Which? Consumers in 2030

It’s always interesting, and sometimes encouraging, to see more mainstream groups take an interest in sustainability issues. Which (a major UK consumer-interest group) have recently published Consumers in 2030: Forecasts and projections in conjunction with Forum for the Future.

The report takes into account two major factors: resource shortage (and consequent economic growth) and technological advances:

Our data and social trend analysis shows that in
2030, people in the UK could be living in a world
where slow growth, resource scarcity and rising
commodity prices have become the norm;
where demands on public finances will have
been impacted by demographic shifts, and where
ongoing scandals such as MPs’ expenses, gas price
fixing and the rigging of the Libor rate have led to
a crisis of trust in institutions.

As well as these social and economic trends,
technology will be revolutionising our homes, and the
way we run our lives. For example, increasing use of
robotics in the service industry – already familiar in the
form of self-service checkouts – could fundamentally
change the nature of customer service, making
personal ‘human’ service the new First Class.

A consequence of this is that levels of disposable income are likely to remain below the 2008 peak for at least the next two decades, and they note a worrying trend towards income inequality, so the poor end of society will continue to suffer.

There’s lots of good stuff in this report, and it’s well worth reading. But a surprising omission is the issue of climate change, the costs of extreme weather, and in particular increased risks of flooding. We already have a major consumer issue of housing that is impossible or prohibitively expensive to insure, and this and the other costs of mitigating against, or tidying up the damage from extreme weather seems to be a further major factor to be taken into consideration.

Can we AVOID dangerous climate change?

There’s been a lot of coverage in the last few days of a speech that Energy Secretary Ed Davey gave to the AVOID symposium at the Royal Society. See for instance The Huffington Post, with the full speech on the UK government site. It’s a powerful piece of rhetoric saying that we should listen to the scientists, stand up to the deniers, and work for a strong international agreement in 2015.

AVOID was a new group to me, and their web presence somewhat limited. I’ve not seen any further coverage of the symposium and what was said. They’re a research programme sponsored by DECC whose remit is to advise on how to avoid dangerous climate change, and are a joint project of the Met Office Hadley Centre, the Grantham Institute for Climate Change, the Tyndall Centre and the Walker Institute – all big hitters.

What’s on their website is worth looking at. It presents estimated trajectories for global temperature rises dependent on when emissions peak and how fast they drop with sliders so you can do your own experiments, and see how likely staying under the usual 2C rise is going to be. They say:

Current research suggests we are at a stage of damage limitation but can still avoid the worst effects of climate change projected to occur without mitigation. AVOID has shown that limiting global warming to just under 2 °C above historical levels is possible yet scientifically and technologically challenging.

What this means according to their figures is that if we peak emissions in 2016 we then need to cut them 4% year-on-year for the expected rise by 2100 to be less than 2C, or if we peak in 2020 then it has to be 5%. For reference, these are over a pre-industrial baseline, with 1990 being 0.56C over it, 2013 0.95C, and expected rises of 2C by 2044 and 4C by the 2090s in their average scenario.

Note also that “expected rise” is a middle figure, so this only gives us a 50/50 chance. For a 90% chance, we are looking at a 5% cut from 2016. In practice, they say, we may need some “negative emissions” (geoengineering or other means of getting carbon out of the atmosphere). It’s worrying to compare these dates with those of the international agreements that Davey is looking forward to: 2015, with things enforced from 2020, is the current timetable. All this is in line with reports such as Greenpeace’s Point of No Return (PDF) and the IEA, both of whom say that projects now being planned will take us over the line beyond which a 2C rise is inevitable.

Davey concluded his speech with:

In reality, those who deny climate change and demand a halt to emissions reduction and mitigation work, want us to take a huge gamble with the future of every human being on the planet, every future human being, our children and grand children, and every other living species.

That bet may already be on the table…

Nature services, technology and grace

Why do so many persist in seeking technological solutions to our environmental problems, whilst denigrating social solutions, or allowing nature to do what it does best? This article from the frequently excellent Contraposition blog explores some of the reasons: like it says, nothing new, but a good summary of the debate in one place. One example is quite striking: our attempts to mimic nature through artificial means often make headline news, even if what we’re achieving is quite modest by nature’s standards.

