Photo: doggy Schnauzer

The original aim of the tariff, known as FIT, was to make solar energy attractive at both domestic and small commercial scale by giving investors confidence in getting a return within a reasonable timeframe.

It’s now all coming together as a classic British bodge, a story that begins with grandiose rhetoric and ends in penny-pinching muddle. The scheme — which only began in April 2010 — has been revised down three times in less than a year, with the change announced yesterday halving the contribution from 69 U.S. cents per kWh to just 34 cents — in just six weeks’ time, if the new proposals go ahead.

In essence, the program seems to have been a victim of its own success. Three times more applications have come forward than the government expected, and it seems the funding is being used up too quickly.

You might think this is a good thing — a plan to promote solar power has actually worked, and better than had been hoped. But it has clearly set alarm bells ringing in the Treasury, where investing in the green economy is deeply countercultural. Chancellor George Osborne began the charge at the Conservative party conference last month, downgrading the importance of climate change and giving his officials tacit permission to wield the knife on FITs without mercy. It was always the plan to “taper” the scheme, but yesterday’s announcement is more like falling off a cliff for many of the projects in the pipeline.

Various reasons for the drop-off have been put forward by the government Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC). One is the falling costs of solar power installation, which now means solar panels could pay for themselves in as little as six or seven years. That’s now going to go back up to 14 years or so — putting solar systems safely back in the realm of fantasy for most British homeowners, and bringing into play a raft of social-justice questions. Another is that there’s a gold rush for solar power going on and “boom and bust must be avoided” — apparently by going straight to bust.

And the savings? The government estimates it will be reducing its investment through the FIT by three-quarters, to just $400 million in 2014. Because the scheme is paid for out of everyone’s energy bills, these savings are being framed in terms of the impact on those bills in 2020 — though I’m not sure anyone really has a clue what those are likely to be. The logic seems to be that it’s better to rely on imported energy than make your own if you want to keep the costs down — with the assumption that the U.K. will somehow remain immune to the energy-security issues worrying everyone else.

Needless to say, the solar PV industry is up in arms. Howard Johns of the industry’s “cut don’t kill” campaign claims this sort of cut will “kill the U.K. solar industry stone dead,” wiping out 4,000 companies and 25,000 jobs. Some argue that the only affordable schemes will now use cheap Chinese panels, cheap labor, and corner cutting, freezing out the more reputable businesses. Juliet Davenport of Good Energy pointed out that “DECC has cut the one scheme that gives households control over their rising energy bills — showing that the Treasury doesn’t have a real grip on the economics of the energy market.”

The twittersphere is buzzing too: “Going trick or treating?” asked @lizmale last night: “Why not trick someone into setting up green SME [small/medium enterprise] & treat them to policy u-turn that destroys their business.” She caught the mood and got dozens of retweets. Others using the #FITs hashtag had similar reactions.

It’s not just the hundreds of new solar businesses — many of which are apparently starting layoffs today — that are suffering. Lots of work by local authorities and “social landlords” — those who run housing for people who struggle to afford it in the private sector — is now holed beneath the waterline. And the community renewables sector, which was growing up to fill the gap between the government’s aspirations for green power and the inability of individual householders to afford them, is also hit hard.

Where I live in Oxfordshire, the Low Carbon Hub — a new social enterprise being set up to enable communities to invest together to put solar power on the roofs of public buildings like schools — was revising its business plan Tuesday morning. The investment case is now much harder to find, but Barbara Hammond, one of the directors of the new business, is surprisingly sanguine: “We need an announcement quickly from government about genuine community schemes being exempt from the additional cuts … We knew a further cut was coming and the case for it in terms of reduced costs of installation does hold some water. But the timing certainly makes life difficult, and if I were someone with a community project in the pipeline that now doesn’t work financially, I’m sure I would struggle to find anything good to say about this or encourage others to act.” Who said British understatement is dead?

Of course, these are just proposals and there is a consultation period, so we can all have our say. That said, the government has confirmed that the cut will be put in place 10 days before the consultation period ends. As Jeremy Leggett, CEO of Solar Century, tweeted yesterday: “So you ‘consult’ until 23rd Dec but cut off tariff from 12th? I guess you have a good lawyer?”  

It’s all the more ironic as the announcement came the same day the government said it would spend $1.6 billion on job-creation schemes, including a new gas-fueled power station in Yorkshire. Threatening real new jobs in solar power to fund possible jobs in fossil-fueled power seems an odd trade-off if you are serious about ambitious carbon-reduction targets and creating the “greenest government ever.”

It’s hard not to see Britain’s target of 20 percent power from renewables by 2020 receding again. But perhaps that was never really the plan.

