Deepwater Horizon

An interesting (and more than a little unnerving) contribution to the current debate on the Deepwater Horizon spillage at http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article19923.html from Dr Stephen A Rinehart - advocating the use of nuclear weapons to plug the hole, raising the prospect of the Gulf of Mexico rapidly degenerating into a carcinogenic benzene pool, and concluding that 'this is a “National Emergency” on the scale of a nuclear weapon attack'. The author's conclusion:

Bottom Line: We are looking at the worse environmental disaster in human
history and it continues to grow and the US Government has failed totally in
responding to this epic crisis because of BP and Big Oil political clout and
money.

James Hansen and the inexorable slide toward nuclear power.

On his Storms of My Grandchildren site, James Hansen talks about how intolerable coal-powered power stations are in any realistic future, and claims that:

in most countries, phase-out of coal emissions requires also a carbon-free source of baseload electric power that is competitive in price with coal. Until we have another way to meet 21st century energy needs while eliminating coal and carbon emissions, nuclear power appears to be the only option.

From this he infers that even nuclear power would be the lesser of these two evils, concluding that

The (“3rd generation”) nuclear technology ready to replace the aging 2nd generation reactors in the United States and other counties is inherently safer than existing nuclear power, which already has an exemplary safety record – however, it still burns less than one percent of the nuclear fuel and leaves a long-lived nuclear waste pile. Hansen recommends initiating urgent development of a fourth-generation nuclear power plant. These “fast” nuclear reactors utilize more than 99 percent of the fuel and can “burn” nuclear waste, thus solving the nuclear waste problem that concerns so many.

This doesn't seem to me to follow. Why is he so confident that these fourth-generation nuclear power plants are any less pie-in-the-sky than carbon capture? It's the first time I have heard anyone suggest that the problems of safety and spent nuclear fuel could be a thing of the past. I would very much like to hear Hansen's reasoning. Not that I would like CCS any more than him, but it doesn't make much sense to be asked to choose between two mirages.

But there's a more important assumption in Hansen's commentary. He argues that, if we are to avoid both fossil fuels and nuclear power, then we need 'a carbon-free source of baseload electric power that is competitive in price with coal'. It is certainly a most attractive option. However, my reading of the technical literature leads me to two conclusions. One, such an option will not exist for many years to come. And two, we can't afford to wait that long.

So how is it Professor Hansen can claim that the solution needs to be 'competitive in price with coal'? Given the magnitude of the potential problem - a series of disasters and creeping destruction that will dwarf any previous human experience short of, perhaps, a re-run of the global plague in the 14th century, surely this is like saying that we should have decided our strategy for the Second World War on the basis of whether it would have been as painless as peace.

Plainly this would be nonsense, and as in the case of WW2, there is little doubt what the consequences of continuing prevarication will be. Add to this the impact of ever-expanding resource depletion, ecosystems collapse and 40% more people by 2050, and waiting for another cheap energy source to come along sounds like madness. It would be nice if we were in a position to choose between cheap, friendly, familiar options, but we aren't. Meanwhile, our social, political and economic system is awash with people and interests for which an effective solution would be anathema, if not fatal.

Of course, we are not at war, and such metaphors are as likely to be misleading as helpful. But to pretend that we can reach Professor Hansen's own goals without paying a price and making preparations comparable to a war strikes me as unwarranted optimism, if not self-deception.

Danny Chivers - Poet Laureate for the Environment

If you haven't already heard of him, take a listen to Danny Chivers. His poems on the environment and on business are brilliant, enthralling, funny and biting. He also knows his stuff, being (according to azclimatechange.com) a professional carbon footprinting consultant based in Oxford with two environmental Masters degrees.

For more on Danny, go to his blog, at A Daisy Through Concrete or his MySpace page. Or watch him on YouTube. And buy his new CD. We did, and it's excellent.

Get him to your children's school, to your local climate change event, to your front room. And pay him lots - we need more people like him.

Fair value? Can free markets ever value the environment?

A basic problem with markets that absolutely must be answered if we are to create an environmentally rational economy is that of deciding how to value things. Valuation failures were a key cause of the recent financial crisis, which stemmed at least in part from the policy of allowing companies to claim that their value was whatever the market would currently bear, including any number of imponderable items that had yet to demonstrate any real value, such as future prices, hypothetical values and debatable projections derived from complex financial models. As part of the general indifference to risk exhibited by regulators and accounting authorities during the last decade or so, this so-called ‘mark-to-market’ or ‘fair value’ approach accounting has been a part of US GAAP since the early 1990s and seems to have all but replaced any notion of intrinsic value. And as if all that were not enough, ‘fair value’ accounting was also central to the Enron scandal.

Mark-to-market is obviously important when it came to buying and selling stocks and shares, but it goes far beyond that. The value of company assets that can be offered as collateral is also the basis for loans, derivatives and other direct and indirect funding. So when a bull market lasts for years on end and prices kept going up regardless of any material value of the companies themselves, smart operators are provided with an environment that favours both massive speculation and spectacular frauds. From the point of view of mark-to-market accounting, a bull market amounts to a universal pyramid scheme: whatever the value of an asset or liability today, we can usually assume that it will be worth more tomorrow, so we can borrow today as though we are more wealthy than we really are.

However, when the dislocations and fantasies this situation naturally engenders go too far, the market will be seized by the bears, and the rapid falls in mark-to-market valuations that follow will mean that previous loans, bonds, asset and liability prices, interest rates and pretty much every other number the markets use will start to go the wrong way for everyone – again regardless of the underlying strengths and weaknesses of individual companies. In a bear market, mark-to-market put the pyramid onto its head, and you would be stupid to lend today, as the collateral that guarantees your loans will almost certainly be worth less – maybe a lot less – tomorrow than it is today. In extremis, markets for many items disappear altogether and the financial sector ground to a halt.

The key problem this presents if markets are to be part of the solution of our environmental problems is that the scope, scale and urgency of those problems mean we cannot allow the kind of fragility and flakiness market economies have exhibited to determine how we invest in the environment. Leaving aside the question of speculators actively manipulating environment-related markets (e.g., greenhouse gas cap-and-trade, offsets, and so on – see the final section of this), we cannot accept the risk of being plunged into years of environmental inactivity or retrenchment simply because markets were unable to value these investments appropriately.

But is there any alternative as far as markets are concerned? Is there any definition of value markets can work with that will always reflect the intrinsic social value of taking action to protect the environment? Are there any accounting principles, valuation methods or other general policies, methods or tools that will ensure that environmental investments are not caught up in speculative frenzies and then dumped as unceremoniously as the global financial system was in 2008-9?

