You are currently browsing Andrew Simms's articles.
Andrew Simms is nef’s Policy Director and head of nef’s Climate Change programme.
Spending a fortune to prop up the banks but only small change on the urgent transition to a dynamic, low-carbon economy, is like building a crystal palace on sand, then shoving a few bricks under it as an afterthought for foundations.
New investment to match the Government’s rhetoric on climate change amounts to a tiny fraction of 1 per cent of the public support given to the finance sector. Such lack of ambition is counterproductive and a missed opportunity if Alistair Darling wants to pay down the public debt. As the Green New Deal Group point out in their report, The Cuts Won’t Work, productive investment in renewable energy, efficiency and green transport both pays for itself through the economic multiplier effect of spending, and ensures that more people are in work to pay taxes.
That’s without counting the additional benefits of cutting carbon emissions, increasing energy security and tackling fuel poverty. It’s odd that such basic economics is so hard for the Government and the opposition to grasp. History told us that it was when Roosevelt stopped spending three years into his New Deal that things went wrong and plunged the country back into depression. More than with the banks, the biosphere really is too big to fail and we should invest what is needed to maintain it, not small random amounts. Around £50 billion a year on a Green New Deal to create jobs and make the UK fit for a low-carbon future is needed to get us on track. The PBR prescription is more like medieval bloodletting, it is more likely to kill than cure the patient.
Andrew Simms is nef’s Policy Director and head of nef’s Climate Change programme.
Cuts, cuts, cuts… The word is chanted in politics until we work ourselves into a frenzy. We’re transfixed by a large and growing public debt brought on by banking failure. But does it make sense, now, to cut public spending? Can we even afford to? History suggests not.
For three years after Roosevelt announced his New Deal in 1933, regulating the banks and launching a bold programme of public spending, things went well. But then he blinked. Afraid of rising debt, he cut spending – and made the depression worse. It was only later, when there was a surge of production for the war effort, that things turned around again.
Public spending creates jobs and has a positive, “multiplier” effect in the economy. There are more economically active people to pay taxes, in turn reducing the public debt. It is a false economy and counterproductive to cut in a downturn.
It’s also a schoolboy error to think that a national economy should be managed just like a personal budget. Governments can issue and manage money for a wide range of purposes, individuals can’t.
But, of course, that doesn’t just mean the government should go ahead and spend on just anything. On the contrary, some spending can do more harm than good.
It’s hard to be precise, but it’s very likely that most of the benefits from the blanket cut in VAT and the bung given to the car industry through the scrappage scheme leaked out of the UK – not to mention encouraged environmentally wasteful consumption.
Targeted spending, however, in the face of climate change and rising energy insecurity, could do an awful lot of good, creating jobs, cutting carbon and fuel poverty and helping to reduce the public debt.
A new report The Cuts Won’t Work by the Green New Deal group (of which I am a member) shows that earmarking just £10bn in “green quantitative easing” (that is, releasing more money into the economy on the condition it is spent on low-carbon initiatives) could create 60,000 long-term jobs in the energy efficiency sector (a total of 300,000 years worth of employment). The same amount could multiply by five the contribution to the UK’s electricity supply of onshore wind power.
Spending on some things creates more jobs than spending on others. Spend on public transport, housing and energy efficiency and you will create far more jobs, pound for pound, than you would if you opted for unproductive military expenditure. Cancelling the Trident replacement and spending instead on the great low-carbon transition would create 105,000 jobs according to a York University study.
So, should the chancellor implement cuts when he announces the pre-Budget report on Wednesday?
Medieval doctors used to think that the best way to cure patients of a wide range of ailments was to drain their blood. More often than not it killed them.
The government and the opposition parties all need to understand that economic bloodletting will not work. It’s far more likely to kill the ailing, carbon-addicted economy.
Andrew Simms is nef’s Policy Director and head of nef’s Climate Change programme.
Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Nobel Peace Prize winning IPCC, and one of the contributors to Other Worlds are Possible
On the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit we seem to be poised between the possibility of new directions for the world, and meek capitulation to environmental upheaval. Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says we have just months to take large-scale action on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. He calls on developing countries not to try to copy western consumer lifestyles.