The new orthodoxy looks depressingly similar to the old one — in short, growth will lead us to salvation, and everything else — the environment included — can wait. What’s odd is that the key dissenters to this view do not come from civil society. Sure, the angry NGOs are still having a go, but it’s business that is keeping the flame alive here, miles out ahead of the government, and more remarkably, beginning to accept they need to be miles ahead of the consuming public, if the transition to sustainability is going to happen in any useful time frame. Even the marketing people get it.

Every so often, this quiet revolution in business breaks the surface as a call to action. Businesses leading the charge (and get some return on their investment) tend to use friendly NGOs as human shields, and a convening idea that doesn’t sound too frightening, to create some space to go further. The latest offering is from Forum for the Future, Sainsbury’s, and Unilever, who recently launched “Consumer Futures,” a study offering four scenarios for the consumer economy in 2020, built on assumptions about prosperity, how much we will expect of brands, and how much we will be able to do for ourselves.

The study’s recommendations for business aren’t hugely surprising — innovate; be transparent; work with the value chain; localize. More colorful are the scenarios themselves. Products that might be with us in just eight years include the already familiar spread of ethical comparison apps, solar-powered clothing, and local produce, and more left-field products such as refrigerating packaging and waste-powered patio heaters. Service shifts point to more radical change, particularly in “from me to you,” a scenario in which peer-to-peer mortgages, hyperlocal produce locators, and gardens full of commercial hemp are part of a new return to self-reliance and local production. 

Consumer Futures’ final recommendation is perhaps its most controversial: “Companies should use their marketing, communications, and innovation skills to create consumer demand for sustainable and profitable products and services.” This sense that business can ride to our rescue by creating new forms of demand and the products and services to meet it is becoming something of an article of faith in the pro-business NGO world, and given the abject failure of other tactics, it’s not all that surprising. But for business it means acknowledging that they create markets at least as much as they follow demand — something they are surprisingly coy about. And for some U.K. NGOs — particularly involved in the “common cause” debate about communications and sustainability — there is something fundamentally problematic about using the dark arts of marketing to promote sustainable behavior.

If Consumer Futures has a view on this debate it is mainly pragmatic, giving the many companies who buy in to their role as enablers of sustainable consumption but not yet really sure how to go about it a practical toolkit. There’s some good process advice, but ultimately business is offered a pretty taxing formula for its next generation of products and services: smart growth (that’s the kind with no environmental impact), smart use, choice editing, and positive social impact.  

Getting all these right remains a monumental challenge, and even the much trumpeted efforts of Unilever, Marks and Spencer, et al. don’t get us that much closer, especially as they and their peers all have their eye on meeting the needs of hundreds of millions of new middle-class consumers in emerging markets, keen to live as Americans do and not too bothered if this means catching up a bit in carbon emissions terms too. And most businesses still calculate their impact in relative terms — per unit of production or turnover, giving us the paradoxical situation where they can all meet their sustainability targets and still destroy the planet at ever-increasing rates.  

Ultimately something has to give. As Unilever’s U.K. Chair Amanda Sourry put it, “The old model of ever greater consumption, with growth at any price, is broken. Companies that succeed in the future will be those that reduce their environmental impact while increasing their social and economic impacts.” But for now, growth seems to be the only answer anyone wants to hear for the short and medium-term questions facing developed economies, and anything that might make it a bit more smart (or just a bit less dumb) while we wait for government to catch up, has got to be worth trying.    

Is this how we’ll get around in the future?

Sounds interesting — but if it’s true, how will we get about in 2040? With most big cities already struggling to provide effective mass transit, and the world’s population growing and converging on urban areas, there’s a crisis of mobility heading our way. At Forum for the Future, we’ve just constructed four scenarios for the future of urban mobility in megacities (i.e. those over 10 million), speculating about how these and other forces, including declining fossil-fuel availability and patterns of city governance, might play out in the next 30 years. The work has yielded four rather different future megacity scenarios, brought to life as animations.

“Renew-abad” is a city where alternative energy–fueled, high-tech, clean transport gets everyone around. Under strong leadership, the city’s confidence and autonomy has grown and urban density is increasing. Sophisticated augmented reality systems reduce the demand for physical travel, but for essential journeys, computer-guided electric and hybrid vehicles rub along with cyclists and pedestrians on massively improved infrastructure.

In “Sprawl-ville,” the dominant urban form is huge low density suburbs, and mobility is still dependent on fossil-fuel powered cars. The elite still get around, but it’s a 24-hour city with never-ending congestion, and poor public transport infrastructure means the majority are either stuck in ghettos or reliant on unregulated paratransit. Nomad businesspeople sit in armored cars, working while moving slowly from meeting to meeting. Others return to buses and bicycles as their principal means of mobility.

