PENGUIN BOOKS
HEAT
George Monbiot is one of the world’s most influential radical thinkers. Celebrated for both their originality and the depth of their research, his Guardian columns are syndicated all over the world. His website – www.monbiot.com – receives a quarter of a million hits a month. He is the author of the bestselling books Captive State and The Age of Consent, as well as the investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows, Amazon Watershed and No Man’s Land. Among the many prizes he has won is the UN Global 500 award for outstanding environmental achievement, presented to him by Nelson Mandela. He is visiting professor at the school of the built environment, Oxford Brookes University.
How to Stop the Planet Burning
with research assistance from
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First published by Allen Lane 2006
Published in Penguin Books with a new Preface 2007
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Copyright © George Monbiot, 2006, 2007
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EISBN: 978–0–141–90074–2
To Hanna
May this be a fit world for you to inhabit
Introduction: The Failure of Good Intentions
6. How Much Energy Can Renewables Supply?
Organizations Campaigning to Reduce the Impact of Climate Change
In the nine months since this book was first published, almost all of us have agreed that climate change, in Tony Blair’s words, is ‘the single most important issue that we face as a global community’.1 We have also agreed to do nothing about it.
That is not entirely true – it depends on who is meant by ‘we’. In formal and informal agreements all over the world – in Parliament, the European Union, the US Congress, the National People’s Congress in China – aspirations, goals, even binding targets are being discussed and set. But we sit and watch our legislators act on our behalf. A recent survey by the Energy Saving Trust shows that only 4 per cent of people have made substantial changes to the way they live.2 Everyone else is waiting for everyone else to act.
It is true that we are now much better informed about the collapse of the biosphere. The new scientific summary by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – which warns that ‘more intense and longer droughts’ have already been observed over wide areas of the earth;3 that sea levels are rising at twenty times the average rate over the past 3,000 years4,5 and that eleven of the last twelve years rank among the twelve warmest since records began – has been reported everywhere. But we read about these changes with the impotent fascination with which we might watch a good disaster movie. This knowledge is useless, or worse than useless – paralysing – unless we are prepared to act on it. The danger is not that we will stop talking about climate change. The danger is that we will talk ourselves to kingdom come.
At first sight, some of the moves made by governments seem reassuring. The biggest event was the publication of the Stern report at the end of 2006. Sir Nicholas Stern, the former chief economist of the World Bank, was commissioned by the British government to assess the economic implications of climate change. He found that the global cost of a high level of warming during the twenty-first century would equate to between 5 and 20 per cent of the world’s spending power, while the cost of preventing it would amount to only 1 per cent of global gross domestic product.6 It makes economic sense to act.
You might have expected me to welcome the Stern report, because in important respects it appears to chime with the message of this book. I did, at first. But the more I have thought about it, the less I like it. Like most climate scientists, Sir Nicholas seems to believe that if we want to avoid dangerous climate change, we should seek to prevent the global temperature from rising by 2°C above its preindustrial level.* If we fail to do so, he says, ‘0.7 to 4.4 billion people’ could suffer ‘growing water shortages’.8 There is a high chance of ‘falling crop yields in many developing regions’.9 The Amazon rainforest ‘could be significantly, and possibly irrevocably, damaged’10; 15–40 per cent of the world’s species face extinction; ‘small mountain glaciers disappear worldwide’, threatening water supplies; and there is the ‘potential for the Greenland ice sheet to begin melting irreversibly, accelerating sea level rise and committing the world to an eventual 7metre sea level rise’.11 Having spelt out the consequences, he then casts this target aside.
Explaining this is a little complicated, but it lies at the heart of the issue, so please bear with me for a moment. Rising temperatures are directly related to a rise in the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The most important of these is carbon dioxide, but there are several others, and when they are all lumped together we measure them with a unit called ‘carbon dioxide equivalent’.
