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January 2009 Archives

January 9, 2009 - The New Politics of Climate Change

"But people just don’t get how urgent it is, Jonathon!" This from a harassed Government Minister looking at the latest survey of public opinion on climate change, with all the usual disturbing data about people’s uncertainty, confusion, ambivalence (saying one thing and doing another) and continuing denial of the now incontrovertible fact that addressing climate change effectively will literally transform all our lives.

Tons of reasons for the continuing confusion, of course – the Clarkson/Daily Mail effect; an army of denialists filling the blogosphere with a combination of vitriol and errant rubbish; a tendency not to believe politicians on anything, let alone climate change, and so on.

But the upshot of all this is that politicians (and this government in particular) feel unable to intervene as decisively and substantively as they need to – for fear of getting punished electorally. The gap between the rhetoric on climate change (world class) and the programme of measures in place to address it (bog-standard) is still very large.

So it was good to see the latest publication from the Green Alliance on The New Politics of Climate Change. The basic thrust of it is that individual action by the "converted" is never going to be sufficient, and that we now need to mobilise the whole of the so-called Third Sector (voluntary organisations, local community groups, trade unions and co-ops, NGOs beyond the environment world, faith communities and so on) to enable a collective shift in both attitudes and actions. Without this, we will never generate a sufficient momentum to encourage/compel our politicians to do what they know they should be doing but still feel they can’t get away with.

"So the critical issue is not simply our behaviour, but the impact of our activism, behaviour and attitudes on political action. The political effect of this action depends not simply on the numbers of people involved but on who those people are and their political influence."

This makes a lot of sense to me. The Third Sector in the UK is hugely influential. Tot up the income of all those different groups and it exceeds £100 billion, with a massive multiplier effect throughout society. But in terms of climate change, it’s a great slumbering monster, largely sitting on the sidelines of the debate on the grounds that its "not my issue", leaving it to the transparently inadequate green groups to keep battling away on their behalf. As Stephen Hale (the author of "The New Politics of Climate Change" and Director of Green Alliance) says: "we need to mobilise action networks that influence individual and community behaviour, and build the social foundations for success."

But how best to mobilise this slumbering monster? I think we will be seeing a lot more action on that front throughout 2009 from many different angles – hopefully with a correspondingly large impact on our political parties.

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on January 9, 2009 12:27 PM | | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (0)

January 16, 2009 - The Third Runway

Yesterday's decision on the third runway at Heathrow marks a critical turning point in UK politics: the point at which the Labour Party turned its back on the future.

What makes politics so fascinating today is its bipolarity. We can't help but live simultaneously in two worlds: one based on abundant fossil fuels, the pursuit of economic growth at almost all costs, rampant consumerism and grotesque inequality; and one based on elegant, very low-carbon, hyper-efficient lifestyles, in a fairer, less frenetic, genuinely sustainable world.

The longer we hang on to the first world, the harder it gets to make the transition to the second – and if we can’t make that transition, we’re stuffed. Persisting with the first world means the death of everything we hold dear. Horribly soon.

A few people in the Labour Party – including at least six members of the Cabinet – get this. Most still don’t. Those who do are constantly trying to persuade their colleagues that we have to accelerate the speed of the transition. We can’t forever live in both worlds. Which means that every big decision taken that locks us deeper and deeper into first (old) world ways of creating wealth and notionally improving people’s lives is a profound betrayal of progressive, forward-looking politics.

So the decision for a third runway at Heathrow is not only massively flawed on both economic and environmental grounds. And not only stupid, as it will never happen anyway. It also marks the death of any residual aspiration on the part of (this particular expression of) the Labour Party to help guide us towards a better world.

Which leaves us all with a lot to reflect on.

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on January 16, 2009 4:18 PM | | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

January 27, 2009 - Agricultural Employment

Nearly two million unemployed. Another 240,000 redundancies already announced over the last couple of months. Heading inexorably towards three million – perhaps even by the middle of the year.

That changes everything. For those at risk, anxiety turns to fear. For those already affected, shock turns to anger. For policy makers, the rules of the game change dramatically. "What contribution will this policy make to protecting existing jobs or creating new jobs?" – that’s the question that now dominates. And that of course is why the Prime Minister organised his Jobs Summit earlier in the month.

Many commentators have already pointed out that there are not many sectors in the UK economy capable of generating many new jobs – and you can guarantee that the one place the Government will not be looking at is Agriculture. Having spent the last few decades fixing the system to reduce the people involved in farming and food production (there’s been an 80% drop in farm workers over the last fifty years, and a 40% decline in the number of farms), I don’t suppose there’s a single person in either Defra or Treasury with any real concern for employment in this critical sector.

