Version 2.0 looks like it’s slicker, broader in scope, and full of new examples. The Transition idea is growing into itself all the time, and there are more and more stories to draw from, bigger projects and more communities experimenting together. I suspect it’s a much stronger film, just as the most recent Transition books feel more complete, more real and less theoretical.

Preview screenings of In Transition 2.0 were happening this week, so expect to see it out and about in the spring. I’m looking forward to showing it in Luton, and since the DVD comes with over a dozen different subtitled editions, there’s no excuse for not showing it where you are too. Here’s the trailer:

I think it was probably from that story that I first learned as a child that the money we put in the banks doesn’t stay there in a big box. It goes out to play, bundled together with everybody else’s. It’s lent out here, invested there, made available to those that need it right now, and hopefully multiplied. We don’t see any of that, and most of the time we don’t care – as long as money comes out of the cash machine when we want it.

We really ought to pay more attention to what our money gets up to in the meantime. It could be used to fund tar sands, or provide a cash injection to an arms company preparing for a big contract. Maybe some of into sub-prime loans. Perhaps it opens a new sweatshop in Bangladesh or chops down a tranche of rainforest in Indonesia. Once our hard-earned pennies are out of our hands, there’s no knowing what the banks will have them doing next.

There is a solution, and it’s not to put your money in a big hole. You can choose a bank with an ethical policy. You can move it to a credit union that operates locally, so that your money can benefit local businesses and borrowers. Most of us never bother to change bank, but it’s not difficult.

This week saw the launch of the UK wing of the Move Your Money campaign. In the US it has inspired over 4 million people to move their money, choosing a banking institution that reflects their values and that is part of the solution.

The website is a catalogue of reasons why you shouldn’t support the mainstream banks with your custom, and offers plenty of alternatives instead. March is going to be Move Your Money Month, so expect to hear more from the campaign in the coming weeks.

This week supermarket chain Tesco announced that they have dropped their plans to introduce carbon footprint labeling across their range. It doesn’t come as much of a surprise.

The project was announced in January 2007, and 15 months later the first 20 products hit the shelves. Crisps, orange juice and light bulbs were among the items bearing a small carbon footprint notice on the packaging, informing consumers about the carbon content of their shopping.

20 items down, 69,980 product lines to go. Tesco dutifully plodded on, adding another 125 products or so a year. As some have pointed out, at that rate it would have taken them hundreds of years to get to the end of the inventory. With consumers taking little interest in something that was expensive and fiendishly complicated to implement, it’s rather predictable that Tesco is abandoning the target. It always was ambitious, and it always was, well, just not very useful….

Here’s what I wrote for Celsias about carbon footprint labeling in 2008:

It’s a nice idea, but I’ve got mixed feelings about it. On the one hand you have to admire the boldness of it all, and giving consumers the information to choose for themselves has got to be a good thing. On the other hand, I’m not sure it works yet. I looked up the labeling system myself on a packet of Walkers crisps recently, and discovered that the snack-sized bag had a carbon footprint of 75 grams of CO2. That’s mildly interesting, but not especially useful. 75g is more than the weight of the product itself, I notice, but without any comparison or standard, there’s no way of knowing if that’s good or bad. I can understand concepts like organic or fair trade because I know what they are. I can use initiatives like energy efficiency ratings, because they give me a top and a bottom. This little CO2 figure is different – it’s just so abstract. Perhaps it’s an early adoption problem, and when all the other products have labels too maybe I’ll be able to make a genuine choice. But even then, how many people are going to choose a snack on the basis of CO2 emissions, rather than taste, or price?

Still, perhaps the market will surprise me and there’ll be a race to the bottom as companies compete for the lowest possible footprint. In the meantime, I’ll be continuing to apply my own guidelines for lowering CO2 emissions – buy fresh, buy local, and above all, buy less. That’s a message you’re unlikely to hear from a supermarket.

Needless to say, skeptics were equally swift to denounce it as a terrible mistake. There is a shrill paranoia about the financial transaction tax. It is epitomised by George Osborne saying it was “a tax on people’s pensions” in his budget update speech. Last week David Cameron laid into it again, saying that it would cost 500,000 jobs and reduce GDP by 200 billion Euros. “To be even considering this” he told the Davos gathering, “is quite simply madness.”

So are they right, or have Osborne and Cameron been quaffing the banking lobbyists’ Kool-Aid?

Lets look at some of the myths circulating about the tax.