Sir Nicholas makes it clear that to have a reasonable chance (50 per cent or so) of avoiding 2° of global warming, we have to stabilize the concentration of greenhouse gases at no more than 450 parts for every million parts of atmosphere. This is expressed as ‘450ppm CO2e’. If we allowed greenhouse gases to rise to 550ppm CO2e (which could happen by 2035 if the burning of fossil fuels keeps accelerating) there is, he says, ‘at least a 77 per cent chance – and perhaps up to a 99 per cent chance, depending on the climate model used – of a global average temperature rise exceeding 2°C.’12 550ppm CO2e also gives us, Stern suggests, a ‘30–70 per cent’ chance of exceeding 3° and ‘a 24 per cent chance that temperatures will exceed 4°C’.13
This is a calamitous level of warming. As Stern says, ‘global food production is likely to be seriously affected’14 ; ‘entire regions may be too hot and dry to grow crops’; ‘rising sea levels will result in tens to hundreds of millions more people flooded each year’ and ‘the proportion of land experiencing extreme droughts is predicted to increase from 3 percent today to 30 per cent’.15 As the global population will keep rising, 4° could cause mass starvation.
So at what level does Sir Nicholas recommend we stabilize greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere? 550ppm CO2e. This is the basis of his calculation that preventing dangerous levels of climate change would cost only 1 per cent of global GDP. It is also the level, as he has shown, which makes dangerous climate change almost inevitable and catastrophic climate change quite possible. Stern embraces a greenhouse gas target with a reasonable chance of causing mass starvation.
He doesn’t even bother to calculate how much it would cost to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations at 450ppm CO2e or below. He simply notes that this ‘is likely to be very costly’.16 The same, of course, could be said for failing to do so. He also claims that it ‘is likely to be unachievable with current and foreseeable technologies.’17 As this book shows, that is not true.
My second problem with the Stern report is that the calculations he uses are nonsensical. On one side of the equation are the costs of investing in new technologies (or not investing in old ones) in order to prevent emissions from rising above 550ppm CO2e. On the other side are the costs of climate change. Some of these are financial – food prices could rise, for example; sea walls will need to be built. But most of them take the form of costs which have hitherto been regarded as incalculable: the destruction of ecosystems and human communities; the displacement of people from their homes; disease and death. All these costs are thrown together by Sir Nicholas with a formula he calls ‘equivalent to a reduction in consumption’, to which he then attaches a price.
Stern explains that this ‘consumption’ involves not just the consumption of goods we might buy from the supermarket, but also the consumption of ‘education, health and the environment.’18 He admits that this formula ‘raises profound difficulties’, especially the ‘challenge of expressing health (including mortality) and environmental quality in terms of income’.19 But then he uses it anyway. The global disaster unleashed by a 5–6° rise in temperature is ‘equivalent to a reduction in consumption’ of 5–20 per cent.
In what way is it equivalent? It is true that as people begin to starve they will consume less, in both the broad and narrow senses. It is also true that when they die they cease to consume altogether. I can accept that a unit of measurement, which allows us to compare the human costs of different spending decisions, might be necessary. But Stern’s unit (a reduction in consumption) incorporates everything from the price of eggs to the pain of bereavement. He then translates it into a ‘social cost of carbon’, measured in dollars. He has, in other words, put a price on human life. Worse still, he has ensured that this price is lost among the other prices: when we read that the ‘social cost of carbon’ is $30 a tonne, we don’t know – unless we read the whole report – how much of this is made of human lives.
This then leads to a disastrous consequence of Stern’s methodology, unintended but surely obvious. Stern’s report shows that the dollar losses of failing to prevent a high degree of global warming outweigh the dollar savings arising from not taking action. It therefore makes economic sense to try to prevent runaway climate change. But what if the result had been different? What if he had discovered that the profits accruing from burning more fossil fuels exceeded the social cost of carbon? We would then find that it makes economic sense to kill people.
That sounds ridiculous. But it was, in effect, the conclusion of another report commissioned by the British government, and written by the former chief executive of British Airways, Sir Rod Eddington. Sir Rod was asked to advise the government on the links between transport and the UK’s economic growth. He found that even when the costs of climate change, as calculated by Sir Nicholas, are taken into account, the total costs of expanding the UK’s airports and road networks are lower than the amount of money to be made.20 Though he never spelt it out in these terms (I can find no evidence in his report that he has even understood the implications), Eddington discovered that it makes economic sense for people to die in order that we can travel more.