In an interview to be broadcast on the BBC, he adds that growth and rising GDP are an “extremely harmful” way to measure human progress. Pachauri’s determination to think about fresh solutions, from championing less meat-eating to challenging bad economics, is a lesson to commentators who affect weariness and distaste at yet another reminder of the extreme consequences of our lifestyles.
It’s a call to rise above national and sectoral interests. But it’s not easy. Point scoring in global talks often becomes more important to negotiators than preserving a planet fit for civilisation. Worse still, as the problem becomes ever clearer, a collective cultural “Am I bovvered?” seems to rise from the most materially comfortable and least likely to suffer.
But are people really saying that it’s just not worth fighting for the climatic conditions that make life both enjoyable and possible? If somebody threatened your child, what would you do? Only the sociopathic or comatose would sit by and let the people they love be threatened without acting. Yet inadequate climate action is the equivalent of inviting threats to our offspring. And in front of us there are clear but diminishing opportunities that really could solve the problem. We’re still living in the grip of a consumption explosion. Our material consumption is rising at the same time that nature’s ability to provide resources and absorb waste is weakening. Human overuse seems to be undermining available biocapacity.
The latest data on humanity’s global ecological footprint makes worrying reading. The UK’s footprint makes our level of consumption even less sustainable: it would take at least 3.4 planets for everyone to live at our level. Globally we are using resources and pumping out carbon emissions at a rate 44% faster than the biosphere can take. It now takes just under 18 months for the earth to produce the ecological services humanity uses in one year.
As Pachauri writes in the foreword to a new report, Other Worlds Are Possible: “It is crucial that we engage in fresh ways of thinking about development and sustainability.” Too often rich countries excuse their own inaction by pointing at the rising consumption of poor countries – as if that is the true problem. It’s convenient, but ignores what many other voices from the global south are saying.
Writing in the same report, the leading Indian economist Professor Jayati Ghosh takes a different view: “The presumptions and aspirations of what constitutes a civilised life will have to be modified. The model popularised by ‘the American Dream’ is perhaps the most dangerous in this context, with its emphasis on suburban residential communities far from places of work, market and entertainment and linked only through private motorised transport.” The Chilean economist Professor Manfred Max-Neef is similarly dissenting: ‘Solutions imply new models that, above all else, begin to accept the limits of the carrying capacity of the earth: moving from efficiency to sufficiency and wellbeing.”
Some of those solutions are right under our noses, according to the energy researchers Mark Z Jacobson and Mark A Delucchi. Writing in the November edition of Scientific American, they describe how, by 2030, the world could shift to a virtually zero carbon energy system. Their model is based only on existing technology that can already be applied on a large scale, and excludes nuclear power and fossil fuels. It calls for, globally, the building of 3.8m large wind turbines (wind being 25 times more carbon efficient than nuclear power), 90,000 solar plants and a combination of geothermal, tidal and rooftop solar-PV installations globally.
They admit the scheme is bold, but it follows Al Gore’s challenge for the US to abandon fossil fuel power in the next decade. In terms of the physical challenge of producing so much renewable generating capacity, they point out that the world already produces 73m cars and light trucks every year.
People forget, perhaps, the effort it took to get us hooked on oil in the first place. As Jacobson and Delucchi point out, starting in 1956 the US interstate highway system managed to build 47,000 miles of highway in just over three decades, “changing commerce and society”.
84 months and counting …
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.
Andrew Simms is nef’s Policy Director and head of nef’s Climate Change programme.
Could the Conservatives be the party to ditch economic growth as a policy and oversee the change our climate needs?
There are only seven more annual political conference seasons to go before the world enters a new, far more dangerous phase of unpredictable global warming, based on the risk categories of climate scientists.
That means we should already be able to see genuine solutions emerging in the debates and speeches echoing around the nation’s conference capitals of Brighton, Bournemouth and Manchester. It also means that whoever is successfully elected to form the next government in 2010, they will almost certainly be in power during the period when the fate of the atmosphere is settled.
