I am starting to a write new book so I won’t write so much on the Bustard now for a bit.
The P.G. Wodehouse road-map to low carbon nirvana
I think we need to go through three stages to reach carbon nirvana. Each requires very different policies.
- Stage one: enthuse
- Stage two: build
- Stage three: chill
Let us use P.G. Wodehouse, the greatest author ever, as our guide.
Unlike Wodehouse, however, I will start at the end. In the end we have to be living a life which uses as few resources as possible. It means that we have to chill out. The more ambitious we are, the more driven, the more we demand resources. It’s not quite as simple as that, but it is broadly true. Once survival is secured, we use resources in our relentless drive to find meaning and avoid boredom.
We have to take the resource-requirement out of our ambition. It could be by making our ambitions spiritual and intellectual. It could be through finding security, happiness, fulfilment and physical satisfaction at home. Those 9 billion people will have to slow right down. So much so that the ultimate human achievement will be pottering about at home.
Lord Emsworth is our model. He spends his life pottering about in the garden. Clipping a faded rose here or there, passing the time of day in quiet communion with his prize pig, the Empress of Blandings. He is utterly satisfied with that simple existence. The thought of having to travel to London fills him with horror.
But before we get to that state, however, we need to consider Lord Emsworth’s home. Blandings Castle is a sprawling country house in Shropshire. We can safely assume it has single-glazed windows, no roof insulation, no wall insulation and no draft proofing. Although it is caressed for eternity by the warm evening sun of Shropshire, it has no solar panels on its roof. So before we can rest, we have to build.
(Lord Emsworth would probably be happy to knock Blandings Castle down and build a smaller, passive cottage in the grounds. If only it were not for his sister, Constance, and her acute sense of social status and propriety!)
So in the second stage we need to embark on a war effort to build very low energy homes and deploy highly efficient transport for the little bit of moving about we do. And we have to create zero-carbon energy sources for switching on the lights in the early hours when there are strange sounds down the corridor.
We cannot rest until something like 20,000 power stations around the world have been knocked down and replaced with something safe. Most of the houses in the word need rebuilding. And that needs to happen in record time.
Now all that is technically possible. But it is not happening. And it is not happening because too many people don’t want it to happen and not enough people want it to happen. That is what the first stage is for: to build enthusiasm and unity.
Who should be our model? Who can galvanise us into action? Could it be Roderick Spode, the black-short rabble-rouser? Or Lord Emsworth’s brother Galahad, with his infectious joie de vivre and bonhomie? Perhaps Freddie Threepwood, Lord Emsworth’s son and salesman for an American FMCG company (dog food). Should it be through the ministry of Stinker Pinker, former rugby player, now curate of Market Snodbury? All that, for we all have responsibility in our respective callings to challenge ourselves and our peers to action.
But most of all it should be, Lord Emsworth himself. In his heart dwells a deep love of nature and peace. Only by instilling that in our hearts will we bring ourselves to care properly for the earth and ourselves.
Notes
1. What about the pig? We should let her life to a ripe old age in peace. The simplest way to cut emissions is to avoid the consumption of meat and dairy.
2. To this day Shropshire’s planning authority does not approve the installation of solar panels on the visible roofs of listed buildings. So it is unlikely that Lord Emsworth would have got permission anyway back then.
Carbon taxes and what goes on in our heads
I feel that a carbon price is higher than it needs to be because of the way we perceive things. If we could change our perceptions then a lower carbon price could be more effective. As it might be more politically acceptable to have a lower carbon price than a high price, this could be worth investigating. It might be relevant for discussions of both cap and trade as well as carbon taxes or fees.
Here is an example:
If you want to use a carbon tax to get Günther to commute by train rather than take the car then the extra cost of driving imposed by the carbon tax should be at least equal to the “losses” of taking the train. Some such losses could include the loss of comfort and time.