Those who will feel most of the costs of climate change do not live in the United Kingdom. The people of the tropics will be hit hardest, particularly the people living in habitats that are already marginal in terms of food production. Hardly any of the benefits of improving the UK’s transport networks accrue to the Ethiopians or the Malawians. They suffer only the costs. Eddington has decided that it makes economic sense for other people to die, in order that we can travel more freely. I do not believe we have the right to make that decision.
Another significant event in the UK was the launch of the climate change bill, in March 2007. This is the first occasion on which a government has legally committed itself to cutting greenhouse gas emissions and ruled that if it misses its own targets it can be taken to court. In this respect it is an extraordinary development.
It commits the government to two binding cuts – a26–32 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2020 and a 60 per cent reduction by 2050. Every five years, governments must give themselves interim goals. An independent committee decides what the goals should be and works out whether the government has met them.21
The bill’s targets are, as this book shows, the wrong ones: too little, too late. But at least the independent committee will allow us to see whether or not real progress is being made. An audit I commissioned for a television documentary shows that the government’s assessments of its own progress are wildly optimistic. It thinks it is on course for a 29 per cent cut in greenhouse gas emissions (on 1990 levels) by 2020. The scientists who conducted the audit discovered that it is in fact on course for a cut of 12–17 per cent.22
At this stage, I think we can predict that the government will be successfully prosecuted for missing its own targets. While its recent climate change announcements make good headlines, they are constantly undermined by weak resolve and conflicting policies. The Department for Transport continues to insist that airports produce ‘master plans’ to accommodate a doubling of flights between now and 2030.23 It is also seeking to build 4,000km of new trunk roads.24
The Treasury refuses to introduce polices which have any chance of discouraging people from flying or even encouraging them to buy more efficient cars. It doubled air passenger duty (the tax you pay to board an aeroplane) and claimed this as a carbon saving. But the government’s own figures show that this measure will have no impact.* It increased the tax that the owners of the most polluting vehicles must pay, but not by enough to make a difference. The government’s figures show that to persuade most people to buy a more efficient model, there needs to be at least £150 between tax bands.28 Even after the new taxes are introduced, the difference will be £67.29
In December 2006 the communities and local government department announced what seemed to be another radical policy. By 2016, every new home in the UK must be ‘zero-carbon’.30 It is not yet clear what this means, but it seems like a worthy goal. Unfortunately the government has no intention of implementing it. How do I know? Because the same department has been forbidding local authorities from experimenting with zero-carbon homes.31 It has also slapped down the MPs who have proposed that local authorities should be allowed to set higher energy standards than the building regulations demand.32 The reason seems to be that it does not want to discourage builders from throwing up as many houses as possible in order to solve our housing crisis. This is all very well, but it is inconceivable that all new homes will be zero-carbon nine years from now if we have not been able to test them on a large scale first. The government’s climate change policies often seem to fall apart when they encounter even mild opposition from either citizens or corporations.
But no one can deny that climate change is now being taken much more seriously, almost everywhere, than it was nine months ago. All over Washington, you can hear the giant scraping sound of officials and legislators frantically back-tracking. After years of obfuscation, denial and lies about climate change, all but the most hardened recidivists in the US government are rebranding themselves as friends of the earth.
In February, two senior White House officials published an open letter seeking to correct inaccurate stories in the press ‘that the President’s concern about climate change is new.’33 ‘In fact’, they reported, ‘climate change has been a top priority since the President’s first year in office’. To prove it, they had found 37 words he said about the subject in 2001; 46 words in 2002, and 32 words in January 2007. In January 2007 he had even managed to say ‘climate change’. This demonstrated, they claimed, that he has shown ‘continued leadership on the issue’.
Both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill are falling over themselves to show how they have sought to save the world. The Senate’s vote in 1997 – 95 to nil – to sink the Kyoto Protocol before it was signed has been forgotten. Joe Barton’s congressional inquisition, in which scientists who refused to alter their results to suit the oil companies were questioned as if they were members of al-Qaeda, never happened. Even Larry Craig, once one of the Senate’s most outspoken climate change deniers, now claims that he has been helping to lead the world ‘toward cleaner technologies’.34 After the war, almost everyone becomes a member of the Resistance.
