Politics for the people?

Stephen Whitehead is a project manager in the Democracy and Participation team at nef

One of the most enduring myths about the decline in British democracy is that of the apathetic voter, too lazy to take part. But it’s nonsense. All over the UK, people care passionately about the community, the country and the world in which they live. They volunteer, they campaign, they sign up to initiatives like 10:10 to help look after the environment.

But for many engaged, passionate people, politics seems like a dead end. The individualistic,  impotent tools that we are offered to hold government to account – intermittent elections where most votes are wasted and the choice is between parties competing to represent the same narrow set of floating voters – simply doesn’t seem worth the time it takes. But we shouldn’t let that fool us into thinking that people don’t care.

I was reminded of this again last month when I attended the Power 2010 deliberative poll which brought 130 ordinary Britons together to discuss ways to improve British democracy. Many of the participants were cynical about the politicians who claim to represent us. But all of them were passionate about making our government more democratic.

Together, by talking through the issues and cross-examining experts from across the spectrum of opinion, these citizens assembled a shortlist of reforms which they think will bring democracy back to the people.

From proportional representation to a written constitution, from stronger local government to a bill of rights, these ideas represent many long-fought arguments about what’s wrong with the British state. But there are also some ideas which break new ground. My particular favourite is the call for more events just like the one I attended – deliberative public consultations on all of the major decisions facing local and national governments. These events give people a chance to really get their hands on the business of government, and the quality of the debates and decisions offers a sharp rebuke to those who say that the public are too lazy, stupid or reactionary to be trusted with power.

The next stage of the Power 2010 project is a public vote on which of the final five ideas will form the basis of the reform campaign that will kick in to high gear in the run up to the general election. This is a once in a generation chance for us to force the issues we care about on to the agenda. So please take the time to vote for deliberation and take a step toward putting political power back into the hands of the people best qualified to use it – all of us.

HuffPo on HPI

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

An interesting piece by Kari Stoever in The Huffington Post, reflecting on the discussion about nef’s Happy Planet Index that took place last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

The piece usefully reflects on the “intuitive” sense that money doesn’t buy happiness, an intuition reflected in the findings of well-being research. Even so, it doesn’t  get the interpretation of the Index quite right. It says:

“the United States ranks as low as most of sub-Saharan Africa. In other words, consuming more than our share of resources doesn’t make us happier, despite the fact that we live almost twice as long than those in sub-Saharan Africa who consume very little.”

This suggest that life satisfaction scores (how the HPI measures happiness) in the US are as low as in sub-Sarahan Africa. They aren’t. But what the HPI does show is that Americans are producing fewer units of well-being per units of resources consumed than countries like Malawi and Congo. Which is a sobering thought indeed for the champions of consumption who constitute the vast majority of Davos participants.

Denying the evidence

Karen Schucan-Bird is a researcher in nef’s Climate Change and Energy team.

You may not be aware of this but, late last week, Ed Miliband ‘declared war’. This was not the usual, armed conflict type. Instead, the climate secretary entered into an ongoing battle based around knowledge and research. The main opponents were those who continue to deny the existence of human powered climate change. Let’s call them climate deniers (the use of this contested term, I realise, is worthy of a blog in and of itself but that will have to wait for another day).

The Minister for Climate Change and Energy was concerned, rightly so, about the extensive media coverage dedicated to the minority opinions of the climate deniers. The coverage was so extensive that I do not need to repeat the details here. Instead, I am interested in the nature of this debate and want it says about the way in which human knowledge is produced, debated and advanced.

Ed Miliband raised concerns about the media’s role in obstructing public understanding and promoting confusion about climate change. The Minister is not the first to make this observation. There is a growing body of academic literature that points to the powerful role played by the media in the climate change debate.[1] Indeed, the media seems to be one of the main platforms for expressing the climate denial perspective. This is problematic not only because the media influences public opinion but also because this form of debate completely by-passes the standard way in which scholarship and knowledge is debated, revised and advanced.[2]

Within the academic community, peer review is the cornerstone of knowledge production. In order to ensure publication (and so legitimatisation), research findings must respond to critiques and comments as part of the peer review process. Peer review, whilst not a perfect system, is the main mechanism we have for validating knowledge. Climate deniers disregard this system. First, the majority of their claims are not submitted to peer reviewed journals. Second, the peer review process has been critical to furthering our understanding of climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change generates reports based on a thorough and critical assessment of the evidence. This is what makes us confident that the findings are robust and trustworthy. Yet, it is this very process (and the findings) that climate deniers continue to dispute.

I don’t always agree with Ed Miliband but his recent concerns about the climate deniers are worth heeding. We need to continue to contest these views, not only to defend the rigour of academic knowledge advancement but, more urgently, to defend the future of our civilisation.