If you look at those losses there are some different types. There is an actual loss – the 15 minutes extra time it takes to go by train. Then there is a perceived loss – Günther feels that it will take 25 minutes longer by train even though in fact it only takes 15 minutes longer. And then there are losses which you can absorb or tolerate: the journey might take 15 minutes longer but Günther actually discovers that he doesn’t really mind 10 minutes of those.
On the face of it Günther needs the carbon price to compensate for the full 25 minutes, because that is the loss which he perceives at the time of decision making. But if we have way of closing the gap between perception and reality, we only need the carbon price to compensate for 15 minutes. Advertising people would know how to close that gap.
But Günther is still making his decision based on the assumption of 15 minutes of lost time. This is because he does not yet know that he won’t mind about 10 of those minutes. But once he knows how delicious the sandwiches are, once he has savoured the fresh expresso or admired the lovely view … once he has caught the eye of the new girl checking tickets: the time simply flies by! Then he only needs the carbon price to compensate for 5 minutes of loss.
So in one case you need a carbon price to compensate for 25 minutes of loss. And in the other case – with some information and enlightenment – you only need the carbon price to compensate for 5 minutes of loss.
If we knew the relative distances between the three implied carbon prices, then we could figure out the yield from informing and enlightening people about low carbon living. It might allow us to have a lower carbon price than we assume.
The combination of price and information can be more effective than price only. Perhaps we can achieve the same reductions with a lower price or get more reductions for the same price. This could make the whole thing more politically acceptable, not least because it is the headline number that people focus on politically.
Practical policy to prepare for a difficult future
People say: “You have to have practical policies, it’s no use dreaming.” Here goes.
First, forget about a functioning “modern” society where everything is on tap 24 x 7. You saw how New York functioned during Sandy. Life will become a pattern of emergency and recovery. It might be huge storms, or three weeks of impenetrable snow, or an epidemic sweeping across the country, a week of riots in the cities, several days without power … these things will break up the comfortable routine of our lives today, and throw us, exhaustingly, into survival mode again and again.
We will get used to that. Survival will become the norm and the hope that keeps us going will not be retirement in the sun but just a few moments of still. There will be centuries where the weather, not man, has dominion over the planet.
The first policy is to talk about this. Don’t pretend it’s not going to happen. Talk about it and prepare us, without panic. By getting the words out there and changing what you talk about, you start to make a big difference.
Second, to make our wellbeing your priority, forget about economic growth. Expunge it from your minds. Focus on resilience. The economy will follow. When we have to re-sow the wheat crop because a hailstorm destroyed the first sowing, we won’t care about 2% or 3% economic growth. We will just care about getting hold of more seeds.
So the second policy is to stop talking about economic growth. Let it drop. Just talk about resilience and getting ready.
Third, to survive we will need a whole range of new skills. The principle of comparative advantage, which you have zealously promoted, is of no benefit when physical and virtual networks are constantly disrupted. A man specialised in the drafting of representations and warranties and unable to mend a shoe will end up in an unmarked grave when his foot-sores pick up something bad or he catches pneumonia. They might not even have the time to bury him properly.
We should look to the people of rural Transylvania (in Romania, in the EU). They are perhaps the closest to us who still hold onto skills and lifestyles which are compatible with the long years of disruption ahead of us and described in James Howard Kunstler’s book The Long Emergency. A friend who lives a village north of Cluj-Napoca spends the summer building houses, working his land and looking after the sheep; during the winter, when there is less to do on the farm, he makes hand-made boots. And throughout the year he plays the violin at concerts, weddings and celebrations. He will take the Long Emergency in his stride.
So the third policy is to get children and adults to learn these skills: gardening, cooking, making preserves, making clothes and shoes, practical first aid and medical care, making medicines from plants, maintenance and repairing of tools, woodwork, metal work, building, practical engineering, playing musical instruments. Pretty boring for sophisticated urbanites but they will have to knuckle down.
