My earliest memories of prefabs, were of those on a beautiful site on Broom Hill, Strood, Kent, overlooking both the Medway and the Thames rivers. I remember my parents warning me not to play with the children from the prefabs. Later I remember that my father got to know some of the men, who worked at the same factory. When the prefabs were removed to make way for a park, he told me that the residents loved their life there and did not want to move. They were a community. A familiar story for prefab estates.
York demolished prefabs and rejected Walter Segal houses
The housing market needs a shock – a big one. A possibility is this: Layout a million or more house-sized plots of land with minimal infrastructure and sell them off to individual buyers, with a limit of one per person. This gives the owners a chance to develop their plots individually, even build their own should they wish.
But no sign of a leveling off in atmospheric concentrations.
Remaining carbon budget – pick a number
The world is heading for catastrophic climate change.
The fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR5) in 2013 was the first to include an assessment of a “carbon budget” – a finite amount of carbon that can be burnt before it becomes unlikely we can avoid more than 2°C of global warming. Later they issued a budget for 1.5°C, which Carbon Brief updated in Six years worth of current emissions would blow the carbon budget for 1.5 degrees.
“It will take just six years of current emissions to exhaust a carbon budget that would give a good chance of keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, based on figures from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The IPCC’s new budget, revealed earlier this month, calculates the remaining amount of carbon dioxide humans can emit and still hope to cap global warming at less than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
Limiting warming to 1.5 degrees has become a political rallying call for some nations and Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs). The IPCC’s calculations suggest hopes of preventing temperatures from ever crossing the 1.5 degree threshold are slim to none. But the IPCC suggests that options to temporarily exceed the target and return to lower temperatures later in the century could still be on the table.”
Carbon Brief’s updated figure for the IPCC’s remaining carbon budget is 243 billion tonnes of CO2, with counting starting in 2015. Dividing this budget by the population of the world gives 33 tonnes per person. To keep within 2°C the budget is 115 tonnes. In Is Green Growth a Fantasy?, I accepted the assumption that in the second half of this century, the world will be able to extract enough carbon from the atmosphere to balance emissions. This meant the remaining carbon budget of 115 tonnes CO2e must be eked out until this “carbon extraction safety zone” is reached. That is when carbon extraction balances carbon emissions.
Some problems with this line of argument argument are:
However, to have some figure in mind, let’s assume a target for remaining carbon budget of 100 tonnes CO2 to keep below 2°C. (2°C is goodbye to Tuvalu).
This leaves the question: How can we devise lifestyles that can cause less than 100 tonnes of CO2e to be emitted over the next 40, 50 or 60 years. If the carbon extraction safety zone can be reached in 40 years the target is 2.5 tonnes per year. If it’s reached in 50 years the target emissions become 2 tonnes a year.
UK carbon emissions – pick another number
For the purposes of the UK Climate Change Act (2008), UK greenhouse gas emissions are measured on a production basis: they are measured as the emissions made within the UK. Closing steel production in the UK cuts the UK’s production carbon emissions. However, the emissions caused by UK consumption does not fall because UK steel is replaced by imported imported steel: Measured on a consumption basis, UK carbon emissions have not been falling.
There are several other complications to measuring per capita carbon emissions but to pick some numbers for yearly emissions: 10 tonnes CO2e for production emissions and 20 tonnes for consumption emissions are plausible. Put simply: If the rest of the world had consumption emissions like the UK the 2°C remaining carbon budget would be exhausted within 5 or six years of the UK’s consumption.
Carbon emissions from everyday activities – pick some more numbers
For the purposes of this post, emissions from developed economies like the UK are of less interest than the emissions from the elements “modern” living. It is these that are of interest in designing a low carbon lifestyle. There is plenty of room for argument about carbon counting methodology but here are some reasonable estimates of the CO2 emissions for some of our everyday activities.
Table: Greenhouse gas emissions in tonnes CO2e over 10 years
(1) Tail pipe emissions from the SMMT for new cars in 2015 (including VW?) uprated a bit – because published figures only account for measured tail-pipe emissions. They do not include emissions in processing and transporting oil. Average distance per year is taken as 12,700 km
From now until the carbon extraction safety zone may be 4, 5 or 6 decades, so the figures in the table for one decade would be multiplied by 4, 5 or 6 – if emissions were to continue at similar rates. Some of the sample activities shown above can, by themselves, bust the 100 tonne budget for a 2°C rise. 1.5°C? Some hopes.
