I stayed in this roundy cottage in Portmerion and was given a whole lot of stuff to think about

Back from the Clough Ellis vision of Italianate Arcadia, setting for the surreal 1970s spy series, ‘The Prisoner,’ I struggled to synthesise what I heard, present it as a General Theory of Universal Knowledge, flog it to a New Age business publisher, save the planet, buy myself a converted trawler with a bikini bird crew and bother Japanese whalers (with the bikini bird crew pole dancing round the mizzen mast).

Frankly, I was plaiting sawdust until this morning, stuck at the general theory of universal knowledge bit, and not for the first time. The whole save the planet/get some cash/buy a trawler/bother the whalers with pole dancing sirens scheme looked as dead in the water as my chances of becoming foreign policy advisor after telling Shadow Foreign Secretary Douglas Alexander, another Portmerion guest, that the UN resembled a second rate, more corrupt, version of FIFA. Then I awoke to the epiphany that we are names, not numbers. Every life form on the planet  has a unique individual identity, dignity and purpose. Nature indiscriminately abhors entropy. Humans, the last, lunkheaded twirl of the evolutionary dice, persist in the deadly fallacy that they are above, not a part of, creation. Their high-handed, cack-handed interventions, based on mathematically impossible attempts to exclude uncertainty and randomness from the infinite possibilities afforded by an ever-expanding series of variable circumstances will, by nature, always generate unforeseen, counter-intuitive consequences. The more binary data we collect, the greater the hubristic illusion of control in a quantum universe. We are the deadly meddlers, psychopathic intellectual delinquents with yottabytes of information but no understanding of the tendency of exosystems to deliquesce. Or something along those lines.

Just then another thought hit, me like a great wave biffing a Japanese nuclear plant: ‘Jesus, it’s 8-30 already. I need to walk the whippet. I’ll park this stuff until I’ve seen what the others have written and knock something off tomorrow after I’ve bought a few robots and done Waitrose.’

Firing up my ecologically incorrect 1972 Beetle convertible, partly compensated by its unique interior rainforest microclimate of continual damp and lichens, I was soon yomping round Hampstead Heath, London’s last great wilderness, with no sighting of any other native species apart from George Michael and packs of exotic dogs and their walkers, dressed for the mild weather in North Face Arctic survival parkas. Coffee beaker in one hand, dogpoo bag in the other – careful which one you lift to your lips – I relegated the Mission to Explain to an internal rant about Arsenal’s inability to grasp the essential notion that the purpose of football was not to create the perfect balance sheet but to win the occasional trophy. I was considering whether a latter day Christopher Marlowe would have substituted the tale of Arsene Wenger’s Icarean 49 match unbeaten run followed by six years of no silverware for Tamburlaine the Great when I thought I saw a huge white airbag, bouncing at great speed across the manicured blasted wasteland. As everyone who wasted time in front of the TV in the 1970s instead of revising knows, whenever he tried to escape Portmerion, the Prisoner was engulfed then herded back by a giant chewing gum bubble. The genius of the series was the ambivalence as to whether the village, its inhabitants and the sheepdog bubble itself (called Rover) were real/partially real or whether we were observing the Prisoner’s dream state, induced by his captors to find out how much he knew. Was this why I had been transported to Portmerion?

This will happen if you can't remember what you learned at Portmerion

Hardly. I didn’t put my hand up once to ask a clever question, fearing the bubble would drag me out as soon as I brought tin robots or whippets into the Big Conversation but nobody noticed, much less dragged me off in an airbag. My engulfing bubble on the Heath was the dread of explaining to Julia that despite inviting me to the most stimulating and sometimes surreal weekend I have spent for a very long time, in the company of some of the most stellar minds in this or any other chiliocosm, my tendency for transference activity was once again getting the better of me. For example, revelations from Nassim Taleb that the best laid plans of mice and men always conform to SNAFU were merely reinforcing my resolve to arse around in life and achieve little. My new best friend Sylvia Earle’s plangent exposition of the wanton destruction of our oceans moved me almost to tears but didn’t stop me from discussing 1950s American nudist postcards and the vanishing folk art of ice cream vans when I sat next to the great lady at dinner.

I walked on the beach with Frieda Hughes, daughter of Ted and Sylvia Plath, two of my favourite poets, an original bard herself and a painter of profound physical and psychological depth, discussing big motorbikes (Frieda rides one, in mitigation). At breakfast with Human Rights diva Baroness Helena Kennedy I turned the conversation to Glasgow hardmen. I simply frolicked in the anarchic slipstream of my heroine, Miriam Margolyes. But I was one of the lads, to all intents and purposes. The genius of Portmerion is partly the geniuses but also the Thusness of the whole shebang. We’re all names, not numbers, individuals with collective responsibility to do the best we can. Julia’s genius is her understanding of the palette of personalities.