For the citizens of “Planned-opolis,” high energy prices and continuing reliance on fossil fuels mean transport is tightly organized and rationed. To meet carbon targets, the central district is closed to cars and 10 million newly planted trees shade the walkways. Many people have moved out to join the millions in new cities — some floating off the coast, others entirely virtual.

You will search in vain for the center of “Communi-city,” where devolved power, localized energy generation, and a DIY approach to life mean the city is a cluster of autonomous communities. The roads are a chaotic racetrack for buses running on home-brew biofuels, kit-made bicycles, covered scooters, pod cars, and motorbikes, but somehow it all works through the smart use of IT to avoid collisions and optimize routes. 

Entertaining viewing, we hope. But what use is it to dream these dreams? The point of scenario planning is to use plausible futures to test strategy now. What are the sensible next steps for megacities planning for an uncertain future and wanting to avoid a mobility crisis? The study proposes a to-do list that includes curbing car use, prioritizing the mobility needs of the poor, sharpening up integration between modes, refueling vehicles with low-carbon alternatives to gasoline, and changing behavior so that people travel fewer miles and by less damaging modes. 

Whether our growing ranks of megacities will be able to apply this advice remains to be seen. But they can’t simply carry on as they are and hope for the best — the changes coming at them are too great and too serious to leave future mobility to chance. And the prize for getting it right is enormous. As Sue Zielinski, sustainable mobility expert at the University of Michigan and one of the experts interviewed for the project, puts it, “The goal is not transport but accessibility — more productivity, more mobility, more beauty in one day.” Quite so. But the gap between that vision and present reality is enormous and growing for the 3 billion of us urbanites, never mind the further 2 billion or so who will be joining us by midcentury, mostly in developing countries.   

Confirmation, once again, that the battle for sustainability will be won or lost in cities. This point is not lost on the many businesses — among them GE, sponsor of our Sustainable Cities Index — tooling up to provide the integrated city solutions of tomorrow. It’s also not lost on the mayors of 135 big cities who met in Mexico City at the invitation of Mayor Marcelo Ebrard last week. The World Mayors Summit on Climate saw Ebrard and many of his peers sign a pact on climate action and issue a call to national governments go further in the run-up to Cancun. That such huge cities still feel hamstrung by national and international inaction is worrying, but their growing confidence and significance on the world stage points to a more promising future. Even London, hardly a bastion of sustainability, now has some good stories to tell, not least the huge popularity of Mayor Boris Johnson’s rent-a-bike scheme, which has put him on the map in much the same way the congestion charge did for his predecessor Ken Livingstone. Small steps toward sustainable urban mobility, perhaps, but progress nonetheless.

Check out the full report: Megacities on the Move: Your Guide to the Future of Sustainable Urban Mobility in 2040 [PDF].

She could be happier if she lived in a more equitable society.

Finkelstein’s exploration of our growing income inequalities, and the effect they have on us, made for fascinating listening. Discrimination of all sorts clearly still operates in the world of employment. Some of it is apparently intractable: Being tall gets you about an extra £1,000 [$1,580] a year per inch, and being ugly takes it away again. Other inequalities could be managed better. Bus drivers earn half as much as train drivers, perhaps for no better reason than a difference in training period of a few months and the effects of the market. Chefs are some of the most badly paid people in the country, and somehow, marketers amongst the best. According to the Office for National Statistics, in 2009, income of the top fifth of households in the U.K. was around 15 times greater than that for the bottom fifth.

It’s all very unfair, but does it actually matter? Should we be like Mandelson, intensely relaxed about some people getting obscenely rich? Does the fact that these gaps are widening make a difference to our chance of achieving sustainability?

Last year, British epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett published The Spirit Level, a remarkable study of the relationship between income inequality and a wide range of social ills in rich countries. Struck by data showing that once gross income reaches a certain level, increasing it has no benefit to wellbeing, they mapped the effect of widening income disparities within countries on everything from teenage pregnancy to childhood mortality to obesity. In most cases the correlation is not just striking, it is eerily precise.

If you want to see for yourself, visit equalitytrust.org.uk, where you can see some of the data and hear from the authors. Last week, I was lucky enough to hear Richard Wilkinson talk about how the work has progressed since the book was published. The data has got even stronger, and stunningly, the analysis has been repeated for U.S. states, showing how those with the highest income inequalities perform worse. There is also a correlation between equality and positive environmental behaviors, with those in more equal countries more likely to recycle.

Wilkinson also talked wearily of how the findings have been under attack from what he termed “the right” — commentators in various think tanks and media ideologically opposed to what he is saying and wanting to challenge his evidence. What’s interesting about this backlash is not so much the claims themselves — which Wilkinson and Pickett answer comprehensively on their site — but what underlies them. Clearly, as with climate change, it is very hard for some people to accept scientific evidence that does not fit with their way of seeing the world. The idea that making the rich richer causes more harm than good is politically inconvenient in the same way that the idea of the Earth going round the sun once was.

