Monthly archive for February 2015
Showing results 1 - 5 of 6 for the month of February, 2015.
24 Feb 2015
Believe or not the Transition Health Check is not about measuring everyone’s blood pressure in your Transition group or seeing how fit you all are. It’s actually a great tool for you to use to see how your group is doing, one that many Transition groups have already found to be really useful. It is very important to state upfront that the Health Check is there to help your group, it is not a test that you pass or fail. Over the next few weeks we hope to hear from some groups who have already done the Health Check for their reflections.
A healthy group
Interestingly the similarities between a healthy human body and a healthy Transition group are both about taking an holistic view of what is happening in order to prevent problems by checking that all the different parts are working well. The Health Check is based around the following elements of the Transition support offer. It has been shown through research, actual experience and feedback that if a group covers these they are more likely to be successful, sustainable and healthy:
The Transition Animal
Sometimes we compare a healthy initiative to a healthy animal, different parts of its body representing different aspects of what makes Transition successful (see right for one artists impression of The Transition Animal, looking a rather like a four-legged Pikachu…):
Four legs: A Transition initiative needs to have legs to walk and move in the right direction. The 4 essential legs needed to help make Transition a reality are; a well functioning group that gets things done and looks after itself, engagement with your local community, having a range of partners and being involved in a range of networks and running practical projects that demonstrate Transition on a practical level.- Heart: We also need a healthy inner life when doing Transition and take care not to burn out. The heart brings values and principles that help us to take care of ourselves and each other – creating a positive culture, giving time to reflect together and checking on our energy levels and personal sustainability.
- Vision: It is very hard to see where you’re going without eyes, in the same way that it is difficult to see what it is you are trying to achieve without having a vision.
- A wagging tale: A happy animal often has a wagging tail, so a Transition group should be having fun, enjoying what it is doing and take time to socialise.
All of these elements add up to a healthy animal, that is not to say that an animal cannot function if it doesn’t have all of these things, but it does make it more difficult. This is the same for a group they can definitely function without some of these aspects, but it will be more effective and happier if it has all of these in place.
It’s not a test
As stated above the Healthcheck is not a test. It is a tool that has been designed to help your Transition initiative to reflect on where it has got to through sparking conversations about what’s working well and what could be strengthened. It also helps you to celebrate your strengths and successes and to identify areas which might need more work, or skills, or resources. As it is linked into the new Support Offer, you can access support activities on our website for any of the areas that you want to spend some time on.
All about discussion
Many groups have found that using the Health Check raises lots of questions, and sometimes the discussion it starts supplies the answers. The focus is on the how your initiative is doing. This is not to say that you have to cover all of them, or you should feel bad if you aren’t doing aspects of them as many groups take time to develop. Also, some aspects may just not be relevant for your group. The whole point of the tool is to help your group to come to its own conclusions about how it is doing and what it can do to develop in the future.
Every Transition initiative is different in the mix of people involved, the opportunities and challenges of your context, and the external events that influence people to join, or not. We hope the result of doing the health check is that you celebrate what you have achieved rather than feeling overwhelmed with what hasn’t happened. No initiative that we know of could achieve a perfect score- and we’d be worried if it did!
People like it
We have run the Health Check as part of the Thrive Training and in support workshops with groups who have been struggling and it has always been a positive experience with people getting a lot out of it. Recently we did a workshop on the health check at Penwith Roadshow and one person carried out the Healthcheck for 2 different groups she had been involved in looking at community engagement. One of the groups had been running a long time and one was relatively new. It highlighted how much more the older group was engaged in the community.
This showed that it can take time to build that engagement, but also that it would be worth looking at what the group had done to build that engagement to see what could be learnt. There is no reason why any group wanting to engage people around a positive project couldn’t use the Health Check – why not try using it with other groups you are involved with?
Many people have said it’s given them a broader, more complete view of what Transition is – even if it’s not possible to do everything. Others find that just reflecting together brings a lot of energy and learning which re-invigorates the group.
Try it out
So give it a go and see what you think. You can download the health check here.
We recommend that Transition initiatives, whether the Core Group or whichever working groups feel it would be useful or both, do the health check once a year, though you can do it as regularly as you want, if you feel like it. We would love to hear from you what you thought of it and on the bottom of health check page is a short survey where you can feedback to us your comments and thoughts.
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24 Feb 2015
This month sees publication of the first new book about Transition not written in English, a landmark moment worth celebrating. Guía del movimiento de transición (‘A Guide to the Transition movement’) is the work of Spanish Transition activist and trainer Juan del Rio. We will be speaking to him soon about the book, what it covers and what his hopes are for it, but for now I wanted to share the Foreword I wrote which looks at why Transition matters, and why this book matters. I’d like to congratulate Juan on producing this book, the first Transition book in Spanish, and hope that it goes far and wide and does much to inspire people to get involved (you can order the book here).
