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September 12, 2007 - Jennifer's Ear

Politicians have always seized on particular instances to build swingeing generalisations about the state of society as a whole.

For instance, I have a rather vague memory of what I think was described as “the war of Jennifer’s ear”, where whoever was in opposition at the time seized hold of the wretched Jennifer ear (metaphorically speaking) to accuse whoever was in government at the time of total, heinous dereliction of duty in the management of the NHS.

At least Jennifer lived to tell the tale. One hopes that her ear is fully operational again, and that she has no abiding grievance against those who so ruthlessly manipulated her affliction.

By contrast, manipulating a child’s death is an altogether different matter. Personally, I feel a deep abhorrence at the sight of politicians (of any persuasion) jumping on the coffin (metaphorically speaking) of any child or young person as victims of street violence to argue that the entire country is collapsing in a state of unprecedented anarchy, and that it is all the fault of the disengaged, incompetent government of the day.

The implication that any one political party “cares more”, collectively or as individuals, about the tragic death through violence of young people, is just grotesque. And with the suggestion that one set of policy overlays (by which I mean if superficial bells and whistles are laid on top of decades of economic and social decline in areas of profound disadvantage) is going to do a massively better job than any other set of policy overlays, is headline-grabbing politics at its worst.

Self-denying, respectful sympathy would obviously be the ideal political response at such moments, in the immediate aftermath of such tragedies. But that would be too much to ask, wouldn’t it?

Posted on September 12, 2007 2:06 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

February 12, 2008 - Loony vs Mainstream

Politicians must be finding it harder and harder to work out in the wider sustainability agenda what still falls in the ‘loony’ category (as climate change once did) and what now falls in the ‘emerging and increasingly mainstream’ category – which they better get their heads around for fear of appearing out of touch. The speed with which issues move from the former to the latter must be mind-boggling for them, persuaded as most of them still are that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with today’s model of ‘progress through growth’ that can’t be sorted out by a few timely touches on the tiller. Bless!

For instance, only a couple of years ago, if you so much as mentioned the need for Ministers and officials to think much more seriously about ‘food security’ (in other words, how this nation will secure access to enough food of the right kind at the right price in the future), you were definitely consigned to the loony category.

Indeed, Defra and Treasury combined forces in 2005 to produce a ‘Vision’ for the Common Agricultural Policy which oozed contempt for any such lame-brain recidivism: food security may have been a big deal after the Second World War (when the Common Agricultural Policy became our principal response), but today’s global food industry is deemed to be totally immune to any such pressures.

It all looks very different now – and although Treasury is unlikely to be found giving voice to such an heretical concept, Defra is beginning to think much more seriously about food security. This may have something to do with the highest-ever recorded rises in the price of food in 2007, or the fact that prices in various food commodity futures markets are climbing higher and higher, or that food imports into China are rising every year, or that harvests around the world are being seriously impacted by extreme weather conditions (which you may or may not link directly to climate change, depending on how cautious you are in pointing out cause and effect in such phenomena), and that ill-thought-out strategies for converting land to produce biofuels rather than food are already having an effect on food prices in different parts of the world.

So watch out for further developments on this front within Defra – if not in Treasury, or even in the FCO, where David Miliband has just junked sustainable development as one of the Foreign Office’s over-arching objectives. But more on that later!

Posted by JP on February 12, 2008 6:50 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

March 28, 2008 - The Battle for London Mayor

I blame London’s taxi-drivers personally. How else can one possibly explain the lead over Ken Livingstone that Boris Johnson has apparently taken in the polls for the London Mayoral Election? On the rare occasions that I have to endure a ride with a garrulous cabbie, any conversation all but instantly comes round to the evil, scheming, cabbie-hating monster that is Ken Livingstone - according to them. I have never come across such a vein of venom and vituperation.

The prospect of Boris as Mayor of London is just so scary. Either he is a genuine, out-and-out buffoon, in which case London becomes a laughing stock alongside its Mayor, or he is a pseudo-buffoon, in which case his true ideological nastiness will soon be revealed. The prospect of Boris taking over London’s Climate Change Action Plan is even scarier. He may have learnt not to reveal his full contrarian bigotry on climate change, but he really doesn’t get it, and would rapidly scale back or completely get rid of the ambitious targets in the Action Plan. And that would be a massive set back. Internationally, London is widely recognised as one of a handful of cities showing real leadership on climate change.

And Ken Livingstone has driven that personally, in a very effective partnership with his deputy, Nicky Gavron. Just as he has driven a host of other environmental and sustainability priorities. The surreal sight of Boris on the TV castigating Ken for his “lack of environmental vision” was almost too much to cope with. So I just hope all the environmental NGOs can rally the troops in London in a pro-Ken campaign, even if they can’t come out and explicitly endorse him.