Probably not, or at least not ones that are capable of controlling markets without considerable active intervention and constraint – which is to say, undermines their very nature as markets. After all, how are markets to price things other than in money? How am I to judge a given transaction other than in terms of the profit it offers me (which means strictly in terms of money)? And once all value is reduced to money and the only goal is more money, what other valuation method is there apart from what the market says? In other words, regardless of whether valuing assets and companies in terms of their market price is sensible, it represents what market-based investors wanted to know about a stock, because it predicted what they most wanted to know about their ultimate concern, namely profitability.

In short, the markets know the price of everything and the value of nothing. As this is Oscar Wilde’s definition of a cynic, that seems appropriate enough – the attitude of markets (and perhaps business in general) to the environment is cynical at heart, for the only question they are capable of posing is, How do we make money out of this? Not exactly a responsible attitude.

Actually there is a limit to how far this is true. In a market who basic function is to direct investment in the real economy, prices will still be determined by prices, but these prices will be linked to the material consequences of making real investments - in houses, in MP3 players, in clothes, in a million other goods and services. And that of course is what the economy is for – to ensure that society works. True, the answer is still expressed indirectly, in terms of money, prices and profits, but at least the link to real, non-financial value is there.

Or so it should be, in a socially rational economy. But when the central function of markets is perverted into speculation, and the key question is not how to distribute wealth in society but how to make a quick killing by exploiting changes in price.

But is this a real problem, or merely a theoretical stick with which to beat the markets? Unfortunately it is very, very real. For example, by 2008 the average barrel of oil was being traded 27 times before it was actually delivered for use in the real economy. This certainly contributed to the otherwise inexplicable massive price spike of that year, and is hard to account for in terms of buying oil for use in the real economy. Or again, the Tabb Group consultancy has estimated that mroe than 60% of trades in the US stock markets are controlled by automated systems that are designed to take advantage of tiny price difference within miliseconds of their arising - not really an issue for investors in the real economy. More generally, it has been estimated that perhaps 85% of stock exchange activity is speculative, with only a small minority representing genuine investment.

And so on. All in all, the speculators are clearly in charge, and as a number of scandals and exposés have demonstrated, the manipulation of prices is a fundamental of stock markets.

This is perhaps the fundamental problem of using markets to manage the environment: that markets recognise only prices, and no price generated by a pure market can reflect socially rational value (including environmentally rational values) unless forced to do so – which is the very antithesis of a market price. Markets are like severely autistic children: it’s not hard to get through to them - it’s impossible. You can constrain them with regulations and rules, but once the market has taken over control of prices, it is hard to see why just this sort of bubble should not develop.

So can markets play any part in managing the environment? Perhaps in limited ways. But the tendency to break the link with real environmental goals and consequences seems to be intrinsic to any system that measures success strictly in terms of prices and profits. If it doesn’t do that, is it a market? If it does, how can we ever trust it not to undermine every strategy for managing the environment?

The problem isn't Peak Oil. It's just plain OIL

It seems to be very hard for some people to 'get' what the problem with fossil fuels really is. Daniel Yergin, Mr Peak-Oil-What-Peak-Oil? in person, is apparently in Davos for the annual jamboree in which all those clever people who got us in the current mess celebrate how clever they are.

Mr Yergin thinks Peak Oil is a long way off. A lot of other people in Davos would agree, I suspect, though whether this is a matter of superior knowledge, judgement or self-interest I would not like to say.

But what does it matter how far away Peak Oil is? Assume that it is close, or has even arrived. The contradiction between falling supply and massively accelerating growth (courtesy of China, India, etc.) will create an equally massive economic crisis. But what if we assume that Peak Oil is far off, as Yergin argues. What then? We syphon billions of barrels of the stuff up the surface and burn it into CO2? Yes, that's exactly what we do.

As various people have now noted, we cannot afford to burn more than a small fraction of even the fossil fuels at our disposal now, let alone any additional future supplies - not because of its economic price but because of its environmental consequences.

So, Peak Oil is a huge problem. But so is the oil continuing to flow.

To put the matter in a nutshell, the problem is not Peak Oil. It's just plain Oil. A uniquely valuable and important commodity, but one for which we haven't even begun to really pay.

Those who cannot remember the past...

Three decades ago, the Carter Administration tried to pass legislation to establish an energy policy for the USA. Writing in Wednesday's FT Energy Source, Philip K. Verleger - then Carter's Director of the Office of Energy Policy at the U.S. Treasury - claims that the current Obama administration hasn't a hope of getting his global warming legislation through. The reasons: arrogance, ignorance of the substantive issues, and failure to recognise the power of pork.

For Verleger the implications are clear, and in the light of recent events in Congress (and Copenhagen, because, whatever the scorn within which Europeans treat US politics, this is by no means a uniquely American problem) I find it hard to disagree. Here are Verleger's closing words:

"Many of the veterans of the Carter battle have quietly exchanged emails and
phone calls as the Obama legislation awaits its fate. The consensus opinions are
these:

1. None of the people putting the Obama energy policy forward understood the
   problems they would face in Congress.
2. The bill’s supporters (”greens”) are less aware of history than we were in
   the 1970s, if that is possible.
3. The legislation’s passage is unlikely absent an outside precipitating
   event.

It will be difficult to take effective action on emissions even when every
American accepts global warming as fact. Concerns regarding economic security
are far greater than those over climate impacts 10 or 20 years in the future.
Tragically, individuals pushing such actions - the representatives of various
NGOs covered in this blog, for example - do not understand history, the concerns
of voters, or the workings of Congress.

The battle is lost."

For those of us for whom the problem of global warming is, as energy was for Carter, the Moral Equivalent of War (MEOW!), it's a depressing insight.

Tax breaks for accelerating Peak Oil

Yesterday's Financial Times includes an article by their Energy Editor, Ed Crooks entitled 'Tax breaks to lure oil and gas sector'. It reported that tax allowances of up to £160m per field will be made for developing an area west of the Shetland Islands that probably includes more than 2 billion barrels of oil.

Tax breaks on oil wells? What sense does this make? Oil companies are some of the richest on the planet, and subsidising them to drill is doubly stupid - in a world fast approaching (passing?) Peak Oil, this is foolish short-termism, and in a world that cannot afford to burn more than a small fraction of its remaining fossil fuels before it trips us into irreversible global warming, paying them extra to make sure it happens is simply bonkers.

