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October 2007 Archives

October 10, 2007 - Tidal Power in the UK

The Sustainable Development Commission’s report about Tidal Power has been out for more than a week now, and we have just about weathered the storm from environmental NGOs – and the Environment Agency – horrified as they were that the Sustainable Development Commission could possibly have given its name to an upbeat assessment of the potential for a barrage on the Severn estuary.

I can’t really blame them. It’s been an article of faith for so long that all self-respecting greenies will, by self-definition, be opposed to a barrage on the Severn. It is, after all, a quite unique environment, and the damage that a barrage will do will indeed be severe. Birds, fish, countless invertebrates, let alone a huge expanse of mud flats, will be lost. No wonder so many people believe that it’s impossible to pursue a barrage proposal without breaching our legal obligations under the Birds and Habitats Directives. We think they are wrong on that score. With the right kind of compensatory package, that damage can be “offset”, if not absolutely in the same part of the world, then certainly elsewhere in the UK.

One NGO that was noticeably restrained in expressing its concerns at the time was The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Little did we know that they were about to announce a major new habitat restoration project at Wallasea Island on the south Essex coast. Building on a prototype project pioneered right next door by Defra, this will be one of the largest schemes of its kind in western Europe, returning arable farmland to a mosaic of mud flats, salt marshes and coastal marshland – a very special kind of habitat, 90% of which has been lost in the UK over the last century through drainage and development.

I defy you not to be inspired by this project – http://www.rspb.org.uk/reserves/guide/w/wallaseaisland/index.asp

“It will be an exciting landmark conservation and engineering project for the 21st Century on a scale never before attempted in the UK, and the largest of its type in Europe. It will demonstrate how land can be managed to help the coast and its wildlife adapt in the face of climate change and accelerated sea level rise.

The RSPB is working to transform a large area of arable farmland at Wallasea Island, in the heart of an internationally important estuary, back into coastal marshland. This will create a wetland mosaic of mudflats and saltmarshes, shallow lagoons and pastures. These will be criss-crossed by low-lying bunds along which visitors will be able to access much of this new 'Wild Coast' ".

But I couldn’t help noticing that there was no price tag attached at the moment! It will, for sure, run to many millions, and this still has to be raised. And that of course is just a fraction of the total compensation package that is likely to be required for the Severn Barrage.

Our argument on that score is a simple one. We are going to have to do many, many schemes of the Wallasea Island kind as we start to adapt to accelerating climate change. And where exactly is the money going to come from? There is just no way that loyal supporters of the RSPB are going to be able to stump up such a massive amount.

But if the bill for such compensatory packages (as we ourselves have recommended) is included right up front in the capital costs of the Severn Barrage project, we just might have one of those elusive win wins: 120 years of relatively cheap, nearly zero-carbon electricity, providing 5% of our total electricity needs, plus an adaptation strategy that really does do the job on an ecological front.

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Posted on October 10, 2007 1:24 PM | | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

October 16, 2007 - Obesity and Climate Change

What an intriguing contribution from Alan Johnson linking obesity and climate change, when he suggested that obesity could be at least as serious a problem by 2050 as we think climate change will be.

Obesity and climate change

Perhaps the Secretary of State for Health is softening us all up for a new Obesity Bill, with ambitious (even statutory?) targets to reduce levels of fat by at least 60% by 2050, with compulsory lipo-suction for failing to meet key weight reduction milestones by 2015, and more intrusive surgical interventions thereafter.

If that’s a little bit too ambitious at the moment, then the Department for Health could immediately commission a serious study into the real (and extremely significant) links between obesity and climate change, based on the rather obvious perception that those factors which have seduced us over the years into our ludicrously CO2 – intensive lifestyles are the self-same factors that promote a dangerously “obesogenic” environment. In that respect, as many people have pointed out, it's no coincidence that the United States is both the most obese nation on earth and the most CO2 – obese, as in per capita omissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases.

