Andrew Simms | ukwatch.net

Tackling the 'triple crunch' with a green new deal

eddie — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 23:37:00 +0000

It’s 4am in the morning. You’re lying awake in the worry hour. You know that, even if there was nothing to fret about, your brain would come up with something. But this time, the anxieties are thundering past, like delayed trains chasing the clock.

Can I trust the bank to look after my money? Clickety clack. How much has my house fallen in value? Clickety clack. Will high fuel prices mean I can’t keep my car on the road? Can I afford to buy enough food for the family? Clickety clack. Will I lose my job, and why is everyone making me paranoid about climate change when there’s nothing I can do about it? Clickety, clickety clack … and then back to the beginning.

The “triple crunch” of a credit-fuelled financial crisis, accelerating climate change and soaring energy prices – how did we get into this mess? In the face of so many simultaneous crises, we all have legitimate questions for the governments that allowed us to sleepwalk into this situation.

These are no longer abstract, distant issues of financial and environmental policy. They are beginning to affect everyone.

A general sense of having our livelihoods and wellbeing neglected by the people elected to govern us can easily tip over into an understandable sense of outrage and having been betrayed. Down these highly charged tracks lie the possibility for both progressive and poisonous political trains of thought to emerge.

For that reason, we must be quick to spell out how peoples’ genuine concerns and fears can become a force for change that is necessary in economic and environmental terms, and socially progressive. But how can we make sure that the junction box switches the emotional tracks to progress, rather than a poisonous reaction? We talk about the issues straight on, using the language with which people experience them.

First, if you’re sitting there feeling angry and worried, good, you should be. Things are out of control.

With very few rules, the banks have played fast and loose with their lending, making some individuals very rich in the process. But often the money they lend you has been created out of thin air with nothing real to anchor it, by – in effect – an accounting trick. This has made the value of things like your home very volatile – rising and falling – making it hard to plan your life …

The answer is that we need many more checks and balances to curb such damaging instability, to protect the value of your assets and make it easier to plan your life.

Next, our leaders and big businesses have been reckless in failing to plan for the end of the oil age. As global demand goes up and supply can’t match it, the price is permanently high and on a long-term rising trend. The cost of warming your home and travelling around will keep going up.

But, it’s not too late. Massive efforts to increase renewable energy, conserve what’s left, and find more fuel-efficient ways to get around and grow food, will give us security, meet our needs and, very possibly, give us better quality of life.

Food seems expensive (although in reality we’re spending less on it now than we did decades ago), but as long as farming stays heavily dependent on oil to grow and transport what we eat, it will remain so. Yet, if we grow not all, but more food locally and use less oil to do so, we can curb future food-bill rises. We can also bring bills down by preparing more of our own food, and cutting down on costly packaging and pre-prepared food. As oil starts to run out, in the UK and all over the world, there will have to be a shift away from large-scale, oil and gas-guzzling farming, to smaller, lower-input or organic farms.

There’s no easy dodge for the last issue, and just like when a doctor is nervous about giving a full prognosis, the patients, all of us, have a right to know the truth. Climate change is real and dangerous. The trigger for potentially irreversible, runaway effects is just around the corner, as little as 99 months away and counting.

But, unlike some big global political issues against which we all feel powerless, like cold wars and hot wars, as far as climate change is concerned, we can all do something. Instead of feeling helpless, there is a new importance to our lives. Everything we do from now on really matters. We must lead by example – for instance by changing our energy supplier to a renewable one, using less and changing how we travel.

And we mustn’t let our governments off the hook. It’s not tenable for the prime minister to say he’s concerned about the impact of climate change on Britain and the world’s poorest, and then allow new runways and coal-fired power stations. Instead of trying to derail clean energy targets in Europe, the government should be implementing plans for dramatic decarbonisation of the electricity supply, reduced energy use in buildings, an increase in renewables on the scale needed, and a huge expansion of clean reliable, public transport.

If Britain leads by example too, then the rest of the world, countries like India and China, may just follow. They certainly won’t if we don’t. The stakes couldn’t be higher, but this is something that everyone can do.

The answer to many of these problems is investing in a massive environmental transformation programme amounting to a green new deal. It is a comprehensive programme designed to stabilise the economy, create jobs, tackle poverty and inequality and help protect us from the vulnerable supply lines of the global food and energy markets.

The rules of the game are designed by policy-makers and they can be changed. So far, the voting public has been horrendously let down. Now, we all have a chance to speak up and get on the train for positive change. If we do so, we’ll probably even sleep better at night.

On Friday September 19 a new economics foundation/Guardian event will discuss ‘Triple crunch: Can we solve the credit crunch, climate change and energy price shocks with a Green New Deal?’ In association with nef, Commentisfree is hosting more debate online; follow all the views and have your say here.

This way happiness lies

Ellie Keen — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 17:50:23 +0000

Instead of worshipping the invisible, and usually remote, hand of the market economy (which too often can be caught picking the pockets of the poor), you design an economic system in which resources flow and circulate effectively to serve the invisible heart of the core economy – made up of family, neighbourhood, community and civil society.

