When is a quote not a quote?

This week, the Lords have been discussing the Brexit bill. There have been some very fine speeches, including one by Lord (Frank) Judd, a highly respected former Labour MP. At one point, according to Hansard, he said:

" There has been a good deal of talk in this debate about taking the 48% seriously, but there is another statistic that we must never discount. Only 37% of the electorate actually voted for Brexit. That is hardly an indication of the overwhelming popular will; it is an indication that some highly motivated people mobilised their case well and effectively."

This is how this was reported on the Express website (http://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/770078/house-of-lords-brexit-debate-live-article-50-bill-theresa-may):

'Lord Judd, Labour, said: “We are the peers, we should not bow to the demands of the people, only 36 per cent of the people voted for Brexit.” '

Note that the Express "quote" is presented as just that - not a paraphrase but a word-for-word quote. Could it be that readers of some popular news sources might be ever so slightly in danger of being misinformed on some matters?

Utopia or realism?

I have just read Phillip Inman's article in The Observer (22 January 2017) -  Utopian ideas on climate change will get us precisely nowhere. It's dangerous stuff - offering what could be a self-fulfilling prophecy that we will fail to do what is needed to tackle the threat of catastrophic climate change.


I generally agree with the first part of the article, which elaborates on the title. Later he makes some sensible points about, for instance, switching to electric cars. I part company from him when he says:

Aircraft makers should be forced to make their planes more efficient, and airport owners must clean up the pollution they create. But this is an exercise in minimising the impact of flying, given that its expansion is inevitable.

Increasing the efficiency of planes is no substitute for reductions in flying. The laws of physics set a limit to aircraft efficiency and we are getting close to that limit. (This was explained some years ago by the late Sir David MacKay). Flying, like most travel, is an intrinsically energy-intensive activity. Because of its speed, low cost and convenience, it encourages us to travel long distances frequently. It seems inconceivable that aviation can continue for long at anything like its present level if we are serious about lowering the risk of catastrophic climate change.

The world needs to be completely carbon neutral by about 2050 - or sooner if we use up our remaining carbon budget before then. How much flying will be possible in a zero-carbon world? I have only seen one estimate (from the Centre for Alternative Technology) - about a third of what we do now.

Furthermore, expansion of aviation is not inevitable - it is the choice of today's politicians to allow it to happen. Much of our population seems ill-informed about the seriousness of the threat from climate change and sees little moral obligation to make more than token personal gestures to mitigate that threat. The crime of our present generation of politicians is that they go along with this. They follow public opinion where they should be leading it. Responsibility lies on their shoulders. It is their duty to be better informed and more morally aware than the bulk of the population.

If we are not lucky or proactive enough to avoid catastrophic climate change, future generations will regard our present politicians, with some exceptions, as criminally negligent. My feelings are summed up in what Dylan Thomas famously said:-

Do not go gentle into that good night...
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

For me, "the light" is our civilisation and the once stable physical climate that made it possible.

So it's Heathrow

Last week I commented on the then impending decision on a new runway at Heathrow or Gatwick. At the weekend I was pleased to see an opinion piece in The Observer by David Mitchell, where he raised a question: 

Climate change is definitely happening. Aviation contributes hugely to it. So global levels of aviation must be significantly reduced. Why is it, then, that everyone with a whisker of a chance of power agrees that London’s airport capacity should increase?

Heathrow or Gatwick - do either make sense?

Recent political events have caused some previously disjointed thoughts to coalesce.

Let's start with the impending decision on whether a new runway should be built at Heathrow or Gatwick. This raises an interesting question: how much aviation will be possible in a zero-carbon Britain and a zero-carbon world? The only attempt at an answer that I know of comes from the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT), who gave a tentative estimate in 2013 that in zero-carbon Britain, aviation would be limited to about a third of its present level.

More on nuclear versus renewables

My last posting was about the late Professor Sir David MacKay's opinion that the UK could not manage on renewable energy alone and that if we had enough nuclear and carbon capture and storage to get us through the winter (when solar power is very weak) we would have enough for the rest of the year and renewables would be superfluous. After that posting, I looked at the contrary view offered by the Centre for Alternative Technology in their 2013 publication Zero Carbon Britain (ZCB).

