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Porritt condemns “dogmatic” decision to axe money-saving SDC
Jonathon Porritt, July 23rd 2010, Forum founders, General, Public Sector
As the former chair of the Sustainable Development Commission, I’m clearly going to be a bit biased about the government’s decision yesterday to get rid of the commission. So I’ve been working really hard to put myself in Ministers’ shoes in terms of the ‘rationale’ they’ve advanced for this reprehensible decision.
They’ve put forward four justifications:
1. It will save money
The SDC costs the taxpayer around £4 million a year, around 50% of which comes from Defra. The rest comes from the Devolved Administrations and other Whitehall Departments – all of which wanted to carry on working with the SDC. As George Monbiot has pointed out, the SDC’s advice on reducing costs through increased efficiency has already saved the Government many, many times that negligible amount, and would have gone on doing so year after year.
2. Sustainable development is now mainstreamed across government
Defra Ministers are now claiming that sustainable development has been embedded in every department. In other words, no specialist capability at the centre is any longer required, simply because the government ‘gets it’.
Like hell it does. To hear Caroline Spelman, Secretary of State in Defra, make such a totally fatuous claim after a few weeks in power is irritating beyond belief. She clearly knows nothing of the constant slog required (of the SDC and many other organisations) to achieve the limited traction that is all that can be laid claim to today.
There’s a rich irony here. The SDC is a UK-wide body. Neither Wales nor Scotland was in favour of getting rid of the commission, no doubt because both countries have done an infinitely better job than Whitehall on ‘mainstreaming’ sustainable development.
3. It will avoid duplication
This is a bit trickier, simply because the SDC does a number of different things. It advises ministers – and there are indeed lots of other people who do that. But rarely if ever from an integrated sustainable development perspective.
It helps countless public sector bodies (from the Audit Commission to the Department of Education, from Local Authorities to Primary Care Trusts in the NHS) to make sense of sustainable development, and no other government body does any of that.
And it scrutinises government performance on a completely independent basis across the whole sustainable development agenda – not just on climate change. And no other body does that.
4. Sustainable development is too important to delegate to an external body
It’s worth recording Caroline Spelman’s actual words here:
“Together with Chris Huhne, I am determined to take the lead role in driving the sustainable agenda across the whole of government, and I’m not willing to delegate this responsibility to an external body.”
Even after nine years working with dozens of government ministers, I’m astonished at such utterly brazen cynicism. The only thing Mrs Spelman has done so far as Secretary of State at Defra is publish a new strategy for the department. This has not one serious reference to sustainable development in it. Such is the depth of her concern.
If Defra’s next step is to get rid of what’s left of its own internal Sustainable Development Unit, then it will have literally no capacity to ‘drive the sustainable agenda’ even within Defra, let alone ‘across the whole of government’. And how can you drive anything if you haven’t the first clue what it actually means? And it just got rid of the only part of the system capable of providing you with a basic primer for beginners?
So let’s not beat around the bush: their justification for getting rid of the SDC is transparently vacuous, if not downright dishonest. This is an ideological decision – in other words, a decision driven by dogma not by evidence-based, rational analysis.
And the only conceivable reason for allowing dogma to dominate in this way is that the government doesn’t want anyone independently auditing its performance on sustainable development – let alone a properly-resourced, indisputably expert body operating as ‘a critical friend’ on an inside track within government.
I don’t suppose the Prime Minister was even consulted about such a footling little matter. But it’s clear that his advisors hadn’t the first idea about the kind of signal this dogma-driven decision sends out, ensuring that his claim that this will be the ‘greenest government ever’ is in deepest jeopardy.
It’s too early to make any definitive judgement about how the green agenda will fare under the coalition. But it’s not encouraging. ‘Greenest ever’ has to mean something substantive. Simply smearing a sickly ideological slime over everything just won’t cut it.
Jonathon Porritt was chair of the Sustainable Development Commission from 2000 to 2009
Calling all creatives: design the future we need!
Fiona Bennie, June 25th 2010, General
The creative industries are in danger of being caught “napping” on sustainability, according to Lord Puttnam. They risk waking up too late to find the world "has changed out of all recognition".
The filmmaker and politician was speaking at our Creative Industries Sustainability Beacon event, last week - the launch of a challenging project to bring together leaders from the world of fashion, performing arts, film, architecture, design and all the other creative industries, to examine the future of their businesses in a rapidly changing and uncertain world.
