« June 2008 | Main | August 2008 »

July 2008 Archives

July 14, 2008 - Food and the G8

Ok, so it wasn’t smart for the Prime Minister to be lecturing us all on the importance of not wasting food just 24 hours before he was tucking into a gargantuan feast at the wretched G8 Summit in Japan. Derision was guaranteed, and not undeserved.

Unfortunately, however, this completely overshadowed the report on which the Prime Minister was commenting – namely, the Strategy Unit’s brand new policy document, "Food Matters". And that’s a shame – as it provides a really important contribution to an increasingly important (and urgent) debate about food.

In fact, this is the first crack at an integrated food policy that we have seen in the UK since the middle of the last century. In a world dominated by the Common Agricultural Policy, the World Trade Organisation and global food chains, politicians of every political persuasion have felt under no obligation to worry much about an integrated approach here in the UK.

Pretty stupid really, as generations of food and environmental campaigners kept pointing out – to no avail. But multiple shocks in the global food system over the last 18 months or more have jolted politicians out of their near-comatose state of complacency on food policy.

Albeit in catch-up mode, there is a lot of really good stuff in "Food Matters", including a number of critical pointers for the future – a new Foresight study to look at the full impacts of accelerating climate change on food consumption and production, and a new (and very welcome) push on sustainable food procurement across the public sector – with a new "Healthier Food Mark" scheme.

Having said all that, observers of the current debate about "sustainable development as add-on to business-as-usual as opposed to "sustainable development as a wholesale transformation of our dominant model of progress", will find "Food Matters" particularly fascinating. There is a deep, hugely damaging fault-line running all the way through it, captured in a brave but ultimately forlorn attempt to hold both "business-as-usual" and "business transformed" within the same policy framework.

For example, the report just takes it as a "given" that the World Bank’s estimates that cereal production "must" increase by 50%, and meat production by 80% by 2030 is some kind of higher-order imperative. If you start from that kind of "predict and provide" point of view, almost regardless of the impacts of climate change, the impact of oil at around $150 a barrel, the impact on the rural poor, the continuing degradation of productive land, over-exploitation of water resources and loss of biodiversity, then you are not likely to end up with anything even vaguely resembling sustainability. And from my perspective, as a keen supporter of Compassion in World Farming’s "Eat Less Meat" campaign, simply projecting year on year increases in meat production because there is a demand for it out there is ecologically insane.

The business-as-usual mindset in "Food Matters" still dominates. Food markets will apparently become even more globalised, high-tech breakthroughs (including GM) will apparently allow huge increases in yields, and intensive mono-cropping of commodity crops will dominate supply chains even more than they already do. There is no empirical basis to justify such manic assertions, but you can at least see exactly where they’re coming from. After all, wouldn’t it be wonderful, as Hilary Benn was arguing the other day, if we could just engineer another "Green Revolution" of the kind that lifted agricultural yields so dramatically in the 1970s and 1980s?

Well, no, it wouldn’t – if we continued to ignore every single one of those environmental and social limits referred to above, which we almost certainly would.

As you might expect, in that context, the "business transformed" mindset is far less well-developed in "Food Matters", but at least it’s there, peeping out tentatively from behind the report’s "business-as-usual" barriers. And that’s progress of a sort.

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on July 14, 2008 1:48 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

July 17, 2008 - One Billion Trees

As I mentioned in my blog on June 11th (Protecting the Rainforests), there is a great buzz at the moment about REDD – Reducing Emissions (of CO2 ) from Deforestation and Degradation. This is great, and getting something sorted on this before the Copenhagen Conference at the end of 2009 is going to be crucial.

But people are weird. Just because policy-makers are focused for the first time on reducing emissions from cutting down existing trees doesn’t mean that taking up emissions from planting new trees has suddenly become completely irrelevant! Or boring even.

OK, so there are indeed a number of dodgy tree-planting schemes being done as carbon offsets, and it is now widely accepted that forestry-based offsets need to be treated with a great deal of caution. But that absolutely doesn’t mean that all tree-planting has ceased to be important.

I was powerfully reminded of this last week when the official report of the Billion Tree Campaign dropped through my letterbox. If anyone reading this piece RIGHT NOW is feeling a little bit depressed, then RIGHT NOW you should check this out http://www.unep.org/billiontreecampaign.

It’s an astonishing story. Back in 2005, the wonderful Wangari Maathai, winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize (the first environmentalist ever to win) started campaigning around the idea of planting a billion trees. This was taken up by UNEP and a constellation of organisations all around the world, and duly launched in November 2006. I must say, I did wonder at the ambition level – that’s one hell of a lot of people out there planting one hell of a lot of trees.

I needn’t have worried. Since the launch, not just one billion, not just one and half billion, but more than two billion trees have been planted!

The overall impact of this must be extraordinary – in terms of biodiversity, soil protection, watershed management, sustainable livelihoods and so on. And that doesn’t even include the CO2 benefits: depending on the location and size of its trees, one hectare of forest can absorb approximately six tonnes of CO2 a year.

The Report is stuffed full of brilliant case studies, drawn from all over the world, involving every sector and every conceivable kind of organisation – particularly young people.

