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.
Andy Wimbush is nef’s Communications Assistant and blogmaster.
I am trying to make this a regular Friday thing…
The good news:
- The billions we currently spend on unemployment benefits could be used more effectively help deprived communities weather the recession. So says nef’s latest report Benefits that work.
- Breaking up the banks is no longer a marginal idea: it seems that everyone from Andy Haldane at the Bank of England to Alistair Darling now thinks that breaking up the mega-banks would be sensible. nef called for this earlier in the year in our report I.O.U.K.
- Age of Stupid director Franny Armstrong was ’saved’ from a mugging by Boris Johnson . The Mayor of London just so happened to be cycling past as Franny was being intimidated by a group of teenagers wielding an iron bar. Saving a green activist while riding a bike has got to be the act of eco-friendly Good Samaritanism par excellence. Let’s hope Franny managed to get Boris to sign London up to 10:10.
The bad news:
- Climate change could lead to a new era of global insecurity, so say the top military figures who make up the Military Advisory Council at the Institute for Environmental Security in the Netherlands (via New Scientist).
- Ed Miliband has admitted that the chances of a global deal at COP15 in Copenhagen is increasingly unlikely. The Minister for Climate Change and Energy said that a full treaty could be up to a year away.
- 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.
Aleksi Knuutila is a researcher in the Valuing What Matters programme at nef
Some commentators believe that the worst of the current recession is behind us. Whether this is true or not, we can be sure that its full social consequences have not yet been felt. People are still losing their work, and unemployment may well rise to 3 million next year. Drastic cuts in spending may make this harmful trend worse.
As previous nef research expected, the recession increases the gap between wealthy and poor areas. Recent research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation the communities that already had highest unemployment have suffered the largest losses of jobs. These areas don’t suffer only from a lack of employment. The downturn has also forced over half of local authorities to reduce their staff and cuts services. The poorest neighbourhoods suffer from both job losses and a cut in the services that support them.
In the form of benefit payments, billions of pounds are spent on these areas. These resources succeed in keeping their recipients out of the gutter. At the same time, benefit payments constrain claimants’ possibilities to improve their lives. Our social security functions more like a trap than a ladder, and is fuelling the deprivation of poor communities.
Welfare reform has for long focused on making work pay. nef’s new report, Benefits That Work, shows that purely financial calculations don’t capture what matters to the unemployed. Benefit claimants are above all concerned that accepting work will make their life more insecure. Benefits systems are function like an on-off switch; either you are on it or not. This makes it insensitive to the fickle and uncertain nature of today’s labour market. Taking up a job with irregular hours and no employment protection risks leaving people penniless.
The benefits spend could be channelled so that it allows people to improve their own communities while helping them to move towards employment. Benefits That Work presents an Social Return on Investment (SROI) analysis of an innovative scheme to make the happen. With the Community Allowance, community organizations would be able to hire unemployed people to work with them for the good of their area. The participants would have their benefits secured for a year, and would be able to earn a small, capped income on top of them. Protecting the current level of benefits would allow the claimants, with the support from the community organization, to focus their efforts on moving towards the labour market.
What makes the Community Allowance effective is that it plays up the strengths of the claimants. Many employment schemes offer subsidized work placements for the unemployed. They often leave the participants feeling stigmatized, as if they would not be good enough for the work without government footing the bill. In contrast, Community Allowance engages the unemployed in work that they are best placed to perform, due to their close connections with the neighbourhood or their capacity to act as positive role models.
Our SROI analysis of the Community Allowance shows that for each £1 invested into it, £10 of social value is created. This extra value is received by the participants, their communities and families. The state is likely to recuperate more than the resources necessary to run the scheme. Channelling the benefits spend so that it works for the good of deprived will take the edge off the ruin of the downturn.
Andrew Simms is nef’s Policy Director and head of nef’s Climate Change programme.
Without essential funds we won't meet climate change targets. The lucrative oil industry has money to spare, so why not tax it? | Photo by arbyreed via Flickr
Many people forget that the basic principles for the Copenhagen negotiations were set long ago at the Earth Summit in 1992. Rich countries were supposed to go first, fastest and furthest, and pay to help others follow in the footsteps. They failed in every single aspect. Consequently, all they can do now is beg, grovel and implore the major low income countries – the likes of Brazil, India and China – to participate willingly, and in good faith.
Of course, it’s not that simple. The “Why should we, when you didn’t and still aren’t?” position may feel smugly strong to negotiators from the global south. But, it needs to be used with extreme caution. Played with too much zeal, while living on the frontline of climate change, they might find that the house of economic development which they hope to move into has burned down long before they get there.