So, at the risk of making myself deeply unpopular on “fattist grounds”, the reality is that fatter people (relatively speaking) not only do more damage to themselves than thinner people (relatively speaking), but they also do more damage to the physical environment and to the climate – both through the nature of their diets and through their more sedentary lifestyles. With a growing reluctance to walk or cycle, the more obese people will become.

What people constantly forget in all this, is that the food supply chain, in its entirety, contributes at least 20% of total greenhouse gas emissions, and probably more, depending on how you define it. Relatively speaking, obese people consume up to 40% more in terms of calories, as Ian Roberts (Professor of Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) pointed out in an excellent article in the New Scientist back in June this year:

“An obese population leaves a significantly heavier footprint than a thin one. Fats and refined sugars, which tend to dominate the diets of obese people, are particularly carbon intensive”.

Does this provide Alan Johnson with enough of a steer as to the synergies between himself, Hilary Benn (Defra) and Ruth Kelly (the Department for Transport)? Despite my earlier blog-prompt that the Chancellor of the Exchequer might just get things sorted by a massive injection of funds to promote cycling and walking, I’m sorry to report that The Comprehensive Spending Review just didn’t take the hint.

With its mind on higher things, it is probably a bit demeaning for Treasury to stoop to the banality of exalting cycling and walking. But if it turned out to be the most cost-effective way of reducing both the pounds and reducing the CO2, that might just swing it.

Posted on October 16, 2007 12:25 PM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

October 18, 2007 - Carbon Free Homes

Readers may be interested in an article I wrote for Building Design:

“Compare Germany’s retrofit of its existing stock with our own seriously clunky energy commitment”

Why put a price on the priceless importance of carbon free homes?

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Posted on October 18, 2007 11:51 AM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

October 18, 2007 - RSA talk

You might also be interested in this event at the RSA, where I'll be talking about my book, Capitalism as if the World Matters:

Author Jonathon Porritt will be joined by Will Hutton, Stewart Wallis (executive director of the New Economics Foundation) and the BBC’s Environment Correspondent Sarah Mukherjee for an RSA lecture entitled Capitalism as if the World Matters: Restructuring the Global Economy for a Sustainable Future.

They will be discussing the impact of Jonathon's ideas and how he addresses the changes that have occurred during the two years since the hardback edition was published.

This will be followed by a question and answer session and there will be an opportunity to meet the speakers and purchase signed, discounted copies in the bar afterwards.

The event is being hosted by the RSA and will run from 6pm - 7:30pm on October 25th. Places are limited and can be booked here.

Posted on October 18, 2007 1:12 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

October 19, 2007 - Climate change and peace

Al Gore has finally (finally?!) declared that he’s absolutely not going to put himself forward as the Democratic presidential candidate. Thank God for that. The thought of Al reverting to his rather wooden, very risk-averse, not particularly friendly pre-2000 persona was an absolute nightmare. If he had failed (either at the first or the second hurdle), his stature would have been substantially diminished – as in “Nobel Peace Prize Winner and failed Presidential candidate twice over”. If he’d won, he’d have had a few other things on his plate other than climate change – and I suspect we would have lost him as the undisputed world leader in this area at the moment.

But hats off to the Nobel Prize Committee. By explicitly linking the worsening impacts of climate change with threats to peace and security (particularly through displaced people and growing numbers of environmental refugees), it reinforces the message that climate change is not an environmental issue, but much more to do with security and economics.

There’s been a predictable spate of hostile comments from Gore-haters and climate contrarians, questioning the sanity/ideology of the Nobel Prize Committee, just as there was a couple of years ago when Wangari Maathai, Founder of the Green Belt Movement in Kenya and redoubtable environmental campaigner, also won the prize. “What has planting trees got to do with promoting a more peaceful world?” This was a common-place response from these lame-brains.

But the Committee didn’t just honour Gore. The joint winner was the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an unprecedented honouring of one little cog in the monolithic machinery of the United Nations. And such a good decision. Even if you believe (like me) that the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report significantly underestimates both the speed of climate change and its severity, the sheer grinding slog of establishing a scientific consensus across all UN countries, and then getting countries like Saudi Arabia and the United States to buy into that consensus (even when that’s absolutely the last thing they want to do in the world) beggars belief.