So I suspect the Soil Association’s admirable contribution to the Job Summit will have got very short shrift. That’s a shame, as it makes some telling points, based on extensive research carried out by the University of Essex:

• UK Organic farms provide, on average, nearly 2.5 times as many full time equivalent jobs as non-organic farms in the UK.
• Jobs per 100 hectares were 14% higher on organic farms (at 2.49 jobs compared to 2.19 jobs on non-organic farms). Small organic farms with an average size of 36 hectares supported the greatest number of jobs (5.23 jobs per farm).
• Organic farms are 3 times more likely to be involved in direct or local marketing (39%), compared to non-organic farms (13%).
• Organic farming is attracting younger people into farming compared to the farm industry as a whole. On average, organic farmers in the UK are 7 years younger than non-organic farmers (whose average age is 56).
• If all farming in the UK became organic, over 93,000 new jobs directly employed on farms would be created.


Somewhat forlornly, the Report concludes: "Government policy for UK food and farming should explicitly encourage farming systems that provide greater employment in agriculture and in farm-based or local food processing and retailing."

Fat chance. I suspect that the total pool of talent inside government, looking at this or any other sector of the economy, that is capable of advising on "job generation", must be very shallow indeed. It's a very long time since the spectre of very large numbers of people unemployed over very long periods of time was causing Ministers sleepless nights.

Indeed, for the best part of 20 years, it's been ideological heresy to argue that it's legitimate to use taxpayers’ money either to protect existing jobs or create new jobs – except in exceptional circumstances. The ruthless pursuit of increased productivity (in terms of per capita Gross Value Added) at almost any social cost ensured that all the brownie points went to those who helped shed jobs rather than create them.

Now that the Government has been forced into some kind of rolling, cumulative stimulus package, there is at last a new reality dawning.

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on January 27, 2009 10:39 AM | | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

January 30, 2009 - Don’t always trust The Guardian!

Earlier this month, The Guardian published an extraordinary article about Carl Djerassi, commenting on an article he himself had written about population issues in Austria and elsewhere – claiming, amongst other things, that Djerassi had blamed the Pill (of which he was one of the inventors) for Austria’s very low birth rate. This had been seized on by the Catholic church.

At the time, I was gobsmacked by all of that, and duly repeated it all in my own blog piece. And it now turns out that The Guardian got it mostly wrong!

Carl Djerassi is rightly very upset - and all I can say to him is that I’m really sorry! By way of reparation, the best thing I can do is to use his own words to show what he really said:

"Your article on my alleged thoughts about the pill began with the sentence: "Roman Catholic leaders have pounced on a 'confession' by one of the inventors of the birth control pill who has said the contraceptive he helped create was responsible for a 'demographic catastrophe'" (Church grabs chance to attack birth control, 7 January).

Let me pounce back on this statement, which in the meantime has escalated throughout the Catholic press in the US, Italy and elsewhere under such headlines as "Pill inventor slams pill" and "Co-inventor of birth control pill now calls it a catastrophe".

This calumny was prompted by a long article I published in the Austrian newspaper Der Standard on 13 December, where I decried the dramatic shift to the right in Catholic Austria's recent election and its startlingly xenophobic overtones. Given that this happened on the 70th anniversary of the Anschluss, I as a former refugee from Austria - a country that has recently placed my face on a postage stamp - felt obliged to speak out.

Contraception, birth control, abortion, or the pill were nowhere mentioned in my article. I accused the disturbingly large xenophobic segment of Austrian voters (notably young ones) of assuming that their small country was not situated in the middle of Europe but rather on an island where God permits them to live independently to enjoy their schnitzels.

I warned against an impending demographic catastrophe. Without immigration, a country requires 2.1 children per family to maintain its population level; so those xenophobic Austrians would have to have at least three children (which I considered totally unlikely) in order to raise the small size of most of their compatriots' families to a national average of 2.1.

I drew attention to Bulgaria, a country to which I fled in 1938 from Nazi Austria, and which possesses roughly the same current population, age distribution and average family size (1.4 children) as Austria. Nobody these days wants to emigrate to Bulgaria, in contrast to Austria or other western European countries. As a result, demographic estimates predict a 35% drop in Bulgaria's current population by 2050.

I also indicated that Germany's family size (1.3 children) requires an annual immigration of 200,000 just to maintain the current population. Consequently, I emphasised the need in Austria for continuing immigration.

To assume that I attributed the decline in Austria's family size (matched by all-Catholic Italy and Spain) to the pill is absurd. People don't have smaller families because of the availability of birth control, but for personal, economic, cultural and other reasons, of which the changes in the status and lifestyles of women during the last 50 years is the most important. Japan has an even worse demographic problem than western Europe, yet the pill was only legalised there in 1999 and is still not used widely.

One only needs to read my 2001 memoir, This Man's Pill: Reflections on the 50th Anniversary of the Pill, to find my personal views on contraception, the pill, and the de facto separation of sex and reproduction - which sooner or later the Catholic church must face realistically and humanely."

Carl Djerassi is an author and playwright and is emeritus professor of chemistry at Stanford University. His most recent book (2008) is Sex in an Age of Technological Reproduction
djerassi@stanford.edu

First published in The Guardian, Comment is free, Tuesday 27th January 2008.
I never blamed the pill for the fall in family size

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on January 30, 2009 12:19 PM | | Comments (16) | TrackBacks (0)

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