So why are they doing it? It's a hard region to develop, so if the UK government wants oil money to continue flowing into the economy, they have to bribe oil companies to bring it here. Hence the tax breaks.

It's a characteristic environmental/resource problem that follows from a) the mass nature of many decision-marking processes (e.g., multiple nations and companies making related decisions in parallel) and b) the absence of effective overarching (e.g., global political or regulatory) systems capable of ensuring that the whole - the net impact of a mass of individually intelligible decisions - does not undermine the interests of us all.

And in this case, that is exactly what is happening: a hundred countries trying to attract investment for the sake of the employment, the tax revenues and the boost to GDP are collectively abandoning the responsibility for handing over a sustainable resource base to future generations and accelerating global warming. A thousand companies, all hungry for investment and struggling to maximise their returns, ravish the planet and resist even the most superficial controls.

But there's nothing unique about the oil industry: we subsidise a huge range of damaging and short-term practices (e.g., airline flights through tax breaks and indifference to 'externalities'). In fact governments and business have been 'managing' the economy between themselves for perhaps as long as there has been an 'economy' to manage. Monopolies, politically inspired subsidies, corruption are the normal practices of all major economies - all delivering short-term gains for state and business that destroy the long term interests of society. All that is new today is that these mechanisms are so powerful and so far of the leash that we are simultaneously creating an unprecedented threat to society's very survival and abandoning every tool we once had to manage such a problem.

On cap and trade

Click on the title of this post for some interesting observations on cap and trade. It can't work unless we force the price of carbon so high that it is uneconomic to burn fossil fuels, and that will never be allowed to happen so long as everyone thinks a) economic benefit can be created while disregarding the environmental consequences, and b) this is a zero sum game in which we have to make someone else pay.

Undertanding stocks and flows: The bathtub metaphor

I’m currently studying for a master's degree in Business Strategy and the Environment at Birkbeck College in London University, and have been very struck by how basic concepts of environmental science are relatively poorly understood – even by our lecturers. A god example is the question of ‘stocks and flows’, which is fundamental to understanding carbon emissions. Nigel Lawson also illustrated his ignorance of this relationship in his recent sceptical tract, so here is a useful metaphor. I did not invent it (in fact it’s a basic model for all sorts of ‘stock and flow’ processes), but here goes.

Imagine that you are lying in the bath. You are up to your nose in water and more is still pouring in through the taps. But don’t worry – your nose is level with the overflow pipe, and as much water is flowing out again as the taps are letting in. But only just – the overflow can handle what is coming in right now but no more. So you are, for the moment, perfectly safe.

But what if the taps are opened just a little more? Leaving aside the very little room for manoeuvre further ‘adaptation’ of your bathtub ‘environment’ allows you, the fact is, an increase in inflow will not be met by an increase in outflow. No matter how small the increase is, you are now in great danger, to the point where you must eventually drown.

Notice that this result does not depend on how much extra water flows in – even the smallest increment will get you in the end. It does not matter how much water was in the bath already or how large or small the maximum inflow and outflow are. As soon as the former starts to exceed the latter, by no matter how little, you will drown.

Likewise for humanity’s collective carbon emissions. Regardless of how much more carbon is emitted from other sources, if the environment is adapted to reabsorb only pre-industrial levels of emissions, then adding more will quickly (in nature’s geological timescale) start to swamp the system. The sizes of both nature's emissions and our own are irrelevant: even if the rest of nature emitted a hundred times as much carbon as humanity as a whole, the natural environment would still be drowning in carbon as soon as we started to increase the flow beyond what nature's carbon 'overflow pipe' is able to remove again.

The same would happen with increased natural eruptions of carbon from natural sources, of course, and we would still have to deal with the consequences. In fact there is good evidence that massive natural changes in carbon levels have profoundly affected the survival of many species. But most such natural intrusions into the natural carbon cycle are erratic and average out over time to quite small net changes.

Industry in by no means such a slight or incidental factor. Indeed, everything we know about our actions to date point to industry being the single most important factor in the emergence of quality complete new era – what Paul Crutzen has called the Anthropocene.

This era will certainly prove to be the most fatal in a quarter of a billion years for most species on this planet. And right at the centre of its effects will be the ‘bathtub’ effect of stocks and flows.

The Limits to Growth

Just about the most convincing – and scary - book I ever read about the environment was The Limits to Growth. I would guess that everyone has heard of this book but my impression is that relatively few people have ever read it, or the two follow-up volumes. I read it when it first came out – almost four decades ago – and then again a few months back.

The book was written by a group of MIT researchers - Donella and Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers and William Behrens – and published in 1972 by the Club of Rome. The timing is interesting, as the first edition of The Limits to Growth is roughly contemporary with a number of other foundation texts in the overall environmental movement. 1971 saw the publication of Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb, which gave the growing concern with population growth a kick start. Then in 1972 Barbara Ward and the well-known anthropologists René Dubos published Only One Earth – a sort of semi-official UN report that attracted a lot of attention. And then in 1974, M. King Hubbard gave what was perhaps his most important summary of the position on oil and energy production, namely his testimony to Congress on the peaking of US oil production.

The reason I found The Limits to Growth so compelling – even more than Only One Earth or Silent Spring - was the simplicity and centrality of the question it posed and the directness of the method its authors used to answer it. Instead of endless facts and figures and yet another multi-faceted discussion of our environmental predicament, they simply asked what would happen if humanity at large continued with a small number of key trends:

• World population.
• Industrialization.
• Pollution.
• Food production.
• Resource depletion.

Their method was equally straightforward – so much so that, had I felt very doubtful about its validity when I first heard about it. They started with a very generalised model of these factors - the ‘World3’ model developed by Professor Jay Forrester (also from MIT). This is described in Forrester’s World Dynamics (published the previous year), which used a ‘system dynamics’ approach. This was really a very simple model - basically a suite of functional interactions (circular, interlocking, sometimes time-delayed relationships, etc.) between what the modellers regarded as the key social and natural phenomena. World3 was based on large, long-term factors, which it defined in self-consciously simple and gross terms, without much detail. It made little attempt to explain why these interactions were as they were.

When tracking what happened when the trends they were interested in unfolded, the Limits to Growth team were not looking for trouble. They made strongly optimistic assumptions when in doubt, and took into account most of the qualifications critics usually offer about predictions of environmental doom and gloom – resource substitution, the power of innovation, and so on. On the other hand, they did assume that all these factors tend towards compound growth - which is to say, that they grow by a constant percentage, and constantly accelerate, not by a constant amount, which would lead only to regular increments of the same size. They also interact with one another, which has the effect of overshoots and disruptions in one undermining the others.