Without a genuine, global commitment to prevent an accumulation of greenhouse gases that is likely to push us over a 2C temperature rise, we could be giving a whole new meaning to the idea of a “scorched earth” policy.
It’s all too easy to imagine a carbon stand-off that has tragic, violent consequences. Western consumers are repeatedly told by their politicians that little matters if China doesn’t play ball. Meanwhile, China views the nihilistic inaction of western societies with a shrug, and keeps building coal-fired power stations. Small behaviour changes happen in the United States, a bit more renewable energy comes on tap, but the bigger policy stays in place: the real fireworks of using the world’s largest military to control declining oil supplies.
The latter gets sustained by its own weirdly self-supporting logic. Since becoming oil-dependent in the early 20th century, the dominant superpower’s military might is used to ensure the fuel supplies that, in turn, keep its own military functioning and mobile. Up to the first world war, it was the British and their navy. Afterwards, it was the US with its air, land and naval forces.
It’s possibly the greatest energy inefficiency we have, not to mention the way that this military “oil protection racket” also removes the incentive for energy alternatives to develop.
In a single year (2007) the US military spent over $12bn on fuel, using the equivalent of 363,000 barrels of oil per day. It is thought to be the biggest institutional buyer of oil in the world. To put those numbers into perspective, it means that just one nation’s military fuel use was almost double that another entire nation, Ireland.
With so much locked into the continuing use and extraction of oil and coal, what will it take for everyone to raise their sights?
The European Union’s murky statement that developing countries would need €100bn per year by 2020 to tackle climate change, but without being very clear how much would come from where, was less than inspiring. Those who remember the 1992 Earth Summit might get a sense of déjà vu, as back then the summit concluded that $125bn new money from rich to poor countries would be needed annually to implement its agreements, virtually none of which was forthcoming. And let’s not pretend that, even during the global recession, the money is not out there.
The oil company BP may have just been hit with a record $87m fine for safety failings at its US, Texas City refinery, but it still managed a massive $5bn profit in just the third quarter of 2009.
If radical steps are not taken when the climatic conditions on which civilisation depends are under threat, when will they be? Why not, quite seriously, impose a near-100% tax on the profits of the oil majors for the next five years? All the proceeds could then be invested into both beginning the great low-carbon transition at home, and delivering the financial resources without which a meaningful Copenhagen deal will not be agreed. At a stroke, it would generate the vast majority of the funds that most say is essential. We’d also be able to save billions in that other area quite rightly referred to as “unproductive expenditure”, the military.
Andy Wimbush is nef’s Communications Assistant and blogmaster.
Writer and filmmaker Ann Danylkiw was at The Bigger Picture: Festival of Interdependence on Saturday, camera in hand. In this video, Ann gets the low down about Ration Me Up and the Ministry of Trying to Do Something About It from artist Clare Patey.
Remember, if you picked up a ration book at The Bigger Picture, you can join me in an attempt at one planet living next month, when I’ll be trying to stick to carbon budget.
<h3><img class="size-full wp-image-95 alignleft" style="margin-left:5px;margin-right:5px;" title="andywimbush" src="http://neftriplecrunch.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/andywimbush.jpg" alt="" width="34" height="34" /><em> </em><a href="http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php" target="_blank"><img class="alignright" style="border:0 none;" src="http://s7.addthis.com/button1-share.gif" border="0" alt="Bookmark and Share" width="125" height="16" /></a>Andy Wimbush is <strong>nef</strong>'s Communications Assistant and blogmaster.</h3> <!-- AddThis Button BEGIN --> Insert your text here!
Andy Wimbush is nef’s Communications Assistant and blogmaster.
Clare Patey, at the Ministry of Trying to Do Something About It
Inside, it’s more or less an empty room. Bare brick walls. No curtains at the windows. A drab patterned rug has been placed in the middle of the floor. And the only furniture to speak of is a kind of desk knocked together from three old suitcases.
Behind the desk stands a woman wearing a vintage blue woollen suit. On her head, is a matching hat, with the words “RATION ME UP” embroidered just above the brim. This is Clare Patey, an artist whose previous work has included Feast on the Bridge – a sit-down dinner for hundreds of people on London’s Southwark Bridge.
There’s a crowd of us standing in the room now. And Clare has started handing out little books, each one a different colour. I look down at the green one which is now in my hands: Ration Me Up. Carbon Ration Book. One Month.
Flicking through the book, I find coupons for almost every activity in my life: taking a bath, running a fridge, eating vegetables, boiling a kettle, taking a bus, even buying a pair of socks. On the back of the book is a grid of forty squares.
