I came across this today, the five stages of decline, as expounded by business author Jim Collins in his book How the Mighty Fall.

He’s writing about corporations, but I reckon you can read the whole of the modern consumerist/economic liberalism project into this graph. Thatcher and Reagan deliver stage one, the boom of the 90s is stage two, and denial of risk sees you through the 00s. That leaves us, post-financial crisis, entering into the grasping stage.

New banks are quite common in many parts of the world, but there hasn’t been a new bank on a British high street for decades. That’s about to change, with London’s Metro bank due to open to customers this week. With many large banks closing branches to cut costs, a stubborn tradition of closing early, and their credibility shot to shreds by the financial crisis, the market has been wide open for a bank with a different philosophy. Metro aims to be that alternative, opening on weekends and from 8 til 8.

More importantly, Metro will not lend more than it receives in savings deposits. It won’t pay big bonuses, and mortgages will require a 25% deposit. While the business plan anticipates 200 branches by 2020, none of them will be outside the M25. In other words, it’s just the kind of bank that we’ve needed for a long time: stable, local, and with a focus on customer service rather than playing the markets. With Tesco and Virgin both due to launch their own high street competitors, Metro may not be the only new bank this year, but it may be the most enlightened.

I’ll be watching Metro’s progress with interest. There’s no reason why every town shouldn’t have its own bank, lending co-operative or savings union. A de-centralised banking system would be much more resilient to international crisis, and better equipped to serve local people and projects. Metro is in London and is still going to be a pretty big corporation, but if it succeeds it could well open the door to a re-localization of our money system.

Last week I posted the results a poll from the States that showed how the number of people who are sceptical about climate science is on the rise. The BBC have carried out a similar survey in the UK, and found similar results:

That’s a pretty stunning change in opinion since November, the result of a couple of stories that have really damaged the reputation of certain scientists. Unfortunately the whole body of evidence seems to get tarred with the same brush, as usual.  I think there’s more in play though – Copenhagen was such a big focus for so many climate change campaigns, it was almost inevitable that there would be a sort of anti-climax to follow, especially after a failed session. People are jaded, the whole climate debate has sort of deflated. We’re also just creeping out of the recession. Obviously the economy has been the top of the agenda recently, and people are going to be wary of anything that looks like it might costs them money. We’ve also just has a freezing spell, so between all those things I’m not losing any sleep over the BBCs findings just yet.

There’s no doubt that the last few months have been disastrous, but I reckon the cynicism won’t last. We’re remarkably fickle that way, and I wouldn’t be surprised if things are right back where they were by the end of the summer. This is an El Nino year after all, so it is likely to be hotter than the last. The Met Office, who correctly predicted that 2009 would be among the top five hottest years since 1850, think 2010 could top 1998 as a new record. I find myself in an awkward position: I still hope we’re all wrong and climate change isn’t happening, but I’m also hoping the Met Office are right about 2010. A record year would certainly move the debate forward, although ironically it would be just as much of an outlier as 1998 is in the overall trend.

If climate change is happening, and I believe it is, then it will become increasingly obvious until even the most blinkered denier has to face it. The worst thing is the delay. Every month of prevaricating and uncertainty makes it less likely that we will be able to prevent the worst of the effects.

• The general public may not be taking entirely seriously just yet, but the US military are – climate change is now formally part of military strategy, and recognised as a destabilising force.

• It’s been a week for not getting away with things, as some of our MPs have discovered, but the big sting is BAE systems. The UK’s biggest arms manufacturer has been fined £285 million for corruption. Hurrah.

• Here’s another bit of evidence for climate change, and a good consequence in this instance: Trees are growing faster than they were 200 years ago, according to scientists in the US.

• When peak oil and climate change has put paid to the aviation industry, this is how I would like to travel instead:

The Stern Review, as you may have gathered, is a highly influential document on the economics of climate change. It came out in 2006 and was a real game changer, showing that the cost of action to prevent climate change would be less harmful to the economy than the consequences of inaction. It’s a complicated and ethically compromised piece of economics, but it made Lord Stern a key figure in the climate debate.

More recently, Stern has turned his attention to the need for a global deal on climate change, and A Blueprint for a Safer Planet: How we can save the world and create prosperity is his attempt at outlining the kind of deal we need. I should start by pointing out that post Copenhagen, the book needs reviewing. It was released this year, but it would be a much better book if the publishers had delayed the paperback edition by a few weeks and brought it up to date. It was written in autumn 2008, and a lot has changed. It was written before Obama was elected, and talks non-specifically about ‘America’s new president’, for example. No doubt a second edition will emerge sooner or later, and if you’re thinking of reading this book I’d hold on for a bit.

For me, the subtitle was the main reason I wanted to read this. Stern is a cheerleader for economic growth, and sees climate change as an opportunity for more of it. “I offer a blueprint of how to build a safer planet” he writes, “or how to manage climate change while creating a new era of growth and prosperity.” Others maintain that this is a fantasy and that growth is impossible in the face of climate change. It’s an important debate – in fact it may be the key debate in the whole climate change problem.

