Category: East Midlands

Eco­log­i­cal debt: no way back from bank­rupt

While most gov­ern­ments’ eyes are on the bank­ing cri­sis, a much big­ger issue — the envi­ron­men­tal cri­sis — is pass­ing them by, says Andrew Simms. In the Green Room this week, he argues that fail­ure to organ­ise a bailout for eco­log­i­cal debt will have dire con­se­quences for human­i­ty.

“Nature Does­n’t Do Bailouts!” said the ban­ner strung across Bish­ops­gate in the City of Lon­don.

Civil­i­sa­tion’s biggest prob­lem was out­lined in five words over the entrance to the small, par­al­lel real­i­ty of the peace­ful cli­mate camp. Their tents bloomed on the morn­ing of 1 April faster than daisies in spring, and faster than the police could stop them.

Across the city, where the world’s most pow­er­ful peo­ple met simul­ta­ne­ous­ly at the G20 sum­mit, the same prob­lem was almost com­plete­ly ignored, mer­it­ing only a sin­gle, after­thought men­tion in a long com­mu­nique.

World lead­ers dropped every­thing to tack­le the finan­cial debt cri­sis that spilled from col­laps­ing banks.

Gripped by a pan­ic so com­plete, there was no pol­i­cy dog­ma too deeply engrained to be dug out and instant­ly dis­card­ed. We went from tri­umphant, finance-dri­ven free mar­ket cap­i­tal­ism, to bank nation­al­i­sa­tion and mov­ing the dec­i­mal point on indus­try bailouts quick­er than you can say sub-prime mort­gage.

But the eco­log­i­cal debt cri­sis, which threat­ens much more than pen­sion funds and car man­u­fac­tur­ers, is left to lan­guish.

It is like hav­ing a Com­mis­sion on House­hold Ren­o­va­tion ago­nise over which expen­sive design­er wall­pa­per to use for paper­ing over plas­ter cracks whilst ignor­ing the fact that the walls them­selves are col­laps­ing on sub­sid­ing foun­da­tions.

Beyond our means

Each year, human­i­ty’s eco­log­i­cal over­draft gets larg­er, and the day that the world as a whole goes into eco­log­i­cal debt — con­sum­ing more resources and pro­duc­ing more waste than the bios­phere can pro­vide and absorb — moves ever ear­li­er in the year.

The same pic­ture emerges for indi­vid­ual coun­tries like the UK — which now starts liv­ing beyond its own envi­ron­men­tal means in mid-April.

Because the glob­al econ­o­my is still over­whelm­ing­ly fos­sil-fuel depen­dent, the accu­mu­la­tion of green­house gas­es and the prog­no­sis for glob­al warm­ing remain our best indi­ca­tors of “over­shoot”.

World famous French free-climber Alain Robert, known as Spi­der­man, climbed the Lloyds of Lon­don build­ing for the OneHundredMonths.org cam­paign as the G20 met, to demon­strate how time is slip­ping away.

Using thresh­olds for risk iden­ti­fied by the Inter­gov­ern­men­tal Pan­el on Cli­mate Change (IPCC), on cur­rent trends, in only 92 months — less than eight years — we will move into a new, more per­ilous phase of warm­ing.

It will then no longer be “like­ly” that we can pre­vent some aspects of run­away cli­mate change. We will begin to lose the cli­mat­ic con­di­tions which, as Nasa sci­en­tist James Hansen points out, were those under which civil­i­sa­tion devel­oped.

Small div­i­dend

As “nature does­n’t do bailouts”, how have our politi­cians fared who ripped open the nation’s wal­let to save the banks?

Not good.

Accord­ing to the Inter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund (IMF), the UK spent a stag­ger­ing 20% of its GDP in sup­port of the finan­cial sec­tor.

Yet the amount of mon­ey that was new and addi­tion­al, announced in the “green stim­u­lus” pack­age of the Trea­sury’s Pre-Bud­get Report, added-up to a van­ish­ing­ly small 0.0083% of GDP.

Glob­al­ly, the green shade of eco­nom­ic stim­u­lus mea­sures has var­ied enor­mous­ly. For exam­ple, the shares of spend­ing con­sid­ered in research by the bank HSBC to be envi­ron­men­tal were:

* the US — 12%
* Ger­many — 13%
* South Korea — 80%

The inter­na­tion­al aver­age was around 15%. HSBC found the UK planned to invest less than 7% of its stim­u­lus pack­age (dif­fer­ent from the bank bailout) in green mea­sures.

Com­par­ing the IMF and HSBC fig­ures actu­al­ly reveals an inverse rela­tion­ship — pro­por­tion­ate­ly, those who spent more on sup­port for finance had weak­er green spend­ing.

So here we are, faced with the loss of an envi­ron­ment con­ducive to human civil­i­sa­tion, and we find gov­ern­ments pros­trate before bare­ly repen­tant banks, with their backs to a far worse eco­log­i­cal cri­sis.

Extreme mar­kets

On top of low and incon­sis­tent fund­ing for renew­able ener­gy, the shift to a low car­bon econ­o­my is being fur­ther frus­trat­ed by anoth­er mar­ket fail­ure in the trade for car­bon seen, for exam­ple, in the EU’s Emis­sions Trad­ing Scheme.

Bad mar­ket design, fee­ble car­bon reduc­tion tar­gets and the reces­sion have all con­spired to dri­ve down the cost of car­bon emis­sion per­mits, wreck­ing eco­nom­ic incen­tives to grow renew­able ener­gy.