A typical outcome of the model went like this:

1. Population cannot grow without food.
2. Food production can only be increased by growth of capital.
3. Creating more capital requires extracting and processing more resources.
4. Discarded waste from resource extraction, refining and usage become pollution.
5. Pollution interferes with the growth of both population and food.
6. So the system tends towards eventual collapse of both population and food production.

It’s crucial to understand that this collapse happens not only because a specific input is damaged or reduced (which might be ameliorated by resource substitution, innovation, etc.) but because the system undermines itself. That is, the initial success of the system destroys the conditions for its continuing success. This is, I think, why it makes relatively little difference to assume that we will eventually find far more resources than are currently expected, or that we can continue to have cheap energy.

The authors made multiple runs of the model based on different assumptions. Although, like most futurologists, they avoided claiming to be making strict predictions, the consistency of the outcomes is quite frightening enough.

The book analyses quite a few scenarios (though only a fraction of those actually run, apparently). The starting point was ‘business as usual’, which led to the following outcomes:

1. Massive industrial growth depletes resources.
2. Resource prices then rise and stocks are depleted.
3. So more capital used for obtaining resources, leaving less for growth.
4. Eventually investment cannot keep up with depreciation.
5. With that, the industrial base collapses, taking with it the service and agricultural systems, the tax base for government, and so on.
6. However, population keeps rising, so the death rate is driven upward by lack of food and health services.

Radical collapse comes ‘well before the year 2100’.

As I say, the authors presented other scenarios in which:

• Nuclear power is cheap and safe.
• We manage to discover vastly increased resources.
• Innovation and technology allow much reduced pollution.
• Agricultural yields are greatly improved.

And so on. By and large, these optimistic assumptions mean that the eventual collapse is delayed by a decade or two – never more.

Here’s another typical example: the Green Revolution. This has indisputably increased food production, but at a price. The specialised seeds require a great deal of fertiliser and water. The former accelerates fossil fuel use and depletion, while the latter extracts more water than natural systems can sustain. In addition, the need for extensive capital also leads to peasant farmers being evicted from the land by their landlords, and hundreds of thousands of landless peasants end up in Mumbai, Kolkata, Sao Paulo or Mexico City, where they have no resources and no relevant skills from what they might earn a living. This increases pressure on urban systems and causes fertile land to be built over by slums.

The increase in capital requirements – tractors, petrol, fertiliser, shipping etc. – needed to operate the Green Revolution hugely depletes resources, including oil and natural gas. What is worse, the intensive treatment of the soil under a monoculture régime means that it becomes less able to support any other sort of agriculture, so the system becomes even more locked into an inherently unsustainable ‘solution’, and by this remarkable ‘advance’ we have managed to convert what one would have thought was an inherently renewable resource – fertile soil – into a non-renewable resource. Aren’t we clever? Meanwhile, the planet’s carbon footprint is made that little bit bigger, global warming is given that small extra shove upwards, and the glaciers that feed the irrigation systems that feed the crops melt that little bit faster. More jam today, but not only less jam tomorrow but also a lot less ability to manage having less jam tomorrow.

More generally, the consistent result reported by The Limits to Growth was overshoot and collapse. If the present trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue, the limits to growth will be reached by 2070. The alternative scenarios only delay collapse: all end by 2100. The most probable direct outcome will be sudden, uncontrollable falls in population and industry – in other words, the ‘hundreds of millions’ of deaths predicted by the Stern Report. Only The Limits to Growth predicted it all three and a half decades earlier.

The authors conclusions about the ‘business as usual’ scenario are stark:

The unspoken assumption behind all of the model runs we have presented in this chapter is that population and capital growth should be allowed to continue until they reach some ‘natural’ limit. This assumption also appears to be a basic part of the human value system currently operational in the real world. Given that first assumption, that population and capital growth should not be deliberately limited but should be left to ‘seek their own levels’, we have not been able to find a set of policies that avoids the collapse mode of behavior.

As so often, the reactions to the original publication illuminating not only for the welcome offered to this absolutely vital book but also by the disdain expressed by those who could see no further than the status quo. It was described as ‘the most fascinating and the most disturbing book’, and it was said that ‘if this doesn't blow everybody's mind who can read without moving his lips, then the earth is kaput’. But it was also described as ‘a piece of irresponsible nonsense’ and ‘an empty and misleading work’.

The authors reviewed their findings in updates published in 1992 and 2004. These books are worth reading in their own right, as they both go far beyond updating the original methods and finding. Their original conclusions, they find, were sound. They needed some qualifications, but by comparison with the critics who greeted the original publication with such scorn and the deniers by whom they are still surrounded, they seem to have been pretty much spot-on.

Nor is this merely their own opinion. In 2008 Graham Turner published a comprehensive re-evaluation of the data, and concluded that:

The analysis shows that 30 years of historical data compares favorably with key features of a business-as-usual scenario…, which results in the collapse of the global system midway through the 21^st century.

In other words, we have done nothing significant to deflect our fate.

So are there no scenarios that lead to a happy ending? Maybe - it depends on what makes you happy. If you want interminable consumerism, then no, there aren’t. If you ever wanted a ringside seat at the end of the world, consumerism represents the front row. But if you are willing to settle for mere sufficiency, to imagine that there might actually be an ‘enough’, then yes, a somewhat reduced standard of living – something like the 1940s or 1950s, it is said – is available for all. Not bad, given the alternative, and hardly desperate poverty by any standard. It’s not as though we are any happier than we were then, though it might take a bit of getting used to. Nor need it look quite like that slightly dismal era – we start from here, not there, and a great deal can be done with a 1950s carbon footprint, give the science and technology of the 21^st century.

But there is a lot to be done – population control, the end of ‘the American Way of Life’ (which surely represents the biggest threat to the planet since the last ice age), serious support for developing countries, and so on. But it’s hardly worth thinking about – we never have done anything about these things, we show no signs of doing anything about it, and we are led by politicians, media and business people with as much grasp of our situation and as much interest in dealing with it as a bucketful of molluscs.

But not to worry – it will soon be too late to deflect the worst effects of our own actions, so we won’t have to worry about it any more. Just die in our millions. If you have ever wondered what the fall of the Roman Empire looked like, stay tuned.

Read this book.

