Green Thing Blog

We've invited the Swedish chef to come up with alternative Copenhagen recipes, meanwhile - watch our Danish one:

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"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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"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 nine: Smart government and big society - the case for both.

"Democracy is not the multiplication of ignorant opinions". Beatrice Webb

Political parties need to distinguish themselves from one another somehow. But this is a time like no other, when we need them to act together on a few basics. We aim to show why we're going to need smart government and a bigger, stronger society - what will that look like and what will they do?

We could - and someone surely will - write a book about how discontent with how we're governed reached a crescendo in 2009.

We now know the long boom of 1993 to 2007 was actually a debt-fuelled binge. The economy fell off the horse of high finance and, surveying an otherwise empty industrial landscape, promptly saddled back up - with a nosebag of public money enough to carpet Britain in high-speed rail lines by way of encouragement. The Parliamentary expenses episode provided a lightning rod for public disgruntlement and, briefly, a rallying call for electoral reform as the thought dawned that the droit de seigneur over the terms of political debate enjoyed by a few hundred thousand capricious swing voters in new-town marginals might not be helping its quality. Books like All Consuming and The Spirit Level showed how inequality, the pursuit of incessant growth to postpone the need to confront it and the resultant culture of competitive consumption are making us miserable and ill, but gained little traction on the policy consensus. Rounding off the year in style is the apparently imminent fudge of Copenhagen when what we really, really, need is radical, urgent leadership not just to lower carbon emissions but toward a different vision of the good life: tough on CO2, tough on the causes of CO2.

Rant over! So what's the fix? Here are our starters for debate in election year.

First, you get the politics you deserve. People who understand that you can't have low taxes and great services, equality of opportunity without regard to equality of outcome, cheap plumbing without migrant Poles or much of a planet in a few years without changing our behaviour need to start making and winning their argument with those whose self-contradiction and denial continues, polls tell us, to dominate popular opinion.

Second, inequality makes for big, bad government. From the complexity of the tax system to the barrage of legislation on crime and anti-social behaviour to the constant meddling in schools: all because we expect governments to ameliorate the effects of inequality without actually making us more equal. It's a social democratic cliché, but let's get a bit more Nordic - then we might find that the changes we'll have to make if we're to live within environmental limits actually make us happier.

Third, we absolutely do need smart, in places huge, central government. It needs to, inter alia, set and steward carbon targets, determine and fund major infrastructure like a clean electricity grid and intercity rail, and describe a national spatial framework for the total (no) carbon economy that aspires to more than the finance-and-foreign-oligarch-driven expansion of London.

But, fourth, we need to combine this with a revolution in the way our cities are run. We can't devolve our national obligations to cut carbon, but the way we shape our cities will essentially decide how good our lives are in a post-carbon world. For a quarter of a century or more - under cover of anti-militancy, public service "reform", regionalism, planning liberalisation, tax capping, the "postcode lottery" and numerous other causes du jour - the power and responsibility of cities to govern themselves has been eroded. Insult has been added to injury by periodic government forays into "community empowerment", "earned freedoms and flexibilities", "double devolution" or - saints preserve us - "citizens' juries" which purport to decentralise but actually extend the control and scrutiny of the centre, all the while using the lack of "capacity" in emasculated local government as an excuse against anything more radical. As a result, our cities and towns today are serviced and managed but not governed.

To allow the possibility of success we must also allow the possibility of failure: we think this starts with powerful mayors and commissioners to govern cities and their hinterlands, with the powers to raise taxes and issue bonds to fund their programmes, held accountable by the local ballot box and reinvigorated local debate (oh, and national carbon targets...). In this way, cities decide for themselves how and what to build; how to feed and power themselves from their hinterlands; what economic and social activities to value and encourage with the apparatus of government; and how to prepare for a world with much less carbon but potentially a great deal of climate change. With proper civic democracy people don't need to be ‘empowered' to provide direct criticism of their local school or hospital: that's what they use their vote for or build their election platform upon. And with the ludicrous notion that Parliament, Whitehall or its agencies can ever be responsive to local needs and wishes dispensed with, we can safely move away from a geographically-based system of electing national governments and free legislators from the parish pump via a proper system of proportional representation - and Manchester tories and Wiltshire lefties get a say.

