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“The UK’s fixed term parliaments could see politicians failing to prioritise climate change, veteran naturalist Sir David Attenborough has suggested,” BBC news report, 26 January 2020

Politicians and decision makers focus on current accounts: income and expenditure over a recent period such as the last year. Not capital accounts. We see it in the behaviour of traders and investors; in the government’s obsession with the national deficit (around £40 billion in 2018/19 according to the Office of National Statistics) instead of the national debt (around £2000 billion, or fifty times as much); and in the public dialogue on climate breakdown.

Current account thinking. I don’t know whether fixed term parliaments are to blame, but it is everywhere.

Take, for instance, government data on our greenhouse gas emissions. The headline number for the UK, as published by BEIS and consistent with the Climate Change Act, is under 500 MtCO2e for 2018. If you rummage around, you can find on the ONS website no fewer than five different measures of our national emissions. The government quotes the lowest number naturally, which omits imported emissions, international shipping and aviation, and has favourable assumptions regarding biomass and crown territories. Arguably the most honest of the measures, called ‘Footprint’, is close to 800 MtCO2e, with most of the difference vis-à-vis the CCA number explained by the emissions embodied in imported goods.

And yet, even the Footprint is on a current account basis in two ways. Firstly, and obviously, it is an annual figure. The trouble with annual figures is that CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere, just as debt accumulates, though unlike debt it can never be written off in extremis. So arguably we should be looking at cumulative emissions over a period of time, say the period of 140 years since Thomas Edison invented his lightbulb. This can be done – and it shows the United Kingdom in second place, behind the United States in first place, in terms of overall greenhouse damage done per head of population by each of the nations on earth. Perhaps this isn’t too surprising given that Britain started the Industrial Revolution – and perhaps we shouldn’t be held accountable for the lives of our forebears – but it is nonetheless startling, especially to anyone who has been exposed to government statistics and China-bashing.

Current account thinking goes beyond government and infects independent bodies such as the Committee on Climate Change. In their technical report published in May 2019, the CCC comment on the importance of avoiding carbon leakage in the future. The irony is that their starting point, 503 MtCO2e in 2017, is on a production basis that ignores (or, rather, sets to zero) all of the carbon leakage that had already occurred up to that point from closure of British manufacturing industry and consequent reliance on imports. It’s a little bit like hosting a party and at some point in the evening – after most people have left – announcing that you’ve thought of a good game to stop people from going. And the unfortunate corollary of the CCC’s definition of ‘net zero’, combined with the latest scientific assessment of what is genuinely sustainable, is that we could hit our target in 2050 and still be living unsustainably unless the exporting nations make substantial reductions themselves to help us out.

Current account thinking also affects individual attitudes, in particular to ‘green purchases’. As an example, some of us are under the impression that buying a new electric vehicle is good for the environment. Of course it’s bad for the environment due to the emissions embodied in its manufacture, especially of the battery. Whether it’s worse than persisting with an existing petrol vehicle depends on the carbon intensity of electricity, future usage, ongoing maintenance and relative efficiency; but as a rule of thumb a new EV, unless it’s an essential replacement, has a ‘payback period’ of a few years, or longer if you buy a Tesla.

It would help us all if a system of labelling could be developed to provide a systematic measure of the trade-off between embodied emissions and ongoing emission savings for something like a new electric vehicle.

Diet and Neolithic Britain

Further up, I mentioned that there are two ways in which the ONS Footprint is on a current account basis. The second of these is more complex: none of the ONS measures take account of land opportunity costs. Which, according to a number of recent studies, are enormous.

Focussing on the UK, 70% (roughly) of our land surface is used for agriculture; and 50%, i.e. half of our land surface, is pasture and grassland for sheep and cattle. By comparison, all of our cities, towns and villages, houses and roads, take up less than 10% in aggregate.

Recently, the BBC published a short video of land changes since William the Conqueror. Apparently in 1066 the proportion of our country that was wooded was similar to today (15% then, 13% now). The implication is that somehow it is ‘natural’ for Britain to be largely grassland; and indeed that is what many of us think (and farmers argue). But this just shows how long the human footprint has been stamped on both the country and our collective imagination. We have to go back to Neolithic times to discover a land that was mostly woodland, before the introduction of agriculture. And what was true then is still true today: the truly natural state of Britain – in the sense of what it would look like if human beings hadn’t changed its appearance, and would return to if we let it – is a land covered (mainly) by trees.

