Archive for the ‘Green growth’ Category

Wind power from on-shore installations, dotted across the British countryside, especially if located in the windiest places, Britain’s magnificent hill and ridge tops, is increasingly giving rise to a major conflict between wider environmental concerns and the pressing need for action over climate change. Neither of the big environmental organisations, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, nor the Green party, have seriously confronted this issue.

Though wind power is Britain’s great asset in the shift to renewables in the struggle against climate change, on-shore wind has started to hit some formidable obstacles. Across the country, schemes for wind farms are having planning permission delayed in the face of local opposition. Most strikingly, a huge scheme to supply 20 per cent of Scotland’s domestic electricity from Shetland’s main island is now opposed by local conservation groups, the RSPB and the Scottish Environment Protection Agency.

This fits the pattern identified by the chief executive of the turbine manufacturer Vestas, explaining that creating wind arrays in Britain was heavily mired in “nimbyism”. People want renewable energy but they don’t want the machinery it takes to produce it set up in their local environment.

Shetland facing threat to natural environment.

This is becoming a major crunch point for the UK energy minister, Ed Miliband, since he has recently said it was now more or less socially unacceptable to oppose wind farms because of the pressing need to reduce our carbon output.

But is it really irresponsible to oppose wind farms? Are opponents of on-shore wind power installations really failing to face the hard realities of what creating a low or zero carbon future will involve? Objectors to the Shetland scheme claim it will seriously damage breeding sites for endangered birds, that concomitant damage to peat bogs will itself release significant quantities of carbon dioxide and that the scale of the scheme would amount to industrialisation of the landscape.

Is it just necessary to accept such consequences as inevitable if we are to have renewable energy? No, it isn’t. Objectors to on-shore wind power are on the right side in the longer environmental perspective. It is not necessary to spread wind turbines across the British countryside, in effect destroying its intrinsic character and beauty. It is also, in fact, pointless to do so. At such a heavy cost, little would be gained.

Low energy potential of on-shore wind.

The reason that this is the case is that on-shore wind arrays located in the British landscape could only ever provide a relatively small proportion of our energy needs.  

This is clear from projections by the OECD and the International Energy Agency of Britain’s technical land-based wind energy potential, published by the European Wind Energy Association. Using its maximum capacity, Britain could potentially supply energy equivalent to 30 per cent of its current consumption of electricity, and therefore only about six per cent of its total energy consumption. [1]

By contrast, the 2002 UK government strategic framework for off-shore wind energy determined that off-shore arrays in the North Sea could supply almost 10 times the UK’s electricity requirements.[2]

Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth overlook key evidence.

In a letter last week to the Guardian, Andy Atkins, executive director of Friends of the Earth, claimed that on-shore wind has “a major role to play in delivering a greener future” – which is simply not supported by the figures. He argued that local authorities should have “obligatory renewable energy targets” and that communities should be obliged “to take responsibility their share of low carbon energy production.”

This position seems to be based on the idea that all areas must make sacrifices, and must be prepared to accept extensive local environmental damage, in the fight against climate change. Given, however, the inevitably minor contribution that on-shore wind can make, there is little logic in making all sides share a burden which won’t achieve much anyway.

 A link on the Greenpeace website will assure you that wind power is “abundant…(since the) UK is the windiest country in Europe.” But it gives no figures to say how abundant it is, and swiftly moves on to the merits of off-shore wind power. The site claims that to produce 10 per cent of our electricity would take up one 20,000^th of the UK’s land area. This does not sound a lot, but the total energy yield is also small, equivalent to 1.7 per cent of our total energy use. Greenpeace is not forthcoming on whether it wants more, and where it would build it.

Green Party undecided between beauty and wind farms.

The Green Party has some excellent energy policies, and sets an ambitious and commendable target to draw 50 per cent of the UK’s energy from renewable sources by 2020. But their website does not say how much of this would be from on-shore wind. Its detailed energy policy does say it would “promote the full use of currently available renewable energy sources” and that there would be a planning presumption in favour of renewables schemes unless certain factors obtain, including that they are in “a nationally designated scenic area.” This suggests that it would enthusiastically support widespread on-shore wind power. 

 A key problem with this policy is that it can be foreseen that many people will consider their local countryside to be beautiful even if it does not have an official government certificate to say it is. Furthermore, the economies of scale required to lay down transmission cables economically will act as a driver towards larger sites. This is a major factor in the Shetland scheme. As a result, reasonably attractive but unexceptional open spaces will be turned into extensive unattractive industrial landscapes, which those living nearby are likely to object to.

Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the Green Party are failing to consider the sheer scale of the energy problem. It is time to abandon the illusion that on-shore wind, in Britain at least, has a role to play in building a zero carbon economy. The future for renewables lies, rather, in off-shore wind, solar, wave and tidal power, where arrays can be laid out on the scale that the crisis demands.