This is a particular challenge for Britain’s coalition government — and indeed all governments in rich countries who think the great prize is economic growth, and its effects on equality generally a secondary consideration. Though in the run-up to the election, David Cameron and others seemed to acknowledge the importance of fairness and equality, Broken Britain seems set to stay broken by the way the deficit is to be dealt with. The cost of bailing out the banks will fall disproportionately on those already disadvantaged, with the Institute for Fiscal Studies claiming the effect of cuts to public services on poorer households has not been factored in to the government’s analysis.

As Kate Pickett pointed out recently, if Cameron’s idea of a “Big Society” is going to mean anything, it will depend on us seeing our relationships with each other as at least as important as the pursuit of wealth. Perhaps that’s why we Brits find talking about money so embarrassing — we know deep down that discovering differences in this key driver of self-esteem will do more harm than good. Sustainable development also depends on high stocks of social capital — connection, reciprocity, trust, and the institutions that embody them. In short, high and growing inequality will not deliver sustainability.

This is a very challenging truth at a time of cuts and crisis in public services. A growing number of commentators (including the Financial Times‘ Martin Wolf) are saying that the scale of cuts planned in the government’s Comprehensive Spending Review (to be announced on Oct. 20) will damage the chance of economic recovery. If they also make inequality worse, their effect may be to diminish still further our inclination to save the planet. Though the government and the Labor Party under Ed Miliband both make noises about “fairness,” our chances of creating a Big Society or fixing Broken Britain in a rapidly deteriorating environment are practically nil. Maybe that’s another taboo, but it’s something we have to start talking about.

Ed Miliband, new leader of Britain’s Labor PartyPhoto: Ed Miliband campaign

Previously on Miliband: Ed and David, sons of Marxist firebrand Ralph Miliband (a Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied Belgium), enter politics. David, four years older, works in Prime Minister Tony Blair’s office, becomes a member of parliament, swiftly moves up the ranks and becomes environment secretary, then foreign secretary, and is widely tipped to become Blair’s successor and the new leader of the Labor Party. Ed, meanwhile, works in Gordon Brown’s office, becomes a member of parliament a few years after David, but rises equally swiftly, joining his brother in government as energy and climate change secretary.  

When Brown steps down as leader, David declares his candidacy. Shortly afterward, Ed enters the fray. Seen as an outsider, and definitely the junior partner, Ed ultimately wins the race by the narrowest of margins. David sets off for the political wilderness.

With the drama coming to an end, attention is turning to what Ed Miliband would actually do were he elected prime minister in five years’ time. The labyrinthine electoral system by which the Labor Party chooses its leader would take pages to explain, but Ed Miliband won in the end by managing to amass more support from the trade unions than did his brother David.  This means he is now dubbed ‘Red Ed’ by much of the right-wing media here, who predict a “lurch to the left” in the party. This is pretty dumb: The likelihood that anyone would lurch to the left and still hope to get elected is nil. Ed Miliband’s greater challenge may be to put much clear water between himself and the ruling coalition government on anything.

With the coalition government making much play of its green ambitions, it will be interesting to watch how Miliband will position Labor on the environment. As energy and climate change secretary, he won a lot of friends in the environmental movement. Writing in the Guardian, Friends of the Earth U.K. Executive Director Andy Atkins welcomed his appointment, giving Ed much of the credit for bringing the Climate Change Act (which commits the U.K. to binding targets on CO2 emissions reductions) into force.  It was also Ed who introduced the feed-in tariffs that will reward households that install renewable energy technologies, and insisted that no new coal-fired power plants could be built without carbon capture and storage technology. Even stern critic George Monbiot reckons Ed is the only major party leader who recognizes the contradiction in having greenhouse-gas emissions targets and hunting for new oil.

Will this track record be carried into practice, and will Miliband be able to hold the coalition government to account if it backtracks on its commitments?  With the Labor Party conference in full flow in Manchester as I write, it’s astonishing to learn there is not a single major session on the environment.  Yesterday’s events were dominated by Ed’s first speech as party leader, the central theme of which was “a new generation for change” — an attempt to put clear water between the Ed generation (he’s 40) and the Tony/Gordon generation.  So, no more “New” Labor; the Iraq War was a mistake; and the party has become stuck in its old certainties. And though there wasn’t much focus on the environment in the speech, a short passage proposed climate change as another feature of the generation gap. As he put it: “When I think about my son, I think what he will be asking me in 20 years time is whether I was part of the last generation not to get climate change or the first generation to get it. And climate change … can’t be tackled by the politics we have.”