Lastly, right now, I can’t help comparing Ken’s approach on these issues with other luminaries in the Labour Party. He really does understand how to make the joins between a high quality physical environment, sustainable resource use and a commitment to social justice, whilst still driving forward plans for increased economic prosperity. Particularly through a different kind of energy economy. It’s sort of grown-up.

Unlike the jejune fantasising about a “nuclear renaissance” in the UK, creating “hundreds of thousands of jobs” which now emanates from BERR – the sort of over-hyped nonsense which has to be put on a par with claims made nearly 50 years ago that nuclear power would one day be “too cheap to meter”.

Wouldn’t it be great, just once, to hear a senior Labour Politician (other than Ken) enthusing in similar terms about the hundreds of thousands of real jobs that would be created were we ever to get serious about energy efficiency?

Posted by JP on March 28, 2008 5:09 PM | | Comments (14) | TrackBacks (0)

April 29, 2008 - Boris and Ken

Writing entirely in my personal capacity (ie without any Government, charitable or business hat on), I am bound to say that nothing I have heard over the last few weeks has in any way diminished my sense of horror at the prospect of Boris as Mayor of London. He may well be a cyclist, an enthusiast for tree-planting, and indeed the son of Stanley Johnson (who is a serious environmentalist), but pro-Boris ‘greenies’ really should wake up and smell the elitist, growthist, consumerist, hedonist, gas-guzzling, contrarian brand of ‘green’ that Boris represents.

Of course Ken hasn’t got it all right (in fact I find it hard to understand how he’s let Boris even begin to threaten him on Thursday), his political instincts are sometimes totally off the wall, and he can be arrogant and idiotically offensive. But having spent a lifetime, literally, observing politicians getting to grips with sustainable development, my headline conclusion is that Ken is one of the few I’ve seen with some real vision as to the way in which sustainable development can transform people’s lives in practice, and some real courage in taking on vested interests and doing the difficult things that most politicians wouldn’t touch.

In politics, as in everything else, you have got to look beyond the messy minutiae of just keeping things trucking along, to some sense of a higher purpose. And in our world of sustainable development, Ken’s got that, Boris hasn’t. End of story.

Posted by JP on April 29, 2008 9:21 AM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

November 28, 2008 - Green at last? If only...

All sorts of things about the Pre-Budget Report are to be wholeheartedly welcomed – not least the Labour Party's re-discovery of the moral case for redistribution – or 'fairness', as they choose to describe it. Hang on in there a little bit longer, and they’ll soon re-discover the concept of social justice.

More broadly, there's no doubt that a stimulus pack of one kind or another has to be welcome. The Government’s continuing boldness here is admirable. And there are a few good dollops of cash in the package. Much of it recycled or brought forward, for instance, spending of around £500 million on insulating homes and energy efficiency initiatives, and another £800 million brought forward on big capital projects such as Building Schools for the Future.

It looks like there’s £100 million of genuinely new money to help low income home-owners cut their energy bills (through the Warm Front programme that was cut back last year!) and £150 million (possibly new money) on building more affordable homes. Treasury claims this is all adds up to around £500 million for a 'green stimulus package', but, as ever, such figures have to be treated with great caution. But beyond that, what a massively wasted opportunity!

No hint of the "Green Industrial Revolution" that Government Ministers have been heard talking about over the last year or more. Ironically, Peter Mandelson was banging that very drum at a CBI meeting on the very same day, about the importance of manufacturing in the UK and the importance of green technology within manufacturing. Even the CBI has been calling for Government to be spending ten times more on green technology – up from £250 million today to £2.5 billion.

No hint of any kind of broader 'Green New Deal', as in a major economic stimulus package to prioritize investments in the low carbon sustainable economy – as is the case with Barack Obama’s $150 billion package. The contrast here is brilliantly highlighted in the text copy of the latest Greenpeace ad – see below

"If only we could turn every building into a power station.
If only we could build high-speed train links to every city.
If only every building in the country was well insulated.
If only we could develop video conferencing that made you feel you were actually there.
If only all vehicles were super-efficient, like plug-in hybrids.
If only we invested in better public transport that everyone wanted to use.
If only industry used energy efficient electric motors.
If only we could harness the world's largest nuclear power station: the sun.
If only every power station could use its wasted heat to warm our homes and offices.
If only there were giant North Sea wind farms, made in Britain.
If only we could create hundreds of thousands of green collar jobs.
If only Britannia could rule on wave and tidal power.
If only there was a Green Investment Bank to finance a low carbon infrastructure and industry.

If only, if only, if only...

If only we had political leaders with the vision to see the economic benefits of green technology.
If only we had politicians with the resolve to put long-term investment ahead of short-term interests.
If only we could secure jobs and the economy while at the same time securing the future of our planet.