The move to cities?
Worse still, official sources say billions of people will move into cities in the next few decades. Building urban infrastructure with bricks steel, concrete and tarmac causes very large emissions of greenhouse gasses. In The carbon cost of achieving low carbon lifestyles, I estimated that the carbon emissions from constructing the urban infrastructure for an extra city dweller was of the order of 100 tonnes CO2e, about equal to the personal carbon budget that remains for the 2°C rise in global temperature. To avoid catastrophic climate change, cities will have to be rather different.
Pick any numbers you want, climate and carbon emissions are worse than you think.
I don’t drive and hate the noise and filth from traffic. I like living in towns, where I can ride my bike or walk. I like more-or-less traffic free cities. I believe many others do too but the only examples of car free cities are now anachronisms. Venice for example is a hang-over from the past.
However, my informal over-a-glass-of-red-wine surveys suggest eight out of ten people would prefer to live in traffic-free Venice rather than Los Angeles or Milton Keynes. If many people prefer a Venice-like lifestyle with pleasant urban spaces and facilities, why is Venice the only well known example of a car-free city? Where are the other cities for people like me to live in? My explanation is that the canals of Venice have protected it from the motor car. They have been Venice’s immune system.
I wrote this note to economist Philippe Aghion after a conference, “Economics of Innovation, Diffusion, Growth and the Environment” in September 2015 organised by the Grantham Institute of the LSE.
Below I ask the question:
If one section of the population (e.g. motorists) cause a fall in the
consumer surplus of another section (e.g. bus users), how should
economists regard this? Can it be classed as an external cost?
Dr Antoine Dechezleprêtre of the Grantham Institute
has kindly allowed me to publish his answer.
The answer is “Yes”.
Dear Professor Aghion,
Thank you for your excellent presentation at the conference. As an occasional follower of economics since the late sixties, I found most of the talks at the conference, instructive and even understood some of the equations.
Congestion and pollution
You may remember we spoke about the problems of traffic in Paris.
We have been aware for many decades of the external costs imposed by traffic on fellow travellers through congestion and on residents by noise and air pollution. There is also an increasing awareness of the carbon footprint of travel. However, the demand for transport has increased. In the case of most cities, the cars and taxis are easily the biggest volumes although there is increasing traffic from light goods vehicles. This has led to proposals like the congestion charges and pollution taxes.
Spatial development and increased travelling
These charges and taxes can be seen as an attempt to internalise external costs by “making the polluter pay”. A topic that deserves more attention from economists is the relationship between travel and the spatial development of settlements. As the cost of travel decreases to the consumer travel increases. This enables populations to relocate (i.e. spread out) and this further increases the amount travelled.
Policy makers have growing concerns about the low-density sprawl of cities and the environmental consequences, especially the effects on carbon emissions. This has led planners in the UK, at least, advocating high urban densities and good public transport. This argument worries me for several reasons. One is that modern construction techniques in cities have very large embodied carbon.
“Recycling one’s rubbish is a gesture of commitment, but the
fitful efforts of individuals do not even nibble at the threat.”
The same might be applied to flying, but would that be a reasonable comparison?
A trip to Teneife is like a 1kW electric fire left on 24/7 for 100 days
I recently flew to Tenerife (for work purposes) and on the ticket it said “Calculated average CO2 emission is 559.70 kg/person”. This amount of carbon dioxide produced can be converted directly into energy consumed by using the figure for the mass of carbon dioxide emitted per quantity of energy for aviation gasoline, namely 65.78 g/MJ, to show me that my trip to Tenerife expended 2.4 MWh. This is the same as the energy expended by a 1 bar (1kW) electric fire left on 24/7 for 100 days.