One unintended consequence of the current global financial crisis is that it will reveal what some have known for a long time, namely that a new economics is already emerging. The tragedy is that the crisis-ridden financial system has long since failed to do the basic job required – underpin the productive economy and the fundamental operating systems upon which we all depend. These have been variously neglected, taken for granted or cannibalised by finance. They include the core economy of family, neighbourhood, community and society, and the natural economy of the biosphere, our oceans forests and fields.

That is why, as we aim for recovery, we should not be trying to get back to how things were before. Before was built on an illusion of limitless credit and unlimited natural resources. It was unsustainable for many reasons. Injecting liquidity into the system and looking for signs of recovery in the return of consumer binge-spending on the high street will simply lay the foundations for an even bigger crash in the future. Consumerism is highly addictive, giving a brief high that quickly wears off and is damaging to both the individual and the world around them.

For a society like Britain, there is a large and growing literature that shows, fairly conclusively, we have been looking in the wrong place to find greater life satisfaction and measure the economy’s success. With most people having most of their basic material needs met, organising society to achieve progress through indiscriminately rising consumption not only doesn’t work – the fall-out from the long hours, throwaway, materialistic, individualistic, status-obsessed culture that accompanies it, is counter-productive, undermining and ultimately destructive.

For a vision of what an alternative might look like, the current edition of New Scientist magazine contains enough economic heresy (but scientific common sense) to choke every finance minister in the northern hemisphere and the whole staff of the International Monetary Fund. Best is the vision for what the country and economy could like in 2020. In it, we have moved from an economy of over-consumption, through-put and waste, and the anachronism of overwork and unemployment, to one which the ecological economist Herman Daly describes as, “a subtle and complex economics of maintenance, qualitative improvements, sharing, frugality, and adaptation to natural limits. It is an economics of better, not bigger.”

The good thing about such an economy is that it is rich in employment and the thick weave of local, micro-economic relationships that help to create resilient economies and bind communities together. Instead of worshipping the invisible, and usually remote, hand of the market economy (which too often can be caught picking the pockets of the poor), you design an economic system in which resources flow and circulate effectively to serve the invisible heart of the core economy – made up of family, neighbourhood, community and civil society.

It is already happening in place but could quickly move to a much bigger scale. Google tell their staff to spend 10% of their time not doing their job. They’re free to get involved with the local community. The company has found that as a result it has made staff more innovative. A lot of research shows that such community involvement also has a very positive payback in terms of life satisfaction. A 10% rule could be introduced across the economy with time credited to the local community. But we could go further. In Britain, the idea of a shorter working week was sullied by the chaos of the 1970s. But again, if people who over-work, worked less, employment could be more equally distributed. Coupled with other innovations to ensure a basic income guaranteeing basic needs, shorter working weeks help turn us from being time-poor, to time-affluent. With more time for family, community and creative learning it makes for happier people and better neighbourhoods.

A duty of reciprocity in public services could also help nurture the core economy. People who offer time, as simple as making visits to the elderly and infirm, could earn time credits to use public services like leisure centres at off peak times.

Local authorities could use Section 106 (the planning gain law) in negotiations with businesses, to introduce a “time commitment” ensuring that they bring some useful service to the local community – even if only making rooms available for use. Time banking is already working successfully in some health centres. In Wales a time banking system was introduced in which older women provided skills to local schools and were given time credits in return. They cashed them in for bingo sessions during the day and theatre performances in the evening. Their fear of going out at night was solved because the local rugby club was part of the scheme too, and took time credits to accompany them. Then, the women started to lose their fear of going out, and felt secure enough to go alone. There was an upward spiral of personal and communal well-being. Note that these are all low-carbon, relationship building activities.

Life satisfaction scores tend to be much higher among people with a more communally oriented set of values than those who are materialistic and individualistic. They are also less driven to consume for its own sake. Kick the addiction. Get time-rich. Be happy.

The final countdown

JamieSW — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 13:16:10 +0000

If you shout “fire” in a crowded theatre, when there is none, you understand that you might be arrested for irresponsible behaviour and breach of the peace. But from today, I smell smoke, I see flames and I think it is time to shout. I don’t want you to panic, but I do think it would be a good idea to form an orderly queue to leave the building.

Because in just 100 months’ time, if we are lucky, and based on a quite conservative estimate, we could reach a tipping point for the beginnings of runaway climate change. That said, among people working on global warming, there are countless models, scenarios, and different iterations of all those models and scenarios. So, let us be clear from the outset about exactly what we mean.

The concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere today, the most prevalent greenhouse gas, is the highest it has been for the past 650,000 years. In the space of just 250 years, as a result of the coal-fired Industrial Revolution, and changes to land use such as the growth of cities and the felling of forests, we have released, cumulatively, more than 1,800bn tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. Currently, approximately 1,000 tonnes of CO2 are released into the Earth’s atmosphere every second, due to human activity. Greenhouse gases trap incoming solar radiation, warming the atmosphere. When these gases accumulate beyond a certain level – often termed a “tipping point” – global warming will accelerate, potentially beyond control.

Faced with circumstances that clearly threaten human civilisation, scientists at least have the sense of humour to term what drives this process as “positive feedback”. But if translated into an office workplace environment, it’s the sort of “positive feedback” from a manager that would run along the lines of: “You’re fired, you were rubbish anyway, you have no future, your home has been demolished and I’ve killed your dog.”