Nuclear versus renewables

The other day I was doing some crude calculations on the feasibility of renewable energy in Britain. This came after I had detected some euphoria about the potential for solar power now that costs of solar panels have fallen and large-scale battery storage is becoming possible. I tentatively concluded that we could get all the energy we currently use if we were prepared to cover about 11% of the land area of the UK with solar farms. This was on the basis that, on average, a solar farm in the UK can deliver about 10 watts per square metre of land occupied by the farm. An on-shore wind farm, by contrast, can only deliver about 2 watts per square metre, though the land between the turbines can be used for other things. I then put together a very crude energy plan for the UK, using a combination of solar, off-shore wind, on-shore wind, tidal and wave power. It assumed that 30% of our current energy use would be from solar farms, occupying about 3% of our land, and that our energy demand would be reduced, through efficiency measures and demand management, by 37%. It looked just about feasible, technically if not politically.

Then I came across this video  in which the late and highly-respected Professor Sir David MacKay is interviewed by Mark Lynas eleven days before his untimely death in April. You can see what I thought was a pretty fair summary of the key points here. MacKay's book, Sustainable energy without the hot air, was my main source of information on the feasibility of renewable energy.

David MacKay

I was very sorry to read today about the death of Sir David MacKay, FRS.

In what I write on my blog etc. I often refer firstly to the urgency and importance of tackling the threat of climate change and secondly on the difficulty of doing so. My thinking on the second point is derived almost entirely from David MacKay's book, Sustainable energy - without the hot air, which I first read seven years ago and frequently refer to.

You can read his obituary, by Mark Lynas in the Guardian.

The future of work

This evening I went to an event at the New Economics Foundation featuring a discussion between Ed Miliband (former leader of the Labour Party) and Nick Srnicek, co-author with Alex Williams of Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a world without work, which I have read. I found the book and the discussion stimulating in a number of ways.

My policy interests centre on climate change and its economic implications and I am increasingly finding that the biggest challenge in dealing with it is political. Climate change is an intrinsically difficult political problem because the people who will suffer the worst consequences will be future generations and few people seem to think they have a personal interest or a moral imperative to help tackle it. Furthermore there are some rich and powerful people who have - and pursue vigorously - a vested interest in our not tackling it. This has parallels in other policy areas, including the one discussed in the book.

The central argument of the book concerns the spread of automation and its implications. The authors say that the left should embrace automation and aim to use it to allow people to work less or not at all, with a universal basic income making this possible.

The budget gorilla

Matthew Green had rather a good piece in his blog last week, following the Budget. As usual, I found it interesting and generally in line with my own views but with some exceptions.

His piece is about "the gorilla in the room". In my experience it's usually an elephant, but I won't quarrel on a matter of fauna-in-camera. He's talking about the big difference between public sector financial commitments over the coming years and the plans to finance them. I agree with his main thesis that there is a serious problem.

I was quite surprised that he takes the standard Coalition line where he says "That this has still meant dramatic cuts to public spending shows just how out of control the government finances had become under the previous government, as it pursued the illusory goal of Scandinavian public spending backed by US taxes."

My own take on this is that the deficits run up by Labour in the mid-noughties were not a major cause of our post-2008 problems. The real problem was that we had come to rely on the banks too much as a cash cow for the Exchequer. When the profitability of the banks collapsed in 2008, tax revenue collapsed with it and that left us with an ongoing hole in our finances. I think the more serious failing of the Blair-Brown years was in allowing the banking system to develop the way it did. However, I don't remember many commentators talking about this at the time, whereas the failure of Gordon Brown to comply with his own "golden rule" on balancing the books over the business cycle was widely noted.

The issue of banking failure is dear to my heart at the moment because at the next meeting of the Kennington Sustainability Study Group (on Wednesday, April 6th, the start of the UK fiscal year, if anybody's interested) we will be discussing "Money". Now the first thing to bear in mind is that the economy of a nation with its own currency is not like a household. The government can create out of nothing whatever money it needs to finance its spending or to keep the economy running. The notion that governments must borrow the difference between what they spend and what they raise in taxes etc is a piece of fiction that politicians use to justify either raising taxes or cutting spending. They get away with it partly because most people don't understand what money is and partly because the fiction is not all that far from the truth. Real resources commandeered through government spending - labour, capital, raw materials, foreign currency etc. - are then unavailable for use by businesses and households. Also, the stability of the currency matters a great deal and, if deflation, excessive inflation or a roller-coaster exchange rate are to be avoided, the supply of money needs to be matched to the potential of the real economy.

