A broken model

I tweeted earlier (@powerdowngirl) about a Jim Puplava interview with Chris Martenson. While listening (about 20 minutes in) on the topic of money system debt, Chris describes the situation in such a way that I felt compelled to transcribe just that bit. I do understand time constraints and the whole interview is almost an hour long so below is just 2 minutes on why consumption and investment are NOT the same things. Given I’ve not finished listening myself, there may well be other gems of wisdom waiting for me as Chris is the author of the excellent Crash Course, which links energy, economy and environment and is well worth a look. It is split into small chapters, so can be dipped in and out of. I strongly recommend Chapter 17b on Energy Budgeting if you’re still a bit confused about net energy.

Anyway, despite record low interest rates and billions of dollars pumped into the global economy via quantative easing and other incentives to spend and consume, we’re not seeing the sustainable growth required by our financial systems. Chris asks, “If we really were going to spend that much money in deficit, what are we spending it on? Are we spending it on consumption or investment coz it’s a world of difference between those two and frankly almost all of that money has gone straight to consumption, not investment. And by investment (I mean) taking the natural gas that we think we have in relative abundance for the next 10 or 20 years, put the pipelines in, do things with that gasoline, figure out how we’re going to invest in the next round of energy technology, you know, these are things that would be investments and we’re not investing with this money we’re just trying to get back to consumption.

And so here’s the model. I think it’s a broken model  but that’s my opinion. But the model here is that consumers are supposed to consume and the way they do that is they take on debt and we need them to consume more than they are actually earning. We love that model. Remember you had your home and it was rising in value and you could (re-mortgage), spending it, that drives the economy and everybody’s happy. Maybe we have credit cards, we’ve got student loans, we’re borrowing for cars, that’s the model we had and the consumer, rightly and as predicted, just started to retract when the recession hit. That’s a good normal behaviour. What’s abnormal in this story is the Government stepping in saying ‘oh, I see you guys were overspending and now you can’t, let me take on the overspending role for you guys’. That’s a broken model.

Somebody lost the narrative in this story which says that in a time when consumers are undergoing normal consumption and they have to retrench from that, the Government can fill that tiny gap. When we’re overconsuming and the Government says ‘not only will I fill that but I’ll double you’, that’s where we lost the way. So yes people who look at these deficits and are concerned that they are unsustainable, as you mentioned, they’re absolutely right on. They are unsustainable but it’s worse than that. It’s how we are trying to sustain something that’s fundamentally, any grade school kid could tell you is unsustainable. We’re trying to sustain the idea that we can live beyond our means forever. The thinking caps have been taken off and we’re just reacting at this point and clearly when that story breaks, and it will, because things that are unsustainable have a way of building up until they stop, in that stopping moment we might find that it’s actually fairly unpleasant consequences and it’s something that I worry about and I know other people are worried about“.

Good, innit? So why do so few people get this? Anyone up on psychology? Because that’s what the next human breakthrough will be – psychological, not technological. Our next real breakthrough will be to understand (or should I say re-learn!) our place in this world, the importance of scale and rate of change, the abhorance of waste and, most importantly, the urgent need for cooperation to replace competition as a way to live. We need a new model and this time, could it please be one which works for all life, not just one elite sector of one rather smart primate?

Ignoring the signs

Imagine a world like ours (let’s call it Thera), with intelligent life forms, opposable thumbs and extractable fossil fuels. After some time, the top predator developed a complex global society and ran the show for its own ends. Yes, there were wars and inequality but when a group of leading scientists published a paper entitled, ‘The peak production of non-renewable natural resources’, everything changed. These beings had an economic system much like ours but unlike ours, it had never been decoupled from their environment. There was no writing out blank IOUs to Mother Nature here. They had never lost the knowledge that everything comes from nature – natural resources were priced in accordance to environmental impact and pollution only occurred by accident as the penalty was to close the business, discredit and bankrupt the bosses and return to the local community those assets not used in the clean up. “Eco-fascist”, I hear some shout. Maybe I am, if eco-fascist means finding it indescribably stupid to damage the natural resources which sustain us. Here on Earth, if someone questions the loss of biodiversity due to intensive farming, they’re accused of genocidal tendencies. And GM food? Hell, we need that to feed the starving millions! Really?

