M&S set a sustainable benchmark for the retail world

Jonathon Porritt, March 11th 2010, Business, Forum founders, Retail

I spoke at the annual M&S Suppliers’ Conference on Tuesday, which took place in Kensington Town Hall. This venue has a particular resonance for me as it was where the votes for the 1979 and 1984 European elections were counted – and every time I’m back there, I can’t help but recall that sense of consternation that so few people seemed to be prepared, at that time, to put their cross in the Green Party box!

Twenty-six years on and it seemed as if the M&S Suppliers were all voting enthusiastically for the updated version of Plan A! And that was not just because Sir Stuart Rose made a very powerful pitch telling them all that this was their reality whether they liked it or not. By the end of the day, they would certainly have had an unnerving sense of bars being raised all around them, in terms of production standards, transparency, reporting, innovation and so on.

Plan A was launched three years ago, and instantly captured people’s imagination. The combination of carbon neutral and zero waste to landfill pledges, the 100 Action Points, the commitment to invest £200 million, and the sense of all this being at the core of the company rather than being grafted on made an immediate impact. It also gave Plan A the kind of brand profile that took it way beyond the usual corporate responsibility strategies.

Three years on, the £200 million cost has been turned into a £50 million contribution to profit. Forty-five of the Action Points have been delivered, and another 80 have been added on. The ambition level has been ratcheted up several notches, with M&S now committing to becoming the world’s most sustainable (major) retailer by 2015.

Forum for the Future has worked closely with M&S throughout this time, so we are not exactly disinterested parties, but Plan A does provide the benchmark for the whole of the retail world. It’s visionary, it’s applied, it’s comprehensive (as in covering all the sustainability bases), and it’s succeeding in getting whole-company buy-in, through the high level  “How We Do Business” Committee, chaired (and driven!) by Sir Stuart Rose.

So it’s well worthwhile checking out the new version of Plan A, available at: http://plana.marksandspencer.com/media/pdf/planA-2010.pdf

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No more niches – we need sustainable innovation at scale

Jonathon Porritt, March 9th 2010, Built environment, Forum founders

It’s the scale of it all that is sometimes daunting. On energy, for instance, we have to transition from around 90% dependency on fossil fuels to around 90% on renewables – allowing a little bit of residual space for cleaner and super-efficient fossil fuels (aviation, amongst other things, where technological substitution is always going to be limited). If we had two hundred years to make all that happen, it would be fine. But we don’t. Between 2025 and 2050 is seen by most scientists as the outer time limit available to us.

Which will require an unprecedented level of innovation in every sector of the economy. And that means getting scale in all those sectors to get the right drivers in place to make the innovation happen. From niche to mainstream. Easy! But scale means different things in different sectors.

I spent a day last week at Ecobuild  - ‘the biggest event in the world for sustainable design, construction and the built environment’. That absolutely wasn’t a claim that could have been made at the first Ecobuild, five years ago, which attracted no more than 1000 visitors. This year, there were more than 50,000 people there. Earls Court was flush with exhibitors, from some of the biggest companies in the UK to distinctly ‘alternative’ start-ups taking a massive gamble on enough people falling for their particular ‘breakthrough innovation’. There were countless meetings and debates going on the whole time, and the kind of buzz that one doesn’t always associate with events of this kind.

For the politicians who’d dropped in, and wandered around looking a bit bemused, it all said one thing: no more niches. This was about scale. New orders. Expanding markets. Innovation (in the construction industry!). And even, dare one say it, new jobs.

I won’t be churlish by pointing out that this supply-chain journey (from niche to huge, scaled opportunity) could have been stimulated by the political system many years ago – as it was in Germany, Scandinavia and so on.  At least we’ve got there now, and it’s exciting.

The UK Green Building Council has been a central part of that journey, and is now providing the kind of leadership (across this complex industry and beyond) that the politicians need in order to stay in touch with the developments on the ground.  The UK Green Building Council launched its new Green Building Manifesto at Ecobuild  – and it’s well worth a look. 

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The science of uncertainty

Sara Parkin, March 2nd 2010, Climate change, Forum founders

What are we to make of the furore around climate science? There are implications for environmental campaigners, government and businesses currently agonising over the implementation of low carbon strategies, as well as for scientists - climate scientists in particular - and the whole scientific community in general.