“It is a delight to be able to write an introduction for this book. This is the first new book on Transition not written in English and not originating from the UK or the US. That feels like something historic to celebrate in itself. That it emerges from Spain, a country that has been so profoundly affected by the fallout from the economic crisis, feels especially appropriate.
Transition is the quiet revolution going on around you. You may not have noticed it but it’s there. It is a movement that doesn’t wait for permission but which just gets on and starts building the healthy human culture that we all yearn for. When we started it, in my small Devon town of Totnes, we had no idea it would even have any kind of an impact there. It has therefore been a process of near-continuous wonder to see it rolling out in what is now 50 countries worldwide. To see this book manifesting as a result of the spread of Transition in Spain would have been unimaginable in those early days of Transition.
One of the great difficulties we have in designing a lower carbon, more resilient world is that we struggle to imagine it. As a species we are fantastic at designing our own demise. We make endless films in which humankind is wiped out by a virus, by mutant robots, by an alien invasion, by a zombie apocalypse, by huge intelligent apes. We love it. Yet where are the films about the culture that saw an avertable crisis coming and responded with imagination, creativity and collective thinking, and managed to alter the trajectory of history? They barely exist.
Yet around the world, it is a story that people are just getting on with telling themselves. I have the great privilege of seeing this happen in different places. Time and again I see the power of people coming together, inspired by a shared vision, rolling up their sleeves and supporting each other to make it a reality. And it’s not just the actual projects themselves, it’s what it does for the people who give their time and passion to making them happen that’s so thrilling.
There’s the guy in Liege in Belgium who decided to start a community supported vineyard project. They started a crowd-funding appeal which was very slow to start with, but by the end they had raised nearly €2 million. “Lack of money ought not be an obstacle”, he told me. “This is Belgium, one of the richest countries in the world. If the idea is good, the money will come. Don’t be afraid”. Time and again I see people keen to put their support, in all senses of the word, behind imaginative projects done with great imagination and good heart.
I travelled recently to Sussex in England to speak at the seventh birthday celebrations of Transition Town Lewes, one of the first Transition initiatives. One of the people I met there was Chris Rowland (see video below), who founded a community energy company. “Transition was something that saved me”, he told me. “It meant that I changed my career, got into local community renewable energy, met loads of fantastic people, and did things which I never thought I’d do, including winning a major national award for community energy and having to stand up in front of 500 people in London and make a speech. Seven years ago I just couldn’t have done that. Transition has given me confidence to do things I didn’t think I could do, and that I really wanted to do”.
In the north of England I spoke to one of a group of women who have started a successful local food distribution system. Running a business was not something any of them had planned on doing, but they found themselves inspired by Transition to make it happen. She told me “we all just really wanted to change the way we live, and change our own personal lives and to change things and live different lives ourselves as well as a different life for our community”. They now jointly run a thriving social enterprise.
A woman in Portugal with no experience of being involved in any kind of community activism or projects, and who was very shy and nervous, found that in her apartment block a project had begun to create a community garden in front of the block. Getting involved gave her, for the first time, confidence to find a place in her local Transition group and start initiating things herself. “It’s amazing”, she told me. “I’ve been living in Portalegre for ever, 37 years, and I have felt my community and my city crumble, people turning their backs to each other. This community garden we created tells me it is possible to do things with other people. It is possible, we just need to wake up to each other again”.
Everywhere I go I hear stories like this. Why? Because these are times that demand that ordinary people step up and make extraordinary things happen, and because Transition is designed to do a few key things that are all too rare these days:
- It gives people permission to just start doing things: not that people need anyone to give them permission, but it can help to feel motivated and inspired
- It gives their work a context: rather than just a series of one-off projects, Transition weaves things together, suggesting that a diversity of projects actually represent a historic wider moment of change at the local level
- It gives them support: any project is just the practical manifestation of the dedicated, and often unseen, group behind it. It matters that that group has a healthy group culture, clear ways of doing things, and strategies for support and reducing burnout
- It balances problem and solution: it’s not enough to show people depressing climate change DVDs and expect them to be shocked into action. It can distress and isolate people, and actually drive them away from the necessary changes. We need to present such stuff in the context of a wider programme of doing something about it.
- You become part of a ‘Learning Network’: no one place knows how to do this, but if we can network thousands of communities doing Transition together, sharing their successes and failures, then it is between us that the solutions lie.
- It’s positive: Transition doesn’t start by trying to blame people we don’t like or see as responsible, it’s about a positive vision of where we want to get, and mobilising everything we’ve got, including our sense of humour, to make that happen.