Lord Puttnam was “personally convinced that climate change is already the single greatest challenge facing all of us – ultimately dwarfing our present economic woes...” But he said climate change and other sustainability challenges present a raft of opportunities for all creative industries and their “attitudes and skills… can really help stimulate change.”
This project sets out to help the creative industries understand and seize those opportunities. Water scarcity; energy security; sustainable consumption; population growth; social wellbeing are just a few of the issues which need to be tackled urgently – and, we believe, creatively – for societies near and far to thrive.
Following Puttnam’s opening address, Jonathon Porritt led a Talkaoke debate from the ‘donut of chat’, surrounded by an impressive line-up of contributors (giving Glastonbury a run for its money).
Franny Armstrong kicked off by showing us the carbon footprint of her brilliant film The Age of Stupid. (Haven’t seen it? Get stuck in, you will not be disappointed.) Turns out Franny’s film emitted “one percent of the emissions of the Hollywood film, The Day After Tomorrow”. How cool is that? The film doesn’t lack anything, it’s just as well-made, well-produced and successful (Box office No.1). And therein lies the proof, it can be done. We now have the task of making her model simple and transferrable across the rest of the film industry.
The Age of Stupid - Pete Postlethwaite stars as a man living alone in the devastated future world of 2055, looking at old footage from 2008 and asking: why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance?
By the virtual magic of Skype, Tim Brown then appeared, from the IDEO studio in San Francisco. As CEO of IDEO, one of the most influential global design consultancies, he’s been in the product and service design world for years. Interestingly, he started out with a confession: that the best part of his career now resides in landfill. The products he has lovingly created over the years have played their part in creating our fast consumption-obsessed world. He now views product design from a systems perspective, something he believes is “important for design but essential for tackling climate change”.
We couldn’t agree more as it becomes ever clearer that we urgently need to change our relationship with the material world to meet the coming resource crunch and deliver low-carbon lifestyles. IDEO’s Living Climate Change website is a place for designers to discuss what they can bring to the debate, and why they should play a fundamental role in finding the solutions we so desperately need.
Frances Corner then boldly answered the debate question, “Can the creative industries lead us to a sustainable future?”, with “a resounding ‘yes’”. As Head of College for the London College of Fashion, Frances at the heart of budding fashion talent. She pointed out that “education has to be part of the way that we address sustainability, otherwise we won’t be able to bring about the constructive persuasion we need”. The new Centre for Sustainable Fashion, which sits within the LCF is working on just that. And their international student awards, Fashioning the Future 2010, are doing a great job at spreading their work far and wide.
“There is absolutely nothing inevitable about the future” said Michael Pawlyn, Director of Exploration Architecture and bio-mimicry guru. He urges us to think about and design the future that we want, not to simply let it unfold. He uses biomimicry, a process that “looks to nature as a source of inspiration for new solutions.” For example, he is exploring the nifty way the Namibian fog-basking beetle stays hydrated in the desert, and using the learning from that natural system in the development of his Sahara Forest Project. He believes designers and architects need to make three transformations: “radical increases in resource efficiency; shifting from a carbon to a solar economy; and transforming from a linear, wasteful, polluting way of using resources to a completely closed-loop model.”
A Namibian fog-basking Beetle
And last but by no means least, Dan Burgess - ex-Naked Planet, now Pipeline Ideas – took us on a rollercoaster of examples of sustainability comms, including photographer Chris Jordan’s stark images of birds’ stomachs full of plastic waste. Dan feels that many people in the creative industries are “wasting their energy” and should get involved in the sustainability agenda, support the great work that’s already going on and put their skills to good use. He reckons we need to get out there and “agitate”.
Photographer Chris Jordan, using shocking images to make his point.
You’re all invited to have your say and contribute to the online community, where you can watch a video of event highlights and share resources. We’ll be running a series of regional workshops in the autumn and launching the project findings shortly after. Click here for more information on this project.
End of the beginning for the class of 2010
Celia Cole, June 23rd 2010, General, Leadership
We know it's coming. The signs are everywhere. Excitement. Stress. Anxiety. Exhaustion. The clock is ticking down the last six weeks and we Forum scholars are left wishing we could squeeze just a few more hours into the day, a few more days into the week.