To start with thee and me. Most of us won’t have a degree in science, and may not even have a GCSE in one of the natural sciences. So we tend to trust what the scientists say without considering too closely what they mean. Consequently, we are rubbish at understanding the uncertainty that is intrinsic in all scientific inquiry. Climate science is no different. A hypothesis was made: that the most recent warming is mainly due to greenhouse gases added to the atmosphere by human activity. This hypothesis developed from the fact that we’ve known since the 19th century certain gases warm the climate, and that humans now generate a lot more of these gases. Despite a lot of effort over the last 40 years, this hypothesis has not been disproved.

As a consequence, climate scientists consider the likelihood that human emissions of greenhouse gases are contributing to a warming climate to be very likely – i.e. 90% certain. The figures below gives the degrees of certainty the IPCC gives to its conclusions. The big step between labelling something likely or very likely means the latter appellation is not given lightly.

Source: IPCC Report (2007) Summary for Policy Makers p53

Nothing in the ‘climategate’ scandals undermines this conclusion. Where thee and me need to get sharper is in comprehending the various levels of uncertainty attached to the projected consequences. In policy and decision-making terms uncertainty translates into risk management strategies – and something with a 90% chance of being true would surely top the risk register. As David Mackay, DECC Chief Scientific Advisor puts it: “since 1750 we have burnt ½ trillion tonnes of carbon, and are on track to burn the second 1/2 trillion in less than 40 years.  The cumulative consequences of that first 500 billion tonnes suggest the next 500 billion (and the rest) ought to stay underground.” (Mackay, 2009)

It would be astonishing if that scale of intervention in the natural cycles of the earth would be without adverse consequence. 

So, ‘climategate’ does not let any of us off the hook of responsibility for serious action – by governments, organisations and individuals. 

And no more excuses for us becoming anything but much more intelligent consumers of science. Promoting selected conclusions of climate science as irrefutable facts has long been the vice of media, but environmental organisations really ought to know better. Now, bereft of a trusted interlocutor to help them understand the science, the public is unsurprisingly withdrawing ‘belief’ that climate change is actually happening. Both climate scientists and campaigning organisations have a lot to do to rekindle that trust. As do governments. Even though we may (rightly) whinge at their muddled prevarication, governments have not (yet) faltered in their risk analysis that there is enough certainty around climate change to justify action. Businesses that have reached the same conclusion need to ramp up the evidence that they too are of serious intent. Mutuality of benefit in the business-government-public triangle of climate change action depends on the thread of trust not being broken.

So what about the climate scientists? As I suggested in my last blog on climate science there are only very small reasons to question the methodology of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that right now is soliciting evidence for its fifth report.  When IPCC chief, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, he returns from his Communications 101 course, he will be making sure his organisation’s perfectly good methodologies are rigorously implemented. Paradoxically, trust in climate science could be enhanced by the whole sorry tale.  

One positive outcome should be more discipline and aptitude for communication amongst senior climate scientists. The few who became caught up in the excitement of it all and sacrificed dispassionate presentation of evidence to campaigning fervour have risked the reputation of all science. Science funders know it must not happen again.

Bob May, one time government Chief Scientist points out that science progresses through organised scepticism – continual challenging of research outcomes to both extend knowledge and improve certainty. He’s really cross that the word ‘sceptic’ has been recruited, not by genuine challengers of research outcomes (and methodologies) but by what I have dubbed the malicious naysayers. Very different from those who deny something out of fear or misunderstanding, these naysayers are driven by knowingly wrong motives, and are often paid by organistions with the most to lose should low-carbon policies be implementated with any seriousness.

Separating the useful sceptics and contrarians from the malicious naysayers is vital. They need to be challenged head on. And the best way to do that - something all science needs to take on board - is transparency and far more involvement of the public in science – upstream where research projects are designed as well as downstream where the outcomes are debated. 

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Genetically modified fetishism

Jonathon Porritt, March 1st 2010, Forum founders, Farming

The assembled great and the good of the NFU must have been absolutely delighted to hear Chris Smith, Chairman of the Environment Agency, extol the benefits of GM technologies earlier in the week.

He stressed that he was speaking in a ‘personal capacity’, despite the fact that he was invited as Chair of the Environment Agency, and presumably had plenty to talk about in that capacity which might have been of more immediate interest to farmers.

Reflecting on this, it seems to have become a mandatory test of credibility for people like Chris to declare their enthusiasm for GM.  The pro-GM lobby has done a fantastic job in persuading the media and politicians that even the most modest GM-scepticism is tantamount to extreme science-hating emotionalism. 

