Two news releases this week revealed a startling, if predictable, lack of seriousness and imagination with which global elites confront environmental crisis.

One was the latest IPCC report. It did reflect something of the growing alarm among climatologists, and it did urge expeditious action. But the IPCC continues to underplay the risk of catastrophic nonlinearities, of the sort that knocked the world into the Younger Dryas, or which, via cascading climate tipping points, could before long propel runaway warming. This latest report refers to tipping points, but as limited, regional phenomena. And even they are excluded from the summary, ensuring that most of the world’s media remain oblivious.

This continues the IPCC’s tradition of ignoring “fat tails” at the catastrophic end of the climate-scenario spectrum. It’s as if, when practising knife-throwing, you dismiss the risk of butchering your accomplice because scientists estimate its likelihood at only ten percent.

A similar conservatism applies to its pages on the socioeconomic transformations required. The IPCC’s policy advice is constrained to fit, fairly snug, within the prevailing economic model. Early drafts of its reports get steadily weakened and adulterated as political and corporate paws—some of them oil-drenched—get to work. Dissenting voices are marginalised. The upshot is a programme geared around market mechanisms and techno-utopianism. And it exudes a specious confidence that still-to-be-invented or untested technologies (such as carbon capture and storage) will rush into the breach. It indulges, in short, in intergenerational buck-passing.

In its economics, the IPCC pretends to neutrality but hews to the dominant neoclassical codes. It claims that the main driver of climate change is “the spread of fossil-fuel-based material consumption and changing lifestyles.” The world economy is driven by us, the consumers. No mention of the central economic role of corporations, a mere one hundred of which account for 71 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. No hint that the world economy might be, at bottom, a system of competitive capital accumulation geared to profit maximisation irrespective of human need.

In the report’s “Mitigation pathways” chapter, one of the most cited economists, particularly during discussion of market-based policies such as carbon pricing, is the Yale economist William Nordhaus.

The Bank of Sweden Prize in Erasing Politics

In Monday’s other announcement, Nordhaus, together with Paul Romer—a Chicago alumnus, now at New York— was awarded the so-called Nobel prize in economics. (In reality, the “Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences.” In instigating it, the Bank’s objective was to frame economics as purely scientific, obscuring the political.)

In their locations and ages (62, 77), Romer and Nordhaus were not quite the typical winners. Maggie Koerth-Baker has pinpointed the average economics laureate as a 67-year-old white man, born in the USA and employed at the University of Chicago.  But they were hardly anomalies.

Nordhaus’ approach to environmental economics has been pithily summarised by Alyssa Batistoni: he consistently minimises the risks posed by climate change and, relatedly, advocates a high “discount rate” in cost-benefit modelling. This is the parameter that weighs the welfare of future generations against those of the present. If the rate is zero, people in the indefinite future are treated equally with those alive today. A positive rate means their welfare is reduced (“discounted”) when assessing the impact of policies today.

Chopping the fat tails

The politics of the discount rate are best approached through two debates involving Nordhaus. One was with Nicholas Stern. A former chief economist at the World Bank, Stern’s neoliberal credentials are as pukka as Nordhaus’. But his is the voice of environmentally-concerned sobriety, against Nordhaus’ “take a chill pill” dismissal of scientists who warn of catastrophic global warming.

Stern advocates a low discount rate (1.4% p.a.). This, by valuing future generations, enjoins fast and decisive emissions reduction efforts. He holds that it is morally inexcusable to impose the costs of the problems we are generating onto our descendants.

Nordhaus by contrast discounts the future at a high rate (6%). This says, in effect: rapid and continuous economic growth will help address the problems of climate change. It ignores that growth, in many ways, will exacerbate the climate crisis.

But he goes further, rebuking Stern for advocating a low discount rate. It implies, in Nordhaus’ gloss, “that the globe is perilously close to driving off a climatic cliff in the very near future,” which would require any “sensible person” to “reconsider current policies” (heaven forfend!).

Nordhaus makes his low discount rate assumption in part because he, more than the IPCC, ignores fat tails. As he himself notes, his climate models fail to account for tipping points. This came out sharply in his debate with Harvard economist Marty Weitzman.

Weitzman pointed out that Nordhaus’ models take little account of the potential for unexpectedly accelerating climate change. He warns that such scenarios may invalidate Nordhaus’ predictions. Hence, more determined emissions-reduction initiatives are needed right now. To this, Nordhaus responded with airy insouciance. If faced with rapidly-escalating climate chaos, he shrugged, human beings will simply introduce “mitigation policies, quickly and sharply,” including geoengineering, thereby ensuring that “catastrophic outcomes” are prevented.

But there’s worse. The policies Nordhaus recommends would themselves deliver global catastrophe. His models propose that atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations (“CO2-e”), currently around 460ppm, need not be stabilised until they reach 700ppm. As Weitzman summarises, Nordhaus’ plan would subject the planet to a colossal climate shock—and yet he doesn’t bother to consider, or even mention, “the unprecedented nature of this planetary experiment.”

Underpinning Nordhaus’ approach—and, less dogmatically, that of the IPCC—is the faith that, as Kate Aronoff puts it, reducing emissions requires finding incentives to wean the corporate sector slowly from hydrocarbon dependence through pricing mechanisms, rather than a breakneck regulatory phase-out of fossil fuels. In one paper he compares cap and trade methods with carbon taxes, but rules out muscular state regulation without even deigning to say why. For Nordhaus, nothing can be allowed to disrupt capital accumulation. As he said to his students when news of his prize was announced, “Don’t let anyone distract you from the work at hand, which is economic growth.”