Transition is also very ambitious. It seeks to change the way our local economy works, to change the food system to one with more local seasonal produce and a clearer link with local, peri-urban farmland. It seeks to change the energy system to one that is 100% renewable, with huge advances is energy conservation, and with as much infrastructure as possible in local community ownership. It seeks to re-imagine local economies as being far more circular, far more resilient and diverse. Ultimately it seeks to change the culture of a place, so as to be more open to new ideas, new thinking, while constantly building practical examples that it can work in practice.
Yet all too often we imagine that we can achieve these very ambitious aims on our Wednesday evenings as volunteers. That way burnout lies. It’s what I call the ‘tyranny of volunteerism’, meaning that we end up with people doing Transition who have skills, time and confidence, not something everyone in our communities has. In the last couple of years we have seen a very welcome upsurge of the idea that if we are to really make Transition happen on the scale we need, then we need to be creating new livelihoods, new enterprises. No-one else is going to do it.
So we see Transition initiatives starting new food markets, new food distribution businesses, new community farms, new community energy companies, new enterprises to give people an experiential immersion in Transition, new local currency systems. We also see the growing realisation that if we are serious about affecting the level of change we need to see, communities need to be able to take control of and own assets in their community, be it buildings, land or energy generation infrastructure. How would an entrepreneur think about generating the scale of change we need to see in the tiny window of opportunity that we have?
In my community of Totnes, after a seven year campaign, we are close to signing a historic agreement whereby the community takes control over the development of an 8 acre site and become, in effect, our own developer. This represents a real step up, and it can happen everywhere. It’s one of the things I love about Transition, the breadth of what people are doing, how distinct it is to each community, to each place, and how both smaller projects and larger ones help to tell a new story about the future we want to create.
That in itself is profoundly political. Yet it is not party political, nor is it explicitly political. And that really matters. This is a movement that seeks what we have in common, what brings us closer together, rather than what distinguishes and separates us. This is a young movement still, and if this book inspires you to get involved in Transition then you will be part of shaping what it becomes. As will this book.
My gratitude to Juan del Rio for writing this book is immense. People might ask me or others at Transition Network what Transition would look like in Spain, but I have no idea. It’s not for me to say. To see it emerging across Spain, and in other Spanish-speaking nations, rooted in the experience of the people and place is thrilling. Take the insight and inspiration you find in these pages and use it to reimagine the place you live. Use it as the foundation for new conversations with your neighbours. Use it as a pair of glasses through which you see your neighbourhood in a different way, as a collection of possibilities, as a vibrant, thriving, resilient community. By deciding to get involved you join a quiet, yet enormously powerful revolution taking place around the world. Welcome on board. Let’s do wonderful things.
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16 Feb 2015
When planning consent is given for a development which local people bitterly oppose, is that the end of the story? What options remain open to them? As South Hams District Council planners grant the Duke of Somerset permission to close down the last working dairy farm in Totnes to replace it with 83 homes, the question I want to explore here is whether, and how, a community might skilfully render such a permission invalid or unusable. Indeed, as we’ll see, there is a strong moral and ethical case for doing so when the permission in question directly undermines the community’s resilience, impacts its quality of life or, in fact, flies in the face of the government’s own objectives.
Great Court Farm lies on the edge of Totnes. It’s a dairy farm that has been in the same family for four generations, and is the last working dairy farm left within the town itself. The land is owned by the Duke of Somerset, a direct descendant of the brother of Lady Jane Seymour (the ‘died’ out of the ‘divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived’ sequence of the wives of King Henry VIII). He owns 2,800 acres around Totnes, including Great Court Farm. Last year he held two paltry ‘public consultations’ (I went to one, it left a lot to be desired), before submitting an outline planning application.
To say the application proved to be unpopular would be an understatement. The colourful and creative ‘The Duke’s a Hazzard’ campaign (see flyer, right) was started up by Friends of Great Court Farm, and generated a lot of support (and local press). Totnes is already groaning under the pressure of new development, hundreds of similarly crap houses already under construction, or about to be. It’s a town where the average house price is more than £300,000 but the average salary is just £21,000 per annum. Every year sees the exodus of another year group of young people heading off to more affordable climes.
From any analysis, the plans for Great Court Farm are a dreadful proposal, yet we live in a world where dreadful proposals are being approved in record numbers, due, in no small part to the coalition government’s National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) which states that:
“At the heart of the National Planning Policy Framework is a presumption in favour of sustainable development, which should be seen as a golden thread running through both plan-making and decision-taking”.
