly insufficient.

To reduce inequality we must make a political topic of another forgotten part of society – the economy. All major parties today regard the economy as a sphere with its own natural laws and best left to its own devices. The role of government is merely to correct market failures and fix some of the resulting unjustness after the free reign of economic forces. The question all of the parties fail to ask is whether the economic system itself, with its gross inequalities and individualistic bent could be the root of the problem.

Labour’s measures such as the minimum wage and tax credits have obviously mitigated some of the growing disparities in the economy. The Tory promises to lift the threshold of the inheritance tax and cut unemployment benefits can only aggravate them and don’t fit well for Cameron’s newly found interest in the poor.

What is needed is a society of many parts: a fair economy, an effective state and a committed community – all of appropriate size.

Lessons from ecology could help us create a resilient financial system

Sargon Nissan is a researcher in nef’s Access to Finance team.

The financial system must contain a diversity of institutions with different structures and focused on specific market niches, something more like an ecology than a monoculture. | Photo by Panoramas, via Flickr

Quantitative Easing. Bank bailouts. Building society rescues. Fiscal Stimulus packages.

What do they have in common? They are all preventative measures. That is to say, they are trying to stop something bad from happening; in this case stopping the financial crisis metamorphosing into an economic depression.

While the jury is out on how well they succeeded, it is clear there is widespread acceptance of the need to have done something.

Now the question becomes, what next? Prominent commentators and regulators have weighed in but without providing a huge amount of detail. Adair Turner, head of the Financial Services Authority, defined the problem succinctly when he reminded us that

British citizens will be burdened for many years with either higher taxes or cuts in public services – because of an economic crisis whose orgiins lay in the financial system, a crisis cooked up in trading room swhere not just a few but many people earned annual bonuses equal to a lifetime’s earnigns of some of those now suffering the consequences. We need radical change.

But that doesn’t take us any further to understanding what needs to be done. The Treasury’s summer white paper, Reforming Financial Markets, set itself this task and concluded that to achieve a well-functioning financial system that would be stable and effective, what was required was greater scrutiny, competition and diversity. Increased scrutiny, especially of ‘systemically important institutions’ (bailed out banks that were too big to fail), greater competition and an increased role for diverse institutions such as building societies would ensure that a crisis of this kind would not happen again. Yet if we scratch the surface of this gathering consensus, it seems there is little substance underneath.

Despite almost two million people excluded from even having the most basic banking services, the Treasury’s solution boils down to more money for financial capability training rather than difficult decisions about what financial services should be for, and which ones are exploitative. As Faisel Rahman, chief executive of Fair Finance in London’s East End that battles predatory lending amongst excluded and vulnerable communities, reminded me last week; there are almost eight million people reliant on ‘unorthodox’ credit in the UK, meaning often doorstep lending at rates of several hundred per cent, yet while this problem grew we in the UK celebrated having the most sophisticated financial sector in the world, on the doorstep of the communities Fair Finance works with.

Released yesterday, The Ecology of Finance: An alternative white paper on banking and financial sector reform tries to take up this challenge. We argue that radical reforms are needed, but preventative measures will not be enough. To deliver a landscape of financial institutions capable of lending and investing a manner consistent with fairness, inclusivity and long-term economic sustainability an entirely new approach is required.

To achieve the ambitions of a competitive and diverse sector, The Ecology of Finance breaks down what the finance system should be for and used to provide. The short-term profit models of ‘plc-finance’ needs to be constrained by a diversity of institutions with different structures and focused on specific market niches – more like an ecology.

Don’t just take it from me either. Andrew Haldane, the Bank of England’s Executive Director for Financial Stability, has identified the need to look to ecological and epidemiological lessons for better understanding how complex systems – be they ecosystems or the financial system – behave. It is not simply a question of more complexity is always better, but rather that there are lessons to be learned from the robustness and the vulnerability of things as diverse as rainforests and outbreaks of epidemics.

Hence, to create a financial system fit for our complex society and economy, we identify preventative and positive financial reforms that could ensure the health of our economy and also enable a greater diversity of institutions to flourish.

We recommend

• Separating retail from other banking and preventing deposit-taking banks from engaging in other, risky activities
• Setting up a social investment bank, a green investment bank and a Post Bank
• Regulating financial institutions according to their functions and how risky their activities: the bigger the bank the higher the capital requirements
• Reforms to encourage more mutuals,  co-operatives and community finance institutions
• Legislation to force banks to be open about their lending and to lend to the financially excluded.

 

Stewart Wallis speaking at the LocalGreenLinks event in Hereford

Ration Me #3: the tale of the greedy fridge-freezer

Andy Wimbush is nef’s Communications Assistant and blogmaster.

Someone fairly prolific in the radical green movement – I forget who exactly – once said that the refrigerator was the sign of a truly decadent society.

At first, this strikes me as remarkably unfair to the fridge. If anything, the poor old fridge seems like the most thrifty and considerate of kitchen appliances. It stretches out the lifetime of our food, thus cutting down our wastage and preventing us from taking daily trips to the shop. Freezing food is especially useful in this regard. I recently stumbled across a handy list of fifty tips for reducing food waste, and a good proportion of them suggest freezing bits of food that you might otherwise throw away. Day-old bread can be frozen for when you need breadcrumbs. Fresh herbs can be frozen in ice-cubes and then tossed into soups. Even the tops of carrots, peppers and onions can be frozen for creating vegetable stock later on.

But last week, I started using the Ration Me Up Carbon Ration Book, produced by the Ministry of Trying to Do Something About It for nef’s event, The Bigger Picture: Festival of Interdependence. Running a fridge 24/7 takes up a greedy 15% of my monthly ration: 6 out of 39 coupons. That’s the same as travelling 200 miles on a train. The fridge no longer looks like such a sensible idea.

There is, apparently, a small contingent of very dedicated green activists who’ve cut out their fridge entirely. An alternative solution might be to only use the fridge in the summer, and simply store perishable food outside during the winter.

A zeer pot in use: sand in the outer pot, food in the middle one. Photo via Practical Action.

More ingenious is the “zeer pot” clay fridge, a very simple technology increasingly being used by people in India and sub-Saharan Africa to preserve food. It consists of a two clay bowls, one inside the other. The gap between the bowls is filled sand and food is put into the inner bowl. The idea is that you then pour water over the sand, the water evapourates slowly and thus cools the food. According to development organisation Practical Action, a zeer pot can extend the shelf-life of vegetables from a matter of days to as much as three or four weeks. All without any electricity. They have an excellent guide to making your own zeer pot, if any of you decide you’d rather spend your carbon rations on watching TV or travelling around.

Of course, the simplest solution is to share the damned thing. A fridge which is empty uses more power than one which is full, so it makes sense to have your fridge stocked with other people’s food. (Apparently, you can even save energy by padding out your fridge with carrier bags full of newspaper!) By sharing my fridge usage with the three other people I live with, I only need to stick one and a half coupons onto my ration book.

The same principle goes for heating, lighting, cooking and buying new stuff. If we’re prepared to share, we can live within our carbon rations without having to sacrifice too many creature comforts.