I knew it was coming when talk of the 'j' word (job) crept into seminars, discussions and to-do lists. Preparations for life after Forum and our Masters in Leadership for Sustainable Development began with a fantastic career session: a professional life coach helped us identify the necessary ingredients for personal success and how to plot the journey ahead of us. CV sessions and job advice have since followed, and now it's down to us.
I knew it was coming when, despite having only just settled into a manic and creative month on The Guardian Environment Desk, I was already walking away from the final placement of the year. But what a year of placement experiences: from food self-sufficiency in Middlesbrough Borough Council, to sustainable planning in the Environment Agency, to the plight of hill sheep farmers' at Friends of the Earth, and sustainable food chains behind Sainsbury's, I have learned an incredible amount. When you add my five placements to those of the other eleven scholars, we have generated 60 months of shared experience, invaluable knowledge and lifelong learning.
I knew it was coming when the evenings and weekends started to disappear. It is June, which is crunch time for delivering our completed sustainable business plans. Combined with a personal leadership analysis and reflection on our year's learning, these form the equivalent of a masters dissertation and, I would argue, are more valuable. Each business plan aims to tackle society’s sustainability woes (or improve a few of them at least!) And, to top it all off, just a few days before we graduate we'll present these business plans before a 'dragon's den'!
I knew it was coming as we waved goodbye to our tutors at the end of our second and final teaching module at the Leadership Trust. Six of the most enlightening and enjoyable days of the course were spent at this centre for leadership excellence in Ross on Wye; practising, studying, and reflecting upon our personal leadership development. And the experience helped us scholars bond as a team.
I knew it was coming this side of Easter when one big test could be ticked off. It was my turn, with fellow scholar Sol, to plan the post-placement event after a month working within in the business sector. Drawing together sustainability professionals from Unilever, BP, Bupa, BT, Sainsbury's and others, the event focused on how sustainable goods and services could be consumed by the mainstream citizen, and in particular, how reusable water bottles and car club memberships could move from a niche to a mainstream market.
I knew it was coming when the final schedule arrived, and time no longer seemed indefinite. Core seminars in science and technology, ethics and values, people and community, and economics, are tailing off. Our ever impressive list of speakers, from social entrepreneurs to political experts, continues, but not for long. A new addition to the timetable has arrived; graduation.
I knew it was coming when it felt like I'd been here before; next year’s applicants have been welcomed, the interviews conducted and our successors announced.
So, we know it's coming. We're very aware. But it's not quite over yet. Ahead lie hours of business planning, big discussions on sustainability, even bigger debates on leadership, one or two essays, a few thousand words, plenty of reflections, an inevitable panic and certainly one large celebration.
We can see the end but the journey is far from over. In fact, come July, the real journey we have been preparing for will finally begin.
Green jam tomorrow, as budget looks for better measures of progress
Ben Tuxworth, June 22nd 2010, Finance, General
The coalition’s first budget headlines are all about tax rises and benefit cuts, but beneath the surface there are some interesting hints of deeper change towards a green economy.
The environment certainly didn’t make the headlines, and was hardly mentioned in George Osborne’s speech, but in the full text of the budget, the Treasury has done the unthinkable, and hinted it might dismantle its own obsession with GDP growth. David Cameron’s flirtation with the idea of ‘general wellbeing’ and better metrics for progress seemed to disappear from the rhetoric in the run-up to the election, but on page 10 of the budget they resurface in a box about economic performance: “The Government is committed to developing broader indicators of wellbeing and sustainability, with work currently underway to review how the Stiglitz, Sen and Fitoussi report [on measurement of wellbeing and sustainability] should affect the ... indicators collected by Defra, and with the ONS and the Cabinet Office leading work on taking forward the report’s agenda across the UK.” Sounds great, but for now it’s all rather exploratory, and this box is the only place where sustainability is used in connection with the environment – the other eight mentions are all in the more limited economic sense.
The nearest we come to concrete green measures is a short section of the budget’s 121 pages devoted to the low-carbon economy. Here the government acknowledges once again that climate change is one of the most serious threats that the world faces, and suggests that the UK needs £200 billion of investment in low-carbon energy over the next decade. To do this, reform of the energy market is in the pipeline, with proposals to be published ‘in the autumn’ for reform of the climate change levy (to better support the carbon price), to be brought into law via the 2011 Finance Bill. There are also firmer plans for the creation of a green investment bank (but not ‘til after the spending review) and promises of a green deal for households, including pay-as-you-save schemes, to hasten the uptake of home energy efficiency measures.