The article ends as follows:

However, it’s this last issue that I think hasn’t really been addressed or resolved yet—how to make this new kind of permaculture-oriented struggle (likely as meaningless, in the sense of Camus, as the one that it seeks to replace) feel more worthwhile to people and societies who have, for a very long time, defined themselves by a “progress”-driven struggle against nature. It’s the challenge of replacing this long-held drive to commodify not only nature, but also other people in the process, that will require not only thought, but action that seems to not yet be a focus of those thinking about these issues today.

I entirely agree that this cultural issue is a major challenge, perhaps the biggest single one. It’s something that EF Schumacher, Ivan Illich, and many others have warned us of for decades, but with little effect on the majority. But what can we say theologically?

The most obvious point is that the breakdown of relationships between humanity and nature, and between human and human, is exactly what we are told happens as a result of the Fall, or or human sin. Exploitation of the weak and powerless is far from a new problem. The solution is the redemption of all through the cross (Colossians 1:15-20), but this has to be thought of properly, and there are two traps we commonly fall into where our theology has become infiltrated by our culture.

The first is seeing the human-God relationship as dominant, to the exclusion of all else. Some strands of Christianity seem to have reduced the Gospel to largely personal ethics, with the only other humans that count being family and church, and nature just being “stuff” that God gives us. Seeing a three-fold relationship (God, human, creation) is necessary to restore our attitudes to what they should be.

Together with individualism comes the second, taken from economics. Only transactions count, preferably those with a financial element. I’ve been preparing for a youth weekend away with the overall theme of “giving” and realising how alien the idea of God’s grace is to modern society: everything else we have to pay for or earn in some way, so it’s hardly surprising that so many struggle with the idea that God’s salvation (and his creation) come to us for free out of his love.

Fixing these isn’t going to be easy, but at least if we come at things from a more correct theological viewpoint, the church has the opportunity to influence the wider world for the better.

All ideas I’d like to think through at greater length in time.

Hope or crunch in 2013?

Apologies for a rather long hiatus in the blog. I’ve had to devote a lot of time to other writing projects, and while I’ve been keeping up with sustainability news, I haven’t had the opportunity to reflect on it so much.

For KLICE, I wrote their monthly comment, entitled Is there still hope for the climate? Many of the themes will be familiar to readers here: continued and increasingly bad indicators for climate, disinterest from our leaders, many campaigners beginning to despair and think only of the time beyond collapse.

But we’re also potentially at a point when the general public begin to wake up to what we’re doing. I covered that in more detail in a post called“Are we near the tipping point for climate change awareness?” Since then the trends have only increased. Hurricane Sandy seems to have a big impact in the US with 70% blaming climate change for it being such a large storm, and the continued wet weather in the UK may have a similar if less dramatic effect here. It would be interesting to know what effects the record high temperatures in Australia are having on the debate there.

On the other hand, we’re also nearing another potential tipping point. The international target has consistently been to avoid exceeding a 2C rise in global temperatures, but given there is a distinct lag between action and consequences, at some point this will be inevitable. Fatih Birol of the IEA predicted in 2011 we could have “lock-in” by 2017. The World Bank’s most recent report (106 page PDF: see media summary here) forecasts a rise of 3.5-4C by 2100 even if all existing pledges are fulfilled, and if not we can expect it by about the 2060s. Much more radical action is needed than most governments are even talking about, let alone implementing.

A Greenpeace report just out makes the same points in a much blunter way. They list 14 fossil fuel projects in planning or development round the world which between them would increase emissions by 20% by 2020 – completely the opposite of what we need. They describe them as “carbon bombs” and the imagery seems apposite. James Murray of Business Green gives an excellent summary of the report. He writes that he ‘tweeted that I was “trying not to think about this new Greenpeace report too hard, because the implications are absolutely terrifying”.’

So are we headed for hope or disaster? It’s not at all clear. It seems to me that while we’re in a situation where urgent decisions on the future of the planet need to be made, we’re also in a situation where, perhaps for the first time in a generation, you feel they just could start to be made, if public opinion switches and pressure is put on governments. 2013 could be an interesting year.

The Lausanne Global Consultation on Creation Care and the Gospel

The week before last I was fortunate to be invited to the Lausanne Movement’s Consultation on Creation Care and the Gospel in Jamaica, and to have the privilege of being involved in editing the book that will be published as a result.

