What the Fukushima is Going on?

Well how could we possibly know? The major consequence of the Fukushima disaster in this household is that we now have a dish aerial so that we are no longer reliant on the BBC's coverage which, in this case, I can only designate as propaganda. The truth is beginning to emerge from Tepco, who are now admitting that three of the Fukushima plant's reactors melted down within days of the tusnami. Those presumably were the days during which the BBC was engaging a range of pro-nuclear stooges to reassure us that there was no problem.

While the internet appears to be ephemeral it can in reality provide a trace, and we can use this trace to assess exactly what we were being told by the BBC. On 14 March BBC churnalists were reporting the view of 'international nuclear watchdogs' (presumably the IAEA) that there was no sign of a meltdown, balanced by the comment of an unnamed minister that the 'melting of rods' was 'highly likely'. On 27 March the BBC reported that workers were 'trying to cool the reactor core to avoid a meltdown' at a time when we now know that three meltdowns had already occurred. Perhaps strangest of all was the constant repetition of the bizarre phrase 'partial meltdown', as though nuclear fuel could somehow resemble a chocolate fondant pudding.

We were, throughout the early days of the disaster, when people were still listening to the stories, being reassured that this was an old plant whose design is no longer used. This is, as made clear in a film made for the BBC by Adam Curtis back in 1992, when it still had a degree of independence, to entirely miss the point. The real question is why these plants were still running if they were not safe: and that is a question about politics not science.

The BBC's inability to provide clear information about the nuclear threat is no doubt a consequence of the increasing political pressure it has been under in recent years, making the inference that we no longer have an independent national broadcasting channel a sad but inevitable one. No wonder, then, that there has not been a reaction against nuclear power in Britain, compared to Germany, where the tide of revulsion from a better informed public has led to the closure of the entire nuclear industry by 2022 and the election of green governments in a number of the country's regions. Tweet

Time to Relaunch the Love Crusade

If you caught Lovely Ed's acceptance speech you will notice that he isn't afraid to use the word 'love'. We greens were onto this way ahead of you, Ed, having launched our own political love crusade some 20 years ago now. The reason why this works so well for us is illustrated by a two-dimensional graph of where the UK parties stand that you can find on the political compass website.

Of course we greens prefer to inhabit multi-dimensional space and live in a constant awareness of the whole system (man), but even two dimensions is better than one, and when we first discussed this in the regional council strategy group some 20 years ago we thought of the east-west axis as being about justice and the north-south axis as being about love vs. fear.

If you see it this way you reach some interesting conclusions. First, it doesn't appear to be possible to be loving and not concerned about social justice - hence the empty space in the lower right quadrant. But perhaps more importantly, we concluded, the way to gain more members for our party was to love them into submission. We need to bring them down across the horizontal line with an excess of free-flowing affection.

At that point, as I recall, Labour found itself well into the upper left quadrant, but I suppose that by now most of the members that kept them there have already left and joined us, or one of the other parties that is in the upper left quadrant. The love crusade was not a great success, but as a political strategy it was more fun than marching for jobs or fighting cuts. Perhaps we should revitalise it before Ed becomes the housewife's choice and takes up all the love space himself. I can't see that message going down well with the unionists who put him into power, but it could be fun to watch. Tweet

From Horsey Culture to Horticulture

I spent last Sunday at the delightful West Country Scything Festival. Having grown up in this part of the world I am deeply proud of its particularly relaxed take on life and it comes as no surprise to me that the Green Party did so well here in the recent European Elections. Unlike the South-East, where you can't help feeling that Cult of Caroline has a lot to do with the Party's success, in our neck of the woods Green voting feels like something that is spreading organically, or rhizomically, with no great media attention and no celebrities. For an increasingly large proportion of West Country people voting Green is becoming a natural thing to do.

The scything festival is a step further. It is an attempt, led by the excellent Simon Fairlie, to keep country crafts and skills alive. Men and women are taught scything and then compete with each other - and with strimmers - to show off their prowess. The whole event feels like a 21st century Medieval fair, with mummers and the inescapable morris men thrown in for good measure. There was also music - a band called Not Made in China and a singer known as 'badly horse-drawn boy', because his home is a gypsy caravan that converts into a solar-powered stage.

The festival crowd grows in size every year, but the scything festival reminds us that the land is for more than leisure. During a debate on the future of farming several speakers railed against the paddock culture, which means that farmers and smallholders cannot afford land because the rich are competing to use it to graze their horses. (In the West Country these people are always said to come from London - as though we didn't have enough home-grown aristocrats).

Just as the phrase 'market town' should remind us that, in a balanced economy, a town has no more citizens than can be fed from the surrounding land, so we should look to recreating the market gardens that have disappeared under car parks and paddocks. A working land is a land that feeds the people who live with it, rather than use being determined by profit maximisation. Tweet

Learning a stern lesson

As part of the Green Party’s submission to the Stern Review I wrote that ‘the globalised capitalist economy is inherently unsustainable because it is based on turning energy into money without regard for ecology. Climate change is just the first and most urgent piece of evidence that this is the case.’ OK, this is rather trite and simplistic, and says nothing of the vast proportion of capitalism (around 97%) that generates profits by speculating on the future values of currencies or commodities, but as a slogan it has much to recommend it.
In the sustainable economy energy will the important measure rather than money. In fact these two can be joined through the creation of a currency backed by carbon, as first suggested by Richard Douthwaite. Scarcity is one of the key requirements of a successful form of money (hence the use of gold or cows in other societies at other times) and now our most valuable scarce resource is the global atmosphere.
The poverty of the South can be explained in terms of their inadequate consumption of the global economy’s energy; the over-consumption of the rich, developed countries can be explained in the same way. The shares of carbon dioxide of poor countries do not match their shares of world population. The comparison of India and the USA is the most striking: a direct swap of carbon dioxide would resolve around a fifth of the inequality at a stroke. India is responsible for 5% of the global output of CO2 but has nearly 20% of the world’s population; the USA, by contrast, is responsible for 25% of emissions but with only 5% of world population.
The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a UN panel of experts who have exhaustively analysed available data about the consequences of carbon dioxide emissions to estimate the ‘carrying capacity’ of the planet, that is how much CO2 it is reasonably safe for us to emit. The Global Commons Institute (GCI) in London has developed a model for sharing this total amount fairly between the world’s people on a per capita basis, and then for reducing this amount rapidly over time, called Contraction and Convergence (C&C). If we work with the year 2000 the sums work out rather neatly, since the model suggests around 6 billion tonnes of carbon can be produced, and the planet had around 6 billion people, which allows us 1 tonne each. At present in the UK we produce around 2.5 tonnes, which gives a clear idea of the size of cuts required just to reach fair shares today, even before the cuts that are necessary.
A comparison of CO2 emissions by country shows how the poorer the country is the less of its share of carbon dioxide it is producing and the more it needs an input of energy from the richer nations. At present we measure economic energy in terms of money, usually dollars. In an economy that respected planetary limits we would measure activity in terms of energy, since this is the scarcest planetary resource. As green economists we need to move towards an economy which uses energy as both a way of measuring the economy and, ultimately, the basis for its means of exchange or money. Tweet