What happened in Britain in the mists of time has been happening more recently in other parts of the world: forest, including rainforest, is being removed in order to create space for human animals. Globally, 40% of the Earth’s land area is now devoted to livestock. Given the (very) low energy efficiency and nutritional efficiency of eating animals that eat plants, it has been estimated by Joseph Poore and his colleagues at Oxford University in 2018, and by Searchinger et al at Princeton, that if we were to largely eliminate consumption of meat and dairy, and rewild the reclaimed land, humanity could change the earth’s appearance from space. Or, rather, reverse the change in appearance that has been taking place in recent centuries and decades. Poore estimates we could reclaim an area the size of the United States, Europe, Australia and China combined.

On the other hand, if we don’t change our diet, and the preponderance of the world’s population that lives in Asia ‘catches up’ with western diets, then we will have to denude the planet further to the point where it is debatable whether we will be able to feed ourselves, quite apart from bringing on catastrophic global heating.

In the CCC’s report from May 2019, agriculture is identified as contributing 9% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions. This is based on the ‘status quo’, i.e. on the national usage of land to which we’ve been accustomed since before William the Conqueror. It is current account thinking, because it accepts the status quo of land use and ignores the potential to rewild a large chunk of Britain in an optimal manner. In the same way traditional statistics, that suggest agriculture globally accounts for around 25% of greenhouse emissions, bear the signs of current account thinking: they do not quantify optimal land use (optimal from the perspective of the climate); if they did, then agriculture would appear to be as important as energy consumption.

The impact of current account thinking is most striking with respect to diet, but is evident also in the whole energy debate. To move away from it requires imagination, an ability to think ‘outside the box’ and not be blinkered by the status quo. Whether we as individuals, and our politicians, can manage such a thought transition is questionable, but it’s no exaggeration to suggest that our survival is dependent upon it.

“There is a place in Oxfordshire … on the verge of creating commercially viable miniature fusion reactors for sale around the world delivering virtually unlimited zero-carbon power”, Boris Johnson, Conservative Party Conference, October 2019

“We do not need to change our lifestyle, but we do need to invest in technology to combat climate change”, Labour candidate, Reading, November 2019

As we vote today, the biggest issue on people’s minds is likely to be Brexit.  This is sadly out of proportion, because the biggest issue facing us, and certainly our children, is environmental decay including climate breakdown.

While it will be drowned out in the British media by the national election results, an arguably more important event is taking place: the international COP25 Climate Conference in Madrid.  There, the head of Greenpeace International, Jennifer Morgan, found herself locked out of the talks yesterday along with hundreds of observers, an expulsion that was without precedent in COP conference proceedings.  With plenty of precedent, however, has been the refusal of the major emitters to commit to anything meaningful. “Frankly, I’m tired of hearing major emitters excuse inaction in cutting their own emissions on the basis they are ‘just a fraction’ of the world’s total,” said the prime minister of Fiji, Frank Bainimarama.

But everything will be OK, because new technology will save us.  So we don’t really need to worry about climate breakdown, at least not excessively, providing we support our talented scientists.  That appears to be the attitude of both main British parties, and by implication a large proportion of our general population.  Alas, blind faith in science in the 21st century has the hallmarks of blind faith in spirits during the middle ages.

The Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, about which Boris Johnson waxes lyrical, is more cautious about its own prospects.  According to its own website: “fusion is expected to become a major part of the energy mix during the second half of this century.  With adequate funding, the first fusion power plant can be operating in the 2040s.”  It would be reasonable to expect them to be at the optimistic end of the spectrum.  It is notable that fusion is rarely mentioned at all in the standard energy press.  And, of course, the second half of this century might be too late, as we might be in the throes of runaway global warming by then.

By all means, let’s support interesting technologies.  But simply to assume that scientific solutions will be found, when they have not yet been found, is profoundly unscientific.

In August, Professor Ian Boyd left his position as chief scientist at Defra with a stark warning: the government must implement policies to encourage people to change behaviour and consume less.  If we do not get resource consumption under control, we will not get emissions under control, he said.  On this topic, amongst others, I would trust his opinion more than those of Boris Johnson and a local Labour MP.