The Call to Action has been published. It, together with the future documents coming from the consultation, have the potential to make a significant difference in the Christian evangelical world, largely because of the prestige of the Lausanne Movement. It was founded in 1974 by Billy Graham and others to encourage evangelicals globally to worldwide evangelisation, and has held three big meetings, the most recent being in Cape Town 2010. The Commitment made then included a call that creation care was both an integral part of the Gospel, and an urgent priority for the worldwide Church; the Consultation which has just happened was tasked with exploring what this meant in more detail.

Why this isn’t just another creation care conference is that it is being backed by a major world organisation in the mainstream of Christian faith: unlike (say) our Sustainability in Crisis conference, what it says cannot be simply dismissed as the views of a special-interest minority. It was definitely exciting to talk to those working in creation care issues worldwide and hear their stories and passion, and feel renewed in my own work too (it can feel lonely at times). I’ll post some of them here as I work on the book, but it’s the overall message to the church that I feel is most important.

The first of the two primary conclusions is worth quoting in full.

Creation Care is indeed a “gospel issue within the lordship of Christ” (CTC I.7.A). Informed and inspired by our study of the scripture—the original intent, plan, and command to care for creation, the resurrection narratives and the profound truth that in Christ all things have been reconciled to God—we reaffirm that creation care is an issue that must be included in our response to the gospel, proclaiming and acting upon the good news of what God has done and will complete for the salvation of the world. This is not only biblically justified, but an integral part of our mission and an expression of our worship to God for his wonderful plan of redemption through Jesus Christ. Therefore, our ministry of reconciliation is a matter of great joy and hope and we would care for creation even if it were not in crisis.

Perhaps the most important part of this is at the end: we are not caring for creation just because it is suffering, trying to get it back under some arbitrary bar of quality necessary for our human comfort. Creation is worthy of love and redemption in its own regard as part of the reconciliation of all things to God in Christ. This brings creation care into the mainstream as part of integrated mission, and also helps avoid the problem of interpreting (or ignoring) the science of climate change and associated environmental issues.

Given this, what is the Consultation calling to be done? Some of the more significant to my eyes are:

• A renewed commitment to a simple lifestyle, looking back to a 1970 Lausanne paper.
• More leadership from the church in the Global South, recognising that they are the most affected by the current ecological crisis and have been very underrepresented in debates to date.
• An economy that works in harmony with creation, and a challenge to prevailing economic ideologies which generally undervalue it, together with robust theological support.
• Recognising that this is a spiritual issue, one affected by human sin, so calling for prayer, prophetic speech and symbolic acts appropriate the local culture.

It’s worth reading the whole Call and reflecting on it, and it will also be interesting to see the reaction from the annual meeting of the (US) Evangelical Theological Society in Milwaukee, Wisconsin this week. Their theme is Creation Care, with a range of keynote speakers ranging across the whole spectrum of opinions on climate change. Their description notes the Lausanne Consultation, so expect some speakers to reference it directly.

Are we near the tipping point for climate change awareness?

I’ve been catching up on reading recently after a fairly busy August, and have been wondering: could 2012 be the year when people in the UK wake up to the fact that our climate is changing, and possibly changing faster than anyone thought?

A lot of people you talk to about climate change are quite accepting of the fact it’s likely to happen if we don’t do something, but don’t expect noticeable effects until 2050 or so, and don’t have too much of a problem waiting another ten years for us to take action. This narrative is backed up by our own government and the international community generally. Even on a relatively positive view of the last couple of governments they seem to be pretty leisurely about the timescales of the action required, and the fact we’ll have to wait until the end of the decade at least for international agreement on carbon reduction doesn’t seem a problem.

Part of the problem is that the reports of the IPCC and climate scientists have to an extent also supported this line. Obviously there’s been considerable uncertainty both about what effects to expect and the timescale, so the mainstream have generally been reasonably conservative to avoid the charge of alarmism. Some have stuck their neck out and warned that things may be worse than the IPCC reckon, and in some areas it seems they’ve been right.