In climate change, a number of feedback loops amplify warming through physical processes that are either triggered by the initial warming itself, or the increase in greenhouse gases. One example is the melting of ice sheets. The loss of ice cover reduces the ability of the Earth’s surface to reflect heat and, by revealing darker surfaces, increases the amount of heat absorbed.

Other dynamics include the decreasing ability of oceans to absorb CO2 due to higher wind strengths linked to climate change. This has already been observed in the Southern Ocean and North Atlantic, increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and adding to climate change.
Because of such self-reinforcing positive feedbacks (which, because of the accidental humour of science, we must remind ourselves are, in fact, negative), once a critical greenhouse concentration threshold is passed, global warming will continue even if we stop releasing additional greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. If that happens, the Earth’s climate will shift into another, more volatile state, with different ocean circulation, wind and rainfall patterns. The implications of which, according to a growing litany of research, are potentially catastrophic for life on Earth. Such a change in the state of the climate system is often referred to as irreversible climate change.

So, how exactly do we arrive at the ticking clock of 100 months? It’s possible to estimate the length of time it will take to reach a tipping point. To do so you combine current greenhouse gas concentrations with the best estimates for the rates at which emissions are growing, the maximum concentration of greenhouse gases allowable to forestall potentially irreversible changes to the climate system, and the effect of those environmental feedbacks. We followed the latest data and trends for carbon dioxide, then made allowances for all human interferences that influence temperatures, both those with warming and cooling effects. We followed the judgments of the mainstream climate science community, represented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), on what it will take to retain a good chance of not crossing the critical threshold of the Earth’s average surface temperature rising by 2C above pre-industrial levels. We were cautious in several ways, optimistic even, and perhaps too much so. A rise of 2C may mask big problems that begin at a lower level of warming. For example, collapse of the Greenland ice sheet is more than likely to be triggered by a local warming of 2.7C, which could correspond to a global mean temperature increase of 2C or less. The disintegration of the Greenland ice sheet could correspond to a sea-level rise of up to 7 metres.

In arriving at our timescale, we also used the lower end of threats in assessing the impact of vanishing ice cover and other carbon-cycle feedbacks (those wanting more can download a note on method from onehundredmonths.org). But the result is worrying enough.

We found that, given all of the above, 100 months from today we will reach a concentration of greenhouse gases at which it is no longer “likely” that we will stay below the 2C temperature rise threshold. “Likely” in this context refers to the definition of risk used by the IPCC. But, even just before that point, there is still a one third chance of crossing the line.

Today is just another Friday in August. Drowsy and close. Office workers’ minds are fixed on the weekend, clock-watching, waiting perhaps for a holiday if your finances have escaped the credit crunch and rising food and fuel prices. In the evening, trains will be littered with abandoned newspaper sports pages, all pretending interest in the football transfers. For once it seems justified to repeat TS Eliot’s famous lines: “This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper.”

But does it have to be this way? Must we curdle in our complacency and allow our cynicism about politicians to give them an easy ride as they fail to act in our, the national and the planet’s best interest? There is now a different clock to watch than the one on the office wall. Contrary to being a counsel of despair, it tells us that everything we do from now matters. And, possibly more so than at any other time in recent history.

It tells us, for example, that only a government that was sleepwalking or in a chemically induced coma would countenance building a third runway at Heathrow, or a new generation of coal-fired power stations such as the proposed new plant at Kingsnorth in Kent. Infrastructure that is fossil-fuel-dependent locks in patterns of future greenhouse gas emissions, radically reducing our ability to make the short- to medium-term cuts that are necessary.

Deflecting blame and responsibility is a great skill of officialdom. The most common strategies used by government recently have been wringing their hands and blaming China’s rising emissions, and telling individuals to, well, be a bit more careful. On the first get-out, it is delusory to think that countries such as China, India and Brazil will fundamentally change until wealthy countries such as Britain take a lead. And it is wildly unrealistic to think that individuals alone can effect a comprehensive re-engineering of the nation’s fossil-fuel-dependent energy, food and transport systems. The government must lead.

In their inability to take action commensurate with the scale and timeframe of the climate problem, the government is mocked both by Britain’s own history, and by countries much smaller, poorer and more economically isolated than we are.

The challenge is rapid transition of the economy in order to live within our environmental means, while preserving and enhancing our general wellbeing. In some important ways, we’ve been here before, and can learn lessons from history. Under different circumstances, Britain achieved astonishing things while preparing for, fighting and recovering from the second world war. In the six years between 1938 and 1944, the economy was re-engineered and there were dramatic cuts in resource use and household consumption. These coincided with rising life expectancy and falling infant mortality. We consumed less of almost everything, but ate more healthily and used our disposable income on what, today, we might call “low-carbon good times”.

A National Savings Movement held marches, processions and displays in every city, town and village in the country. There were campaigns to Holiday at Home and endless festivities such as dances, concerts, boxing displays, swimming galas, and open-air theatre – all organised by local authorities with the express purpose of saving fuel by discouraging unnecessary travel. To lead by example, very public energy restrictions were introduced in government and local authority buildings, shops and railway stations. This was so successful that the results beat cuts previously planned in an over-complex rationing scheme. The public largely assented to measures to curb consumption because they understood that they were to ensure “the fairest possible distribution of the necessities and comforts of daily life”.