The overarching message, if there was one, was probably wasted on me, like the time I met the Dalai Lama and spent the few seconds in the presence of a Realised Being wondering if he was wearing a Casio or a Rolex. But if you get the chance, go to the Editorial Intelligence Names Not Numbers Symposium. For a taste of the Portmerion conversation, listen to The Forum on the BBC World Service. Make an effort to see Beeban Kidron’s documentary on the Devadasi. iPod the EI podcasts. Read anything by Frieda Hughes and Sylvia Earle’s ‘The World is Blue.’ Imagine Simon Schama having a bloody good knees up in the bar at 2 am then delivering a multidimensional summary of all the big ideas of the past 2500 years six hours later. Try to understand Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan then imagine he was sitting next to you on the bus, which, by the way, was one of those executive football team coaches with leather seats and a big round sofa at the back with loads of snacks and Sky TV  . . .  Jesus, is that the bubble again? Be seeing you.

John J Kelly

PS. Here’s a handy link to all the videos and podcasts from Portmerion

“Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money.” – Cree Saying.

This quote, possibly the biggest cliché in the environmental literature, inspired Jared Diamond’s seminal work “Collapse“. But humans seem to succumb to boredom fairly quickly, so the real crisis, which is after all about something as mundane as food, has slipped off of the radar. The global meltdown of the banks, a grand Greek drama of the folly of the gods if ever there was one, has captured our attention. Have the problems with food thus disappeared? I think not. They are here to stay and getting stronger.

The problems we saw with the huge price rise in 2008 are still around, bio-fuels, huge agri-businesses exploiting market power, and so on. It is a myth that this was driven by increased demand from China and India, downwards pressure on wages in developing countries has actually reduced per capita food intake in the poor majority of these countries. Adding speculation in food markets yields a lovely recipe for population control (Thus Passim). Over the past two years, evidence has grown of the impact of Climate Change on agriculture. An FAO report by Cline in 2007 put agricultural yield losses by 2080 at between 5 and 20% globally. This hid a regional picture where India could lose 30-40% of its yield. As if this was not enough, he pointed out the glaringly obvious problem with equilibrium models, which mean even greater declines in food production.

These models assume systems tending to a steady state, and are used in both agro-economics and climate modeling. They mask extreme events and chaotic systems that refuse to settle down. Extreme weather is a fact of life in India, whose climate is driven by the dynamic monsoon weather system. No-one quite knows how this system will respond to changes in climate, but what we do know is that around 40% of India’s population depend directly on the rain. They live in terror of extreme weather, and this year, with a major drought from failure of the monsoon, India is importing food again. This just after India signed an accord to turn land over to fuel production to help keep American engines going.

Finally, there is sea-level rise to consider, something also not included in Cline’s report. For instance Egypt is facing the loss of much of its prime agricultural lands along the Nile Delta. So worry about the banks that hold in your money all you like, the food problem is not going away.

By Daniel Taghioff.

This development has brought on a wave of angst across the civilised world, as middle-class lefties realise they will have to brush up on their modes of production and dust off their anecdotes on ideology (See Thus Passim). But the thing is, none of this is difficult. So with no further fanfare, here it is:

The THUS potted guide to political economy:

Profit: If you have an unhealthily high rate of profit the money moves away from the poor to the rich. If you have a low rate of profit the rich get pissed off. 

Capitalist Crises: Too much of the former, you crush the poor – who then, incidentally, can’t buy stuff. Too much of the latter, a counter-revolution like Neo-liberalism.

An even briefer history of Neo-Liberalism: TheThatcher revolution and ’Reaganomics‘ both inspired by Milton Friedman (and Ayn Rand et al) led to redistribution of wealth, largely from the middle to the top and ‘light touch’ regulation in the financial markets. The stated objective was smaller government and an end to Keynesian supply-side economic dogma, but this didn’t happen. It all went horribly wrong (Thus passim).

Inequality: The poor got richer (in absolute terms) despite the robbery from above because there were more resources coming in from the environment.

The environment: A lack of natural resources makes inequality more of a problem (free summary), as you loose cheapo consumer goods as a way of buying off the poor, and as prices spike, especially for food… (Thus passim).

Productivity: Productivity gains or ‘advanced technology’ allegedly defeated Marxism, or rather the lumbering economic giant of Communism. But in reality, it actually dramatically increased natural resource usage. All that growth from the ‘white heat of technology’ can be accounted for as increased available energy in the economy,(Full text here) which nowadays means Big Oil.

Consumption: Productivity should really be measured in terms of goods per unit of natural resource. This is not going up anywhere near fast enough (look at page 20). To quote Monbiot (if you must- JK) “if our economy grows at 3% between now and 2030, we will consume in that period economic resources equivalent to all those we have consumed since humans first stood on two legs.” Hence we are running out of stuff, like Oil, though there will be peak other things too, like available fresh water.

Revolution: So there will be a crunch (or several). Printing money will not buy us out of trouble if there isn’t stuff to buy (Thus passim). Developing countries, especially those with a a big exposure to food price rises such as India will not be able to hold onto democracy if basic natural resources totally deplete. Revolutions, on a small or large scale are imminent. We are in for some interesting decades (Thus Passim)…

Conclusion: This recession is a phoney war. Our kids won’t need to worry about levels of debt – which, by the way, are notional – a future dictatorship of the proletariat could abolish these by simply refusing to honour them (or just by printing money). Our kids (and their parents) need to worry about natural resources, because we can’t print more of them.

