One person might come in from work to their flat on a cold day, put the kettle on and sit in an armchair in front of the television. She does not turn on the 26 Kw gas central heating, which has an “energy-saving” gas condensing boiler, newly installed by her housing association because this takes an hour or so to heat the flat. Instead she switches on a 600 watt electric halogen heater, which is pointing at the armchair. When she has warmed up a bit, she goes to the colder kitchen to make a cup of tea and get something to eat and goes back to the warm armchair.
Another person might have a dispute with his electricity supplier and have no power in his flat. He might stay in a warm friendly gas heated pub then go home and get into bed. He remains reasonably healthy by eating raw food at home.
The food distribution chain is getting longer and food production is becoming more industrialised. The food we eat travels further from the grower to the consumer and goes through more stages of processing.
This distribution chain is an increasing source of global pollution and modern food production has dietary dangers. Both, however, have great advantages to the consumer: convenience. This is common with market driven activity: the immediate benefits to the paying customer are paramount but longer-term problems and detrimental effects caused to non-customers (external costs) are given less consideration, usually left to consumer education or the less reactive regulatory system.
I lift my glass to the Awful Truth
which you can’t reveal to the Ears of Youth
At my age, youth means someone under thirty five so most of them should be old enough to figure things out for themselves. It seems they have not – or perhaps they’ve just given up.
Back in the sixties the young cared, money didn’t matter much and “Love was in the air”. Sadly, I was just too old, a child of the fifties so most of it passed me by but I admired that generation’s enthusiasm and willingness to confront the restrictions of their rulers. They wanted freedom from the control of the old.
Methane or ‘natural gas’ is an important player in UK lifestyles, we heat our homes with it, we generate 30% of our electricity with it and the cattle that provide dairy products and red meat create substantial amounts of it.
The arguments over methane are fraught with controversy. Do leaks of methane make it as climate damaging in creating electricity as coal? Will the leaks from fracking increase the UK’s carbon footprint by much? Should we “kill all the cows and eat them now” to protect the climate?
My experience leads me to believe that the UK Government is not keen to answer such questions (e.g. Buried by Defra?) but there is a debate amongst scientists about what policies should be taken to limit methane emissions – and how soon. Some say we can wait but others see that curbing methane emissions will really help to reduce climate change.
Buying time or loosing time?
Scientists Ramanathan and Victor say that reducing emissions of two powerful and fast-acting causes of global warming – methane and soot – will not stop global warming but it could buy time. This might allow a few decades, for the world to put in place more difficult efforts to regulate carbon dioxide and keep Global Temperature Rise below the so-called danger level of 2°C. However, Ray Pierre Humbert thinks this might detract from the task of reducing the emissions of the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide. He says
There was an interesting presentation by Roger Fouquet similar to his The Importance of History. The presentation had a graph showing the net welfare of personal transport (consumer surplus less net external costs?). I think the graph can be interpreted as “cars have made a large increase in net welfare”.
At the time, I suggested that many would prefer to live in Venice, where there are few cars, rather than Los Angeles, where there are lots. If this is true, how does the high net welfare in Dr Fouquet’s work fit in for the residents of Venice? One explanation may be that his external costs (e.g. pollution and congestion) are too low. Another is that external costs do not apply uniformly to a complete population – some people suffer more from noise and bad air quality than others.
A further explanation is that the infrastructure in Venice is different and more supportive of a lifestyle with fewer cars.
1
Disaggregation of populations and consumer surplus
At a lecture in June at the York Festival of Ideas, the chair did her best to shut me up but to his credit Aramatya Sen, the Nobel laureate economist, let me continue – for a bit. I suspect that most of the audience were in awe of Professor Sen. Me too. However, he either misunderstood my question or dodged it. As I remember, I asked:
“Professor Sen, how can you believe that democracy works? Climate change is the most important issue for us now, we may be facing another mass extinction of life on Earth, yet hardly anybody here will even know what the ‘remaining carbon budget’ means. How can democracy work when there is such ignorance.”
Professor Sen answered “I don’t believe in budgetary approaches, taxation is much better.” I can’t remember exactly what happened next but I do remember shouting “You made a semantic shift” as a last (rather sad) throw.
The semantic shift was this: The IPCC’s “remaining carbon budget” is a concept referring to the physical capacity of the atmosphere to accept greenhouse gas emissions before we hit dangerous climate change. Sen’s reference to taxation rather than a “budgetary approach” referred to economic mechanisms. Was this semantic shift deliberate?