The IPCC is a unique scientific body which has had a quite unique impact on the global debate.

And what a powerful way of telling critics of the IPCC like Bjørn Lomborg to bog off.

Posted on October 19, 2007 1:43 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

October 22, 2007 - Capitalism As If The World Matters

Here's a short article about the paperback edition of my book Capitalism As If The World Matters, which launches today:

2007: the atmosphere warms up; the forests crash down; the poor of the world go on getting poorer; water resources in more than 30 countries are running dry; fish stocks decline; an additional 73 million people join the human race; 800 million go hungry while a billion get fat. Just an average year in the life of planet Earth. And still we wait for today’s political “leaders” to begin to get their act together.

This is not a question of disputed science. Even on climate change, the consensus is now overwhelming. Neither it is a question of money. The rich world squanders countless billions of dollars of tax payers money on subsidising life-destroying industries year in, year out. Instead, it is a question of fear and lack of political vision.

Politicians are fearful because they don’t believe the answers can be found within a capitalist framework. And they know they won’t get elected unless they go on offering voters the same kind of “get rich quick, party on politics” that has dominated our lives for the last 50 years.

Whether capitalism really is capable of delivering a genuinely sustainable, equitable economy is by no means clear. But it had better be. It is the only game in town, and will be for many years to come. Precisely those years during which we have to take urgent, radical action to halt the current pattern of damage to the planet and our communities.

Capitalism As If The World Matters is all about confronting that all but unspoken crisis in our political systems. Without inspirational and utterly transparent political leadership, the beneficiaries of today’s feel-good societies will go on thinking that they can go on forever.

Since the first edition of “Capitalism” came out two years ago, its basic thrust has been warmly received by business leaders, academics and campaigners. This edition has been substantially updated, with extended analysis of what is happening in China and the United States (on which two countries our future prospects almost entirely depend), a whole raft of new case studies from the business world, and a deeper treatment of some of the security issues that have such a profound effect on people’s lives.

It also continues to raise difficult questions for the environment movement to address as it struggles to make its voice heard beyond the “already converted” and broadly sympathetic.

Change will not come by threatening people with yet more ecological doom and gloom. The necessary changes have also to be seen as desirable changes: good for people, their health and their quality of life – and not just good for the prospects of future generations. This is a ‘here and now’ agenda, as well as an agenda for tomorrow.

This means working with the grain of markets and free choice, not against it. It means embracing capitalism as the only overarching system capable of achieving any kind of reconciliation between ecological sustainability, on the one hand, and the pursuit of prosperity and personal wellbeing on the other.

That said, today’s particular model of capitalism is clearly incapable of delivering this kind of reconciliation, dependent as it is upon the accelerating liquidation of the natural capital upon which we depend and upon worsening divides between the rich and the poor worldwide.

At its heart, therefore, sustainable development comes right down to one all-important challenge: is it possible to conceptualize and then operationalize an alternative model of capitalism – one that allows for the sustainable management of the different capital assets upon which we rely so that the yield from those different assets sustains us now, as well as in the future?

The case for sustainable development must be reframed if that is to happen. It must be as much about new opportunities for responsible wealth creation as about outlawing irresponsible wealth creation; it must draw upon a core of ideas and values that speaks directly to people’s desire for a higher quality of life, emphasizing enlightened self-interest and personal wellbeing of a different kind.

It is only this combination (sustainable development perceived as answering the unavoidable challenge of living within natural limits, providing unprecedented opportunities for responsible and innovative wealth creators, and offering people a more equitable and more rewarding way of life) that is likely to provide any serious political alternative to today’s economic and political orthodoxy.

Unless it throws in its lot with this kind of progressive political agenda, conventional environmentalism will continue to decline.