So what’s the blueprint? Well, it’s based on the idea that climate change is a market failure, “the biggest market failure the world has ever seen” in fact. The damage that CO2 causes isn’t factored into the price of emitting it. Price it in through carbon trading, and the market will correct itself, although there’s more to do as well. Halting deforestation is a priority, along with every possible energy efficiency, an upscaling of renewable energy, and serious investment in promising technology, including carbon capture and storage. All of this should work together to keep atmospheric concentrations below 500ppm, which is Stern’s baseline.

There’s a lot of detail here about how individuals and companies would fit into the picture, and even more on the structure of a global deal – who gives what to whom, and how. It’s a maze, quite frankly. I admire Stern for tackling it and getting his head around it. I also understand much more clearly why world leaders didn’t secure a deal at Copenhagen. The whole thing is fiendishly complicated and full of pitfalls, potential inequities, or opportunities for gaming the system. It’s obvious that a global climate deal is possible, but getting there is going to require a whole new approach to diplomacy.

There’s no doubt that Stern has thought this all out very carefully. However, I have a couple of problems with his starting assumptions. After all his careful reasoning, the growth question is still the elephant in the room. “It is neither economically necessary nor ethically responsible to stop or drastically slow growth to manage climate change” he asserts, because “without strong growth it will be impossible for the poor people to lift themselves out of poverty.” I don’t doubt Stern’s commitment to the poor. He co-authored the Commission for Africa report and knows his stuff, but growth is not the best way to solve poverty. As nef have proved, growth is so unequally shared that if you wanted to lift everyone living on less than $2 a day to just $3 a day, you would need 15 planets worth of resources to do it.

The failure here is to distinguish between necessary and unnecessary growth. I agree that African economies need to grow, but why should American or European economies continue to grow? Stern even recognises that growth can’t go on forever: “a picture of indefinite expansion is an implausible story of the future” he writes, but he doesn’t go on to say when ‘enough’ would be. If everyone lived like Americans, we’d need five planets. So when is enough? Six planets, seven? It’s ridiculous to see growth in Africa growth in the West as equally good. A dollar of growth in a poor country is worth far more than growth in a rich country.

What’s worse is that Stern uses this very logic to justify ‘discounting’ the needs of future generations. We know that a unit of extra wealth means less to a richer person than to a poorer person. We also know, according to Stern’s growth assumptions, that growth will continue and future generations will therefore be richer than we are. That means that a unit of growth will mean more to us than to them. Conveniently, this means we can put our needs first. It’s economically logical, and neatly circumvents the golden rule of sustainability that requires us to meet “the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.” It also shows why you should never put an economist in charge of anything that involves real people.

Interestingly, Stern hints at another way in passing.  “Short of creating an immediate, major and prolonged world economic decline, it is impossible to big and sustained reductions in emissions starting immediately” he says, acknowledging that de-growth is the only immediate solution to climate change while dismissing it at the same time.

Lord Stern is obviously a highly intelligent and influential man. What if he were to able to entertain that heresy for a bit, to explore the idea that ending growth might actually be the best way to fix the climate? He could have written a book detailing how to ‘ration’ growth to countries that need it most, how to slow an economy without destabilising it, how to maintain employment, how to create new money for mortgages and pensions without the growth imperative of interest. In a world of peak oil, climate change and population growth, the notion that the future must inevitably be richer than the present strikes me as a rather rash assumption. Because of it, the message of A Blueprint for a Safer Planet is music to the ears of politicians and businessmen alike, but it is ultimately built on sand.

A local update. International readers may want to skip this post, unless you’re interested in the practical stuff we get involved in.

Green Up Luton
Luton Borough Council is challenging ten households to ‘Green Up’ in as many ways as they can think of, including saving energy, reducing waste, and travelling by more sustainable means.

It’s a competition, with a £500 council tax rebate for the household that makes the biggest dent in their environmental impact after three months. It’s also about awareness raising. The selected households will keep diaries, and share their ideas and progress online and in the local paper. Hopefully the challenge will be infectious. Luton’s annual energy bills are £90 higher than nearby towns in the county apparently, which suggests some money could be saved along with that energy. And we’re lagging a little on recycling: Luton recycles 32% of its rubbish, not the lowest rates in the county, but some towns are over 50%.

Grow Your Own 1.0

We had a bit of a transition photoshoot in the back garden at the weekend to publicise the event. I’m not proud of our shameless posing. I am proud of the raised beds, which I put in the day before.

Transition Luton Hustings
As Luton South has a particularly interesting set of candidates in the upcoming elections, we thought we’d take a punt at running a hustings event and get them to declare their environmental credentials. Somewhat remarkably, the candidates have agreed to it, most of them, and it’s at 7:30 at St Mary’s on February 25th.