To express any reservations about the notional sustainability benefits of current GM crops, let alone about the massively hyped potential benefits of future GM products, is to open oneself up to the charge of debilitating technophobia.  Shades here of George Bush beating up his NATO allies over the Iraq war: “If you’re not with us, you’re against us”.

Sorry, Chris, but that’s really not the deal. Interviewed on Radio 4’s Farming Today, he suggested that anti-GM campaigners would really have to ‘move on’ in terms of their opposition on both environmental and health grounds – given that the balance of the available evidence would appear to indicate a relatively clean bill of health for GM on both counts.

If only it were that easy.  One’s judgement about ‘the balance of the evidence’ depends largely on where that evidence comes from, and even pro-GM advocates are very uneasy about the stranglehold that the big biotech companies have over access to data and transparency of the data used by regulators.  I wonder how content Chris is, as Chair of the Environment Agency, about the quality of that evidence, and the credence that should be attached to it? 

Furthermore, I wonder what Chris means by ‘environmental concerns’ in this context? I’d be astonished if he is not worried about the biggest environmental concern of all: the fact that even the next generation of GM ‘solutions’ promise little if anything in terms of reducing the dependence of modern intensive agriculture on fossil fuels and hydro-carbon-based inputs. 

On broad sustainability and governance grounds, GM-scepticism still seems to me to be the most appropriate response to the latest surge of evangelism for all things GM. 

But balance in this debate seems to be entirely lacking.  As the IAASTD (International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science, Technology for Development) Report in 2008 so eloquently pointed out, there are so many things that can and should be done right now to address issues of food security and increased yields without casting all our eggs in the GM basket.   (Don’t ask, incidentally, what happened to the IAASTD Report, which has, to all extents and purposes, been ‘disappeared’.  Some would say precisely because it was so sceptical about GM.) 

But for reasons I still can’t fathom, people like Chris get hugely over-excited about GM whilst remaining resolutely underwhelmed by all those other aspects of sustainable food production and distribution that would make a far bigger difference to an infinitely greater number of people in a far shorter period of time.

This is clearly not a rational process, whatever GM advocates may say.  Indeed, I’d go so far as to suggest that Chris is just the latest ‘big name’ to have given into the phenomenon of what I can only describe as ‘GM fetishism’.

President Sarkozy recently accused his fellow world leaders of having given in to ‘GDP fetishism’.   By which he meant (I assume!)  that their obsessive preoccupation with GDP at the expense of every other measure of prosperity, wellbeing and quality of life, was seriously impairing their judgement. 

By the same token, it is clear to me that the elite of today’s farming establishment (plus a few misguided Greenies) have clearly given in to a form of GM fetishism, which overshadows every other measure of innovation, sustainable yield improvement and resource efficiency in farming today.

I am sure Chris doesn’t see himself as a GM fetishist. But then he has also converted to the pro-nuclear cause over the last few years, and I have noticed that this is rich ‘two for one’ territory: go nuclear and throw in GM evangelism for good measure.  Or vice-versa. That, it would seem, is the only way to demonstrate one’s serious scientific credentials these days.

Or so some sad people say.

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The Marmot Review: health and inequality in the spotlight once more

Jonathon Porritt, February 18th 2010, Forum founders, General, Public Sector

I spent last Friday at the launch conference for the Marmot Review – a report on health and equality and what we should be doing about them here in the UK.

It’s a really good report and powerfully reminds all those who see themselves as active in the ‘sustainable development community’ of the overlap with the public health/health and equalities community, and the importance of working much more effectively together than we’ve sometimes been able to in the past.

I won’t bang on about those synergies, two graphics in the Review illustrate these well. (See Fig 4.6 on cycling on page 127 or Fig 4.7 on green spaces on page 130 of the Review)

Some people say that this is all old hat.  The Black Report, the Acheson Report, the Wanless Report. And now the Marmot Report. Same old, same old.

In some instances, that’s true. But there are many completely new insights in this report, building on new evidence.  For instance, the principal recommendation (‘give every child the best start in life’) is based on new research looking at what happens between birth and the third year of any child’s life.

Just looking at the difference between the most advantaged and the least advantaged on indicators like birth weight, post-natal depression for mothers, regular bed times, being read to every day, breastfeeding and so on, you can see why this is the critical point of intervention. After the age of three, a lot of future interventions may well be far less impactful. And by the age of five, brighter, poorer kids have been overtaken by less bright kids from families that are better off.