Well, it’s very early days for Ed, and much to do if he is to have any chance of beating Prime Minister David Cameron’s coalition in a few years’ time. If his older sibling does indeed leave politics today, it should at least avoid an even worse struggle for power than we saw in the Blair/Brown years, and give Ed a clear run. How much he’ll want to make the environment a key platform of his leadership remains to be seen.

Commentators in both the Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph recently launched spiteful attacks on him for allowing the Copenhagen climate summit to influence his marriage plans, knowing that much of their readership is still ready to see the environment as the concern of nutters and do-gooders. Many of these readers are part of the group of 5 million voters that Labor lost between its landslide victory in 1997 and its election loss in May of this year.  

If Ed wants Labor to reshape the center ground of politics, as he claimed in his speech, he will have to find ways to sell environmentalism to them. His best route in may be in his comments about “community, belonging, and solidarity.” Reframing a protected environment as the necessary backdrop to these laudable qualities might give him more traction with Middle England than any number of visits to international conferences.

Energy and Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne.Photo courtesy Liberal Democrats via Flickr

Huhne is a Liberal Democrat, so his remarks at the Economist Energy Summit began with the now ritual reassurances about the ability of coalitions to tackle the big challenges. The last one, he pointed out, won the war. (It wasn’t you Americans after all!) This one will have to tackle the greatest challenge facing the nation (that’s the deficit) and the greatest challenge facing humanity (that’s the climate), both at the same time. The challenge is so humungous it almost calls for the underwear to be worn outside the trousers, as in cartoonist Steve Bell’s famous caricature of luckless Prime Minister John Major.

To the rescue in tackling this stereo apocalypse comes the “Big Society,” and as of this week, the Green Deal. Huhne pointed first to how other nations are getting on with it — “Even in the United States” — putting Europe’s lead in low-carbon tech at risk. That’s the rest of Europe, presumably, since the U.K. has been doing little more than blowing its vuvuzela in the spectator area when it comes to renewables. He then softened his audience up a bit further by pointing out how “events in the Gulf of Mexico” have given us all pause for thought on the question of energy security and energy prices. Given all this and the need to cut emissions drastically and renew our energy infrastructure, he promised a reshaping of the climate-change levy to create a carbon price floor.

But his main thrust was about the fourth low-carbon energy source. The first three are renewables, nuclear, and fossil fuels with CCS. The fourth is energy efficiency. Huhne pointed out the tragic state of the U.K. housing stock when it comes to energy, saying we “may as well be burning £50 notes outside our front doors.” Crucially, Huhne is reframing this challenge as a means of driving economic recovery, pointing to 14 million homes in the U.K. that might benefit from the Green Deal, which could “unlock tens of billions of spending in the coming years.” But it’s not the public coffers where this money is locked up, but in energy companies and high-street retailers who are willing to pay for their customers’ energy-efficiency investments, as long as householders then pay the money back from the energy savings they make.

There’s proven demand for such “pay as you save” schemes and some have been trialled. But there are some tricky things to sort before this can be applied across the housing stock. What’s to stop householders turning their heating up a bit and wiping out any savings? What about the very long payback periods for the more expensive measures like triple glazing? Who will underwrite the risk of these investments never paying back? In the budget, Chancellor George Osborne put the figure of £6,500 ($9,700) per household as the cost of retrofit, but in truth this would take most households to a 30 percent reduction. Since the need is to go to 90 percent ultimately, it would be much better done straightaway rather than in two or three phases, but of course this will cost more — perhaps £40,000 ($59,696) per household — a rather more daunting investment scenario for both householder and service provider.

So, some way to go, but this is promising stuff. It was also interesting to hear Huhne reiterate the coalition commitment to new nuclear (to which he is personally deeply opposed), but also remind his audience that there would be no public subsidy, “a pledge robustly guaranteed by the state of the public finances.” Whether this, in truth, puts nuclear back on the path into the wilderness, we can only hope.

Britain’s housing stock: charming but leakyPhoto courtesy UGArdener via Flickr

Take moving to low-carbon energy.  One of the greatest challenges in the U.K. is the housing stock — the most energy inefficient in Europe, and responsible for 60 percent of emissions from the built environment here. Energy use in housing has actually risen in the last 20 years, with emissions only remaining stable because of the increasing use of gas as a primary heating source and fuel. And most of these terrible houses will still be with us in 2050 when we are to have achieved an 80 or 90 percent reduction in emissions. 

With retrofit the priority, the question is, who’s going to do it? The big utilities are interested but have so far struggled to find a business model that reduces demand for their product and still stacks up. The regulatory barriers to them providing energy services and offering energy-efficiency measures to householders as part of a package are largely gone, and some, including British Gas, are experimenting with various new technologies and service models in the demand-management space. Despite these promising efforts, progress generally is slow, and for most of the big energy “incumbents,” there’s little incentive to change the energy game fundamentally.