All things considered, what is the alternative anyway? If not genuinely sustainable development, then what? And if not now, when?

The paperback of Capitalism As If The World Matters is available from the Earthscan website

Posted on October 22, 2007 10:30 AM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

October 26, 2007 - Good news from Wales

Excellent news from Wales. First Minister Rhodri Morgan has just announced a very creative plan to bring forward nearly 1,000 MegaWatts of new wind energy on Forestry Commission land owned by the Welsh Assembly Government.

Subject to the standard planning process, developers will be able to bid for major new wind farms on Forestry Commission land, with part of the “rental value” from the use of that land going back into community-based projects – to the tune of around £4 million a year. And part of that must be invested in schemes to reduce CO2 emissions in the local community. Efficiency plus renewables plus community benefits – spot on!

I haven’t seen the responses in the media as yet, but, for once, I hope the positive voices will outweigh the moaning minnies who still think the best way of dealing with climate change is to just carry on talking about it.

Their ranks have been strongly reinforced of late by what I call the “wouldn’t-it-be-better-brigade” – as in “wouldn’t it be better to invest in energy efficiency”, “wouldn’t it be better to put the wind farms offshore”, “wouldn’t it be better to focus on small-scale generation on our homes”, and so on. To which the answer has to be “No, No and No”: all of those things would be great in their own right, but they wouldn’t be better. People still don’t get this: we need the whole boiling lot, and then a lot more on top of that, and then a lot more on top of that.

Which is why I’m so gobsmacked by those who have piously pointed out since the SDC’s report on tidal energy that a Severn Barrage would contribute only 5% of the UK’s electricity over the next 120 years. Only 5%! Do they have any idea how hard it’s going to be to get 1%, let alone 5%?

Anyway, back to Rhodri’s wind farms. The big ones (more than 50 MegaWatts) will have to be approved by BERR, which currently seems to have lost its renewables bottle in a big way. Leaked memos, ministerial back-sliding, “if it’s not nuclear, we don’t want to know”. So fingers crossed they don’t screw it up for Wales as and when the proposals start coming through the system.

Posted on October 26, 2007 2:40 PM | | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (0)

October 31, 2007 - The Green Belt

Who would have thought that staid old Natural England, one year into its new persona, would have come out with such a fantastic pot-stirring initiative to celebrate its first birthday – by calling for a fundamental review of the Green Belt. In its announcement there is more than a hint that Green Belts have had their day, and that we should come up with a radically different approach. Dovecot duly disturbed, with doves duly wheeling around in consternation, outraged at such unthinkable heresy.

Actually, I’m a bit envious. Somebody had to do it, and I would have quite liked the Sustainable Development Commission to get stuck in on the future of Green Belts – precisely because it is so important, so controversial, and so rich from a sustainable development perspective. Too bad.

But the fear that everyone has (and it’s a wholly legitimate fear) is that the only reason for reviewing the Green Belt at this moment in time is to make life easier for volume house builders who want to make life easier for Gordon Brown who wants to make life easier (theoretically) for all those people who can’t get their first foothold on the housing ladder – by building more than 3 million new homes.

And the Government’s current appetite for all those new homes is so rampant that these fears are more compelling now than ever before. Housing Minister Yvette Cooper is keen to dispel those fears (regardless of Green Belt issues), and powerfully hits the “sustainable and affordable” button on every available occasion – which is great. But there is more than a suspicion that Treasury might hear those same words but continue to treat them as little more than linguistic baubles.

To be fair, Natural England has tried to reflect those fears in the way that it would like the Review of the Green Belt to be carried out. The obvious thing to do (to ensure the kind of quality debate we need) is first to review the need for a review – in other words, just how broke is the current system before anyone sets out to fix it. How well has it achieved its objectives? How good a job is it doing in terms of nature conservation, recreation, amenity value, and simply preventing development. Without so much as a mention of new houses, this would really begin to highlight the nature of the debate that is needed.

But good for Natural England. A pot well stirred!

Posted on October 31, 2007 3:59 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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