This presumption in favour of development has led to a free-for-all, given the extremely low standards by which it is decided what sustainability actually is. In the Highways Officer’s report recommending approval for Great Court Farm he writes:
“Totnes is a sustainable location, benefitting from shops, schools and transport links and as such can support the delivery of more affordable housing”.
So just having shops and schools is now sufficient to render a place “sustainable”. If only I had known 8 years ago it was so easy, I wouldn’t have had to bother with all this Transition stuff. Planning departments, stripped to the bones thanks to cuts in government spending, no longer have the clout to take anything to appeal, and so virtually anything that is submitted is being approved. All that “red tape” we were told needed getting rid of actually starts looking quite appealing again.
Up and down the country, on appeals by developers about ‘viability’, levels of affordability are being driven down to virtually zero. Five years ago we were told that by 2016 all new homes would be ‘zero carbon’: that all now seems long forgotten. The least ambitious levels of energy efficiency you can get away with are the order of the day now.
Great Court Farm was approved 6:5 by councillors, one of the deciding votes, strangely, coming from a fellow dairy farmer. The application was granted on the grounds that it represented ‘sustainable development’. Yet this is an application which will:
- have grave impacts on already congested roads, affecting traffic safety and reducing quality of life for local residents
- put pressure on already overstretched local primary schools and other local services
- require residents to be dependent on cars given its peripheral location and the steepness of the hill leading to the site
- add an unacceptable level of new housing to the 400 already granted approval in a small town
- lead to the loss of the last working dairy farm in Totnes
- add an unacceptable degree of extra traffic to a junction that is already very congested at key times of day.
Cllr Carol Wellwood of Totnes Town Council said, in relation to the application, that “for the people of this town it is a disaster”. The Duke’s response to concerns about the inevitable car dependency of the development and the impacts of that additional traffic? A free bike and free bus pass for every resident. Given the steepness of the hill, they had better be mountain bikes, preferably electric ones, or better still a ski lift, and sadly no buses pass the site. There is also no reason to assume that the houses built will be anything other than all the other developments happening around the town, i.e. the minimum standards the developer can get away with.
So here’s my question. What can a community do when a development is foisted on them that they don’t want, when the planning system fails them so gravely? When presented with a development that has exploited the “build everywhere” frenzy generated by a government that conflates economic growth with an unrestricted construction industry? Is that it? Game over? I think not. What might it look like if the community itself withdraws that consent? There are interesting precedents here…
In 2008, Greenpeace activists who had scaled the chimney of a coal-fired power station were found not guilty when they argued that their actions had prevented a bigger crime, namely that of the impacts that climate change will bring. In 2000, five Greenpeace activists were found not guilty of criminal damage after occupying an incinerator on similar grounds. In 1999, three women were cleared of causing £80,000 damage to a Trident nuclear submarine, claiming they were preventing greater possible war crimes, a similar case used in 1996 by four women who caused £1.5 million damage to a Hawk fighter jet at a British Aerospace factory.
While not proposing the kind of direct action approach seen in these examples, what I am suggesting is a withdrawing of community consent. All of the above show that it is justifiable to oppose something that on the face of it is legally acceptable, if, in the bigger picture, its negative impacts outweigh the benefits. The leaders of the 3 main political parties at Westminster recently signed a joint pledge on climate change which commits them “to seek a fair, strong, legally binding, global climate deal which limits temperature rises to below 2°C”, the level seen as the threshold of dangerous global warming. We need to hold them to that (although in fairness they did also all support the recent Infrastructure Act, which commits governments to “maximising the economic recovery of UK petroleum“, a bill George Monbiot calls “the Climate Change Act’s evil twin”. For example, actually staying below 2 degrees requires huge cuts in carbon emissions from the residential sector, as seen here:
The Duke’s development flies in the face of this, rather than contributing to it, as does all the rest of the poor quality building being thrown up around the town. It is being built to 20th century energy efficiency standards, not 21st. The town also needs affordable housing (the Great Court Farm application currently promises 44% affordable housing, but everyone knows in a full application this will be haggled down, on grounds of “viability”, to something more like 17.5%). The town needs work and training for local people. It needs the maintenance of its existing farming industry. It needs safe roads and clean air. Yet this development will provide none of that. If the planning system won’t provide them with that, then as a community we do have another option. It is to withdraw our support, withdraw our consent. And that consent is more powerful than we perhaps realise.
In Hay-on-Wye, local people, faced with their local school being sold to a developer for housing and a possible new supermarket, launched ‘Plan B for Hay’, bringing together local residents who were architects and planners to put forward an alternative for the site, which is now, several years later, what is happening on the site.
