Here’s David Cameron:

We must fight the scourge of tax evasion by promoting a new global standard for automatic information exchange between tax authorities. And we must tackle aggressive tax avoidance by encouraging better global reporting to tax authorities in both the developed and developing world; and by letting tax collectors and law enforcement find out who really owns and controls each company.

Note that Cameron is promising to tackle both illegal tax evasion, and legal tax avoidance. This is new. Britain has been silent on tax issues for a long time, mainly because we still run many of the world’s tax havens.

But the change isn’t just in government. In 2007 The Economist claimed that “tax havens are an unavoidable part of globalisation and, ultimately, a healthy one.” This year they had a special edition on tax havens and articles on “how to stop companies and people dodging tax.” Or take The Spectator. Ten years ago it could publish recommendations on tax havens – “Costa Rica is my tax haven of the year” wrote columnist Christopher Fildes. This year it hosted an article titled “Tax avoidance must stop, and companies themselves must lead the way”.

Both these publications are still skeptical and are far from becoming champions of tax integrity, but they are symptomatic of a cultural change. Discussions that were off-limits are now permitted. Accounting practices that were simply considered clever are now considered morally questionable.

What’s changed? The enduring recession has forced the government to look at new ways of securing revenue. That’s probably the biggest factor, but it’s impossible to ignore the work of campaigns and NGOs in raising awareness of the problem. Groups like UK Uncut have protested imaginatively around tax avoidance. ActionAid and WDM have run extensive campaigns around tax, and the IF campaign has put it front and centre. Tax campaigners like Richard Murphy or the Tax Justice Network suddenly found they had company, after years of being niche specialists. Nicholas Shaxson‘s book Treasure Islands lifted the lid on tax havens and new campaigns like End Tax Haven Secrecy or Tackle Tax Havens spread the word.

Through the work of these groups and people, a light has been shone on an issue that most people knew very little about. The media have picked up on it, and it’s now a scandal when a celebrity or a corporation is found to be dodging their tax, whether they’ve done it legally or not.

The problem is far from being fixed of course, and the gulf between talk and action remains vast. It would be premature to declare any kind of victory, but when you stop and look at where we have come from, things are moving fast. Cultural ideas about what is and isn’t acceptable behaviour are changing. Campaigning can work, and it’s good to be reminded of that from time to time.

There’s another element to the graph – the green and blue lines that disect the graph. The blue one is the cut-off point for developed countries. Anything past 0.8 on the index is high development. The green horizontal line just shows a sustainable ecological footprint, currently just below 2 hectares per person. Ideally, countries need to be both delivering high welfare to citizens and doing so sustainably. That would put them in the corner at the bottom right. That blue box, you will note, is empty. (If you’re curious, the country on the join there is Ecuador).

Putting sustainability and human development together like this shows that there are two directions to development – on this graph, right and down. Nations need to be improving welfare, but also improving environmental performance. There are also two ways to fail as a country in the 21st century. You can lag behind on human development, and fail to provide for your citizens. Much less recognised is that you can also fail by overshooting the sustainability waterline, putting future prosperity at risk through pollution and over-consumption of resources today.

There’s one other thing to point out about this graph, and that’s that the green line can move. Because we’ve overshot the earth’s biocapacity, it is reducing every year. That means that the green line is dropping lower, and that blue box that we all have to aim for is getting smaller by the year, a race with a receding finish line.

The image here is static, but it’s actually from an animation on the Footprint network. On their site you can see which countries are which on the graph, and see how performance has changed over the years.

*observant readers may notice that the Middle East and Central Asian countries are missing. You’d have to ask the Footprint Network where they’ve gone.

“When I come to examine aviation, I discover that there are simply no effective technological solutions: in this chapter I have failed in my attempt to reconcile the luxuries we enjoy with the survival of the biosphere, and I am forced to conclude that the only possible answer is a massive reduction in flights.”

That’s not welcome news, and most people have chosen to ignore it. I’ve met people who are passionate about reducing their carbon footprint, but insist on their right to fly. It’s particularly tricky when family members live overseas. Nobody wants to be told that they shouldn’t go and visit.

I’ve recently read something that puts a slightly different spin on things. Living Within a Fair Share Ecological Footprint is a book that attempts to define one-planet living and show what life at a truly sustainable level would look like. In the chapter on transport, they analyse the transport habits of residents of Wellington, NZ, as a roughly typical modern Western city. There’s a lot of maths that I won’t share, but essentially they work out that when it comes to transport, a sustainable lifestyle requires us to make a choice.

