Making planning work differently | Brussels Blog

Making planning work differently

This article was originally published in the December 2011 edition of Challenge, the magazine of the Green Liberal Democrats. See also A market in prototype neighbourhoods.

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The UK and the World face a century with multiple problems. Climate change will bring about problems of food and water security. The end of cheap energy, particularly cheap liquid fuel, will make economic growth difficult and some predict the retreat of globalisation. I believe the current planning system can be modified to help overcome these problems with important changes to the way we live – at home and in our communities.

The key mechanism is to allow and encourage more stringent planning permission criteria. These criteria should to be designed to achieve environmental sustainability, local jobs and local food production. To make this work it will be necessary to have financial mechanisms which can be used to reward or punish those that are granted planning permission.
The starting point is the recognition that the grant of planning permission can bestow enormous value on land owners. Local and national government control planning permission. They should use this to set a new agenda.

Tax carbon to create jobs for the young.

The UK Government and Climate Change

That’s been discussed here before:

• The Department of Energy Security
• Committee on Climate Change discounts important science
• Can DEFRA be trusted with the climate?

  continue reading…

And lo the poor weren’t hungry

The Royal Society: People and planet

Yesterday, the Royal Society published a report, People and the planet which (at last) recognises

Population and consumption are both important: the combination of increasing global population and increasing overall material consumption has implications for a finite planet.

So now “increasing overall material consumption” is a problem. To put that another way “economic growth is a problem”. Growth is too crude a measure for policy making. It’s an artificial construction of little practical use.

The authors avoid straightforward examples e.g. we Eat beef and starve the poor. Beef is one of those foods that take enormous amounts of production capacity – land, energy, water – squeezing out more productive foods. Just one example would help to convince me that they not only saw a problem but had the balls to tell us the things we must do to make it better.

Climate officials and climate provisionals

There have been some interesting sessions at the House of Commons Climate Audit Committee.

Conventional coverage by the media largely covers the debate between official scientists (such as those in the IPCC) and the climate sceptics (or lying bastards as some of us call them). But for us cognoscenti the real debate is between the officials and the provisionals. The climate provisionals think climate change is much worse than the officials admit.

I don’t want to be disrespectful of those that have suffered in the complicated Irish tragedy and I have tried to think of alternatives to the terms “officials” and “provisionals” but I can find nothing else that has the right emotional power. The many tragedies that climate change is beginning to visit on the world will dwarf the troubles in Ireland.

Thought for the day

The realisation has dawned that the BrusselsBlog is nearly always angry. While there are many causes to be angry about we sometimes need a rest. It is with pleasure that I post this piece by Phil Roddis. Tweet @GeoffBeacon to ask for more…

Thought for the day

On Saturday mornings Radio 4 has a slot where listeners send in stories of cherished possessions, objects they’d brave smoke and flame to retrieve should home turn raging inferno. Today’s contributor – just seventeen when Hendrix blasted the Isle of Wight with reverb, screeching feedback loops and electrifying rendition of Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower – told of a very special blanket.

Her presence at the 1970 festival had been in flagrant defiance of parental decree. A febrile press had for years titillated readers with tale upon lurid tale of, take your pick … fatal, LSD induced attempts at flight from tenth storey windows (never had that effect on me) … horny guys with too much hair, too little soap, stoned grins and glib flannel about free love … Mick, Marianne and the Mars Bar (to this day she denies it) … a turn-on, tune-in, drop-out threat of monumental proportions to decent society …

Job creation doesn’t need economic growth.

James Hansen‘s Cowards in Our Democracies, includes a summary of his ‘carbon fee’ proposal:

a gradually rising carbon fee should be collected from fossil fuel companies, with the money distributed uniformly to legal residents. This would stimulate the economy, making it more efficient by putting an honest price on fuels, incorporating their costs to society.

But why are government economists ignoring Hanson’s advice? Perhaps because they are so focussed on economic growth they dismiss the sheer urgency of climate change.

My preferred option is to tax carbon to subsidise jobs. While this is on the edge of political possibilities, it is more feasible than Hansen’s scheme, particularly in Europe, where unemployment rates are dangerously high. I am sure that Hansen’s carbon fee would have a beneficial effect on employment by allowing people to work for lower wages – without actually starving – but it has a less direct effect on employment than using the carbon fee to create employment directly.

Leeds Low Carbon Futures

I’m sure the The Economics of Low Carbon Cities, the City-Scale Mini-Stern Review, has been commissioned with the best of intentions but it is distraction because it follows an approach that is too little to late. It says

Low carbon measures can deliver multiple benefits for cities, enabling them to meet carbon reduction targets whilst at the same time growing the economy, creating jobs, reducing exposure to increasing energy costs and securing a competitive edge in the global marketplace.

The Problems:

The first problem is that the “carbon reduction targets” are woefully inadequate to do anything soon enough to stop dangerous climate change and the report does little to show the rest of the world how to take the problem seriously.

The second they is that they aspire to growing the economy as the means of creating jobs. They should consider the work economist Jeff Rubin, who points out that this century will see only a few exceptional years of growth because of the high cost of oil. He doesn’t claim oil will run out just that growth and globalisation will stall because of its high price.

The third is the assumption that energy efficiency in the absence of price changes can cut carbon emissions. There are several studies that show that energy efficiency measures alone are not particularly successful because of the rebound effect. An example of the rebound effect is when houses are insulated and instead of saving on the fuel bills householders turn up the thermostat. There are cases where this leads to increases in emissions.

The report should be congratulated for advocating the supply of lower carbon electricity.

It’s the poor that starve

It’s the poor that starve.

This is not a new idea. The Wikipedia entry on Amartya Sen says:

In 1981, Sen published Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (1981), a book in which he demonstrated that famine occurs not only from a lack of food, but from inequalities built into mechanisms for distributing food. Sen also demonstrated that the Bengal famine was caused by an urban economic boom that raised food prices, thereby causing millions of rural workers to starve to death when their wages did not keep up.

If there is a real shortage of food, the rich will be fed before the affluent: The poor will starve.

Plan A , PlanB and Big-Agri

Posted on ClimateProgress.

The current Plan A for addressing climate change relies on reducing the emissions of long lived greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide. It emphasises keeping the level of long lived greenhouse gasses below a peak level at which dangerous climate change becomes probable.

Plan B delays global temperature rises by means that have an immediate effect. It places emphasis on the reduction of short term climate forcing agents such as methane and black carbon. It also advocates geo-engineering schemes to reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface and to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere – with the hope they will become available.

Houses for climate refugees

Climate Progress has a discussion on a recent paper by James Hansen which highlights the prognosis for climate change in southern parts of the United States, where drought and sea level rise are particular dangers.