Anyway, least I digress, back on Thera the news that many important natural resources were, in fact, not limitless resulted in the ratification of a global treaty on resource use within 10 years of the paper’s publication. It was obvious to global leaders that if the current systems of trade and travel relied on a resource which would not be available 100 years into the future then the sooner the change started, the cheaper it would be. Yes, cheaper. These weren’t a bunch of tree huggers like me, who marvel at the beauty of moss and those tiny shiny beetles, who get excited mid-April when the swallows will return, who recycle fervently despite not really believing it will make a difference – it’s the principle. Thera’s global treaty defined a 100-year timeline for the switch away from all non-renewable natural resources. By the time the 100 years was up, they had used a quarter of their available fossil fuels to build resilient local infrastructure for energy and food provision – the remainder was left in the ground. They had realised that most goods would have to be produced locally, with international trade for essentials which could not be. Transport was radically altered – the personal vehicle was almost a thing of the past and while people travelled relatively little, mass transit ran regularly but rarely. These beings knew that future generations are as important as those living today.

Meanwhile, here on Earth, over 50 years have passed since M. King Hubbert gave a talk in San Antonio in which he predicted that US oil production would start to decline by the early 1970s. Up until minutes before Hubbert began, executives at the head office of Shell Oil (his employer) were on the phone asking him to cancel the talk. Hubbert’s presentation is widely regarded as the opening of the great debate about the finiteness of our oil supply yet are we using less fossil fuels? No. Are we planning how to use what’s left of the cheap (affordable) oil to invest in a future infrastructure which might conceivably work in a world without cheap energy (remember folks, every renewable device other than those carved by hand from freshly hand-sawn timber and dragged to site by horse or human has a fossil fuel input)? No. We’re going to more desperate measures to keep the oil flowing.

Net energy and growth
When I caught on to the significance of ‘net energy’ in the energy crisis (not that I’ve posted on it much), I suppose I thought that if more people understood the basics of energy, and realised that we’ve had an unprecedented abundance of cheap energy for the last 150 years, then there might be a shift in attitudes. I’m not sure why I thought that. Most people don’t want to talk about carrying capacity and human population growth; in fact, some get quite irate should the subject dare to be mentioned. It seems that we’d rather delude ourselves into believing that everyone can have a better standard of living, without our own standard of living decreasing, and with no acknowledgement that our standards of living have come about from centuries of exploiting natural resources. I don’t doubt that we could run human affairs in a ‘fair-for-all-species’ way – of course we could, if that’s what we all chose to do.

However, most of us don’t really get to choose much. We didn’t choose the system we’re in now, did we? That was dreamed up by various economists over the last two centuries and remains embedded in the fiction of rational markets. How can markets be rational when they are run by and for people with money to invest and dollars in their eyes? People mostly dislike risk, which is why we buy insurance or pray for deities to keep us safe; it’s also why economists pretend that they can model the market, the rational market kept on the straight and narrow by an “invisible hand”  which will create the best possible outcome for the most people. C’mon, Adam Smith said it in 1776, it must be true! We do not like risk but if the stakes are high enough we might be prepared to take a greater risk than normal.

The reason we are in the mess we’re in is not because people don’t understand energy and where it comes from. It’s because people don’t take responsibility for their ecological impact. Before this sounds like some misanthropic rant, it’s not.  Most people simply do not understand ecological impacts because they are not economic impacts – they don’t affect people directly, therefore they can be forgotten about or at least put way down the priority list. If you stood to make millions from exploiting natural resources, would you do it? If you’d been unemployed for 3 years and got offered a job driving a dump truck in a local quarry, would you take it? There are many reasons why people destroy the planet.

We can’t believe that globalised industrial civilisation, which provides so much comfort and convenience, might come crashing down. “Don’t say that, you’ll scare/annoy/disempower* people” (*delete as necessary). Well, it’s gonna get pretty scary when we hit the inevitable ‘limits to growth’ (there’s another seminal report which we could have used as a wake-up call – published 40 years ago come 2012 and yet it’s still a concept few can bear to contemplate). Which is worse – a disaster totally out of the blue or one which you knew was coming and at least had some time to prepare for? I think we all should ask ourselves, “at what point will I struggle to make ends meet – how dear must food and fuel get before I am forced to give up things I like? At what point will I work and eat locally – when it’s the cheapest option or the only option?” For most people, behavioural changes which benefit the environment only happen when there is no other choice. It’s the same for fossil fuels – my fear is that we will only leave them in the ground when their extraction is no longer profitable and by that point, who knows what state the economy will be in or how many tipping points will have been passed. Even if the economy imploded suddenly and completely, ending global trade altogether, I’d bet those living locally would work out how to use whatever remaining fossil fuel reserves they could access. We’re talking life and death here. Would you die of cold rather than burn some gloopy goo you’d found oozing from the ground? Yeah, maybe, if you didn’t have a match or Ray Mears to rub some sticks together.