Except, perhaps, during wartime, history rarely offers up such a definitive performance indicator for a government. But here, for better or worse, the words, “it happened on your watch” will be carved, probably in coal, on their headstone.
New research from the Hadley Centre, part of the government’s own Met Office, set the scene for the political challenge. It warns that we should now plan for the possibility of a 4C temperature rise by 2060. This is far beyond the maximum 2C rise considered a maximum safe threshold before the environmental dominoes start to fall.
On 25 September, the Friday before the Labour party conference began, the world went into ecological debt for the year, beginning to consume more resources and produce more waste than the planet could handle.
The challenge couldn’t be clearer. Bad accounting, poor risk assessment and profligate behaviour nearly destroyed the global financial system. It threatens to do the same to a climate conducive to civilisation. It’s not reform that the next government must oversee, but paradigm shift.
Yet in the last few weeks, the siren voices for a return to business as usual have been getting louder. We need bonuses back, says the City, although they never really went away, to get and keep the best talent. But that was hardly a good strategy last time, when the “best talent” on bonuses wrought chaos. The Confederation of British Industry says recovery depends on cutting back regulation. But an absence of appropriate regulation is the slippery slope down which the economy and environment slide. Others call for another wave of no-strings bailouts for the fossil fuel-intensive car industry. These voices, effectively, are telling the survivors of a sinking ship to leave their lifeboats and climb back on board.
As the Conservative party takes energy from Labour’s disarray and disheartenment is there any sign that they might do the seemingly unthinkable, and consider radical economic redesign to prevent what happened to the banking system from happening to the climate system?
On one hand, there is a disturbing and furtive creep of old vested interests. Big money, big business, old school connections looking to return to their comfort zone after more than a decade of feeling culturally uncomfortable with a Labour government. Regressive tax, more binge consumerism and dirty and weakly regulated industry are all poised for a potentially easy ride. Yet the Conservatives are also on a journey to distance themselves from their own past. What started as an unavoidable rebranding exercise can take on a life of its own.
David Cameron is on record as saying that well-being is as, if not more, important than growth in an economy. An increasing number of voices from Nobel economists down are pointing out the ultimate incompatibility of endless rich country economic growth with the preservation of a habitable planet. What’s interesting for the Conservatives is that ditching growth as the single, overarching economic policy obsession could well revive ways of living that they find politically appealing.
A world in which there is much less passive consumption of goods and services is a world in which we do many more things for ourselves and each other. It’s a world not of absolute but much greater self-sufficiency, at the national, local and even individual level. In other words, it’s a world in which we have much more control over our own fate. A revival of real local democracy beckons in which we are more responsible locally for our own food, energy and the reciprocal delivery of services. With 86 months to go, that doesn’t sound too bad to a public very jaded about UK politics – it may even sound infinitely preferable.
86 months and counting …
Andrew Simms is nef’s Policy Director and head of nef’s Climate Change programme.
Any vision of a genuinely better world gets trampled beneath the suited herd and their passion for technocratic tinkering.
Fears of species extinction at the Labour party conference have been uncommonly domestic in Brighton. Concern for the future of the nocturnal Aye-Aye, the exotic White Rhino or the fate of the climate, have all come a distant second to the survival of the party itself.
Ed Miliband, at least, has tried to combine the two. Roving the corridors of the conference secure zone like a modern political hunter gatherer, and making constant forays out on to the more threatening savannah of the fringe scene, Miliband has sought to muster support both for the government and for a bigger public campaign for action on climate change.
But what lies behind his relatively fruitless search this year goes a long way to explain the government’s own malaise and that of the environment more broadly. Speaking on the BBC’s Newsnight programme shortly before the conference began, Miliband defended his and the government’s role on climate change by saying that they were in the “business of persuasion”. It made it sound as if he thought he was in advertising, rather than in government, when the job is to lead.
Seeing the herds of suited corporate lobbyists and party apparatchiks drift with dutiful reluctance from venue to venue, as they know their efforts here are probably wasted, it’s to see how both the party and the planet got into such a mess.
