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April 22, 2010 - Worse than the worst case

There’s a great episode of The Simpsonswhich has been much in my mind this week. Lisa Simpson is asked by her teacher to do an essay on what her hometown of Springfield would look like in 2050. Lisa’s vision is a decidedly gloomy one, with most of Springfield under water as a direct consequence of accelerating climate change and rising sea levels. Her teachers are so appalled that they decide the best thing they can do is prescribe for Lisa a course of ‘Ignorital’ to ensure that she puts all her worst fears behind her!

I encounter a lot of people who have clearly been on ‘Ignorital’ for quite a long time – and I sometimes wonder whether I’m self-medicating myself when I’m not concentrating! I find it hard to imagine what life would be like if I had genuinely come to the irrevocable conclusion that it was too late to do anything serious about preventing runaway climate change. I can’t imagine how I would persist with (let alone continue to feel excited by) the kind of advocacy work that I spend most of my life doing with Forum for the Future and the Prince of Wales’s Business & the Environment Programme.

For me, this has been an ongoing internal dialogue for at least the last five years. It gets a little bit more painful, every year, with spikes of self-doubt obliging me to keep on checking the state of the science.

And having just finished reading Clive Hamilton’s excellent (but deeply disturbing!) Requiem for a Species, I’m now going to have to think it all through all over again.

Clive is one of those who has come to the conclusion that it is indeed too late – whatever we now do – to ensure that average temperature increases can be held below that 2C degree threshold by the end of the century.

The truth of it is that this is a view that is gaining ground amongst more and more scientists and informed commentators. The worst case in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assumes emissions of greenhouse gases increasing by 2.5% per annum. In fact, they are currently increasing by 3% per annum.

What’s more, that ‘worst case scenario’ takes no account of what are known as ‘natural feedback loops’ – where natural systems (such as the permafrost in the Arctic, or rainforests in the Amazon) begin to ‘adapt’ as a direct consequence of the warming that we humans have already set in train. And there’s now growing evidence of these feedback loops beginning to kick in.

The IPCC has estimated the temperature increase that would result from its worst case as going as high as 4.6C degrees . More than twice the 2C degree threshold. And it’s worth bearing in mind here that at 3C degrees, the Greenland Ice Sheet is definitively in irreversible meltdown.

We know all this. It’s the kind of analysis that underpined the Kyoto Protocol all those years ago, and which now informs the UK’s Climate Change Act and other policy interventions. But Clive Hamilton argues that:

“Despite our pretensions to rationality, scientific facts are fighting against more powerful forces. Apart from institutional factors that have prevented early action – the power of industry, the rise of money politics, and bureaucratic inertia, we have never really believed the dire warnings of the scientists. Unreasoning optimism is one of humankind’s greatest virtues and most dangerous foibles”.

The reasons not to subscribe to the ‘too late’ hypothesis get just a little bit weaker every year. Countervailing scientific (and majority) opinion indicates that we’ve still got a ‘window of time’ to ensure first that emissions peak as soon as possible and then reduce dramatically from that point on. That still allows us to think that we might manage this transition into an ultra low-carbon world without the traumatic dislocation that is otherwise going to beset us.

This countervailing view depends, of course, on the assumption that the politicians will be able to do what needs to be done before that window comes crashing down on us.

I haven’t entirely given up on that possibility. Clive has. With painful intensity, he describes how he went through that barrier himself, renouncing spurious optimism and ending up in profound mourning for the loss of hope, for his children, for the Earth, for the future of humankind – hence the Requiem.

He is still sympathetic to those still on the other side of that line of hopefulness, but indirectly challenges our integrity:

“Denial requires a wilful mis-reading of the science, a romantic view of the ability of political institutions to respond, or face divine intervention. Climate Pollyannas adopt the same tactic as doom-mongers but in reverse: instead of taking a very small risk of disaster and exaggerating it, they take a very high risk of disaster and minimise it”.

But it is not all as bleak as it may sound. Following Joanna Macy’s powerful dictum, “Despair, Accept, Act”, the book ends with a very positive message as to how we just need to re-orientate ourselves in this more realistic world.

But all very challenging stuff.


Clive Hamilton’s Requiem for a Species; Why we resist the truth about Climate Change is published by Earthscan

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on April 22, 2010 1:00 PM | | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

April 28, 2010 - Windpower to the people

Last week I witnessed two wonderfully windy ‘inaugurations’.

On Friday, I cycled down to the Springbank Community Resources Centre in Cheltenham to ‘turn on’ a neat little wind turbine, precisely 17.5 metres high. Not much wind to start with, but then (thankfully!) it kicked into satisfying action.