The anti-growth message is the hardest of all to get across because we have set our economic system up in such a way that it can’t function without growth – growth is essential to repay debt. Really considering the implications of zero or negative economic growth means radically altering the way we view the Earth’s resources, each other and all species. Gone would be the days of one percent of the world’s adults owning 40 percent of all global assets (or whatever the figure really is).

The fervour with which some cling to their beliefs crosses all divides: religious vs. atheist, pro-nuclear vs. anti-nuclear, leave it in the ground vs. drill baby drill. The trick is to know when not to waste one’s time or effort in trying to change the opinion of others. Yes, the planet’s a-burning and there are lots of (often conflicting) solutions out there from the ‘will-we-ever-learn’ geo-engineering schemes to more in tune with nature permaculture, which while being much more ecologically convincing leaves me with an amusing mental image of unlikely suspects tending their gardens and a whole new meaning to ‘drill baby drill’.

As ecological economist Herman Daly pointed out, ‘since the earth itself is developing without growing, it follows that a subsystem of the earth (i.e. the economy) must eventually conform to the same behavioural mode of development without growth’. Apparently this sensible statement is in his book ‘Beyond Growth’ but I can’t access the book online and the quote seems to originate from Andrew Simms, which is good enough for me!

Energy and water
Some of those who believe peak oil to be a distraction are the ‘gigawatt guys’ – you know, the ones who spout forth about the number of gigawatts which hit the Earth each day – if only we could harness just a fraction of that energy, we’d be OK although they sometimes seem to forget that the required infrastructure demands considerable investment of money, energy and raw materials. A big part of the solar future is to come from concentrating solar power (CSP), large solar devices built in deserts across the world. It makes sense – deserts are not usually used for agriculture given the lack of water so there should be no ‘food not fuel’-type conflicts. But, wait, what exactly is CSP? While some systems focus sunlight onto photovoltaic cells to generate electricity directly, most are solar thermal devices. What all thermal-based energy production has in common, whether involving solar concentrators, fossil fuels or nuclear is that they all use heat to boil water and produce super heated steam. The steam then rotates a large turbine activating a generator that produces electricity. Hmm, so where will the water come from? Previously untapped underground aquifers? Like we haven’t screwed enough of them up! Or perhaps irrigated desert lands, replacing crops which themselves require a lot of water?

According to a 2006 report to Congress on the interdependency of energy and water (see table on page 65), a coal fired plant consumes 300–480 gallons of water per megawatt hour (not including cooling water which is returned to the source warm – I’m sure that alters the local ecosystem but for better or worse I don’t know); a nuclear plant uses between 400 – 720 gallons/MWh; and a solar parabolic trough plant uses 760 – 920 gallons/MWh. Considering the large number of solar plants being proposed (e.g. in Arizona) the question of the amount of water needed to produce solar energy is an important one. Efforts to increase water efficiency in solar energy operations involve modifying the conventional cooling tower, which would greatly increase building costs and could decrease the efficiency of the plant. So, once again, I would like to see people restrain their excitement at ‘the next green solution’ and consider all the arguments, not just the energy, not just the land, not just the water, not just the raw materials involved but the whole system.

Peak everything
I’ve probably spent more time than I should have trying to come up with the perfect argument for those who still see peak oil as a mere distraction compared to its limelight-hogging twin, climate change. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: they are intrinsically linked, not just to our use of fossil fuels but also to our attitude to natural resource use in general. We exploit, we use, we profit, we waste and we assume that something better will come along – it always has before, right?

With respect to climate change, our attitude has been to maximise fossil fuel production and consumption, while also destroying forests, peatlands and other natural carbon ‘sinks’ which might have stood a chance of absorbing a good chunk of the resultant CO2 had they been left intact. But they weren’t and now we even talk about making artificial trees  (various types). As for peak oil, it’s only posing a problem because of our short-termism – inhabitants of Thera were open to the idea that they’d miscalculated how to live and they changed. They heeded the signs.