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[1] See, for example, Boykoff, M., and Roberts, T. (2007) Media Coverage of Climate Change: Current Trends, Strengths and Weaknesses, Human Development Report Office Occasional Paper (UNDP)

[2] Antilla, L (2005) Climate of scepticism: US newspaper coverage of the science of climate change, Global Environmental Change, vol. 15: 338-352

How to make an economist squirm

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

“Economic growth cannot continue as before”. “We need to consider the possibilities of de-growth”. These were some of the concluding remarks at the Growth in Transition conference held in Vienna last week. The kind of thing you hear radical economists and think tanks saying more and more nowadays. But here the context was a very different. A conference organised by the environment ministry of a European nation (Austria), and sponsored and supported by seven other ministries including the Federal Chancellery, and the Federal Ministry for Finance, the nation’s leading banks, main supermarket chain and the Chamber of Commerce.

The event was perhaps the first time that such a broad spectrum of mainstream bodies have agreed to confront the challenge of our times – how to transform our growth-hungry economy into something more sustainable, stable and socially just. Of course, not everyone jumped at the solution of doing without growth – and the rhetoric of ‘green growth’ continued to be bandied about. But in plenary on the morning of the second day, over 40 minutes, Professor Felix Ekardt of the University of Rostock drilled home the message that such green growth was not enough – that we needed to stop growing. You could almost hear the audience wincing.

It’s clear that this is a message which will take some time to sink home. A representative of the Austrian National Bank spoke excellently on the need to shrink the financial system, reduce inequalities and reduce debt. But she quickly, and without much discussion, expressed the faith that economic growth could be decoupled from resource use.  I approached her later and highlighted that, allowing for ‘business-as-usual’ economic growth, this would require a 95% increase in resource efficiency by 2050 (as nef has recently calculated in the report Growth isn’t Possible). When I asked her whether we can really gamble humanity’s fate on the ability to achieve such efficiency gains, she did something quite unusual.  She squirmed. It was only momentary, and was soon followed up by a repetition of the same mantra of efficiency. However, I have hope for her.

82 months and counting…

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

If economics was subject to the same evidence-based scrutiny as climate change, our world would be run very differently. Photo by genericface via Flickr.

The world is not run according to climate science. Amid the almost hysterical jeering since the Copenhagen climate summit, it’s a fact worth remembering. If things were done with one eye carefully checking the planet’s ecological engines and the resource levels in its fuel tank, it would look very different The largest indoor snow park in the world would not, for example, be in the roasting Middle Eastern emirate of Dubai. Public transport would be quick and cheap, and Richard Branson would be an unknown gardener, quietly cycling back and forth to his organically-run allotment.

Yet fear of the likely adjustments needed to halt dangerous climate change seems to fuel the vitriol of the vociferous minority attacking climate science. It’s odd when you think what those changes might be. A cartoon currently going around sums it up. An academic-type gives a lecture, listing the outcomes of climate action: energy independence, clean water, clean air, green jobs, liveable cities, healthy children etc etc, while a man in the audience blusters, “But what if it’s a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?”

And, it’s not, of course, a hoax. The basic chemistry of global warming has been understood and remained unchanged for around 200 years. Stories concerning the science in recent weeks have been of the type, “how long can you hold your breath?” Not “can we actually breathe underwater?” At the same time, observed trends on greenhouse gas emissions, measured since the last major report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), reveal the opposite of scaremongering.

If anything, the IPCC has been too conservative, having underestimated how quickly we would be pushed toward dangerous change. Actual carbon emissions have been beyond even their “most fossil-fuel-intensive scenario”. Crowing over the inclusion in its last report of an erroneous date for the melting of Himalayan glaciers drowned out a new report from the World Glacier Monitoring Service, that detailed an “unbroken acceleration in melting” of glaciers around the world.

Sadly, right now, the climate change deniers have little to fear. We have no policies or actions remotely equal to the threat. Why is that? It is partly because the world is not run in respect of basic, well-understood physical laws. It is run according to the dictates of an altogether more variable discipline, economics, whose insights and proposals are subject to a weaker scrutiny. The real world ticks reliably according to the laws on thermodynamics and the conservation of energy. Such consistency cannot be claimed for the notion that a deregulated, greed-driven approach is the most efficient way to organise banking. But what if economic policy was subject to the same standard of evidence and review as climate science?

What would natural science make of the assumptions underlying mainstream economic models? They include the classic assertions that we are all perfectly rational, make choices that are unaffected by the behaviour of others, and that we have “perfect information”, knowing everything important there is to know. Or there’s the one in which an infinite number of small firms compete in open markets with no barriers to entry (think Walmart, Microsoft, Amazon, Tesco, Google). And the idea that consumption can grow infinitely on a finite planet.

