I don't tend to read many "green" books these days - not because I think I know it all, but because I'm topping up my knowledge everyday simply by doing my job, so sitting down in the evening and opening a weighty tome at p1 is less than appealing. However, I had heard a lot about these two titles so I read them back to back. On the face of it the two cover similar ground - charting the scale of the environmental challenge and what we need to do to fix it, but they go about their jobs in quite different ways.
Hot, Flat & Crowded by Thomas Friedman is a few years old now (I picked up my copy in a second hand book stall at my son's school), but I had somehow managed to avoid the works of this pillar of US green thinking. The book is very well researched and covers a huge amount of ground including some concepts I was unfamiliar with such as "Dutch Disease" - the negative impact of sudden discoveries of natural resources - and the link between human rights in OPEC countries and the price of oil. Friedman's main thesis is that while the US is addicted to oil it will never free itself from the threat from militant Islam and will end up getting crushed by the Chinese economic juggernaut. Maybe it was Friedman's assumption of a US readership, or the reliance on lengthy quotes from the good and the great from around the world, but frankly I found reading Hot, Flat & Crowded a bit of a trudge.
You can't say the same about Mark Lynas' zippy new book The God Species. The thesis here is that as we are wreaking biblical levels of destruction on the planet, we'd better use our 'god-like' technologies, such as genetic engineering and nuclear power, to stop the damage before it is too late. Lynas uses the Planetary Boundaries Group's set of 10 9 global environmental pressures to assess the threat from everything from climate change to loss of freshwater before proposing the most effective way of dealing with each problem. While doing so he lays into right-wing anti-environmental libertarians and left-wing greenies with equal abandon, arguing that the former ignore the science on the problems, but the latter similarly ignore the evidence on the most promising solutions. Not content with lauding the green bogeymen nuclear and GM, he delights in proposing water privatisation, carbon offsetting and geoengineering techniques - all anathema to the green movement.
Overall I found The God Species refreshing, entertaining and informative - certainly enhancing my knowledge of the nitrogen cycle and ocean acidification to name but two. Lynas (and indeed Friedman) is one of an emerging breed of what I call 'rational environmentalists' who say "forget the politics and the sacred cows, look at the facts, find the solutions that work". I too have long believed that while the political green movement may have done great work flagging up problems, they are hamstrung by their own dogma when it comes to solutions - nothing is ever good enough for them. That's not to say I'm swallowing Lynas' conclusions wholesale just yet - there is a faint whiff of wilful contrarianism about the book that makes me want to seek out second opinions - but he has certainly made me challenge some of my own shibboleths, and that's never a bad thing.
Verdicts:
The God Species: a must read.
Hot, Flat & Crowded: ideal for American students of geopolitics.
Just this weekend, my partner and I were chatting about the UK petrol protests of 2000 (it's laugh a minute in our house sometimes...). At the time my partner was working in Poland for a week and couldn't believe my reports from home - empty petrol stations, empty roads, no fresh fruit in the supermarkets and semi-panic buying of staple foods - all within a couple of days of fuel depots getting picketed. This small action had a massive impact on business, communities and individuals. It was a graphic demonstration of how vulnerable our modern economy is to quite minor events.
As chance would have it, Chatham House has released a report today suggesting our economy has taken 'just in time' to an extreme, leaving it vulnerable to low-probability/high-impact events like the Icelandic volcano, the Japanese earthquake and the 2004 tsunami. But, the report notes, there are also concerns about the resilience to high-probability/incremental impact environmental issues like climate change, resource depletion and water pressures.
We are seeing the pressures of unsustainability across the economy with energy prices having a higher impact on the economy than Government spending cuts. The big question for individual organisations is "are we resilient to these sudden and long term events?"
The subsidiary questions are:
What will rising energy bills do to our business?
What will scarcity of resources like rare earth metals do to our business?
What will scarcity of water do to our business?