The fantasy X-factor

Growth itself is the metier of the other 2018 laureate, Paul Romer.

Romer, scion of a politician, business owner and airport builder, is a guru of growth. He advocates, for example, making the spelling of the English language more phonetic because he believes this would boost the rate of economic growth. In the belief that they would spur growth, he is a prominent advocate of charter cities—territories in the Global South that hand the reins of power to external, sometimes foreign, actors. (In view of the neo-colonial subtext, it’s fitting that Romer received his Nobel on Columbus Day.)

Underpinning Romer’s work is the desire to hasten economic growth, towards the infinite. In explaining why it will be infinite, he came up with “endogenous growth theory.”

The theory centres on the role of technology and knowledge—”human capital” in Chicago-school lingo.

There were predecessors. The nineteenth-century German economist Friedrich List spoke of “mental capital” (Geistiges Kapital) as the source of a nation’s productive power. In that same century, science was pressed into the direct service of industry. This was scarcely addressed in classical political economy, although Marx touched on it. But the process deepened. R&D became professionalised and internalised within industries—it was no longer “exogenous” to the firm.

Joseph Schumpeter was the economist most alert to this. In the interwar era he identified “bureaucratised R&D” as vital to the competitive superiority of the large corporations. He talked up innovation and entrepreneurship as the engines of growth, to be encouraged by monopoly rents.

In the post-war decades, exogenous growth theory recognised the role of science and technology but conceived of them as public goods, exogenous to the sphere of firms and markets. It located the source of growth in the expansion of capital and labour inputs. These are subject to diminishing returns to scale, and may therefore tend toward a no-growth state.

Romer sought to overturn the prevailing theory on both counts.

By postulating knowledge/technology, which are typically subject to increasing returns to scale, as the elixir of growth, he set aside the physical limits that attach to capital and labour. Science, skills and know-how are invoked as a fantasy X-factor, a mysterious kind of surplus knowledge/technology over and above that which is already embodied in labour and in capital goods.

The Gospel of Paul

Endogenous growth theory was dismissed by some economists for resting on “assumptions about how unmeasurable things affected other unmeasurable things.” And yet in claiming to have put scientific heft behind the creed that the growth horizon stretches to infinity, it found support among many economists and policymakers, eager to believe.

The other assumption of exogenous growth theory that Romer overturned was that knowledge should be treated as a pure public good. If firms are to have the incentive to invest in R&D, he argued, knowledge must be monopolisable. Ownership of knowledge enables firms to earn monopoly rents, rewarding the investment. In his words, “What endogenous growth theory is all about is that it took technology and reclassified it, not as a public good, but as a good which is subject to private control.” Growth, in the doctrine of Romer, is driven by technological change implemented “by profit maximizing agents” (i.e. private firms). And because technology is a “nonrival, partially excludable good,” the market realm is necessarily “monopolistic.”

It’s little wonder that endogenous growth theory was all the rage in the 1990s. It championed globalisation, for world-market integration, in Romer’s words, will straightforwardly “increase growth rates.”  It was zealously neoliberal, in its insistence that knowledge is a field that must be enclosed, monopolistically, by private corporations—and yet, in recognising a role for government in feeding private business with human capital, it was more flexible than some variants of the neoliberal genus. The state, Romer and his cothinkers maintained, should assist private capital, building infrastructure and fostering R&D. This should not be thought of as provision of public goods but investment in individual human capital. All this explains why endogenous growth theory was taken up by Third Way neoliberals such as Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

Environmental economics is not Romer’s specialism, but his general stance resembles Nordhaus’. When asked to comment on the IPCC report, Romer was as blasé as his co-laureate: “Once we start trying to reduce carbon emissions, we’ll be surprised that it wasn’t as hard as we anticipated.” Breezily dismissing those who issue “alarming forecasts” about the future of the planet, he said reducing carbon emissions while also “sustaining growth” would be “totally doable.”

A retrospective rogues gallery

When future generations compile a retrospective rogues gallery of the major abettors of climate chaos, which of our laureates will they pin up? Many will pitch for Nordhaus. After all, his “discount rate” is explicitly designed to belittle their lives. There is, too, his attempt to translate all ethical questions of environmental concern into utilitarian cost-benefit analysis, his definition of “catastrophic” change solely in terms of reduced consumption and, relatedly, his complacent neglect of the risks of non-linear environmental lurches, his chiding of climate campaigners for demanding rapid action, and his downplaying of the perils of the “700 ppm” scenario.

Others will make the case for Romer. His defence of monopoly rent and corporate power helped sanctify a global policy regime, neoliberalism, that is uniquely resistant to the sort of Marshall Plan transformation of the society’s productive capacity that swingeing emissions reductions will require. And Romer has done as much as any economist to naturalise the growth paradigm.

In tackling environmental crisis, growth needs to be critically desacralized. Some sectors will have to increase rapidly, including renewable energy, public transport, forestry, and the weatherisation of buildings. Others, especially in the Global North, should shrink: advertising, automobiles and aviation, the military and meat (especially beef), and the high-carbon lifestyles of the top 20%.

Such demands will gain little traction if citizens are atomised in their private cubicles. But resistance to oppression—on all fronts: neoliberal, misogynist, authoritarian-populist and all—recurrently emerges, coalesces, and can build. Coalitions emerge, and the horizons of solidarity expand. It is through struggles—by no means only environmental—against oppressive conditions that collective subjects can constitute themselves, find their voices, discover and expand their capacities, and realise world-transformative change.

Mobilising for social justice, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have shown, encourages that richer sense of community, public-spiritedness and solidarity which is indispensable to a socially just and ecologically habitable future. Where an expansive sense of solidarity arises, reaching out from ego and family to distant shores, it tends to extend temporally too, embracing the lives of generations yet unborn—and hushing the laureates with their “high discount rates.”