Now, 2008, we face the fallout from the credit crisis, high oil and rising food prices, and the massive added challenge of having to avert climate change.

Does a war comparison sound dramatic? In April 2007, Margaret Beckett, then foreign secretary, gave a largely overlooked lecture called Climate Change: The Gathering Storm. “It was a time when Churchill, perceiving the dangers that lay ahead, struggled to mobilise the political will and industrial energy of the British Empire to meet those dangers. He did so often in the face of strong opposition,” she said. “Climate change is the gathering storm of our generation. And the implications – should we fail to act – could be no less dire: and perhaps even more so.”

In terms of what is possible in times of economic stress and isolation, Cuba provides an even more embarrassing example to show up our national tardiness. In a single year in 2006 Cuba rolled-out a nationwide scheme replacing inefficient incandescent lightbulbs with low-energy alternatives. Prior to that, at the end of the cold war, after losing access to cheap Soviet oil, it switched over to growing most of its food for domestic consumption on small scale, often urban plots, using mostly low-fossil-fuel organic techniques. Half the food consumed in the capital, Havana, was grown in the city’s own gardens. Cuba echoed and surpassed what America achieved in its push for “Victory Gardening” during the second world war. Back then, led by Eleanor Roosevelt, between 30-40% of vegetables for domestic consumption were produced by the Victory Gardening movement.

So what can our own government do to turn things around today? Over the next 100 months, they could launch a Green New Deal, taking inspiration from President Roosevelt’s famous 100-day programme implementing his New Deal in the face of the dust bowls and depression. Last week, a group of finance, energy and environmental specialists produced just such a plan.
Addressed at the triple crunch of the credit crisis, high oil prices and global warming, the plan is to rein in reckless financial institutions and use a range of fiscal tools, new measures and reforms to the tax system, such as a windfall tax on oil companies. The resources raised can then be invested in a massive environmental transformation programme that could insulate the economy from recession, create countless new jobs and allow Britain to play its part in meeting the climate challenge.

Goodbye new airport runways, goodbye new coal-fired power stations. Next, as a precursor to enabling and building more sustainable systems for transport, energy, food and overhauling the nation’s building stock, the government needs to brace itself to tackle the City. Currently, financial institutions are giving us the worst of all worlds. We have woken to find the foundations of our economy made up of unstable, exotic financial instruments. At the same time, and perversely, as awareness of climate change goes up, ever more money pours through the City into the oil companies. These companies list their fossil-fuel reserves as “proven” or “probable”. A new category of “unburnable” should be introduced, to fundamentally change the balance of power in the City. Instead of using vast sums of public money to bail out banks because they are considered “too big to fail”, they should be reduced in size until they are small enough to fail without hurting anyone. It is only a climate system capable of supporting human civilisation that is too big to fail.

Oil companies made profits when oil was $10 a barrel. With the price now wobbling around $130, there is a huge amount of unearned profit waiting for a windfall tax. Money raised – in this way and through other changes in taxation, new priorities for pension funds and innovatory types of bonds – would go towards a long-overdue massive decarbonisation of our energy system. Decentralisation, renewables, efficiency, conservation and demand management will all play a part.

Next comes a rolling programme to overhaul the nation’s heat-leaking building stock. This will have the benefit of massively cutting emissions and at the same time tackling the sore of fuel poverty by creating better insulated and designed homes. A transition from “one person, one car” on the roads, to a variety of clean reliable forms of public transport should be visible by the middle of our 100 months. Similarly, weaning agriculture off fossil-fuel dependency will be a phased process.

The end result will be real international leadership, removing the excuses of other nations not to act. But it will also leave the people of Britain more secure in terms of the food and energy supplies, and with a more resilient economy capable of weathering whatever economic and environmental shocks the world has to throw at us. Each of these challenges will draw on things that we already know how to do, but have missed the political will for.

So, there, I have said “Fire”, and pointed to the nearest emergency exit. Now it is time for the government to lead, and do its best to make sure that neither a bang, nor a whimper ends the show.

www.onehundredmonths.org

www.greennewdealgroup.org

Ending Poverty in a Carbon Constrained World

Ellie Keen — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 13:12:07 +0000

Rapid Transition and New Development Directions

Several years ago the International Red Cross sent me on behalf the World Disasters Report to assess the early impacts of climate change on vulnerable populations. What I saw in Tuvalu, in the South Pacific, and learned from other small island states, about being resilient in the face of an unpredictable and extreme climate, may hold lessons now for how many millions more can withstand the upheaval of global warming on our small island planet. Tuvalu is living a uniquely modern paradox. It won the lottery of the internet age being awarded the domain name ‘.tv.’ Allegedly it has a bigger delegation in Los Angeles to sell rights, than it has here at the UN to protect its political interests. But, lying just a few metres above sea level, Tuvalu is in acute danger of losing its real home, just as it benefits from its new, virtual one.