So, why is peak oil important? Because peak oil is about the end of cheap oil, which means the end of cheap everything – transport, food, goods, everything which requires oil as an energy source or a raw material will become more expensive. Oil used to return almost 100 units of energy for every unit invested in its production – you’d poke a stick in Texas or Saudi Arabia and the stuff would come a-gushing. Not anymore. Now it’s all hi-tech, semi-submersible ‘accidents-waiting-to-happen’ operating deep offshore and tar sands (don’t get me started on that one!) Oil is the single most valuable source of energy, particularly transport energy. Without cheap and plentiful liquid fuel, global trade grinds to a halt. I do not believe that ‘we’ don’t know this. If we can’t wake up to what peak oil means, we won’t wake up to peak anything. We’ll live in hope of electric cars and biofuelled aeroplanes, of some hydrogen economy, of a sustainable world which will never happen. We have to end growth economics and I think that’s the biggest ask of all.

Fuelling the future by force

You know when you open your emails and click a link someone sent months ago, which has another link to the original article, which you look at, wondering why, but then you see something really annoying? Well, that’s just happened to me. It’s happened before. In fact, it happens a lot. Today, it’s the idea of 21st century warfare being powered by biofuels.

OK, so the story was from a newsletter sent back in October, about a new publication which I misread as being called “Fuelling the Future by Force”. Whoa, that’s a bit blatant! What do we have here? Click. The report, which is actually called “Fueling (sic) the Future Force” (easy mistake!) is one of several recent reports (such as last April’s warning from the US Joint Forces Command and the leaked German military report) which refer to the military thinking about ‘peak oil’ issues. It’s no surprise. If I’m worried about and making plans for the inevitable rise in fossil fuel prices and its impact on our globalised, just-in-time, energy-guzzling way of living then I’d bet my last penny that the military was. After all, oil exporting countries will, I’m sure, stop exporting their oil willingly, especially to us infidels, long before they stop pumping it out of the ground. If the West wants continued access to oil, and the emerging economies also want access to it but there’s less to go around and the countries whose oil it is want to hang on to it, there’s gonna be a fight.

Anyway, the report was produced in September 2010 by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), a think tank which, despite sounding alarmingly like the Project for a New American Century (what did happen to that refreshingly open plan for continuing American global supremacy?), allegedly has strong links with the Obama administration. CNAS recommends that the Department of Defence (DOD) transitions entirely away from petroleum by 2040 and suggests biofuels. Turns out there have been several successful tests of biofuels blends in military aircraft at Elgin and Edwards Air Force Bases and no doubt others.

So “Fueling the Future Force” states, on page 3, that “To ready America’s armed forces for tomorrow’s challenges, DOD should ensure that it can operate all of its systems on non-petroleum fuels by 2040”. It goes on (page 7) to inform the reader that “There is an array of reliable, renewable fuels that should be considered as alternative supplies to petroleum, including multiple generations of biofuels”. Given that “up to 77 percent of DOD’s massive energy needs – and most of the aircraft, ground vehicles, ships, and weapons systems that DOD is purchasing today – depend on petroleum fuel” (page 2) this is indeed some task! But never fear, they’ve done it before and they can do it again. Page 6 reassures us that “Transitioning away from petroleum dependence by 2040 will be enormously difficult, but fortunately the U.S. defense sector has made several energy transitions successfully in its history. In particular, it moved from coal to petroleum to nuclear power in its ships”. Now that’s what really annoyed me. The net energy-enhancing switch from using coal to using oil for fuelling ships (which happened about 100 years ago, when we were just on the cusp of vast oil discoveries around the globe) provided more energy more cheaply. It was an economic winner which just required some technological innovation to realise. We’re great at technological innovation when energy is plentiful. However, today’s supposed switch from oil to biofuels for aviation is not the same thing.

You see, the problem is that very few people seem to realise (or if they do, they don’t speak out about it much) that the energy returned from oil is colossal compared to that returned from biofuels once you take the energy inputs into account. Most of us understand ‘net profit’ but we fail to make the logical leap to ‘net energy’ because we have been swimming in cheap energy for over 100 years thanks to, mostly, oil. There has to be a positive surplus in both cases or things start to go awry. The jury’s out on whether some biofuels even have a positive energy return but an excellent report on all things EROEI (Energy Returned On Energy Invested) reminds us on page 51 that “it is important to recall that industrial societies emerged in the context of energy returns in the double digits- 50:1 or more, meaning fifty times as much energy yielded as invested”. According to this study, soybean biodiesel currently returns 93 percent (note that 100% more is just a doubling or 2 times as much) more energy than is used to produce it (1.93:1), while corn grain ethanol provides only 25 percent more energy (1.25:1).