There are other precedents closer to Totnes too. Costa Coffee famously decided not to open a branch in town, in spite of being granted planning approval. The strength of feeling in the ‘NoToCosta’ campaign led to Costa’s CEO meeting with the local MP, local Mayor and local traders and deciding not to take up the permission. A recent campaign in the neighbouring village of Dartington, ‘Don’t Bury Dartington Under Concrete’, formed in response to Dartington Hall Trust putting 19 sites forward for consideration for planning permission.
The resultant campaign involved petitions, a march, a ‘Community Vote of No Confidence’ in DHT’s Trustees and Senior Management, and resulted in a complete u-turn, DHT actually writing to local people to apologise for its behaviour, and may well have led to the resignation of its CEO. The local Atmos Totnes project, being created by Totnes Community Development Society, is modelling what good consultation looks like and what development owned and driven by the community can lead to.
So what might a community withdrawal of consent look like in relation to Great Court Farm? Friends of Great Court Farm have:
- Launched a petition requesting the Duke to withdraw his application (launched last week and already signed by 377 people)
- Begun planning a series of high profile events to bring public attention to the Duke’s approach
- And my favourite: there are plans to submit a planning application for affordable housing on the lawn in front of the Duke’s house
Also, Totnes Town Council, with the support of Totnes MP Dr. Sarah Wollaston, have written to the Secretary of State and asked him to “call in” the application for review. A letter from the campaign to the Duke concludes:
“We hope you can see that it is in all good conscience that we do not feel like we can just let this go. Not only do we feel you should acknowledge that you have a duty of care to the Hooper family and the community who live on and near the land of which you are a ‘custodian’ and act upon it but also that you cannot continue to hide behind your agents and planning consultants. You need to take responsibility for this appalling state of affairs and back down before any more heartache is caused and any more money is wasted. We would like to ask you again to withdraw this application and work with Totnes and Berry Pomeroy on their neighbourhood plans to reach a right and proper approach to the divestment of your land”.
A key to this is the idea of ‘discrepancy’. In Motivational Interviewing, a technique used to treat addiction, the aim is stated as being to “develop discrepancy between the client’s goals or values and their current behaviour”. The Don’t Bury Dartington campaign has been all about discrepancy, putting a mirror up to the gap between the organisation’s stated values and its actual behaviour. I think that as a tool for communities wishing to withdraw consent from ruinous planning applications, highlighting discrepancy, the gap between what the community wants/needs and what they’re being offered, the gap between the landowners stated values and the development they’re proposing, and the gap between the values that most local people live by and the values underpinning the development, is a very powerful approach.
The NPFF argues that in order to be considered as ‘sustainable development’, any development must demonstrate that it is sustainable in terms of its economic, social and environmental impacts. For a development (Great Court Farm) that builds unsustainable, high carbon houses on prime agricultural land, leading to the forced closure of a family business, in a setting that will worsen air quality, reduce safety for pedestrians, be unaffordable to most local people, and in a way that takes no account of national climate targets to be granted planning approval on the grounds of being a ‘sustainable development’ is an affront.
Under such circumstances, it’s time more communities began to withdraw their consent from such appalling approvals, and they can be found up and down the country. Indeed, rather than being somehow wildly subversive, there is a strong case, as in the Greenpeace example cited above, to say that doing so is actually helping the government meet its aims better than the current planning system seems capable of doing. Consider, for a moment, the following selections from the NPPF:
- “empowering local people to shape their surroundings”
- “a creative exercise in finding ways to enhance and improve the places in which people live their lives”
- “support the transition to a low carbon future in a changing climate”
- “allocation of land for development should prefer land of lesser environmental value, where consistent with other policies…”
- “promote the development and diversification of agricultural and other land-based rural businesses”
- “encouragement should be given to solutions which support reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and reduce congestion”
Yet the Great Court Farm permission flies in the face of all these. This is the small field in South Devon where sustainable development went to die. If we seek to build resilient, vibrant, diverse communities, and to build an economy consistent with our grandchildren not having to live with the worst effects of climate change, then communities have more power than they might realise in shaping that. What an approach best suited to supporting them in doing this is something we sketched out a few months ago in our SWIMBY (‘Something Wonderful in my Back Yard’) Manifesto. Giving their consent and support to developments that are consistent with that, and withdrawing it where it’s not, is powerful indeed. And indeed it is more consistent with government policy than the planning system currently appears capable of being.
I would argue that good development, development that meets the needs of the community and of the wider world, is ONLY possible if communities are engaged from the outset. We need new models of development, rooted in Community Land Trusts, a Land Value Tax, genuine local decision-making, an explosion in innovation around local building materials, a reimagining of the potential for development projects to drive local economic ingenuity. But we also need to be able to mobilise to stop developments which are an affront to our values as communities and which undermine our local economies and what makes them resilient. In doing so, we inevitably also start talking about the kinds of development we do want, and therein lies the spark for rich creativity and collective brilliance.