Blind faith: a case study

Within the last couple of years, there has been an interesting development in the relative impact of different sectors on our climate footprint. The direct emissions of CO2 from flights arriving at and leaving from Britain’s airports are, in aggregate, now 70-80 Mt per annum. This total is more than the emissions from Britain’s power stations, around 65 Mt in 2018 (as published by BEIS). One could argue that only half of those flight emissions should be attributed to the UK; equally, one could argue that the greenhouse impact of those flights is significantly larger if non-CO2 effects are taken into account. What is clear is that the global warming effect of British aviation is now comparable with the global warming effect of our electricity generation.

Really? How does this result square with the claim, beloved by the aviation industry, that aviation only accounts for 2-3% of global carbon emissions?  Well it’s partly because of good progress in the power sector.  But it’s also explained by the fact that in Britain we fly 5 times as much, as measured in terms of airmiles per capita, as the global average.  We account for 4% of aviation emissions but have less than 1% of the world’s population.  Most people in the world don’t fly.  Chances are they want to catch up – and growth in aviation appears to be outstripping the UN’s own forecasts.

The blindly faithful have a range of solutions superficially to hand: biofuels for aviation, electric planes, hydrogen planes, lighter planes, more efficient planes.  Let’s consider these in turn, briefly:

Biofuels: in order for biofuels to offset our CO2 emissions from flying, fast-growing coppice needs to absorb CO2 at the same rate as it is emitted by aircraft.  Without repeating my discussion of this from a previous post, we would need to cover 20-30% of our island with such biomass dedicated to the purpose.  This would mean tripling our current level of forest cover.  Where is the land going to come from?  We would have to re-assign some of the land used for agriculture (about 70% of Britain’s total area).  The most realistic such re-assignment would be to reduce our meat and dairy herds.

Electric planes:  I have tried to elicit views as to whether it is physically – let alone technologically – possible to design an electric plane that will fly over an ocean.  Those who have answered, including Martin Rees, think probably not.  One difficulty is the weight of the battery is about 50-100 times as much as the weight of the corresponding volume of jet kerosene, so it is difficult to see how an electric plane destined for New York, say, would ever get off the runway.

But let’s suppose that these respondents are too pessimistic and we get electric planes in future for long-haul as well as short-haul flights.  Given the trends in consumption, and the fact that electric planes would be heavier, we might have to double our electricity generation to meet the demand.  Possible?  Yes, but certainly non-trivial.

Hydrogen planes: hydrogen may be produced from electrolysis (using electricity) or from methane reformation.  If we use electricity, the increase in required generation is even greater than for electric planes, because the most efficient processes for making hydrogen yield 60-70% as much output energy (in the form of hydrogen) as is input.  If we convert methane, we would have to increase our natural gas consumption by maybe 30-40%.  This of course would be counterproductive unless we capture the greenhouse gases from the conversion process.  To date, carbon capture and storage has been too expensive to be developed to any significant extent.

Lighter planes: the aviation industry has had around 50 years of strong commercial incentive to make planes light in order to save fuel and hence money.  But let’s suppose a miracle occurs and new materials are developed that halve the energy expended to combat gravity.  Because planes use around half of their energy combating wind resistance (as opposed to gravity), that miracle would only reduce fuel consumption by one quarter, unless we are prepared to travel more slowly and take longer getting to our destination.  Actually, travelling more slowly is probably part of the answer.

More efficient planes:  again, the commercial incentives on the airline industry have made planes pretty much as efficient as they can be.  There is a limit to how good a gas turbine (jet engine) can be.  The late David Mackay, author of Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, wrote that he would eat his complimentary socks if plane efficiency were to be doubled in future.  I suspect that even had he lived to a great age, he was safe enough from cotton consumption.

I hope this aviation case study conveys some idea of the scale of the challenge; and why I have concerns about the flimsy rhetoric of (many) politicians.  One could pick on other aspects of consumption – heating for homes, car transport, goods manufacture, diet – and show for these also that the future is pretty challenging.  Especially if we are determined not to change our lifestyle in response to the “emergency” that those who should know best are telling us exists.