Myth 1: The financial transaction tax will cost me money
No, you wouldn’t be taxed for drawing money out of a cash machine or paying in a cheque, something I’ve heard as an argument against the tax. It wouldn’t apply to retail banking or personal money transfers.  It is squarely targeted at the commercial banks.

Why? Because when you and I go to the corner shop, we pay VAT on the items we buy, but the trade in derivatives isn’t taxed at all. VAT is levied at 20%. The transaction tax would be at 0.05%, but it still has the world’s richest corporations whining that they couldn’t possibly afford it. Don’t believe them.

Madness, Mr Cameron? I’ll tell you what’s mad. Through his future taxes, my little boy will pay for the banking bailouts for the whole of his working career, and he wasn’t even born at the time of the financial crisis. Meanwhile, the derivatives traders who brought the global economy to its knees carry on making their billions, contributing next to nothing to the cost of their own rescue.

Myth 2: The financial transaction tax will cost British jobs
The claim here is that if any country puts a FTT in place, business will simply move elsewhere to avoid the tax. That would certainly happen if the tax was set too high, but it would have to be really quite high to cancel out all the advantages of doing business in Europe – the talent pool, the infrastructure, the ease of doing business. Besides, if you moved to New York and wanted to deal with the EU, you’d still have to pay the tax. It applies to trades within Eurozone jurisdiction, wherever in the world the buyer happens to be.

There’s also plenty of precedent to show that threats of banker flight are overblown. When Labour announced a one-off 50% tax on bonuses for example, City analysts predicted a mass exodus. It never materialised. Tullett Prebon apparently gave every member of their 950 staff the right to leave London to avoid the bonus tax, and not a single one of them did.

Myth 3: A financial transaction tax will penalise pension funds
With Britain’s pension funds in such a fragile state, anything that stands in the way of them flourishing is going to be controversial. However, a transaction tax would have little impact on pension funds. Because they need steady, dependable income streams, pension funds tend to hold shares for the dividends, rather than buying and selling them for quick profits.

An FTT would fall most heavily on trading houses that make multiple, rapid trades, particularly computer-controlled ‘flash trading’. Since this is predatory and destabilising, slowing it down is a good thing.

Myth 4: The transaction tax will undermine growth
I’m not one who believes that all things must kowtow before the growth imperative, but it is one of the frequent objections. This is exaggerated too. Cameron’s claim that it will cost 200 billion Euros is from the European Commission’s worst case scenario, and the Prime Minister neglects to mention that it’s spread over 10 years. EU tax commissioners now suggest that if there was any impact on growth, it is likely to be less than half of one percent of GDP growth. And this has to be understood in context. The financial crisis will cost Britain several trillion by the time it has run its course. If the tax helps to recharge the public coffers and prevent a further collapse, it will be worth every ‘lost’ penny.

What’s more, the tax will generate pretty impressive revenues, and those funds aren’t going to be just stuffed into Sarkozy’s mattress. They will be reinvested and used to stimulate growth. So perhaps the financial services sector will see fractionally slower growth, but if the funds raised are used wisely, other sectors would compensate for it. An FTT could be a useful way of rebalancing the economy and breaking the dependency on finance.

Myth 5: A transaction tax would send our taxes to Europe
The tax would be collected nationally, so no – it would not be an EU tax on our business activity. In fact, when Sarkozy announced the new French FTT yesterday, he said it was to help reduce the deficit.

With a vast deficit of our own, that’s something we could consider ourselves. We already have a financial transaction tax in the form of Stamp Duty on shares, and it raises £3 billion a year. (Strangely enough, no politicians are campaigning for an end to Stamp Duty) Perhaps we should extend it to other forms of financial trading. It would certainly be a less painful way to reduce the deficit than many of the other policies we are currently pursuing.

—

Most of the objections to the financial transaction tax have no basis in fact. It is true that the tax may dent profits in the City, but it’s supposed to. It’s meant to dis-incentivise the most unproductive, risky and short-term trading, and that’s no bad thing at all. It will also deliver large tax revenues, and generate a public benefit from economic activity that is otherwise parasitic.

This morning David Cameron was saying that the FTT would be “punishing a successful industry“, but a 0.0.5% tax is not a punishment, and neither is finance is a successful industry. The financial sector wrecked the economy, and remains unreformed. It will collapse again. The financial transaction tax is one of the simplest and fairest ways to rebuild public finances and bring stability to financial markets. If we turn it down, refuse to discipline the City and suffer another inevitable crash, we will find ourselves far poorer for it.