While a great deal is going on in some US states, there is still no positive action on climate change at the federal level. George Bush says the US will reduce its greenhouse gas emissions ‘relative to the size of the American economy’ by 18 per cent over the next 10 years. He claims that this is ‘an ambitious climate change strategy’.35 But it means nothing. The only cuts that count are absolute cuts: the relative size of your economy makes no difference to the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Bush’s reduction in ‘carbon intensity’ means, in reality, an increase in emissions. As all economies tend to use less energy per unit of production as they mature, his proposal for tackling climate change amounts to doing nothing.
Far worse than this fake initiative are the real ones Bush is deploying. In his 2007 State of the Union address, he announced that he was raising the government’s mandatory target for alternative transport fuels five-fold. This was wonderful news for the grain barons of the red states, who will grow the maize and rape that will be turned into biofuel. It’s a disaster for everyone else.
An analysis published last year by the Sarasin Bank found that until a new generation of vegetable fuels, made from straw or wood, is developed ‘the present limit for the environmentally and socially responsible use of biofuels [is] roughly 5 per cent of current petrol and diesel consumption in the EU and US.’36 Bush now proposes to raise the proportion to 24 per cent by 2017.37 Already, though the rich world has replaced less than one per cent of its transport fuels, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization reports a ‘surge in the prices of careals, in particular wheat and maize’ to ‘levels not seen for a decade’, partly as a result of ‘a fast growing demand for biofuel production’.38 The impacts will be felt by hungry people all over the world. Rather than deal with the problem – an excessive demand for transport fuel – at source, Bush seeks to trade one catastrophe for another.
Similarly, the administration now proposes to deal with climate change by means of ‘modifying solar radiance’39 – in other words by seeking to reflect sunlight back into space with particles or mirrors. As Chapter 11 shows, the schemes of this kind proposed so far either exacerbate climate change or threaten to cause another kind of atmospheric crisis. Again, this is a means of avoiding difficult decisions, and again other people must pay. Bush is seeking to persuade the people of the United States to do everything except the one thing that has to happen – reducing their consumption of fuel. It is another species of denial.
But we can no longer blame the slowth of the global response to climate change only on governments or corporations. They cannot act until we want them to. At the moment we want it all: palm-fringed beaches, monster trucks, plasma screen TVs and a clean conscience.
The middle-class people I know still fly to the Canaries for their holidays. Some of them still have second homes in Croatia and Greece. One environmentalist flies from the UK to Thailand to have a pipe stuck up his bottom (the proper term, I am told, is ‘colonic irrigation’). They drive ancient Volvos or sporty convertibles. They use a gas to heat their homes (even in the summer) and have radiators in their conservatories. Many of them haven’t even bothered to replace their incandescent lightbulbs.
Yes, it is true that they recycle their bottles and buy handmade candles, organic meat and locally produced vegetables. This permits them to feel that they are on the side of the angels, without being obliged to make any significant change to the way they live. But as soon as they are asked to make a decision which intrudes on the quality or quantity of their lives, their concern about the state of the planet mysteriously evaporates. If the biosphere is wrecked, it will be done by nice, well-meaning, cosmopolitan people who accept the case for cutting emissions, but who won’t change by one iota the way they live.
Governments have no interest in challenging our illusions. If their aspirations and our aspirations diverge too widely, they will lose elections. They won’t take real action until we show them that we have changed.
April 2007
The Failure of Good Intentions
The god thou servest is thine own appetite.
Doctor Faustus, Act II, Scene 11
Two things prompted me to write this book. The first was something that happened in May 2005, in a lecture hall in London. I had given a talk about climate change, during which I had argued that there was little chance of preventing runaway global warming unless greenhouse gases were cut by 80 per cent.2 The third question stumped me.
‘When you get your 80 per cent cut, what will this country look like?’
I hadn’t thought about it. Nor could I think of a good reason why I hadn’t thought about it. But a few rows from the front sat one of the environmentalists I admire and fear most, a man called Mayer Hillman. I admire him because he says what he believes to be true and doesn’t care about the consequences. I fear him because his life is a mirror in which the rest of us see our hypocrisy.