Intriguingly, the most inspiring talk of the day came from the Deputy Chief Fire Officer from Merseyside. The Fire and Rescue Service on Merseyside has been running a community engagement and advocacy programme for the last 10 years, providing advice in the first instance on fire prevention, but then helping local residents think much more about all those things that exacerbate health inequalities (smoking, alcohol, drugs, poor quality housing, poor diets and so on), whilst simultaneously increasing fire risk – if only indirectly. His officers are now putting out 50% fewer fires than 10 years ago.

The Deputy Chief Fire Officer didn’t bring this out explicitly, but his presentation provided a powerful analogy for the whole day. Shift the effort (and the investment) upstream – into prevention and brilliant public service interventions in people’s lives – and the downstream costs can be progressively reduced. But if you don’t do that, there’ll be no reductions downstream.

The vast majority of health practitioners are well aware of that.  But the truth of it is that after 30 years of talking about prioritising prevention and public health, practically nothing has been done about it. Just 4% of total health spending in the UK goes on prevention and public health.

The Marmot Review doesn’t make a particularly strong case on that score. But the truth of it is that all its recommendations may well make no more progress than the recommendations of its predecessors unless that imbalance is addressed.

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Lessons from Kraft’s Cadbury takeover

Jonathon Porritt, February 12th 2010, Business, Finance, Forum founders, General

So the first blow has fallen on Cadbury’s from its new owners, Kraft.

The Keynsham plant near Bristol (pictured) will close, despite the fact that Kraft promised to keep it open (that was actually a bit weird, as Cadbury itself had announced that Keynsham would be closed at some stage in the future).

And the fear, of course, as much in the mind of Peter Mandelson as in the minds of all Cadbury’s workers, is that this is just the first of many cuts that will be brought forward during the next few years.

I haven’t written about this since the takeover. Apart from the odd sardonic chuckle as the process unfolded (with that arch-globaliser Mandelson shedding a few crocodile tears at another ‘great British company’ being gobbled up by ‘predators’ like Kraft – or Warren Buffet (who owns about 9% of Kraft) complaining that it’s a really bad deal for Kraft shareholders, however good a deal it might be for Cadbury shareholders), it’s been too bloody miserable.

The optimists would have curmudgeons like me cheer up a little. They point to the pledges made by Kraft to stick by Cadbury’s ethical and Fairtrade commitments. Just before the Cadbury’s Board accepted the bid it announced that Green & Black’s would be moving its entire range to Fairtrade by the end of 2011, which elicited the following emollient words from Kraft:

 “We strongly support certification as a way to improve sustainability in cocoa farming, so we welcome this step by Green & Black’s. Cadbury and Green & Black’s have proud histories in ethical sourcing, and if our offer is successful, we look forward to maintaining this heritage.”

Just so long as you ignore the unmistakable sound of grinding teeth behind the reassuring words, perhaps that really is something to be optimistic about.

But it is still a wretched outcome. And surely a complete failure on the part of Cadbury’s shareholders to tell the difference between ‘a good price’ and ‘lasting value’.

Roger Carr, who has just stepped down as Chairman from Cadbury, having felt ‘obliged’ to recommend to shareholders the offer of £11.7 billion (up from the opening bid of £9.8 billion in September last year) has now weighed in with some ‘radical ideas’ to ensure that something similar doesn’t happen again.  He has suggested raising the ‘victory margin’ from 50% plus one share to 60% plus one share, and that simultaneously there should be a rule that those who bought shares during the course of any takeover battle would not be permitted to vote until the battle was over.

Useful ideas. But the lack of any genuinely radical ideas during the takeover battle was very noticeable. “This is just the way it is with markets”, as one commentator put it. Indeed! Which is why we go through the same nightmarish process with every single takeover proposal.

Why don’t we, for instance, have more John Lewis look-a-likes in the UK? The John Lewis Partnership is hugely admired even by people in the City – even if they don’t really approve of its ‘bizarre’ employee benefit Trust. But this example has been followed by very few companies over the years. As is the case with Scott Bader (a successful chemicals company), and Tullis Russell (a successful paper company in Scotland).

But there is still Royal Mail, which currently has only one shareholder (the Government), which would make it easier to think of some kind of employee ownership basis. Allan Leighton, Royal Mail’s Chairman, has indeed hinted at the possibility of some kind of employee share-ownership.