[1] Renewable Energy. Ed. Godfrey Boyle. Open Univ. 2004 – Table 7.4
[2] ibid. – Table 7.5

As the British energy minister Ed Miliband sets out the government’s strategy for combating climate change a good question to ask is: where is the leadership that’s really needed over this matter going to come from?

The government’s proposals involve cutting carbon emissions from electricity generation by 40 per cent by 2020. Since electricity only accounts for 35 per cent of our primary energy consumption that leaves most of the remaining 80 per cent of our emissions unaffected. The longer term goal is to reduce our total emissions for all purposes by 80 per cent, but that is only over four decades and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that this target is far too low and not soon enough to halt climate change.

The government is also allowing itself the safety valve of letting poor developing countries do some of the emissions reduction by carbon trading when implementation in the UK becomes difficult.

Well informed observers know that action at this leisurely pace is drastically inadequate, but where are the political leaders who will start telling voters, not that they must give up the good life, but that some significant changes will be needed? When Miliband cannot bring himself to tell people that they can still have their holidays in the sunny south but that will have to take the train and not fly and when the Prime Minister and Chancellor will not robustly confront the widespread popular delusion amongst voters – shown in a recent opinion poll – that what is needed now is cuts in public investment – the exact opposite of the truth – where does one go to find radical and imaginative political leadership?

The Green Party has the most comprehensive policies for the environmental crisis. It faces major hurdles getting elected precisely because what it offers involves radical change. That change, however, is of the kind that, it is now recognised across the political spectrum, is increasingly consonant with the urgency of climate change.

The Green Party has imaginative policies across all of public affairs and its lead candidates engage with balance and coherence in current debates. For all that, however, they fail to make the striking impact on the political stage that one might expect given the strong current relevance of their political platform.

It is quite possible that what lies behind this is a shortfall in outright political ambition: not the ambition to weald power in itself but the ambition to at least share in a measure of real political power in order to be able to achieve the radical change the Greens believe in. Strong ambition might involve, for instance, abandoning or weakening one strongly held position in order to focus attention upon the strengths of some other even more important policy.

Nuclear disarmament, for instance, could become a major electoral liability for the Greens as their wider electoral attractiveness increases. It is a fundamental conviction for many Greens that the UK’s nuclear weapons must be scrapped unilaterally with no delay. However, the Greens, even with popular policies on all fronts, are likely to deter many potential voters because of this issue.

The fact is, though, that it now looks as if modern civilisation is far more at risk from the rising threat of climate change than from the threat of nuclear war. In fact, it is now a matter of overwhelmingly critical importance. It is also central to the Green Party’s very raison d’etre. Why should not the Green Party, in order to prevent the nuclear issue from stalling its progress towards the centre of the stage, shift to a multi-lateral position? There would be uproar amongst its membership, but many more amongst the voters would be highly impressed.

Defective political ambition shows up, too, in Green Party spokes-persons and amongst their natural supporters in the manner in which they present the arguments to show, quite justifiably, how fundamentally optimistic and attractive their long-term vision is. An environmentally sustainable way of life would be a much better one, but the way to draw attention to this is to focus on concrete and specific and attractive facets of it. By contrast, the Greens will often make broad, abstract observations about their vision which don’t engage people’s imaginations, or even sound off-putting.

A major theme is localism, for instance. Life would be much better if we all worked much closer to home, we are told, and if we similarly enjoyed our leisure closer to home and bought things from nearby sources. The trouble with this approach is that it comes into conflict with so much of the pattern of people’s lives. Many people will be unable to see how they can realistically do the job they do without considerable travel, and many of course find that amusements located far from home and purchases from far away are highly attractive.

Instead, the focus should be upon such things as how greatly enhanced local public transport would make towns and other places more attractive to live in, and how high-speed rail journeys at reasonable prices would make long car journeys less appealing. People can readily grasp such clear advances without being obliged to take on a personal belief in the virtues of localism.

In fact, the focus upon the local is almost a distraction and irrelevance to the wider Green agenda. Climate change and the wider environmental threats are global issues, requiring co-operation between national governments. Voters can readily see that there is only  so much that they locally and personally can do about these things. They will expect those seeking election to focus on the big-scale things that governments alone can grapple with.

In the midst of the climate change crisis, when a strongly Green platform ought to be advancing to the forefront, the Greens can often be found emphasising that they are a party with policies on all the key issues of the day, that they are not a one issue band. This is undoubtedly true, but it should not prevent them from making it very clear that their programme for government would be focused first and foremost upon climate change.