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13 Feb 2015
We are gathered here today to mourn the passing of our dear friend, Transition Free Press. TFP, as it was more affectionately known, had, in its short life, become a lighthouse for those bobbing on the seas of Transition, a shining beacon of our collective emergent culture. Ever since its initial ‘Preview Issue’ in June 2012, and through its 6 subsequent issues, it brought together beautiful design, skilful editorship, and a range of stories and insights from across our ever-diversifying movement that was always deeply inspiring and treasured by many.
But ultimately, even the deep passion and enthusiasm of its editors and writers, as well as of its 100 distributors, 50 advertisers, and everyone around the world rooting for it, it proved impossible to create a financially viable economic model in a world that expects its information for free. The dedication and enthusiasm that got it through those 7 issues should not be underestimated.
So, on this sad occasion, we pause also to celebrate. To celebrate the thrill many of us felt when a new bundle of TFP arrived. The delight, in a world of blogs and Facebook alerts, of getting ink on our fingers when reading TFP. To celebrate the many people who supported the crowdfunding appeal that got TFP underway in the first place, as well as the diversity of stories it covered, and the experience it gave many people of seeing their writing in print for the first time. To celebrate what it meant to our movement to see itself, in its many manifestations, reflected in the colourful, rich and nourishing pages of TFP. To celebrate its ability to speak its mind, hold its own ground and not to tow a party line. And for featuring a photo of Mike Grenville in a dinner jacket and bow tie.
There will of course be life after TFP, but there will always be a TFP-shaped hole at the centre of it. I’m sure I speak for most people in the Transition world when I pass on my condolences to those closest to it, to thank them deeply for all that they have brought to our lives, and to wish them the very best in whatever comes next. In editor Charlotte DuCann’s editorial in what we now know was the final edition of TFP, she wrote about the qualities of working together to create a better world. She wrote that such acts “embody a certain intrinsic spirit: they’re witty and colourful and alive, and when they take place, everything else feels gloomy and somehow out of date“.
It was a spirit that TFP embodied, and which will be much missed. So long, and thanks for all the beautiful gift that was TFP.
If you would like to pass on any condolences, or share you feelings about this, please do so in the comments thread below.
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4 Feb 2015
I first heard about Alex Epstein’s book ‘The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels’ via an unsurprisingly fawning review over at the SkeptEco blog. Its premise is so ludicrous that normally I wouldn’t read it, never mind review it. There is no “moral case for fossil fuels”, just as there was no “moral case for slavery” in 1860. But given the alarming rise, in the US and elsewhere, of the climate sceptic/pro fossil fuel lobby (witness, for instance, Sen. James Infoe’s ludicrous attack on climate science in the US Senate recently) it feels important to look a bit closer at the arguments presented here.
Epstein recently started something called the ‘Center for Industrial Progress’, and lectures on the need to keep fossil fuels as a key driver for the economy. At other times he can be found, among other things, defending child labour or arguing that animals have no rights. He likes to paint himself and the fossil fuel industry as the misunderstood underdogs, holding the line against the far more influential “greens”. He’s a curious character, as can be seen in this video of him standing in the middle of the hundreds of thousands of people who attended the Peoples’ Climate March in New York last year, heckling them with inane comments like “you know, your clothes are fracked!”
“As you read this”, he writes, “there is a real, live, committed movement against fossil fuels that truly wants to deprive us of the energy of life”. This painting of the oil industry as the good guys, as the misunderstood heroes being undermined by uninformed idiots (i.e. you and I), is the first, but by no means the last, place where Epstein parts company with reality.
He bemoans the fact that fossil fuel companies “have had to fight daily for permission to empower billions of people”. Try telling that to the communities in Ecuador affected by the oil spills for which Chevron was fined $19 billion, people in Richmond, California who live in the shadow of the Chevron refinery which exploded in 2012, communities living near mountaintop removal coal plants, people living near fracking sites, or First Nation people living near the Tar Sands in Alberta. He continues:
“I believe that we owe the fossil fuel industry an apology. While the industry has been producing the energy to make our climate more livable, we have treated it as a villain. We owe it the kind of gratitude that we owe anyone who makes our lives much, much better”.
Central to Epstein’s argument, echoing those put forward by other cornucopians such as Matt Ridley in ‘The Rational Optimist’, is the idea that fossil fuels have been the best thing that ever happened to us (given that Ridley was recently estimated to be personally responsibly for 1% of the UK’s total carbon emissions, one might be forgiven for questioning his objectivity here).