You can just feel the spirit of Wangari Maathai behind all of this. She was over in the UK a month ago to present the Awards of the annual Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy – itself an amazing organisation (of which – to declare an interest – I’m a Trustee) with its own amazing portfolio of inspirational award winners – this year from Ethiopia, Tanzania, India, Uganda, Brazil and China, as well as Mid Wales, Cornwall, Sussex, Yorkshire, Ayrshire and Oxford!

So if the Billion Trees haven’t done it for you, then check them out too at www.ashdenawards.org

“No one can attend an event like the Ashden Awards and fail to be inspired……these Awards have told us how to illuminate the path to a sustainable future together”

(Al Gore)


Posted by Jonathon Porritt on July 17, 2008 10:45 AM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

July 23, 2008 - Energy as an employer

Great to see Al Gore out there last week refreshing his ‘Inconvenient Truth’ by challenging both Republicans and Democrats to raise their sights in the run-up to the November election. And his “100% renewables” should certainly achieve that particular goal!

Big emphasis in his campaign on jobs – and I’ve no doubt that’s going to become a huge issue here in the UK too. The Prime Minister himself is clearly alert to that reality, and liberally peppers his various energy–related speeches with references to the number of jobs that will be created in promoting different strategic priorities.

Bag-loads of salt required with these projections – most especially with the latest gob-smacker that a new nuclear programme in the UK would create around 100,000 jobs. Not a single one of the big energy companies involved as potential nuclear bidders has the first clue as to where those jobs are likely to come from.

Much better to work with the facts rather ditzy dreams. Where I am in the South West, for instance, there are now 2,900 FTE jobs in the renewable energy sector, up from 1,140 in 2005 – equivalent to an annual growth rate of around 37%. This amounts to £215 million of Growth Value Added today, up from £34 million in 2005. And that’s just the start – if the Government gets really serious about renewables, as indicated for the first time in the new draft Renewables Strategy.

It’s not just the potential growth in renewables that is threatened by today’s nuclear nonsense. All sorts of short term opportunities to rethink the current energy mix in the UK are likely to be over-looked by BERR (and indeed by investors). A month ago, for instance, Greenpeace published a fascinating report on industrial CHP which it commissioned from Poyry Energy Consulting which really should make the civil servants in BERR totally rethink their heat strategy (in so far as a heat strategy can be said to exist at all).

The report shows that at just nine industrial sites, the installation of mega CHP schemes would provide between 13,000 MW and 16,000 MW of electricity in providing the heat needed by the companies on those sites. 13,000 MW is the equivalent of eight new nuclear power stations.

And guess what? Lots of real jobs projected, no particular planning issues, no complex design challenges, no particular security risks and no legacy of nuclear waste to trouble future generations for thousands of years to come.


Posted by Jonathon Porritt on July 23, 2008 12:42 PM | | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

July 28, 2008 - How bad is the economic downturn?

There must be millions of people sitting around in the beautiful weekend sunshine pondering one simple question: just how bad is this “downturn” going to get? Will it turn into a “technical recession” (two quarters of continuous negative growth) from which we recover relatively quickly? Or are we in for a full-blown, thirties-style Depression? Or are we already over the worst?

One group of campaigners (authors of The Green New Deal report, published last week by the new economics foundation) are in no doubt: "we expect that the sub-prime debt crisis (in the US) will soon come to be seen as just the first domino to fall in a line of adjacent dominoes, threatening a systemic crisis. This will lead to a massive wave of corporate defaults. Because their profitability is too low to repay costly debts, these companies will likely default, tipping their lenders-banks and institutions such as Hedge Funds – into crisis."

Right or wrong, their analysis of how we’ve got into this mess is devastating: irresponsible deregulation of the financial services sector, leading to unethical, greedy and even fraudulent behaviour; a deliberately induced credit crunch, with financiers borrowing and lending almost without limit, leading to totally unsustainable asset inflation – particularly in housing markets; and a total failure to crack down on tax havens and dodgy accounting systems that allow corporates and the ultra-rich to prosper at the expense of the vast majority of citizens today. As Nicholas Sarkozy has said: "we have to put a stop to this financial system which is out of its mind and which has lost sight of its purpose."

The credit crunch is the first of three "crunches" that "The New Green Deal" brings together, the others comprising much more familiar territory around climate change and soaring energy prices driven primarily by an encroaching peak in oil production. Each of these crises could of course be addressed separately, but it is precisely their "perfect storm" convergence that renders contemporary capitalist economies so unprecedentedly vulnerable.

It’s also this convergence that makes the proposed solutions so compelling. Drawing deeply on the analogy with President Roosevelt’s New Deal in the early 1930s, when he dragged America out of the worst impacts of the Great Depression, the Green New Deal depends on two essential thrusts: re-regulation of financial services (including the reasserting of government control over credit and interest rates), and the re-flation of the economy through a £50 billion a year crash programme, over 10 years to reduce – dramatically reduce! – both emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases and our chronic dependency on fossil fuels. A new "carbon army" will create hundreds of thousands of jobs, "make every building a power station", eliminate forever the scourge of fuel poverty and severely curtail the worst activities of profiteering energy companies.

Crazy stuff? Possibly. But its worth bearing in mind that’s exactly what all the usual vested interests kept telling President Roosevelt as his New Deal set about rescuing the United States from one of the worst periods in its history.

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on July 28, 2008 4:31 PM | | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Subscribe to this blog's feed
[What is this?]