Changing our culture to achieve sustainability…..

The Worldwatch institute have just released a fascinating – and lengthy – publication on ‘Transforming Cultures’ as part of their ‘State of the World’ series.

It covers a wide range of issues, from the environmental & wellbeing advantages of working fewer hours per week, to the role of education, business, religions and Government in the transformation to a sustainable society.

A free preview version – with a number of full chapters, including the one on working time, is available from here; the full 268 page report costs $9.95 for the pdf.

Commission nominees give written responses to Parliament’s questions

Next week in Brussels the European Parliament’s committees will be cross-examining the nominees for the new Commission – the timetable is here. The Parliament has sent written questions to the nominees already, and has now published their responses on their Hearings web site.

The Environment nominee Janez Potočnik says in his response that his “three priorities .. would be promoting a green economy, halting the loss of biodiversity and implementing and improving existing environmental legislation.”

He also puts a welcome emphasis on the importance of making Europe more resource efficient, which is a priority for my work at Friends of the Earth (see our Resources & Consumption campaign web page for more info):

Resource efficiency will be a critical component of any strategy to protect our environment and enhance our competitiveness. It will mean putting in place the right mix of smart regulation, incentives and market-based mechanisms to foster eco-innovation and sustainable consumption and production, finding ways to promote the changes needed which fully respect our levels of environmental ambition. This will include presenting action plans for eco- innovation, environmental technologies and the next phase of Sustainable Consumption and Production to make the EU more resource efficient.

He also acknowledges that environmental policy is not about selecting one “silver bullet” – ‘If we are to achieve ambitious environmental objectives, we must act on many policy fronts.’

Interesting post on different approaches to foreign affairs between Commission and governments

The ‘Charlemagne’ blog from the Economist has an interesting post discussing what he learnt from his contacts as he wrote an article about the new EU representative for foreign affairs, who heads up the new External Action Service (EAS), and the issue of who should be in the driving seat, the Commission or EU governments:

‘One is the very deep cultural difference between the European Commission and the national governments, when it comes to foreign policy, or “external relations” in the Brussels jargon.

National diplomats tend to see the world, ultimately, in rather Hobbesian terms. Strip away the talk of co-operation and values, and at the end of the day they are paid to promote their countries’ national interests in a rough and at times wicked world.

The European Commission has a different culture. The commission has instruments that help it exercise soft power: it gives out money for projects and programmes, or makes proposals to ease visa rules for citizens of country X or Y. It signs trade deals, and reports on whether countries that want to join the EU are fit to do so.

These are all important things, but Kissinger it ain’t. In other words, the commission can only function in a rational world, and as long as a legitimate partner is sitting on the other side of the table, pen in hand, ready to sign an action plan, or agree to some new programme or partnership accord.

National diplomats, for all their smooth manners, have to be prepared to go a bit more off-road, if you know what I mean’

He also makes a second – quite controversial – suggestion:

‘A second big point kept coming up. I would put it to interviewees that I had heard anger from some national governments about, say, the way the European Parliament was flexing its muscles and trying to assert control over the new EAS.

Well what did they expect, the Lisbon Treaty gives them powers over the budget of the EAS, my interviewees would say. More than once, I heard the same despairing phrase, said of EU foreign ministers and heads of government: “the problem is, they signed the treaty without reading it”, or “they should have read the treaty, and worked out the consequences.”

I do not want to fuel the most outlandish Eurosceptic fantasies here: I am sure that such phrases have their share of hyperbole. Most European governments will have tried to work out if the Lisbon Treaty contained things that should worry them.

But there is something to the jibes though. I have no doubt that British ministers, for example, were probably briefed during the drafting of the EU constitution (the first version of the Lisbon Treaty), that it could cause problems to give more powers to the European Parliament. But they were so busy seeking opt-outs from things like immigration policy that they did not have time to focus on things like the powers of the parliament.

And the shorthand for that process is the phrase that several senior people used this week, when talking to me: “they should have read the treaty before they signed it.’

A twitter feed too….

One of the problems I’ve found with blogging is that I often see interesting articles, but don’t get around to creating a blog post. I’m now trying out Twitter as a way of dealing with this problem.