‘That’s such an easy question I’ll ask Mayer to answer it.’
He stood up. He is 75, but looks about 50, perhaps because he goes everywhere by bicycle. He is small and thin and fit-looking, and he throws his chest out and holds his arms to his sides when he speaks, as if standing to attention. He was smiling. I could see he was going to say something outrageous.
‘A very poor third-world country.’
At about the same time I was reading Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday. Henry Perowne comes home from his game of squash and steps into the shower.
When this civilisation falls, when the Romans, whoever they are this time round, have finally left and the new dark ages begin, this will be one of the first luxuries to go. The old folk crouching by their peat fires will tell their disbelieving grandchildren of standing naked mid-winter under jet streams of hot clean water, of lozenges of scented soaps and of viscous amber and vermilion liquids they rubbed into their hair to make it glossy and more voluminous than it really was, and of thick white towels as big as togas, waiting on warming racks.3
Was I really campaigning for an end to all this? To ditch the comforts Perowne celebrates and which I – like all middle-class people in the rich world – now take for granted?
There are aspects of this civilization I regret. I hate the lies and the political corruption, the inequality, the export of injustice, the military adventures, the destruction of wild places, the noise, the waste. But in the rich nations most people, most of the time, live as all prior generations have dreamt of living. Most of us have a choice of work. We have time for leisure, and endless diversions with which to fill it. We may vote for any number of indistinguishable men in suits. We may think and say what we want, and though we might not be heeded, nor are we jailed for it. We may travel where we will. We may indulge ourselves ‘up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics’. We are, if we choose to be, well-nourished. Women – some women at any rate – have been released from domestic servitude. We expect effective healthcare. Our children are educated. We are warm, secure, replete, at peace.
For the first two million years of the history of the genus Homo, we lived according to circumstance. Our lives were ruled by the vicissitudes of ecology. We existed, as all animals do, in fear of hunger, predation, weather and disease.
For the following few thousand years, after we had developed a rudimentary idea of agriculture and crop storage, we enjoyed greater food security, and soon destroyed most of our non-human predators. But our lives were ruled by the sword and the spear. We fought, above all, for land. We needed it not just to grow our crops but also to provide power – grazing for our horses and bullocks, wood for our fires.
Then we began to discover some of the opportunities afforded by fossil fuels. No longer were we constrained by the need to live on ambient energy; we could support ourselves by means of the sunlight stored – in the form of carbon – over the preceding 350 million years. The new fuels permitted the economy to grow – to grow sufficiently to absorb some of the people dispossessed by the previous era’s land disputes. Industry and cities boomed. Forced together within the workplace and the warren, the dispossessed could start to organize. The despots empowered by the seizure of land were forced to loosen their grip.
Fossil fuels helped us to fight wars of a horror never contemplated before, but they also reduced the need for war. For the first time in human history – indeed for the first time in biological history – there was a surplus of available energy. We could survive without having to fight someone for the resources we needed. Our freedoms, our comforts, our prosperity are all the products of fossil carbon, whose combustion creates the gas carbon dioxide, which is primarily responsible for global warming. Ours are the most fortunate generations that have ever lived. Ours might also be the most fortunate generations that ever will. We inhabit the brief historical interlude between ecological constraint and ecological catastrophe.
Oh, those distant, sunny days of May 2005, when I believed this problem could be solved with a mere 80 per cent cut! After my talk, a man called Colin Forrest wrote to me. I had failed, he explained, to take note of the latest projections. He sent me a paper he had written whose argument (which I will explain at greater length in the next chapter) I could not fault.4
If in the year 2030, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere remain as high as they are today, the likely result is two degrees centigrade of warming (above pre-industrial levels). Two degrees is the point beyond which certain major ecosystems begin collapsing. Having, until then, absorbed carbon dioxide, they begin to release it. Beyond this point, in other words, climate change is out of our hands: it will accelerate without our help. The only means, Forrest argues, by which we can ensure that there is a high chance that the temperature does not rise to this point is for the rich nations to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 90 per cent by 2030. This is the task whose feasibility Heat attempts to demonstrate.