The “big society” answer to the retrofit challenge is for communities to form associations that provide a route to the finance and practical measures that individual households find difficult to achieve on their own. It’s an increasingly popular approach, and in my town of Oxford, there is one of the most advanced such groups, Low Carbon West Oxford, which is rapidly scaling up retrofitting of households and finding ways to finance community-scale energy schemes. Examples like this are very encouraging — but they require enormous effort on the part of the founding members. Oxford is perhaps Britain’s most middle-class city, so there is a fair amount of participants’ “linking” social capital being leveraged. A new group, Low Carbon Oxford North, is forming around my kitchen table at the moment, with the founders including the chair of an environment think tank, a senior sustainability consultant, and a seasoned environmental fundraiser. If the model for change is that this sort of group will happen everywhere, it’s not obvious who is going to form them in the run-down housing estates of Birmingham, Liverpool, and East London.

The grease in the wheels of all this should, of course, be local government. Municipalities are nothing more than the formal expression of “big society” and are the obvious enablers of a community-based low-carbon energy transition. So are they stuck in to this challenge? In some respects, yes. Councils such as Woking are doing a lot to help their citizens step up. But in my personal experience, in others, there’s still a long way to go.

Six years ago, I built Cheltenham’s first eco-house. Back then, I hoped the energy-efficiency plans I had would be of interest to Cheltenham Council, given their many policies on sustainability, so it was a surprise to discover the plans had absolutely no bearing on the council’s planning decisions. This year I am renovating a house in Oxford, and had aimed for PassivHaus standards, showcasing how it could be done in a typical English suburban house. Part of my plan was to put solar power on the roof. I imagined times had changed, and that the planners would now be insisting that I include such measures, so it was a shock to discover last week that, according to Oxford city council’s development control officers, solar power is still not part of their planning decisions, except when they have concerns about it being “ugly.”

As we lag behind every nation in Europe apart from mighty Luxembourg in our generation of renewable energy, it’s surprising to learn that matters of opinion on the appearance of a house from the street might still trump the need to tackle climate change in the realpolitik of Oxford decision making. I will probably persist with my crazy green dreams because, hey, that’s the eco-warrior creed, but were I the average citizen thinking of joining the big society and looking for an encouraging sign, this would not be it. In fact, I would give up straightaway. The idea that we will achieve 90 percent carbon reduction in this context is clearly a pipe dream, a bit like winning the World Cup: a very popular idea, but no real belief or convincing plan that could make it a reality. 

I’m reminded of Billy Bragg’s song “The Home Front,” which takes a look at British ambition and concludes that “our place in history is as clock watchers, old timers, window shoppers.” It’s too early to write off the big society, but we have to be realistic about the barriers and the potential scale of community action. That said, with unemployment heading for record numbers, there are going to be an awful lot of Brits with time on their hands in the coming years. Maybe they hold the key to Britain’s retrofit question.

The cover of Great Britain’s Daily Express — “His rants against BP are a disgrace.”Photo courtesy of the Daily Express

While it’s definitely not a diplomatic incident, and of course Americans don’t just think of BP as a British company, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has the British media transfixed.

The Daily Mail has in recent days cranked up the anti-American sentiment, lambasting what it calls “Obama’s inflammatory rhetoric,” and contrasting it with the rather muted response so far from Prime Minister David Cameron and foreign secretary William Hague.

“When disaster strikes, the U.S. will NEVER take the blame,” rages Michael Hanlon, the Mail’s science correspondent and erstwhile climate change denier. According to Hanlon, the U.S. walked away from Bhopal, defended Exxon rather than its own citizens in Alaska, and tried to get away with paying Britain a mere $50 in the wake of the 1966 Torrey Canyon oil spill. We, meanwhile, kept the upper lip stiff when the U.S.-owned Piper Alpha rig burned down off Aberdeen in 1988, killing 150 Brits and taking out 10 percent of North Sea oil production.

Stirring stuff. But as comedian Bill Bailey pointed out recently, “when you read an article in the Daily Mail and think, ‘They’ve got a bloody good point’, your life is effectively over and you should give up immediately.”

Our politicians have also been reluctant to take this populist bait. Until today, the only high profile Tory willing to stick his boot in was Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, a man well known for flying off the handle. In this case, Johnson suggested that it’s a matter of national concern “if a great U.K. company is being continually beaten up on the international airwaves.”

British business leaders have also joined the fray, calling for Cameron to be more forthright in backing BP. In an open letter to Obama, John Napier, CEO of British financial services giant Royal Sun Alliance, went further, suggesting that Cameron’s “double standards” along with anti-British rhetoric are fueling the collapse of BP’s share price. Given that BP stock hit a 13-year low yesterday, Napier may have a point; though, to be fair, the markets may also be reacting to the unpleasant fact that BP will be picking up a very large tab for the worst environmental disaster the U.S. has ever seen.

