Guides
Week reflections on a divided world Images: Bill Gunyon/Peter Armstrong
week ending October 31st What if there had been no banking crisis? I began these GuidesWeek articles just over a year ago, when our beloved banks were scaring the daylights out of those parts of the world that depend on their services.
My view has always been that the banking system should have been shut down at that point and rebooted under total government control rather than the phoney public-private partnership now in place. My first piece questioned the mantra of “doing whatever is necessary” – for whose benefit? Instead Gordon Brown seized the hour and “saved the world” with his recapitalisation strategy, a plan to throw so much public money at the banks that they could not fail.
Although politicians avoid the subject, state finances will take a generation to recover. Faced with chronic global insecurities over food, water and energy, plagued by climate change, governments have nothing in the kitty. Rich countries have mortgaged their exchequers for a turkey. I often wonder what would have happened if all those financial risk management systems and banking regulations had functioned properly. The industrialised world would approach 2010 bathed in solvency but, for the poorest countries, the consequences of long years of economic injustice and environmental abuse would be there just the same.... ...eventually, as successive crop failures, extreme weather events and forced migration take their increasing toll, world leaders pronounce that poor sovereign states are “too big to fail” and that we must do “whatever it takes” to bail them out. Analysts draw attention to “sub-prime” assets of small farms, prone to accepting loans beyond their means. And regulatory bodies responsible for stabilising the climate are exposed as useless. Successive attempts to revive these economies with aid and poverty reduction programmes fail. Then it’s discovered that the toxic agriculture assets are impossible to value. No one can agree on a price for adapting to climate change. The opportunity cost of saving tropical forests is disputed, indeed scientists don’t even know how to measure the carbon content of a forest. In desperation, the world turns to Gordon Brown, the only leader with a grasp of international development issues. They accept his decisive remedy to recapitalise the least developed countries, a Marshall Plan for world poverty. The funding is raised effortlessly in a global justice bond issue, skilfully brokered by Lehman Brothers.... Elements of this whimsy may increasingly haunt the debt-laden years that lie ahead. Even the most extravagant of NGO estimates for addressing the troubles of the developing world – food security, education, health, AIDS, climate adaptation, safe water, sanitation, electricity – would cost a fraction of all those bank rescues and recession-busting stimulus packages. That Gordon Brown missed his real chance to “save the world” has been a personal tragedy for him, and for the cause of sustainable development. ****** Whatever is necessary for the economy from GuidesWeek archive Latest Goldman Sachs profits swell billion-dollar bonus pool from the Guardian. Hungry get Hungrier as Funding for Food Aid Stutters from World Food Programme OneWorld Guide for reference: Global Poverty
****** week ending October 24th Population and consumption: two sides of the coin Cycling home along the lanes just outside Winchester on Friday evening, I was confronted by an unattended horse. This sleek, black monster had a distinctly shifty look about him so I deemed it prudent to whizz by. Sure enough I soon encountered the panicky owners, running up and down screaming into their phones. Behind them, the paddock gate swung leisurely on its hinges.
Our superiority over the animal kingdom has proved so emphatic that every corner of the earth has opened its doors to accommodate 6.8 billion of us. Closing the doors will not prevent the irreversible consequences that the biosphere already suffers. Universal access to family planning is of course an essential goal, but as much for the sake of the 200 million women who are denied it as in hope of turning the tide of ecological calamity. This requires something much more fundamental in our lifestyle choices, more painfully described as cutting consumption. The divorce between population and consumption debates was betrayed in the alarmist reaction to the latest UK population projections published just last week. The estimated increase of just over 15% in the next 24 years to a figure of over 71.6 million prompted the Optimum Population Trust, amongst others, to declare that things are “out of control”, taking the country “nearer to a position of extreme environmental precariousness.” These extra numbers will indeed exert pressure on our food, water and energy needs. But there are two elephants in the room of our little country and population is the baby elephant. The big daddy is the behaviour of the 61.8 million people that we already have. I don’t have the resources to calculate the change in real GDP per capita over the last 24 years and will have to appeal to intuition. Imagine how the standard of living of the average British family has changed since 1985 – the boom in overseas holidays, the throughput of household goods and digital equipment, the wider range of packaged food, the additional car for the children. We all love these things but another 24 years of that pace of change will trample over the impact of population when it comes to environmental limits. The OPT explains that it focuses on population-related pressures on the environment rather than “wasteful consumption” because green groups are guilty of the reverse. That’s fair enough, but two wrongs don’t make a right, especially on such a vital issue. And by slipping in populist references to tougher migration policies, the OPT comes across as just another anti-immigration lobby.