It takes energy to get energy into a useful form and with biofuels there’s the additional dimension of growing the stuff. So if biofuels are really going to replace the energy used by the US military complex then how many acres of land would that take? Well, that would depend from what the biofuel was being extracted. Page 4 reveals that, “The Air Force and Navy flight-tested camelina-based biofuel blends in the past year”. Hmm, camelina? It turns out that others with a keen interest in flying have also tested this non-edible, easy-to-grow plant. So, how much land? I’d really like to know….

“Fueling the Future Force” does acknowledge (page eight) that, “Other environmental costs of fuel production can include heavy water use and diverting arable land to fuel production, both of which can trigger negative side effects if not managed properly”. But nowhere does it mention how much land would be required, which seems quite an obvious question, or how much energy we would actually have compared to today’s fossil-fuelled military. I fear we will be fuelling the future by force after all, as we always have.

Dead dolphins – BP oil disaster lives on…

Well, a few days ago I took the Twitter plunge. I’m failing miserably to keep up with, well, anything really! A bag of flour sits beside the kettle prompting me to make bread but I really want to suss this Twitter malarky out. Whilst jumping from site to site I found a worrying report about dead, young dolphins being found along Mississippi and Alabama shorelines. Their ages suggest that their mothers were just starting gestation when BP’s oil leak began.

I made comment previously about the spill & its miraculous disappearance but while I wondered if there might be an increase in birth defects in children conceived at the height of the pollution, I don’t think I mentioned it. There is no proof yet for what might have caused the dolphin deaths and linked article points out that toxins from oil or the chemicals used to disperse it may be a less likely cause than cold or disease as only one species of dolphin has been found. If the cause is determined, will we find out? And worse still, would we change our ways?

Post-peak living: Egypt

Well, here we are in February and I’ve not posted for months. I’m not sure what’s blocking my ability to write but am hoping it’s a mix of general winter apathy, when I spend more time worrying about how damp our wood pile is rather than the price of oil, and having two part time jobs (neither of which are particularly satisfying!)

 The civil unrest in the middle east and north Africa has filled the media recently and one can’t help but wonder where oil might feature. Egypt’s oil production was never huge and peaked in 1996 at 922,000 barrels/day. Meanwhile, Egypt’s oil use has been rising rapidly, at the same time as the amount extracted each year is declining – always a recipe for disaster. Starting about 2010 or 2011, Egypt will change from an oil exporting nation to an oil importing nation, if there are imports available on the world market. Egypt isn’t the only country with declining oil production – world oil production has been more or less flat since 2005 (see fig. 6 here), and the countries that produce the oil are using more and more of it themselves. One of the big problems in this post-peak world is that there is less oil available for export, even as countries like Egypt need more.

But it’s not just Egypt’s oil which matters. Nearly 3 million barrels of oil pass daily through the Suez Canal, making it one of the world’s most important oil routes. I’m sure theories abound as to what vested interests are at work here but there’s little doubt that Egypt’s oil use has been rising rapidly while the amount extracted each year is declining. Such a scenario will cause civil unrest, whether people see this link or not.

The scary thing about living at the peak is the social and economic impacts. Most people care about feeding their families and paying their bills, not where their energy comes from. It would be a good exercise to look at civil unrest around the world and see how it links to the energy crisis – whether direct energy prices or associated costs, such as food. I shall try to do this but you know how crap I am at putting fingers to keyboard so do feel free to reply with your thoughts….

Indigenous diets

When I find myself shouting at the radio, I should use it as a sign to post a blog. However, time and mental agility don’t always allow for that – if they did, this site would certainly be updated more than once every month or two. But yesterday I caught The Food Programme which was reporting from Turin, where the Terra Madre network held their biennial gathering of food communities, farmers, fishermen and cooks (organised by the international Slow Food movement). Sounds great. Why so shouty?

Well, apparently scientists and economists have spent the last few years studying indigenous peoples and their diets and concluded that (here it comes…) traditional indigenous diets are more nutrient packed and healthy than what most of us eat. You don’t say! Is it really such a shock that people who live in harmony with nature, eating natural foods and walking further in a day than many of us manage in a month (or a year) are healthier than us? That nomadic tribes, living in real communities, eating  a diverse range of food species grown without chemicals, breathing clean air (well, if they’re lucky) and not stuck in front of a TV/PC monitor all day are healthier than us? How can it be? I mean, we’ve got Wii now so we can jump about pretending to play sports after our McMeal and a hard day at the McOffice – we’re civilised!