There’s a couple of things that don’t quite sit right with me here. The images of superheroes laid over the African continent make me a little uncomfortable and I can’t quite put my finger on why. Is it because they’re fictional characters, juxtaposed with all-too-real human tragedy? Is it just that comic book plots don’t generally concern themselves with the gritty realities of the developing world?

Maybe it’s the fact that our superheroes are actually pretty impotent in the face of genuine disaster. What’s Batman going to do in Ethiopia? What can the Flash offer in a famine situation? Re-locating our heroes to Africa makes them look like the costumed cartoon characters they are, and our cultural mythologies start to look a little pathetic. Or perhaps I’m being defensive about Africa, I don’t know. Answers on a postcard please.

Those nagging doubts aside, there’s plenty to commend about We Can Be Heroes. DC cleverly puts its characters in silhouette so they don’t dominate proceedings. Instead, all the faces are real people, captured in the video on the homepage talking about what it’s like to be needed, or a time when they needed to rise to the occasion. It puts the issue back into the real world.

They also also put the heroes together, demonstrating the strength in numbers that is a vital part of any global response to disaster. Your individual donation won’t do much, but when combined with millions of others you can genuinely change things. There’s some smart messaging behind the simple website.

We Can Be Heroes is also likely to appeal to younger people, and 16-24 year olds are the least likely to give to charity and give the least when they do. That’s to be expected when you’re not earning much, but it’s never too early to get people thinking about how they can use their money to make a difference in the world. I’m interested to see if the campaign succeeds in engaging those who wouldn’t normally pay much attention to global issues.

Finally, DC aren’t just making their IP available to a good cause. If you make a donation through through the campaign, they will match your gift 100%. With DC part of the Time Warner mammoth, the potential for cross-marketing is considerable and I imagine this could be a pretty big campaign. A generous offer – good work DC.

• Did George Monbiot just single-handedly take down the tabloid’s favourite weather forecaster?

• I generally avoid Hollywood films set in Africa, and Bill Easterly nails why in his Academy Award for Exploiting Africa.

• Why Ecuador is one of the most exciting places on earth right now, according to Jayati Ghosh.

• The PR man at Lego has the easiest job in the world. This week saw the first Lego minifigure in space, and Russian activists using them in miniature protests.

Here’s somewhere I stayed a couple of months back with the good folks from the Breathe network – Britain’s only purpose-built eco-hostel. It’s in the National Forest, part of an ambitious plan to re-forest a 200-mile strip of English countryside. Being in a ‘forest in the making’ means the hostel is currently surrounded by saplings and looks a little isolated, but once those trees have grown it’ll be beautiful.

What makes it an eco-hostel? It has overhanging roofs that shade the building in the summer and keep it cool without blocking natural light. The windows are all shuttered to keep heat in during the winter and out in out in summer. It’s also well packed with insulation.

On the roof you can see a solar hot water system, and the heating runs off a biomass boiler which is fed with wood pellets from the National Forest itself. The roof collects rainwater and stores it in an underground tank beneath the building, and that is used to flush the toilets.

To top it off, the canteen tries to source as much of the food that it serves locally.

To me, this is just the kind of future-facing building I want to see more of. It’s not wacky or waving its green credentials in your face. You could stay there and not notice any of it. It’s just a well thought-out building, a great hostel, and one that will have a considerably lower impact on its environment. I’ll have to come back in 20 years and see it with the trees full grown.

The Coming First World Debt Crisis came out in 2006, and is pretty much prophetic. Ann Pettifor was a debt campaigner with the Jubilee 2000 movement, and having spent years looking at developing world debts, turned to the overlooked issue of rich country debts. Her book spots a property bubble and an impending credit crunch, and foresees the costs of the crisis being passed to the taxpayer.

She predicts a financial crisis that turns into a sovereign debt crisis, and then into a crisis for democracy itself, with a prescience that is almost heart-breaking. Along the way there are some very useful notes on how banks create money – see the Positive Money campaign. There’s a great historical explanation of US Treasury Bills and the US’ unique place in the global economy too.

The biggest problem with the book is of course the second word of the title. The crisis isn’t coming, it’s well and truly here, and there’s a sense of stable doors and horses about it. I wanted to read it because if someone saw the problem from afar, perhaps they had some solutions in mind to prevent it happening. And while it might be too late to stop the crisis, at least we could take those suggestions on board in fixing things.