This Author

Gareth Dale teaches politics at Brunel University. He is a co-editor of Green Growth (Zed, 2016), and has written on the growth paradigm, sustainability, and Marx’s ecology.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reconvened in Bonn, Germany in 2001 for the sixth Conference of the Parties (COP).

Michael Mann’s hockey stick took centre stage of the IPCC’s third report, appearing twice in the synthesis report and another two times on the Working Group I Summary for Policymakers.

The public were already aware of the graph; President Bill Clinton had previously paid homage to the image in his final state of the union address, but Mann’s iconic image provided a rare chance for the scientific community to powerfully communicate its message to the world, and the IPCC made full use of the opportunity.

Speaking to the Naysayers

IPCC chair Professor Robert Watson (pictured) was frequently quite outspoken in public. At the time, he stated that “China has done more, in my opinion, than a country like the United States to move forward in economic development while remaining environmentally sensitive,” just days after President George W. Bush’s inauguration. 

Now, with the Kyoto Protocol lost, following Bush’s swift withdrawal from the agreement, Watson’s introduction to UNdelegates on 29th July 2001 unambiguously squared up to the naysayers:

“The question is not whether climate will change in response to human activities,” the bearded climatologist told the assembled delegates, “but rather how much.” 

The power of the image outshone the sceptic noise; Watson held his own. As the public debate became bogged down in minutiae, he cautioned that “the only long-term solution is to decarbonise the energy system.”

Hand-Picked IPCC Chair

But, in April 2002, Watson was removed as IPCC chair. Britain voted for Watson to stay, the US for him to leave.

Environmental groups immediately cried “Exxon!” but their accusation was not confirmed until documents were released under Freedom of Information, revealing a fax from Exxon’s bullish science chief ‘Randy Randol’ to President Bush only a week after his inauguration.

Randol asked: “Can Watson be replaced now at the request of the U.S.?” According to him, Watson had been “hand-picked by Gore” using the IPCC to further his “personal agenda”. 

The fax also called for the firing of two other officials who worked on the US National Assessment on Climate Change whom Randol considered “Clinton/Gore carry-overs with aggressive agendas” – Drs Rosina Bierbaum and Mike MacCracken. The two subsequently left the panel.

In the face of these job losses, Randol was not without constructive advice. 

Dr Richard Lindzen – the dean of deniers – was appointed co-lead of Working Group I, along with Dr John R. Christy, a climatologist who had been hired for a handful of Exxon and Koch-funded think tanks, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Cato, Heartland and the Marshall Institute.

This Article

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist, founder of Request Initiative and co-author of Impact of Market Forces on Addictive Substances and Behaviours: The web of influence of addictive industries (Oxford University Press). He tweets at @EcoMontague. This article first appeared at Desmog.uk. 

Climate litigators are celebrating after a second landmark court victory that will hold the Netherlands government to account for greater action on climate change.

The Hague Court of Appeal has upheld an historic win for the Urgenda Foundation on behalf of 886 Dutch citizens in their climate case, rejecting the Dutch government’s arguments.

A day after the UN IPCC report outlined the urgent climate action needed to restrict global warming to 1.5 degrees, the Dutch court today affirmed that any less than a 25 percent reduction in carbon emissions by the Netherlands government before 2020 would be a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Constitutional duty 

Dutch emissions are currently only 13 percent lower compared to 1990 levels and have stagnated during the last six years.

The original legal victory by Urgenda inspired a wave of climate lawsuits worldwide, brought by people determined to hold their governments accountable for a lack of climate action.

ClientEarth CEO James Thornton said: “This news shows just what a powerful tool climate litigation has become in holding decision-makers to account for their climate inaction.

“For a second time now, a Dutch court has ruled that the country’s government has a constitutional duty to protect its citizens from the impacts of climate change, and that anything less is a violation of their human rights.

“This second victory shows that Dutch judges have been clear about what the government must do now: accept both decisions and refocus its efforts on reducing its carbon emissions by 25 percent by 2020.

“This is the climate case that started it all, inspiring similar lawsuits worldwide. It has completely changed the debate on climate policy and will inspire people everywhere to use the power of the courts to hold their leaders to account for greater action on climate change.”

This Author 

Marianne Brooker is a contributing editor for The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from ClientEarth. 

Climate campaigners have accused big oil and gas companies of trying to “subvert” the divestment movement as top executives gathered in London to discuss how to use PR “to combat” the growing campaign against fossil fuel investments.

The annual Oil and Money conference, which is taking place at the luxurious Intercontinental London Park Lane hotel between Mayfair and Knightsbridge this week, is a mainstay of the oil and gas industry calendar.

The three-day meeting — a “who’s who” of the global oil and gas industry — is co-hosted by the New York Times Company and Energy Intelligence and is attended by more than 500 senior level executives from the industry.

More money

The overwhelmingly male line-up of speakers include some of the most influential CEOs in the oil and gas sector such as BP’s chief executive Bob Dudley, Shell’s CEO Ben van Beurden and Total’s CEO Patrick Pouyanné as well as senior executives from Chevron, ExxonMobil, Glencore and Saudi Aramco.

Other speakers include the head of the Donald Trump’s administration dealing with matters related to energy and the global oil industry at the US State Department, Francis Fannon, and the executive director of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol.

A number of bank executives representing oil and gas interests from HSBC, Barclays, J P Morgan, Société Générale and Goldman Sachs are also present.