“It is perfectly possible to have a low enough transport footprint provided that flying is eliminated. There can still be some car use provided that the car is either small or has low fuel consumption.” (They assume that public transport is used for commuting.)

“If all land transport currently done using a car were done by bus with no car use, the travel footprint could accommodate the average amount of flying currently done by a New Zealander. So there is a clear choice: you can drive a car, or you can fly, but it is not possible to do both, unless a way is found to operate aircraft from renewable energy.”

How much flying is that, you may ask. They work it out as one long-haul flight every five years, if you give up the private car entirely and use public transport, walking or cycling for all other transport.

For some, this is going to be an unacceptable choice between the ‘right to fly’ and the ‘right to drive’. Others might recognise that we have a limited right to the earth’s atmosphere too, and be more prepared to work within those limits. Personally, I think this kind of choice is actually quite helpful. Rather than saying ‘you must give up flying’, it gives us a way of working out what we’d need to do to allow it. Conversely, if we couldn’t live without our cars, here’s how that can be accommodated.

How we choose is up to us, and we might want to choose differently according to our stage of life. For example, it might make sense to run a small car for occasional use when children are small, but give up the car when they’re older and take a couple of family adventures. And they would be adventures – if you’re only going to travel once every five years, you’d better take your time and make the most of it.

Whatever the post-millennium goals might be, it’s a good opportunity to hardwire sustainability into the development agenda, argues Alex Evans of New York University.

“Climate, scarcity, unsustainability and development have long since morphed into a single challenge” he writes. “Poverty reduction is the first casualty of unsustainability, with poor people disproportionately reliant on natural assets and vulnerable to climate and scarcity risks. At the same time, current models of development are also the main driver of unsustainability”.

Sustainability is a clunky and much maligned term, but sustainable development is essentially progress that can be maintained long term. That shouldn’t be controversial. “Development that is not sustainable is not worth having” says Evans, “given that unsustainable models of development will only end up a victim of their own success.”

• Meanwhile, how about this for the definition of institutional denial – the Treasury recently blocked a proposed review into the risks that climate change and resource scarcity pose to the economy. That’s from this speech by John Ashton CBE, in which he also mentions that the number of people working on climate adaptation at DEFRA has been cut from 38 to just 6. I find that extraordinary.

• I came across The Baffler the other day, a somewhat unorthodox journal of art and criticism. This issue includes an extract on revolution from David Graeber’s book The Democracy Project, which is well worth a read.

• And as Microsoft and Sony prepare to do battle again in the next generation of games consoles, did you know there’s an Android-based open-source upstart console?

This is how the climate works too. There are a variety of different forces affecting the temperature of the atmosphere. The sun can be stronger or weaker as it goes through its cycle. There are weather cycles like El Nino, and long running regional climate variations. Other human activity has an effect, such as aerosol loading that slows down warming. There are other greenhouse gases – methane or nitrous oxide, and these interact with other natural processes such as cloud formation, another factor in the climate.

The existence of these many factors does not undermine the main argument that CO2 from human activity is warming the planet. In fact, they are vital to understanding the climate out there in the real world. Just as you can speed up and slow down while pedaling at the same rate, so the earth can warm faster when different cycles coincide, and slow down when they work against each other. CO2 emissions continue to rise, but warming will move faster or slower as all these various effects inter-relate.

This isn’t particularly complicated, but it’s surprising how often it has to be repeated. This post was prompted by hearing James Hansen having to explain it on Radio 4 this morning. Despite being among the more senior journalists in the country, the Today programme team didn’t seem to understand it.

Specifically, warming moved faster in the 80s and 90s than it has done over the last ten years. This doesn’t change the importance of CO2. To suggest it does is like riding your bike uphill, and concluding that since you’re slowing down even though you’re pedaling, pedaling doesn’t work.

Forest Green Rovers, if you don’t follow the Blue Square Premier League, are just one division down from the Football League (same league as Luton, alas). They may be a small club in footballing terms, but their environmental credentials put the premiership to shame. They’re the only football club in the world to have achieved the EU’s gold standard in environmental management (EMAS).

They have a biodiversity action plan, there are solar panels on the stadium roof, and the pitch is maintained with a solar powered driverless robot. Many of the initiatives are experimental, such as the world’s first organic football pitch, or LED stadium lighting, in development at the moment. Meat has already been removed from the menus at the caterer, a move that got national attention, and they are working towards more local and seasonal food. You can still get chips of course, and the oil is recycled to make biodiesel.

