Author: Andrew Nind

“Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages”, Samuel Johnson 1758

In recent days, Extinction Rebellion has been demonstrating in London, calling for urgent action to avoid climate disaster.  Most of the media coverage has been unsympathetic, arguing that Extinction Rebellion has been putting a strain on police resources and inconveniencing millions of people who are trying to earn a living.  A much-repeated statistic has been from the department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS): since 1990, Britain’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have fallen by 44%.  In other words: Britain is making good progress without your interference, Extinction Rebellion, so stop your self-indulgent protest and go back to work.

Certainly a reduction of emissions by nearly half since the commonly used benchmark year of 1990 would be good progress.  But is it true?  Well, it depends how you measure it, and this measure leaves a lot to be desired.

Import dependency

The UK imports most of the goods that we buy.  We even import nearly half of the food that we eat.  And imports have grown since 1990, as we have closed much of our remaining manufacturing industry.  This is an important point, because the standard way of measuring our GHG emissions is to consider what we produce rather than what we consume.  So if we import beef from Argentina, cotton jeans from the United States, or computer hardware assembled in China, the impact on our emissions, as normally measured, is precisely zero. 

The standard reporting is irresponsible, quite literally, even if we abjure the pejorative overtones: we are assuming no responsibility in our measurements for the environmental impact of the stuff that we import.

Though you have to look a bit deeper to find it, the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) does also report our greenhouse emissions on a consumption basis.  Or rather, they almost do: even the consumption statistics ignore international aviation, which is inserted as a row with no data in their published spreadsheets.  Subject to that significant omission, the CCC publishes consumption-based statistics as far back as 1997.  What do these figures show?  They show that Britain’s GHG emissions were 878 MtCO2e in 1997 and 847 MtCO2e in 2015, the last year of published data available.  That is a reduction of under 4%, which is a lot less impressive than 44%. 

But, as I say, you need to dig a little to find the data.  CCC have a different way of presenting the trend in consumption-based emissions.  In their FAQ section, see https://www.theccc.org.uk/faqs/, they state: “the UK carbon footprint was 19% lower in 2015 than in 2007”.  Er, why 2007?  Because 2007 shows the highest level of reported consumption-based emissions in the historical record.  If CCC picked any other year against which to measure progress, the reduction would be less impressive.  Since 1997, 4% reduction.  Since 2000, 7% reduction.  Since 2010, 5% reduction … The CCC is meant to be an independent body advising the government on climate change.  Picking statistics that show progress in the best light possible is hardly consistent with proclaimed independence, quite apart from being bad science.

The truth would appear to be that – ignoring international aviation but otherwise putting our trust in government statistics – we have reduced our national GHG emissions by 4% over the timespan of data published by government, i.e. 1997-2015.  International aviation now adds an additional 5-10% to our total – the exact figure depends how you measure it – and its growth since 1997 means that the overall reduction has been minimal at best.

Setting in context

But does that matter?  Aren’t British emissions swamped by those polluting 1.3 billion Chinese?  Again, it depends how you look at it.  On a consumption basis, we are now responsible for 13 tCO2e per capita, using the government’s aviation-ignoring statistics.  China?  I am not sure the data exists on a consumption basis, but on a production basis the Chinese emit 7-9 tCO2e per capita depending on your source.  Given that China is a major net exporter, that means the average Chinese person is responsible for less than that, say around 5-6 tCO2e, or about half the average Brit.

And how much is sustainable?  On a global basis, it’s been estimated humanity needs to get down to 2-3 tCO2e per person to avoid climate catastrophe.  So we have a long way to go, and the evidence – once you strip away the unfortunate political spin that BEIS and the CCC put on their data – is that progress to date has been limited.

Some of the media coverage of the Extinction Rebellion’s demonstrations feels a little bit unfair.  After all, what is more important: having our daily commute disrupted for a day or two, or increasing awareness of the need for immediate action to save future generations?  We laud David Attenborough (no less self-publicising) for saying the same thing.  

We are not at war, yet, over climate breakdown, but the debate is becoming more confrontational.  As the government in its defensiveness publishes highly misleading statistics, and supposedly independent bodies like the Committee on Climate Change become politicised, there is a risk that truth will be amongst the first victims of impending fire.

“The nation behaves itself well if it treats its natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased, and not impaired, in value.” Theodore Roosevelt, American Museum of Natural History, New York City

Brexit dominates our waking thoughts.  Whether we are Leavers or Remainers, most of us are agreed on one thing: this is a crucial moment in history.  Our future, our children’s future, will be shaped by the events of the next few weeks.  Our jobs, our public services, our culture … for the British, there is nothing that is now more important.

