Mark Higginson

The Copenhagen summit on climate change is drawing to a close, an exercise in legitimation for the world’s governments. The facts of climate change are but one strand to a wider problem that goes beyond any kind of agreement on the tricky issue of emissions. The root cause of the worsening state of the environment on which we depend is too many people consuming too much. It is in our nature to reproduce; it is in our nature to be ambitious and acquisitive beings. The debate stops abruptly at the point where those labelled as various stripes of green advocate a radical reorganisation of our entire global society and everyone else stays in denial, either by simply ignoring the problem or getting angry at what should by now be obvious. None of these people are helping.

The juggernaut of our collective manifest destiny that is lurching to this precipice for our species goes way, way back. Back before access to abundant energy in the form of oil caused our present population spike. Back as far as when we first began to spread across the planet and started to change the environment we inhabited to make survival a little easier, day-to-day and generation-to-generation, unable to have the foresight to understand that eventually this would have far-reaching consequences.

It has become a serious problem since the exploitation of abundant and accessible sources of energy in the 19th century was responsible for an explosion in human population numbers, a growth rate of such rapidity and enormity that 150 years later the species is left in what looks to be an increasingly precarious situation. We have an economic and political situation that is reliant on finite resources for growth, but encourages such growth in the face of irrefutable logic that counsels otherwise. The debate around the effects of human beings on their environment is pressing yet is at a level that seems absurdly myopic to the key feature of our predicament, one of too many people. It doesn’t matter whether we become more efficient at using what we have, or whether we develop new technology to deal with problems we’ve already caused. If the population keeps growing, or even if it stabilises at some future point, the consequences are still the same as we can expect the majority of people to desire ever higher standards of living in the form of the ability to overconsume.

Those who haven’t got past the primitive notions of religious tenets as a meme for tribal survival most frequently advocate unfettered expansion, an attitude that belies a hideous cruelty to those not fortunate to be born in the wealthier parts of the world. The crunch, when it comes, will be felt by those least able to afford it. But what of the more enlightened movements of our age? How do they perceive this problem?

One way to get a rough idea of the priority with which mainstream pressure groups view a particular topic is to perform a site restricted search on Google for the terms ‘climate change’ and ‘overpopulation’.

The keywords ‘climate change’ appear together over 27,000 times across these 8 sites. ‘Overpopulation’ in the context of human overpopulation is mentioned a total of 4 times. This looks like not so much a case of emphasising one issue over another but of deliberately ignoring a major issue that is seen as problematic to address. Government isn't interested and neither are human rights groups, despite population size being a significant pressure on resources.

Greenpeace: climate change (6,480) / overpopulation (0,001)
Oxfam: climate change (6,150) / overpopulation (0,000)
Friends of the Earth: climate change (4,490) / overpopulation (0,002)
WWF: climate change (4,130) / overpopulation (0,000)
defra: climate change (2,860) / overpopulation (0,001)
People and Planet: climate change (2,590) / overpopulation (0,000)
Amnesty International: climate change (633) / overpopulation (000)
Green Party: climate change (511) / overpopulation (000)

Greenpeace UK’s tagline is: “Providing solutions is just as important as identifying problems”. Except when the problem is so massive and unpalatable to a donation-funded pressure group they’d rather ignore it. The same goes for Friends of the Earth: “Making life better for people by inspiring solutions to environmental problems”. Friends of the Earth mention ‘overpopulation’ on their site four times, excluding forum mentions, with two mentions being directly relevant. One is a motion to the board from September 2008 from a local group calling for “the promotion of the stabilisation, and ultimately the reduction, of the human population; both within the UK and, via the Friends of the Earth International network, globally, in line with depleting natural resources”. The motion was denied. The reason for the denial was the same as given in the other mention which is part of their FAQs. The reason given is that they do “not believe that population growth is the main cause of environmental pollution. The richest 20% of people consume 86% of the Earth's resources and have the lowest birth rates”. Incredible. Their reasoning is therefore that we have to reduce consumption, which I would argue requires not only a complete change in the way global society presently operates but a complete change in human consciousness. I am not saying I don’t find this desirable; it is more that I think it highly unlikely to happen.