What would legislation designed to protect or ration natural resources do to our business?
What would the impact of more extreme weather events be on our business?
Are our data and other resources safe from, say, increased flood risk?
Do we have contingency plans in place for, say, expected lack of travel?
Of course the flip side to this is providing resilience to others as a business offering. As the effects of climate change and resource depletion ratchet up, this will be a growing market.
So something has finally been agreed. Governments have agreed to make an agreement by 2015 which will come into force by 2020. Ministers are jubilant. Pressure groups say it is not enough. Plus ça change!
Here's my thoughts:
Global agreements will always suffer from a degree of lowest common denominator - keeping Washington, Beijing, Brussels and New Delhi happy is an almost impossible task;
Agreements, agreements under negotiation, or lack of agreements should not be seen as an excuse for lack of domestic action (are you listening George O?);
That doesn't just go for Governments - there's nothing to stop organisations and individuals acting either;
The main purpose of international agreements should be to put a brake on 'carbon leakage' (ie migration of 'dirty' industries) from one country with high standards to one with lower standards - this is the only risk of a country going it alone;
Governments are best placed to decarbonise through the markets - particularly using their own colossal buying power. If you want industry's attention, make low carbon a prerequisite of doing business - you then stimulate innovation and cut emissions;
Business is better placed to cut carbon than Government. If captains of industry decide they will, say, go zero carbon, you will see a lot of change happen very quickly - they don't have to worry what the Daily Moan will say about it. Supply chains are global, so one big buyer in the West can affect emissions around the world.
So I am neither excited nor depressed by the news from Durban. Those of us working to cut emissions will just keep on doing so!
Regular readers will know I'm a big, big fan of TED talks - I thrive on the optimism, insight and eloquence of the speakers. This one, by Johan Rockstrom, is another gem. I spend so much time reading, writing and discussing sustainability, it really takes something to grab my attention, but Rockstrom manages it. He quantifies all the major environmental pressures, shows how they almost all accelerated in the mid-50s, and demonstrates how many can simply be solved. I love his pronouncement that we are living in the most exciting decade in human existence as we try and 'bend the curve' back towards sustainability. Highly recommended.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) is fast becoming the scariest organisation in the world - almost every press release contains extraordinarily bad news - that peak oil probably occurred back in 2006, that the price of oil is going to undermine any global economic recovery and, now, that 2010 saw record carbon emissions making hitting the 2°C target almost impossible. While there's a strong temptation to hide our head in the sand in the face of such a stark warning, the only sane response is to up our game.
Here's a mini-manifesto for progress:
1. Stop finger pointing: sustainability is everybody's responsibility - Governments, business, the media, civil society and individual citizens. Playing the blame game just slows us down, waiting for others to act will get us nowhere, sitting on a high horse is for pompous fools;
2. Be practical: let's bin the political ideology, sacred cows and conspiracy theories that clog both sides of the environmental debate and do what works;
3. Be ambitious: for all the posturing, most environmental improvements are merely incremental. Let's stretch ourselves and use ingenuity, determination and vision to get us out of the hole we're digging for ourselves;
4. Be prepared to pull the plug. Face up to the fact we're going to have to stop doing some stuff - sustainability is not just about starting to do good stuff, but phasing out bad stuff;
5. Relish the challenge and enjoy the ride. If others see you enjoying making your household, your neighbourhood, your organisation or the whole world a better place, they're far more likely to join in.
This isn't going to be easy, but as the great philosopher Billy Ocean once sang, when the going gets tough, the tough get going.
So, Cancun produced something after all. Not an awful lot, it has to be said, but there is a definite narrowing of the agenda to a framework where more concrete actions can be worked up. The clearest sections are the $100m fund to help poorer countries cut carbon and adapt to climate change, and the forestry package (known as REDD) to help preserve forests. Everybody seems relieved that progress has been made - only Bolivia and a handful of NGOs are throwing their hands up in despair - saying the world has failed once again.