These forty squares, I’m told, represent my carbon ration for one month. That’s based on the knowledge that in order to avoid catastrophic climate change, each person in the world must limit their yearly output of greenhouse gases to 1.15 tonnes of CO₂e. For some people, such as those in developing countries, that will be more than they currently emit, allowing them to raise their material standard of living. But for someone like me in the UK, where the average annual emission is around 11 tonnes of CO₂e, that’s going to mean a fairly hefty carbon detox.
I’m already a vegetarian who doesn’t fly and who cycles to work, but apparently it’ll take even greater levels of dedication to the cause to get me down to one-planet living. Next month I’ll be trying to stay within my carbon ration. If you picked up a ration book at The Bigger Picture on Saturday, you can join me and my much obliging other half, Belinda, on a low carbon adventure here at the nef blog. Post your comments, share your photos and let us know how you get on.
Ed, engrossed in his ration book, while Andrew addresses the crowd.
We may or may not have a high-profile guest quietly joining in too, in bizarre twist of fate blurring one fake Ministry with another genuine one. At a rally last week, nef policy director Andrew Simms managed to press one of these little ration books into the hands of the Rt Hon Ed Miliband MP, otherwise known as the Minister for Energy and Climate Change. It turned out that Ed was so taken by the idea that he was busy mentally totting up his rations and paid precious little attention to Andrew’s speech. So, who knows, maybe Ed’s out there busy trying to work out how many pairs of underpants he can afford this month, just like the rest of us.
Ration Me Up is part of a series of new work around art and the new economics, commissioned by nef, supported by Platform and funded by Arts Council England.
Dr Stephen Spratt is Director of nef’s Centre for the Future Economy.
Mervyn King has annoyed Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling again with his call for UK banks to be split into smaller groups focusing on either retail or investment banking, but not both. King does not share the government’s belief that stricter regulation would prevent banks heading straight back to the casino, describing such thinking as a “delusion“.
He is almost certainly right. Banks like being big, and they particularly like being too big too fail. With the backing of the taxpayer, should their gambles go wrong, they can borrow cheaply and make huge bets in the market, safe in the knowledge that they will capture any gains but be protected from losses.
It is not surprising then that the banks also oppose King’s idea. Of course, they say that this is because of the enormous complexity, or “practical difficulties”, that implementing it would involve. Another reason is more likely. Simply, they are able to make a lot of money from leveraging their depositor base to support speculative activities elsewhere.
But this creates strong incentives to focus on the more “exciting”, and highly lucrative, gambling activities at the expense of the “boring” business of providing banking services to individuals, families and small businesses. This is nothing new in the UK, where financial exclusion remains a huge problem and small businesses struggle to access finance at all. The closure of branch after branch, particularly in disadvantaged areas, is just the most brazen example.
It seems very hard for banks to concentrate on providing a good service to these parts of their customer base when the global casino beckons. If some banks want to roll the dice in the markets, fine – they just shouldn’t be allowed to gamble our money to do so, and they certainly should not have these bets underwritten by the taxpayer.
For banks to serve their retail customers well, they should be dedicated to this essential function, and only this. By cutting banks down to size we could bring them closer to the communities they should be serving, and so better able to meet local needs.
At nef we would go further. Will Hutton on this site rightly calls for root and branch reform. Here are a couple of ideas of how that process might start. Most “investment” banks don’t really do any real investing. They are trading banks. But we do need real investment banks that focus on long-term needs, and nowhere is this more obvious than with green energy and transport infrastructure.
As well as separating out retail banking, why not also restructure the investment side? The government, on our behalf, retains its stake in the banking system, and it could use this as the means to form a green investment bank, charged with financing these long-term investments. And why stop there? A national housing bank to underpin a more stable housing market that meets people’s needs is an idea whose time has come.
For a while not so very long ago, people remembered that the purpose of banking was not to feather its own nest, but to provide the vital financial services and long-term investments that underpin our economy and society. King seems capable of seeing through the hard sell of the financial lobby to recall this. It would be good if the chancellor and prime minister could do likewise.
Andy Wimbush is nef’s Communications Assistant and blogmaster.
“A map of the world that does not include Utopia,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.”
A map from Thomas More's Utopia
“Progress is the realisation of Utopias.” Can you imagine Peter Mandelson saying that to the CBI? Would Gordon Brown produce such a quip at the World Economic Forum? Even Barack Obama might have problems with this level of political lyricism. Progress might be the realisation of ambition, enterprise, or even dreams, but not utopias.
Utopianism tends to be a pejorative term these days. It’s associated with religious and political myths which we now might find naive and old-fashioned: be it the New Jerusalem of Christianity or the promised revolution of Marxism. The quotation from Wilde comes from his 1891 essay ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism‘, a political polemic with a curiously evangelical and redemptive tone.