These groups would ask that you do not stick your head in the sand over the issues they care about yet are quite happy to ignore the size of the human population as having anything to do with the issues they supposedly wish to solve.

We can conclude that these groups will only push things so far. They are happy to accept financial support from their members to campaign on issues sufficiently abstract that it does not require change to the lifestyle or thinking of the general populace. Recommending actual solutions such as changing your diet or choosing not to have children will not be contemplated as a position that will prove acceptable to the continuing survival of the organisation. If this is the best we can expect from campaigning groups then the chances of most of the population alive today surviving and perpetuating themselves are vanishingly small. None of this is about ‘saving the planet’. It has always been about ‘saving ourselves from ourselves’. The Earth will endure even if we pass.

The human mind represents the pinnacle of evolved information processing ability in the universe; from the big bang to big brains. The destiny of such a feat of complexity does not lie in the drudge labour of hand-to-mouth survival or of a ghastly fate from preventable disease, nor should it fall prey to petty ideological squabbles or a poverty of imagination as to the path we travel through our days. The challenge we face in our time is to elevate our perception not to raise the population. That necessity is obviously long gone, the aberration of our recent explosion in numbers would be horrifying if we could perceive it over a longer timeframe than the snapshot our threescore and ten grants us. Irony of ironies, the very act that once ensured the survival of the species now edges it closer to destruction.

Good post on Bristling Badger about the weasel words being used regarding attempts to reach some sort of agreement to manage climate change and the futility of such agreements under the present system:

"An economy based on growth will increase total consumption and so rapidly eat up any carbon savings from reducing 'carbon intensity'. Basing any agreements on carbon intensity is a guarantee that we will not reduce carbon emissions."

In other news oil is on the up-and-up and nearing $80 a barrel. A leak from 'whistleblowers' at the International Energy Agency say that their reassurances that global production can reach 105m barrels a day is impossible; in fact we're past peak and the ongoing fabrication is due to a desire not to trigger panic on the markets. The UK government bases its energy policy on figures from the IEA. In other words successive administrations would rather make believe the problem doesn't exist and pay this ever-growing elephant-in-the-room forward. You can download a report from the UK Energy Research Centre that says there is a significant risk of terminal decline in production before 2020.

Between climate change and our out-of-control use of energy use we're about to hit ever more interesting times. Preparedness will be essential in the years ahead.

Read this post entitled Entropy Gets No Respect over at The Archdriuid Report. It sums up the way it is and why we don't talk about it. We need to face truths such as these collectively, moreso now than ever before. A great post and well worth your time and consideration.

"The hard reality is that the minority of us who happened to have been born in a few powerful countries squandered half a billion years of stored photosynthesis to give ourselves a brief period of spectacular economic abundance, and by doing so, foreclosed the chance that anybody else would enjoy that same abundance in the future. Fossil fuels are not renewable resources in any time frame accessible to our species. Every barrel and ton and cubic foot of fossil fuel we use now is subtracted from the total available to our descendants; despite an orgy of handwaving, no other resource can provide anything approaching the glut of cheap abundant energy on which our lifestyles of relative privilege depend."

I read on Schnews and Corporate Watch that the Big Green Gathering has been bailed out of its financial difficulties by a joint venture involving "AEG - the largest sports and entertainment corporation in the US, owning arenas, cinemas, newspapers and sports teams". It reminded me of what was said in The Rebel Sell about the counterculture being the vanguard of capitalism. The Big Green Gathering say that they:

"... developed organically in response to a desire from people within the green movement for a festival that was focused on Green issues. Now we have somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 people expected this year. Staying Green is now a bigger challenge than ever."

Quite. I'm reminded of something the character Cayce Pollard says in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition:

"It's about a group behavior pattern around a particular class of object. What I do is pattern recognition. I try to recognize a pattern before anyone else does." "And then?" "I point a commodifier at it." "And?" "It gets productized. Turned into units. Marketed."