Austerity, growth, public expenditure and democracy
In his speech Sen argued for economic growth against austerity. He made similar points in an article for the New Statesman, The economic consequences of austerity,
“even if we want to reduce public debt quickly, austerity is not a particularly effective way of achieving this… For that, we need economic growth; and austerity, as Keynes noted, is essentially anti-growth.”
This is a note I sent to Dr Mike Weightman in 2011. He was then Chief Inspector of nuclear installations and head of the Office for Nuclear Regulation.
He was reporting on the safety of nuclear power after the accident at Fukushima.
Are there additional concerns on the safety of nuclear power?
Dear Dr Weightman,
I understand that you are conducting a review on the safety of nuclear power plants following the recent events in Japan.
I have consulted the following: “Review of medium to long term coastal risks associated with British Energy sites: Climate Change Effects – Final Report, by Mark L Gallani, Met Office 22 February 2007. I make the following comments:
Missing climate feedbacks
The report relies on the HadRM3 Regional Climate Model. This may underestimate or omit the effects of certain climate feedbacks which are mentioned on the NERC website:
– reduced sea ice cover – reflecting less of the sun’s heat back out to space, changing ocean circulation patterns
– less carbon dioxide absorption by the oceans
– increased soil respiration
– more forest fires
– melting permafrost
– increased decomposition of wetlands
BBC Word Service has recently updated Robert Owen’s worries on the decline of labour as a factor of production. This time the concern is a new form of industrialisation: artificial intelligence. The programme, What Will Happen When Robots Take Our Jobs? has the introduction:
“Blue-collar jobs in industries like manufacturing have been disappearing for years but now white-collar work is under threat too. Machines are already taking roles that used to be done by journalists, lawyers and even anaesthetists. One recent study calculated that 47% of total employment in the US is at risk of automation in the next 20 years.
So what will happen to all the human beings who did those jobs? … And how will they earn money?”
The most powerful computer in the world
My first job was as a computer programmer in 1967 on the most powerful computer in the world, the Atlas Computer. It was a time when computer programmers were young and held in awe. Computer operators were mostly glamorous young women. The computer occupied the ground floors and basements of two large terraced houses in Gordon Square near University College. On hot days we went to the observation bay to take advantage of the air conditioning and watch the film set of magnetic tape drives starting, stopping, spinning rapidly and being changed by glamorous people. It was always sunny.
This was published in the Computer Weekly in 1978. Key point:
“technological change can bring about conditions under which
a large proportion of the population cannot live by the sale
of their labour alone, and they should not be expected to do so.”
Headings have been added.
BEFORE discussing the details of the different methods for reducing the cost of labour to create full employment as discussed in your correspondence columns, it is worth pointing out that the general principle behind such policies has not yet been given sufficient consideration. For example, no such policy was considered by Barrie Sherman (Futureview, February 23) even in the form that Keynes proposed: reducing real wages by creating inflation.
No to the Keynesian solution
Naturally, I would have been shocked if Barrie Sherman had suggested a further dose of the Keynesian solution with the lowering of workers‘ standard of living at a time when technological change is making large increases in real wealth possible. It does need to be appreciated, however, that the present phase of technological change is likely to bring a fall in the real value of labour, just as happened in the first industrial revolution.
This point was well understood at that time by Robert Owen and well expressed by his son:
“Will any man who stands on his reputation for sanity affirm that thenecessary result of over production is famine: that because labour produces more than even luxury can waste. labour shall not have bread to eat? If we can imagine a point at which all the necessaries and comforts of life shall be produced without human labour. are we to suppose that the human labourer is then to be dismissed to be told that he is now a useless encumbrance which they cannot afford to hire.”
To me the message is simple: technological change can bring about conditions under which a large proportion of the population cannot live by the sale of their labour alone, and they should not be expected to do so.
“If we can imagine a point at which all the necessaries and comforts of life shall be produced without human labour, are we to suppose that the human labourer is then to be dismissed to be told that he is now a useless incumberance which they cannot afford to hire.”
What Robert Owen did not foresee is the increased demand for the “comforts of life”. This increased demand has generated extra production and extra jobs. In modern terms economic growth has created jobs.
“Europe needs its real economy now more than ever to underpin the recovery of economic growth and jobs and it needs to re-industrialise for the 21st century.”
Economic growth can replace jobs lost to industrialisation. It can relieve poverty. However, there have been periods when the job destroying effects of industrialisation have caused unemployment and poverty. In the words of the Economist magazine
“The great inventions of the 19th century, from electric power to the internal-combustion engine, transformed the human condition. Yet for workers who lived through the upheaval, the experience of industrialisation was harsh: full of hard toil in crowded, disease-ridden cities.”
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