By ‘feasibility’ I mean compatibility with industrial civilization. Within the environmental movement there are some people who regard the preservation of this state as an unworthy goal. The slogan of North American EarthFirst!, for example, is ‘Back to the Pleistocene’. But even if you would prefer to be running around in skins, chasing or being chased by giant aurochs, advocating a return to the economy of the Stone Age is futile, for the great majority of people find this prospect unappealing. Even demanding the restitution of a largely agricultural society, or the economy of ‘a very poor third-world country’ would be pure self-indulgence. Whether or not we enjoy the soft life (and I suspect that some of those who advocate its dissolution would be among the first to perish in the wilderness), it is politically necessary to discover the means of sustaining it. This book seeks to devise the least painful means of achieving a 90 per cent cut in carbon emissions. It attempts to reconcile our demand for comfort, prosperity and peace with the restraint required to prevent us from destroying the comfort, prosperity and peace of other people. And though I began the search for these solutions almost certain that I would be unsuccessful, I now believe it can be done.
Heat is both a manifesto for action and a thought experiment. Its experimental subject is a medium-sized industrial nation: the United Kingdom. It seeks to show how a modern economy can be decarbonized while remaining a modern economy. Though the proposals in this book will need to be adjusted in countries with different climates and of greater size, I believe the model is generally applicable: if the necessary cut can be made here, it can be made by similar means almost anywhere.
I concentrate on the rich nations for this reason: until we have demonstrated that we are serious about cutting our own emissions, we are in no position to preach restraint to the poorer countries. The rich world’s most common excuse for inaction can be expressed in one word: China. It is true that China’s emissions per person have been rising by around 2 per cent a year.5 But they are still small by comparison to our own. A citizen of China produces, on average, 2.7 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. A citizen of the United Kingdom emits 9.5, and of the United States, 20.0.6 To blame the Chinese for the problem, and to claim that their rapacious appetites render our efforts futile, is not just hypocritical. It is, I believe, another manifestation of our ancient hysteria about the Yellow Peril.
After looking at what the impacts of unrestrained climate change might be, and at why we have been so slow to respond to the threat, I begin my search for solutions within my own home. I show how years of terrible building, feeble regulations and political cowardice have left us with houses scarcely able to perform their principal function, which is keeping the weather out. I look at the means by which our existing homes could be redeemed and better ones could be built, and discover what the physical and economic limits of energy efficiency might be.
I then seek to determine how best their energy might be supplied. Before I began my research on that subject, I thought it would be quite easy to cover: I would need only decide whether we should use wind, waves or solar power, or nuclear energy, or biomass, or a means of stripping carbon dioxide from the exhausts of power stations. But the more I read, the more difficult and contradictory the questions became. The three chapters dealing with this issue are the most technically complex in the book. I believe – though by the skin of my teeth – that I might have found a workable solution.
Next I show how a new system for land transport could cut carbon emissions by 90 per cent with scarcely any reduction in our mobility. But when I come to examine aviation, I discover that there are simply no effective technological solutions: in this chapter I have failed in my attempt to reconcile the luxuries we enjoy with the survival of the biosphere, and I am forced to conclude that the only possible answer is a massive reduction in flights.
Then I look at two industrial sectors – retailing and cement manufacture, both of which produce disproportionate amounts of carbon dioxide – and propose some radical means by which shops can stay in business and houses can be built without melting the ice caps. I have tried throughout this account to identify the methods that are cheapest, that have already been shown to work and that are most compatible with the lives we lead already.
I would like to believe that the changes I suggest could be achieved by appealing to people to restrain themselves. But though some environmentalists, undismayed by the failure of the past forty years of campaigning, refuse to see it, self-enforced abstinence alone is a waste of time.
What is the point of cycling into town when the rest of the world is thundering past in monster trucks? By refusing to own a car, I have simply given up my road space to someone who drives a hungrier model than I would have bought. Why pay for double-glazing when the supermarkets are heating the pavement with the hot air blowers above their doors? Why bother installing an energy-efficient lightbulb when a man in Lanarkshire boasts of attaching 1.2 million Christmas lights to his house? (Mr Danny Meikle told journalists that he needs two industrial meters to measure the electricity he uses. One year his display melted the power cable supplying his village.7 The name of the village – which proves, I think, that there is a God – is Coalburn.)