While Somali pirates are taking hostages, killing and getting killed by the French navy, French trawlermen are blockading Calais, Boulogne and Dunkirk. The Somalis claim they have taken to robbery and kidnapping because their traditional fishing livelihoods have been abstracted by factory ships. The French trawlermen are protesting more or less the same thing, except that their fishing methods are somewhat more automated and their temporary victims are a bunch of tourists, truck drivers and ferry operators. I have no sympathy for either group. The French will exact concessions from their government – so far Eur 4 million has been offered in aid – and maybe the EU. The Somalis will probably end up dead. In either case the root cause will remain. If the matelots were protesting about the ghastly English in general or any number of legitimate gripes other than EU fish quotas, they’d have the full power of Thus behind their routine trashing of the UK Easter half-term holiday. But if they win this one, everyone loses. The restrictions to which they object are insufficient, impossible to enforce and arguably contribute more to the problem than to the solution. We need to pay them to stay in port and find them something sensible and dignified to do while they don’t go to sea. Ditto for the Somalis, but that’s another story.

Charles Clover presents a compelling and authoritative account of the overfishing of the world’s oceans, to which I can’t add much other than to urge you to look out for the documentary film, released in June. Scientists agree that while pollution and climate change, environment and food stocks all affect breeding patterns and populations, factory ships, super trawlers and the collateral damage they cause with their catch-all multi-kilometre nets have damaged fish stocks beyond the tipping point. While fishermen themselves are a breed in decline, it is insane to allow them to exercise their right to work by destroying what remains of the planet’s fish populations.

Spain has the biggest EU fishing fleet. Non-EU members Norway and Iceland, combined populations less than 5 million, account for 22% of the fleet.

The current French protest (now halted) is targeted against the 2008 EU quotas, which are are harmful and wasteful, but not because they are too stringent. They encourage fishermen throw back corpses of endangered fish they have caught by accident if it takes them over their quota of a specific species. While increasing net holes has theoretically helped immature fish to escape, trawling is at best an inexact science and the big ships create havoc as they scrape the seas in search of dwindling stocks in a compressed timeframe. Even if EU fleets comply with quotas, non-EU trawlers account for over 28% of the tonnage in European territorial waters. Quotas may be seen as a ploy to avoid the inevitable recognition that without a total moratorium on factory fishing, white fish in particular face extinction in the North Atlantic and North Sea within a maximum of 30 years, perhaps much earlier. Because this is politically unpalatable we will allow the next generation to take the consequences of our idiocy.

The French government offer of EUR 4 million aid to the trawlermen won’t even pay the legal fees of the proposed litigation from the ferry owners whose businesses have been affected by the blockade. According to the European Environmental Agency, France accounts for around 8% of the tonnage of the EU fishing fleet, similar to Britain and Italy, with combined populations of over 180 million. The Netherlands accounts for 6%. At 19%, Spain is the biggest EU member state fleet. Iceland (7%) and Norway (15%) are not EU members and have a combined population of less than 6 million. Both are grudging signatories to EU memoranda. 28% of the fishing fleet is described as ‘other.’

EU figures show that the while numbers of ships fell by 10%, total tonnage, engine power and overall numbers of vessels in the combined fishing fleets of member states has remained roughly constant since 1997. Factory ships, which do the most damage, have come to the fore. It is a classic example of EU funhouse economics. Giving the same number of people the right to catch 30% less fish from a naturally-declining supply is bound to cause price inflation and bring misery to all but the most ruthless and best-equipped operators, who cause the most environmental damage. A fishy version of the EU Common Agricultural Policy ‘set aside’ scheme (itself flawed) should be enacted, paying trawlermen to lay up for a significant period while stocks recover. Punitive taxes, based on tonnage, could be applied to the big ships. Klondikers from Asia, Japan, Russia and, it has to be said, Spain, should be made very unwelcome indeed in EU territorial waters and fish markets should be better monitored for smuggled catches.

I have recently eaten gambas in a pictureseque waterfront café in a remote corner of southern Spain, to be informed that they were caught and shipped from Northern Scotland – the local stocks were exhausted long ago. I have heard of Klondike trawlers from the Vladivostok fleet, forced to fish half a world away from home, unloading illegal catches of North Atlantic cod at Lowestoft, Yarmouth and Ipswich, where they fetch bullion-robbery prices. Populations of Atlantic herring have declined by almost 95% over the past two decades. Atlantic salmon smoult numbers have fallen by 70% over half that period. I’m no Cousteau – more of a Clouseau if the truth were told – but I know a red herring when it’s under my nose. EU fishing quotas are dangerous, unworkable and shift the balance in favour of the very factory ships which have destroyed the seas and the livelihoods of ‘traditional’ fishermen.

By John J Kelly.