Or is there?   Even in these dark days of national self-sabotage, something is happening that is deeper and more irretrievable than Brexit.  Which is?  Climate change and its consequences.

Scarcity value

Human-induced climate change epitomizes perhaps better than anything else the attitude to the natural world shown by the ‘developed world’ since the Industrial Revolution.  This attitude is that the natural world is there to be exploited for human benefit, and if the process of exploitation leads to any problems, then it’s up to people in the future to sort them out as they arise.  The subject of economics has given this attitude a theoretical legitimacy as follows: trading of goods leads to price formation; and if a good becomes scarce in the future, then the price will automatically tend to rise to reflect its ‘scarcity value’.  The rise in price will discourage further consumption of the good in question, and also to encourage alternative goods to be traded and consumed instead.

Armed with this economic framework, we have dug up coal, drilled for oil and natural gas, used them for heating, transport and electricity generation, and pumped carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, all the while ‘growing’ our economies and generally relying on market prices to keep demand and supply in balance.

There is however a snag: there is no guarantee, as a limited resource is gradually consumed and its price rises, either that it can be quickly replenished or that an alternative can be found.  In the case of fossil fuels, we have not really worked out how to replace them for space heating or for transport, though some progress has been made in replacing them with renewables for electricity generation. Meanwhile, a large proportion of the earth’s hydrocarbons that took around 2,000,000,000 years to form in the Earth’s crust has been consumed within a space of 200 years.  That’s an extraction rate which is 10,000,000 times as fast as the rate at which they are produced naturally.

All the while, prices for hydrocarbons have been modest, because they have not yet become scarce.  The legitimized tendency to use up limited natural resources until they become scarce can be seen in several other contexts.   For example, the Great Barrier Reef is thought to be around 500,000 years old, but half of it has now been destroyed by climate change in a period of 50 years, while the remaining half is thought to have another 30 years to go.  Arctic ice, Antarctic ice and equatorial rainforests might similarly disappear, perhaps not quite as quickly, but still within this century at current rates of change.  Natural systems simply cannot respond that quickly to human exploitation.  In the case of CO2, the oceans will eventually absorb the excess we release into the atmosphere, but ocean circulation is measured in hundreds or thousands of years, far too slow to keep pace with our economic activity.  By the time hydrocarbons become scarce or world temperature rise forces politicians into meaningful action (the ‘resource’ here being the atmosphere’s capacity to absorb carbon dioxide without spiralling temperatures), it will be too late.  Scarcity pricing does not work for natural limits.

Replacement value

Long before climate change was an international concern, Theodore Roosevelt identified the need to replace natural resources that we consume.  Somewhat ironically, his statue stands in a museum in New York City, surely one of the world’s leading icons of unsustainability.

It is never too late though, and we can translate Roosevelt’s sentiment from desired behaviour to practical economics by assigning not just scarcity value but also replacement value to our natural inheritance.  Here’s the idea: the price of a natural good should cover the cost of its replacement.  For oil, given its very long geological development time, such a cost would be very high indeed, meaning that the remaining stocks largely stay in the ground.  For biofuels, combustion of which still produces carbon dioxide, the price should take into account measures such as reforestation and carbon capture that are sufficient to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere just as quickly as the combustion releases CO2 into the atmosphere.  Remember it’s the rate that matters.

The practicality of how replacement value might be implemented in the context of greenhouse gas emissions is a big enough subject for a separate blog.  In the meantime, I’ll just finish this one with a few thoughts on motivation.

A new story

For continued human existence to be sustainable, we will need a series of technological miracles or we’ll need to alter the way we live.  Currently most of us are wont to believe in the former, not very scientifically, because the latter seems too much like hard work and to go against the grain of our nature.  But that in turn depends on the story we tell ourselves about how to be happy.  So here is a germ of a replacement story.

Depression is increasingly normal amongst both young people and old.  To rediscover happiness (and, incidentally along with it, a chance of long-term survival), we need to re-invent our concept of happiness.  It is not much use if we look with envy upon those who have big houses and fly around the world.  Somehow we need to write a new story for ourselves, one in which envy is replaced by bemusement and a certain amount of sympathy.  In this story, it is a lonely and unfortunate state of affairs to live in a large dwelling on one’s own, having to worry about burglars and upkeep.  Instead, a more sociable and communal lifestyle means more laughter as well as higher occupancy rates.  Holidays are exciting because they are relatively rare, not tediously frequent and repetitive.   Food, wine and material goods all retain their savour from moderation in consumption.  To have any of these in excess is not to be privileged, it is to be burdened.

These are the germs of a new story that may be poorer in respect of property and travel and richer in respect of time and meaning.  I will try to build this story up in future posts.