Worse still, the dif­fi­cul­ty of account­ing to ensure that per­mits rep­re­sent real emis­sions has led both ener­gy com­pa­nies and envi­ron­men­tal­ists to warn of an emerg­ing “sub-prime car­bon mar­ket”.

Rely­ing on mar­ket mech­a­nisms is attrac­tive to gov­ern­ments because it means they have less to do them­selves. But they will fail if car­bon mar­kets are just hot air.

There seems to be a hard-wired link between mem­o­ry fail­ure and mar­ket fail­ure.

As the his­to­ri­an E J Hob­s­bawm observed in The Age of Extremes: “Those of us who lived through the years of the Great Slump still find it almost impos­si­ble to under­stand how the ortho­dox­ies of the pure free mar­ket, then so obvi­ous­ly dis­cred­it­ed, once again came to pre­side over a glob­al peri­od of depres­sion in the late 1980s and 1990s”.

Per­haps the great­est fail­ure is one of imag­i­na­tion.

Some peo­ple alive today lived through those past reces­sions and depres­sions. They know they can be nasty and need avert­ing.

But the last time the Earth­’s cli­mate real­ly flipped was at the end of the last Ice Age, more than 10,000 years ago. No one can remem­ber what that felt like.

Lessons of his­to­ry

Look­ing for­ward, the IPC­C’s worst case sce­nario warns of a max­i­mum 6C rise over the next cen­tu­ry.

Look­ing back, how­ev­er, indi­cates that an unsta­ble cli­mate sys­tem holds worse hor­rors.

Work by the sci­en­tist Richard Alley on abrupt cli­mate change indi­cates the plan­et has pre­vi­ous­ly expe­ri­enced a 10C tem­per­a­ture shift in only a decade, and pos­si­bly “as quick­ly as in a sin­gle year”.

And, around the turn of the last Ice Age, there were “local warm­ings as large as 16C”.

Imag­ine that every day of your life you have tak­en a walk in the woods and the worse thing to hap­pen was an acorn or twig falling on your head.

Then, one day, you stroll out, look up and there is a threat approach­ing so large, unex­pect­ed and out­side your expe­ri­ence that can’t quite believe it, like a mas­sive goth­ic cathe­dral falling from the sky.

In tack­ling cli­mate change we need urgent­ly to recal­i­brate our respons­es, just as gov­ern­ments had to when they res­cued the reck­less finance sec­tor.

Then offi­cials had to ask them­selves “is what we are doing right, and is it enough?”

They must ask them­selves the same ques­tions on the eco­log­i­cal debt cri­sis and cli­mate change.

The dif­fer­ence is, that if they fail this time, not even a long-term busi­ness cycle will come to our res­cue. If the cli­mate shifts to a hot­ter state not con­vivial to human soci­ety, it could be tens of thou­sands of years, or nev­er, before it shifts back.

Remem­ber; nature does­n’t do bailouts.

Andrew Simms is pol­i­cy direc­tor of the New Eco­nom­ics Foun­da­tion (nef), and author of Eco­log­i­cal Debt: Glob­al Warm­ing and the Wealth of Nations

——

One Plan­et Liv­ing http://www.oneplanetliving.org

Your city’s Eco­log­i­cal Debt Day:

Using the lat­est data avail­able WWF has cal­cu­lat­ed when res­i­dents of British cities will have con­sumed their fair share of nat­ur­al resources for 2008 – or when their eco­log­i­cal debt day is.

City Eco­log­i­cal debt day

Win­ches­ter 10 April
St Albans 13 April
Chich­ester 14 April
Brighton & Hove 14 April
Can­ter­bury 17 April
Oxford 17 April
Southamp­ton 21 April
Durham 22 April
Cam­bridge 23 April
Portsmouth 23 April
Edin­burgh 23 April
Chester 24 April
Aberdeen 24 April
Ely (East Cambs) 26 April
Here­ford (Coun­ty of Here­ford­shire) 28 April
Stir­ling 28 April
Lon­don 29 April
Lich­field 29 April
Lan­cast­er 30 April
New­cas­tle upon Tyne 30 April
Wells (Bath and NE Som­er­set) 1 May
Bath (Bath and North East Som­er­set) 1 May
Ripon (Har­ro­gate) 2 May
Man­ches­ter 2 May
Inver­ness (High­land) 2 May
Pre­ston 2 May
Nor­wich 2 May
Peter­bor­ough 2 May
Dundee City 3 May
Leeds 3 May
York 3 May
Sheffield 3 May
Der­by 4 May
Carlisle 4 May
Leices­ter 4 May
Worces­ter 4 May
Ban­gor (Gwynedd) 4 May
St Davids (Pembrokeshire)4 May
Not­ting­ham 4 May
Liv­er­pool 4 May
Bris­tol 5 May
Birm­ing­ham 5 May
Lin­coln 5 May
Brad­ford 5 May
Glas­gow 6 May
Cardiff 6 May
Exeter 6 May
Coven­try 7 May
Swansea 8 May
Sal­ford 8 May
Wolver­hamp­ton 8 May
Truro (Car­rick) 8 May
Sun­der­land 8 May
Wake­field 9 May
Glouces­ter 9 May
Stoke on Trent 10 May
Kingston upon Hull 10 May
Sal­is­bury 10 May
Ply­mouth 11 May
New­port 11 May