« February 2009 | Main | April 2009 »

March 2009 Archives

March 4, 2009 - A sustainable population

I’ve always felt that logic and sound evidence provide a pretty solid foundation for good policy-making. But some issues are more amenable to logic than others, and population is clearly the least amenable of all.

I’m in the population doghouse yet again. On 1st February the Sunday Times carried a front page story based on comments I had made that as we are heading off into some very troubled times, it would come to be seen as “irresponsible” for families to have more than two children.

You’d have thought I’d advocated compulsory sterilisation, emasculation, euthanasia, and baby-slaughtering all in one fell swoop. Melanie Philips likened me to Pol Pot and Hitler (who was “green” after all!), and when Fox News in the US got hold of the story, every religious nutcase with nothing better to do crawled out from under their stones to suggest the best thing I could do to help address population pressure would be to top myself. Instantly. Logic and sound evidence were not much in evidence.

So let’s just start all over again – here’s the logic, in 12 easy steps.

1. The more human beings there are on the planet, the bigger our collective impact. There were about 3 billion of us in 1950, and there will be about 9 billion by 2050 – if we just carry on as usual. That’s an extra 6 billion in 100 years!

2. Our impact is felt in many different ways – in terms of soil erosion, over-fishing, deforestation, water shortages, loss of species and habitats, and so on. Most particularly, it’s felt in terms of the rising emissions of C02 and other greenhouse gases that we’re putting into the atmosphere, with the prospect of horrendous consequences by the end of the century if we can’t turn this around.

3. Each individual is responsible for their own carbon footprint. Here in the UK, it’s about 12 tonnes per person per annum. In China, it’s about 4 tonnes per person per annum. It soon mounts up. Were it not for China’s ‘one child family’ policy (which is certainly very controversial), there would be as many as 400 million additional Chinese alive today – with a combined annual carbon footprint of around 1.6 billion tonnes of C02!

4. Population and environmental impact are therefore inextricably intertwined. New technology (around energy efficiency and renewables) can do a lot to help reduce that impact. But at the moment, the efficiency gains it gives us are not even keeping up with the combined increase in human numbers and economic growth.

5. Here in the UK, we have adopted some extremely ambitious targets to reduce emissions of C02 and other greenhouse gases by 80% by 2050. On a per capita basis, that means going from around 12 tonnes per person per annum today to around 2.5 tonnes per person per annum by 2050 – if our population remains the same in 2050.

6. But it’s not going to! Current projections indicate that our population is going to grow from 61 million today to 77 million by 2050. Logically, that means there’s a lot less C02 to go round (in terms of our per capita allocation), making it all the harder to achieve that 80% target. (A target, incidentally, which many scientists now see as the absolute minimum which will be required in rich countries like ours).

7. It also means a lot more overcrowding, a lot more pressure on housing, on water supplies, on our trains, on our already congested roads and so on.

8. If you accept that this is a not very attractive proposition, and that it would be better to aim for a lower, rather than a higher population, there are two things that have to happen here in the UK.

9. The first is to allow into our country no more people than leave it on an annual basis. That’s called “net zero immigration”. This is not xenophobic, let alone racist. It’s just common sense.

10. The second is to see if we might persuade (please note, persuade, not coerce!) the 26% of women in the UK who are currently expected to have more than two children to ‘stop at two’. (The other 74% already do stop at two, or have one child or none.) If we did this, we would be able to cut our forecast population by around 7 million people.

11. Combine both policies (neither of which, I think you’ll agree, are that extreme, let alone threatening, let alone totalitarian!), and the consequences are enormous: instead of a population of 77 million, we’d have a population of around 55 million – 6 million fewer than we have today.

12. Amazingly, if we then applied ourselves to doing more or less the same for women the world over, during the course of the next 20 years or so, by the tried and tested means of improving education for all (but particularly for girls), including healthcare for all (but particularly for women), and ensuring a choice of contraception for all women so that they are free to manage their own fertility, without fear of oppressive religious and male-dominated constraints, then we might just be able to stabilise world population to something closer to 7.8 billion instead of 9.2 billion. And just work out what that means for climate change, the planet and all future generations.


So that’s the logic. Of course, it isn’t as easy as that. The barriers are still huge.
Many religious people still think the use of any contraception other than abstinence or the ‘natural method’ runs counter to the will of God. Many economists still think that a declining population will create an increasingly problematic imbalance between those at the end of their working lives and those whose taxes will be needed to support them.

But there seems to be little reason, on either count, to declare that population must remain for ever a taboo subject, beyond rational discourse, worthy only of the rantings of Daily Mail columnists and religious extremists.