References

Ehrlich, P. (1971). The Population Bomb. Cutchogue, N.Y.: Buccaneer Books.

Forrester, J.W. (1971) World Dynamics. Cambridge, Mass.: Wright-Allen Press.

Hubbert, M.K. (1974). Testimony to Hearing on the National Energy Conservation Policy Act of 1974, hearings before the Subcommittee on the Environment of the committee on Interior and Insular Affairs House of Representatives. June 6, 1974. Published as The Nature Of Growth by Technocracy.org.

Meadows, D.H., Meadows, D.L., Randers, J. and Behrens III, W.W. (1972). The Limits to Growth. A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York: Universe Books.

Meadows, D.H., Meadows, D.L., Randers, and J. (1992). Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future. Earthscan.

Meadows, D.H., Randers, J., and Meadows, D.L. (2004). The Limits to Growth: The 30-year Update. Earthscan.

Turner, G. (2008). A comparison of the Limits of Growth with thirty years of reality. CSIRO Working Paper Series 2008-2009.

Ward, B., and Dubos, R. (1972). Only One Earth. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

A very handy resource - Apocadocs

Click above for some very handy stuff.

The worst threat to the environment on Earth

By far the single best demonstration that business is about profit, not any sort of social or environmental responsibility, is the Alberta Tar Sands. Billed by Greenpeace and others as the largest industrial and energy project, the biggest capital investment and the worst environmental crime on earth, it really does have to be seen to be believed.

For a first-hand view, click here. Right now.

The real point? That tar sands make no environmental or social sense at all. Imagine someone replacing Florida with a slag heap - that's the new Alberta.

But for business? Lots and lots and lots of money. A no brainer, really. Say goodbye to Alberta now, children - and don't worry about the mess. No, I don't ahve any plans to clear up after me, but always remember - Daddy Business knows best.

Market irrationality and the environment

There are in fact at least five ways in which the rationality of markets can be challenged, and all of them have implications – not all negative - for the environment.

Firstly, sometimes people just aren’t rational by any standard. However, this is not all innocent folly or individual caprice. Not only are individuals open to irrational behaviour on their own account, but they can often be manipulated, stampeded and panicked into actions that are, from their own point of view, profoundly irrational, but that are very much in the economic interests of others.

This possibility is routinely exploited through (and often by) the mass media, of course. In the absence of a systemic account of the ways in which individuals in the economy are behaving irrationally, it is hard to say just what that means, or what it does to conventional economic theory apart from render it more or less fuzzy. But whatever the answer is, it is unlikely to figure in conventional economic theory, as it my suggest that the power to exploit and control is fundamental to our economic system, yet decidedly not the benign (or at least neutral) thing markets are supposed to be.

Secondly, if by ‘rational’ we mean, ‘pursuing economic self-interest’, it is obvious that a great deal of human behaviour can’t be forced into this particular (indeed, peculiar) mould. That does not mean that we are irrational – only that the rationality according to which we operate is not narrowly economic. I doubt that a committed church-goer tithes a significant fraction of their income out of reasons of economic self-interest, and the idea that people contribute to charities out of a very indirect calculation that they may need that charity’s services one day is surreal, to say the least. It would be doubtful to propose that a person on the streets of Manchester or San Francisco contributes to Oxfam because they expect to need Oxfam’s support any time soon. People have values, goals, interests, relationships, and any number of other motives that affect their behaviour, all of which can be pursued rationality without ever reflecting economic rationality.

This can be extremely fortunate for the environment, because it means that people are willing to pay for environmental management even when it ‘harms’ their economic self-interest. Unfortunately there are quite a few ways in which the same ability to rise above economic self-interest is likely to harm the environment – as when a certain kind of fundamentalist is persuaded that environmental problems are signs of Last Days, or that any kind of collective action is ‘communism’.

Thirdly, when we hand over the direct management of our economic interests to others (typically investment professionals, the senior management of the firms by which we are employed, our government’s treasury department, and quite a few others), this creates a dilemma for the theory of economic rationality. Either they pursue our interests on our behalf, and not their own, in which case they are not being rational from their own perspective, or they do the reverse – in which case they aren’t being rational from our perspective.

This is the problem of ‘agency’, as economists like to call it, and it had a major impact on creating the recent global economic crisis. Investment banks hotly pursuing their own interests netted themselves billions in fees for investment advice and dubious sales, not to mention outright fraud, but added little value as far as the rest of us – including their immediate customers – were concerned.

From an environmental point of view this could prove to be a serious issue, as it is crucial that environmental problems are seen as affecting all of us equally, and, conversely, that one group cannot evade the consequences by exploiting another. Unfortunately, although this may be true in the long run, especially if the problems turn out to be still more severe than most people expect, it is unlikely that such a long-term perspective will be the rule. Indeed, we can certainly expect some groups – from privileged individuals up to corporations and national governments – to do their utmost to exploit the weaknesses of others.

Fourthly, there is the more profound kind of irrationality that follows from the fact that what is rational for an individual can be counterproductive, or even outright destructive, when replicated all across a market.

From an environmental perspective this is all too common, as can be seen from the ratchet effect of many investments. To take a very parochial example, right now the London underground train system (the Tube) is being blighted with hundreds of screens that show dynamic advertisements in place of the old posters. This raises the impact of these advertisements, but they probably also represent only the thin end of the wedge, and we can certainly expect these deeply annoying devices to become the norm. But with that, all advertisements will be restored to an equal footing, so no advantage will be gained by using electronic screens. But no one will be able to go backwards either, to old fashioned paper posters. From an environmental point of view, these necessarily lead to more material resources – electronics, energy, and so on - being invested to achieve absolutely no net material benefit (as opposed to monetary) value.

Finally, there are situations – some extremely widespread – in which the economically ‘rational’ option simply isn’t available. In any market that is dominated by large-scale capital (which is to say, any area of heavy industry, any long-term commitment, and so on), rapid movements to reflect a sudden change of circumstance are simply not options.

For example, if a lower-cost operator suddenly enters the market – as often as not taking advantage of the most recent methods, processes, technologies, etc. – they can price their goods and services below more established operators, who are still committed to the old approach. The latter may have the option of moving to a lower-cost operation too – but the long-term nature of many financial commitments may mean that the old investments still have to be paid off, and the arrival of a radically new operating model may mean that the systems and resources by which they currently operate simply cannot be sold off, because no one want them.