Don’t get me wrong, it’s great that we are finally waking up to the fact that the remaining indigenous people, who we called ‘primitive’ and either killed, enslaved or ‘changed’ to our way of thinking, are often the most enlightened people on the planet. Unlike us in so many ways, indigenous people also keep a good handle on their population, with the women using herbs to control their fertility. Indigenous knowledge of plants as medicines, as well as foods, is vast – it has to be as it’s all they have. No dashing off to A&E with a broken arm or a nasty rash for these guys. And no welfare state or ‘just-in-time’ delivery. No, these people look after themselves and truly are sustainable. So long as their environment remains intact, they know that everything will be OK because they know their environment, they know what use it can tolerate and what abuses it can’t. More importantly, they know that intolerable abuses may not make themselves apparent immediately – they know the ‘precautionary principle’ and they don’t need a team of environmental lawyers to implement it. So long as they live somewhere in which we have no commercial interests, they will live happy and fruitful lives.

What, living sustainbably isn’t fruitful? Not being involved in destroying the environment isn’t fruitful? I think we should define fruitful! Indigenous people have words for plants and insects that have not yet been identified by the world’s botanists and entomologists. The Hanunoo people of the Philippines, for example, distinguish 1,600 plant species in their forest, 400 more than scientists working in the same area. Nearly 75 percent of 121 plant-derived prescription drugs used worldwide were discovered following leads from indigenous medicine and ‘we’ can’t wait to find more treasures lurking in the rainforests, just waiting to be turned into a profitable drug, controlled by pharmaceutical companies and dispensed globally to those who can afford it. Is that fruitful?

For anyone interested in indigenous diets, among the many publications are the UN FAO’s 2009 report on indigenous peoples’ food systems and the IIED’s book out earlier this year entitled ‘Modern and mobile’, which received coverage in the Guardian. This says it all – we’re turning to indigenous knowledge to help us with our own mess yet we still can’t quite bring ourselves to admit that we’ve lost this knowledge because we chose to lose it – we ditched it because it was primitive and we tried our best to wipe out those who practiced it. We had a better way – growth and development. While advancements over the last 200 years or more have undoubtedly made life a lot better for a lot of people, it has diminished the lives of many more. And, those developments would not have happened without the vast bank of energy supplied by the fossil fuels. Worth remembering.

It is abhorrent that in the 21st century, awash with information, we still act surprised to learn that living with nature, rather than in competition with it, can make for a better life. Those ad men did a good job on us, didn’t they?

Hurrah for Kyoto!

Well, the academic term begins so I thought I would just post a link to the latest article from George Monbiot, which makes sobering reading and should give you something to mull over while I get back into the swing of note-taking. There are climate talks coming up in Mexico in December but after Copenhagen, I doubt anyone’s too excited about them. Certainly not Monbiot, and rightly so. 

Monbiot points out that the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012 and there is no realistic prospect that it will be replaced before it elapses. The existing treaty took five years to negotiate and a further eight years to come into force yet it has achieved nothing. In terms of real hopes for global action on climate change, we are now far behind where we were in 1997, or even 1992. It’s not just that we have lost 18 precious years. Throughout the age of good intentions and grand announcements we spiralled backwards.

An analysis published a few days ago by the campaigning group Sandbag estimates the amount of carbon that will have been saved by the end of the second phase of the EU’s emissions trading system, in 2012. After the hopeless failure of the scheme’s first phase we were promised that the real carbon cuts would start to bite between 2008 and 2012. So how much carbon will it save by then? Less than one-third of one per cent. The full report, Cap or Trap, can be downloaded as a pdf.

Plenty of nations, including the UK, have produced what appear to be robust national plans for cutting greenhouse gases but only the Maldives has targets which might actually prevent more than two degrees of global warming if carried out globally. Worse than that though is the outsourcing of our carbon emissions, which is missing from the equation. The UK doesn’t make much anymore – it’s all about the ‘service’ industry now. Manufacturing has been outsourced to other countries, where labour and other costs are cheaper. Then we import the goods and pretend that our emissions are falling. Were these imported carbon costs included in the UK’s accounts, alongside the aviation, shipping and tourism gases excluded from official figures, the UK’s emissions would rise by 48%. Rather than cutting our contribution to global warming by 19% since 1990, as the government boasts, we have increased it by around 29%. It’s the same story in most developed nations – our apparent success results entirely from failures elsewhere. Globalisation does it again and we’re left wondering what to do – again!