In the place of passion, belief and real human connection a dreadful pall of technocratic managerialism descends over proceedings. In this landscape, any vision of a genuinely better world gets trampled beneath the suited herd as they periodically migrate between parties who manage business-as-usual with greater or lesser degrees of success.
The prospect of political ecosystem collapse does, though, seem to loosen some of the shackles of ministerial office. Hilary Benn, speaking, appropriately for this article, at an event organised by the trade body for chartered accountants, undoubtedly understood that nothing short of a rapid and revolutionary change in the UK’s over-consuming lifestyles will stave off disaster. It’s just that, even now, he can’t draw the logical conclusions because it would mean the opposite of technocratic tinkering. It would mean fundamental economic change.
In the last few months, however, a succession of great and good outside the party have begun to mention just this. From the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz to French president Nicolas Sarkozy, and the UK’s own Lord Stern to Lord Turner of the Financial Services Authority and formerly the UK climate change committee, the environmentally destructive doctrine of indefinite economic growth is finally being mentioned.
The Labour party though, still clinging to its faded “business-friendly” rebranding of more than a decade ago, seems unable to stop fighting the last war and move on. Joan Ruddock, the minister for climate change and energy, for example, had a few uncomfortable minutes defending the government’s disproportionate support for banks and the City, in comparison to the shockingly low levels of new and additional spending on any green stimulus. The last budget provided only a fraction in new green spending of what the City will still be allowed to pay itself in bonuses this year. Alistair Darling’s last-minute reinvention at conference as a bonus-basher looked like the worst kind of hollow gesture politics.
Everywhere you see the problem of skewed priorities. Where its friends in the City were concerned, the government calculated precisely what it thought was needed to preserve a failed and self-serving banking system. Where the environment has been concerned, it has largely been dragged by external pressure to doing just what it could get away with. This explains why, alongside the climate targets and initiatives for renewable energy, it is still building roads, new airport runways and coal-fired power stations. It’s a contradiction they cannot escape, and a prime example of the contradictions that are killing Labour.
Charles Clarke revealed one vein of antipathy to the green movement that is still deep in Labour, and chose to blame the messengers. Clearly irked by Miliband’s encouragement for the public to protest more (old ministerial portfolios are hard to shake) he complained about environmentalists being anti-science and anti-progress. A frustrated audience cried back that an awful lot of environmentalists were scientists, and that it was the greens that often put science on the public agenda. Progress, too, is surely about not putting the concerns of political, public image management above destroying your ecological life support systems. Slightly flustered, Clarke veered off into discussion of “genetically modified organisations”. Either it was an indication of how far Labour will have to go to survive, or the suspicion that the already modified Conservatives, meeting in Manchester next week, are using crafty new tricks to take over and dominate the political ecosystem.
Andrew Simms is nef’s Policy Director and head of nef’s Climate Change programme.
It could be the premise for a zeitgeist science-fiction thriller about global warming. Secrets, lies, and breathless chases along corporate corridors. Millions of pounds at stake, and ultimately millions of lives too. The United Nations suspends an auditor at the heart of a mechanism key to the success of the international climate change treaty.
In another country, a multi-million carousel fraud in the carbon emissions trading market leads to a swoop on homes in London and the South East, and multiple arrests.
A new police force is launched to investigate corporations suspected of being big greenhouse gas polluters.
This could be earnest, adrenalin-pumped entertainment, the next Syriana. But all these things are real and were revealed in the last month or shortly before. One of the more gruesome ways in which wildlife conservationists can tell the health of animal populations, like otters or badgers, is by how many roadkill get found. If more are found, it means there are more around and, ironically, must be doing well. It’s a risky analogy, but if organised crime is now taking the market for cutting carbon seriously, perhaps we are finally getting somewhere. Or, it could mean that, like so many other markets revealed in recent months as flawed, the carbon markets are just as badly designed and in a mess.
Here’s another reason why the British government would be ill-advised to perform a U-turn, and instead of cutting its own emissions directly, try to meet its commitments by carbon laundering in the supremely dodgy markets for offsetting.
But, in the UK, it could be that the phoney war over reducing emissions is finally about to end, and we will begin to get serious. Because today, as you can read about in the Guardian, a new, bold and simple campaign is being launched. It has one target: to cut emissions in the UK by 10 percent during the year 2010.