The world’s electricity supply is the same energy as one return trip to Tenerife for almost everyone on the planet, once each per year
In 2012, total world electricity generation was 23 PWh (from the IEA website). This is the total energy value of the electricity produced by all means, renewable & non-renewable: coal, oil, gas, nuclear, hydro, etc. Let’s say we had a means to convert all this electricity production into aviation fuel and further that all this fuel was then expended in flying to Tenerife. This will allow us to make 23 x 10^15 divided by 2.4 x 10^6 which is 9.6 billion trips, more than one trip each per year for every person on the planet! Well, there would be a bit of a squeeze on hotel accommodation in Tenerife so we’d better count return trips instead, so that’s 4.8 billion return trips, Stansted to Tenerife, so we are not all going to get to top up our suntans once a year.
But we can’t make airline fuel from electricity – yet
I started writing this after Sir Mark Walport’s keynote address at “The Future of Cities” session in the York Festival Of Ideas but put it aside because the task was so big. This is a more realistic note, pointing out some issues that are sometimes missed.
The Future of Cities is one of the Foresight projects by Government Office for Science. Foresight projects examine either an important public policy issue where science might be part of the solution, or a scientific topic where potential applications and technologies are yet to be realised.
I believe the Foresight project on the Future of Cities is one of the most important.
With wicked problems (climate change is currently the prime example), and in marked contrast to tame problems (the hole in the ozone layer, for instance, to which climate change is often, and erroneously, compared).
The future of cities is definitely a wicked problem – it not only incorporates the wicked problem of climate change but others too
1. The global economy
2. Feeding the future population
3. Terrorism and armed conflict.
4. Pollution
These issues and consequently the future of cities qualify as a super wicked problem as described by Kelly Levin, Benjamin Cashore, Graeme Auld and Steven Bernstein. They say such problems have the additional characteristics:
1. Time is running out.
2. No central authority.
3. Those seeking to solve the problem are also causing it.
4. Policies irrationally discount the future.
The Machine Learning Revolution is going to be very different from the Industrial Revolution, because the Machine Learning Revolution, it never settles down. The better computers get at intellectual activities, the more they can build better computers to be better at intellectual capabilities, so this is going to be a kind of change that the world has actually never experienced before…
In the last 25 years, as capital productivity has increased, labor productivity has been flat, in fact even a little bit down.
Computers right now can do the things that humans spend most of their time being paid to do, so now’s the time to start thinking about how we’re going to adjust our social structures and economic structures to be aware of this new reality.
A recent blog post on the Beacon Dosworth website caught my attention because it concerned a commuter using an electric vehicle (EV) and many see the EV as the car of the future. It produces none of the fumes that cause local pollution, which cause dangerous health problems. Additionally driving an EV instead of a petrol car may help the world cut emissions of greenhouse gasses.
I have asked the commuter, Joel Weekes, for more details.
Joel Weekes commutes with his EV, a Nissan Leaf
Joel Weekes is a upwardly mobile academic and businessman. He drives from Durham to York a few times a week and travels to London regularly. His EV is a Nissan Leaf. On the road, he uses “fast” charging points. The charging point at A1 Wetherby Services fits in well with his trip from Durham to York, after he charges his car at home overnight.
I sent a Freedom of Information request to the BBC recently. The BBC refused to supply the information. The refusal was blunt.
I regard this as a minor success. Some of my other FOI requests are described in other postings. The replies to these were much less clear.
1
BBC: No FOIs on our journalism
The BBC responded:
Thank you for your request to the BBC of 2nd November 2015, seeking the following information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000:
“I would like a copy of any documents referring to climate change that have been held at the web addresses that start with http://edpol.gateway.bbc.co.uk”
Please note that the information you have requested is excluded from the Act because it is held for the purposes of ‘journalism, art or literature.’ Part VI of Schedule 1 to FOIA provides that information held by the BBC and the other public service broadcasters is only covered by the Act if it is held for ‘purposes other than those of journalism, art or literature” 1 . The BBC is not required by the Act to supply information held for the purposes of creating the BBC’s output or information that supports and is closely associated with these creative activities; however, on this occasion we’re happy to provide the following information in response to your request.
The web address which you quote in your letter is out of use and has been replaced with http://www.bbc.co.uk/editorialguidelines/
In response to your request I should tell you that no documents on climate change are held at this address. However there is some published guidance on the BBC Academy site on climate change given to BBC journalists by David Shukman, our Science Editor which can be accessed at http://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/journalism/subject-guides/science/article/art20130702112133765
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