Orthodox economics is based on simplifications that so distort the real world as to make it unrecognisable, yet its basic tenets are credulously repeated on an almost daily basis in national newspapers and on television news. A genuinely evidence-based approach to economic policymaking would not produce a system remotely like the one we have, the business-as-usual version that many climate sceptics seem so eager to defend. Given its task, the vast range of subjects covered, the thousands of scientists involved, and the sheer size of its reports, what’s stunning about the IPCC’s work is that comparing it to any economic analysis used to actually run the world is like comparing the complete Oxford English Dictionary to a guide to slang published by the Sunday Sport.

Elsewhere, some voices have called for there to be a separate climate sceptics’ report. On one hand, this misses the point. If the sceptics’ science was good enough to be published in decent, peer-reviewed journals, it would be considered alongside everything else by the IPCC. But on the other hand, subjecting the deniers to the same degree of rigorous review as everyone else is a rather delicious prospect. If that was done, the final report would likely be short indeed.

And, on current trends, it is still the case that by the end of the year 2016, the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will make it unlikely that we’ll stay below the critical 2°C temperature rise. It’s 82 months and counting…

Andrew Simms at the LSE: The New Economics

Andy Wimbush is nef’s Communications Assistant and blogmaster.

Our policy director, Andrew Simms gave a lecture to the London School of Economics last night introducing the kind of economics we do here at nef.

Listen now (mp3; 38 MB; approx 82 minutes)

Cut the bad habits

Rupert Crilly is a researcher in Environmental Economics at nef

Photo by wools via Flickr

We used to get along well with oil, in a lonely sort of way. It has played a major role in the advancement of much of our civilisation, providing energy and materials. But now our progress does not have to depend on it. Emerging from the recession provides the ideal time to redirect our progress.

Black Gold
Over 4000 years ago we used asphalt, present in most crude petroleums, as a fairly benign glue to build the walls of Babylon. And the industrial revolution was a bright spark in the history of human innovation: our technological advances have revolutionised how, where- and even when- we live. It wasn’t long before Thomas Midgley, Jr. developed both leaded gasoline and CFCs, certainly in the top five recent environmental disasters. We learned to use oil to provide energy, fuelling our cars, and help in the creating of plastics, pesticides, fertilisers and solvents. But, despite our addiction, we now need to use the alternatives.

Taxing the Bad
This month the Office of National Statistics posted employment figures (the lowest in over ten years; see below) and an estimate that the UK has, behind the other G7 countries, emerged from the recession with growth of 0.1%.

The graph above, from the Office of National Statistics, shows the employment rate for September to November 2009 was 72.4%, the “lowest since winter 1996-97 and is down 0.1 on the quarter”. Average regular pay (excluding bonuses) was up 1.1% over the same period to £424/week. This was the lowest annual growth rate since records began in 2001.

The 0.1% growth of the economy has been used for two opposite viewpoints on fiscal policy: that the government should cut our budgetary deficit by slimming our net spending, and that our spending levels should be maintained in order to secure the economy’s recovery. Neither addresses our addiction to oil and fossil fuel-based consumerism. Fiscal stimulus should be ploughed into building clean and renewable energy sources, creating ‘green’ jobs and preserving our natural environment. As many have advocated, including the economist Paul Krugman, the tax system would be an effective way to transition our economy to a cleaner future that would actually help the economy and the environment. Tax the ‘bads’ (fossil fuels, aviation, environmental degradation) and nurture the ‘goods’ (employment tax credits, subsidise renewable energy).

In times of darkness and uncertainty we should turn to someone who knows better. So, I close with some help from the Tick: “Everybody was a baby once, Arthur. Oh, sure, maybe not today, or even yesterday. But once. Babies, chum: tiny, dimpled, fleshy mirrors of our us-ness, that we parents hurl into the future, like leathery footballs of hope. And you’ve got to get a good spiral on that baby, or evil will make an interception.”

Tobin Tax

Andy Wimbush is nef’s Communications Assistant and blogmaster.

The Tobin Tax is back in the headlines again, with Gordon Brown now insisting that support for a levy on financial transactions is growing. I’ve also noticed that our friends at the World Development Movement are starting to campaign in this area. nef made a case for the Tobin Tax way back in 2001, with our report Robin Hood Tax.

All of which gives me license to reprint a cartoon I published in the last edition nef’s newspaper, Radical Economics. Enjoy!