The interesting thing is that employee-owned companies regularly outperform those in the FTSE All-Share Index. Over the last 17 years, employee-owned companies have outperformed FTSE All-Share companies each year by an average of 10%. In the third quarter of 2009, for instance, employee-owned companies’ share prices were up 27.6% compared to FTSE All-Share companies share prices, which were up 21.3% over the quarter.

But we are still so stuck in our wretchedly unsustainable ways when it comes to ownership structures within the capitalist economy.

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Time to press the panic button?

Jonathon Porritt, February 5th 2010, Climate change, Forum founders

I’m still reeling from the surreal sight of Lord Whacko Monckton (the climate contrarians’ eccentric of choice), captured on Newsnight last night doing an imitation of Al Gore at a public meeting in Australia. Frightening stuff.

Whenever I see Monckton at work, it reminds me just how desperate people must be to have their doubts and prejudices about climate change affirmed by some public figure – indeed, by any public figure at this stage of the debate.

The politics of climate change in Australia are even worse that they are here in the UK. That may well be, paradoxically, because changes in their own micro-climates over the last 10 years have been so much more visible. And painful. And this has polarised the debate about whether these changes are primarily a consequence of man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, or primarily natural climate variability. The end result is that the Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, might have to call a general election to break the impasse on his proposals for a carbon-trading scheme.

Could it get that bad here in the UK? Very improbably, but the whole tenor of the debate has deteriorated so badly, so rapidly, that it's now a serious political headache, rather than a minor irritant.

The combination of the ‘climate gate’ fiasco at the University of East Anglia and the growing concerns about the workings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), broader concerns of the whole peer review process (the so-called ‘Gold Standard’ of scientific research), and the utter failure of Copenhagen has transformed the climate debate here in the UK.

Where they were once thought as contrarian outliers, both the Daily Mail and the Daily Express are now thought to be closely aligned with public opinion. Ed Miliband (the Secretary of State in the Dept of Energy and Climate Change) must be in despair.

So should we be pressing the panic button? I think we should. The damage done to the credibility not just of climate science but also of the UK’s entire approach to climate change is already serious – and getting worse. This could be extremely problematic in the run up to the general election.

So if I was Gordon Brown, I would be asking David Cameron and Nick Clegg to issue a joint invitation to Martin Rees, the President of the Royal Society, asking him to convene a high-level Scientific Panel to comment on ‘the state of the science’ two years from the publication of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report at the end of 2007.

Does it still stack up? What should people make of all these recent revelations? Is the Climate Change Act (to which all three political parties have signed up) still based on robust scientific foundations? Can people still have confidence in the way climate science drives climate policy?

Martin Rees would be asked to recruit three or four top scientists (reflecting different shades of opinion), a couple of business people (like James Dyson or Richard Lambert of the CBI), and a couple of scientifically-literate ‘pillars of the community’ in whom the general public has absolute trust. No NGOs, let alone campaigners!

Give them two months. Bang out a short, sharp report written for lay people, not for scientists. Blitz the media. Run a full-page ad in the Mail and Express for weeks on end – instead of today’s highly questionable ‘Act on CO2 ‘ ads.

Overkill? Possibly. It seems ludicrous that what is still by any standards a rock-solid scientific consensus should have to be shored up by such extreme measures. But if we don’t, might we be looking at an Aussie-style meltdown in public opinion in the near term?

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Selling a low-carbon life just got harder

Jonathon Porritt, December 21st 2009, Climate change, Forum founders, General, International

From Hopenhagen to Fiascohagen in 12 dire days. Though there are now as many brave faces out there as after defeat in a general election, to bill the Copenhagen accord as anything other than a failure is simply dishonest.

Of course it matters that China, India and the United States have, for the first time, formally recognised the need for “deep cuts” in emissions of CO2. Of course it’s a good thing that rich-world countries have committed “to a goal of mobilising $100 billion a year by 2020” to help the poor world to cope with climate change. And of course it’s critical that the science underpinning these two commitments has been strongly reconfirmed.

Unfortunately, that’s about it. Ed Miliband, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, may well be right in claiming that “there is a danger of too much negativity”, but we have to be realistic about what did and didn’t happen in Copenhagen. The accord itself has no formal standing, and there are no firm figures in it regarding either the scale or urgency of the cuts required, even though many countries are already signed-up to such cuts. There are no details as to how the $100 billion will be raised. Worst of all, there is no commitment to move from this desperately inadequate accord to a legally binding treaty over the next year.