So what solutions does Pettifor propose? A new definition of usury is one big one: “usury is the practice of exalting money values over human and environmental values; of creating money at no cost and lending at rate of interest.” She describes how much of finance is parasitic, extracts money from the poor to deliver it to the rich, and makes a claim on the future. Fundamentally, banks have the right to create money, and they charge extraordinary sums for something that costs them nothing. This sort of usurious behaviour needs to regulated out of existence, putting finance back in its proper place as the servant of the economy and not the master.

Re-regulating the financial sector is a primary concern, and most of all, creating a healthier culture around money. Sizeable chunks of the book are dedicated to the ethics of banking, and the responsibilities than lenders need to accept in return for the privileges they enjoy.

The other reason I wanted to read the book is that I heard Ann Pettifor give a talk at the Greenbelt festival a couple of years ago, in which she proposed a jubilee for indebted developed countries. It was an outdoor lecture and it was raining and windy and just about the worst possible conditions to have to give a talk, but I heard enough to set me thinking. There’s not as much in the book about jubilee as I expected, but it gets a mention and I will refer to it when I get around to writing up my thoughts on the subject. I am increasingly convinced that a Jubilee-style debt write-off is the only way out of the current debt crisis.

It may be too late for the warnings in The Coming First World Debt Crisis, but there is still much to learn from this wise, angry, well informed book.

• Ann blogs at Debtonation.org

If you’re in the UK, you can listen on iPlayer. Otherwise, here’s the audio:

A third of the world’s population doesn’t have access to cheap energy. If current progress continues, there will still be 900 million people without electricity in 2030, and 3 billion still cooking on traditional fuels such as wood or animal dung. In fact, given population growth, there will be more people cooking with unhealthy and inferior fuels in 2030 than there are today. As a consequence, an estimated 30 million people will die from smoke-related diseases.

Despite this, access to energy is fairly low on the global to-do list. Perhaps that’s understandable, given the competing priorities of health, education, and basic poverty alleviation. But, as we’ve seen before with water and sanitation, infrastructure is a catalyst to all of those other aims. Access to energy has benefits across all those other legitimate social concerns. So Practical Action is campaigning for Total Energy Access, and the Poor People’s Energy Outlook is a way of monitoring progress. It “seeks to understand and communicate the real experience of people living in energy poverty, and show how people’s lives can be changed by energy access.”

Access to energy is a vital part of overcoming poverty. Imagine living without a fridge to store fresh food, or without electric lights to read by at night – your way of life is constrained by daylight hours. When you factor in not being able to use power tools, charge a phone, or run a computer, you can see the obstacles to business too.

Without access to reliable and affordable electricity, you can’t use any kind of machinery – whether that’s a mill to grind grain, a pump to irrigate fields, or a lathe to shape wood. You are shut out of global communications, and all the benefits of online services and information. You have to use simpler, old-fashioned technologies such as manual sewing machines or typewriters. Even if funding is available through micro-finance, you will never run anything more than a cottage industry. So developing countries need energy to do business, creating new opportunities and making existing activity more productive and efficient.

Energy is also vital to agriculture. Raising yields in African countries is a real priority in a world of rising food prices and growing populations, yet many small farmers still rely on hand tools and manual labour. Farmers need energy inputs to till, plant and harvest, and then for processing and storing foods. Energy allows you to increase local production and improve food sovereignty. You can also add value to your crops. If you can power a mill, you can sell flour instead of grain.

That poor people need access to cheaper energy is, in my opinion, not up for debate. The important questions are around how that can be delivered in a sustainable manner. There is climate change to consider, and there is no point in creating energy dependencies on dwindling resources. It would be counter-productive to mechanise a farm, only to see global diesel prices spiral out of reach of the tractor driver.

Energy access for all therefore requires a judicious combination of old and new technologies. Draught animals can double the amount of land cultivated, which is a big step up. Tractors can double it again and more, but remain too expensive for many small farmers. One approach to this problem is Integrated Food Energy Systems, where farmers grow food and energy crops together. The waste from one crop might serve as fuel for anaerobic digestion or biomass burning, which provides energy that irrigates another crop, for example.

Many poor people will be able to leapfrog to newer technologies and bypass older and more polluting forms of energy generation. Renewable energy will reduce the need for national grids and power stations. Mobile phones mean many places will never be connected to a landline phone system. Biogas will ease the pressure on forests for firewood.

Still, even with the best technologies available, there will still be a rise in CO2 emissions from the poorest countries. That’s why we in the West need to work in the opposite direction. As developing countries increase their energy use and fight poverty, we can create ecological space for the poor by reducing our energy use and eliminating waste.