So I shall stick to my guns on this one! As a Patron of the Optimum Population Trust, I shall be keenly supporting their ‘Stick at Two’ campaign. And as an environmentalist with a bit of a track record, I shall continue to point out to many of my colleagues that their continuing silence on the links between population, climate change and social justice is actually a betrayal of everything that they stand for – however ‘politically correct’ they may imagine it to be.

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on March 4, 2009 5:17 PM | | Comments (43) | TrackBacks (0)

March 18, 2009 - Pre Budget Talk

With one month to go before the Budget, the debate is hotting up about the desirability of the Chancellor announcing some kind of “green recovery” initiative.

There are all sorts of signals coming from the Treasury that there’s nothing left in the pot – but all sorts of initiatives urging the Chancellor to seize hold of this opportunity to demonstrate that behind all this talk about a low-carbon Britain there is some real substance.

The eloquence of the talk reaches ever greater heights. Get this lot:

"This transition to low-carbon is an environmental and economic imperative. It is also inevitable. There is no high-carbon future. Low-carbon is not a sector of an economy - it is an economy."
(Lord Mandelson, BERR)

"The science says we need to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 80% to avoid the most catastrophic and irreversible effects of climate change. We’ll have 20% of current emissions, with an economy that we want to be three times bigger. It’s not just a change, it’s a transformation."
(Ed Miliband, DECC)

"We can now build a new green economy. Rise to one of the greatest peace time challenges of all, that will not only help our country prosper, but will build a better, more secure and more sustainable world."
(Prime Minister Gordon Brown)

On that basis, you’d expect something more than another dribble of stuff along the lines that we had in the 2008 Pre-Budget Report. To do that, the Chancellor has first to persuade himself that some further stimulus package is both necessary and desirable. Then he has to determine the overall scale of such a package (the eminent US economist Paul Krugman has urged all OECD countries to commit up to 4% of annual GDP – which for the UK would be around £60 billion) and then to determine what share of the total package should be devoted to "sustainability-specific" investments.

And that’s where it gets really interesting. The NGOs are getting increasingly vocal about green tokenism: if the low-carbon, sustainability elements come in at less than 10%, say, then the 90% is, almost by definition, going to be "high carbon and unsustainable". That would hardly seem to fit with the green words from the Low Carbon Industrial Summit above.

According to the new HSBC report (‘A Climate for Recovery – the colour of stimulus goes green’), the current sustainability percentage here in the UK is less than 7%. Compare that with China or South Korea.

 Country/Region Fund $b   Period Green Fund $b  % Green 
 Asia Pacific        
 Australia  26.7  2009-12  2.5  9.3%
 China  586.1  2009-10  221.3  37.8%
 India  13.7  2009    0%
 Japan  485.9  2009 -  12.4  2.6%
 South Korea  38.1  2009-12  30.7  80.5%
 Thailand  3.3  2009    0%
 Subtotal Asia Pacific  1,153.8    266.9  23.1%
 Europe        
 EU  38.8  2009-10  22.8  58.7%
 Germany  104.8  2009-10  13.8  13.2%
 France  33.7  2009-10  7.1  21.2%
 Italy  103.5  2009 -  1.3  1.3%
 Spain  14.2  2009  0.8  5.8%
 UK  30.4  2009-12  2.1  6.9%
 Other EU States  308.7  2009  6.2  2.0%
 Subtotal Europe  634.2    54.2  16.7%
Americas        
 Canada  31.8  2009-13  2.6  8.3%
 Chile  4.0  2009    0%
US EESA  185.0  10 years  18.2  9.8%
US ARRA  787.0  10 years  94.1  12.0%
Subtotal Americas  1.007.8    114.9  11.4%
 TOTAL  2,796    436  15.6%

Source: ‘A Climate for Recovery – the colour of stimulus goes green’ (HSBC, Feb09)

So if the Chancellor is going to do something in the Budget, it needs to be big. And that’s what the Sustainable Development Commission is going to be recommending in our forthcoming “Sustainable New Deal” paper.

This really is the moment. If not now (with only a year or so before the next General Election), then one really has to ask when. I’d hate to think of all those fine words just left hanging in the wind.

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on March 18, 2009 11:24 AM | | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

March 27, 2009 - Renewables

With the best will in the world, one must sometimes despair of the completely inexplicable decisions of certain government departments.

Last week, I posted a piece about the difficulties that Labour now faces if it’s going to be brave about a serious “green recovery package”.