These professional negativists are never happy - ignore them. When my city of Newcastle was awarded 'UK's most sustainable city' by Forum for the Future for the second time, the local Green Party didn't even mention it in their newsletter (which they send me). When I challenged them, they said they believed it showed we were 'least bad' - OK you could argue that, but surely such progress was worth a mention by a group for whom sustainability is the raison d'être. I rather suggest that they are hiding from an inconvenient truth - that environmental purism doesn't deliver whereas environmental pragmatism does.
And I know I keep banging on about it, but slow international progress doesn't preclude fast local or organisational progress. And here too pragmatism and optimism rule the day. Ignore the doomsters, or better still, get them involved so they can understand the real messy world of imperfection in which the rest of us have to operate. Then they might get real.
It's been quite hard to get a real feel for progress at the COP16 climate change negotiations in Cancun this week, but the overall impression has been slow progress on a number of issues and a more reasoned debate over some of the bigger issues. This contrasts starkly with the high stakes game played by national leaders and environmental groups in Copenhagen this time last year - which famously ended with a whimper rather than a bang.
The softly, softly approach has a number of advantages. Minor disputes are not exaggerated by a story-hungry media and can be deftly resolved. Small wins create forward momentum and a positive atmosphere which can help unlock trickier conundrums. Progress can be made without the often destructive interference of either the NGO or libertarian/denial camps, one shrieking the clock is ticking and less than 100% success is failure, the other shrieking that the whole thing is a recipe for economic suicide/communism.
However, I'm still of the view that a world-wide single binding agreement is an impossible ideal. What works in Washington is unlikely to work in Kuala Lumpur and vice versa. There is nothing to stop individual nations cutting their own carbon and shifting to a low carbon economy. Furthermore, the big economies along with their huge corporations, have such global reach that the power to act is actually in relatively few hands. Destructive companies in the primary industries like forestry or oil extraction can only operate if they have customers willing to buy their produce.
Business has the power if they step up to the plate.
It feels a bit weird to be reading about the climate change talks in balmy Cancun when looking out the window at a foot of snow and wearing two pairs of trousers. But the current cold period in the UK, like the freezing winter at the start of the year, is a great illustration of the difference between short term, local weather and the long term global climate patterns which are likely to make 2010 the warmest year on record.
Hopes aren't high for Cancun - with very little progress has been made since Copenhagen last year and with Obama further weakened by the Tea Party's gains in the mid term elections. Of course there's nothing to stop individual countries acting, but my hopes are increasingly with business to bail us out. To the green activist corps this probably sounds like a crazy notion, but, I would ask them, who really controls the global supply chains? Who chooses what we consumers can or cannot buy and at what price? Who develops and commercialises green technologies? Who can act quickly and decisively without fearing electoral backlash? Business, that's who.
There's a story in the Independent this week that upgrades to the UK's electricity grid will cost £32bn, part of an estimated £200bn that will be required to hit the country's climate change targets for 2020. The £32bn will add £6 per year to the average electricity bill, yet it is being portrayed as an obstacle or some great painful sacrifice.
Just £6 a head a year to make such a huge leap forwards in tackling climate change? Is that all? Given the risks of doing nothing, I'd say that was a bargain.
And just think, that's a £32-200bn clean tech market to deliver the transformation. Just when we need to build a greener, more robust economy to get us out of the current economic pickle.
What's not to like?
On the wider scale, this shows once again we have got to flip our attitudes from seeing the problems to seeing the opportunity. Optimism is a rare commodity in the environmental movement, but whether we are looking at one country's infrastructure or one company's environmental strategy, we have got to get much better at, as sausage manufacturers would say, "selling the sizzle."
The other evening I watched The Road, the post-apocalyptic movie based on a novel by Cormac McCarthy. The plot involves the attempt by a father and son to escape an unnamed catastrophe which has killed off every living thing except people. Survivors have either turned cannibal, or, like the father and son, scavenge for tinned food amongst the wreckage of small town America and the dead forests of the surrounding countryside.
