Just finished off an article for UK climbing on climbing and climate change.
http://www.ukclimbing.com/articles/page.php?id=2038
Will post some eco blog thoughts sometime soon!
Wednesday 19 August 2009
Monday 15 June 2009
End of an era
Apparently Margaret Thatcher once said that any man who reaches the age of 26 without owning a car can consider himself a failure. Up until now I was pleased to be branded a failure by Thatcher's kind of idealism, outliving her target date by 3 years. I've found living without a car not too difficult for the past decade of adulthood. I've got very good at finding cheap train tickets, knowing where I can get to on what train/bus lines and blagging lifts out of friends more "successful" than myself. So it was with a heavy heart that I finally conceded that I needed to buy myself a car. Ironically the event that spurred this was my imminent (I hope!) qualification as a commercial energy assessor, someone who can issue Energy Performance Certificates for Commercial buildings. This looks likely to involve visiting lots of sites that are in the middle of nowhere, on industrial estates and other places hard-to-access by train/bus.
I was primarily looking for something with the lowest CO2 emissions per km (which pretty accurately translates into a high mpg), I didn't want a hybrid because I wouldn't be doing that much city driving, and I was going to need a bigger range than current electric vehicles offer, so I narrowed it down to half a dozen small diesel cars. The murky world of second hand car sales was all new to me and luckily I managed to avoid the hard sell at dealerships and got a good deal out of a private sale on the first car I saw, a 2002 Citroen C3. I picked it up in Wakefield and it took two and a half hours to drive from there to the Hope Valley in heavy traffic, longer than it would have taken by train, my eco-karma was clearly not amused!
Once you have a car, of course, you are tempted to use it all the time - the upfront investment is so large, and the marginal cost per journey so small (often smaller than a bus or train fare), that it makes economic as well as convenience sense to do so. I almost found myself driving to and from north wales twice in 5 days this week, until the old self kicked in and I realised dossing with friends for a couple of nights in between trips was a cheaper, greener and altogether less stressful option. This seems to be the crux of the problem of getting people out of cars and onto public transport - we have to not just make public transport cheaper, faster and more convenient, but we have to make the cost per journey of car travel more expensive. It might be hard to do with the actual purchasing of cars, but it wouldn't seem unfeasible to make insurance and road tax something that we paid for on a "per journey" rather than "per year" basis, and this would be much fairer as well - currently you pay the same amount of road tax whether you drive 20,000 miles a year or 2000 miles a year.
I was primarily looking for something with the lowest CO2 emissions per km (which pretty accurately translates into a high mpg), I didn't want a hybrid because I wouldn't be doing that much city driving, and I was going to need a bigger range than current electric vehicles offer, so I narrowed it down to half a dozen small diesel cars. The murky world of second hand car sales was all new to me and luckily I managed to avoid the hard sell at dealerships and got a good deal out of a private sale on the first car I saw, a 2002 Citroen C3. I picked it up in Wakefield and it took two and a half hours to drive from there to the Hope Valley in heavy traffic, longer than it would have taken by train, my eco-karma was clearly not amused!
Once you have a car, of course, you are tempted to use it all the time - the upfront investment is so large, and the marginal cost per journey so small (often smaller than a bus or train fare), that it makes economic as well as convenience sense to do so. I almost found myself driving to and from north wales twice in 5 days this week, until the old self kicked in and I realised dossing with friends for a couple of nights in between trips was a cheaper, greener and altogether less stressful option. This seems to be the crux of the problem of getting people out of cars and onto public transport - we have to not just make public transport cheaper, faster and more convenient, but we have to make the cost per journey of car travel more expensive. It might be hard to do with the actual purchasing of cars, but it wouldn't seem unfeasible to make insurance and road tax something that we paid for on a "per journey" rather than "per year" basis, and this would be much fairer as well - currently you pay the same amount of road tax whether you drive 20,000 miles a year or 2000 miles a year.
Monday 16 March 2009
Career environmentalism
I’m just back from my sixth Msc module, and the first I’ve attended for a while. The modules are 5 intense days' long; lectures and practical work all day followed by evenings in the pub of fired-up debate and discussion. Most of the people on the course are what you might call scientific idealists – hugely idealistic people suggesting far-fetched solutions that they actually have thought very deeply about, rejecting some of conventional green thinking because they don’t think it stacks up, and adopting other innovative solutions. There is so much experience from a wide range of professions, so much knowledge and so much enthusiasm that I look forward to each module as much for the inspiration it gives me as anything learnt in lectures.
