Day two: The Total (No) Carbon Economy – more than just building clever stuff

"This is part of our 10 Big Ideas which we hope will help the transition to a very low-to-no-carbon economy make cities, homes and work places better, movement easier, society stronger and improve quality of life...oh, and save the planet." The Beyond Green Team

Day two: The Total (No) Carbon Economy - more than just building clever stuff

"We must learn to see that every problem that concerns us conservationists always leads to the question of how we live"

Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community (1992), Wendell Berry

Thank goodness for politics. With a deal at Copenhagen looking shaky and a climate that's already becoming unpredictable and uncomfortable for millions of (albeit mostly poor and hitherto pretty uncomplaining) people and on course for well over two degrees of warming, you might expect riots in the streets, stock market crashes (again) and gridlock as we all head for the hills.

But politics has a knack of bringing people together, and the outstanding achievement of global climate politics is arguably in how quickly a consensus has formed. And it's decided that the challenge of our generation is power generation. There are some significant nods to deforestation, and plenty of exhortations to use less energy by lagging your loft properly, but the most energetic discussions are about clever new kit and the carbon targets and pricing mechanisms, subsidies and regulations that will increase the rate at which it renders dirty old (and new) kit obsolete all over the world. It's a reassuringly calm, mainstream agenda. But this is not just a plan for planet-saving: it's the dawn of a new low-carbon economy - an agenda for investment and jobs; maybe even some of the skilled, hands-on jobs that in Britain we've found ourselves a bit short of since we decided that money lending, property speculation and shopping were enough to keep a post-industrial economy going.

So what's not to vote for? Well, unfortunately, even if we started in earnest tomorrow it's unlikely we could install the capacity to generate the quantity of cheap, clean, plentiful and secure energy we'd need to meet projected demand quickly enough to avert climate disaster. Between 1980 and 2002, energy use in the thirty richest countries - in which energy-efficiency standards have generally been tightening for longest - rose by nearly a quarter, setting a poor example to the developing giants whose growth of carbon emissions the rich world so urgently wants to cap. This may in part be down to the Khazzoom-Brookes postulate: people often spend money they save as their homes, appliances and cars become more energy-efficient on something more energy intensive, like a faster car or an extra foreign holiday. Meanwhile, debate still rages about the best way to meet our rising energy demand - just ask any wind-farm protestor.

Even if low/no-carbon energy were abundant, the technology-replacement theory of planet-saving has painful limits. As operational energy standards for buildings tighten it becomes clearer how much carbon is ‘embodied' in their materials and construction. Almost no-one believes that a truly low carbon form of aviation is on the cards, and on projected rates of aviation growth flying could alone account for more than 100% of Britain's carbon emissions allowance under its own statutory target in 2050.

So if technology-replacement and decarbonisation aren't enough, what's needed?

Buildings and machines don't use energy, people do. So we need to think holistically and systemically about how we live. Total carbon footprinting can be used to calculate carbon emissions across the lifetime and the lifestyle of a person, a business, a neighbourhood or even a whole city. This way of accounting allocates emissions on the basis not of remote upstream energy generation but of localised consumption choices and behaviour - housing, movement, food, goods, public services and everyday goods and ‘stuff' (whether made nearby or out-of-sight, out-of-mind overseas).

Thinking about total carbon footprints is intuitively ethically right: it corresponds with notions of personal choice and responsibility and with the ‘polluter pays' principle. People and places vary, but accounting for carbon in this way also helps us to make certain general principles evident. One is that richer people and places have much more carbon-intensive lifestyles and as we get richer it's our consumption of the hardest-to-replace-energy that grows fastest. Another is that our carbon footprint is governed as much if not more by local economic and environmental circumstances than by what happens upstream: if you live somewhere without a nearby shop the chances are you also live somewhere without any workplaces or much of a bus service - three reasons to need to get in the car a lot more than in well-served neighbourhoods. It also, incidentally, helps lay bare the absurdity of a policy agenda that, as in Britain, seeks to achieve ‘zero carbon' buildings at any cost while making it progressively easier to build shopping centres and business parks out-of-town.

Perhaps most attractively, however, thinking about carbon in a total footprint way offers a route out of the technocratic conceit of climate-change-policy-as-energy-policy and into a richer politics of human relations, happiness and the good life. Whether or not you buy the argument (and evidence) that ever-rising, increasingly competitive consumption is making us miserable and unhealthy, decarbonising business-as-usual presents not a safe politics of orderly global adjustment but a dangerous one based on delaying the toughest choices until it may just be too late. On the other hand, embracing the need to change not just how we power our economies but how we live our lives raises not just the stakes but the opportunities: from thinking about total carbon footprint we can work out how to build the Total (No) Carbon Economy - beyond new sectors and new jobs to a social and economic system for living prosperously and well, within environmental limits.

In the next few days we'll explore the opportunities of the Total (No) Carbon Economy further, but here's an idea for starters: in the built environment let's get beyond the obsession with zero-carbon homes (there's no such thing anyway, unless you build them out of air) and into the realm of low-carbon lives. Specifically, let's start using total carbon footprint modelling as the primary tool for understanding the sustainability of homes, places and lifestyles. Once we frame the issue, debate and argument in this way, we can start to provide meaningful answers to the question of how we might live in a no-carbon world. So go on then, how shall we live?

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A PDF version of our 10 Big Ideas is available to download from the ‘what's new' section of our website. Please follow the link, enter the website and select ‘current' under the ‘what's new' page: www.beyondgreen.co.uk

The Beyond Green group puts sustainability principles into practice through strategic and practical projects that achieve real sustainability outcomes. Beyond Green Consulting delivers policy, strategies, plans, place-making and process for authentic sustainable developments which inspire and enable free, pleasurable, healthy and environmentally sustainable living. Beyond Green Living offers advice on sustainable lifestyles, often through brands and communications; TV projects, personal appearances and publications. Sister company <a title="BlueLiving" href=" BlueLiving</a">http://www.blueliving.co.uk">BlueLiving</a> has a portfolio of strategic land and development projects with a view to building, owning and managing seminal sustainable developments across the UK.

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