We’ve witnessed too many failed or dangerous utopias to be taken in by such rhetoric anymore. How many of the 20th century’s worst atrocities started with a vision of a perfected world? And even when they haven’t ended in totalitarianism, utopian mindsets have collided with the wall of reality sooner or later. The global financial crisis of the last eighteen months has put paid to the neoliberal belief that history “ended” with the rise of free market capitalism.
Today we’re inclined to agree with the political philosopher John Gray, who writes that “utopia is the projection into the future of a model of a society that cannot be realized.”
And yet, somehow, I still have some sympathy with Wilde’s vision. Even once we accept the danger of utopianism and see through its mirages, we still need to chart a course for our societies to follow. We will always need some sort of compass to guide us.
The sociologist Stephen Lukes came up with the idea of a ‘concrete utopia’. Unlike John Gray’s definition, the concrete utopia is based on ‘the knowledge of a self-transforming present, not an ideal future’.
There is no doubt that we are currently in a ’self-transforming present’. Thanks to a century and a half of industrialisation powered by fossil fuels, the world’s climate is changing – not somewhere else or at a future date, but right here, right now. The biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression has shaken all economic and political orthodoxies. And as inequality has risen in developing countries, so too has social instability and unrest. If we do nothing about these things, the present will transform itself for the worse. nef has calculated the costs of carrying on with ‘business-as-usual’ until 2050: the UK will be faced with a £1.6 to £2.5 trillion bill for climate change, and a £4.5 trillion bill for social problems arising from income inequality.
In order to steer clear of these threats, we’ll need something like a concrete utopia. Our new report The Great Transition attempts to put in place some clear steps towards the kind of economy which works for people and the planet. The Great Transition is undoubtedly utopian in spirit: we call it ‘the tale of how things turned out right’. But its recommendations are based right here in the present moment. There are things we can do immediately to tackle climate change, restore economic stability and create a more equal human settlement.
For the concrete utopian, it isn’t enough just to draw utopia onto Wilde’s map. First, you have to do some scouting, to see if that country actually exists, to glimpse its shores, even from afar. At nef, we’ve been able to do so through the vast array of practical projects we’ve been involved with over the years. Timebanking, complementary currencies, new methods of participation and democracy, Transition Towns, our BizFizz project for budding entrepreneurs, co-productive public services and barter economies all constitute, as we said in our pamphlet From the Ashes of the Crash, part of a ’sleeping architecture of a new, diverse and resilient local financial system’, human-scale and low-carbon. And it’s on these foundations that we’ll start to build our concrete utopia.
If you’d like to glimpse the beginnings of the Great Transition, and help make it a reality, make sure you head along to The Bigger Picture: Festival of Interdependence, this Saturday 24 October, at the Bargehouse, South Bank, London.
of a new, diverse and resilient local financial system
Andy Wimbush is nef’s Communications Assistant and blogmaster.
Today, apparently, is Blog Action Day 2009. The idea? Everyone blogs about climate change! In a frenzy of web activity! (Just don’t mention the carbon footprint)
But what can blogging really do for climate change? Well, for a start, it provides a means for climate scientists to connect directly to a popular audience, without having to rely on the press and broadcast media. Ben Goldacre, doctor and author of Bad Science, has argued that more scientists should be blogging to increase public understanding. Fortunately, in the field of climate science there are some excellent blogs out there.
For dataheads, there’s no beating RealClimate, a strictly science-only blog run by five professional climate scientists, working at leading universities and scientific institutions, including the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The RealClimate guys don’t get involved in politics or economics, but they’re keen debunkers of pseudoscience nonsense that abounds in the climate denialosphere.
Then there’s Climate Progress, written by the unstoppable Joseph Fromm, who holds a Ph.D in Physics and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Joe goes beyond science to think about the political and economic solutions we need, and remains upbeat about the possibility of global climate deal at Copenhagen. His coverage of the US climate bill is second to none, and his rebuttals of climate blunders are hilarious as well as definitive. I especially recommend his take on the new book from the authors of Freakonomics. Climate Progress really is one of the best blogs around, climate-related or otherwise.
At nef, we’ve always believed that only a cultural paradigm shift will stop climate change, and deliver the economy we really need. That’s why we’ve made the arts such a vital part of The Bigger Picture: Festival of Interdependence. My final climate-related blog recommendation is that of the RSA’s Arts and Ecology project. Every book, exhibition, film or social movement relating to climate change and other environmental issues gets clocked here. Well worth a visit.
So there’s my contribution to Blog Action Day. Sending our precious readers elsewhere. Go off and explore, but be sure to come back to the nef blog. There are big plans afoot!
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