If we are lucky, we won’t need to use all these skills –with buckets and hand-pumps and sandbags we will just about keep open the channels of comparative advantage. But we need to be ready for when those systems break down.
Restraint. Why and how it can save us.
Here are some bad things:
- Obesity
- Israelis and Palestinians beating the hell out of each other
- Goldman Sachs before the crash (and possibly after it)
- A fox going wild in a chicken run
- The chaps on Easter Island who cut down all the trees and destroyed their own society
Although these are very different problems, there is one common factor: the protagonists do not or cannot observe restraint in the face of abundance. Of hamburgers, bombs, greedy clients, chickens and trees in that order.
A recent article on Grist talks of Michael Freedman’s documentary film, Critical Mass. This describes experiments on rats by John B Calhoun. Mr Calhoun gave his rats as much food as they wanted so that availability of food was not a constraint. Eventually their population spiralled out of control and they all died. (http://grist.org/cities/population-growth-and-the-road-to-total-societal-meltdown/). Again, the rat population just grew and grew and then got too big for its little planet and bang! It all went pop.
It seems as though there are lots of situations where we don’t have the ability coded in us to observe restraint in the presence of abundant resources. It’s like we are programmed to shop til we drop.
So nature dealt us a bad hand. She gave us lots of biological mechanisms for dealing with scarcity but the instruction manual doesn’t have an entry for “How to deal with abundance”. You’re unpacking the kit bag frantically looking for an abundance management tool, but she forgot to put one in.
What was nature thinking? All these living creatures scrabbling about for survival in scarcity and then this whopping big black swan event turns up – abundance – and we have no defence. We are on our backs arms waving helplessly like bloated beetles, unable to do anything.
Nature has one way dealing with abundance: DEATH. She can be very cynical. She doesn’t endow us with a mechanism to deal with abundance. She just gives us enough rope to hang ourselves with.
I think that one way of dealing with abundance is restraint. Restraint is about knowing what is enough, recognising when we have got there and then stopping.
Unfortunately restraint is mocked in society. You might get away with: “No thank you, I have a meeting tomorrow,” but try: “No thank you, my salary is big enough,” or “We’re not going to pump oil next month because there is enough energy around” and you are a labelled a weirdo. Or even illegal because you aren’t maximising the share price.
Not only is restraint mocked, it suffers from moral asymmetry. Marketers and politicians can urge people to be greedy without censure. But if you urge people to show restraint then you are banded a killjoy, a party pooper, and, worst of all, a hypocrite.
So there is a fundamental and perilous gap in our DNA, a massive evolutionary blooper, and one good way of handling it is ridiculed, uncool and trodden in the mud.
Restraint has been abandoned. The techno-optimists have given up on it. They are realists. They are saying: “Look, there is no way you are going to get people to tone down their desires. We just have to come up with a technology which makes the fulfilment of their desires harmless.”
Economists are too scared to mention restraint. They say: “There are planetary constraints on how much CO2 we can emit, how many species we can exterminate, how much nitrogen we can bung into the system. So to avoid hitting those constraints we need to make it very expensive to get too close to them. We’ll tax. Preach restraint? Heaven forbid, it is not for economists to judge. We can’t preach anything except fiscal rectitude.”
Technology will delay the collapse by a few years perhaps. Taxation by a few years more. If we don’t learn restraint, we’ll still crash into the brick wall all the same.
A message from 350.org’s current Do the Math campaign is that 80% of our fossil fuel reserves need to stay underground. What is going to make us stop pumping oil and digging coal when we reach that limit? Is someone going to impose a fine on China? Is someone going to bomb the Indians? That won’t happen. China, India or the USA have no masters. They have to be their own masters. That is, they have to demonstrate restraint.
So as it is the only route to survival, we need to stop being embarrassed about restraint; we need to embrace it and get it up the political agenda. Importantly, it transcends political ideology. It can outlive electoral cycles. A capitalist can show restraint as can a socialist. Its message of balance and beauty and intelligence can appeal to all political views.