From an environmental perspective, this is almost invariably disastrous, as it obliges the owners of that capital to carry on using it, regardless of the environmental consequences. A power station or car plant built today must be operated for decades to come if it is to be paid for, and its proprietors will lobby for the continuation of dirty energy and transport for the same period.

And all that is leaving aside the conscious exploitation of other complexities such as 'informational asymmetry' (i.e., they're lyng to you). All in all, the case for the ‘rationality’ of markets, or for the so-called ‘efficient markets hypothesis’, is not strong. As far as the environment is concerned, it is pretty disastrously flawed.

Paying India and China to do what, exactly?

Anyone with a sense of decency and proportion about humanity’s current environmental predicament understands and sympathises with the claim by developing countries that the developed countries should actively support their contribution to controlling global warming by technology transfers, improved terms of trade and direct funding. Conversely, as India and China’s own governments have pointed out, the attitude of the governments of developed countries to their position is hypocritical at best and shameless at worst.

But at the same time, is it really clear exactly what would be accomplished by such support? Just as the justice of their cause is clear to anyone with half an eye, so the doubtfulness of their chosen route to development is clear to anyone with half an ear for the brilliant but discordant disharmonies of emerging capitalism. For both India and China (and most other developing countries) have certainly set themselves on a strictly capitalist road to industrialisation, and it is exactly this that undermines their claims to the sympathy and assistance of developed countries.

Not that the latter are any less culpable – after all, we invented capitalism, we made sure that most developing countries (with the notable exception of China itself) would adopt a capitalist strategy for economic development, and we have wilfully turned a blind eye to the environmental (not to mention social, cultural, political and psychological) consequences of our own road to wealth. But to support the industrialisation of any country on the same basis would only be more of the same problem we already have. Indeed, capitalism’s incessant demand for growth and more growth, coupled with the lower ‘carbon efficiency’ of less developed countries’ industries, would actually make the problem disproportionately worse. So even if the global environment could countenance the rapid doubling and trebling of the global economy, the environmental impact is actually likely to be much worse than that.

So what is the answer? Beats me. But it isn’t capitalist development, because that can only lock us – and in this case it really is us all – into a worse problem. Nor will it solve developing countries’ developmental problems, given that they are far more likely to suffer from the resulting climate chaos, resource depletion and ecosystems damage than their more developed neighbours.

Should We Seek to Save Industrial Civilisation?

Yeasterday George Monbiot's website published a debate between George and Paul Kingsnorth on the question Should We Seek to Save Industrial Civilisation?

I commented on this rather abstract discussion, and here is what I said:

I find myself bemused by this debate. On the other hand, after reading
George’s Captive State, I would have expected a more specific focus on exactly
what it is about our economic system that drives its relentless growth, and on
the other I am sure I can’t be alone in finding any dispute that lays the blame
for environmental disaster at the door or either ‘founding myths’ or ‘humanity’
a bit abstract, to say the least.

Industry does not lead to environmental collapse. Firstly, any machine or
factory or oil well or fishing fleet can be shut down or made more
environmentally friendly any time its controllers want to do so, and secondly I
see no reason to believe that those who control these things are inherently
blind to the facts of climate chaos, peak oil and all the rest. Rather, the
issues are what it is that motivates whether or not we turn down industry and
who realistically exercises enough control to do so. These are matters of
society’s political and economic structure, not abstract speculation.

As far as motivation is concerned, our economic system is driven by profit,
and practically every sector of our global economy is committed to investments
that demand a return for decades to come. So although there is no technical
reason why the factories and power stations cannot be switched off, the economic
consequences would be disastrous. So cars keep roaring off the production lines
and the oil keeps gushing not because of Judaeo-Christian foundation myths about
control over nature or because we are too weak to give up foreign holidays, but
because if stopped buying, there would be no revenues to repay the bank loans
that fund all those hotels, aircraft, oil wells, and all the rest.

The same can be said of industry as a whole – the issue is not one of
industry as such but of the economic motivation that determines how industry is
used and developed. There the answer is simple: it is run and developed for
profit, and unless the state intervenes to impose specific environmental and
social obligations, nothing else. Nor, while those who control this whole cycle
limit their perspective to profitability, can things be otherwise. But at the
same time, they could not change this perspective to something more socially and
environmentally responsible even if they wanted too without markets and
investors simply demolishing them. That is only likely to change if there is a
truly vast realignment of our economic system, such that social and
environmental sustainability became our ultimate criterion for economic success
and profitability, if it remained at all, would become a secondary accounting
issue, not the be-all and end-all of industrial civilisation.

In short, it is capitalism that is the ‘fifth horseman’ who drives the four
horsemen of our impending environmental apocalypse – global warming, ecosystems
collapse, resource depletion and (the disastrously adverse effects of)
population growth. Conversely, it is wholly implausible that the motivation for
and control over our industrial civilisation will shift away from profitability
and radical unsustainability without equally radical political
intervention.

All in all, I don’t know how far capitalism can be adapted to social and
environmental sustainability – given its inherent drive for economic growth,
either it or civilisation itself will have to give – but I am quite certain that
capitalism is a much more realistic answer than Paul and George’s rather
speculative abstractions.

One of nature's little jokes

One of the great hopes for environmentally clean energy to reduce the impact of climate change is of course wind power. One of the places where, through as combination of geography, technology and economy, you would have thought wind power had a good chance of proving itself is the American Midwest. Where, according to a paper just published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, wind speeds are have been falling for decades. Because of climate change.

Never let it be said that Mother Nature doesn't have a sense of humour.

Source: Pryor, S.C., R.J. Barthelmie, D.T. Young, E. S. Takle, R. W. Arritt, D. Flory, W. J. Gutowski, A. Nunes, and J. Roads (2009), Wind speed trends over the contiguous USA, J. Geophys. Res., doi:10.1029/2008JD011416, in press.

China shakes the road

China has certainly bought into consumerism in a big and perhaps irreversible way. General Motors has sold off now its Hummer division to a Chinese buyer, the Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Company. Tengzhong’s CEO is quoted int eh New York Times as saying that:

‘The Hummer brand is synonymous with adventure, freedom and exhilaration,
and we plan to continue that heritage’.

Plainly he hasn't heard of peak oil.

One might take issue with this interpretation of such ‘a symbol of gas-guzzling, road-hogging American excess’ (as the FT's correspondents put it), but it is hard to avoid also seeing it as yet another symptom of China’s growing environmental impact still farther. And contrary to China’s stated defence of its unwillingness to impose carbon emission limits on itself, this is hardly the kind of development that a poor country needs to create a decent standard of living for its people.