This is particularly important in an economy as open as the UK's, which reminds me of what I think of a second large mammal in the room - our trade deficit. This issue raises interesting questions for me. Which causes the other: the surplus on the capital account and hence an over-valued pound, as more of our industry, infrastructure, national debt, land and property gets sold to foreigners; or a deep-seated propensity to over-consume imports and/or under-produce exports? Could an underlying problem be inadequate private saving and excessive borrowing for consumer spending during boom times? I suspect there is a complex pattern of cause and effect working both ways between the capital and current accounts and others no doubt have a much better handle on this than I do.

Matthew Green alludes to the current account deficit but only in the context of the constraint he thinks this would impose on "people's QE". As it happens, I think "people's QE" or "sovereign money creation" is rather a good idea, but only as part of a balanced strategy that reduces money creation by private banks from a typical 97% of all money in circulation. In other words, I tend to favour the idea that the public sector should create more money and private sector less. This would have at least three major advantages.

Firstly it should make for greater stability in the banking sector and make us less vulnerable to the sort of things that happened in 2007-8.

Secondly, money creation is a very profitable activity.  With increased sovereign money creation, some of the profits that currently accrue to banks would go to the government instead, so helping to reduce the deficit.

Thirdly, if there were another banking crisis (as some commentators think there almost certainly will be) the effects would be more limited.

Against all this, of course, there would be no return of the banks as a cash cow for the Exchequer. But I have to confess that I have a lot more reading to do around the issues of money and banking.

While I have my differences with bits of Matthew Green's post, I think his overall message is right. The public sector deficit is a serious problem and there is no simple, painless answer to it. I think that sovereign money creation might play a substantial part in the solution and might facilitate a much-needed increase in public-sector investment in infrastructure, particularly in energy conservation and clean energy. But this will not obviate a need for reduced consumption by some so that the government's commitments to others can be honoured.

A tantalising glimpse....

A report this week in The Guardian (Europe's climate change goals 'need profound lifestyle changes') gives a tantalising glimpse of what might be in store in Europe on action against climate change following the Paris Agreement. It's tantalising because the report is about a leaked document from European commission. Because it is not yet published, what we know about it is confined to what is in the Guardian article and that is very scant.

However, I am encouraged for two reasons. Firstly, I am struggling to work out just how far-reaching will be the lifestyle changes needed to reduce the threat from climate change to acceptable proportions and the report, when it is finally published, should help me on my way. Secondly, this seems to be a rare example of an official document recognising that far-reaching changes will be necessary. Not long ago, the message from on-high seemed to be that climate change was a serious problem but all would be well as long as we didn't leave our televisions on stand-by.

My joy is damped by two thoughts. One is about possible Brexit, which, if it happens, could release our Government from any climate-related obligations coming from the EU. The second is about the ability of the EU to agree on necessary action, particularly following the recent change in government in Poland. The Guardian this week has a long article about the party now in charge in Poland and it's not comforting reading. I'm no expert on EU procedures but I have a feeling that the new Polish government will strain every sinew to try and stop any effective action by the EU against climate change.

The Paris Agreement and the Committee on Climate Change

When I wrote my blog post a couple of weeks ago on the implications of the Paris Agreement, I was looking forward to seeing how the Committee on Climate Change would respond. Last week it gave its first response, as you can see from this report from The Guardian.

The main thrust of the response was to reaffirm its recommended fifth carbon budget for the UK covering the period 2028-32. This has disappointed some climate activists and made me curious to see what was the committee's logic. Given the major gaps in my knowledge, I found the committee's letter to Amber Rudd interesting and informative, particularly the Annex.

Paul Mason's end of capitalism

I have recently had my attention drawn again to a seminal Guardian article by Paul Mason, which first appeared six months ago.

I'm almost a fan of Mason. He writes some thought-provoking stuff, much of which I'm inclined to agree with. I think of him as a natural political ally but not quite a kindred spirit. This is because I don't share his preoccupation with the "end of capitalism".