On transport, the club realised that if you added all the miles traveled by players coming and going from training, it added up to almost 10,000 miles a week. They began car-pooling, and then took on a fleet of Nissan Leaf electric cars, which can be plugged in to charge at the club. Emissions from players commuting has fallen by 83%.

Rainwater is collected from the pitch and harvested from the stand. Along with a borehole on site, the grounds will soon be off-grid, with rainwater flushing the toilets and irrigating the grass. You can view their full environmental policy here.

The club are also keen to model sustainability to the local community and to sport more widely. There are plans for a conference centre and education suite where schoolchildren can learn more about sustainability. Forest Green is also serving as a ‘test bed’ club for Sustainability in Sport, founded last year by Dale Vince and former Manchester United player Gary Neville. Here’s a short video with the two of them, and here’s their Facebook page.

PS – I’ve tagged this post as part of my ‘building of the week’ series because of the interesting things happening at Forest Green, but the stadium has been retrofitted and many of the environmental initiatives are about behaviour rather than design. There is one other stadium in Britain that I could be writing about under this tag, one that was designed from the start as an eco-stadium, but I’ll save that for another day…

Their briefing is titled In Land Revenue: The Case for a Land Value Tax in the UK. It’s by housing consultant Andy Hull and it argues that “a Land Value Tax, targeted at unproductive wealth and speculation, could help deliver the house-building revolution – and the economic revival – our country desperately needs.”

The first and most important reason for considering land taxation is that Britain has a housing problem. Many parts of the country have a shortage of affordable homes, and need to find space to build them. Despite the need, speculators continue to sit of large areas of land, hoping the economy will turn a corner and the value of the land will increase. In Luton, this has led to the crazy situation of local parks being given over to housing development, while vast areas of the town sit derelict.

One of the worst aspects of this land hoarding in Luton is that it is a predatory way to make money. Those sitting on the unused post-industrial sites around the town are depending on others to invest. They’re waiting for the council and local businesses to invest in regeneration, and they’ll then sell up once the value of their holdings rises. A tax on that unused land would make it less profitable to hoard it in this way, and it would be released for development.

This freeing up of unused land would be likely to lower the price of land, encouraging development and house building. This would ease the housing shortage, and could provide a  more stable, less inflation-prone housing market in future.

I won’t go through all the detail now, but if you’re interested in the idea, it’s worth taking a few minutes to read the briefing. It’s only 10 pages or so, and it’ll give you some context on how it could be applied, pitfalls to avoid, and other groups who are looking into it too.

It’s fairly easy to set a benchmark for sustainability. A sustainable lifestyle would be within the planet’s limits, and to be a just lifestyle too it would need to be one that everybody could have. To work that out, you need to know how much of the planet is available to each of us.

All of life’s processes require land. We need land to grow the plants and raise the animals that we eat, to source the timber and cotton and other resources that we use, and to absorb the carbon we emit. That land requirement for each of us is our ‘ecological footprint’. (The image below is from the New Zealand ministry of the environment. It’s not accurate in the proportions, but does illustrate the various components quite nicely)

Not all of the earth’s land is available to us to produce the things we need. Once you have subtracted deserts and mountains and so on, you get a total of 12 billion hectares of productive land. That’s the total planetary space we have to play in. Now we divide that between the world’s population of 7 billion, and we get an earth share of 1.7 global hectares (gha) each.

“If everyone on earth adopted an equitable 1.7 gha lifestyle, the entire human family would be living within the means of nature” say William Rees and Jennie Moore in Living within a Fair Share Ecological Footprint, which I’m reading at the moment.

The good news is that over half the world already lives at or below that benchmark figure – most of Africa, Asia and Latin America. The bad news is that many others are a long way above it – European average footprints are around 5 or 6 hectares, American and Australian footprints higher still at 8 or 9. “To live fairly within the earth’s means” say Rees and Moore, “Europeans should be implementing policies that will reduce their per-capita ecological footprints by two thirds. Average Americans and Australians should be planning an 80% reduction.”

That’s the challenge, and it’s considerable.

There are a couple of things to note here. First, the simple calculation above assumes that all the world’s productive land should be used by humanity, and we might want to leave some for the other species that share our planet. And that 1.7 gha allowance depends on population, which is increasing. As population rises, the amount of productive land is spread more thin. If we reach 10 billion, we’ll only have 1.2 gha each to work with.

