We need to change – but to what? and how fast?

“cognitive dissonance: the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioural decisions and attitude change.”

We are living in a time of cognitive dissonance – on the one hand, many people (particularly in business) now realise that the economy can’t go on the way it is – with increasing climate changing emissions, pressure on resources and biodiversity – while at the same time taking the view that it’s not politically practical to do anything about it.

The most glaring example of this at the moment is the ‘carbon bubble’ – the markets are valuing companies based on large oil, gas, coal reserves, yet any sensible person knows that these reserves can’t be burnt without devastating our climate – for more read this in the Guardian, covering work by Carbon Tracker.

The parallels with the start of the financial crisis are very strong – people were going around selling sub-prime mortgages to poor Americans, when it was obvious that they were not going to be able to pay them back. This seemed to be working – until the (obvious!) failures of this approach came out of the woodwork.

It’s clear that we need to make a transition to a resource efficient, low carbon society – but this is not straightforward…

It’s not only quite challenging to work out how to make this transition (what tools, policies etc), but there will also be considerable opposition to any substantial changes.

Change is always going to worry those who are doing well out of the current situation – it may  worry even more those who aren’t doing so well, thinking that it could get worse (just look at Europe’s unemployment statistics). These concerns can be alleviated, for example though government support for training & new businesses – but this requires action from Governments, European Commission – and maybe  other businesses too.

The complexity of these issues – and the need to create solutions that are widely supported – led the European Commission to create the European Resource Efficiency Platform (EREP) – web site here – which brings together people from a wide range of backgrounds, including business, government ministers, Unions and environmental NGOs like Friends of the Earth.

The panel members are ‘high level’, including the CEO of Unilever, the Danish & German Environment Ministers, the EU Commissioners for Environment, Climate & Industry and the Secretary General of the European Trade Union Confederation. It’s chaired by John Bruton, former Irish Prime Minister.

Each of the ‘high level’ members of the panel is backed up by a sherpa (‘sherpas prepare the summit‘) – and I’m the Friends of the Earth Europe Sherpa, with Magda Stoczkiewicz, Director of Friends of the Earth Europe, as the panel member.

The panel has already produced a short ‘Manifesto‘ in December, and now we are preparing a declaration which will be finalised at a meeting of the panel on 17th June.

We sherpas are doing the background technical work, and it’s constantly challenging, trying to establish what we can call for, what will have sufficient impact, where is there sufficient agreement?

Coming back to the cognitive dissonance point – as the Manifesto acknowledges:

“In a world with growing pressures on resources and the environment, the EU has no choice but to go for the transition to a resource-efficient and ultimately regenerative circular economy“

So we all agree on what the outcome needs to be… but can we get our recommendations to be consistent with the scale of this task?

The declaration on Monday 17th of June will be the first test of this – so stay tuned to:

• my twitter account – @mwarhurst
• the Resource Efficiency Platform twitter account – @ec_orep

Resource Efficiency flagship launches tomorrow

The European Commission’s President José Manuel Barroso will launch the Flagship Initiative on resource efficiency tomorrow. As mentioned in my previous post, this should start to spell out what the Commission intends to do to address the challenges posed by our increasing use of the world’s resources.

President Barroso’s web page is here, and the press release should appear on the “Midday Express” page at around 12.00 CET on Tuesday 26th.

Many groups will release press statements during the afternoon following the release, including Friends of the Earth Europe and the European Environment Bureau. I expect that it will also be covered by the news sites Euractiv and, in the early evening, ENDS Europe Daily.

Update: There should also be a live video feed here on the Commission’s web site; after the event you should be able to watch a recorded stream from the same page

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.

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

“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.]

Welcome pack for Environment Committee MEPs, briefing documents on climate policy

The Institute for European Environmental Policy’s (IEEP) latest newsletter is full of interesting stuff, including links to a couple of projects involving training MEPs, and stories on EU land use, sustainable development indicators & promoting the importance of biodiversity:
http://www.ieep.eu/publications/pdfs/newsletters/newsletter_autumn_2009.pdf

The first training project is a set of briefing documents on climate policy, aimed at MEPs and assistants (they are also running a training programme):
http://www.ieep.eu/climatebriefings//

The second is a welcome package for new MEPs on the Environment Committee, which summarises legislative progress in the last parliament, identifies some priorities for the next & lists upcoming implementation and review dates for legislation:
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/activities/committees/studies/download.do?language=en&file=26671

Economics and climate change

You might be wondering what has happened to the environment in this blog… It has started off rather politically, but then this week is a big week in EU politics, as the new Parliament starts its work.

However, tonight I’m at an event organised by the Green Alliance in London, as part of the celebration of their 30th birthday and the launch of a new publication From crisis to recovery: New economic politics for a low carbon future.

I can’t report most of the discussion – for one thing I am typing on my iPhone! – but here are some snippets:

One of the panelists, who is also one of the few politicians who is really active at both UK and EU level, is Caroline Lucas. One of the points she makes is to challenge the importance that Governments (and others) give to economic growth. This is a very complex issue, but the UK’s Sustainable Development Commission recently produced a very interesting report called “Prosperity without growth” which clearly lays out the arguments.

Another panelist, Lord Adair Turner who is both chair of the Finanacial Services Authority and the UK’s Climate Change Committee.

He argues that prices don’t work by themselves, for example home insulation is viewed as ‘low hanging fruit’. Yet in reality people have to find builders, put up with dust, stay at home etc. (and finding reliable builders is a big issue in the UK).

He therefore suggests that it’s not just about government grants, but about further government involvement in making things easier (better regulation of builders would be a start!).

There’s a lot of agreement on the panel about the idea that the banks that the UK Government now owns (as a result of the credit crunch) should have to invest in low carbon technologies – and not in high carbon ones. This is not currently UK policy….

Lord Turner has the interesting suggestion that there could be border tax adjustments – ie tax those products that come into Europe from places that don’t have high carbon prices – but with a twist… the tax would be sent back to the origin country, to be used on greening their economies.

Caroline Lucas takes the opportunity of a question on Europe to point out that, as of yesterday, the Green group is one MEP larger than the Conservative’s new group (Peter Ainsworth, ex-Conservative Shadow Environment Minister is also on the panel).

There’s also a very interesting final discussion on growth, with Lord Turner arguing that growth should not be the aim of policy, even though it may still happen as a side effect of improving society. He also argues – along with others – that population is important.

[Update: Green Alliance have now put a recording of the event on-line]

Finally, here’s a not particularly good photo of the panel in action….