So, I’m afraid it’s not anything as important as the health of the Gulf’s fisheries, wildlife, or residents that is now dominating the debate here. The more pressing question for the average Brit is whether BP will pay a dividend, and if not, what impact that decision will have on U.K. pension funds.

“Obama’s boot on the throat of British Pensioners,” raged the Telegraph on Thursday, a theme taken up Friday by the Daily Express with their nicely balanced headline: “Barack Obama is killing all our pensions.”

In fact, BP dividends account for a significant portion of the pension plans of 18 million Brits, so this concern is justified. A Guardian poll found that 56 percent of respondees want the dividend paid, and in the accompanying debate commentators Dan Roberts and Nils Pratley argued for and against payment, focusing on how BP can best manage the political fallout, avoid the most ‘wacky’ financial demands of U.S. politicians, and pay dividends eventually.

One fascinating sub plot in this shifting story is the tragic figure of Tony Hayward, a kind of replacement fall guy now that Gordon Brown has left the stage. Once an ‘affable geologist,’ Hayward is now the man who can do no right. It’s all the more ironic since Hayward was brought into the ditch by all that ‘Beyond Petroleum’ green whimsy of his predecessor, Lord Browne, and instead focused on technical excellence and safety. In apparently failing to achieve the latter, Hayward has lost any ground BP might have gained by positioning itself as a friend of the environment.

No one here is calling for Hayward’s head yet, not publicly anyway. But the bookmakers Paddy Power have now cut the odds of Hayward resigning this year to ½ — from Tuesday’s 5/6 line. “You know your luck is definitely out,” said Paddy Power, “when the president of the U.S. reckons you should be fired.”

Where all this goes next is anyone’s guess. But the tide may be turning, slightly, for BP. Cameron is due to phone Obama this weekend and perhaps ask him nicely to ease off. I wonder if he’ll make the call before or after football (the U.S. meets England in a World Cup match on Saturday).

Either way, given that BP has an equal number of shareholders and employees on both sides of the Atlantic, forcing the oil giant into failure seems ultimately to be in the interests only of its rivals — with Exxon the most likely buyer of the remnants. That’s a thought to make an environmentalist on either side of the Atlantic shudder.

Just the usual crowd on a usual day in London…Photo courtesy of Odolphie via flickr

Environmentalists in Britain and elsewhere have sometimes been reluctant to talk about population in recent years. But with the U.K. Office of National Statistics projecting a 9 million rise in the country’s population to 70 million by 2030, it’s increasingly difficult to get away from the old Malthusian dilemma of population, resources, and economic growth.   

Engaging in this debate is fraught with risks for the well-meaning green. As Sara Parkin puts it [PDF], “The maths of sustainability is simple — it requires fewer people, consuming less — yet we find it difficult to talk about either.”

We all sort of know deep down that if it looks difficult for 6 billion global citizens to achieve the standard of living we are used to in the West, then it’s got to be much harder — about 50 percent harder, in fact — for 9 billion to do the same. With poor countries consuming so much less per capita, it’s been fair to look to the high-consuming nations to clean up their act, rather than blame population and economic growth in the South for the ills of the world. If numbers in wealthy nations like the U.K. are increasing too, any moral stance we might take on population management elsewhere looks holed beneath the waterline. Time to take on this taboo. But with the increase in numbers in Britain largely a result of immigration, simply raising it can easily be cast as racist, especially by those with an anti-migrant axe to grind.

So, girding up our loins, we at Forum for the Future entered the fray yesterday with a report on the implications of U.K. population growth for sustainability. Growing Pains: Population and Sustainability in the U.K. [PDF] sets out our stall, in what we hoped would be a reasonable but challenging way. We looked at the environmental and social consequences of 14 percent more Brits on our crowded island, and found that — guess what? — resource demands will almost certainly increase, along with waste and pollution. So we set out a seven-point plan — from preparing for the increase, to managing it down through better family planning (a third of U.K. pregnancies are unplanned), to developing new attitudes to aging, to rethinking our growth paradigm — and called for an objective and sensible discussion on immigration and population. And then we held our breath …

It was the first Forum for the Future study ever to be picked up big time by all of our tabloid newspapers. Since most of them are just a teensy bit “conservative,” we feared the worst. The Daily Mail and the Daily Express were perhaps the most excitable, with the latter inevitably focusing on how a “migrants boom” would throw our public services “into chaos.” But they also reported our recommendations in a pretty balanced way. The BBC and ITN were more measured still. By and large, we seem to have successfully avoided coming to the aid of anti-immigration groups, most of whom are perhaps still licking their wounds in the aftermath of the British National Party making zero headway in the recent election.