Foolish people have argued that there is a choice between preventing the worst effects of climate change and adapting to unavoidable changes, despite compelling evidence, such as that produced at the latest meeting at Copenhagen that the majority cannot survive without drastic emissions reductions and even if we do, adapting to a lot of changes. While there is a very lively debate on mitigation, on reducing the amount of carbon in the air, the debates on adaptation have been sidelined, perhaps becuase they are seen as distracting from the serious task of saving the world – or perhaps saving the relatively rich English-speakers having the debate. Most measures supposedly designed to reduce carbon in the air also tend to have a horrible impact on the poor. Bio-fuels, which would allow a kind of business-as-usual in terms of running car on liquid fuels, are a prime example – large scale cultivation will disrupt food production. Indeed, the World Bank claims that 75% of last year’s food price spike was down to this very factor.

Another example is the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) designed to get developing countries involved in  Carbon Trading. These are mitigation measures, this money might help adaptation as well, but, under the current system, it won’t.  India’s Center for Science and Environment has been very critical of CDM, which lets the rich buy all the cheap ways of reducing their carbon outputs, forcing the rest to pay more for this later. In addition, the complex process of obtaining carbon credits means it is only really suitable for big companies. So the money won’t go to helping the poor adapt, but will go to the big companies, who do most of the polluting in the first place.

Aided and abetted by consultants from the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, business lobbies have managed to get environmental impact assessment laws diluted in India. Bribery and political influence from big companies is so widespread that several activists have been forced to send industrial water pollution samples to the US to get them processed, because no Indian laboratory dares to return results that would upset big business. Are we seriously going to direct more resources at this lobby in the hope that this will reduce emissions? And how exactly will this help the poor to adapt?

Alternatives will need to be fought for. The recent Forest Rights Act has made its way through Indian Parliament and is now being put into practice. It sets an interesting precedent by putting into law a framework of rights to underpin local democratic control of natural resources. This highlights one of the few advantages the poor have in terms of winning real adaptation concessions. Despite the tiny character of their landholdings,  due to their sheer numbers, they command control of a sizeable proportion of the land.

If you combine the recent findings about climate change with likely emissions reductions paths, you see that we little chance of making it through this crisis without taking some of the carbon back out of the air. The global carbon cycle suggests two main ways of doing this: put it into the sea, by seeding the oceans for instance, but the technology is not developed yet. Alternativey, you can put it into the land, either through minerals like Olivine, or through biomass, and turning it into charcoal (Biochar). It has been correctly observed that using charcoal as a global commercialised solution to climate change has the same effect as bio-fuels on displacing food production. However, dismissing biochar out of hand misses an important strategic point.

Oxfam and others argue that Human Rights should be put at the heart of the climate debates, particularly adaptation. However, they are somewhat more coy in public about the fact that rights are generally never given freely by the powerful, but forced as concessions from them by the struggles of others. But what on earth do the rich need the poor for? One area is to get access to land. Tata’s troubles in building a plant to manufacture the new Nano car illustrates that the poor will not give up control of what little land they have so easily. If the rich need to use land for getting carbon out of the air, and if the poor can prevent the rich  from doing so by thwarting their plans, perhaps this gives them leverage to demand more rights over their natural resources.

Despite biochar being criticised as an unreliable way to improve soil quality, there have been studies that show that used correctly it can be a useful input into organic agriculture, as well as offering a credible method for sinking carbon into the soil, especially when considered as a part of strategies to increase tree-cover overall. Can we afford to dismiss Biochar as an option because we fear the implications of its commercialisation? As a potential low cost-technology that the poor could implement to improve their land, and a possible source of some leverage on the rich in adaptation negotiations, it may be rash to dismiss it out of hand. With only $1Bn of the already pitiful $18Bn of adaptation funding having been paid out, current approaches to mobilising those resources are clearly not working. Can we afford to overlook the potential advantage the poor may have in the one resource they may control?

If the Indian Forest Rights model can be extended to support dryland organic agricultural practices within a democratised natural resource management framework, this actually creates a model where subsidy for mitigation, in the form of support of increased tree coverage and use of biochar might be used to build productive assets for the poor that may help them adapt. The experience of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in India shows that productive use of subsidy is crucial to prevent the subsidy from undercutting the existing local economy, especially agriculture. Thus the issue of having a rights regime to protect access to the environment and thus local economic activity is crucial to any adaptation approach. There is almost no chance of realising such regimes unless the poor have some real leverage to exercise in order to get them.

 Anyone see any other leverage out there?

Yes we can see it's gone green, but please switch some of those bloody lights off, children

According to Slashdot.org, ‘the nuts and bolts of news for nerds’ – to which I confess I’m addicted, US companies waste at least $2.8 billion per year on leaving unattended PCs switched on. A US government report also claims that idling PCs are responsible for an extraordinary 20 million tons of CO2 emissions, equivalent to 4 million cars. Companies such as General Electric have already made savings amounting to millions of dollars simply by instructing employees to switch off their computers when not in use. Myths that powering up a PC negates the benefit of turning it off, that screen savers somehow save electricity (or screens) are similarly debunked in a report by 1E Energy Awareness Campaign, whose CEO, Sumir Karayi, claims that if all of the world’s 1 billion PCs were powered down for just one night, the energy saved would light the Empire States Building for 30 years. The 1E report is also available in a UK version. You can download it from their site.

