Here’s an innovative idea for tackling world debt – since 90% of debt is imaginary money, spirited out of thin air by the banks, why don’t we ‘move the zero‘ on our debts and write off the made up bit?

As you will know if you’ve been paying attention to the financial crisis, most of the money in the world banking systems does not exist. A mere 10% of the figures tossed around actually exists anywhere as real wealth. All the rest is written in as debt, downpayments on future earnings.

Since it doesn’t exist, there’s no reason why that 90% couldn’t be written off at a stroke, saving the world’s tax payers from a burden of debt that our children’s children are currently destined to carry. Moving the zero would reset the banking system, bring money back down to earth and give us a fresh start.

As a proposal, I like it. It has the ring of the Old Testament’s jubilee principle, where all the debts were cancelled every 50 years so that poverty wasn’t passed on to the next generation. In practice, politicians are too craven to ever consider such bold ideas, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ask. Let’s shame them with a more just, more generous, and more common sense solution than anything they’ve proposed so far – click here to sign the petition.

The new economics foundation has published a second edition of the ‘Happy Planet Index‘, its groundbreaking new measure of success. Rather than counting economic activity, as GDP does, the HPI measures the ‘ecological efficiency’ of an economy.

The countries that do best are delivering long, happy and meaningful lives to its citizens, with a minimum of resources. The two have to go together – if people aren’t living good lives, the economy is failing. If they’re living good lives at an unsustainable level, the economy is simply failing in the longer term, as the next generation will not have good lives.

Count GDP, and the US and the Western nations are the most successful. We’re also responsible for climate change, which makes GDP a desperately inadequate way of judging success. If you look beyond size and examine the efficiency of an economy, you get a very different picture. Ranked for a combination of life expectancy, life satisfaction and ecological footprint together, the top country is Costa Rica.

In fact, nine out of the top ten countries on the HPI are in South America. The bottom ten are all, alas, in Africa, with Zimbabwe taking up the rear with just 16 points out of a possible 100.

Where does the UK fall, I here you ask?

74th.

The point of all this is of course to show that ‘good lives don’t have to cost the earth’. Happiness and satisfaction do not depend on gross consumption of the earth’s resources. Costa Ricans live longer than Americans are more fulfilled, with a footprint one quarter the size.

We all know intuitively that there is more to life than the pursuit of wealth, but somehow we run our economies in defiance of that simple wisdom. For decades, possibly centuries, the pursuit of growth has been the one guiding principle of economics. If it remains a guiding principle, it will kill us. The Happy Planet Index proves it doesn’t have to be that way. All the evidence is there. The will needs to follow.

“The unwavering pursuit of economic growth – embodied in the overwhelming focus on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – has left over a billion people in dire poverty, and has not notably improved the well-being of those who were already rich, nor even provided us with economic stability. Instead it has brought us straight to the cliff edge of rapidly diminishing natural resources and unpredicable climate change.”

‘The Happy Planet Index 2.0′ is inspiring, life affirming, and necessary. You can read the report here, browse the findings online at happyplanetindex.org, and discuss it on the triple crunch blog.

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HT – Breathe

I come across a lot of great images that capture something about sustainability, without an earth from space, a melting iceberg or a polar bear in sight. I thought I might see if I can post one every week. Herewith post number one of a saturday series.

HT Reineke.

Another illustration from ActionAid’s ‘Let them eat promises‘ report, this one shows where the 08/09 harvest went.

As you can see, less than half of the crops grown feed people directly. A large proportion goes to animals, which are then eaten in turn – a very inefficient way to feed ourselves.

A growing percentage goes to biofuels, and this represents a double insult to the hungry. With oil prices low, biofuels don’t even make economic sense in the current market, and only survive because of ill-conceived targets and government subsidies.

Last night Transition St Albans hosted a screening of ‘The End of Suburbia’, a film exploring the unsustainability of suburban sprawl in an age of peak oil. The film mentions New Urbanism at the end, the revival of pre-automobile town planning, walkable cities and local high streets.

With the suburbs on my mind, I was interested to see that Inhabitat have teamed up with Dwell Magazine to launch a competition called ReBurbia:

Calling all future-forward architects, urban designers, renegade planners and imaginative engineers:
Show us how you would re-invent the suburbs! What would a McMansion become if it weren’t a single-family dwelling? How could a vacant big box store be retrofitted for agriculture? What sort of design solutions can you come up with to facilitate car-free mobility, ‘burb-grown food, and local, renewable energy generation? We want to see how you’d design future-proof spaces and systems using the suburban structures of the present, from small-scale retrofits to large-scale restoration—the wilder the better!

For more information, visit the ReBurbia site.

The good folks at the Post Carbon Institute have looked back at the last couple of years and the trends in oil prices and supply, and concluded that July 11th 2008 was the turning point.

That was the day that the price of a barrel of oil hit $147.27, the highest it has ever been. It was a record month for production too, at 74.8 million barrels a day.

As we’ve mentioned before, the oil price subsequenly collapsed, infrastructure investments were cancelled, demand crashed along with the economy, and the chances are that the oil industry will never again climb the giddy heights of July 2008.

