THUS Magazine

At a recent Royal Society of the Arts (RSA) lecture on Feb 19, 2009, Environment Agency Chairman (Lord) Chris Smith delivered a measured analysis of ‘the seriousness of the economic and environmental challenges that we currently face - and the recognition that the economic turmoil we are going through is an opportunity to change as well as a disaster to be remedied.’ Watch the entire RSA speech here - it’s well worth doing so. Here are some edited highlights: 

‘Over the ages, great changes have tended to come out of adversity.  The welfare state was after all born out of depression and global conflict.  A moment of crisis is precisely the time to think boldly about what it was that precipitated the disaster, and to plan for doing things better in the future.  For some years now I’ve felt that our national politics in Britain has lost the ability to be bold.  It has become too “managerial”, too absorbed with minor adjustments – tinkering, almost – and too little prepared to set ambitious goals and seek to persuade people to join the journey towards them.  We need to recapture some of that spirit, in the same way that politics and political discourse have been triumphantly revived over the past couple of years on the other side of the Atlantic.

‘When we emerge from this economic turmoil what we mustn’t do is simply re-establish what went before, and continue with all the old assumptions – about patterns of growth, consumption, and impact – as if nothing had happened.  2009 could be the year when we radically change some of our economic and social habits, and make a historic shift towards a more sustainable pattern of human activity and economic interaction. 

‘It was notable that when the Climate Change Act finally passed through the House of Commons there were only three votes against it.  It is rare for such a fundamental piece of legislation to arrive on the statute book with such overwhelming cross-party support.  Could we dare to hope that this same non-partisan approach could be established more generally for the environmental and climate change agenda?  How about, as a start, an official mechanism for sharing information and papers between government and opposition parties, on privy council terms, on a regular basis?  It’s done when the country is preparing for war; given the sheer importance of the issue, can’t it be done for the war on climate change?  And how about a cross-party delegation at Copenhagen, to demonstrate the national commitment that transcends any single government or parliament?

‘Not only should the Government be doing things itself in the short term, but it must also be acting as a catalyst for much wider change . . . They could start by developing a full-scale, comprehensive, nationally publicised programme to fit better insulation and provide improved energy efficiency to people’s homes.  We’ve had some scattered initiatives to date, but no sense of a full-scale national endeavour.  When the change was made, years ago, to natural gas in the home, there was a team of people who called door to door, making changes, fitting new meters and valves, and explaining what was happening.  Everyone knew about it, everyone made sure they participated, and a remarkably smooth and successful transformation was achieved.  We need the same approach. 

‘In the immediate term, Government – and the broader public sector – should be leading by example.  All public buildings should be fitted with solar or photovoltaic panels.  New buildings should be fitted with ground-source pumps.  Public land should be used, where possible, for wind power generation.  Every new public building should meet the highest possible standards for energy and water efficiency, becoming a showcase of good practice for other local businesses and organisations to follow.  Government and public bodies should be switching their fleet vehicles to those with low-emission and hybrid engines, and reducing mileage wherever possible.  Video-conferencing should be used more frequently.  And I would like to see every government department and public-sector organisation required to publish an Environmental Responsibility Report alongside its budget each year.

‘Government can also make it much easier for households to get access to photovoltaic panel technology, and wind turbine technology, for their own homes.  Feed-in tariffs are an important part of the picture, but how about a one-stop-shop clearing house for arranging and organising the work, run by each local authority or a cluster of local authorities, to enable householders to get it done with a minimum of fuss and effort?  And how about interest-free loans to assist those households who might find it difficult to pay up-front?  How about priority access to the electricity grid for household renewables, as happened in Germany?  This resulted in far higher take-up by households than here, and we should learn from the incentives and procedures they put in place.

‘One of the great tragedies of the past twenty years has been that some of these early forms of renewable technology – wind turbines, and solar and photovoltaic panels – have been seized on and developed by other countries, and not by firms based here in Britain.  Does this have to be a permanent state of affairs?  As we increasingly ratchet up the demand for these forms of energy generation, isn’t there a strong case for trying to develop a large-scale manufacturing capacity here?  There are some small investments . . . . struggling against mega-competition from Denmark and Germany and elsewhere – but these are isolated examples.  Surely this should be a case of genuine opportunity that could be unlocked by investment from the Regional Development Agencies?  