I am suddenly telling you this not because I’ve gone all muesli, but because reports like this are genuine evidence that the US is actively joining the developed world community and pragmatically addressing energy savings. This is far from trivial, fellow planeteers. If the Obama effect only extended to reducing wasteful greenhouse gas emissions by, say, 10% in four years, (a lot more than Kyoto, so in a bizarre way, Bush was right) he would leave the US, and the world, in much better shape to have a fighting chance of survival to the 22nd Century. Yes you can (sorry) turn off your PC, take your phone charger out of its socket, stop leaving your TV on standby and switch a few lights off. Yes it will make a huge collective difference. The fact that this will save huge amounts of money and reduce dependence on dwindling fossil fuels from – ahem – unstable regions should not be lost on the citizens of the world’s most hated nation (which could easily be its most admired). The elephant in the room is air conditioning, however. If North Americans  – and North East Asians, for that matter – could temper their addiction to artificial climate control, in cars as well as buildings, we would see a step change in energy consumption and Co2 emissions. Switching off PCs is a welcome start, however. Go green, USA!

John J Kelly

‘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”.   

Stan and Ollie save the world

As Gordon and Alastair puff out their chests and iron their M+S Let’s Pretend We’re Businessmen suits (made in Indonesia) to host the G20 Global Summit on the global economy, a letter from Steven Katirai, whose Google search reveals him as a capital markets consultant based in the North East of England, has been doing the rounds on the internet. I publish it here with no guarantees as to its provenance, but with no party political line or biased intent, at least on the part of Thus. Whatever his motives, Mr Katirai professionally indicts, fillets and condemns the performance of the Brown government in a way which the Opposition have largely failed to do. Most of what he says is economic fact, much of which has already been covered in Thus and a small part is ad hominem, which I’ve left in, but don’t necessarily agree with (my attacks are more in the spirit of knockabout fun). Some of his observations scream to be in the public domain. I for one did not make the connection between Andrew Brown (whom I have met in his role as Public Affairs Director for EDF) and his BROTHER, Gordon. Neither did I realise that Tony Cooper, a top nuclear industry lobbyist, is the father of Yvette. Apart from revealing  how little I know – it shows how casually we have descended into elitism and cronyism in the war-torn years of Tony, Gordon, Mandy, Ballsy and the other Alastair. The letter was written on 15 February and is presented more or less as written.

An open letter demanding your resignation.

Prime Minister
Your position is untenable and I, as a citizen of Great Britain, demand your instant resignation. You are unelected, have no popular mandate and lack the moral authority to be Prime Minister. Your terms as Chancellor and Prime Minister have been a total disaster for this nation and your attempt to cling on to power at all costs show a complete contempt for this nation and displays your absolute vanity and thirst for political power. I list below some of the mistakes made by you during your time in public office. If as a director of a limited company you had made similar mistakes you would be subject to criminal prosecution and banned from being a company director. As a Government minister the standards exercised should be significantly higher than those exercised by a company director, you have failed to maintain those standards and are unfit for public office.
• Banking Supervision: You transferred responsibility for banking supervision to the Financial Services Authority from the Bank of England so directly laying the seeds of the current banking crisis.
• Banking Crisis: The initial response to the Northern Rock crisis was so slow as to be glacial and ultimately led to the damage done to the whole banking sector. A strong Prime Minister would have provided depositors with a guarantee that their deposits were safe and the bank run would have stopped. Ultimately the same guarantee would have ensured that the HBOS and RBS debacle would not have been so severe.
• Criminal Negligence: The entire UK banking crisis has been caused by a lack of supervision under the regulatory regime set up by you, any man of honour would have resigned upon seeing the damage caused. You however have tried to blame everyone else and accept no responsibility. You are criminally negligent.
• Vanity: You have used the banking crisis to attempt to advance your personal standing and political career at the expense of the nation.
• Lack of judgment: You have made three serious errors of judgment in your appointment of advisers on the current financial crisis.
1. Your choice of banker to compile a report on ideas for improving public health was Sir Derek Wanless. a Northern Rock director when it imploded in 2007.
2. You appointed Sir James Crosby, the former HBOS CEO, to the board of the FSA who then had to resign after becoming embroiled in the row over failings of risk management at HBOS.
3. It now also appears that Glen Moreno will be forced out of his job, as chairman of UK Financial Investments Ltd, the company set up to oversee the government’s stake in the bailed-out banks, because of his links with a Liechtenstein trust accused of tax evasion. (NB Moreno did resign).
• You fantasise: by clinging to the idea that, thanks to your genius, British citizens are far better placed than competitors to handle this crisis. The following two facts demonstrate that this is a fantasy:-

1. The Office for National Statistics’ revelation that while the number of foreign workers getting jobs in the UK continues to grow (up by 175,000 to 2.4 million last year), domestic unemployment is rising sharply.