A number of agents and factors motivate the provision of goods and services - markets, public administrations, community spirit, the intrinsic satisfaction of productive work, sheer creativity and perhaps much else. What Mason would describe as the decline of capitalism, I would describe as a decline in the importance of markets as motivators of production.

For a variety of reasons, markets are in decline in some areas. As Mason points out, they are being undermined in the information industries and beyond as digital technology has made it cheap and easy to make and store perfect reproductions of text, software, data, pictures, sound and video. In other areas, increased government intervention is likely in response to environmental threats such as from climate change.

Further government interventions may become unavoidable in the area of banking and other financial services - if only to allow markets to function better. Growing perceptions of social injustice may generate political will to address, through government action, such issues as gross income and wealth inequality.

Let us assume that, over the world economy as a whole, these actual and potential blows to the significance of markets are unmatched by the enhancement of markets in other areas - such as a de-bureaucratisation of economic life in India. Does there come a point where we can say that the world economy, or some major part of it, is no longer "capitalist"?

Perhaps, but "frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn". I am not a Marxist but I am not a fervent economic liberal either. I see threats to individual welfare and liberty coming as much from plutocracy as from an overweening state. I think the state should be as big as it needs to be to do what we want it do and no bigger. Reversing what I see as a drift towards plutocracy is one of the things I want it to do.

If we reach a happy state where the major threats are averted, where acute suffering is much reduced and where most people have before them growing opportunities to flourish, then I won't care if we call our economic regime capitalism, post-capitalism or something else.

Airport expansion and the Paris Agreement

A couple of weeks ago I commented to a fellow blogger on a posting about airport expansion at Heathrow or Gatwick and said:-

COP21 brought a touch of reality to thinking in high places on climate change. One implication is that the UK’s commitment to 80% cuts [in greenhouse gas emissions] by 2050 can no longer be considered adequate. By 2050 we will need to be completely carbon neutral, as will the whole world shortly after. This means that by then any aviation will either need to be completely carbon neutral (running exclusively on biofuels or something not yet invented) or offset by carbon-negative activity.

The date by which we become carbon neutral is less important than what we emit in the meantime. We need to start making big cuts in emissions now and I don’t think an optimal mix of cuts could exclude aviation.

Hence the big issue is not where we site a new runway but how quickly we can reduce aviation, so turning any new investment in airport capacity into stranded assets....

Sorry – I’ve made a lot of sweeping statements here. I’ll try and justify my position in a resuscitation of my own blog.

Climate change as the paramount issue

I may have mentioned before that I participate in a local study group on sustainability which has now been running for slightly less than a year. We discuss many aspects of sustainability but so far we have tended to focus on social and economic issues. Although the issue of climate change has always been there in our minds, we have tended not to focus on it. This, I think, is because none of our early participants has a significant scientific education and so other aspects of sustainability have seemed more accessible.

I think we have to tackle the subject nevertheless. This is because I think the threat from climate change requires us to overturn a lot of generally-accepted thinking about the economy and this has profound political and social implications. Furthermore, other perceived threats to our civilisation -  such as food shortages resulting from over-population - would look manageable were they not amplified either by the effects of climate change or by action needed to tackle it. Before I elaborate, I should clarify some of my premises:-

Nasty, brutish and short?

A pregnant relation recently asked me: what does global warming really mean? I replied something along these lines: it means that if your child has a child, then global warming may render that child's life nasty, brutish and short. I wondered afterwards whether I could really justify what I had said. Everything I have read recently suggests that I was right but I want to be prepared to set out in detail why.

In my last blog post, about Tim Jackson's Prosperity without growth?, I hinted that I would be trying to update some of Jackson's figures. In fact, I have a more general project to get a better handle on the figures relevant to global warming and related issues. This familiarisation is intended as a prelude to a wider project to do more campaigning on the issue of climate change.

For some years I have been alarmed at the disconnect between what the science tells us about global warming and what politicians and the public seem prepared to contemplate by way of action. There is, for instance, much talk among politicians about returning to economic growth and hardly any discussion about whether growth is compatible with serious action to mitigate the threat from global warming.

Prosperity without growth?