The government will also "explore changes to the aviation tax system" such as switching from a per-passenger to a per-plane levy, and will consult on major changes, but for now there is to be no increase in fuel duty for drivers. And there are a couple of tweaks to the structure of company car taxation to favour lower-emitting vehicles, and the promise of legislation in the autumn for enhanced capital allowance for zero carbon goods vehicles.
Does all this add up to a green revolution? And in the round, is this a progressive budget, as the Chancellor claimed? Campaigners on social issues will see the loss of disability benefits (the Disability Living Allowance will be subject to ‘objective medical assessment’ – in time expected to save over £1billion), and the failure to increase duty on cigarettes and alcohol as a step back. For the poorest - pensioners and the unemployed - the VAT increase will hit hard. And much of the cutting is set for October, when another statement will flesh out how ‘unprotected’ government departments - which include environment and energy/climate change - are expected to cut 25% over the next four years. Tough times ahead.
Should men leave technology to women?
James Taplin, June 18th 2010, General
I can’t listen to the radio, eat breakfast, AND talk to my family at the same time. If I’m listening to music, I can just about manage the mechanics of walking but making intelligent routing changes is always a challenge. And if I’m on the phone, all other systems effectively shut down. My wife, on the other hand, appears to view dealing with complex financial accounting online, chatting on the phone, monitoring our small daughters, and preparing supper all at the same time as an entry-level multi-tasking problem. She is a wonderful woman & I’m in awe of her.
Curiously, however, I feel I can write a blog, check facebook, shop for a new cycle jersey online, and download a free album all at the same time, albeit inefficiently. So it seems that I can multi-task after my own fashion, so long as it is all through the same portal. I don’t think that I’m particularly unusual in my simplicity, and I mention this not as a plea to other men out there to back me up by admitting that they too find reading and eating mutually exclusive activities, but because of a growing unease I feel about how communications technology is affecting the sexes.
Tanya is the very lovely lady who cleans our offices. She usually has her mobile phone tucked into her headscarf, and for two or more hours she chats with friends as she goes about her business. For her, communications technology adds a layer of richness and entertainment over an otherwise routine job, and enhances the experience. It opens the world up to her, and the people in it.
I leave the office and get on the tube. Many people about me are plugged into some sort of device or other – a number of them with ill-fitting earphones, and I secretly fantasize about a society in which I could cut their cords and get away with it. Or even if could do it anyway, and the aural relief from the tinny spluttering beat would encourage my fellow commuters to back me up in the ensuing fracas. Looking about, I come to the conclusion that they wouldn’t, and not just because it would contravene tube-rule one of never consciously acknowledging any unpleasant ’incident’*. No, the real reason is that I happen to be in a male-heavy area, and most of them are already so engrossed in their blackberry / DS / iPod-Pad-Phone that the real world has shrunk and contracted to a few square centimetres of bright colour which they caress obsessively. If they’re largely oblivious to their few female companions, likewise physically engaged with their technology but still valiantly attempting to maintain real-time human conversation with their Neanderthal grunting colleagues, what possible hope would I have?
The contrast with Tanya is complete. And although this is a slightly extreme distinction, taken in conjunction with my own experience, it does lead me to wonder whether communications technologies shrink male horizons & engagement with the here and now, whilst expanding the same for women. And if so, what will the implications of that be in a world where digital communications are constant and ubiquitous, where we’re always ‘on’, and where the clamour for competing attention is only going to get stronger? What will it mean for social interactions between the sexes as men retreat further into digital domains whilst women get the best of both worlds? And should we be seriously rethinking when & where we consume communications, recognising that unconstrained connectivity is a dangerous thing, especially to men?
* Even, and this is where true mastery of the tube rules comes in, when you have your nose unpleasantly crushed into said ‘incident’s’ armpit, and your foot has gone to sleep under the vast briefcase of the halitosic man nuzzling your ear.
Vorsprung durch Frauen
Ilka Weissbrod, June 17th 2010, General, Innovation, Metrics
It’s good to hear gender equality being talked about widely again, especially by people in my age group (30+). I’ve overheard many a discussion – and of course took part in them – and the central point is always the same: the higher you climb on the job ladder, the manlier the air. Organisations like the OECD and the ILO agree.