The Greens seem almost to have conjured up this problem for themselves in their own imaginations. This is because they are reluctant to state openly what they are. The Green Party is a social democratic party in practice, its policies falling firmly within the tradition of the Labour party and similar parties of western Europe. It is for strong public services, a mixed economy, active macro-economic interventionism, reducing inequality and high taxation.

Critically, this established social democratic way of doing things is exactly what is needed to deal with the environmental crisis. Why don’t the Greens just start putting across the message that they are social democrats, whose natural supporters would be Labour and other centrist voters, and that they are determined to use government leadership and direction to engage in the battle to deal with the paramount issue of the day, climate change?

The Green Party not long ago achieved a major breakthrough by electing for the first time a single leader, thus responding to the reality that people can only be led to support the right policies if someone is clearly taking responsibility for doing the leading. And they have chosen the highly impressive, direct, clear-headed and experienced Caroline Lucas for the job. But a party is not just its leader, the Green Party’s message still needs to show more of the inspirational and the imagination that the situation calls for.

The current financial crisis raises fundamental questions about the alleged merits of globalization. Britain’s current plight illustrates this strikingly.

Britain’s long, much-praised boom was based upon our much-vaunted competitive advantage in service industries, above all in the financial sector. It did not matter, it was said, that we had small manufacturing sector and imported most everyday consumer goods, because our high-level expertise gave us the wealth to buy these things from economies that could produce them at much lower cost.

As a result of the financial crisis, major financial institutions have become insolvent or at risk of collapse and public funds have been required in order to stabilise the system. Britain’s premier service industry can no longer claim to be the robust front-runner of the economy it once did. Furthermore, the feted expertise and creative panache of investment bankers looks less convincing than it did. Much of the boom, it has emerged, was based upon high-risk investments and elaborate stock-value gambles whose yields eventually began extensively to fall short of expectations. A more prudent and old-fashioned investment model now looks cleverer than the proceedings of recent times.

This leaves Britain’s service sector economy with its leading sector badly weakened in economic power and prestige, with its strident demands for minimal regulation refuted by events and the widely –accepted need for pro-active government intervention.

This leaves the rest of Britain’s economy-leading service sector and the country’s wider prospects on the global stage planted on a fast-shifting sandbank. At the root of this lie the sharp contrasts between the nature of the jobs in the upper echelons of the service sector and that of the vast bulk of service jobs done by millions of British workers.

In most service jobs, the service provided by the worker involves merely facilitating use by the customer of a piece of advanced technology. The passenger pays for the temporary use of a railway, consisting of a large set of manufactured goods. The train drivers and station staff merely facilitate this. The customer phones up for information processed on a large corporate computer built from solid hardware and tangible software expertise, while the call-centre worker does little more than read the information out. When a shopper goes to buy the latest sophisticated gadget the shop assistant’s role is largely confined to processing the purchase. It is only at the very top end of the service industry, such as in the law, medicine or accountancy, that it is predominantly the skill of the individual service provider that one is paying for.

In the greater part of the service sector, the service worker contributes only a small proportion of the value of the service provided. It is above all the technology that they provide access to that holds the predominant value in the transaction.

The low level of value added by the rank and file service sector worker is reflected in the fact that the wages for the majority of British workers are punitively low in relation to the cost of living . In addition, the gap between these incomes and the well-off is very great.

These factors lend firm support to the view that an economy simply cannot generate enough wealth to ensure a robust level of income for most without making real concrete objects that offer substantial added value to the purchaser.

But what, exactly, should Britain manufacture? For one thing, what it most certainly and with urgency ought to be doing is embarking upon the large-scale making and installation of off-shore wind turbines. Britain has the greatest wind resources in Europe, and is surrounded by shallow seas well suited to this.

It is unlikely, however, that this would be enough to turn Britain into a high value-added economy. Moreover, China and the other export-led developing economies have already gone beyond simpler mass-produced items and before long are likely to rival British capabilities in renewables at prices which, because of our labour costs, we cannot match.

Many of our European partners have avoided going nearly so far down this road towards a labour force made up of a high-earning minority and a majority on stagnant earnings in low value-added occupations. They have done so by maintaining a robust manufacturing, exporting sector.

However, the inexorable logic of competition from the developing economies is that free trade will enable them to make increasing inroads into most spheres in western Europe that produce the high value-added real objects of manufacturing and software design. If they do so, these economies will become hollowed out as those sectors shrink, a process which Britain has followed furthest.

Eventually, it must become clear to policy makers that maintaining our wealth depends upon maintaining our capacity to make real objects that people need and want to buy. At that point, it is likely that there will emerge a mounting tide of calls for targeted tariffs to protect the most valuable industries. This would run counter to EU economic orthodoxy, but this is an orthodoxy that could well be overturned.