Celebrating Zero Growth

I spent yesterday evening at the launch of the second Zero Carbon Britain report, a second edition of the report again produced by the Centre for Alternative Technology, this one intended to frame our transition to a climate-friendly society by 2030. There is lots of good stuff here, with detailed plans for the obvious areas like built environment, transport and energy, and more on the less obvious areas such as agriculture, motivation and policy than the last time the report was put together.

I was invited to contribute to the economics chapter, which was an additional area, but I am sorry to say that none of my contributions seem to have made it into the report. One reason for this is that the cultural home of Zero Carbon Britain as a study - and even as a concept - is the rather tecchie world of modelling and gadgets, a world where my approach must seem rather girlie. The deeper reason is that the report was intended to influence government, and it was therefore self-consciously set within the existing paradigm.

My question to the report's writers is: can we have a Zero-Carbon Britain unless we have a Zero-Growth Britain. In spite of the fact that the job of writing the economics chapter was delegated to nef, and they have clearly stated elsewhere that a steady-state economy is a prerequisite of sustainability, this question caused some confusion at the launch and is not adequately addressed in the report. A decision had been made to frame the report in terms that parliamentarians would feel comfortable with, so the growth paradigm was left unchallenged.

Economics is an expert field, perhaps even a field whose jargon and mathematical symbols operate like a 'Trespassers will be prosecuted' sign, but it is desperately important that those who would propose sustainability policies in any area have a basic level of economic literacy. There is little point in talking about changes to housing, energy or transport without stating simultaneously that all these changes will be irrelevant if we continue to live in an economic system that requires growth in order to survive.

The report was launched at the first meeting in this parliament of the All-Party Parliamentary Climate Change Group, a group who include E.On and Royal Bank of Scotland amongst their membership. I am sure that both will find opportunities for making profits from the sort of move towards a zero-carbon Britain that the report proposes, whether as installers of massive new energy grids or the providers of the capital for the same. For my money, the Steady-State economy conference in Leeds on Saturday has more relevance to our species' survival on this planet. Tweet

Living Lightly on the Land

The Land magazine brought good news this month of a series of appeals decisions that had been won by low-impact dwellers - and particularly in Wales.

The grandmother of all these victories for a sustainable lifestyle is Lammas - a low-impact community that grew out of the occupation of a pre-war community of wooden homes at Holts Field near Swansea. The residents grew tired of struggling to resist eviction in favour of development and created a dream to build their own community in Pembrokeshire instead.

They were supported in this by some unexpectedly inspired planning officers working inside Pembrokeshire County Council, who decided to do their jobs properly and apply the lip-service commitments to sustainability that were enshrined in their planning policies. The result was Policy 52 on Low Impact Development, a supplementary planning guidance note that permitted people to build homes on the land if they could provide a plan for meeting at least 75% of needs for livelihood directly from the land.

Lammas has been the test case for the implementation of this policy which, while consistent with the Council's stated sustainability objectives, and beneficial for the planet, ran counter to the Tory councillors who dominated the local authority in 'little England beyond Wales'. The ripples are now moving outward to influence national planning policy.

The Welsh Assembly is now developing the original Policy 52 into an overall low-impact policy to be included in the TAN6 Welsh planning guidance for the countryside under the title One Planet Development. This is a significant victory for those who seek to build human communities that are embedded in and respectful of the land, against those who seem determined to confuse the word 'environment' with the word 'view'. Tweet

Don't Get Caught on the Rebound

It is generally assumed that efficiency of resource use will lead to a lower level of environmental impact, most commonly in the case of energy efficiency which is suggested as a major policy response to the problem of climate change. However, this is an assumption that fails to take into account the human factor and the range of possible responses that people might make to higher efficiency levels. An example of an unexpected response is the ‘rebound effect’, which means that when energy efficiency is increased, the response may be to use more of the good or service that is now produced more efficiently.


For example, is a home is better insulated, the people who live there may choose to enjoy warmer surroundings, rather than using their central heating less, thus some of the efficiency will not translate into energy savings. These rebound effects are illustrated in the figure, which shows the intricate relationship between product design, improvements in design processes, economic structure and social responses that are all involved in productive activity. Reducing the energy required to produce any particular good will lead to a fall in its price, which may then stimulate further demand, increasing the sales of that product.

This system of growth in the productive economy can be conceived as a reinforcing feedback cycle, with technological advance being one of the factors that drives economic growth (and hence resource and energy demand), rather than reducing demand and promoting conservation of energy and resources.

Rebound effects point to the difficulty of devising policies to tackle environmental problems. They also indicate that the major changes that need to occur as we move towards a lower-carbon economy will be in terms of a social and cultural paradigm shift rather than a technological change. So having citizens who appreciate the depth of the environmental crisis and are engaged in changing their lifestyle to contribute to its solution is more important than paying scientists to devise gadgets or even to redesign production systems.

You can find out much more about these effects in a useful book called Energy Efffiency and Sustainable Consumption. Tweet

A Dance to the Music of Home

Continuing my theme of carbon-free culture I have arrived at the importance of music in a bioregional economy. With this in mind, I recently dusted off my ancient violin and am taking lessons. The sounds is appalling but I feel thoroughly virtuous and well-prepared to entertain myself - if not others - once we run out of oil.

Shared music-making will be a staple of the convivial community as it already is in so many communities across the world. Gary Snyder writes that 'When men drink together in Japan, at a certain point in the evening they begin to take turns singing folksongs of their home provinces. When the American in the group is called on, he has a hard time knowing what to sing.'

Having Welsh relatives and living a large part of my life in Wales - renowned as "the land of song" - this has never been a problem for me. In Wales songs are used for identification, for affirmation and for raising your spirits or those of your rugby team. Tough men are quite happy to shed drunken tears. Emotions are unleashed.

In classical music the foremost example of nationalistic music-making was surely Smetana, whose tone poem Ma Vlast (my home country) portrays in music six aspects of the natural world of the Czech Republic, most famously the musical portrait of the river Vltava. Such music was instrumental in supporting the establishment of the nation-states of central Europe in the 19th century.

As we lose the ability to import goods from across the globe the sense of local pride and identification will have to act as a substitute. But the emotional power created by a strong identification with your local soil has a dark side too, a potential for exclusiveness and parochiality that we have to beware in our economic as well as our cultural relationships. Tweet

The Artists' Way

It was Lesley Greene, the Green Party councillor in our local well-heeled village of Bisley who first made explicit the importance of art in a low-carbon economy. 'Once the oil runs out', she intoned in her rather pukka way, 'there'll be bugger all else to do'. Now it seems that local artists in Stroud and Dursley have found a way of using the recession to their advantage.

As economic times get harder the property rights carefully honed by the marketeers will start to buckle and bend. I'm not talking bread riots, here, but questions about why property should stand empty when others have a desperate need for it will become sharper. In the end people will ignore the law and start taking over what they need for themselves, their family and their community.

This was the situation in Argentina following the economic collapse of 2001. Named 'la Toma' (the Take), it was a spate of spontaneous actions by workers, who moved backed into factories from which they had been made redundant and restarted them as worker co-operatives. Capitalism had broken down but they still needed work and people still needed the product of that work.

The artists in Dursley are bringing life, creativity and vitality to a row of shops in the town, and the Woolworths in nearby Stroud, a mecca for artists since the time of the Arts and Crafts movement, is likely to follow soon. To think of these one-time temples to consumerism being liberated is refreshing, but the issue of land requisition or squatting will be next on the agenda as the recession bites deeper. Tweet