At which point, all sorts of stuff began to surface about the mind-boggling situation that the Government seems to have got itself into in terms of the current support for renewables here in the UK.

Here’s what it looks like: the UK is signed up to a Europe-wide process that mandates the UK to source 15% of all its energy (electricity, heat and transport) from renewables by 2020. Everybody knows we are massively off the pace at the moment – and even Ed Miliband at his most optimistic acknowledges that we haven’t got a hope in hell of getting from where we are now (performing worse than any other country in Europe, apart from Luxembourg and Malta) to where we need be without radical new measures.

What we’ve got going for us at the moment is the Renewable Obligation Certificates scheme and the worthy but terminally inadequate Low Carbon Buildings Programme. The demand for its limited largesse (just a few tens of millions) to support the installation of photovoltaics and other micro-renewables is strong, and it’s already run out for this year. No more money, apparently, till the new feed-in tariffs kick in April 2010.

That’s not good. But there’s something even more foolish going on. At exactly the moment when biomass boilers and the woodfuel industry is beginning to make a real difference, all grant funding has dried up until the new Renewables Heat Initiative kicks-in, in (wait for it!) April 2011. Between now and April 2011, as I learned recently on a visit to the UK’s first ever exhibition of woodfuel technologies (which could, by the way, meet all of the 15% target for renewables heat!), this nascent but strategically crucial industry will struggle to survive.

And then I heard yesterday that Iberdrola (one of the biggest renewable energy companies in the world) is halving its investments in renewables in the UK, not just because of the credit crunch, but because of its very grave doubts about the UK Government’s renewables policy – and seriousness of intent.

It really is bonkers, isn’t it? Old BERR clearly lives on in new DECC and Ministerial words clearly count for little at the moment.

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on March 27, 2009 12:46 PM | | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

March 31, 2009 - Prosperity Without Growth?

At last, the Sustainable Development Commission’s magnum opus has landed. Prosperity Without Growth? was launched on Monday, representing the culmination of five year’s work. Tim Jackson, our Economics Commissioner has produced an absolute ‘tour de force’. And there’s a lot riding on this for the Commission.

Way back in the mists of time, through the 70s and into the early 80s, there was an extremely lively debate about the compatibility between economic growth and big-picture resource and sustainability issues. Heavyweight economists batted academic papers back and forth; party political conferences formally debated the pros and cons of economic growth. All this was nicely stoked up by the two Opec-induced oil shocks, and even the media were all over it. Then oil prices came plunging back down, Jimmy Carter got stuffed by Ronald Reagan, and free-market fundamentalists began their long march through the knackered ranks of superannuated Keynesians.

The consequence of which has been hardly any serious discussion about economic growth and sustainability since then. Unbelievable, in retrospect, as even a fool could tell you that if you continue to grow both the number of human beings and the volume of goods and services consumed by each of those human beings, on a planet with limited resources and stressed-out life support systems, then you are heading inevitably for a bust. Sooner or later.

Politicians of all persuasions have hugely enjoyed their 20-year leave of absence. But it’s an inexcusable dereliction of duty to go on avoiding this crunch point in the light of what’s been happening over the last few years – with oil going to $147 a barrel, food reserves at their lowest level for decades, chronic water shortages the world over, accelerating climate change and so on. Paradoxically, the collapse in the global economy gives us some breathing space – but not much. If it’s back to business-as-usual, growth-at-all-costs as the sole route to progress, then biophysical reality will not long be delayed.

Politicians have got used to using one get-out clause in terms of avoiding any intellectual encounter with that crunch point: decoupling. Just decouple the benefits of economic growth from its costs (or externalities, as economists call them) through technology-driven resource efficiency, and all will be well.

If only. One of the toughest messages in "Prosperity Without Growth?" comes in Tim Jackson’s clinical critique of "the myth of decoupling". The reality is that even progress on relative decoupling (reduced environmental impact per unit of GDP) has been limited, whilst progress on absolute decoupling (reduced environmental impact, full stop - which is what we have to achieve) has been non-existent.

That isn’t to deny the critical significance of decoupling. We desperately need far more of it than anything we’ve seen so far. Which means governments have got to do it, rather than just talk about it, even as they come to the inconvenient conclusion that it won’t be enough on its own anyway.

Politicians may not want to hear these messages. But it’s our task to broadcast them much more loudly and much more clearly than we’ve done over the last 20 years. And "Prosperity Without Growth?" is what you need to make that happen.

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on March 31, 2009 1:34 PM | | Comments (30) | TrackBacks (0)

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