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Regular readers will know I’m a City Councillor here in Newcastle. When I was first elected in 2004, my party took control of the Council for the first time ever. We inherited an 8% recycling rate, poor even for that time. Over the next couple of years we pushed it up to just shy of 40% (the current English average is 44% for context), but we found we had inherited another problem that stymied further progress.

The previous administration had signed a 25 year contract for an in vessel composter (IVC) to take the ‘heavy fraction’ of residual waste and stabilise it. This was better than landfill as it avoided methane emissions, but the resulting ‘grey compost’ was so contaminated it was only allowed to be spread on top of landfills. But the real problem was that contractually we had to ‘feed the beast’. We wanted to start food waste collections to create nice compost and/or energy via anaerobic digestion, but the food was needed in the feedstock to make the IVC work properly. So while friends and relatives across the country were diligently filling their food waste caddies, we sat red-faced in Newcastle.

Last Wednesday I proposed a motion in Council asking the current administration to avoid making the same mistake by signing a 30 year contract to buy into a new incinerator along with six other Councils. I can’t go into all the details here for confidentiality reasons, but the contract would prevent us meeting the Government’s target of 65% recycling in English Councils by 2035 (Wales is already doing 66%). In fact, we wouldn’t achieve this target by 2045 or even 2055, unless of course we doubled the city’s municipal waste arisings… anyway, I won the battle but have probably lost the war – my motion passed, but it isn’t binding. A pyrrhic victory in more ways than one.

Amongst the noise of the current Government’s unplanned reshuffle last week, there was a murmur that Energy and Net Zero Minister Ed Miliband nearly got shuffled out of his role in order to permit the dilution of environmental standards on house building and thus ‘stimulate growth’. Now, the house I’m writing this in is 130 years old, was certainly not designed for energy efficiency and retrofitting is difficult/expensive. Whichever long dead Victorian architect designed it is shaping our carbon footprint today from beyond the grave. So even if we did get a couple of years’ economic benefit of a housing boom, the environmental and economic implications of any loosening of standards on carbon emissions, biodiversity or flood prevention will be felt by generations to come.

The problem is the temptation to find solutions to today’s problems at the expense of the situation 10, 20 or 100 years hence, aka ‘the tyranny of the present’. This is why I use backcasting to develop Sustainability Strategies. If you start with the future goal you are trying to achieve and work backwards to the present day, you are much less likely to choose a path which gives a quick win but which locks us in to a high carbon future. I wish everybody used backcasting; we’d avoid a huge number of long term blunders made by people thinking they were doing the right thing for today.