(click for a bigger version)

Football, floodlights and well-being

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

What solution do primary school children propose for the high energy use involved in floodlighting football matches? Simple – stop playing matches at night. Of course, such a change would require greater working flexibility, so that typical working hours don’t get in the way of spectators getting to the match, but we needn’t expect primary school children to get into these details…

Working with three local authorities in Wales (Caerphilly, Torfaen and Carmarthenshire), nef is developing a website for children on how to live good lives that don’t cost the Earth. So as to get a better picture of what makes children happy, Jody Aked and I have been running workshops with children about happiness and sustainability. We’ve discovered a quiet revolution. In schools around the country, children are getting the environmental issues in a way that makes Swampy look like Susan Palin.  They spout facts about recycling, they name and shame energy-guzzling teachers, and – ok – she said carbon ninoxide instead of carbon monoxide, but I still think knowing about either is pretty impressive for a 9 year old.

And do they get the message about well-being?  Do they believe that you can have a good life without costing the Earth.  Here the message is a bit more mixed.  Yes, some children highlighted receiving an iPod or playing on their Playstation as the last moment they felt ‘on top of the world’.  But many mentioned  scoring goals, acting in a play, or simply the snow. And when we asked them to give their top tip for feeling happier whilst saving the planet, they had no difficulty – many bigged up turning off the telly, and doing sport.  But only during the day of course.

Growth is good … isn’t it?

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

Like a patient waiting for hospital scan results, this week the government nervously anticipates new growth figures for the economy. Any sign of an increase and relief could quickly lead to self-satisfaction about its handling of the recession. Approving nods may be seen later this week in Davos at the World Economic Forum. Why? Because among political and business classes, growth, measured by rising GDP, is considered always a “good thing”. But is it?

The banking crisis taught us that when things look good on paper, if the underlying accounting system is faulty, it can conceal high risk and imminent disaster – as Jared Diamond put it in Collapse, his book about societies throughout history that fell by wrongly estimating the resilience of their environmental life-support systems. What looks like wealth might just be a one-off fire sale of irreplaceable natural capital. Ecologically speaking, he writes, “an impressive-looking bank account may conceal a negative cashflow”.

To avoid collapse the economy has to operate within thresholds that do not critically undermine the things that we depend on on a daily basis. They’re often interconnected, like a sufficiently stable climate, productive farmland, fresh water and a healthy diversity of plants and animals.

On climate change, a new piece of research by the New Economics Foundation thinktank looks at which rates of global economic growth are compatible with prevention of a dangerous level of warming.

It shows that, even with the most optimistic likely uptake of low-carbon energy, it is seemingly impossible to reconcile a growing global economy with a good likelihood of limiting global temperature rise to 2C, the agreed political objective of the European Union, and widely considered the maximum rise to which humanity can adapt without serious difficulty.

In this context, Adair Turner, chair of the Financial Services Authority and the Committee on Climate Change, refers to the pursuit of growth for its own sake as a “false god“. Other work by Professor Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at Manchester University concludes that: “Economic growth in the OECD cannot be reconciled with a 2C, 3C or even 4C characterisation of dangerous climate change.”

The problem is that growth drowns out the gains from increased efficiency and technological innovation. The New Economics Foundation study looks at by how much growth would need to be delinked from fossil fuels – the so-called carbon intensity of the economy – to reach the mark of climate safety suggested by Nasa climate scientist James Hansen.

Having improved steadily in the late last century, “carbon intensity” changes flatlined over the last decade and even worsened in some years. Against this trend, to avoid dangerous climate change the fall in carbon intensity would need to improve by more than two hundredfold. The economic doctrine of growth collides headlong with the laws of physics and thermodynamics. Only so much energy efficiency can be squeezed from a system. The other problem is the counter-intuitive rebound effect spotted by William Stanley Jevons in 1865 when he wrote, “It is a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.” Increased efficiency tends to lower costs and perversely drives up overall resource use.

Writing in the science journal Nature last year, a multidisciplinary group of scientists identified nine key safe-use planetary resource boundaries, three of which had already been transgressed (climate change, biodiversity and the nitrogen cycle to do with farming). We are on the cusp of several others.

So, this week, if you find yourself cheering a return to growth, you may be inadvertently celebrating our acceleration toward an ecological cliff edge and an opportunity missed to find a new, better direction. For example, the economist Herman Daly points out that full employment could be easier to achieve in an economy not addicted to growth because it would reverse “the historical trend of replacing labour with machines and inanimate energy”.

Both the desirability and possibility of never ending growth goes unquestioned in mainstream economics. It’s odd, because the world would be a very strange place if the same was applied in nature. For example, from birth until around six weeks old, a hamster doubles its weight each week. If, it didn’t stop and continued doubling each week, on its first birthday, you would be looking after a very hungry nine billion-tonne pet hamster. There is of course one thing in nature that grows uncontrollably. It’s called cancer and tends to kill its host. So when those growth figures come out, let’s hope the government scans the results for what they really mean.

nef’s new report Growth isn’t Possible was published today.