We can learn a lot from the mere fact that island communities like this survived for so long on remote shards of land, exposed to the full force and vagaries of nature To do so, first they had to respect their obvious environmental limits. Next they evolved resilient local economies that helped them cope with extreme and unpredictable weather. These were, of necessity, based on reciprocity, sharing and co-operation, and not unlimited growth fed by individualistic, beggar-thy-neighbour competition.

Today, as collectively we face and exceed the limits of the earth’s bio-capacity, we are challenged at the global level to learn in a few short years, lessons that such small communities often took millennia to arrive at. Our task is enormously complicated by the intricate interdependence of the modern global economy, the unbalanced distribution of power and benefits within it, and a pace of international decision making that, until the ice started to melt so rapidly, I would have described as glacially slow. Fortunately there is much that we already do know to guide our actions, drawing on decades of experience in dozens of countries and through thousands of community based organisations around the world.

For example, the Working Group on Climate Change and Development, a coalition of leading NGOS based in the UK, that we helped to form, spelt out in a series of reports looking in detail at different global regions, how climate change, if unchecked, stands not only to block further progress on the Millennium Development Goals, but to reverse gains hard won over many years. Our conclusion was that irreversible global warming, which appears perilously close, would mean not just greater hardship for millions, but the end of development as we have understood it for the last half a century.

One severe drought in Australia has already partly triggered world-wide food shortages and high and rising prices, creating shocks that ripple from the High Street in Britain to the markets of Dhaka and Port au Prince. And the UK’s official Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, recently concluded based on a moderate scenario for change, that the percentage of the Earth’s land surface prone to extreme drought having already trebled to three per cent in less than a decade, will rise to fully one third by 2090, with droughts also longer in duration.

More worrying still, the edge of the climate cliff is not clearly visible. Scientists such as NASA’s James Hansen believe we may already be tipping over. This means not just stabilising atmospheric greenhouse gases, but reducing them, with unimagined implications for the global economy. Oddly-named ‘positive environmental feedbacks’ are volatile, hard to predict and may be terrifyingly sudden. So we must act on precaution and the best estimates available.

Because the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the biosphere we have no choice but to act, using precaution and the best information available. An individual may recover from financial bankruptcy, but if we allow our ecological debts to bankrupt a climate conducive to human civilisation, geological history shows that it could take tens of thousands of years to be restored if, indeed, it ever is.

We already know that people living in poverty are hit first and worst by global warming. This and the challenge of reducing poverty in a carbon constrained world calls for a new development model which is climate proof and climate friendly. From now on, all decisions will need to be scrutinised for whether they will increase or decrease vulnerability to climate change. We must look through the lenses of building resilience at the community level, and reducing risk. And, it is the communities at risk who must shape our plans.

Parallel to the approach of the IPCC, the recent report of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology showed that a massive shift of support to small scale farmers using a diverse range of agro-ecological methods would be one of the most efficient ways to build resilience, inoculate against food crises, and insure against increasingly hostile weather patterns. Community-based coping strategies such as the use of seed banks, water management, vulnerability mapping, storm and flood protection that works with the local environment, and the conservation of forests and other ecosystems – all represent effective ways for threatened communities to adapt.

If replicated and scaled-up, small-scale renewable energy projects promoted by governments and community groups can help both to tackle poverty and reduce climate change. But this needs political commitment, significant new funds from governments and a major shift in priorities for energy lending by the World Bank and other development bodies. There is no either/or approach possible; the world must meet both its commitments to achieve the MDGs and tackle climate change. The two are inextricably linked.

Here we crash headlong into another, equally large problem. It is clear that conventional economic growth will happen in poor countries as a consequence of effective poverty reduction. But at a global level, the policies designed to pursue growth have become a mask for making the rich, richer, whilst leaving the poor with few benefits and abandoned to deal with growth’s environmental consequences. During the 1980s – what was called lost decade of development – from every $100 worth of global economic growth, around $2.20 found its way to people living below the absolute poverty line. A decade later that had shrunk to just $0.60c, and the actual mean income of those living under $1 per day in Africa also fell.

There has been, in effect, a sort of ‘flood-up’ of wealth from poor to rich, rather than a ‘trickle-down.’ It means, perversely, that for the poor to get slightly less poor, the rich have to get very much richer, implying patterns of consumption which, in a world facing climate change, cannot be sustained. It now takes around $166 worth of global growth – made up of all those energy-hungry giant flat screen TVs and sports utility vehicles – to generate a single dollar of poverty reduction for people in absolute poverty, compared with just $45 dollars in the 1980s. Earnings of between $3 and $4 per day is the approximate level at which the strong link between income and life expectancy breaks down. So, let us ask what would happen if we agreed $3 per day as the minimum level of income to escape absolute poverty?

Using the ecological footprint measure, if the whole world wished to consume at the level of the United States – a consumption pattern which has been fuelled, incidentally, by the credit binge which led to the current economic crisis – we would need, conservatively, over 5 planets like earth to support them. But, under the current pattern of unequally distributed benefits from growth, to lift everyone in the world onto a modest $3 per day, would require the resources of around 15 planets like ours. Where, you might ask, will the other 14 come from?