Well, we can. The Future is green."

Greenpeace

And no hint at all of any shift in the ambition level of the government as a whole in terms of addressing climate change – notwithstanding the passage of the Climate Change Act with all its new targets and renewed sense of urgency.

What have we got instead of that? Promises of more detailed proposals on the low-carbon economy and the green industrial revolution, following yet more consultations. That should take us through 2009 without too much having to happen. At the heart of the package is the reduction in VAT to encourage consumers to spend more money.

Surreal! At exactly the point where the Government has belatedly recognised the grotesque irresponsibility of having driven the economy via massive, utterly unsustainable credit bubbles (in house prices, personal debt and so on), the answer from Government is to get out and persuade people to spend even more to maintain very high levels of debt, and to massively increase levels of national debt.

Worse yet, the vast majority of commentators seem to think it will make no difference whatsoever to consumers' readiness to start spending again. The cost to the taxpayer – at least £9 billion over the next 13 months. All of which will have to be paid back by higher taxes from 2010 onwards.

So what kind of government deploys that kind of money to ramp up further unsustainable consumption rather than invest in our sustainable future? Mind-boggling.

See the full Greenpeace advert.

Posted on November 28, 2008 2:08 PM | | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (0)

April 20, 2009 - Sustainability on the political agenda

This is going to be one hell of a week. Big announcement on industrial policy from DECC today, followed by the Budget on Wednesday. And despite the fact that most of the discussion will – understandably – be focussed on the state of the public finances, budget cuts and projected rates of growth and unemployment, the whole sustainability agenda is hanging in there and may even be rising in significance. Not least because the Tories are back into “proactive mode” on sustainability issues. Last week, the Shadow Chancellor George Osborne laid down his marker as to what a Green Budget would need to look like to create any kind of real forward momentum. The ten main action points (some of which bear an uncanny resemblance to some of the principle recommendations in the SDC’s advice to Government on building a low-carbon, sustainable economy!) cover a wide range of energy efficiency, renewable energy, green technology and transportation ideas – and if any Chancellor really did deliver all of that in one fell Budget swoop, it would indeed represent a serious step change.

With one massive caveat: not one of the £30 billion identified as the level of investment required would (according to George Osborne) by a taxpayers’ pound. So the totality of the funding required for a new high-speed rail link (circa £5 billion) will come from the private sector, and the totality of the £20 billion required to retro-fit 1 million homes a year over the next 10 years (at £6500 a house) will be liberated through a new mechanism to recoup the cost of the improvements made through a charge on future fuel bills. To be honest, that strikes me as privatised pie-in-the-sky.

That said, it’s great to have the Tories mixing it with Labour on this particular territory – and the Lib Dems have also got a thing or two to say.

As to what Mandelson and Darling come out with this week, watch this space.

Read the Sustainable Development Commission’s advice to Government on how to bring about a sustainable economic recovery package that has the environment and sustainable development firmly at its heart and could create around 800,000 new jobs.
www.sd-commission.org.uk/publications/downloads/SND_booklet_w.pdf

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on April 20, 2009 2:59 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

September 22, 2009 - Sarkozy launches crusade against obsession with growth

I can’t help it, but I love seeing the Treasury discomfited. Through my nine years with the Sustainable Development Commission they set up so many barriers to promoting more sustainable economic growth, did so many foolish things, and missed so many opportunities, that I can’t help but feel a little bitter.

They were particularly obstructive in terms of the work the Commission did on economic growth, seeking to open up the debate about the completely irrational way in which the pursuit of GDP has come to dominate all economic policy debates.

The Commission’s report, ‘Prosperity Without Growth?’ was met with a combination of disdain and indifference that only the Treasury is capable of. The Commission was told, in no uncertain terms, that this just wasn’t the kind of advice that the UK Government needed.

So I had particularly good reason to celebrate the publication of a new report, authored by Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen on the 'Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress’, commissioned personally by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, questioning the continued obsession of nations with conventionally measured economic growth.

“For years, statistics have registered an increasingly strong economic growth as a victory over shortage – until it emerged that this growth was destroying more than it was creating,” said Sarkozy, endorsing the report. “The crisis doesn’t only make us free to imagine other models, another future, another world. It obliges us to do so”.

President Sarkozy has instructed France’s national statistics body to update its gathering and reporting of economic statistics in line with the report’s recommendations. Better yet, he will invite other world leaders to join his crusade against what the report describes as “GDP Fetishism”. “France will put this report on the agenda of all international meetings, including next week’s G20 Summit,” Sarkozy said.

I fear he’ll get very short shrift from Gordon Brown, who will see it as an irritatingly Gallic distraction from the serious business of getting the global economy back on track.