And which of us – except perhaps Mayer Hillman – can really claim to live as we urge others to live? Most environmentalists – and I include myself in this – are hypocrites. I know of a British climate-change campaigner who spends her holidays snorkelling in the Pacific, and she doesn’t get there by bicycle. One friend – a prominent environmentalist – burns coal on an open fire. Another – a biodiversity campaigner – serves tuna steaks to his guests. In an interview with the Guardian conducted in Las Vegas, Chris Martin, the lead singer of Coldplay, spoke about the songs on his album X&Y.
Twisted Logic is an intense, angry track encouraging people to make the right decisions about how they live their lives and how they treat the planet.8
A few paragraphs later, he revealed that he was about to
fly by private jet to Palm Springs, 35 minutes from Las Vegas. The band can now afford to fly wherever possible, and the increased privacy and speed mean that Apple will be able to join her father on tour more often. ‘I certainly don’t want her to stay at home all the time,’ Martin says. ‘As she gets older, hopefully she’ll come out as and when she wants. I always thought it’d be cool to be in school and say, “I’m not coming in today – I’m off to Costa Rica to see my dad play.” I do think that wins you a few points.’9
At the beginning of his Organic Bible, the green gardener Bob Flower-dew explains that organic gardening means ‘minimizing ecological damage and making best use of resources’.10 He goes on to boast that ‘when most people are only planting their [new potatoes] on Good Friday, as is traditional in the UK, I am eating mine.’11 How? By growing them in a heated greenhouse.
We might buy eco-friendly washing-up liquid and washable nappies. But we cancel out any carbon savings we might have made ten thousand-fold whenever we step on to an aeroplane. Our efforts are tokenistic. By and large, whatever our beliefs might be, we consume as much as our incomes allow. Environmentalism is for other people.
What this means is that changes of the kind I advocate in this book cannot take place without constraints which apply to everyone, rather than to everyone else. I am sorry to say that only regulation – that deeply unfashionable idea – can quell the destruction wrought by the god we serve, the god of our own appetites. Manmade global warming cannot be restrained unless we persuade the government to force us to change the way we live.
I have mentioned that one of the gifts fossil fuels have granted us is freedom: freedom to choose how we should live, to go where we wish, to buy what we want. A 90 per cent cut in our emissions of carbon dioxide is, I admit, an inherently narrow constraint. I did not invent it – it is what the science appears to demand. But within that constraint, we should be free to live as we wish. The need to tackle climate change must not become an excuse for central planning. The role of government must be to establish the limits of action, but to guarantee the maximum of freedom within those limits. And it must help us by ensuring that even within those constraints, life remains as easy as possible. In Chapter 3 I explain how this might best be done.
I am not writing this book to confirm what you believe to be true. Many of the things I say will disturb and upset people who have taken an interest in this subject. As always, I seem destined to offend everyone. But I am sorry to report that an extraordinary amount of rubbish has been written by well-meaning people about tackling climate change. It is hard to see how it helps us to pretend that certain measures work when they do not.
Let me give you an example. In 2005 the environmental architect Bill Dunster, who designed the famous BedZed zero-carbon development outside London, published a brochure purporting to show how homes could best be refurbished. ‘Up to half of your annual electric needs,’ it claimed, ‘can be met by a near silent micro wind turbine.’12 The turbine he specified has a diameter of 1.75 metres.13 He suggested it be attached to the gable end of the house. It looks like a bargain, as it costs only £1000.
Later that year the magazine Building for a Future, which supports renewable energy, published an analysis of micro wind turbines. It found that a 1.75 metre turbine would produce about 5 per cent of a household’s annual electricity demand.14 To provide the 50 per cent Bill Dunster advertises, you would need a turbine 4 metres in diameter.15 If you attached a beast like this to the gable end of your house, the lateral thrust it exerted would rip the building to bits. Though it did not say as much, the magazine’s analysis made it clear that micro wind turbines are a waste of time and money. In most environmental circles this admission is heresy.