This has been the trouble with population. It prods a hornets’ nest of family planning, religious dogma, immigration and consumer sacrifice. No wonder campaigners and politicians steer clear. I already sense that I may have said too much, with the wrong emphasis. Time to stop. ****** UK population “to rise to 71.6m” from BBC News UK Population Increase “Out of Control” from Optimum Population Trust. Jonathon Porritt on population - interview from AOL Video OneWorld Guide for reference: Population Guide
****** week ending October 17th Lights out in Nottingham or Nigeria? I admit to twinges of sympathy for the communications department at E.ON UK. Not because of the anti-coal protesters, in action again this weekend at the Ratcliffe power station, but rather the hideous brand name bestowed by the German parent company.
A less explicit banana skin tripped up chief executive Paul Golby in his introductory video for Talking Energy, the company’s YouTube invitation to public debate. A full 15 seconds into the film, he declares that: There is no question that we all need power; the world simply cannot function without it.Well, almost a quarter of the world’s population has no choice but to function as best it can without electricity. Too often the energy debate is framed within the comfort zone of the other three quarters. Something is nagging me that UK climate campaigners might also be neglecting the global dimension in their strategic focus on coal.
Earlier this month we learned that China is bidding very seriously for a share of Nigerian oil. The Chinese model for acquiring rights to African natural resources is to offer sweeteners of new infrastructure. China builds coal-fired power stations like we make bread and butter pudding. Nigeria has plentiful supplies of coal. You can see where this is heading. Tough questions loom. Does success in the UK campaign to halt development of Kingsnorth power station take Nigeria any closer to switching on the lights so that kids can learn and health centres function? Are we even sure that it will reduce global emissions?
The best way to find these new technologies is to persuade companies like E.ON to intensify their research programmes. And the most effective means of persuasion is a sharp rise in the price of carbon and a sharp fall in demand for their product. Coal-fired power stations in the UK survive only because a decade of advocacy and political endeavour has failed to create this enabling market environment. Enter the Camp for Climate Action, not unreasonably justifying their direct methods by reference to this inertia. The Nigerian campaigners are more articulate and better connected than the Climate Camp people and their cause more immediately compelling. I’d love to put the two campaign teams in a room and challenge them to find a message for Copenhagen of greater impact than the sum of their parts. It’s not just the north-south politicians who are failing to connect on climate change. ****** Welcome to Talking Energy - E.ON UK chief executive, Paul Golby, introduces the company’s YouTube debate. Camp for Climate Action The Light Up Nigeria Movement Light Up Nigeria Independence Day TV interviews on YouTube OneWorld Guides for reference: Climate Change Nigeria
****** week ending October 10th Fair blows the wind from Texas The controversial closure of Vestas’ UK capacity for production of wind turbine blades has limped to its inevitable conclusion. Jobs have been lost here in Hampshire and on the Isle of Wight. The solidarity of national environmental campaigners had no answer to what Vestas called “a lack of local political action in certain markets.” This is the diplomatic Danish take on our parochial planning system which has allowed nimbyism to drive wind farms offshore. All the action on wind energy is in the US. Vestas is opening a new research centre in Houston, declaring that “Texas is the leading wind state in the USA.”
He opts for a reassuringly upbeat tone, claiming that the state of Texas has enough wind generation in the pipeline to meet the needs of its 24 million population.
This is the extraordinary story of William Kamkwamba who built a windmill from scrap material in his village in Malawi, bringing basic power to his incredulous family. But how can a nation which devours books depicting global warming campaigners as fifth-columnists seize on an African tale with a wind machine on the front cover? It may be because the co-author, US journalist Bryan Mealer, was born in Texas. ****** Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilisation? - Lester Brown discusses Plan B 4.0, from Earth Policy Institute US Energy Department announces new support for renewable energy projects The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope by William Kamkwamba, Bryan Mealer from OneWorld Books (US $) Plan B 4.0 Mobilizing to Save Civilization by Lester Brown from OneWorld Books (UK £) from OneWorld Books (US $) OneWorld Guides for reference: Climate Change
****** GuidesWeek Archive from October 2008 |
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