On the web page of this blog (but not on the RSS feed) you will now see a new list of my twitter posts on the right hand side [I know I need to find a better template soon...].

Alternatively, you can view my twitter feed via any twitter software, under mwarhurst – or you can just look at http://twitter.com/mwarhurst

I’m doing most of the tweeting from the Reeder app on my iPhone.

The 20-30-40% issue and some Copenhagen blogs….

I’m not at Copenhagen, and I don’t work directly on climate (though of course much of what I do is closely linked to climate). However, it’s a bit strange to have an EU Environment blog without mentioning Copenhagen!

One key EU question in the whole process is whether the EU should go for a 30% reduction in emissions by 2020, rather than the 20% that they have already committed to…

The ENDS blog is quoting the Swedish Environment Minister Andreas Carlgren as saying:

“We need more ambitious offers from the US and China. We want to go to 30% but don’t want a sell out… 30% will be part of the end game. It could be decided in the last hours of Copenhagen.”

Friends of the Earth is arguing that the EU should in fact be committing to a 40% cut – without offsets – and have a report to show it is possible.

If you want to follow what’s happening, these three blogs are a good start:

• The Friends of the Earth International blog
• The Guardian’s Copenhagen blog
• The ENDS Copenhagen blog

Barroso outlines responsibilities of Commissioners-designate

European Commission President Barroso has sent letters to all the people he has nominated as Commissioners, outlining his view of their priorities. All the letters are available on the Commission web site here.

(I got this link from the excellent ENDS Europe Daily email newsletter).

“Other worlds are possible” – a new book on climate, development and growth

New Economics Foundation has published a new book, “Other Worlds are Possible”, which contains a set of essays on climate change, development & growth.

It features contributions from Dr Rajendra Pachauri (Chairman of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), Professor Herman Daly (Leading environmental economist and winner of Right Livelihood Award), Professor Wangari Maathai (Nobel Peace Prize winner), Professor Manfred Max-Neef (environmental economist and winner of the Right Livelihood Award), Professor Jayati Ghosh (economist) and David Woodward (nef fellow).

It can be bought in print, or downloaded free from this page:

http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/other-worlds-are-possible

A forward by Herman Daly introduces the book:

Climate change, important as it is, is nevertheless a symptom of a deeper malady, namely our fixation on unlimited growth of the economy as the solution to nearly all problems. Apply an anodyne to climate and, if growth continues, something else will soon burst through limits of past adaptation and finitude, thereby becoming the new crisis on which to focus our worries.

The fact that the contributors to “Other Worlds are Possible” realise this makes this report a serious study. The fact that they seek qualitative development that is not dependent on quantitative growth makes it a hopeful study. It is a valuable collection of the specific and the general, of the grass roots details and the macroeconomic big picture regarding climate change and economic development.

The reader is told up front that, ‘This report represents the work and views of a range of individuals and civil society groups. It is a contribution to debate on what other worlds are possible. Not all the views and policies discussed are necessarily held by all the groups and individuals’. Although I did not find any contradictions among the various contributions, they differ greatly in approach and perspective—mainly between top-down and bottom-up modes of thought. Some people like to start with a big picture. They are impatient with concrete details until they can fit them into or deduce them from a framework of meaning consistent with first principles. Others are impatient with a big picture unless they first have a lot of concrete details and examples that inductively suggest a larger pattern. I confess that I belong to the first type, but that is more of a bias than a virtue. Both approaches are necessary, and are present in this collection, but the bottom-up predominates, at least in number of pages.

My advice to the top-down types is to first read Manfred Max-Neef’s fine big-picture essay. Then fit in the inspiring examples of Kenya’s Green Belt Movement, Thailand’s self sufficiency, Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness, the Happy Earthworm Project, the Happy Planet Index, etc. More inductive types should save Max-Neef for last. I do not mean to characterize Max-Neef as a top-down thinker since he has spent much of his life doing grass roots, ‘barefoot’ economics. But in this volume’s division of labour his is the big-picture essay.

To have packed so much information, inspiration, and analysis into less than 100 pages of clear prose leaves the reader grateful to the authors, the Working Group on Climate Change and Development, and nef.

Some challenges for the new Environment Commissioner (updated)

So, Commission President Barroso has nominated his new Commission, and moved around some roles.