Whether that means the average Brit is up for a sensible debate on population and sustainability is rather less clear. They’re certainly up for debate: With 185 comments on the Daily Mail story and counting, there’s any amount of opinion, but about 99 percent — including all the highest rated comments — express raw anti-immigrant sentiment. Particularly vehement are the Brits living abroad, who of course like nothing better than the idea that the country has gone to the dogs since they left. I wonder if they think they should be sent home too — along with the 6 million or so other Britons living overseas.

Scary stuff, and the temptation is to run away. But in the end, if we believe we have to face the population question globally, then we have to face it within each country, and Britain can’t be an exception.

Prime Minister David Cameron and Energy and Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne heading out to announce that the government will cut its greenhouse-gas emissions by 10 percent over the next 12 months.Photo: Prime Minister’s Office

Amongst the many surprises of the recent British election campaign was the near absence of environment from the parties’ campaigns and the first ever prime-ministerial debates. Does it mean the British care less about the environment than in previous years? Apparently not: The share of the green vote held up and the Green Party won its first-ever seat in the British Parliament (Caroline Lucas, leader of the party and long time member of the European Parliament, taking Brighton from Labor). 

But with the parties fairly close to each other on much of environment policy, there were more points to be scored by talking about social policy (we are bracing ourselves for Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron’s “Big Society,” whatever that means) and, of course, dealing with the deficit, where we are up there with European basket cases like Greece, Spain, and Portugal.

Having torn lumps out of each other for months on these and other issues, our identikit party leaders now find themselves round the table in Britain’s first true coalition government in 65 years — with the Conservative Party in charge along with the minority-partner Liberal Democrats. I’ll spare you the constitutional niceties of how that came about; suffice to say that political commentators, having had to speculate wildly for several days about what the outcome of the election might be, now find themselves, along with the new government, in largely uncharted waters. In a cabinet of 23, Lib Dems hold five posts, including the responsibility for energy and climate change, which has gone to Chris Huhne, millionaire businessman and one-time contestant for the leadership of the Lib Dems.

This appointment throws into sharp relief the strategic and tactical questions this coalition raises for the future program of the government, not least on environmental policy. Despite substantial areas of common ground — on the need to cut emissions, boost renewable-energy generation, and create a “green bank” for investment in cleantech, for example — the Lib Dems have long been opposed to new nuclear reactors to replace Britain’s aging nuclear fleet, whilst the Conservatives see nuclear as the mainstay of both emissions reduction and future energy security in the U.K.  

This issue is such a clear divide that in the formal agreement about the coalition, the issue is dealt with directly, with a bizarre result. The government (i.e., Huhne) will bring forward a “national planning statement” that will give permission for new nuclear plants to be built, but then Lib Dems (including Huhne) would be allowed to abstain from the vote bringing it into force. This in effect means that the Conservatives can push it through on their own, whilst the Lib Dems have (just about) a path of dignity in opposing it and allowing it. What Green supporters who voted Lib Dem for their anti-nuclear stance will make of this is anyone’s guess. 

In any case, both parties are agreed that there should be no public money for nuclear power, and since no nuclear power plant has been built, ever, without such subsidy, it will be interesting to see if any of the utility companies that were lining up to build the new capacity will still find it so appealing. Lib Dems are presumably hoping not. 

Elsewhere the picture seems a bit clearer, and generally positive for the environment. Campaigners are elated at the scrapping of Labor’s plans for a third runway at Heathrow. The coalition agreement makes positive noises about a new high-speed rail network — though it’s hard to see how that will be paid for any time soon. Though there’s no new target on the proportion of energy from renewables, investment in marine power and anaerobic digestion gets a mention, as does a smart grid to link it all up, smart meters to make us all more frugal in using it, and other measures to boost energy efficiency in the home. And along with the promise of public investment in carbon capture and storage (CCS) and a floor price for carbon comes an undertaking to prevent new coal-fired power without sufficient CCS to meet a demanding emissions standard.  

Some cynics have suggested that Lib Dems have been given jobs that are either so marginal to the conservative project that they don’t matter, or that require them to dip their hands in the blood of “dealing with the deficit” and so alienate their supporter base. A more nuanced view is that the coalition has enabled Cameron to do what he could not have done with a majority, giving him a reason to be more positive about the environment and Europe and move his party further onto the center ground. If he succeeds in finally decontaminating the Tory brand in this way, they argue, he will have laid the foundation for successive conservative governments for many years to come.

Whatever the motivation, the new team have started with a bang. On Friday, Cameron announced that government will cut its own emissions by 10 percent in the next 12 months. Speaking to staff at the Department for Energy and Climate Change, he said, “I want this to be the greenest government ever.”  Meanwhile, Huhne took up the reins at DECC, promising to put energy security “at the heart of the U.K.’s national security strategy” and to “fundamentally change how we supply and use energy in Britain.” Amen to that.