Ten percent in 2010 sounds quite catchy, but why those figures, and why is this important?
For years the government has resisted taking action on climate change that the science says is necessary. The excuse – though untested – is always that the public won’t support it – as if we’re all eager to hasten our own collective demise.
Now the opportunity is here for individuals and organisations to do something that is about more than changing lightbulbs. If successful, it could be the biggest experiment yet by a society set on positively determining its own future.
A 10 percent cut is in line with what the science suggests should be an annual target for a country like the UK. Its not to be sniffed at, but an economy entering a period of rapid transition throws up as many opportunities as it does challenges. We may fear change, but all the evidence shows that we are a highly innovative and adaptive species capable of dealing with it.
Expecting individuals alone to save the climate simply by making choices in the marketplace is not working. That much has become a common place. The necessary options are typically unavailable, either due to price or practicality. When sewage disposal in 19th centruy London was left to individuals in the marketplace, the result was open cesspitts, cholera and typhoid. There was a good reason for officialdom to mandate a new infrastructure that separated sewage from drinking water, and oversaw one of the public engineering triumphs of the age.
Perhaps the problem is that we cannot smell carbon dioxide. It was the Great Stink of 1858 that finally pushed Parliament to pass an act that would allow for the large but necessary investment needed to realise Joseph Bazalgette’s vision for a new sewage system. It took only 8 years to connect-up most of London.
The government had to hold its breath back then, in more ways than one, before it took action. But who, afterwards, would go back to how things had been before. Today they can make a leap of reason again over short-sighted intransigence, by joining the 10:10 pledge. It shouldn’t be necessary for campaigns like 10:10 to cure the government of timidity. But, with just 87 months left before odds on avoiding runaway warming shift badly against us, real leadership is, at least, coming from somewhere. Politicians are running out of excuses. If they don’t want to skulk as the bad guys in the background of the global warming movie, they should come and join the carbon reduction party.
Andrew Simms is nef’s Policy Director and head of nef’s Climate Change programme.
Levelling out: the maximum wage isn't just for equality: it helps firms – and big earners – to function happily
Whether it is bankers, doctors or dentists pulling in excessive pay, people are left wanting to spit at their greed. But John Varley, Barclays chief executive, reacted in horror this week to the suggestion of a Radio 4 interviewer that some parameters should be put around pay and bonuses awarded to bank staff. It would “interfere with the market”. This, it should now be clear, was a deeply strange thing to say.
Extraordinary powers of compartmentalisation may be a key skill for any banking chief. Yet this breathtaking adherence to doctrine in the face of real-world evidence is worthy of the officers of 1916 who ordered soldiers to slow walk against machine guns.
Had the banking market not been interfered with, to the tune of hundreds of billions in public largesse, it would not have survived in its current form. Something for which Varley, if not the rest of us, should be deeply grateful, and for which there must be a serious quid pro quo. And why should the market not be interfered with when it doesn’t think twice about interfering with life, the universe and everything else?
Six years ago, I proposed a maximum wage in an article for the Guardian. At the time it seemed a logical complement to the minimum wage, one of the key achievements of New Labour’s first term. The signs of the crash to come, in terms of ludicrous executive pay expectations, were already there. As Richard Wilkinson’s work in The Spirit Level has shown, inequality really is at the root of most social, and by implication, environmental problems. A maximum as well as a minimum wage would tackle income inequality from both ends of the scale.
The defence of high pay is that it is needed to attract and motivate senior executives, and give mid-level executives something to aspire to. Yet, as with so many facets of the failed neoliberal economic model, it is a triumph of self-serving assertion over reality.
The unintended consequences of that argument lie all around us in the landscape of the recession. But, more than that, the existence of an inverse relationship between pay and performance has been demonstrated for FTSE 100 companies. One of the fathers of modern banking, JP Morgan, believed that to motivate people you didn’t need a ratio of more than 10 between the highest and lowest paid. This is common knowledge in management school, but seemingly ignored in the workplace.