The rediscovery of municipalism creates the basis for the re-emergence of the big society. The importance of the neighbourhood, town and city as organising units of identity and economy can be recognised and nurtured. Public understanding can be rebuilt of the relationship between particularities of place and culture and the fine-grained economic, social and environmental outcomes they make possible. It becomes respectable for clever young people to build a career shaping and serving their city rather than such employment being perceived as what you do if you lack ambition or can't cut it among the London elite. Vital institutions like universities are challenged and enabled to become the civic assets many aspire to be. A ‘soft' infrastructure of pressure groups, advisors and thinkers is encouraged to take root, as it does wherever democratic power is exercised and meaningful decisions made. Voluntary association and social entrepreneurship become means of enriching and celebrating shared interest, rather than a politically fashionable but intellectually empty basis for reorganising the administration of centrally-designed public services.

In such a scenario we might also end the culture of scale that dominates society, often in the name of efficiency. Why do we need Tesco and M&S to lag our lofts for us - what's "localist" about that? Why not a network of local builders? Why, in the desire to make finance serve the ‘real' economy and put an end to institutions that are too big to fail, are we not looking at how to rebuild the model of the city building society? Who wants to live in clone-town? What's efficient about big if it means we lose power over the nature and range of the choices we choose to make available to ourselves?

OK, rant really over: the debate starts here.

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 BlueLiving 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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Following the failure of Copenhagen, this is the rousing message from the international youth climate movement to (so called) world leaders:

"You're not done yet. And neither are we."

[Spotted in the 100 Months newsletter]

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In just a couple of days, voters in Britain will be heading to the polls to elect a party for leadership. There have been some big promises in the lead up to the election day about Climate Change Policy so here is a glimpse of the promises from each of the three main parties.

Conservatives

- Introduce an emissions performance standard to set a legal limit on emissions from power stations

- Provide incentives for small scale energy generation

- Introduce new nuclear power stations

- Creating a 'Green Deal for homes giving each household energy improvement measures up to £6500, paid for out of savings made on fuel bills

(From the Conservative Party)

Labour

- Create 400,000 new green jobs by 2015

- Smart meters (to measure energy consumption) in every home by 2020

- Open new Nuclear power plants

- Help make environmentally conscious behaviour the norm by phasing out energy inefficient light bulbs, single use plastic bags and reducing unecessary packaging of products.

(From the Labour Party)

Liberal Democrats

- Create more renewable energy sources from wind, waves and solar sources (Lib Dems are highly oppposed to the construction of new nuclear power stations)

- Introduce a 'major programme' to help insulate buildings better

- Implement an 'Eco-cashback' scheme for people who instal their own microgeneration technology at home

- Build green infrastracture to create more jobs

(From Liberal Democrats)

Perhaps an obvious question would be what about the Greens? Well, it seems to be a three horse race. Although the Green Party did participate in the Climate Change debate, their environmental policy has not been widely covered. The Green's main stance is to invest in large-scale wind renewable energy sources, taking people off the grid, while generating more than 80,000 new jobs from the shift. Find out more about the Green Party's Climate Change policy here.

If air miles traveled during the election gives an indication of a party's comittment to the environment, then the conservative party are fairweather environmentalists. Their leader, David Cameron wins the jetsetter award making sure he could fly to at least two regions in Britain a day during the campaign trail.

Some more food for thought can be found on The Guardian's site, where there are audio highlghts from the next climate minister debate and the Telegraph has summaries of each of the parties policies. The BBC has an excellent comparison tool for each party's stance.

If you're really struggling trying to decide who to vote for, maybe Downing Street Fighter can help. It's just like Classic streetfighter the game, but with politicians.

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