Which brings me onto this scene that I witnessed today:

The village green of the 21st century

Your eyes are not deceiving you. There is not some visual trickery at work. This photograph actually shows people sitting in deckchairs on a piece of artificial turf on a sunny day in the middle of Brighton. It causes my brain to disengage and spin uncontrollably. This is some weird copy-of-a-copy where there was an error in the duplication process so all we're left with is this ersatz thing that has had all meaning removed. I actually saw a flyer the other week advertising events happening in this location; a place where I'm entirely unclear as to whether it is a public space or private land on which the public are permitted to roam between chain coffee shop, chain hotel, chain cocktail bar, chain sushi restaurant and chain grocery store. You can see another chain logo reflected in the monolithic front of the library, which I suppose is intended to define this 'public' rather than commercial abomination in the middle of the North Laine that is without trees, grass or any pleasing natural form. We've not only sacrificed the places where we once gathered together but have also sacrificed our very ability to gather together freely.

I've spent 22 hours over the past two days with my friend and colleague Simon Handby in the new Toyota iQ seeing how far it's possible to drive on one tank of fuel for the official Toyota iQ UK blog. As part of the challenge we wanted to beat the manufacturer's stated 65.7 mpg by visiting 18 cities and covering 500 or more miles. Given the iQ has a tiny 32 litre tank (the average car's is more like 45 or even 55 litres) the range based on the given figures should be 460 miles.

On Brighton seafront

I thought it would be pretty easily to achieve with careful driving which, although billed as such, wasn't exactly ecodriving or hypermiling. I'd prefer to call it careful driving as conserving fuel is really about anticipating how the driving situation is about to change and altering your behaviour ahead of time. In fact, if anything, this was a real world test as we took no extraordinary measures to set up the car differently (apart from increasing the air pressure in the tyres 2 psi over recommended) and were carrying two people and luggage. It rapidly beacame apparent that on Britain's busy roads techniques to minimise stop start driving were nigh on impossible, especially as we were driving right into the centre of each city we were visiting to take photos of the iQ by a landmark. We achieved our best fuel economy out on the motorway, but were travelling at a slightly higher speed than perhaps would have been most efficient as we were conscious of ensuring our own safety and that of other drivers by maintaining pace with the dense traffic around us.

Outside Wales Millenium Centre

The car was pretty much entirely dry after 504 miles, just as we were leaving Oxford in heavy traffic. We managed to complete the challenge we'd set ourselves and I did learn from it:

• 45 to 50 mph on a long journey feels excruciatingly slow
• You need a different mindset towards driving to accomodate this and...
• ... to accomodate other drivers behaviour
• The quality of the road surface is key; gritted roads are horrible to drive on
• Anything other than smooth tarmac causes increased rolling resistance

As to the car itself I was really surprised as to how  much I grew to like it. It feels no different to a medium-sized car to sit inside or to drive. It's short length does more than make it easy to park, it feels nimble and, if necessary, can more than keep up with motorway traffic. This last point is important as once out of the city and on a long journey you want to feel both comfortable and safe.

Our final mileage

My specific criticisms from the perspective of the test were that the readout that told you how many miles you were getting to the gallon stopped at 60 mpg which is idiotic for a car rated at 65.7 mpg or higher. Perhaps we were doing something incorrectly. I really want to see a manufacturer take the issue of driver behaviour seriously by making relevant data clearly available. This article on Wired talks about precisely this issue: Next-Gen Dashboards Teach Leadfoots How to Hypermile.

Update: the challenge has been featured on Wired.com's Autopia blog! There's a photo of me fueling the car after we ran out of petrol in Oxford.

Update: the story has now appeared on Treehugger. A cleaner and less fraught me is lurking behind the car in the photo taken outside the Palace Pier on Brighton seafront at the start of the journey.

Update: ... and now on The New York Times blog Wheels too.

It's got cold out all of a sudden. At least I can keep warm by burning all the articles that appear telling us how we can reduce our fuel bills. The proffered advice is only of any use if you own your own home and have spare cash lying around, two unlikely scenarios in this equally chilly economic climate. If you rent an older property then you're going to face higher energy bills, contribute to climate change and use more precious natural resources completely unnecessarily. This triple whammy of unhelpfulness is due in the main to poor housing stock. Every house I've rented has suffered from the same problems: large sash windows, no double-glazing, wind coming through cracks that draft excluder simply isn't going to fill, solid walls, uninsulated roof spaces and old boilers. Tenants pay the bills and landlords own the property. Neither is going to invest money in sorting the energy efficiency of an old house, it doesn't make sense for either party. Given that heating accounts for 57% of energy used in a house and the government is mad keen to set targets for carbon emissions you'd think they'd be all over this, especially as 30% of property is rented in this country.