The rise of fossil fuel use, Epstein argues, has led to better air quality, increased life expectancy, rising incomes, better access to clean drinking water, etc etc. This is stated as though it is somehow an insight that has escaped those arguing that we should now, with great urgency, leave fossil fuels behind, because, you see, “fossil-fuelled development is the greatest benefactor our environment has ever known”. The argument that it has led to the improvements he states is one that few would argue with.
However, at the same time, it can hardly be said to have been without its side effects. To name but two, it has appallingly corrupted international politics and undermined democracy around the world. As Naomi Klein put it in ‘This Changes Everything’:
“Fossil fuels really do create a hyper-stratified economy. It’s the nature of the resources that they are concentrated, and you need a huge amount of infrastructure to get them out and to transport them. And that lends itself to huge profits and they’re big enough that you can buy off politicians.”
How many people in Nigeria, for example, dubbed the “world oil pollution capital” and where much of the wealth generated has been siphoned off through corruption, would argue that “fossil-fuelled development is the greatest benefactor our environment has ever known”? It is true that for many people (but by no means all) the fossil fuel age has brought great benefits.
However, Epstein’s argument is rather like staying with a psychotic and abusive partner because the first couple of months of the relationship were very lovely. Just because the first half of the oil age enabled some remarkable things does not mean logically that therefore the second half will be the same. Last year the IPCC stated that unchecked climate change will be “severe, widespread and irreversible”. You would think that that, along with the overwhelming body of scientific opinion, suggests that the second half of the oil age might not quite be the bed of roses the first half was (for some at least). But not for Epstein.
He writes:
“To me, the question of what to do about fossil fuels and any other moral issue comes down to: What will promote human life? What will promote human flourishing – realising the full potential of human life?”
Given that this is the same question we ask in Transition, it’s fascinating to explore how we end up at such resolutely different places (and how he ends up advocating an approach almost guaranteed to put an end of any possibility of human flourishing). Epstein does this by several sleights of hand. The first is by dismissing climate change. His argument is only logical, or even possible, if climate change isn’t an issue. Fortunately for him it isn’t.
We know that 14 of the 15 hottest years on record have occurred since 2000. Yet to make his case that that somehow isn’t a problem, he wheels out lots of the rather tired and unfounded sceptic myths, such as:
Myth #1: CO2 is a “plant food with a fertilising impact”: a ridiculous argument; plants need much more than just CO2. They need water (availability of which reduces as temperatures rise) and other minerals and, er, soil. The fact that plants in a greenhouse grow better when some CO2 is added, doesn’t scale up to the planet as a whole. For example, plants exposed to more CO2 can be more vulnerable to pests, and reduces the quality of crops.
Myth #2: You can’t rely on climate models: Epstein argues that the case for climate change rests largely on climate models, of which he writes “those models have failed to make accurate predictions – not just a little, but completely”. But a recent study has shown that actually climate models have been very accurate, and actually can be more conservative than what is actually unfolding, for example in relation to the speed of melting of Arctic ice. Epstein writes “just about every prediction or prescription you hear about the issue of climate change is based on models”. But it’s not … the whole picture is also supported by a huge body of evidence of the impacts unfolding in the world around us, often in ways predicted by models. To say, as he does, that “every climate model based on CO2 as a major climate driver has been a failure” is simply untrue.
Myth #3: There is no 97% consensus among climate scientists: But there is. Read more here.
Myth #4: Scientists in the 70s predicted global cooling, so what do they know?: Again, a rather tired and silly myth beloved of climate sceptics. Reality is that even in the 70s, when climate science was in its infancy, there were 6 times more scientists predicting global warming than global cooling, it’s just that the cooling folks got the memorable Newsweek covers. Over time, as the evidence built, the case for global warming became clearer and stronger until the consensus we see today.
And so on. The rest of his arguments about climate change are similarly out-of-date, foundationless and silly, the intellectual equivalent of his standing facing in one direction, as in New York in the video above, while science and reason pour past in the other direction. But without them his so called ‘moral case for fossil fuels’ crumbles to dust.
He then argues, remarkably, that actually even if climate change were true, burning more fossil fuels in response will make us safer (I know, just go with me here, we’re in an Alice Through the Looking Glass parallel universe now). Fossil fuels, he argues, “don’t take a safe climate and make it dangerous, [they] take a dangerous climate and make it safe”.
Fossil fuels, you see, mean that we can, for example, power air conditioning so we can live in hot places in comfort. We can build better flood defences, we can use fossil fuelled technology to adapt to any climate. And of course, he adds, fossil fuels mean we can always up and move somewhere else! He writes:
“If you think about the climate in a real way, not as some vague mystical, “global climate”, but as the climate around you, you are a master of climate just by virtue of the fact that you can change climates”.