For the past few years, campaigners have protested outside The Dorchester hotel, on Park Lane, where the conference holds its annual gala dinner, to denounce how big polluters come together to discuss how to make more money from exploiting untapped oil and gas reserves.

But this year, campaigners themselves were part of the conference’s agenda.

‘Murderous’

For the first time, the conference includes a panel discussion on how oil and gas companies can “survive the energy transition” and what they “need to do on the PR front to combat the growing fossil fuel divestment movement”.

At a time when scientists are warning that the next decade will be crucial for action to prevent dangerous climate change, the oil and gas industry is discussing using its promotion tools to fight back against calls to move away from fossil fuels.

Climate campaigners protested outside The Dorchester hotel where BP’s CEO Dudley was due to receive Energy Intelligence’s “petroleum executive of the year award”.

Protesters blocked the entrance to the hotel with large banners while chanting “Hey, Bob Dudley, I wanna know how you sleep at night,” before being pushed to the sides of the front door by security officers.

Taking part in the protest, Alastair Binnie-Lubbock described the oil and gas industry as “murderous” for contributing to dangerous climate change.

Divestment movement

“Those people gathering here for the conference only think about short-term profits and are not thinking about the next generation, let alone the generation after that,” he said.

Jessie Amadio, from Fossil Free London — one of the divestment groups which organised the protest — told DeSmog UKthat campaigners were keen to show the oil and gas industry that they were “not welcome in London”.

“Their business model revolves around continued extraction of fossil fuels and if we are going to stop the destruction of our climate, we need to switch to renewable energy immediately,” she said, adding: “They are trying to subvert the divestment movement through PR rather than propose a real alternative to fossil fuels to tackle climate change.”

Hannah Staab, also a campaigner with the London divestment movement, added that the fact the divestment movement made it to the conference’s agenda show how much it has grown over the past few years.

“This shows that we are winning. The divestment movement is not on the fringes anymore but it is becoming mainstream,” she said.

Risks of droughts

Around the world, calls for institutions, pension funds and investors to divest from fossil fuels have ramped up. Last month, London mayor Sadiq Khan and New York mayor Bill de Blasio announced that they will take “all possible steps” to divest their city’s pension funds from fossil fuels and called on other cities to do the same.

Meanwhile, Bank of England governor Mark Carney has warned of the “catastrophic impact” climate change could have on the financial system, unless companies, banks and insurers provide more information on the risks they face from global warming.

This year’s Oil and Money conference also kicked off the day after the world’s leading climate scientists warned that rapid and unprecedented action needs to take place by 2030 if global warming is to be kept to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels.

The authors of the landmark report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was released on Monday, said the world’s emissions had to be cut by around 45 percent between 2010 and 2030 and reach net zero by 2050 in order to keep global temperature increase below 1.5 degrees.

The report warned that warming of an additional half degree would significantly worsen the risks of droughts, floods, extreme heat, loss to biodiversity and poverty for some of the world’s most vulnerable communities.

Gas executives

The findings prompted little reaction from the oil and gas industry, which has long known that its products are rapidly eating up the carbon budget the world has left before the impacts of climate change are tipped to dangerous levels.

However, the sector is starting to express some concerns over becoming laggards as governments start to wake up to the urgency for a zero-carbon future.

The conference closing session, entitled “Climate Forum: Can oil companies learn to adapt?”, is expected to address how the energy transition “threatens to relegate oil companies to the sidelines if they cannot adapt” and ask whether big oil is doing enough to “survive the transition”.

While campaigners have long demanded oil and gas companies radically transform their business models to fit into a low-carbon society, solutions considered by the industry at the conference include a “shale gas revolution”, the financing of gas as a bridging fuel and the “potential” for deep-water drilling.

Fossil Free London’s Amadio accused oil and gas executives of being “unrepentant and shameless” to hold the conference in the light of this week’s scientific evidence published by the IPCC.

Low carbon

But failure to act on scientific evidence is not knew in the oil and gas industry.

Recent investigations have revealed that both ExxonMobil and Shell knew about the impacts burning fossil fuels were having on the world’s climate as early as the 1980s but did little to reverse the trend.

Although big oil and gas companies are known to have the scientific expertise to use necessary technology to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, they spent decades lobbying to water down or obstruct climate actions in order to protect their commercial interests and continue business-as-usual.

Campaigner Hannah Staab added that it was important for campaigners to call out the New York Times Company which she accused of “giving the oil and gas industry a forum” to push their fossil fuel agenda.

In a statement to DeSmog UK, a New York Times Company spokeswoman said that discussions and debate at the conference will “address the transition to a low carbon economy, an issue which has been covered extensively by The New York Times”.

“That transition is unlikely to occur without the participation of the world’s largest energy companies,” she said, adding that the New York Times’ newsroom has complete editorial independence from the company.

This Article

This article first appeared at Desmog.uk.

Approximately 88 million tonnes of food are wasted in the EU annually and the consequences seep far beyond homes, businesses and landfill sites.

Along with associated economic losses, and the ethical matter of disposing food in a world where eleven percent of the population are undernourished, wasting food amounts to a huge squandering of natural resources.

Through committing to UN Sustainable Development Goal 12.3, the EU endeavours to halve food waste at consumer and retail level by 2030 and reduce food losses along production and supply chains. The establishment of the EU Platform on Food Losses and Food Waste bolstered this goal, but  novel approaches are needed to support a growing population .

Avoidable waste

This circular economy model aims to reduce waste streams by reusing waste as a resource elsewhere.

The EU aims to transition towards this in many areas and in their Action Plan for the Circular Economy, it’s potential for food waste mitigation is recognised.