We at Forum for the Future are in a privileged position: four of the seven members of our senior management team are women. I know that I am incredibly lucky to have four different role models I can look up to and, believe me, my girlfriends envy me.
It’s very clear that this is quite unusual. For example, for two whole weeks I was the only woman present in all my external meetings. When I was a kid my dad said to my sister and me that we’d need to be better than men to go the same distance in the professions we chose. I always laughed and said women make up 50% of the population, when I grow up, surely, I won’t have to worry about gender issues anymore. Well… I was wrong.
It’s not just a matter of equality, there’s also the content women bring. The humble, award-winning astrophysicist Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell aptly put it in the recent BBC documentary ‘Great Minds’: “Women simply bring a slightly different view of the world to the table”.
Some businesses do share this view. René Obermann, Chairman of Deutsche Telekom, said earlier this year: “We’ll simply be better with more women at the top.” This wasn’t just rhetoric. Since March 2010 Deutsche Telekom has set a target of at least 30% women in senior management. This is supported by a substantial HR implementation programme: university recruitment and selection processes, talent pools and internal high-potential development programmes are now all geared to reach this target. The business has also enhanced its policies on flexible working, parental leave (in Germany both parents share a chunk of ‘maternity’ leave), childcare.
Here in the UK, Kingfisher has started to report on the number of women in management positions. But the overall picture is bleak. Cranfield University reported in its annual FTSE Board report that in 2009 only six of the FTSE 100 companies had 30% or more women on their Boards. Sixty-three companies had one woman, or none, on their Boards.
I think that programmes like those at Deutsche Telekom will help women in my generation to overcome barriers to gender equality and, ultimately, bring more women into the boardrooms.
There are other gender-related postings on this Forum blog - for example from Sara Parkin. But, so far, we at the Forum haven’t systematically addressed gender issues in our work. Interestingly both Deutsche Telekom and Kingfisher report on gender through their sustainability programmes. So they see gender equality as a part of the sustainability picture.
Should we do the same and routinely encourage all our Partner organisations to work towards a quota of 30% of female Board members? Or even go beyond this number? Norway, for example, has a government quota of 40% for all public companies. Or should we at the Forum stay well clear of this debate? I’d like to hear your views.
Smooth operator?
Martin Wright, June 15th 2010, General
So just how clever is Barack Obama, eh?
There we were, puzzling over the waves of factitious “kick ass” outrage pouring from the Oval Office, when suddenly everything became clear: it was all a cunning ruse to trick redneck America into backing green energy.
“Our continued dependence on fossil fuels will jeopardise our national security”, intoned the President. “It will smother our planet… put our economy and our environment at risk. We cannot delay any longer, and that is why I am asking for your help…”.
Slick (pun intended) or what?
At a stroke, a whole slew of liberal initiatives on energy and climate which had been widely derided by an increasingly confident Republican right were repackaged as pure patriotism: all wrapped up in the Stars and Stripes.
It’s been tried before, of course: George Bush famously urged America to overcome its oil addiction in the name of energy security. But that was somehow less impressive, coming after he’d tried and largely failed to secure abundant easy oil by force majeure in Iraq. Besides, you never quite believed a Texan steeped in gasoline really had his heart in all that greenery in the first place. Especially not with Dick ‘Halliburton’ Cheney just that heartbeat away…
With Barack, though, it’s a bit more polished. First comes the fury at the easy target – and let’s face it, they don’t come much easier than that pantomine Hollywood villain, the ‘toffee-nosed’ Brit. It’s sustained just long enough for the slick to hit the sand: a direct assault on homeland security, on primetime Fox News.
Only then, with the country crying out for action and the Brits duly whipped, does Operator Obama slide the green stuff into the mix...
OK, so the banality of day to day politics, especially when lurching from crisis to crisis, is rarely as Machiavellian as I’ve just described. But those of us fearing that the once super-cool President was losing it, big time, might take some comfort from the latest developments.
And at the very least, you’d have to agree that the sheen of oil on the Louisiana beaches could yet turn out to have one hell of a silver lining.
Population - time to face the future
Sara Parkin, June 9th 2010, Futures, General
It’s perverse that in all the debate about how to achieve low-carbon economies that still bring satisfying lifestyles to all, the absolute numbers of people involved get little mention. Certainly not in policy circles.