Global solutions: effective, efficient, equitable?

A persistent theme in much writing about the coming decades is the need for global agreements that go a good deal further than the technical questions of environment management. Nicholas Stern (the author of the authoritative Stern Review on the economics of climate change) is typical of this line of thought:

But we have to act together, to create a global deal – this is a problem that is global in both its origins and its impacts.

That global deal must be effective, in that it cuts back emissions on the scale required; it must be efficient, in keeping costs down; and it must be equitable in relation to abilities and responsibilities, taking into account both the origins and impact of climate change. (From Stern's A Blueprint for Safer Planet, p.4)

Everyone seems to say as much, and as a statement of how we should approach the coming decades, it is impossible to contradict.

I just don’t believe it will happen. In fact I suspect that the most we can realistically expect is that the actions we take will be moderately effective. Civilisation will probably not collapse. But as for efficiency and equity, what is it in our performance to date that would lead anyone to expect either? I doubt that, whatever the deals we collectively agree too, our collective response will be anything of the kind. There are far too many countervailing forces for that to happen.

The efficiency of any future global strategy is almost certainly out of the question. As everyone admits, we are faced with global problems. But we do not have global systems in place to deal with them. On the contrary, our systems are not only fragmented but also full of conflict and antipathy between individual nations. There is also a profound conflict of interest between the owners and senior management of global corporations - the other most powerful economic players on the planet - and the rest of us.

Of course, in some profound sense we are all in this together, and completely failure will be fatal for all of us. But between here and complete failure there are many decisions to be made, each of which will benefit some and burden others. Reluctant though I am to say it of my fellow human beings, those who control the decision-making at each of these branching points will, more often than not, make sure that the decision is made in their own favour. That is to say, they will be decisions which are efficient for them. In Stern’s very appropriate words, they will be ‘keeping costs down’. This may mean keeping down the costs for humanity at large, but it will almost certainly involve minimising the costs of those who control the decisions. If this means increasing the ‘costs’ – the poverty, the danger, the hunger, the misery, the disease, the fear, the agony – of everyone else, then that will be presented as the best – or at least the least bad – alternative. Those who do not control these decisions will take the consequences. Which, in many cases, will be fatal.

As for equity, we have never taken this seriously in the past and I believe it will be a lot harder to take seriously in future. In the current (relatively) stable and affluent industrial world, only a handful of the most wealthy nations ever fulfils its public commitments on aid. We announce and re-announce help for long term development and short-term disaster, and then fail to live up to either. Given that the sums involved – currently just 0.7% of GDP – are so small that we would not miss them if we paid them in full, what can we expect of decisions about disasters that are not yet even visible. And in a future world of successive environmental crises, mass migrations, resource wars and much else, there will be far less concern for, let alone commitment to, equity. On the contrary, most of humanity will not even show up on the radar screens of the key decision-makers.

Why then should we expect equity from any future arrangements to curb climate change, resource depletion, ecosystems degradation, population growth and other environmental threats? I suspect that the real fount of future ‘equity’ is likely to be what it has always been - the economic power that countries like China, India, Brazil and Russia are already starting to wield. In a world of declining fossil fuels, the European Union will not be allowed to forget that Gazprom alone controls a sixth of the world’s natural gas reserves. The United States Treasury has long since started to eye nervously China’s enormous dollar holdings - they currently hold nearly $2 trillion in US Treasury bonds, whose manipulation could easily hole the entire western economy. These are people we will treat ‘equitably’ – because they come to the negotiating table as equals, not to mention rivals. But the hundred-plus countries that are each smaller than all of the world’s hundred largest companies? If GlaxoSmithKline, Cisco Systems and Wells Fargo are unlikely to be granted a seat at the top table, what can lesser economic entities like Estonia, Ethiopia, Cameroon, Trinidad and Tobago, Ivory Coast, Panama, El Salvador, Tanzania, Bahrain, Jordan, Iceland, Bolivia, Ghana, Paraguay, Zambia, Uganda, Botswana, Honduras and the many other yet smaller countries expect?

But not even the effectiveness of any future ‘global deal’ can be taken for granted. There are after all degrees of effectiveness. I previously suggested three levels of outcome for our current position: a setback comparable to a world war; an impact on our civilisation as a whole comparable to the fall of the Roman empire; and a threat to civilisation as such, comparable to a new ice age. As I have previously said, I do not know which we are really facing, but for all the reasons that we should expect neither efficiency nor equity, we should expect the effectiveness of our actions to be limited too - perhaps to the point where the twenty-first century goes down as the worst in history.

More precisely, we should expect rich and powerful countries that are situated in relatively cool regions to do as little as possible until they have no choice but to act in their own interests. That is after all what they have always done about global problems and what they have done so far about our current environmental threats. Even if they have the foresight to recognise that disaster in developing countries now will mean disaster for them later, they will almost certainly do only what is needed to forestall the later disaster to themselves. This will almost certainly be much less than preventing or remedying the original disaster to developing countries, no doubt accompanied by a great deal of hand-wringing, protestations of good intentions and dishonest claims to be taking ‘appropriate’ action. The real focus being on deflecting the negative consequences for the rich and powerful. Again going by our experience of aid, we will even find opportunities to benefit from the suffering of developing countries. Again, we always have. And then millions and millions of people will die.

The upshot of all this is simple. Simply continually asserting that our approach must be efficient or equitable will result in neither. If we want our response to the many environmental threats we face in the twenty-first century to be efficient or equitable, we must take a very firm and explicit decision that it should be so. More than that, we must create global institutions that represent humanity at large – which is to say, people rather the most powerful corporations and nation states.

It is hard to imagine what such an institution would look like. After all, none of our existing systems operate at that level. But in any case, I can still think of no compelling reason to expect any such institutions to be created even if they could be easily described, and the chances of their coming into existence will recede faster and faster as the real problems caused by 3° and 4° temperature increases start to hit us, as the global economy starts to unravel in the face of accelerating oil and gas prices and whole populations start to move in the face of poverty, hunger, disease and war.

Why capitalism must expand - whatever the environmental consequences

I have suggested several times that capitalism’s destructive relationship with the environment is not a matter of greed. Nor is it natural to industrial systems. Rather, it inheres in the basic economic structure of capitalism itself – in the things that make it capitalism rather than any other kind of economy. But how is this so? One would never have drawn any such conclusions from economic theory as it is taught in our universities or the way most professional economists talk about their subject.