Not a bad film, but portraying such utter dystopia leaves me in two minds. The first thought is that it was a powerful reminder that we rely on the eco-system for all our essentials, one which we often forget as we in the West spend most of our time inside and increasingly on-line. If it goes we go. But this is balanced by the nagging thought that this kind of "it'll be our DOOM!" type message is misleading and off putting to the general populace. The earth will recover from climate change, but in its own time. The big question is whether society can continue to thrive in warming world.
You can see this problem in the slight repositioning of many of the climate change denial brigade. They seem to have invented something called 'catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW)' which the rest of us apparently believe in. I assume the introduction of the word "catastrophic" is to give them wriggle room as the fundamental science of climate change stands up to the huge scrutiny put on it over the last year. We might have melting glaciers, disrupted weather patterns, floods, droughts and heatwaves - but if the result doesn't look like The Road then they'll claim it was all exaggerated (tell that to the people of the flooded Sind province of Pakistan).
It is becoming a cliché, but we really do need a more positive view of sustainability and the low carbon economy. I believe this vision needs to go further than the 'green jobs' that politicians fall back on. What about vibrant cities full of pedestrians, cyclists and urban greenery? What about people working from home, cutting crime in their neighbourhoods simply by being there, revitalising the local economy and getting to know their neighbours? What about holidays on high speed rail bringing back the romance of travel? What about being able to park outside your house because no-one needs a second car?
And for business? The same positive vision needs to be applied both inside and outside the business. Companies need to lead on this agenda and develop those products and services that are not just green in themselves, but that go further and help other people cut their emissions and improve their lives. I saw a TV ad for Hitachi at the weekend that showed the difference that their technologies - from high speed trains to data centres - could make to carbon emissions. It was great, positive stuff and no hand wringing or hair shirts in sight. That's the future I want.
Russia is burning (and choking), Pakistan is drowning - major humanitarian disasters which are likely to be in part due to climate change as Pakistan is effectively getting the rain that the Russian plains should have had. A similar thing happened in the UK this winter - we got Arctic weather stuck over us for weeks, while the Arctic had abnormally high temperatures. While the usual caveat must be rolled out - we can't attribute any one event to climate change - the frequency of such events is increasing as the science would suggest.
Climate change mitigation (cutting carbon emissions) is a medium term measure, but it must be backed up by adaptation measures for the short (and medium) term impacts which are already in the system. Adaptation is normally considered at the regional/national scale, but what about individual organisations? Are you prepared for climate change? Would you be resilient to extreme heat or cold? Are your data servers in your basement and vulnerable to flooding? Are your raw materials grown in a climate sensitive area? After all, Russia has announced restrictions on grain exports.
Of course we can flip this around to the positive. Have you a design, a product or a service to help make organisations, regions or whole countries resilient to climate change? Can you spot a gap in the market? Will climate change produce gaps in global markets for, say, food stuffs? This may sound mercenary, but a robust response to climate change will involve the markets as much as it does disaster relief organisations.
So whether climate change is an opportunity or a threat to your business, you should be factoring it into your business planning.
Finally BP seem to be getting a grip, quite literally, on the source of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. But with its stock value plunging by a third, the threat of multi-billion pound clean up operation and talk of criminal charges, the company must be wishing that they'd lived up to their ill-fated "Beyond Petroleum" slogan from the turn of the millennium.
For the question remains, what on earth were they doing drilling almost a mile below the waves, anyway? Why, for that matter, are vast tracts of Canadian sands being dug up and squeezed for a few drops of oil? Is it because oil is becoming an increasingly scarce resource? Is this peak oil writ large?