Here Epstein situates himself alongside the ‘neo-greens’ such as Stewart Brand, who argues “we are as gods, and we have to get good at it”. The belief that anyone can be a “master of climate” is deeply arrogant and flawed, as was highlighted in our recent interview with Clive Hamilton about geoengineering.
But while that “master of climate” argument may resonate in his air conditioned house in southern California, it doesn’t work so well in, for example, Pakistan. The Asia Development Bank already suggests that environmental factors, including climate change, are “already an important driver in migration”. 10 million people have been displaced by flooding and 2,000 died when 20% of the country was under water. A recent report by the UK Climate Change and Migration Coalition told some of stories of those affected. While you could feasibly imagine that fossil fuels might have a small role to play in creating flood defences in Pakistan, the impacts of the developed world, including the emissions associated with Epstein’s air conditioning, will overwhelm any benefits.
Ideas of fairness, social justice, global inequalities of power and wealth barely register in Epstein’s analysis. For him, fossil fuels are benign, with no noticeable impacts on geopolitics and relationships of power. Their role in creating corruption, war, their role as a driver in the US’s dreadful foreign policy approach, rendition, torture, how the US government has become central to the US pushing fracking on the rest of the world, all go without mention. He argues that it is wrong to deny the developing world the benefits of fossil fuels, an approach Michael Klare terms ‘carbon humanitarianism”, describing it as:
“the claim that cheap carbon-based fuels are the best possible response to the energy-poor of the planet (despite everything we know about the devastation climate change will cause, above all in the lives of the poor)”.
The $1.9 trillion the world spends a year subsidising the fossil fuel industry goes without mention too, as he prefers to bemoan the tiny fraction of that the world spends on subsidising renewable energy. He writes that thanks to fossil fuels, “we don’t take a safe environment and make it dangerous; we take a dangerous environment and make it far safer”. Actually of course the global picture is that while wealthy nations are able to make themselves safer to climate risks (although it didn’t help much with, for example, the great floods in south west England last year), the developing world, where the impacts are felt most acutely, simply are not, nor are the wealthy nations rushing to help.
In terms of energy resources, he is, one might say, on the optimistic end of the spectrum. The world apparently has 3,050 years of “total remaining recoverable reserves” of coal left. But you will hear no mention of Energy Return on Energy Invested in these pages, no sense that not all coal is the same, nor all oil. Renewable energy is swept aside as “expensive, unreliable and unscaleable”, as he argues that “modern solar and wind technology do not produce reliable energy, period”.
It’s a book that will often have you pausing to think “did he really say that?” You’ll hear stuff like:
“There is no inherent reason to think that the extinction of any given plant or animal is bad for humans”
and…
“Not only can our way of life last; it can keep getting better and better, as long as we don’t adopt “sustainability” policies”.
For me, in the face of the profound urgency of climate change, and a fossil fuel industry that sows corruption and destruction wherever it goes, there really is no “moral case for fossil fuels”. Yes, they have, in many ways, been amazing. But all the evidence shows that continuing with fossil fuels runs a very high risk of finishing us off altogether. Given Epstein’s love for the infallible power of the market, and the creativity it can unleash, why is it so impossible to imagine that our inventiveness and brilliance cannot solve the challenges of intermittency in relation to renewables, and enable us to use energy far more efficiently?
“Humanity needs as much energy as it can get”, he argues. Quite where the morality of assuming that on a finite planet with finite resources it is acceptable to gorge oneself on energy, and to assume it is your right to always have as much as you need, eludes me. In ‘This Changes Everything’, Naomi Klein quotes Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre as saying:
“Our ongoing and collective carbon profligacy has squandered any opportunity for ‘evolutionary change’ afforded by our earlier (and larger) 2°C budget. Today, after two decades of bluff and lies, the remaining 2°C budget demands revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony”.
It’s that unavoidable reality of the need for “revolutionary change” that triggers Epstein’s denial and compels him to write a book as feeble and poor as this. We have a choice when faced with reality, of either retreating into clinging to what we’ve done up to that point, or stepping out with purpose, vision and creativity, and doing something else. It was, after all, such a bold approach that created the Industrial Revolution in the first place. Why does it dissipate the moment we now have to design something else, something more appropriate to moving forward from now? Sadly Epstein, and most of the US Senate, are unable to take that leap. Their cautiousness does us all a huge disservice.
As Naomi Klein (whose ‘This Changes Everything’ Epstein’s book cover has clearly been designed to echo) puts it “there are no non-radical solutions left”. Epstein speaks for those for whom doing anything other than how we do things at the moment is unimaginable. Rather than being a moral position, it’s the opposite. File alongside those silly Michael Crichton climate change-bashing novels and move on. There’s too much to do, and too little time.
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