Yet just as our growing consumption of energy outstrips any gains we make in efficiency so growing numbers of people outstrip gains made in not only energy but also food and water security.
More people make everything more difficult because building extra housing, hospitals, schools and other infrastructure (phones, roads, railways etc.) comes on top of adapting what we have already to cope with the floods and droughts of future climate uncertainty.
Which is why Forum for the Future has brought out a new report: Growing Pains: population and sustainability in the UK. The ONS projects that on current trends UK population will increase by 9 million to reach 70 million by 2030, so we’ve brought forward some of the latest thinking in order to bust a few population myths and to promote sensible conversations about the different choices we face.
And it looks as if putting the brakes on the UK population might be one of the easier things we could do to achieve a sustainable society– but only if there is an open and constructive discussion about it, plus a deeper understanding of how it is relevant to achieving a wide range of policy goals.
So, to set the ball rolling, we’ve come up with seven recommendations for policy makers and decision-makers everywhere:
1. Plan for what is coming. Even if lower projections are met, there will be more people in 2030 than now.
2. Use the resources we do use more efficiently. Massive innovation and opportunities here.
3. Rethink ‘growth’ so it means growth of well-being and quality of life not consumption.
4. Develop new attitudes to ageing. People living longer and healthier lives is a matter for celebration, and deserves more imagination in the way we all live our lives.
5. Enhance family planning. There is something wrong if a third of pregnancies are unplanned - in the UK and globally.
6. Hold an objective discussion on immigration. Reclaim the debate from the extremists and address the underlying concerns about jobs, equality, and housing.
7. Have an open and sensible debate. Population is only controversial because we shy off having a well-informed and thoughtful debate that brings the topic into mainstream planning for the UK’s future
What sort of person would act sustainably?
Helen Clarkson, June 2nd 2010, General
Recently on this blog I asked the question ‘Are you what you do?’ – how far is our identity tied up in our working lives? The question crossed my mind again this week when Tony Hayward, boss of BP, declared he’d like the oil spill to end because ‘I’d like my life back’. It might seem a nuanced point compared to the loss of life, environmental destruction and economic disaster now facing the Gulf of Mexico, but I couldn’t help noticing that he seemed to refer to his life as something outside his work. Does his very highly paid job not constitute a core part of his life? Or does it only do so when things are going well?
Whatever you think about that, the question of our identities and how we create them is endlessly fascinating. It comes up again in the new book “Switch – How to Change Things When Change is Hard” by Chip and Dan Heath, which is about overcoming our inbuilt resistance to change.
For those of us trying to work on the systemic changes we need to transition to a sustainable way of life, there’s lots in the book on which to reflect. They prescribe, for example, getting in touch with people’s emotions to provoke change: does a graph showing rising carbon parts per million stir the soul sufficiently to provoke such a change in people? They also suggest helping set the path – not just arguing for change but showing what people need to do.
But they also get into the notion of identity and the need to get people to rethink their identity so that they become the person who acts in the new way.
They give as an example a (very sneaky) psychology experiment from the 1960s. Two psychologists – Jonathan Freedman and Scott Fraser from Stamford University – got a researcher to go door-to-door in a neighbourhood and ask people to put a sign up on their lawn saying “Drive Carefully”. The sign was a real eyesore and only 17 per cent of people said yes. However, in a parallel experiment they went to houses first with a petition which they asked people to sign which said “Keep California beautiful”. They returned two weeks later to ask about the sign, and about half of them said yes – an increase of about three-fold.
Freedman and Fraser concluded: “Once [the home owner] has agreed to the request, his attitude may change, he may become, in his own eyes, the kind of person who does this sort of thing, who agrees to requests made by strangers, who takes action on things he believes in, who co-operates with good causes”.
I think this is highly relevant for the sort of behaviour changes we’re trying to create – whether at the societal, organisational or individual level. So what sort of person would act sustainably? And how do we get more people to take on that identity?
Defra’s framework for pro-environmental behaviour divides the public into seven clusters, each sharing a distinct set of attitudes and beliefs towards the environment. The model looks at the sorts of intervention that could be effective for each cluster. But what if we tried to move people into different clusters? If we understand what makes people identify as ‘Positive Greens’ and more importantly how we get more people into this category, they will be more likely to decide to change behaviours for themselves.