Inconveniently, that’s precisely the same track that has caused such devastating damage to the Earth’s life support systems that sustain us, has unleashed what could still prove to be irreversible climate change, has left between one and two billion people living in conditions of dire poverty, and has ruthlessly promoted private greed and avarice over social wellbeing and community cohesion.

In other words, exactly the kind of growth-based economics that “destroys more than it creates” – to paraphrase the French President.


Posted by Jonathon Porritt on September 22, 2009 12:09 PM | | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

October 22, 2009 - US position on Copenhagen may be treaty-wrecking

You can’t fault our Government for its ongoing efforts to get people to focus on the Copenhagen Conference. Both the Prime Minister and Ed Miliband are out there emphasising the ‘make or break’ nature of the event: governments either seal the deal now, or we could be into drift for a couple of years.

Personally I’m not so sure about this kind of rhetoric. It probably wouldn’t be the end of the world if it took another six or nine months to get the right deal sealed – and that means a deal with the US on board. And that probably won’t happen until some kind of climate bill has got through the US Senate.

That, at least, was the prevailing view at the end of the most recent round of talks in Bangkok a couple of weeks ago. The Senate is bogged down in health insurance stuff; Obama doesn’t want to use his political capital to try and force it through the Senate prior to Copenhagen; and he absolutely doesn’t want a re-run of the Kyoto process, where Al Gore signed off on the Kyoto Protocol only to find that the Senate would have nothing to do with it later on.

And that’s the reason Obama hasn’t accepted the invitation to go to Copenhagen himself in order to bring his own personal leadership to bear on the negotiations.

Because the focus of a lot of this discussion is about Obama and most people just seem to have bought into this approach. That’s just the way it is: unfortunate timing and all that. America doing its best in difficult domestic circumstances.

I must say, I don’t quite see it like that. I think this represents a massive failure on Obama’s part. As the rest of the world raises its game (particularly in key countries like China, India and Brazil), the United States’ negotiating position, in essence, doesn’t seem to have advanced much beyond George Bush’s negotiating position.

US negotiators still refuse to acknowledge historical responsibility. They’re still trying to force developing countries to do what America itself has totally failed to do up until now – and doesn’t show much readiness to do it even now. They’re still trying to change the baseline date from 1990 to 2005 – and, in essence, want to tear up Kyoto rather than build on it by allowing each country to determine its own path to greenhouse gas reductions.

For US negotiators, read Obama. I don’t know why everyone (and particularly Government ministers) is being so ‘understanding’ about this. It’s a despicable, immoral, self-serving, treaty-wrecking negotiating position which, in the current context, where the need for action is so much greater, and so many other countries are now playing ball, is no better than what George Bush was doing during his eight poisonous years in the White House.

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on October 22, 2009 4:12 PM | | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

December 10, 2009 - Booze and bracket-bashing – inside the real Copenhagen ‘junket’

As you read the daily reports from Copenhagen, spare a thought for the hundreds of environmental and development activists out there, keeping the cause of ‘climate justice’ under the noses of government delegations, UN Officials and the media.

It always amuses me when I hear sarcastic journalists refer to these conferences as ‘junkets’ or ‘jamborees’.

In reality they are more like a descent into hell, with delegates surrounded on the one hand by the demons of utter mind-numbing tedium, and on the other by the gremlins of mischievous government delegations intent on emasculating any final agreement.

The formal process is focussed on the draft text, which summarises that agreement with much of its text still in brackets. These brackets can only be removed via unanimous agreement between all government delegations.

It’s often the same ones (from Saudi Arabia onwards!) that stick to their oil-drenched arguments, yielding as little as they can possibly get away with short of total opprobrium descending upon them as other delegations get angrier and angrier.

That goes on for days, until the elected politicians bowl up next week, and it starts all over again.

The only escape for knackered greenies is alcohol, liver-numbing quantities of which are consumed every evening.

That’s what life is like for the poor sods that have to do the work in the formal conference. Far more stimulation is available for those attending the informal, largely NGO conference (the Klimaforum in Copenhagen), buzzing away on the margins of the government negotiations.

Every now and again positive messages flow out of the NGO forum to cause a bit of a stir inside the conference, but nothing like as often or as powerfully as the negative energy flowing in the other direction.

Which is exactly what happened on Tuesday, when a document leaked to the Guardian revealed a ‘secret text’ put together by a group of rich countries (including the UK and the US), which pretty much undermines every single aspect of the tortuous negotiations that have been going on over the last two years.

Inside the conference venue the bracket-bashing goes on uninterrupted. But when something like that happens, everything else goes pear-shaped. Anger, incredulity, rage, despair and dark, demonic humour take over until the alcohol kicks in.

Some junket!

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on December 10, 2009 12:39 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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