One specific data point in the news at the minute is the amount of ice in the Arctic, which has just hit a new historic low of 3500 km^3 (volume) or a bit under 4 million km^2 (area). This is about one quarter the volume or half the area that was a typical summer minimum in the 1980s. Experts have long forecast that at some point the Arctic would be largely ice-free in the summer, with a large uncertainty as to when this would occur as we don’t really understand the mechanisms behind melting that well, but with dates generally somewhere between 2040 and 2100. If the current trends continue, we are looking at it happening this decade. My sources for this are a series of articles on the Climate Progress site, see this for information on melting, and this for some more information on the consequences.

While Arctic sea ice loss may not have a major impact on us in isolation, the knock-on results are potentially quite severe. One immediate effect is that the amount of sunlight absorbed in the Arctic will increase (ice reflects a lot more sunlight back into space than water does), and the temperature rise there will accelerate. This in turn has two further consequences: affecting the jet stream and increasing methane emissions.

Again, we don’t yet know as much about these as we’d like. We do know there’s a lot of methane locked up in the Arctic permafrost, and if it starts to melt then we have a lot more greenhouse gases to deal with. One of the articles above suggests that the effect will be equivalent to 15-35% of our current annual emissions, which is bad enough. I’ve also seen reference to a paper by Malcolm Light with the cheery title of “Global Extinction within one Human Lifetime”. He warns that if we get eruptions of large amounts of methane in one place, we could get localised temperature anomalies of tens of degrees, a runaway methane problem, and resulting global temperature rises of somewhere in the region of 12-14 degrees. This takes us beyond the sudden rise that provoked the Permian extinction (the worst in Earth’s history) with mass dieoffs by mid-century in the northern hemisphere, delayed by 20-30 years in the southern.

Whether this is true or not, it shows the kind of tipping point we may well reach.

Less catastrophic, but more likely to be proven in the near-term is the effect on the jet stream. This is a band of high-speed high-altitude air which is one of the main governing factors in temperate northern hemisphere weather. What’s generally believed it will produce more extreme weather, and often “stick” for a time, which is exactly what we’ve seen happen in both the UK and USA this year – the jet stream has been way off where it normally is, and the USA has had an extremely hot summer and the UK an extremely wet one. This analysis demonstrates that since 2006 there has been a distinct pressure anomaly affecting the UK: we have had much lower pressure in the summer months each year, and a worse summer. The author isn’t sure whether Arctic melt has caused this, or vice versa, but the correlation is there so far.

And other parts of the world have had unusual weather too. Bill McKibben, in an article entitled A summer of extremes signifies the new normal lists some of the effects, and concludes with a rather chilling statistic from James Hansen: while normally only 0.1 to 0.2% of the planet was affected by an “extreme heat anomaly” at a given time, this figure has now been approaching 10%.

If we are now at the point where scientists are able to say with confidence that we are both getting more extreme weather than we used to, and that it is caused by climate change – and the American Meteorological Society for one has put out a statement to this effect – we may get a tipping point where the majority of people in the UK also believe that climate change is both real and here. (A friend who works in Uganda tells me that there there’s almost no doubt. The elders used to be able to predict the rainy season pretty reliably, but now they’ve just given up, and the people feel themselves much more at the mercy of the weather.) At least in the UK, our regular conversations about the weather seem to have changed recently, and most seem to think it’s now consistently worse than it used to be.

One interesting question is whether it will also have an effect on people’s willingness to take action. Some will undoubtedly want to do things to stop it getting worse, others may just say “it’s too late”, or – if they’ve picked up on the likelihood that things like the cost of food will probably increase due to poorer weather – batten down the hatches and be even less willing to spend money on mitigation.

But it’s at least an opportunity to reopen the debate, particularly in a time when the government’s reshuffle seems to have made it less green than before. Climate change as an issue has become “tired” for many people, but if it’s becoming real here, that could change quickly.

Clive Hamilton: The church and the ethics of climate change

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation website has run some good extended pieces on faith and environmental issues in past months, the most recent being by Clive Hamilton, prominent ethicist who has written several books on this area.

While practically we know what we should be doing – in broad terms at least – we are too caught up in our comfortable identities to want to change, and are influenced by the calls of the deniers who tell us we don’t have to. Even if we don’t agree with them, the doubts put in our minds detract us from action.

The church could be doing more about this, but (in Australia – there are equivalents elsewhere such as our own Bishop of Chester) the powerful voice of Archbishop George Pell clouds the debate. Hamilton spends some time explaining just how and why Pell is wrong on this.