To tackle poverty in a carbon constrained world, then, we need a new development model, based on better measures of progress, and a shift from relying on unequal global growth to serious redistribution. If we think of the planet as a cake, we can slice it differently, but we surely cannot bake a new one. Climate change is not the only reason that we have to learn to live with far fewer fossil fuels. Development must also contend with the high and rising price of oil, and the imminent global peak and long decline of oil production.

What, if any, guides do we have to surviving these multiple shocks?

One country, much maligned, provides a glimpse of a near future that many more may face. Almost like a laboratory example, positioned on the flight path of the annual Hurricane season, since 1990 Cuba has lived through the economic and environmental shocks that climate change and peak oil hold in store for the rest of the world.

The sudden loss of cheap Soviet oil and its economic isolation were so extreme at the end of the cold war, and its reaction to the shock was so contrary to orthodox approaches, and relatively successful, that it was dubbed in Washington the ‘anti-model.’ Then oil imports dropped by over half. The use of chemical pesticides and fertilisers dropped by 80 percent. The availability of basic food staples like wheat and other grains fell by half and, overall, the average Cuban’s calorie intake fell by over one third in around five years.

But, serious and long-term investment in science, engineering, health, education, plus land redistribution, reduced inequality and research into low-input ecological farming techniques, meant the country had a strong social fabric and the capacity to act.

At the heart of the transition after 1990 was the success of small farms, and urban farms and gardens. Immediate crisis was averted by food programmes that targeted the most vulnerable people, the old, young, pregnant women and young mothers, and a rationing programme that guaranteed a minimum amount of food to everyone. Soon, half the food consumed in the capital, Havana, was grown in the city’s own gardens and, overall, urban gardens provide 60 percent of the vegetables eaten in Cuba. The threat of serious food shortages was overcome within five years.

Time magazine recently called for a ‘War on Climate Change,’ and, interestingly, Cuba’s experience echoed what America achieved in a more distant time of hardship during World War II. Then Eleanor Roosevelt led the ‘victory gardening movement’ to produce between 30-40 percent of vegetables for domestic consumption, and public education campaigns warned that wasting fuel was like fighting for the enemy. Cuba demonstrated it is possible to feed a population under extreme economic stress with very few fossil fuel, but there were other surprises too.

As calorie intake fell by more than one third, of necessity the proportion of physically active adults more than doubled and obesity halved. Between 1997-2002, deaths attributed to diabetes halved, coronary heart disease fell by 35 percent, and strokes and other causes by around one fifth. The approach was dubbed the ‘anti-model’ because it was both highly managed and led by communities, it focused on meeting domestic needs rather than exports, was largely organic and built on the success of small farms. The same countrys approach to disaster preparedness and management is also instructive.

Compared to the deaths and destruction in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, when Hurricane Michelle hit Cuba in 2001 only 5 lives were lost, and recovery was quick. It was due to proper planning, and a collective approach managed by government, but owned at the local level. Disasters expert Dr Ben Wisner commented on the evacuation of 700,000 of Cuba’s 11 million population, ‘This is quite a feat given Cuba’s dilapidated fleet of vehicles, fuel shortage and poor road system.’ At least one analyst suggests that the Cuban experiment, ‘may hold many of the keys to the future survival of civilisation.’

Currently, according to our calculations, in a given calendar year the world as a whole goes into ecological debt around October 7th – by which time we have consumed more and produced more waste than ecosystems can deal with. The results are seen in climate change, oceans emptied of fish, and desertification. Forty years ago Robert Kennedy said that economic growth measured everything apart from that which really matters. But it is possible to assess if we are achieving human development whilst living within our environmental means.

nef’s own ‘Happy Planet Index’, compares the relative success of nations at delivering long life expectancy and high levels of well being, compared to their size of ecological footprint. The results reveal many middle income countries performing well, with good life expectancy and well-being, and relatively low footprints. Strikingly, some of the best performers are small island states. Somehow, they have worked together to produce more convivial communities, whilst respecting environmental limits.

The UN faces huge challenges. Not least is how to recognise and protect the large and growing number of people we can expect to be displaced in a warming world. The climate refugee crisis will dwarf that of political refugees. What will happen to the nationhood and economic areas of countries that could disappear entirely, like Tuvalu? How can we change our locked-in thinking about economic development, and reorganise around the principles of resilience, social justice, sufficiency, ecological efficiency, and the capacity to adapt?

We might begin by asking, as acid tests:

Will what we do make people more or less vulnerable?
Will it move us toward truly sustainable, one-planet-living?
Will it move us fast enough to prevent irreversible, catastrophic climate change?

When the people of Tuvalu first encountered Europeans in the 19th century, they gave them the name palangi. Victorian travellers translated the word to mean “heaven bursters,” a reference to their ship’s guns. Now, some of our lifestyles truly threaten to burst the heavens. At the very least, to achieve poverty reduction in world threatened by climate change, we know that rich countries must radically cut their own consumption to free-up the environmental space in which others can pursue, as a first step, the Millennium Development Goals.

The good news is that we now know from the literature on human well-being, that making the rich, richer does nothing to increase their life satisfaction. On the contrary, numerous studies confirm that once your basic needs are met, you are just as likely to have high life satisfaction, whether your ecological footprint is large or small. My conclusion is that a new development model is needed as much, if not more, in countries like Britain and the US as the majority world. We have to demonstrate that good lives do not have to cost the earth.