It was a bit of a surprise then, in the middle of a long and involved debate about carbon trading, when the guy I was discussing it with admitted that the only reason he was on the course was because he thought it would be good for his career. My first reaction was indignation – how dare he dilute this bubble of ecotopian optimism with his career environmentalism! But thinking on it a little deeper I should have welcomed the news that people were signing up for this Msc simply because they see it as a way to make money. It will never be possible to educate sufficient numbers of people to make the magnitude of changes that are necessary to avert dangerous climate change, so we need market solutions that drive people, who otherwise would be indifferent, to seek work in the environmental field. And we need thousands of these people. That this is happening already – that people see the environmental sector as a growth area, that people are becoming what is sometimes disparagingly referred to as “career environmentalists”, is grounds for celebration not derision.
It was a bit of a surprise then, in the middle of a long and involved debate about carbon trading, when the guy I was discussing it with admitted that the only reason he was on the course was because he thought it would be good for his career. My first reaction was indignation – how dare he dilute this bubble of ecotopian optimism with his career environmentalism! But thinking on it a little deeper I should have welcomed the news that people were signing up for this Msc simply because they see it as a way to make money. It will never be possible to educate sufficient numbers of people to make the magnitude of changes that are necessary to avert dangerous climate change, so we need market solutions that drive people, who otherwise would be indifferent, to seek work in the environmental field. And we need thousands of these people. That this is happening already – that people see the environmental sector as a growth area, that people are becoming what is sometimes disparagingly referred to as “career environmentalists”, is grounds for celebration not derision.
Wednesday 28 January 2009
Money Money Money
I’ve been working hard for the past few months on building up contacts and qualifications for my environmental building consultancy. It’s been an interesting time, and it got me thinking about money, and the way in which it affects our society. Most people like to succeed, and for their successes to be recognised by their peers. Very successful people are presumably more concerned with this than others. Outside of small groups of people looking to succeed in niche areas (for example peer respect amongst mountaineers or other amateur sportspeople), this recognition of success is almost always provided through money – the more successful you are, the more society rewards you with wealth. This wealth has a double effect on you – not only do you gain the recognition from your peers (you must be successful because you have money), but you are able to do more of the things that you’ve always wanted to but could never previously afford. In other words it’s an extremely strong motivator.
As someone who likes to see himself as being not very materialistic I was amused to find myself getting excited while waiting to hear about whether or not I had won a large contract. No doubt some of this excitement was due to the challenge of taking on such a big piece of work, but I was also excited because of the positive impact it would have on my bank balance. Now if I’m working in an area that I feel is doing something worthwhile in the world, this isn’t such a bad thing – if the business is making money that means it is being successful, and the more successful it can be the more of a positive impact it can have in the world. In this case the incentive provided by money is a very good thing. The problem is that much of the economic activity in the world is providing goods and services that, while useful to those involved, leave the world as a whole worse off. In many cases people are being very strongly incentivised to deplete and pollute the global ecosystem upon which the whole economy depends. This is because the economy is full of market failures – incidences in which the producer of a good or service is failing to pay the full cost of the activity. In his eponymous report on the economics of climate change, Nicholas Stern called climate change “The biggest market failure the world has ever seen”.
As environmentalists we should recognise the extreme power of money in influencing the way people act, and instead of demonising it, seek to reshape the rules of the economy so that the incentives are pushing in the right direction.
As someone who likes to see himself as being not very materialistic I was amused to find myself getting excited while waiting to hear about whether or not I had won a large contract. No doubt some of this excitement was due to the challenge of taking on such a big piece of work, but I was also excited because of the positive impact it would have on my bank balance. Now if I’m working in an area that I feel is doing something worthwhile in the world, this isn’t such a bad thing – if the business is making money that means it is being successful, and the more successful it can be the more of a positive impact it can have in the world. In this case the incentive provided by money is a very good thing. The problem is that much of the economic activity in the world is providing goods and services that, while useful to those involved, leave the world as a whole worse off. In many cases people are being very strongly incentivised to deplete and pollute the global ecosystem upon which the whole economy depends. This is because the economy is full of market failures – incidences in which the producer of a good or service is failing to pay the full cost of the activity. In his eponymous report on the economics of climate change, Nicholas Stern called climate change “The biggest market failure the world has ever seen”.
As environmentalists we should recognise the extreme power of money in influencing the way people act, and instead of demonising it, seek to reshape the rules of the economy so that the incentives are pushing in the right direction.
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