And let's not forget climate change. I always say that in any environmental debate the laws of physics always win. And so, despite the relative disappointment of Copenhagen, the fuss of the UEA e-mail leak and a single rogue statement on glaciers in an IPCC report, the world keeps warming. In fact, the 12 months to April 2010 were the warmest 12 months as far back as we can reliably measure. This puts paid to all the nonsense talk of global cooling in the 'denialosphere' and puts carbon cuts back on the urgent section of the to do list.
The answer is obvious. We've got to wean ourselves off fossil fuels and onto clean, safe and reliable renewable energy. This will require efficiencies to deliver, and a whole new way of thinking about energy: smart grids, anaerobic digestion of organic wastes, wind farms, solar energy, and whole new ways of living and working: teleworking, teleconferencing, buying quality rather than quantity, buying services rather than 'stuff'.
There is a growing belief that business should not only respond to this agenda, but drive it forward. The opportunities for innovation are immense: new products, new services, new technologies, new business models. Those that grasp this will prosper, those that cling to the old certainties will flounder. It's decision time.
This TED talk was given last summer before the CRU/IPCC furore and it gives an insight into how painstaking the science behind climate predictions actually is.
I'm co-presenting this Earthcast (hosted by my publishers Earthscan) with Paul Lingl and Deborah Carlson from The David Suzuki Foundation and authors of Doing Business in a New Climate. The webinar will focus on the challenges and opportunities that climate change poses for businesses of all sizes.
I'm extremely angry with the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Their job is to assess the state of the science across a wide range of aspects and provide a digest for policy makers and others. In general their analysis errs on the conservative side. Both the loss of sea ice and the rise in sea levels are happening much more quickly than the IPCC prediction. So it came as a great shock that a statement buried in their last report that the Himalayan glacier system could all but disappear by 2035, depriving 40% of the world's population of drinking and irrigation water, turns out to be very unlikely to be correct.
The actual mistake appears to have arisen in the World Wildlife Fund report which was being quoted by the IPCC - they accidentally attributed this to an expert group of glacier scientists when the 2035 date comes from a New Scientist interview with a single scientist. What makes me cross is:
1. why a statement of such impact was not sourced directly from a peer reviewed scientific paper? The WWF may have messed up, but they're a pressure group not a scientific body. I actually wonder if it was left in by mistake during drafting - if it had been reliable, the statement would surely have been a headline fact, not an obscure comment buried in the text.
2. why did the IPCC chairman dismissed the representations of the Indian Govt on this matter as 'voodoo science' rather than checking the facts first? I suggest he should seriously consider his position.
3. Of course the denial industry is having a field day, blowing it out of proportion, and trying to bring down the science as a whole. But for the rest of us, we should be able to trust the IPCC to get these things right and, as with the rest of their work, err on the side of caution where there is uncertainty.
4. While I've never personally quoted 2035, I've used the wider Himalayan case as an example in my talks and courses as it is a human story rather than one featuring polar bears. Given the resulting hoohah, I'm going to have to use other examples as I don't want to get bogged down in debunking myths and splitting hairs.
So what is the true situation? I've had a quick rummage through various documents, books and official websites and what I can gather is:
1. The Himalayan glaciers do appear to be retreating as temperatures have risen by 1°C in the region. This is in line with a serious reduction in glacier mass around the world, but, strangely given their importance, the Himalayan glacier system has not been well studied.
2. This melting is already impacting on the surrounding populations through flood risks and reduced flows in rivers - this is likely to get worse if temperatures continue to rise.
3. The ice sheet is so huge it probably won't disappear for a couple of hundred years.
I've updated the climate change FAQs on the resources page to substitute other, peer reviewed, impacts to avoid confusion. Looking on the bright side, if the 2035 prediction had been correct, it would probably have been game over.
Looking on from afar, it is hard to judge how the climate change negotiations are going - for every 'breakthrough' story there is a counterbalancing 'deadlock' tale. But today is the day that all the world leaders are going to have to face reality - can they agree or can't they? The biggest driver now will be face - which world leader wants to have been seen to have stood in the way of success?