The circular economy model can apply to food waste but it’s not a one-size fits all solution. Determining the type of food waste involved is key to deciding the most appropriate way to deal with it according to Eoin White, a Research Development Specialist with AgroCycle – a Horizon 2020 funded project addressing agri-food waste.

White explained: “Residue is used to define unavoidable waste, such as fruit skins. They’re a natural part of producing food. The other is wasted food and that’s very much leftovers; things that should and can be eaten but due to consumer behaviour, poor storage and management practices, end up becoming waste.”

While unavoidable food waste can have high value secondary uses, the focus for tackling avoidable waste should first be on prevention: “If the goal is just to utilise this wasted food elsewhere, there’s no incentive to reduce it.”  

Loop logic 

Hilke Bos-Brouwers, senior Scientist Sustainable Food Chains at Wageningen University and Research, said: “Once this distinction is made, it’s important to seek out the best possible new destination for a waste stream.”

Bos-Brouwers, a scientific coordinator for the FUSIONS (Food Use for Social Innovation by Optimising waste prevention Strategies) and REFRESH projects, said: “With unavoidable food waste, we must valorise it with the highest value possible. You can interpret value on many levels but it basically involves keeping it as close to food as you can.”

If not fit for human consumption, high value applications could include animal feed, biomaterials, and ingredients. While recognising the potential to convert food waste to bioenergy and compost, Bos-Brouwers says it shouldn’t be the first resort.

Prioritising high value applications forms the basis of the cascading principle  ̶  an idea that prioritises material uses for biomass before energy uses to prevent raw materials being lost.

White explained: “You could take potato peel, burn it and get a little bit of energy. Technically that’s recycling. But there’s a lot of value in that potato peel. You should try to take as much as you can from it and when everything is taken out, then you can burn or compost it.”

Integrated approach

The circular economy model aims to mitigate waste by creating closed loop systems, but how wide that loop is drawn varies. Internal loops may be preferable as they can ensure resources are conserved with given product lifecycles.

Food waste occurs at production, retail and consumer levels and the circular economy approach can be integrated at all stages.

For example, AgroCycle is partnered with Fraunhofer in Germany, IPCF-CNR Institute in Italy, and Demeter in Greece to help develop innovative products such as straws and cups using potato pulp and rice bran fibres from the agri-food industry, notes White.

Bos-Brouwers noted that innovations also happen where supply chain partners meet up. Her Wageningen UR team provided the example of a retail franchiser and a catering expert who recognised the potential to work together and were supported with knowledge on supply chains, logistics, legislative issues and business models. They founded a company that repurposes retail and food processors surplus into marketable products. Based in the Netherlands, this successful initiative is now known as De Verspillingsfabriek.

Households generate over half of the EU’s food waste and while its inconsistent nature make it difficult to find high value applications, apps such as OLIO allow consumers to share their unwanted food.

Instilling confidence 

The recently revised EU Waste Framework Directive now includes a definition for food waste but a level of ambiguity still remains.

Bos-Brouwers said: “In the definition, when something becomes waste, it’s with the intention or the action to discard. Yet, if some entrepreneurs want to collaborate using the sideflow of one company as a resource of the other, they could run into permit problems trying to transport the sideflow as they’re not a waste management company.”

Instilling trust in new approaches to food waste can also be challenging. White added: “I don’t think you get the multiplier effect if it’s only enforced. It’s important to find the right nudges or confidence levels with the [large groups involved] to get them on board.”

“The research community plays a vital role, not by making this more complex, but by investigating what can be done with a fresh look.”

Introducing standards for material passports would help to instil trust within producers and consumers, who may be uncertain how a material created from biomaterials compares to its traditional counterpart.

Shared responsibility

While finding new destinations for unavoidable food waste is celebrated, food waste prevention when possible is preferable. 

A study conducted by Oldfield and colleagues at University College Dublin found that food waste minimisation results in the greatest reduction of global warming, acidification and eutrophication potential when compared with other food waste management approaches.

Lisa Ruetgers, who is currently doing a PhD in food waste and market solutions in Coventry University argued that “everybody is responsible food waste reduction.”

Checking the fridge before shopping, sharing or freezing leftovers and purchasing imperfect produce can help at consumer level, while retailers can offer imperfect items, avoid overstocking shelves and inform consumers of best storage practices. Legislation is also very important.

Ruetgers added: “All approaches are needed and need to be aligned, ideally top-down as well as bottom-up. I don’t think you can blame just one part or solve the problem by just one approach.”

This Author

Amy Lewis is a freelance science journalist from Dublin, whose work has been published in Science, The Scientist, Australian Geographic, the Irish Times, among other publications. She specialises in environmental stories and is keen to highlight some of the major environmental challenges being faced globally.

Roger Bate and Julian Morris of the British free-market think tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), decided to catch ExxonMobil’s gravy train across the Atlantic as they began working for US think tanks.

Bate became a Fellow in International Policy at the oil giant’s think tank du jour, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), which by 2001 had become ExxonMobil’s biggest beneficiary.

From here, he pitched the ‘Africa Fighting Malaria’ project to Philip Morris Commercial Services, which paid him $800 a day for his work. 

The project would further the tobacco company’s interests since it would enable Bate to build a reputation amongst African politicians, enabling him to influence the World Health Organisation (WHO) on their tobacco protocol.

Koch ties

Bate added that if Philip Morris agreed to fund the project, he would be happy to continue working with the company under the guise of a “new operation, initially based in UK, but soon to have offices in South Africa.” In 2001, he published a paper with the CEI called “When Politics Kills: Malaria and the DDT Story”.

Meanwhile, Julian Morris had also been keeping tabs on the well funded US think tanks.