2. According to Business Monitor International, a research company specialising in country risk, “Britain is facing an unprecedented fall in its economic world ranking … from 12th place in 2007 to 21st in 2010″. “Despite enjoying 11 years of growth between 1997 and 2007, the UK ran a budget deficit of 1.7 per cent of GDP over this period, fuelling a fiscal time bomb. Faced with the financial burden of bailing out the banking sector and kick-starting the economy, the budget deficit will swell to an unsustainable 9.3 per cent of GDP in 2009.”

• Public spending: Your 2000 Spending Review presaged a major expansion of government spending, without any significant benefit to public services, directly leading to the UK being in the worst shape of any industrialised nation to weather the current financial crisis.
• You have colluded in hiding the full extent of public borrowing by using PFI initiatives to hide the borrowings off balance sheet. PFI is the most expensive and inefficient form of finance possible, and you have saddled the country with a debt that you cannot even quantify. Jeremy Pocklington, leader of the Treasury’s corporate and private finance team, could only give a rough estimate to Richard Bacon that the total liabilities, but not debt, from the vast majority of PFIs, but not all, from 2006-07 to 2032-33, but not beyond, is £157.9bn. That is not only astounding but unbelievable.
• Public sector Employment: The office for national Statistics shows Public sector employment was 5,846,000 (20.4 per cent of all in employment) in June 2005, 680,000 (13.2 per cent) higher than in June 1998, whereas from 1998 to 2005 private sector employment only rose by 1,241,000 (5.7 per cent). This growth is unsustainable and wrong.
• Growth: An OECD report shows UK economic growth averaged 2.7% between 1997 and 2006, lower than in any other English speaking country.
• Gold sales: Between 1999 and 2002 you sold 60% of the UK’s gold reserves at $275 an ounce, close to a 20-year low, a disastrous foray into international asset management.
• Your spectrum auctions gathered £22.5 billion for the government which caused a severe recession in the telecoms development industry, leading to the direct loss of 30,000 UK jobs. Two auctions were run in the USA, the first being cancelled and re-run (for less revenue) due to damage caused to the industry. The Americans realised their mistake and tried to rectify it. The British and German chancellors copied the North American first auction; which had failed. To copy a failed economic model is normally considered a serious error of judgement.
• Your East Coast Mainline franchise auction led directly to the demise of GNER, an excellent company, which was replaced by National Express who offer East Coast mainline users a significantly poorer service. Your duty was not only to maximise revenues, you also had a duty to the shareholders, employees and customers which you completely failed.
• Anti-poverty: The Centre for Policy Studies found that the poorest fifth of households, which accounted for 6.8% of all taxes in 1996-7, accounted for 6.9% of all taxes paid in 2004-5. Meanwhile, their share of state benefit payouts dropped from 28.1% to 27.1% over the same period.
• Tax: According to the OECD UK taxation has increased from a 39.3% share of gross domestic product in 1997 to 42.4% in 2006, going to a higher level than Germany. This increase has mainly been attributed to active government policy, and not simply to the growing economy.
• You pledged to not increase the basic or higher rates of income tax however in all but your final budget, you only increased the tax thresholds in line with inflation, rather than earnings, resulting in fiscal drag.
• You abolished the 10% tax band so that you could reduce the basic rate from 22% to 20%, to make it look like you were decreasing taxes. However in fact it led to increased tax for 5 million people, and, left those earning under £18,000 as the biggest losers.
• Pensions: Your changes in 1997 in the way corporation tax is collected, directly led to the taxation of dividends on stock investments held within pensions, thus lowering pension returns and contributing to the demise of most of the final salary pension funds in the UK. This act alone has single handedly damaged the pension of every person with a pension in the UK but also saddled UK corporations with a an ever growing pension liability, so much so that many companies futures are imperilled by these debts.
• Falsehoods: You used the Laura Spence Affair to beat up Oxford and Cambridge about their admissions procedures, Lord Jenkins, then Oxford Chancellor and himself a former Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, said ‘nearly every fact you used was false.’
• Inappropriate links: Given the finding that the government did not carry a proper public consultation on the use of nuclear power in its 2006 Energy Review, your brother Andrew’s links to one of the main nuclear lobbyists, EDF Energy, could be construed as inappropriate.The father-in-law of your closest adviser Ed Balls, Tony Cooper (father of Labour minister Yvette Cooper) has close links with the nuclear industry. Cooper was described as an ‘articulate, persuasive and well-informed advocate of nuclear power over the last ten years’ by the Nuclear Industry Association on his appointment as Chairman of the British Nuclear Industry Forum in June 2002.
• Iraq War: You supported British involvement in the Iraq War against the wishes of the UK population and helped to justify that involvement by publishing false intelligence. This war has directly increased the odds of terrorist attacks on British subjects and the financial cost has had a significantly detrimental effect on the British economy.
• Military Covenant: You have not adhered to the ‘military covenant’,leading to a significant decline in the moral of the armed forces due to poor housing, lack of equipment and adequate healthcare provisions. The lack of equipment has directly led to an increase in the loss of lives,
and serious injuries, compounded by a lack care following serious injury.
• The 15% VAT Rate: introduced to counter the effects of recession demonstrated a total naivety and breathtaking stupidity. Far from digging the nation out of a hole, it has saddled the country with a huge unsustainable debt.• No one should benefit from failure: You have on numerous occasions stated that no one should benefit from failure, however your tenure as chancellor was universally recognised as a failure, but you were rewarded with the Premiership and had the gall to accept.