Hamilton gives us as a species, and the church in particular this challenge:

We all become wedded to our beliefs and change them only grudgingly in the face of new evidence. We are more reluctant when the evidence contradicts beliefs deeply held or seems to vindicate the beliefs of those to whom we feel antipathy. Yet when something of immense importance is at stake – and what could be more important than the survival of the most vulnerable of the Earth’s citizens in the face of famine, flood and epidemic – we owe a greater allegiance to the truth, and must put aside any personal discomfort the truth causes us.

This is the essential moral failing of those who deny the science of climate change. For someone to turn their face away from enormous suffering in order to avoid the personal discomfort of having to re-examine their beliefs is not just unethical, it is wicked. In the words of the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “God blesses those who come to the aid of the poor and rebukes those who turn away from them.”

Dave Bookless blog

The name Dave Bookless will be familiar to most of us in the UK Christian environmental scene, through his work with A Rocha, his books or talks. He has now started up a regular blog at the A Rocha site, looking at some of the big questions in Christian theology, the environment and related matters. The intent, I think, is to build up a resource covering this, taking into account that the environment isn’t just its own little bit of Christian life, or if it is, it can get neglected in the face of issues like bringing people to personal salvation, social justice, or the ongoing economic crisis.

The last two posts at the time of writing bring this out well: is saving souls in opposition to saving seals, and are the poor or the planet the priority? In both cases, Dave shows that they must be interlinked: part of what we are saved for is a true relationship with God, which includes fulfilling his mandate for, and relating to his creation and the poor of this world.

The comments are well worth looking at too, helping to put some meat on some very challenging questions.

Dmitri Orlov: Sustainable Living as Religious Observance

This article is well worth reading. It’s some notes from a talk given by Dmitri Orlov at a recent conference (The Age of Limits) in the USA. Orlov is a prominent Peak Oil blogger, not religious as far as I’m aware, so it’s a pleasant surprise to have him give a clear case for the role of religions both in promoting sustainability and forming a core of society through difficult times or collapse. He notes that for them to survive at all they need to transcend the society they were formed in, but that they also have a natural place in serving people in difficult times, and in standing apart from governments when they need to.

These are his concluding thoughts:

My point is that we have religious institutions, or traditions, that are able to survive just about anything. We also have a society that is disintegrating, a corrupt political system that will ruin many lies, and an economy that is failing to provide the necessities for more and more people. Why should we fight battles that have already been won? Religious institutions have already succeeded in fighting political institutions down to a reasonable truce, which the politicians are rightly terrified to break. Let us not start from scratch; let us work with what we already have.

Some pre Rio+20 reading

Twenty years after the original Rio conference, representatives from around the world will be assembling in Brazil to reflect on progress and set the agenda for the next stage. How have we done and what do we hope to happen?

Our friends at JRI have put together a briefing paper which sets out many of these issues. Amongst the many helpful thoughts, they call for a more holistic view in two respects – firstly between what can be called “sustainability” and “susstainable development”:

Perhaps the most important outcome of Rio –
understanding that economic, environmental and
social concerns are all interlinked – has shown
the least progress. The convergence between
economic and social issues is now better
appreciated and, to some extent, acted upon.
However the convergence of these two pillars
and the third, environmental protection, remains
poorly outlined and acted upon.

and secondly to provide joint goals for developing and developed worlds. A major failing of the development agenda has been that it attempts to provide economic growth in the developing world in isolation, without relevance either to environmental and other related issues, or to the effect that developed economies have on the rest of the world.

Although Rio+20 seems of relatively marginal interest among the population at large – it seems the only Rio being cared about right now is Ferdinand – the BBC have at least been giving it some airtime. A new UNEP report was discussed on the 6pm Radio 4 news yesterday and makes for rather bleak, if unsurprising reading. Of 90 environmental issues, only four have improved substantially since 1992. Overall there has been some progress in a reasonable minority, but more have gone the other way.

Perhaps more scary is a new paper in Nature (Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere (not public access, summary at the BBC) which argues that we are likely to be close to a tipping point in world ecosystems which would send us irreversibly into a new, and probably less rich, biosystem. This kind of forecast is frequently made about the climate, but this is the first time I’ve seen the consequences for the biological world spelt out.