Mix blue and yellow: get green?
Ben Tuxworth, May 17th 2010, Climate change, General, Public Sector
Environment policy didn’t break the surface during the UK election campaign. How will it fare in a coalition of parties at opposite ends of the political spectrum?
Amongst the many surprises was the near absence of environment from the parties’ campaigns and the first ever prime-ministerial debates. Does it mean the British care less about the environment than in previous years? Apparently not: the share of the green vote held up and the Green party won its first ever seat in the British Parliament (Caroline Lucas, Leader of the party and long time Member of the European Parliament, taking Brighton from Labour).
But with the parties fairly close to each other on much of environment policy, there were more points to be scored by talking about social policy (we are bracing ourselves for Conservative leader David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’, whatever that means) and of course, dealing with the deficit where we are up there with the European basket cases like Greece, Spain and Portugal.
Having torn lumps out of each other for months on these and other issues, our identikit party leaders now find themselves round the table in Britain’s first true coalition government in 65 years. I’ll spare you the constitutional niceties of how that came about. Suffice to say that political commentators, having had to speculate wildly for several days about what the outcome of the election might be, now find themselves, along with the new government in largely uncharted waters. In a cabinet of 23, Liberal Democrats hold five posts, including the responsibility for Energy and Climate Change, which has gone to Chris Huhne, millionaire businessman and one time contestant for the party leadership.
This appointment throws into sharp relief the strategic and tactical questions this coalition raises for the future programme of the government, not least on environmental policy. Despite substantial areas of common ground – on the need to cut emissions, boost renewable energy generation, and create a ‘green bank’ for investment in cleantech for example - the Lib Dems have long been opposed to the replacement of Britain’s ageing fleet of nuclear reactors, whilst the Tories see nuclear as the mainstay of both emissions reduction and future energy security in the UK.
This issue is such a clear divide, that in the formal agreement about the coalition the issue is dealt with directly, with a bizarre result. The government (i.e. Huhne) will bring forward a ‘national planning statement’ which would give permission for new nuclear to be built, but then Lib Dems (including Huhne) would be allowed to abstain from the vote bringing it into force. This in effect means that the Conservatives can push it through on their own, whilst the Lib Dems have (just about) a path of dignity in opposing it and allowing it.
What Green supporters who voted Lib Dem for their anti-nuclear stance will make of this is anyone’s guess. In any case, both parties are agreed that there should be no public money for nuclear power, and since no nuclear power plant has been built, ever, without such subsidy, it will be interesting to see if any of the utility companies that were lining up to build the new capacity will still find it so appealing. Lib Dems are presumably hoping not.
Elsewhere the picture seems a bit clearer, and generally positive for the environment. Campaigners are elated at the scrapping of Labour’s plans for a third runway at Heathrow. The coalition agreement makes positive noises about a new high speed rail network – though it’s hard to see how that will be paid for any time soon. Though there’s no new target on the proportion of energy from renewables, investment in marine power and anaerobic digestion also gets a mention, as does a smart grid to link it all up, smart meters to make us all more frugal in using it, and other measures to boost energy efficiency in the home. And along with the promise of public investment in carbon capture and storage and a floor price for carbon comes an undertaking to prevent new coal-fired power without sufficient CCS to meet a demanding emissions standard.
Some cynics have suggested that Lib Dems have been given jobs that are either so marginal to the Conservative project that they don’t matter, or require them to dip their hands in the blood of ‘dealing with the deficit’ and so alienate their supporter base. A more nuanced view is that the coalition has enabled Cameron to do what he could not have done with a majority, giving him a reason to be more positive about the environment and Europe and move his party further onto the centre ground. If he succeeds in finally decontaminating the Tory brand in this way, they argue, he will have laid the foundation for successive Conservative governments for many years to come.
Whatever the motivation, the new team have started with a bang. Cameron swiftly announced that the government will cut its own emissions by 10% in the next 12 months. Speaking to staff at the Department for Energy and Climate Change he said ‘I want this to be the greenest government ever’. Meanwhile Huhne took up the reins at DECC, promising to put energy security ‘at the heart of the UK’s national security strategy’ and to ‘fundamentally change how we supply and use energy in Britain'. Amen to that.
This blog first appeared in Grist
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