Paradoxically, the greatest cause for hope lies in the depth of that failure. Before Copenhagen, many campaigners had argued that no agreement would be better than a weak agreement. And in effect, that’s exactly what has happened.

The shock of this is only just beginning to sink in — as is the realisation that there is still all to play for before the next conference in Mexico in a year’s time. By that time Barack Obama should have done his deal with the Senate, China should have got used to its new responsibilities as a global climate player and the EU should have recovered sufficiently from the recession to play a more influential leadership role.

It is intriguing to speculate that it might be David Cameron supporting the EU in that role rather than Gordon Brown. In an election year, the domestic fallout from Copenhagen will be intense. And who knows how individual citizens will react to such a confusing scene?

For Gordon Brown, the failure of Copenhagen will be a deep disappointment. He has worked tirelessly over the past 18 months to help to broker a real deal. British embassies around the world (and particularly in China and India) have put climate diplomacy right at the top of their agenda. Mr Miliband has become the most effective member of Mr Brown’s Cabinet, and he personally played a hugely significant role in Copenhagen. Credit where credit is due: on the international stage, no Government has done more to get a legally binding deal on climate change than the UK’s.

However, the Prime Minister will not now be able to lay claim to some Copenhagen breakthrough. The UK’s unforgiving media will give him little slack in that regard. There is no reassuring “global deal” to provide cover for some of the more controversial and unpopular policies that the Government is now bringing forward — on air passenger duty, for instance, or zero-carbon housing. Peter Mandelson’s new-found enthusiasm for a “green industrial revolution” might just slip down that old fixer’s list of things that really matter in a pre-election period.

But there’s no political upside in any of that for David Cameron. Indeed, I suspect that the fallout will prove to be more problematic for Mr Cameron than for Mr Brown. It will give succour to that weird bunch of “grandees” (David Davis, Peter Lilley, Lord Lawson of Blaby et al) who have become increasingly critical of Mr Cameron’s intelligent leadership on climate change.

It will provide new ammunition for the out-and-out “contrarians” scattered through the UK media who remain unpersuaded by the overwhelming consensus on the science of climate change, and who do so much to reinforce people’s uncertainty and confusion.

Though I have no doubt that Mr Cameron will see off the Lawson brigade, he has a much tougher challenge on his hands with local Conservatives. Many of them do not share his enthusiasm for a low-carbon economy, do not want to sign up to the targets in the Climate Change Act, and continue to treat wind farms as if they were invading aliens from another planet. This is not just “a “generation thing”; some of the most vociferous critics of Mr Cameron’s blue-green politics are young thrusters for whom concern for the environment is seen as an ideological aberration.

All of which, I fear, will make it even harder to persuade individuals to play their small but still crucial part in addressing climate change. That feeling of disempowerment (“what difference can we make when China is single-handedly trashing the climate anyway?”) will be reinforced. Politicians will have to get even smarter in making the case — for improved energy efficiency in the home (saving you a lot of money), reduced car use (less congestion, healthier lifestyles), less waste and even more recycling (saving even more money), and more holidays at home rather than abroad (less hassle, good for the economy).

The fact that low-carbon lifestyles are both healthier and cheaper gives politicians plenty to work with. But the past two weeks in Copenhagen have not made that task any easier.

This article was originally printed in The Times, 21 December 2009

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Booze and bracket-bashing – inside the real Copenhagen ‘junket’

Jonathon Porritt, December 10th 2009, Forum founders, International

As you read the daily reports from Copenhagen, spare a thought for the hundreds of environmental and development activists out there, keeping the cause of ‘climate justice’ under the noses of government delegations, UN Officials and the media.

It always amuses me when I hear sarcastic journalists refer to these conferences as ‘junkets’ or ‘jamborees’.

In reality they are more like a descent into hell, with delegates surrounded on the one hand by the demons of utter mind-numbing tedium, and on the other by the gremlins of mischievous government delegations intent on emasculating any final agreement.

Listen to Jonathon's phonecast of this blog

The formal process is focussed on the draft text, which summarises that agreement with much of its text still in brackets. These brackets can only be removed via unanimous agreement between all government delegations.

It’s often the same ones (from Saudi Arabia onwards!) that stick to their oil-drenched arguments, yielding as little as they can possibly get away with short of total opprobrium descending upon them as other delegations get angrier and angrier.