We know now all too well how destructive are the forces of seeking profit and pay maximisation for their own sake. Another benefit emerges of capping high pay or setting a maximum ratio between highest and lowest paid: beyond that level, an executive’s performance has to be judged against achievements other than personal accumulation. So, instead of status derived from higher incomes, the desire to excel can instead be directed toward the social contribution and environmental performance of the bank or company involved.
In an efficiently functioning market, there should be no exorbitant pay or profits. Competition is supposed to deal with that. There should always be someone or some business prepared to offer the same goods, skills or services and do the job for less. The pressure at the top should be down, not up on salaries.
Varley is fond of using the example of footballers pay to defend bank bonuses. But football managers get sacked. Varley himself earned more than £1m as the banking system crashed around him in 2008. Time to blow for a foul and show a maximum-wage card to those bringing the economic game into disrepute.
Andrew Simms is nef’s Policy Director and head of nef’s Climate Change programme.
Is the Vesta case merely a symbolic blip, or something more interesting? Dim hope can be found in this dismal affair.
Picture the scene. It’s the beginning of the second world war. Germany’s industrial war machine is in full production and Hitler is advancing across Europe. Back in England, the government decides that the cost and planning complications of building tanks and aircraft are just too great and lets the factories – who would be willing to build if there was a demand for them – close. In compensation, it offers the firms a grant from an already existing budget to carry out research and development.
As bizarre as it sounds, a rough equivalent of this otherwise unimaginable scenario is playing itself out at the Vesta wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight – the subject of a high-profile sit-in protest by some of its workforce. The company says that the government has failed to make the domestic market happen, and so plans to shut up shop. The government, for its part, braces to endure a crushing symbolic failure just as it publishes its strategy for a transition to a low-carbon economy, and it is reported that it has offered the firm a little compensatory R&D money (£6m).
Which brings us to the strategy itself. It arrived just weeks before the clock ticks down to 88 months left until global greenhouse gas emissions tip us into a new, more dangerous phase of risk of runaway warming.
Depending on which parts of the strategy you look at (actually having one is, of course, a good start), it seems to be characterised either by some good intent, but too few resources (renewable energy), severe blind spots (peak oil and the role of communities) or a lack of vision about real alternatives for our oil-addicted economy (transport, food and farming). Through the document you can almost feel the begrudging effort of a system coming to terms with external realities that can no longer be entirely ignored or simply “news managed”.
Symbolic events in politics can sweep away even the very best intentions. But is the Vesta case merely a symbolic blip, or something more interesting? On the one hand, it couldn’t be worse. If the UK were to specialise in any form of renewable energy, it is in wind that we are particularly wealthy. The UK has access to 40% of the total wind energy resources in Europe (pdf). And the government plans for another 10,000 wind turbines to be erected by 2020.
So for the nation’s only full turbine factory to close, and for its sit-in protesters, who were trying to keep it open, to be sacked by letters tucked in with a lunch box, it’s hard to imagine a worse message being sent to the public and the marketplace. Why bail out banks to the tune of billions, to keep profit-hungry, bonus-obsessed financiers in work, who then still fail to provide necessary capital to the productive economy, and allow the foundations of our future energy system to crumble? Anyone wishing to register their thoughts can sign a petition on the No 10 website.
One dim hope filtering from this dismal affair is the way in which the environmental and trade union movements have finally found common cause over the future direction of the economy.
It is just one incident, but the message is getting through that a low-carbon economy, and the transition to it, is going to generate a vast number of new jobs. With the vast range of skills that will be needed in a world in which we will almost inevitably do many more things for ourselves, it could also represent a rebirth of useful and interesting work. It’s not just about the number of jobs, but their quality. The reason that this won’t just happen is because the government is still in thrall to market mechanisms.
As Vesta’s business decision to move production to the US shows, markets aren’t there to solve your, the nation’s or the planets problems, they are there to make profits. That is why they need to be subservient to the social and environmental objectives that we choose. On this case, at least, if you want to know the future for employment and the environment in the UK, and whether or not we are likely to avert catastrophic climate change, the answer, my friend, really is blowing in the wind.
88 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.
Vimeo
Twitter
Flickr