Morris maintained close ties to Koch’s Heartland Institute, writing environmental ‘myth busting’ articles advocating a ‘don’t worry, be happy’ attitude towards combatting climate change.

Morris and Bate co-authored “Risk, Health and the Environment,” a selection of essays debunking pervasive myths about, for example, the health risks of pesticide use.

The collection included an array of Heartland, Cato Institute and IEA insiders, including Dr Indur Goklany, who was, at the time of publication, in receipt of Heartland funding of $1,000 a month, and who would later sit on Lord Lawson’s advisory board at the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF): a climate denial charity in the UK.

International Tools

Morris and Bate met with their American counterparts, including Fred Smith of the CEI, in May 1999 to talk about how to attack the green agenda.

Having thus developed their contacts, the two Englishmen in America decided to take advantage of the Libertarian spending boom.

They were looking for an international tool, according to a strategy document released as part of the tobacco settlement, and were especially interested in “how to present our arguments to developing countries”.

The International Policy Network (IPN), based in the UK and the US, would provide this link. And so, the IPN officially came into being on 1st April 2001.

In reality, the IPN was none other than the UK branch of Antony Fisher’s Atlas Economic Research Foundation. The name change was supposed to be a new lease of life for the organisation, in line with the original conception of Atlas: to scatter the seeds of the free market across the globe.

The idea was that branches of the IPN would be set up across the world. Morris and Bate set up offices in India, Chile and the US.

American Donors

Their first year was strong, with more than £607,000 in foundation and corporate donations. Their accounts for 2001 state that the organisation was principally involved in archiving “historically important papers” for the forthcoming biography of their founder, Antony Fisher.

The biography, Antony Fisher: Champion of Liberty, was later written by Gerald Frost, when he was director of CPS. But the men’s experiences in America had taught them the benefits of corporate donations stateside.

During 2002, the trustees decided that it would be advantageous for donors based in America to be able to take advantage of the US tax regime in giving support to the IPN’s mission.

Accordingly, a ‘sister’ US-based charity was formed, International Policy Network US, Inc., with the trustees of the IPN forming the majority of the Board of Directors of International Policy Network US, Inc.

Following this initiative, donations to the IPN declined in 2002, as expected, compared with the 18-month period ending in December 2001.

In 2001, the IPN reported £607,272 in donations (including £450,269 from corporations and £152,186 from foundations), but in 2002, only £79,745: this difference hints at the size of the donations coming from the other side of the Atlantic.

ExxonMobil Funding

Of the £79,745 that was received, £79,495 was donated directly from corporations, with just £150 given by individuals. The IPN’s setup in the United States helped them in securing extensive funding from Exxon, totalling $390,000 between 2003 and 2005.

ExxonMobil’s largest grant to the organisation, $115,000 in 2004, was specifically designated for “climate change activities”. This grant represented 16 percent of their total expenses for that year.

Thus, well oiled, in August 2002 the IPN moved its headquarters from the IEA’s offices on North Street to Bassetts Manor in Sussex, England, purchased for $900,000.

One month later, Morris was made a visiting professor of the Department of International Studies, University of Buckingham – known for aligning with the interests of dirty energy and climate denial – in the same month that Lord Martin Jacomb, now a GWPF Trustee, was appointed as the university’s third chancellor.

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist, founder of Request Initiative and co-author of Impact of Market Forces on Addictive Substances and Behaviours: The web of influence of addictive industries (Oxford University Press). He tweets at @EcoMontague. This article first appeared at Desmog.uk. 

A programme of ‘Compassionate Communities’ in Frome combined with changing the way the general practice provides care for patients and families has dramatically reduced emergency admissions to hospital, according to a new peer reviewed paper.

The report, Reducing emergency hospital admissions:  A population health complex intervention of an enhanced model of primary care and compassionate communities was published in the British Journal of General Practice on 9 October and “opened the door to a new field in medicine”. The Resurgence & Ecologist magazine was the first with the story. 
Friendship and kindness

Dr Julian Abel, lead author and Director of Compassionate Communities UK, who has been working with the Frome Team since 2016 said: “The number of emergency admissions in England increased by 42 percent between 2006/7 and 2017/8. The project in Frome started in 2014 and since then, emergency admissions have fallen by 14 percent across the whole population.

“This is the first time over the last 25 years that we have found a way of reducing the total emergency admissions to hospital. This is the biggest single challenge to the NHS and until now, there has not been a solution to the ever increasing influx.”

The enormous resources of friendship and kindness in the community make a big difference to quality in people’s lives. Working with communities helps to lessen feelings of loneliness and isolation that many of us, from young to old, experience.

Dr Abel said that if people are going to be given the best and most effective care, compassionate communities must be a part of the routine clinical consultation.

This has two major components, working to enhance people’s individual supportive network and making best use of the resources that exist in communities. 

Broader implementation 

Dr Abel said: “This is about how we treat each other as human beings. Kindness and compassion have an enormous impact on our health and well being.

“Being kind and compassionate is now more than a good idea. It is something we must do if we are to help solve the increasing healthcare crisis of the last 25 years.”

The results suggest that 30 percent of people in hospital are there not because they need more or better medication, but because they have become disconnected from the social world around them.

Through the broader implementation of this model in England, potential savings to the NHS could be over seven billion pounds.

This Author 

Marianne Brooker is a contributing editor for The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from Compassionate Communities UK. 

Ecologists need to discover the terrestrial – to both literally and metaphorically come down to earth – if we are going to persuade humanity to fundamentally change its relationship to Nature and save the planet. This is the only counter to the apparent insanity of continuing to burn vast amounts of fossil fuel while denying the devastating consequences.