Given the name of this blog, clearly the Environment Commissioner is particularly important, and President Barroso has nominated the current Slovenian DG Research Commissioner, Janez Potočnik.

Commissioner Potočnik has a blog already, as DG Research Commissioner, and he has posted quite a few entries on climate/low carbon economy, and also on the broader issue of sustainable development, including the following statement:

“Our ability to sustain will depend on whether we can and want to change our behaviour, both at global and at local levels in our daily lives. It will hinge on whether can find a new model of economic development that marries economic, social and environmental objectives: profit, people and planet. Sustainability is no longer an issue of morality only; it is also becoming an issue of self-interest”

Update: He has also posted a brief statement on his nomination as Environment Commissioner.

In his new job (assuming he is accepted by the parliament) he will be in an important position to address the challenge of sustainable development.

It’s true that DG Environment has lost climate policy to the new DG Climate Action, but there are many other important policy areas still in the DG, which have an important part to play in reducing our climate impacts, as well as moving us towards a more sustainable world.

For example:

• We in Europe are using an ever-increasing amount of the world’s resources, and we are particularly dependent on imported resources. Yet Europe is not even measuring its resource use, nor does it have any targets to reduce it (we have some ideas that could help). This is in spite of the fact that resource efficiency is also economically beneficial.
• The EU has been developing policies on waste for many years, yet we still dispose of more than €5 billion per year of valuable resources by landfill or incineration; if these materials were recycled it would save climate emissions equivalent to taking around 47 million cars off the road every year.
• The EU has a target to halt the loss in biodiversity within the EU by 2010 – this will not be met, according to the European Environment Agency. At the same time, the global biodiversity situation is even worse, with the EU directly responsible for some of this through the impacts of our consumption. For example, the impacts on wildlife of soy production in South America – soy that is used to feed Europe’s chickens, cows and pigs.

[For a longer list of policies for the new Commission, see the Spring Alliance manifesto.]

Some important changes in the new Commission

Following on from the previous post, Barroso has made a number of changes to the division of responsibilities in the new Commission – here’s some notable changes:

• A new DG Climate Action has been created, made up of the climate section of the old DG Environment
• Energy and Transport have been separated, creating a DG Energy and a DG Transport
• DG Health and Consumer Policy (which has often been called DG Sanco) has been strengthened with the transfer of some key regulatory dossiers – pharmaceutical products and cosmetics, including the Medicines agency (from DG Enterprise) and biotechnology & pesticides (from DG Environment)
• DG Enterprise is now called DG Industry and Entrepreneurship, and though it looses pharmaceuticals, it retains the regulation of chemicals. This is unfortunate, given the inherent conflict of interest between a department that both promotes an industry and regulates its environmental and health impacts.

A full description of the new Commission structure is available in this document.

The new (nominees) for the European Commission

President Barroso has announced his new commission (who will be subject to approval by the European Parliament).

The Commissioner-designate for the Environment is Janez Potocnik (Slovenia), who was Commissioner for Research in the last Commission, the new DG ‘Climate Action’ nominee is Connie Hedegaard from Denmark.

The third document linked below explains the new DG Climate Action:
“DG Climate Action (to be set up before Summer 2010): core of DG Climate Action will be the existing Directorate C of DG Environment (ENV) except the Clean Air Unit ENV C.3 that will remain in DG Environment.”

Here are the changes to DG Environment:
“Changes for DG ENV: – The Climate Directorate ENV C moves from DG ENV to the new DG for Climate Action (except the Clean Air Unit C.3); – The Civil Protection Units ENV A.3. and ENV A.4 move from DG ENV to DG Humanitarian Aid (ECHO); – The Biotechnology, Pesticides and Health Unit ENV D.4 moves from DG ENV to DG Health and Consumers (SANCO).”

The press release is here:
http://ec.europa.eu/commission_designate_2009-2014/pdf/press_release_barroso_team_en.pdf

Photos linked to brief CVs [NB: this page has since vanished; it may return...]:
http://ec.europa.eu/commission_designate_2009-2014/index_en.htm

The detailed portfolios are here:
http://ec.europa.eu/commission_designate_2009-2014/pdf/portfolio_table_barroso_en.pdf