• ‘There will be no more Boom & Bust’: In your hubris you made a statement that was patently untrue, and counter to any economic theory. You either knew that statement to be untrue and lied or if you believed it then you clearly demonstrated your foolishness and proved that you were unfit for office.

• ‘The UK is in a better position than any other developed country’: this again is completely untrue, we have more than double the debt per head of population than any other country in Europe.
• Public Services: You have destroyed Public Services by a raft of inappropriate targets, which have led to resources being wasted by the attempts to meet those targets.
• Surveillance society: You have presided over and led to the creation of a surveillance society in which any perceived wrongdoing is used as a pretext to pass oppressive laws. You and your predecessor have both single headedly succeeded in making the UK an unpleasant place to live in.
These are but a small sample of your failings any of which make you unfit for public office and for which you should immediately resign. You sir are a fraud and I am forwarding this letter to as many people as I can, via the internet in an effort to shame you into accepting your failures, Prime Minister.

Steven Katirai

When the Food and Agricultural Organisation says that another 40 million were pushed into hunger in 2008, what images spring into your mind? Is it possible to imagine that many people starving? Well imagine it or not, we had better get used to it. Because the other thing that the FAO announced was that to bring the truly mind-boggling 973 million people who are starving now into the land of plenty, we need to double food production by 2050. Quite a challenge, bearing in mind we also have to totally rejig our energy systems in the meantime.

Global food markets are effectively trade in water. Tony Allen coined the phrase “Virtual Water” to point out that water mainly travels around inside other things. And these other things are mostly food: a tonne of which takes 1000 tonnes of water to make. Another thing the food trade uses a lot of is oil. We are talking (in 1974) a calorie of oil to grow a calorie of food, and then you have to ship it. And even though a thousand times lighter than the water it embodies, food is still bulky. Think about the heaviest things that regularly come in and out of your house. It is lugging food shopping in and waste out that breaks up our sedentary lifestyles.

All that bulk gets moved around, a sample shopping basket of 26 imported organic items having travelled a total of 150,000 miles, or six times around the Earth. The US food system alone uses  as much energy as France and 80% of this is used outside the farm in transport and processing. This huge oil-driven industry is a way of redistributing water across the globe, albeit guided by purchasing power. The dry parts of the world rely on the food trade to a very great extent, and as it gets harder to grow food in the tropics under climate change, this dependency is likely to increase.

The IEA now forecasts that the production of conventional oils is likely to peak around 2020. That’s only 12 years away, and is likely to drive the price of energy up sharply across the board, as people try and substitute on type of fuel for another. This is bound to affect the food trade, partly because of the oil that goes into food,  but also because it makes it ever more tempting to use land for growing fuel.  The food price rises in 2008 were 75% caused by the increased demand from bio-fuels. It all adds up. The extra 40 million hungry in 2008 was with an oil price peaking around $100 a barrel. But the coming oil peak, dubbed “The last oil shock”, could raise the price to $300 a barrel. So this international trade in food (AKA water) is likely to get a lot more expensive. We could be seeing a lot of inflation (Thus Passim).

Countries will find it increasingly expensive to buy in the food they need. This will mean an increasing need, in the tropics especially, for countries to rely on the water they have in order to grow food. If you combine this with population growth in places like India, you get a worrying picture of massively declining amounts of water available per person even as you need more of it.

As if this were not enough to put you off your muesli, take a look at industrialisation. The US uses as much water for industry as it does for agriculture, and the EU uses twice as much. These are both areas with tight environmental regulations, particularly in relation to water pollution: This was the original cause celebre of the environmental movement, with the publication of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring.” And let’s not forget Erin Brokovich.

In many tropical countries there is not much water to spare. In India 80-90% of the water demand is already from agriculture. Whilst there are a lot of good environmental laws on the books, the enforcement is weak, what with all the corruption. In 2006, pushed on by the World Trade Organisation, the Indian government rushed through 2 new laws. The first allowed major sections of Industry to self-certify their environmental impacts, which is a bit like asking them nicely for a confession, pretty please . The other was a directive that all natural resources should be exploited to the maximum benefit of “the people”. How the people will get a slice of the profits is not made clear.

This all seems a bit schizophrenic, because the same government is so concerned about water shortage that it is proposing the largest development project in the history of humanity. This is a 1 billion US$ proposal to link all of India’s rivers together.  The joke being that without enforced environmental regulations, this is likely to turn into a national pollution network. So what to do? Buy food from abroad? Fat chance.

Well one thing is to get the existing environmental regulations enforced. This is a global problem, as the food-oil-water link indicates, so a global treaty about the enforcement of environmental regulations in international trade looks ever more urgent. Otherwise international organisations will keep on lobbying to weaken the laws that protect the increasingly scarce water in the tropics.