I'm always an optimist, so here's my worst case scenario...
1. Not getting an agreement does not stop individual action on a national level.
2. The political capital of having so many of the world's leaders turn up makes that local action much more likely. This is now a mainstream issue, not one for environment ministries.
3. The discussions have brought home some inconvenient truths about who is responsible for climate change (rich nations) and who's feeling the pain most (poor nations). A world where Tuvalu can take on China is the sort of world where I want to live.
4. Not even the best efforts of the denial dinosaurs, CRU e-mail hack and all, could impact on the process*.
5. Business can lead where Governments fear to tread. The increased awareness amongst the general public will boost green markets, lower resistance to innovations and reduce tolerance of high carbon behaviour. Green performance is already a source of competitive advantage and it will become more so.
If, through some unlikely last minute breakthrough, a legally binding agreement is made, then it is game on. High carbon businesses will soon become fossils, low carbon business will boom. I'm an optimist, I live in hope!
* If you want a bit of festive Friday fun, watch Ian Plimer, darling of the denial circuit, squirm as his "science" comes under scrutiny on Australian TV.
A bit of fun for a Friday to get us ready for Copenhagen next week* - "Al Gore" and "Christopher Monckton" have a rap battle to settle the climate debate for once and for all.
* I was actually invited to Copenhagen, but didn't fancy drifting around the cocktail circuit pretending I'm more important than I am!
You can always tell when things are coming to a crunch when the game gets dirty. If you are reading this blog, then you are probably aware that the University of East Anglia's IT system has been illegally hacked and e-mails between the UEA's Climate Research Unit and other climatologists leaked onto the web. This has thrown the climate change sceptics into a frenzy of outrage/delight and boosted the conspiracy theories about international socialism creating the climate change hoax to enslave the people... but if you look at the e-mails objectively, in context and with a sense of perspective, it's a load of fuss over nothing.
The timing is of course important as it brings the sceptics and deniers back into the media just when they want to be there. The same thing happened with the first Earth Summit in 1992 and around the Kyoto Protocol discussions a few years later. These attempts to muddy the waters are deliberate to protect vested interests and are to be expected, but their influence has been waning as big business shifts away from the denial camp and starts to engage proactively with the issues. A shift to morally and legally dubious tactics such as hacking could be seen as a sign of desperation.
On the other hand, I'm becoming increasingly convinced that the 'global binding deal' approach is the wrong one. It is very unlikely that such a deal could please people in Idaho and Indonesia, or Birmingham and Brunei. It also feeds the fears of those the deniers are trying to influence - people don't like being told what to do by some remote entity. There must be a model of flexible interlocking national programmes where each country can set, and vary, its own targets and programmes, with mechanisms to cover trade between them. Then we could have, in the words of Elvis, a little less conversation, a little more action.
Hot, Flat & Crowded by Thomas Friedman is a few years old now (I picked up my copy in a second hand book stall at my son's school), but I had somehow managed to avoid the works of this pillar of US green thinking. The book is very well researched and covers a huge amount of ground including some concepts I was unfamiliar with such as "Dutch Disease" - the negative impact of sudden discoveries of natural resources - and the link between human rights in OPEC countries and the price of oil. Friedman's main thesis is that while the US is addicted to oil it will never free itself from the threat from militant Islam and will end up getting crushed by the Chinese economic juggernaut. Maybe it was Friedman's assumption of a US readership, or the reliance on lengthy quotes from the good and the great from around the world, but frankly I found reading Hot, Flat & Crowded a bit of a trudge.
You can't say the same about Mark Lynas' zippy new book The God Species. The thesis here is that as we are wreaking biblical levels of destruction on the planet, we'd better use our 'god-like' technologies, such as genetic engineering and nuclear power, to stop the damage before it is too late. Lynas uses the Planetary Boundaries Group's set of 