That goes on for days, until the elected politicians bowl up next week, and it starts all over again.

The only escape for knackered greenies is alcohol, liver-numbing quantities of which are consumed every evening.

That’s what life is like for the poor sods that have to do the work in the formal conference. Far more stimulation is available for those attending the informal, largely NGO conference (the Klimaforum in Copenhagen), buzzing away on the margins of the government negotiations.

Every now and again positive messages flow out of the NGO forum to cause a bit of a stir inside the conference, but nothing like as often or as powerfully as the negative energy flowing in the other direction.

Which is exactly what happened on Tuesday, when a document leaked to the Guardian revealed a ‘secret text’ put together by a group of rich countries (including the UK and the US), which pretty much undermines every single aspect of the tortuous negotiations that have been going on over the last two years.

Inside the conference venue the bracket-bashing goes on uninterrupted. But when something like that happens, everything else goes pear-shaped. Anger, incredulity, rage, despair and dark, demonic humour take over until the alcohol kicks in.

Some junket!

More phonecasts available here

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Time to renew fight against nuclear distractions

Jonathon Porritt, December 8th 2009, Climate change, Forum founders, General, Leadership

It was Teddy Goldsmith’s “Memorial Celebration” on Tuesday last week. 

I think everyone thought it was extraordinarily important to have a chance to think back over the life’s work of this extraordinary man.  From the mid-1960s onwards, he was often the first to raise big sustainability issues, to pursue them ferociously through the pages of The Ecologist (established in 1969 and “virtualised” 40 years later in 2009), and to keep confronting people with the often uncomfortable logic of what it means to fashion genuinely sustainable lives for an ever-expanding number of human beings on an ever-shrinking planet. 

Sadly, I didn’t see much of Teddy in his last few years.  But he was often present in my thinking about different issues, particularly in terms of his views on population, economic growth, agriculture, GM and so on.  And nowhere more powerfully than in the renewed debate about the potential role of nuclear power in a more sustainable world. 

Right now, those who still feel that nuclear power has no role to play in a genuinely sustainable world are completely downcast at having to fight those same old battles all over again – this time with the added problem of a growing number of serious environmentalists who’ve thrown in their lot (holding their noses as they go) with the nuclear option.

It has to be said that there’s no enthusiasm for the fight.  How could there be?  And at the moment, there’s no clear sense of where the leadership is going to come from. 

More than ever, we’re going to miss that utterly uncompromising, forensic focus that Teddy brought to bear on the nuclear industry – especially in terms of Windscale/Sellafield, Dounreay, Sizewell and so on.

Without Teddy, who is going to rub people’s noses in the continuing scandal of nuclear waste mismanagement, and remind people that this government promised time after time that there would be no expansion of nuclear power in this country until it had sorted out the problems of nuclear waste?

Who is going to hold to account politicians and industry leaders for whom secrecy remains the default mindset?

Who is going to expose the near-fraudulent accounting practices endemic within the nuclear industry that continue to blind people to the true economic costs and penalties involved in nuclear power?

Who is going to interrogate the philosophical and moral implications of one generation imposing on the next a set of problems and security hazards for which they themselves have absolutely no solution?

And who is going to take on those sincere but utterly misguided environmentalists who’ve “gone nuclear” over the last few years because they feel there’s no alternative?

Sustainable development activists can’t afford to be absolutist about new technology developments.  When the facts change, we should indeed change our minds.  Even in the Green Party (after very lively discussions with Teddy himself!), I argued that we should be open to the theoretical possibility that evolved nuclear technologies, at some point in the future, might have a contribution to make to a genuinely sustainable energy mix.

And who can tell what lies ahead in that regard.  Once issues regarding cost, public subsidy, waste, decommissioning, proliferation, vulnerability to terrorism and availability of uranium have all been addressed and sorted, maybe that day will dawn.

But it hasn’t dawned yet.  And there’s nothing in the latest reactor designs currently under consideration that tells me that it’s going to dawn any time soon.

As Teddy would be pointing out right now, by the time that day does dawn, it will almost certainly be too late anyway.  And we will have wasted all that time and all that money fixated on our nuclear fantasies, and failing to do the obvious sustainable stuff on efficiency and renewables.

So I don’t doubt that those still opposed to the nuclear option will be drawing down on Teddy’s astonishing life work, as they reluctantly pick up their cudgels all over again.

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