The key question is how investment works under the rules of a capitalist economy. These rules have evolved along with capitalism itself, but the basic cycle as it now operates is very simple. Imagine that you have a good deal of money available to invest, and choose a sector where a lot of ‘fixed’ capital is needed. That is, your business will need to pay for a lot of materials and facilities before it can even start doing business. This might mean almost anything – expensive tools, specialised equipment, vehicles, energy generation, storage, offices, changes to the terrain, and so on – all of which must be paid for before production can start and none of which will be paid off until you have been in business for a long time – certainly years, and quite possibly decades.

For example, a car or a cement factory can cost several hundred million dollars, almost all of which must be paid for before the first car or bag of cement comes off the production line. A nuclear power station can costs several billion dollars, yet will not generate one iota of revenue until long after its owners have had to start paying out to build it. To fund these enormous outlays, even the biggest company has to borrow equally enormous sums, all of which must be paid back, typically over a very long period.

The upshot of this is that there is a constant pressure on the owners to keep selling the product. That makes it extremely difficult to reduce sales of even the most environmentally destructive product, once the capital has been raised and the factories, roads and power plants are in place. On the contrary, there is bound to be a pressure to deal with any such problem far more economically, such as be simply denying its reality. Other stakeholders in this process – including the workers whose jobs are at risk and the governments whose loans and tax revenues are equally on the line – will frequently back them up, sometimes (as in the case of global warming and other environmental problems) beyond all reason. So it is no wonder that every successive environmental problem, from industrial accidents to global resource depletion to climate change, are routinely denied by big business: they know who will be expected to pay for the damage.

In fact, far from showing restraint, there is ample reason to believe that having a lot of fixed capital to pay off will not only encourage owners to look the other way when problems loom but actively encourage them to expand production as much as possible. The more any given piece of equipment or building or other facility can be used while the debt is outstanding, the more income it will generate to pay off the debt. For example, if a car production line is used for three shifts each day rather than one or two, then the part of the costs that goes towards paying for the factory building (or approach roads or office space or any number of other items) can be spread out over more cars. As a result, both the costs and the value of the output will go up, but because nothing extra is being paid to use the factory 24 hours each day, the cost per car goes down and the revenue available to pay off the debt goes up. So it always makes sense to look for new ways to intensify production, so that more revenue can be had for the same costs.

On the other hand, the value of your investment is constantly being eroded by competitors. If you plan for your investments to pay for themselves over many years, you can assume that three things will happen. Firstly, your equipment will wear out, while more recent entrants to your market will be using more up-to-date machinery that does the same job at lower costs. Secondly, notwithstanding all the laws of patents and intellectual property, you can expect any innovations you have made to be copied by others without them having to bear the research and development costs you had to pay for. And finally, the longer the term of your investment, the more likely it is that you will find the whole way your investment works radically undermined by a truly ‘destructive’ innovation that simply changes the way things are done in your industry. Thus, the car destroyed the horse and cart, the valve was all but eliminated by the transistor, the European and American car and electronics industries wilted before the Japanese quality revolution, supermarkets are destroying small retail businesses everywhere, and right now downloading is destroying CD and DVD businesses all around the world.

All these forces means the same thing: you need to exploit your capital as much and as quickly as you can, which ultimately means one thing: make and sell more. The environmental effect of this imperative may be mitigated by improvements in efficiency, but the likelihood is that any given business will also find easier but less desirable techniques for solving their economic problems, such as to manipulating customers, markets and suppliers. Obsolescence can be built into products in all sorts of ways. They may also be eased by protective governments (many of which have not hesitated to put the interests of business before those of their own people), by buying out competitors and by flagrant abuse and dishonesty of one kind or another.

A good deal needs to be added to the basic production process to make sure that all these extra goods and services are sold, of course, and it is no coincidence that mass production and mass marketing came into existence hand in hand, or that encouraging debt and consumerism has long since been a matter of government policy. The stability of our society relies on industrial systems that operate on a larger and larger scale, and under a capitalist economic system that means the ability of big businesses to repay the loans and bonds that have been used to finance all this. That in turn means profit, without which not only these investments would collapse but the entire system of employment and the entire tax system that underpins government would simply disappear.

Yet there is no economic necessity for our economy to work like this. Society is perfectly capable of identifying its own needs. We are perfectly capable of building factories and offices and communications and energy generation systems and all the rest without all the paraphernalia of big business. To claim that we need the profit motive to make people behave in an economically rational manner is not so much doubtful as absurd, given how irrational every bubble and collapse proves profit to be. Likewise the severely deceptive ‘price signals’ from mostly imagined ‘markets’ – they serve the purposes of a small elite that does so well out of these fictions, but the continual assertion that we are capable of nothing more intelligent surely requires more than the routine abstractions of discredited politicians, ivory-tower economists and toadies to big business itself.

And as the above argument I hope shows, any idea that capitalism can be the centrepiece of any attempt to deal with serious environmental problems is not so much absurd as grossly irresponsible, not to say terrifying. Capitalism is incapable of weaning itself off growth, because that is what the basic rules of investment demand. So where it has invested in selling physical goods, it must grow its output and so increase its physical impact; and where it is a non-physical service, it must intensify its use of the many physical resources even the most ‘dematerialised’ service employs. It is incapable of shutting down the most filthy factories or deliberately choosing a more expensive but environmentally more rational way of delivering our economic needs, unless this can also be proved to be the most profitable way of proceeding. That may sometimes be the case, but to rely on such a foolish assumption in the face of the worst threat to the planet in human history must surely be regarded as verging on insane.

How much your government cares about your children

If you have children and expect to have grandchildren, you might like to know just how little your government is thinking about them. The following table (data from the Financial Times) sets out the national 'economic stimulus' packages for dealing with the current economic crisis and the fraction – typically pretty small - that goes to green programmes.



Even the green investments are rather illusory. Most of them are only partially credible (especially in China), and many are bound up with very ungreen initiatives. For example, the Italian, French and German figures all include programmes to encourage car owners to buy newer, greener vehicles. But not only is this of doubtful environmental value (because of the 'embedded carbon' put into the environment by building new cars) but thsi approach simply perpetuates the car culture that is half of the current problem.

Nor are things that are not in these packages exactly helping. For example, Canada will spend $150 million on low-carbon energy in this package. Very nice. What a pity is also plans to invest billions and billions in digging up the environmentally catastrophic tar shales in Alberta. It’s as though they have decided to take an aspirin before chopping their leg off.

I think I’ll move to South Korea.