Impassable ecological obstacles lie on the path down which we chase the shadows of over-consumption to deliver our well-being, expecting the poor to be grateful for and crumbs that fall from our plates. The good news is that another way is not only possible, as the philosopher A.C. Grayling writes, it is better, richer and more enduring.

Andrew Simms is policy director and head of the climate change programme at nef (the new economics foundation). This article is from a speech he gave to the UN ECOSOC special session on climate change and the MDGS, New York, 2 May 2008.

Tescopoly

Alex Doherty — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 13:31:37 +0000

Invasive species often triumph as a result of good intentions gone wrong. Take Japanese knotweed (Fallopia japonica), introduced to Britain by enthusiastic Victorian gardeners who thought it an ornamental delight that doubled as cattle feed. But from just a scrap of root no bigger than a pea it could grow through tarmac, pavements and brick walls. A century later, its spread is considered such a threat that planting or dumping knotweed is a crime. Knotweed is so hated because it suffocates other plants, replacing them with an unproductive, leafy monotony.

Then there is the Nile perch (Lates niloticus), branded one of the “world’s worst” invaders by conservationists. It’s a freshwater fish that can grow to huge proportions. Again, with good intentions, it was introduced in 1954 to Lake Victoria, straddling Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda. Since then it has helped push over 200 well-established local fish species to extinction. Like the Nile perch, the cane toad (Bufo marinus) eats almost anything it gets its mouth around. Introduced for pest control, it turned out to be noisy, fast-spreading, and a greater pest itself.
As it is in nature, so it is in the economy. Big superstores and chain retailers were allowed to spread by planners, town councils and governments in awe of big business. But then it started to go wrong. The chains became the economic equivalent of invasive species: hungry, indiscriminate, often antisocial and destructive. When no one was paying much attention, the superstores and cloned shops grew to dominate and suffocate the economic ecosystem.

They passed through planning regulations as easily as knotweed pushes through tarmac, devoured smaller and independent retailers with as much reflection as the Nile perch cleansing Lake Victoria of competition. They were often introduced to provide a specific service but outgrew their habitats until their cash-till song could be heard on every street corner, forecourt, roundabout and out-of-town shopping centre. Neither in balance, nor even a boom-bust cycle with other similar, local species of shop; they began permanently to displace them.

Natural scientists use a whole new term to describe the current epoch of comprehensive, global human interference in ecosystems. Our time, they say, should be called the “Homogocene” to describe the way that distinctiveness and difference are being eroded. A combination of the creep of invasive species and habitats destroyed by development is driving a mass extinction.

The World Conservation Union warns that such invasions are leading to the “irretrievable loss of native biodiversity”. Typical characteristics of an invasive species include the absence of predators, hardiness, and a generalist diet. Whatever the reason for their arrival and proliferation, invasive species tend to cause a “disruption” of the ecosystem that is “catastrophic for native species”.

The big, centralised logistical operations of the supermarkets are likewise driving the homogenisation of business, shopping, eating, farming, food, the landscape, the environment and our daily lives. In the process, Britain is being sucked into a vortex of US-style, chain-store-led, clone retailing, both in towns and in soulless “big-box” out-of-town shopping parks – what they call in the US, with its associated suburban sprawl, the “dead zone”. They are spreading in the way “invasive species” spread in nature, lacking checks and balances, killing off diversity and “native” (in other words, local) species. Tesco is not the only guilty party (think of McDonald’s, Starbucks and Gap), but it is possibly the largest driving force. With around 2,000 stores in Britain, almost one third of the grocery market, and rapid international growth, City analysts believe the brand has the land and resources in place already to double its UK floorspace. Can anything stop it?

Bear in mind those characteristics of an invasive species: the absence of predators (real commercial competition or effective regulators to hold them back); hardiness (the legions of corporate lawyers, financial leverage and endless commercial cost-cutting); and a generalist diet (supermarkets will sell virtually anything, and chain stores operate according to a low common denominator).

If you want diversity in your world rather than one kind of plant in your garden, one kind of fish in your lake and only one type of venomous, croaking toad under your shed, then you have to manage for that outcome. When we garden, we hold back aggressive, opportunistic plants in order to keep space open for a celebration of variety and colour.

Like it or not (and it is something about which most policy makers and economists are in deep denial), weakly regulated markets give free rein to economic invasive species and hence tend towards monopoly. This is the great modern economic irony. Advocates of free markets argue against checks and balances to counter the power of big business, but in doing so ultimately destroy the possibility of markets that could meaningfully be called free, or, rather, “open”. They resist anti-monopoly regulation in the name of providing consumer choice, and in the process they ultimately destroy it.

In some important ways, we are returning to an earlier phase of corporatism. Henry Ford told customers they could have any colour of car, as long as it was black. The scale and seriousness of Tesco’s ambition means that, before long, unless we recognise what is happening and have regulators up to the job, one day we will be able to shop anywhere we like, as long as it’s Tesco.