This is Cheltenham’s first wind turbine, located in the middle of a newly-regenerated urban park. The driving force behind the initiative is the Hesters Way Partnership, one of Cheltenham’s most effective community groups. It would have been completely impossible to have made any progress on this without the Partnership’s full-on support.

There were of course the usual worries about the noise the turbine would make. The flats and houses all around the park overlook the turbine, and are very much within earshot. Local Councillors got very positively involved, some ‘seeing is believing’ visits to other projects were arranged, and there was a lot of reassurance offered up over limitless cups of tea.

The result is that the community feels it’s their turbine, and are reinforced in that association by the fact that the energy bill for their Resources Centre will be £850 lower every year.

I’d encountered a rather different community operation earlier in the week – on a visit to Eurotunnel HQ just outside Calais.

Obviously a much bigger operation, with a much bigger investment in three 800kw turbines. (It should have been six, but the local planning committee objected!). Representatives of the local community were there in force, not least because of the decision by Eurotunnel to dedicate 10% of the revenues from electricity sales to an organisation called Secours Populaire France – which works with some of the most deprived communities across the country.

Eurotunnel’s got a really good environmental story to tell anyway – and has had right from its creation because of the strict conditions put upon it both by the UK and the French Government.

More details of this are available in the Eurotunnel Sustainability Report.

Interestingly, it had taken Eurotunnel almost exactly the same amount of time to move from initial idea about its wind farm to inauguration as it had taken Hesters Way Partnership! French citizens are no more enthusiastic about wind power than they would appear to be here in the UK – despite having vast stretches of not particularly distinctive landscapes with almost limitless potential for windpower – and I know how popular that statement will make me with the legions of French NIMBYs who sound and think very much like our own home-grown NIMBYs!

But there’s one simple message here: the more actively local communities are involved in new wind developments, the greater the likelihood of their success. Even if things still take a ludicrously long period of time to get delivered on the ground.

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on April 28, 2010 5:35 PM | | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

April 29, 2010 - Green issues are sidelined as the Big Party Circus rolls on

It’s certainly a more exciting election than any I can remember for years. But it’s a bit of a nightmare from a sustainability point of view.

The party manifestos themselves are OK – a considerable improvement on the 2005 manifestos. Out of the three major parties, you’d have to put the Liberal Democrats way out in front (as usual), if only because of the way in which they spread the ‘green content’ through the entire manifesto rather than having the usual ‘green section’ with everything else around it pretty grey and grim.

But beyond the manifestos, there’s been next to nothing on either climate change or wider green issues. The parties had a brief moment set aside to go through their green motions, but without any seriousness of intent whatsoever. Gordon Brown was there to launch a separate Labour green manifesto, but devoted almost all of his entire speech to yet another lacklustre rant against David Cameron. It’s never been his strong suit, as we all know, and Labour’s whole election campaign has made that very clear all over again.

We shouldn’t be too surprised at this, simply because it has always been like this. It could have been different this time around, given all the serious political interest in climate change over the last few years. But then Copenhagen crashed, scientists started messing up all over the place, and our wretched rightwing media seized their moment to intensify their promotion of the near-bonkers babbling of Nigel Lawson, Ian Plimer et al. And all that pretty much blew any prospect of climate change featuring in any serious way in this election.

Happily, beyond the Big Party Circus, there’s an astonishing foment of political activity going on elsewhere, touching on every conceivable aspect of sustainable development territory. I’ll be focusing on one or two of these over the next week or so.

If your principal concern is about policies, instead of personalities and presidential debates, then the Vote for Policies initiative has thrown up some fascinating findings. If you go onto their website you’ll be asked to compare policies in nine main areas without being told which political party they come from – and then you are asked to ‘vote’ for the policy you prefer. The parties those policies belong to are then revealed to you.

It’s highlighted the general popularity of Green Party policies. At the last count, it was ahead on 26% with Labour on 19%, the Lib Dems on 18%, Conservatives on 16%, and UKIP and BNP bumping along at the bottom.

What’s astonishing me, looking at voters’ preferences, is how well the Green Party did on other policy issues apart from the environment: top on education, health, crime and welfare, and second (behind the Lib Dems) on democracy and the economy.

I’m not sure how much that will help Green Party candidates on the ground – but there could be a few surprises here too. I was in Cambridge on Tuesday, when a local poll put the Green Party’s Tony Juniper ahead of all the other parties! A win for the Greens in Cambridge would be one of the biggest election shocks of all time!

Caroline Lucas, Green Party Leader and candidate in Brighton still has the best overall chance of being the first Green Party candidate to beat our despicable first-past-the-post system. I’ll be down in Brighton on Saturday – so more on this next week!


I'll be blogging every day in the run up to the election so watch this space.

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on April 29, 2010 12:17 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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