It’s always going to be controversial to announce a precise date for peak oil, but who cares if it turns out to be inexact? How about the 11th of July for an international Peak Oil day? I like it, and it can be our next sidebar ad.

There are plenty of ways to observe it. Richard Heinberg suggests “spending time in nature, engaging in a 24-hour oil fast, or organizing a neighborhood bicycle parade and solar-cooker bakeoff.” If you want to help make it official, you can sign the petition here, and it will be presented to US energy secretary Stephen Chu.

I have a lot of admiration for George Monbiot, so I’ve been meaning to read his book ‘Heat’ for some time. There are several things that I appreciate about Monbiot’s writing. It is extremely well researched, and well footnoted, making his articles and columns a mine of useful reports. It’s also thorough and painstaking and rational, and Monbiot does not suffer fools, of any persuasion. He is just as likely to come down hard on misguided environmentalism as he is to criticise big business.

All of which sounds very promising in a book on climate change, and Heat delivers. It is a hard nosed, unsentimental analysis of the problem and what can be done about it. Heat sets itself a difficult challenge of a 90% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030, considerably deeper cuts than most would consider, but the minimum target to realistically avoid serious climate change.

With this target in mind, Monbiot then tackles each source of carbon emissions in turn, from housing to transport. Some of it is familiar and easy to agree with, such as better insulation, or passive house architecture. Other sections are less comfortable reading – many popular solutions are stripped down and exposed as useless, from biofuels to small scale wind turbines. Ardent greens will find plenty to worry about as nuclear power gets a tacit nod, and the sacred cow of renewable energy gets cut down a size.

A great many ideas are discarded, but this is ultimately a book of solutions, and there are all manner of things that will work. Efficiency measures, tighter planning laws, improved coach travel, combined heat and power, hydrogen fuel cells, tele-working, internet shopping. There is no single answer, but dozens of helpful avenues that will trim carbon from our current lifestyles.

The only sector beyond help is aviation. After reviewing every mainstream solution or proposal, Monbiot concludes that there is just no way for flying to survive. “Long distance travel, high speed and the curtailment of climate change are not compatible” he writes, adding a statement I have often seen quoted for its sheer brutality: “if you fly, you destroy other people’s lives.

As well as the solutions, the book spends some time exploring why it has been so hard to get climate change onto the political agenda. The findings here are fascinating. A lot has been said about climate change denial and conspiracy theories. I don’t have a whole lot of time for that, or for environmentalist matyrdom, but anyone tempted to dismiss those theories entirely should read Monbiot’s chapter on ‘The denial industry.’ Obviously not everyone who disagrees with climate science is in the pay of the oil companies, but a shocking number are, and there is plenty of evidence here to prove it.

There are a couple of things missing from ‘Heat’, in my opinion. One is any discussion of consumption, or of food, both of which account for a large and mostly indefinable amount of our carbon emissions. There is no mention of re-localization, an idea which seems to have been embraced since the publication of ‘Heat’ two years ago.

Still, as a guide to what can practically be done about climate change, as a society, this is second to none.

• Visit the website, turnuptheheat.com

Thanks for all the support and for making a big fuss about Electricite de France and their silly antics with our flag. You’d be forgiven for thinking they were trying to kill us off!

The Green Jack has been at the heart of all we do for a long time now so we are going to have to take it back.

This is Nuclear energy jumping on the bandwagon of Green Britain and of Climate Change. Maybe the reason EDF don’t make so much fuss about renewable investment is this – EDF spent about a fiver per customer in the last five years building new renewables – less in total than the cost of this Green Britain campaign and the Olympics – that’s less money spent on doing green than talking it up.

That’s the reality at the heart of EDF’s green makeover. It’s about kudos for EDF. Image not action.

Green Britain needs to be a very big tent indeed, big enough even for EDF and the rest of the big six energy companies. But it’s not big enough for pretenders, those hiding corporate goals, behind green smoke screens. Or for the unethical.

Taking someone else’s identity is just not acceptable. It’s a very bad start!

My advice to EDF is this – be who you are, don’t pretend to be something or someone you are not. Be proud to be French and Nuclear, sell us that. Use your massive resources to create your own identity. Better yet use those resources to actually do something actually green, if you’re serious but just misunderstood….

Oh and stop using our flag pronto because we just won’t stand for it. I’m all for a Green Britain but not the kind EDF appear to have in mind.

Dale Vince
Founder, Ecotricity

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‘Let them eat promises‘ is the striking title of the latest report from ActionAid, which once again outlines the gaping void between the rhetoric of rich countries and on the ground delivery.

There is currently a $23 billion dollar shortfall in tackling hunger worldwide, money that has been promised as part of the Millennium Development Goals. With the recession and rising food prices, failing harvests due to climate change, and the increase in both meat eating and biofuels, the problem is set to get worse before it gets better.

Can the world afford another $23 billion? Sure it can, says Meredith Alexander, Head of Trade and Corporates at ActionAid: “Given that the world has already spent $18 trillion dollars propping up the global economy, we know they can afford it. We are asking for peanuts from elephants.”