It’s also worth mentioning, since people are looking for things to object to, that an equitable 1.7 gha share is a benchmark figure. There can and will be degrees of inequality around it, and nobody is suggesting any kind of legally binding one planet share or global communism to manage it. But it is what we need to aim for. If we want to continue to live a 7 hectare lifestyle in a world where 1.7 is the fair share, (since I’m writing on the train), we’re like a guy on a packed commuter train who wants a seat for his bag.

We know George Osborne favours shale. “We don’t want British families and businesses to be left behind as gas prices tumble on the other side of the Atlantic” he told Parliament last year, and he has put in place tax incentives to encourage drilling. The government’s current energy strategy ties Britain’s energy future to gas, and there are a growing number of voices talking up the potential of shale.

Among the more optimistic views is that of MP Peter Lilley. “Shale gas has reduced America’s gas prices to a third of what they are in Europe, increased huge tax revenues, rebalanced the economy, created tens of thousands of jobs, brought industry and manufacturing back to the country’s heartlands, and given rise to a real prospect of American energy self-sufficiency by 2030,” he writes in the Spectator. “Britain may well have comparable shale resources.”

The idea that Britain has ‘comparable’ resources to the US is, I’m afraid, a fantasy (see graph below). There’s certainly plenty of gas down there, but the gas market in the US is very different and so are the rules around drilling. The vision of falling energy prices and job creation is compelling, but here are four reasons why we shouldn’t be holding out for a shale gas boom in Britain.

1. We don’t know how much gas there is
It’s very hard to estimate shale gas reserves. An initial estimate by the British Geological Survey mooted a figure of 150 billion cubic metres, which sounds like a lot but is actually only 1.5 years of supply at current consumption rates. That was not a survey of the resources, just a guess, and their actual survey is likely to be ten times that amount. Cuadrilla, the only company currently drilling in Britain, estimates 5.67 trillion cubic metres, but that is ‘gas in place’, not gas that is recoverable or economically viable. The International Energy Agency estimates around 1 trillion:

The thing is, you can’t tell how much gas you’ve got until you start drilling. We may have vast resources. We may not. Poland, for example, began drilling and after two years has had to revise its estimates downwards by 80%. Likewise the much hyped Marcellus Shale in the US, which turned out to contain a third of the gas hoped for.

As drilling begins, we may find resources beyond our wildest dreams. Or we may find water, like Exxon did in Hungary 2009. The point is, we shouldn’t be developing energy policy based on the assumption of shale gas.

2. Britain is more densely populated
The second reason why we can’t depend on a gas boom is that it will be much more complicated to drill in Britain than it is in the US, and the main reason is population density. It’s all very well drilling in Texas, where you have 34.8 people per square kilometer. There are plenty of remote spots where you’ll be able to drill without bothering anyone.

Lancashire, on the other hand, has 475 people per square kilometer. That’s a lot more people who are going to be upset about fracking in their community, more people who will protest, block planning permission, or who will need to be compensated.

3. There’s less incentive for land owners
In the US, the rights to oil or gas lie with the surface landowner. If you own land that has gas resources, you own those assets and can exploit them yourself or sell the rights to them for your personal profit. It’s in your interests to find gas on your land, which will boost its value and make you a fortune. In fact, much of the money in shale gas in the US has been from land, buying and flipping the rights to drill, rather than drilling itself.

That market dynamic doesn’t work in Britain. Since the Petroleum Act of 1934, all oil and gas found in Britain belongs to the Crown, not to the landowner. Landowners are compensated for the loss of their land, but don’t get any royalties from the gas extracted. That may be worthwhile for some, but the gold rush into shale that the US has seen is impossible to replicate under our current laws.

4. It is unlikely to bring prices down
Perhaps most importantly given the rhetoric, there is no evidence that shale gas will bring energy prices down. That’s because Britain’s current North Sea production is declining, so any new shale gas would just be replacing lost production. We’d still need to import gas from overseas, and that means we’d still be dependent on international gas prices. UK shale gas will also be more expensive to extract than it is in the US, for the reasons discussed above.

An LSE study concluded as much on price: “As long as the UK remains a substantial net importer of gas, it is reasonable to assume that its wholesale gas prices will largely depend on prices charged by foreign suppliers. Although domestic shale gas production could benefit the economy by generating jobs and tax revenues while displacing imports, it is unlikely that gas consumers would see much, if any, benefit in terms of reduced gas and electricity bills.”