St Anne’s TARA
While I’m talking Luton I might as well get really local and mention the St Anne’s Tenants and Resident’s Association, which formed a fortnight ago. It’s been a great way to meet neighbours and plan good things for the street, and I highly recommend joining a resident’s association if you have one in your area. Among other things, the St Anne’s group will be attempting to keep and improve Abbotswood Park, which has been shortlisted as a site for a new housing estate.

A couple of weeks ago I was making my regular pilgrimmage to London’s second hand bookshops*, and down in the basement of one of them I found a rather curious cultural artifact: a novel called Oil Seeker, by Michael Elder. It’s long forgotten and rightly so, but Oil Seeker is a work of science fiction published in 1977, and it combines two fears of the time – the Cold War and peak oil.

Oil Seeker is set in the future, when the earth’s oil reserves are entirely depleted. To survive, humankind has to search for alternative sources of oil – in space, obviously. Oil Seekers are ships sent out to scan distant planets and report back through ’sub-etheric radio’, while avoiding the enemy Ship Seekers that are out to get them, for the whole world is now divided between the two factions of Combloc and Capbloc.

Let’s not worry that the idea of a ‘Capitalist bloc’ is somewhat antithetical, that oil in space is a rather unlikely proposition, or that despite being in the distant future, the ship’s computers still deliver their results by ticker-tape. As I said, it’s not a very good book. However, Michael Elder would have been writing in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis, when OPEC first started flexing their muscles. The prices at the pumps were playing havoc with the global economy, resource depletion was a daily reality, and the end of oil caught the imagination of this particular science fiction writer.

As we know, disaster was averted, mainly by the discovery of Alaskan and North Sea oil. The prospect of oil shortages receded. Nobody would have written a book like Oil Seeker in the 80s or 90s – but they might now. In 2008, the combination of speculation and rapidly rising consumption drove the oil price to record highs. As usual, recession duly followed, although since it coincided with the financial crisis it’s hard to who was most responsible. It’s becoming apparent that maintaining oil supplies is getting increasingly difficult, and many believe the Iraq war was primarily about oil.

Add these factors together, and you might expect to find a new generation of cultural stories. The communist and capitalist distinctions are obsolete, but there may be modern equivalents, say aggressive corporate interests versus docile native people. And so from Michael Elder’s Oil Seeker we come full circle to James Cameron’s Avatar -  a story about conflict and resource depletion in space.

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*For any book-loving Londoners who might be reading, this is the tour I carry out every few months: I leave the office in Victoria and catch the 24 bus up to Charing Cross Road, and visit Quinto and Any Amount of Books. The latter has a shelf of advance and ex-review copies downstairs. I then walk down the road and pop into Fopp, where the books are new but cheap. From there I catch the 73 bus to Euston and walk down to Judd Books in Cartwright Gardens, see what’s new in the School of Life, and end up in Skoob, probably the best second hand bookshop in London.

I thought I’d mention a website I came across recently, Life squared. It’s the brainchild of Richard Docwra, author of Modern Life – as good as it gets?. The site aims “to help people to ‘live well’ – to live happy, wise and fulfilled lives within the pressure and complexity of the modern world.”

To that end, the site has a series of booklets and leaflets to download, and there are details of courses and talks. The booklets were all a fiver, but as of yesterday you can download them for free. The Problem with Consumerism is a particularly good introduction to the topic.

Other topics include Christmas, ethical living, and other aspects of living well in a busy consumer socity, and there’s a good blog rooting out interesting things from around the internet.

Everything is written in an accessible style, and there is a real emphasis on both simplicity and wisdom, which I appreciate. It also reminds me of these two similar projects:

• The School of Life

• Information deformation (video)

Other countries have had them for years, we’ve campaigned on it, and now it’s arrived: Britain finally has a feed-in tariff. From April 1st, households and communities installing micro-generating solar panels or wind turbines will be able to claim higher prices for any energy they create.

Energy Secretary Ed Milliband announced the measure today. “The feed-in tariff will change the way householders and communities think about their future energy needs,” he said, “making the payback for investment far shorter than in the past.”

A feed-in tariff is essentially a subsidised price for renewable energy. By guaranteeing a higher price for green electricity, people are able to invest in solar panels knowing that they will at least make their money back, or even make a profit. Without a feed-in tariff, solar panels do not pay for themselves before they wear out and are usually a net loss, meaning only wealthy ecologically minded house-owners could install them.

As more people are able to invest in micro-generation, demand will rise, and more companies will enter the market. This creates competition which in turn lowers prices, creating a virtuous circle that will drive the development of green energy.

Milliband also announced a feed-in tariff for sustainable heat generation today, apparently a world first. Starting in 2011, those using ground source heat pumps or solar thermal would also be able to claim payments, which are funded through a small levy on energy bills.

Campaigners have welcomed the move, although they had hoped for a more generous package. “Ministers have been far too timid,” says Dave Timms from Friends of the Earth. “There is huge public support for small-scale green energy schemes. The Government must do much more to tap into this enthusiasm and ensure that everyone plays their part in developing a safer, cleaner future.”