I have just re-read Prosperity without growth?, by Tim Jackson, published in 2009 by the Sustainable Development Commission, which the government abolished in 2011. I skimmed through it when it first came out but, not then having  the time to study it in detail, I was left wondering whether action to tackle climate change really does mean doing without economic growth. Although in the long run (perhaps when we're all dead) growth can't continue on a finite planet, it's possible to argue in principle that growth can continue for some years or even decades while we transition towards a zero-carbon economy.

The story of solutions

The story of solutions is another fun, animated video from Annie Leonard and the Story of Stuff Project. Brief, entertaining and with a powerful message - well worth watching.

By the way, I was heartened to find Martin Wolf in the FT saying things similar to what I was saying in my last post.

Denialism isn't confined to global warming

I am an avid reader of Paul Krugman's blog. At a pinch I can call myself an economist (because I have a degree in economics) and that blog is one way I can keep in touch with my profession. (To be honest nobody has ever paid me for being an economist, so my claim to be part of the profession is a little thin.)

Krugman is an out-and-out Keynesian and has consistently raged against the imposition of austerity over these past few years of depression. But he doesn't just rage - he argues cogently and produces evidence to back up what he is saying.

To get a balanced view, I have from time to time hunted for a good exposition of the opposing view - that austerity was a necessary response to high levels of government debt and that it would create the confidence to stimulate the private sector to make up for the contraction of the public sector. I have never found such an exposition. All I have ever found is bluster or what looks like a fundamental misunderstanding of the Keynesian position. Sometimes I am tempted to conclude that, because the austerians produce such bad arguments, they can't have any good ones.

I am left with the impression that no competent and intellectually honest economist would now attempt to defend the austerity that has been imposed on Britain and Europe over the past three and a half years. The British government, rather than crowing about early signs of economic recovery, should be apologising for the three years of economic stagnation that its policies have produced.

Today, my failure to find a convincing economic justification for austerity is echoed by Krugman himself. I'm particularly struck with his final paragraphs:-

Yes, you can find economists at right-wing think tanks and some international organizations making the austerian case, but again, I’m talking about economists with big independent reputations, justified or not. And I can’t think of any. That wing of austerianism has simply dissolved.

And as far as we can tell, it makes no difference. Have Paul Ryan, George Osborne, Olli Rehn, Wolfgang Schäuble changed their tune even a bit? No, they’re busy claiming one quarter of positive growth as vindication.

For those who like to think that serious economic debates matter, it has been a humbling experience.

What has this got to do with my main pre-occupation - global warming? Quite a lot. The insights of Keynes and his followers make logical sense and appear to be supported by evidence. Yet, because the implications do not always fit well with free-market ideology or right-wing thinking in general, there seems to be a loud denial, unsupported by sound reason or evidence, of the validity and relevance of those insights.

This seems a remarkably precise parallel with the denial of the findings of mainstream science on global warming.

Hansen and the Apocalypse

I'm indebted to Joe Romm for drawing my attention to the latest paper from James Hansen and some of his colleagues. It's all about what happens if we carry on burning fossil fuels until they're exhausted, thereby tripling or quadrupling the CO2 in the atmosphere compared with pre-industrial levels.

The received wisdom was, and perhaps still is, the notion that people don't get motivated by apocalyptic visions. That doesn't apply to me. If there's anything that motivates me to make my own modest contribution to saving humanity's life-support system, it's the thought that our addiction to fossil fuels may bring about a premature end to all human life.

IPCC reports have tended to limit their time horizon to the end of this century. My own hunch is that, if we don't mend our ways, by the end of the century we'll see catastrophic consequences for some people but life carrying on much as before for others. Those of us living in high latitudes may be OK if we manage to grow enough food for ourselves (a big if) and defend our territory against the starving masses trying to escape the unbearable heat nearer the Equator.

Unfortunately, it won't stop there. According to the new paper by Hansen et al, we are heading, perhaps on a longer timescale, to a situation where most of the world is uninhabitable.

Read Joe Romm's posting first and go on to the paper itself if you can.

More from James Hansen

As you will have gathered I tend to hang on James Hansen's every word. You can find lots of his recent words in his latest missive.

I was particularly interested to read about his latest thinking on the Venus Syndrome - towards the end of the missive.