Andrew Simms’ Tescopoly: How one shop came out on top and why it matters, is published next week.

andrew.simms@neweconomics.org

The Climate Change Choice

Alex Doherty — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 01:17:45 +0000

Overuse tends to dilute the meaning of telling phrases, especially in politics. But it does seem that the Stern review on the economic impacts of climate change, published on 30 October 2006, represents a genuine tipping-point. The question is, in which direction?

After years in the economic wilderness, a chemistry of awareness, science and political opposition has finally landed the issue of global warming where it mattered – at the door of the Treasury, Britain’s finance ministry. Some assiduous lobbying helped in pointing out the monstrous threat that climate change represents to international targets for poverty reduction, in which the chancellor, Gordon Brown, invests so much political capital. But the process and its outcome is more important even than that.

A rare act of seamless political unity between Brown and prime minister Tony Blair saw them declare global warming the “greatest market failure” the world has ever seen; and the Stern review itself to be the most important report published since New Labour came to power in 1997.

The Stern Review on the Economics of Global Climate Change published its report. Its author Nicholas Stern, former chief economist at the World Bank, says:

“There is still time to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, if we act now and act internationally. Governments, businesses and individuals all need to work together to respond to the challenge. Strong, deliberate policy choices by governments are essential to motivate change. But the task is urgent. Delaying action, even by a decade or two, will take us into dangerous territory. We must not let this window of opportunity close.”

But, just as these political leaders seemed to talk up the need for immediate, radical action on climate change, behind-the-scenes advisers seemed to be talking down Britain’s role in contributing to the problem. Every official briefing for journalists and analysts emphasised that the country’s greenhouse-gas emissions represented only 2% of the global total. With our paltry size-2 carbon shoes, we were told, any benefit from emission cuts in Britain itself would be erased by growth in the emerging giant, China.

Here, official spin dramatically understates the United Kingdom’s true leverage. If emissions from the global activities, products and services of “UK plc” are added, we actually find ourselves walking around in something between size-11 and size-15 carbon clodhoppers. Because so many heavy extractive industries are listed on the London Stock Exchange, the country is in a prime position to push for much greater cuts. For example, to send the right economic signals to investors, we could require companies like Shell and BP to publish what proportion of their known oil reserves are, in effect, unburnable, and therefore a liability rather than an asset – because to burn them would trigger irreversible climate change.

But where should that line be drawn, and what would trigger, dangerous, irreversible climate change? On this vital question Stern is both revealing and coy.

An elusive landmark

The report says that a temperature rise of more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels is likely to trigger “rapid, major, irreversible” impacts from climate change. Assuming that’s a sensible place to draw the line, Stern then shows that to keep a good chance of staying below that level, greenhouse-gas concentrations should not go beyond 450 parts-per-million-by-volume (ppmv) CO2 equivalent. At current rates of accumulation in the atmosphere, that gives us less than ten years to turn the corner. The logical next question faced by Stern brings on a certain shyness, born of the knowledge that it represents economic heresy.

The world economy depends for more than 80% of its energy on fossil fuels. Even allowing for greater efficiency and more renewables, global economic growth has a carbon value, or “intensity”. It could be low or high, depending on what we do, but it has such a value nonetheless. This means that to hit any given target to stabilise atmospheric greenhouse gases, there will be a level of growth commensurate with doing that.

Yet, at the launch of the Stern review, Blair, Brown and Nicholas Stern held on to the mantra that there is no clash, or even connection, between growth and meeting targets on climate change. We can, in effect, have our global climate and eat it. It is obvious to a schoolchild studying maths, chemistry and physics – if not to an economist – that this is not the case. The multi-trillion dollar question Stern unwittingly asks is: what level of global economic growth is compatible with preventing runaway climate change? And, the question that flows directly from that is: how will it be divided around the world?

Both prime minister and chancellor called for a new global deal that will limit emissions internationally and allow carbon entitlements to be traded. That means persuading countries like China and India to be part of a global cap. But the UK has been burning fossil fuels unrestrained for over 200 years. So, to get developing countries on board, when we have agreed the size of an acceptable global-emissions pie, how is it to be shared out among the nations and people of the world? Will it be on the basis of current inequality, or will it be on the basis of equity, as agreed at the heart of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change?

The answer to this question will determine whether or not we in the rich west will be able to win the support of developing countries and are then able to prevent catastrophic climate change. Yet when the author of the Stern report and the politicians who commissioned it were asked how they would deal with the tricky question of allocation – an issue that falls unavoidably between capping and trading carbon emissions – there was silence.

So, a landmark publication on how to save the planet merits the assessment that Orson Welles once memorably delivered to his own latest film: “another flawed masterpiece”. Stern seems reluctant to follow his own argument to a logical conclusion. The review points out how to keep the world safe; but, by entertaining levels of greenhouse-gas concentrations that will cause “rapid, major and irreversible” warming, it flirts with scenarios that would have apocalyptic consequences – falling directly on the people in developing countries whose interests Stern, Blair and Brown espouse.

A tipping-point, yes. But will it tip us out of denial or, because it cannot face the economic heresy of questioning growth as an overarching policy objective, over a cliff marked “global warming”?

__Andrew Simms is policy director and head of the climate-change forum at the New Economics Foundation (nef). He is the author of Andrew Simms, Ecological Debt: The Health of the Planet and the Wealth of Nations (Pluto, 2005) __