The other way is from the ground up. There are plenty of traditional crops in Asia and Africa that have been displaced by markets for “modern” “luxury” food. Millets and Ragi in India have suffered this fate, replaced by water-guzzling rice paddy. Promoting these crops, which can get by on 5 times less water than wheat, is one way towards food security. Another is to reduce oil dependence in food production, especially in poor countries like India, where farmers already face huge problems with debt.

However, until international policy-makers wake up to these issues, and moderate the market fundamentalism that got us into our current mess, these types of solution are likely to remain drops in the ocean. Doing things mainly by markets and purchasing power means it is cheaper to let the poor starve. So don’t you know, we’re talking about a revolution.

The only way out is to win a quiz show

Aravind Adiga’s Booker winner White Tiger and Danny Boyle’s Golden-Globe-harvesting film Slumdog Millionaire (based on Indian Diplomat Vikas Swarup’s novel Q and A) illustrate a “Shining India” that has long shown up in the statistics of those critical of the Globo-glorifiers. It bears repeating (Thus Passim) that 70-80% of India’s population cannot afford to feed themselves to international minimums, that is 2400 calories of cheap stodge per day, assuming they spend on nothing else.

Yet in the UK we continue to talk about “the poor” as if they live on council estates, and as if all they need is the chance to show how bright they are in order to climb up into our middle class paradise. Meritocracy may imply that the less intelligent ones should stay where they are, but what if they were dulled by malnutrition? The world is not made up of a series of Westminster villages, but being good nationalists, the policy makers and pundits seem reluctant to acknowledge this.

The implication of this is that national governments tend to live in a room full of mirrors, where all that they see is themselves, especially in rich OECD countries. Almost everyone uses the poor to justify their policies and positions in these compassionate days of media-conveyed suffering, yet our policy and political debates do not at all reflect their circumstances. This is a flaw of the Left as well as the Right. The legacy of Marx and the Union movement is that we see emancipation of the poor in terms of workplace rights, yet only around 8% of people in India have formal employment contracts, so this is mostly irrelevant and this is probably the case in most poor countries.

If people cannot feed themselves in the cash economy, as the numbers show, then they have to be feeding themselves in the non-cash economy. How can this be so? Where does food come from if not from shops? That’s because the poor are in the environment. Either an urban one, scavenging the remains and polishing the shoes of those visible to us, or a rural one, growing or gathering food under unpredictable conditions. But since policymaking is largely about economics, and economics largely about the cash economy, and the cash economy about people with purchasing power, and not the environment or the poor, these humans (of whom there are rather a lot) remain largely invisible. But what is the problem with them, and their environment, remaining invisible to policy makers, particularly in the rich world?

It gives us a totally misleading sense of the future. Economists, particularly historically oriented ones, write as if it is the swing of a pendulum that determines economic history.  Presumably this means that after this latest desperate burst of neo-Keynesianism we will turn back to more liberal and less risk-averse approaches once times are good again. But that invisible thing, the environment, is changing, and it will impact on all of us, but mainly on those other invisible things, the poor, so that our whole perception of risk, and thus how to organise ourselves, will have to change. We are not going back to a nice cosey stable world with seemingly unlimited natural resources, and we are not replaying the Industrial Revolution in countries like India, even if our policy makers have been Oxbridge-raised on a diet of social thinkers from the steam-engine age. We can talk about public spending as a way of stabilising things until we are blue in the face, but how do we propose to get money to those really at risk under our undoubtedly changing circumstances?

Via NGOs? Well they are not coping well with spending the fraction of the 0.7% of GDP put to aid budgets efficiently. Via business? Well their track record of behaving well in the absence of strong regulation is not so good. Via governments in poor countries? To quote Aravind Adiga’s lead character in White Tiger, “what a fucking joke.” Survival of the fittest in a world where pro-poor leaders in the poor world, particularly those that interfere with rich world access to natural resources tended to “dissappear” has left a legacy of governance that does not exactly channel funds to the needy as a first priority.

We can perhaps hope that our rich world “Social Mobility” thesis works in poor countries, and the poor can suddenly help themselves. Sadly the post-industrial boom in India seems not to be creating lots of jobs, so the whole 1950′s rich world idea of mechanising agriculture and shunting people into the cities is creating shanti towns rather than a lovely unionised industrial base. Also, it takes rather a lot of planets, at current levels of inequality, to lift the poor out this way.

So we have a big problem that our current policy debates are simply not up to addressing. We don’t know how to think about the dependency of the poor on the environment, or how to support them in the face of environmental change or indeed how, in short, to stabilise the world through the coming times of trouble (Thus Passim). There is the  Keynsian idea of a “Green New Deal”, but this is not a cyclical issue we are facing, actually the problems are likely to grow gradually but inexorably over time, so a short-term spending strategy won’t do it (though long-term rural employment guarantees may help a bit, even if dogged by corruption).  Maybe we in the rich world should look to the artists for answers, because right now, it looks like our wonks are all out of ideas.