1 original comment:

Tax relief for landlords prepared to invest money in increasing fuel efficiency in their properties? I think that would be a good avenue to explore and is similar to the current government’s policy re: road tax and fuel efficient cars.
Comment by Joe — 6 December, 2008 @ 11:19 pm

Bruce Sterling issued The Last Viridian Note last week which led me to re-read the original manifesto from January 2000. Check the final section which covers 'where we are' (circa 2000), 'what we want' and what 'the trend' is likely to be. Have a think about what's happened in the past eight years. One part I did pick out was the following:

"Energy meters, for instance, should be ubiquitous. They should be present, not in an obscure box outside the home, but enshrined within it. This is not a frugal, money-saving effort. It should be presented as a luxury. It should be a mark of class distinction. It should be considered a mark of stellar ignorance to be unaware of the source of one's electric power. Solar and wind power should be sold as premiums available to particularly affluent and savvy consumers. It should be considered the stigma of the crass proletarian to foul the air every time one turns on a light switch."
from the Viridian Manifesto by Bruce Sterling, January 2000

This takes me back to an earlier post where I talked about the real need to have access to data about what we consume in a meaningful form we can act upon. Having an energy display in the spaces in which we live rather than confined to the meter box is a simple enough step. Hopefully with awareness comes action.

3 original comments:

You certainly find out a lot of extremely interesting things when you have an energy meter – you can buy ones that plug between an appliance and the socket.
I wouldn’t normally be so crass as to include a link, but we’ve done quite a few tests for living:
http://living.morethan.com/tag/power-meter/
The short story: Want to save energy? Turn your fridge off.
Comment by handolio — 6 December, 2008 @ 4:00 pm

I think it’s quite ironic how the new technologies of the past 10 years or so (mobile phones, wireless broadband, cheap laptops etc) actually use up an incredible amount of energy. The media is telling us to use less energy via forms of communication that actually increase it! The only way we’re really gonna decrease our energy consumption is if we force ourselves to make decisions like “I can either turn my router on or cook a roast but not both because they use too much energy”. Having an energy meter would really help inform this decision and track it’s effects on energy consumption. No one wants to live like that but if people are serious about lowering their energy bills turning appliances off and charging batteries less often is really the only way. (N/B I’m as guilty of reckless energy consumption as the next man)
Comment by Joe — 7 December, 2008 @ 12:02 am

Handolio, I’ll let the link pass as it is actually relevant but I should add a disclaimer here for other readers that I currently work with Handolio at an agency and as part of his job he writes content for a website paid for by the insurance firm More Than called ‘Living’. The site aims to encourage:
“… customers to do their bit for the environment by incentivising and rewarding green behaviour”
Obviously there is a tension here as More Than offer car and travel insurance and the best ‘bit’ for the environment you could do would be to not own a car or fly abroad when you go on holiday.
Joe, I reckon your router probably uses a trivial amount of energy compared to cooking a roast but as you say knowing this information would be a big help in decision making.
Thanks for your comments!
Comment by Mark — 9 December, 2008 @ 2:33 pm

Interesting article over on guardian.co.uk discussing the UK's water footprint, another example of an environmental cost of our lifestyles that we're able to easily ignore. They also have a good interactive guide to put things in perspective. The piece is based around a new report from the WWF that they've released as it's World Water Week. The full report is a 7.7Mb PDF and can be found here. I'm going to give it a thorough read.

Ye gads. The Guardian is reporting Ban Ki-moon as saying that world food production needs to rise by 50% by 2030. Perhaps we could magic up a source of cheap energy, de-salinate seawater and irrigate the desert? Or perhaps increases in production to feed the hungry we already have could go hand-in-hand with a crash programme of policies to reduce our population and hence our ever greater demands on an over stretched biosphere? Just a thought. Oh, hang on, The Guardian's article is topped by a photo of Ban Ki-moon with the Pope. Rational and workable solutions to overpopulation will just have to wait. Have more kids, we've got the loaves and fishes on standby.