The latest edition of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine is out now!

Bruno Latour’s latest book, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, is a fascinating and provocative manifesto for a new way of addressing the compound crises we face. Latour is billed on the cover as “one of the world’s leading sociologists and anthropologists”. But is his prop­osition useful?

The starkest claim in this book comes on the first page: the “ruling class” has given up on any vision of a shared future for all humanity. The response to climate change is to deny the science, to ramp up social inequality and deregulation in a bid to acquire vast material wealth and escape an earthly demise. 

‘Modernization front’

Latour is among those who will be left behind, but he claims to have uncovered a way out. The stated aim of his text is to provide a mode of analysis that can help us overcome neoliberal capitalism. This is necessary to prevent the increasingly absurd pursuit of short-term profit made by devastating the natural environment on which human civilisation depends.

This mode of analysis is drawn from systems thinking and networks, and in particular the concept of the ‘attractor’. The key premise of Latour’s book is that humans have been mesmerised by the conflict between two diametrically opposed attractors – the local and the global. Movement towards the global was agreed to be progressive, and resistance regressive. 

Society has until recently been enthusiastically carried along a ‘modernization front’, Latour argues, separating those who are ‘ahead’ and those who are ‘behind’. This fascination wastrue for both the political left and the right. But climate change and the breakdown of other natural processes have fatally undermined this optimism.

The two attractors are losing their attraction. The response from the extremely wealthy is to abandon ship. This might take the form of ever more segregated communities, rural bolt-holes for the wealthy, even flights to Mars. This is the third, new attractor: out of this world.

In order to counter this third attractor a fourth is needed. Ecologists – and anyone with any concern for their fellow humans – need to embrace the terrestrial. This involves abandoning the old dichotomy of left and right – and previous attempts by greens to sit carefully between the two.

World as body

What Latour’s analysis appears to be lacking is the terrestrial itself: the down-to-earth problems of fossil-fuel dependency, the political power of corporations, and the violent oppression imposed by nation-states.

Latour is successful in evoking a sense of urgency, and in presenting a sophisticated model of human responses to ecological crises. However, his solution is too ill-defined and abstract to convince many to abandon the attractors of their existing approach. 

Where Latour is weakest, Graham Jones, in his debut book, The Shock Doctrine of the Left, is most successful. Both books are published by Polity Press in what is becoming a fascinating series. Jones draws explicitly on systems thinking to provide an elegant, robust and precise proposal for the left. 

This work could inform how environmentalists organise, work collectively and respond positively to the environmental, economic and social crises that too often feel completely overwhelming.

William Harvey described as a system the flow of nutrients in the blood in the human body. Thomas Hobbes transposed this to the economy to produce the first systems analysis of social phenomena. The metaphor of world as body has been enduring, and is consciously adopted here by Jones. 

Building systems

The aim of the text – again – is to provide a schema that can be used by humanity to move beyond the crisis of capitalism. Jones is pragmatic and concise. He sets out four modes of organising: smashing, building, healing and taming.

Smashing is already a behaviour (or at least vocabulary) associated with the traditional (hard) left. Jones does not deny that for him this remains a necessary if insufficient mode of organisation. Rather than physical violence, however, industrial action and online hacking are, Jones argues, both forms of smashing. 

Just as important as smashing is building. “For the institutions of our shock doctrine to beat the neoliberal model, our organisational resilience must improve,” Jones explains. This involves intense and intensive community building and networking.

We then move to healing. It is here that Jones would move the old left into new territory. We see the influence of family therapy based on systems theory. 

Jones argues that the systems of oppression that make neoliberal capitalism possible require and create trauma – both of individuals and of society. Healing means feeling, sharing and processing this trauma. This necessity of feeling – including feeling empathy for every individual – denies oppressive politics access to Jones’s shock doctrine.

Practical and profound

Finally, we have taming. Here Jones sets out a new response to the institution of the state. We cannot smash the state, he argues, as this creates trauma and chaos. Nor can we reform or ignore it. He proposes a different response. Change comes “through coordinating smaller but escalating shocks, each time increasing the power of people to organise beyond the state”.

Magic happens in the final chapter, ‘The Meta-Strategy’. Here, in true ‘systems’ style, Jones provides a simple flow diagram. For smashing, we see a ‘growing movement’ leading to ‘chaos’, then to ‘absorption’ and finally closing the loop to ‘growing movement’. For taming, we again see ‘growing movement’, which now leads to ‘gaining legitimacy’ and thence to ‘reforms’ and back to ‘growing movement’.

Then all four of the charts are drawn together around the central phenomenon of ‘growing movement’. The strategies of smashing, building, healing and taming are autonomous but also mutually reinforcing. The micro-systems nest perfectly into one meta-system.

The Shock Doctrine of the Leftis practical and profound, short and essential. Much should be gained by reading, rereading, sharing and adopting these ideas. Taken together, Latour and Jones offer a fresh diagnosis of the ecological crisis, and a potential and novel solution.

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist, founder of Request Initiative and co-author of Impact of Market Forces on Addictive Substances and Behaviours: The web of influence of addictive industries (Oxford University Press). He tweets at @EcoMontague.

This article first appeared in Resurgence & Ecologist magazine, which is out now!

Much ink, and blood, has been spilt on the ethics of a good life, but relatively little on the ethics of good money. The passing of ‘Good Money Week’ and the most recent IPCC report in to climate change seems like a good time to consider what it means to be good with your money. 

Money is all about value, but financiers play the game that money is morally neutral. Look after the profits and the outcomes take care of themselves.

In other words, when it comes to ethics, how you spend money matters more than how you earn and invest it. 