‘Nick Stern, for example, said at the recent Davos summit that the world needed to invest $400 billion in low-carbon technologies and infrastructure over the next two years.  President Obama has placed green technology and renewable energy at the core of his proposals for a major public-works stimulus to the US economy: making the argument on energy-security and environmental and economic grounds.  There is good precedent for this.  Franklin Roosevelt planted hundreds of thousands of trees as part of the New Deal public-works programme – and in the process helped to stabilise the shifting soils of the dustbowl lands that had created such agricultural poverty over earlier decades.  He built dams and channelled water and irrigated new pastures.  He understood precisely how the deployment of publicly-led investment could help to transform the relationship between the land and the people who could derive work and benefit from it.  Barack Obama recognises this too, for energy as well as for land. 

‘The centrality of green initiatives to the Obama rescue package is highlighted by estimates from the Climate Change Centre of Excellence at HSBC, comparing the green percentage content of stimulus packages on a country by country basis.  The initial analysis shows that green investments represented only 2% of the Bush Stabilization Act measures;  they represent 16% of the Obama proposals.  The comparative figures for the other highly-performing countries are 34% for China, 19% for Germany, 10% for Spain, and 69% for South Korea.  The equivalent figure for the UK is 7%.  This is disappointing for the UK.  It represents some good specific initiatives, but it has tended to be in bits and pieces.  There is as yet no sense of an overall, coherent, planned, national strategy to see green investment as central to the recovery.  There should be.  And surely the forthcoming Budget – together with the publication of the low-carbon industrial strategy – is precisely the place to do it.

‘At the heart of any such green investment strategy must be nothing less than the complete transformation of energy generation in Britain.  If we are to have the remotest chance of meeting our 80% reduction target by 2050, we have to have more or less de-carbonised our electricity production completely by 2030.  And in order to do so, we have to ensure that carbon is removed from fossil-fuel-burning processes (more of this in a moment).  We have to include new nuclear generation within the overall mix –and this means solving the major outstanding dilemma of how to find a safe and secure repository for our high-level and intermediate-level radioactive waste.  And we have to make huge strides in our hitherto faltering progress in the development of renewables.

‘There’s a tendency amongst some within the “green movement” to talk only of doom and gloom.  To paint a picture of rising sea-levels and disappearing forests and growing deserts and violent storms and food and water scarcity and destroyed biodiversity and wars over environmental territory, and to tell us all that we’re going to hell in a handcart unless we all turn into green hippies and live off the land.  The problem is, it simply isn’t going to happen;  people won’t want to live their lives like this.  It’s difficult enough to convince people to do something, however small, to help to avoid a disaster that is waiting to happen but hasn’t happened yet.  To do so on the back of an unrelievedly doom-laden analysis isn’t going to persuade very many people.  We need to learn the classic lesson that Barack Obama has re-taught us:  tell it as it is, yes, but give a sense of hope that things could be made to be different.  And that all we need is the will to do it.

‘What’s more, in relation to environmental change, we’ve done it before.  The past fifteen years have seen an 80% reduction in sulphur dioxide emissions.  The hole in the ozone layer has been repaired.  The threat of acid rain has retreated.  It’s all happened because of human endeavour, incentives, and regulation.  And in the process we’ve demonstrated that it is possible to change environmentally-destructive behaviour for the better.  We need to apply the same dedication, now, to the issue of climate change. 

‘So, give everyone the facts, yes.  Give them hope too.  And then go beyond that, and give them the opportunity to shape the debate and discussion about what we want society to look like in forty years’ time.  Until last year, we tended to assume that the key to perpetual economic progress was ever-increasing consumption, and indeed that part of the cure for our economic ills is to re-start the consumption motor.  Could we, though, envisage a time when we think more of the balance between consumption and consolidation and – dare we think it – sharing;  when we try to find our way to a new economics that factors in the needs of future as well as current generations;  when we try to place a real value on the resources that we use up, and the waste we generate, and the impact on the rather fragile world around us without which we couldn’t do anything;  and when we see wisdom in some rather old concepts like husbandry and stewardship and well-being?  These aren’t easy things to shout about and inspire people with.  It means appealing to something more than the automatic immediate aspirations people have.  It doesn’t mean abandoning the sense of reaching for the best that life can offer.  But it does mean having the maturity to discuss and decide, seriously, what the shape of “the best” might be.  Surely it must be the case – in the shadow of  economic crisis – that the right time to have this discussion, to make this change, is here and now.

 As George Bernard Shaw used to say, “Some men see things as they are and say why;  I dream things that never were, and say – why not”.