One of the discoveries I have made in writing this book is that my instincts are almost always wrong. Like many environmentalists I have succumbed, for example, to what could be described as the aesthetic fallacy: I have made the mistake of confusing what is aesthetically pleasing with what is environmentally sound. For instance, I have always assumed that candles are more environmentally friendly than electric lighting, for no better reason than that I like them and that they produce less light. In his excellent textbook on energy systems, Godfrey Boyle points out that in terms of the light given off per watt of expended power, a candle is 71 times less efficient than an old-fashioned incandescent bulb, and 357 times worse than a compact fluorescent model.16 The same applies to oil lamps. Boyle notes that
It is quite remarkable that the complex process of choosing to burn a litre of kerosene in an engine, to drive a generator, to power a fluorescent lamp, can produce 250–450 times more useful light than burning the same amount in an oil lamp.17
Nothing here is as it seems. The research for this book has involved me in a long series of surprises. I am sure that they will continue long after it is published, as my findings and proposals are challenged and refined by others. But what I have sought to do throughout the text is to start from first principles, to believe nothing until it is demonstrated, to junk any technology, however pleasing it may be, which does not work. What I am attempting to do is to find the least painful means of making real cuts, rather than the least painful means of being seen to do something.
One of the hardest tasks I have faced is deciding whom to trust. Many of those who have written about climate change have economic interests in the outcome. In some cases, as I will show in Chapter 2 (The Denial Industry), these interests have been heavily disguised: the oil companies, for example, speak with many voices. On the other side, environmentalists – as the example I have given suggests – have often made wild claims unsupported by verifiable facts. In some cases such claims support their own economic interests, though these are generally undisguised. One rule I have devised for myself is to trust no one who has something to sell. By tracing the statements different people have made back to their roots, I have developed a kind of heirarchy of credibility.
When trying to decide which solutions work and which ones don’t, the organizations I have found most useful are learned societies and special committees – such as the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee and the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee – and academic institutions, such as Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute, the Tyndall Centre on Climate Change, the UK Energy Research Centre and the US National Academy of Engineering. Their reports draw together hundreds of years of collective experience. The International Energy Agency and the US Energy Information Administration, though partisan, are useful sources of raw data. Rather to my surprise, given that it has become so closely associated with spin and the massaging of figures, I have also found most of the British government’s technical reports to be reliable: the data seem to be manipulated only after they have been collected. For news about technological developments, I’ve found, New Scientist, Energy World and Building for a Future especially helpful.
When attempting to determine what climate change will do to the planet, the choice, at first sight, seems simpler: the most credible sources are peer-reviewed academic journals, and particularly the most illustrious ones, such as Science and Nature. But the science – as science always should be – is contradictory and confusing. There is no ‘answer’; simply a story with many tellers, which changes every day. From time to time, committees of scientists try to reach an overview. The most eminent of these, bringing together thousands of researchers, is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which produces an ‘assessment report’ every few years. Another useful summary was provided by a conference run by the UK’s Meteorological Office in 2005, which tried to work out the total impacts of climate change on different ecosystems and human populations.
But not all the topics I have investigated have been covered by these distinguished bodies. In some important respects they have abandoned us. It has been left to amateurs to try to perform the carbon-cutting calculation I explain in Chapter 1, and to work out a fair method of deciding how the right to pollute should be allocated. None of the official reports I have read will tell you how much electricity a micro wind turbine produces or, for that matter, what percentage of our electricity can be generated by wind or wave or solar power without causing the national grid to collapse. So I have been forced either to rely on less august sources or to try to work out the answers for myself.
In other cases there is too much data, by which I mean that the bodies I have learnt to trust have produced conflicting estimates, and I have no means of deciding which one should be believed. This is especially true when it comes to the costs of energy, over which there is a remarkable degree of dispute. In these cases, I have published a range of estimates.
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I have one purpose in writing this book: to persuade you that climate change is worth fighting. I hope I have been able to demonstrate that it is not – as some people (notably the geophysiologist James Love-lock) have claimed – too late. In doing so, I hope to prompt you not to lament our governments’ failures to introduce the measures required to tackle it, but to force them to reverse their policies, by joining what must become the world’s most powerful political movement.
Failing all that, I have one last hope: that I might make people so depressed about the state of the planet that they stay in bed all day, thereby reducing their consumption of fossil fuels.