Ethical divestment 

It is certainly the case that we have become highly exercised in how we spend our money ethically. Buying a running shoe is now a political act.  

Everything from tipping to how we grow coffee is increasingly scrutinised through an ethical lens. The message is clear: how you spend your money should reflect your own ethics and tells a story about the morality of society. 

By contrast, how you save and invest is still very much a private matter reflecting personal values of thrift and prudence – or capitalist virtues of risk taking and adventure.

The public ethics of how your money is used by the financial system when you are not spending it have remained taboo. The industry sees itself purely as a guardian of our wealth with less regard for the social usefulness or wellbeing it generates.

This came to a head at my own alma mater, Cambridge University, where half of the investment management team who handle the university’s £6bn + endowment fund recently resigned.

The Financial Times and others reported comments that “the debate around divestment has left staff unable to get on with their jobs of trying to maximise the value of their endowment” – while the University commented on the team “transforming the performance” of the fund allowing the institution to further its social and charitable mission. 

Cognitive dissonance

Both views reflect the cognitive dissonance – the ability of the human brain to hold two conflicting positions simultaneously without losing our marbles – that is endemic across much of the financial system.

In these private pools of capital that are large enough to have real public consequences, how you make money is as important as how you spend it. A fund that is designed to maintain itself ‘in eternity’ should think about the world it is creating for future students through its significant investments in companies that contribute to man-made climate change.

It is not just institutions that have this split morality when it comes to money. Modern tech-based capitalism produces individuals with levels of wealth not seen since the Tsarist empire.

With her usual rapier eloquence Marina Hyde in the Guardian described Jeff Bezos’s attempts to join the human race with his ‘One Day’ inititative as ‘fauxlanthropy’, asking whether a better use of his wealth would be paying his workers a fair wage.

It’s not that finance itself is intrinsically ‘bad’. That’s as faulty as the argument for the neutrality of profit seeking, ‘we make the markets and the money we deserve’.

Collective wealth

It may still end in a Marxist meltdown but until then we can re-make capitalism to reflect the morality of the society it serves. We need a system of ethics conscious of the impacts of investment beyond the boundaries of the firm set by traditional accountants. 

The Finance Innovation Lab campaigns for a fairer financial system for people and planet. Its recent report criticised the ‘value neutral’ stance of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) as a fallacy, when actually it has ‘values blind spots’.

This prompted the regulator to consider how it should respond to the very real moral challenges presented by man-made climate change, for example.  

Money is created by and helps shape our society. The way it is regulated fundamentally affects the behavior of financial firms in that process. As the recent welcome memorandum from the Department of Work and Pensions demonstrated, it is the legal duty of the guardians of our collective wealth to consider the wider impacts of how it is invested on our behalf. 

Abundance is not alone in thinking that it is not enough to blame the regulators for our ethical shortcomings. We try to make it easier for people to consider the ethical impact of how their money is invested and provide investments that fit with the values of our customers.

I believe that private money is capable of producing public good, and that will be accelerated if it takes place in a financial system whose idea of profit, benefit and value looks beyond short term self interest. 

This Author 

Bruce Davis is managing director of Abundance Investment, which advertises with The Ecologist.

Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, hates to see the public misinformed on science. 

As an A-level student at Southend School for Boys in the mid-eighties, he read an article in the Guardian which had confused the hole in the ozone layer with global warming, attributing global warming to aerosols.

The outraged teenager wrote to science editor Tim Radford to notify him of the mistake. Later, as a geology PhD student, he became staunchly anti-Greenpeace after he saw one of their posters wrongly claiming that an area proposed for storing nuclear waste was an earthquake zone.

In 1999, after spending 10 years trying to finish his PhD in experimental rock deformation and a brief stint working as a science reporter for The Daily Telegraph, he found himself working in the Policy Department of the Royal Society. 

Exxon’s Lecture

A few months into his job, Ward was invited to a seminar at Exxon’s London HQ. Brian Flannery, ExxonMobil’s veteran climate advisor, would be speaking.

Earlier in his career as an astrophysicist, Flannery had started to produce peer-reviewed work for the IPCC. At Exxon he would commission work from MIT climate modellers, who he would instruct to “embrace the uncertainty of all this”.

He was now being called in to talk to UK policy bodies and politicians about how the IPCC’s conclusions were far from certain and did not support such extreme measures as Kyoto.  

“Why does Exxon have such a problem with the IPCC?” Ward recalls having thought at the time.

The Wider Campaign

The young geologist was bemused by the whole charade: his work at the Royal Society had included a project on the contribution of nuclear energy to tackling climate change, which was “framed in terms of nuclear being an important way for the UK to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions which seemed to me to be a perfectly reasonable thing.” 

Ward would later recognise the context of Flannery’s talk: “I did not realise it at the time, but this meeting was part of a wider campaign by the oil company to resist restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions, including those applied to the burning of fossil fuels.”

In the United States, Exxon was engaged in intensive lobbying efforts against the Kyoto protocol, including advertisements that questioned the scientific basis for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

This was all changed by President George W. Bush and the Kyoto Protocol.

In 2001, Ward was heading the Royal Society’s Press Office. When Bush announced that the US wasn’t going to ratify Kyoto – and what’s more, that he wasn’t sure of the science – the Royal Society joined with 15 other national science academies to combat Bush’s scepticism by endorsing the IPCC’s main conclusions.

To be continued…

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist, founder of Request Initiative and co-author of Impact of Market Forces on Addictive Substances and Behaviours: The web of influence of addictive industries (Oxford University Press). He tweets at @EcoMontague. This article first appeared at Desmog.uk.