It’s half an hour or so after the end of Britain’s biggest-ever protest against climate change, and I’m still hanging out in Trafalgar Square.

A few groups of kids are milling around, and a couple of anarchists have set up a bicycle-powered disco. One or two old-timers are trying to get rid of their last remaining copies of the Socialist Worker. Most of the protesters have heeded the organizers’ advice to reuse or recycle their placards, but the local cleaning crews are quick on the job, cleaning up the rest of the rubbish to get the place ready for a typical London Saturday night. Everyone else is heading home, or to the pub.

My cell phone rings.

“Meet us near the top of the square,” says the voice on the other end of the line. “We’re wearing the tiger suits.”

So begins my foray into the world of radical opposition to climate change.

It’s been a big year for climate change in Britain — in several ways. The country’s three main political parties have more or less converged on the idea that something needs to be done urgently about global warming. Even the last holdout, the Conservative Party, has come over all green, going as far as to change their party logo from a torch to a tree.

The recent Stern Review, commissioned by the man likely to be the next prime minister, puts a pound amount on future upheaval along with a cost estimate for the change to a low-carbon economy. A system of mandatory individual carbon allowances — an idea outlined in Grist last year — is closer to becoming reality. And that big march to coincide with the Nairobi climate change conference? It drew 20,000 people.

Bubbling underneath all this highly visible mainstream progress, however, is a current of direct action — a hardened core of activists who have decided that it’s time to throw their bodies in front of the coming storm.

My efforts to track down this new wave led me to settle down on steps near Nelson’s Column to chat with a guy in a tiger suit.

A Rising Tide Floats All Votes

John Zee (not his real name) is a polite chap, and once we get to talking he seems no more outrageous or paranoid than your average activist. But behind the whiskers it’s clear that his brand of action is much different than that of mainstream environmental groups. Zee is part of London Rising Tide, a group with about 10 or 15 regulars and 40 or so occasional sympathizers.

“What people speaking at the demonstration today want is capitalism light, capitalism with a smile, and most of them believe this is the way we’re going to fight climate change and save the planet,” he says. “We disagree.”

Traditional direct actions, like tree sits and bulldozer blockades, have been designed to halt or stall the effects of environmental destruction. But you can’t chain yourself to a hurricane or stand in the way of a flood, so these protesters have had to focus on the sources of climate change — things like power stations and airports.

In August, Rising Tide helped organize a “climate camp” at Europe’s biggest coal-fired power plant, the Drax Power Station in Yorkshire, northern England. Hundreds of protesters spent a week near the station and nearly 40 were arrested in minor scuffles with police.

Brits get in their leader’s face.

Photo: Greenpeace

Another coal-fired power station west of London has been targeted twice this year: in July by a small group of protesters calling themselves “Reclaim Power,” and again by a larger group from Greenpeace earlier this month.

“We want to show that the only way we’re going to cut carbon emissions by 90 percent is if we shut these plants down ourselves,” Zee says.

Of course, direct environmental action is nothing new, and energy generation has long been a source of controversy. But several of the people I talked to indicated that activists here in Britain are ready to unleash a massive new wave of climate change-focused actions to rival in scale the opposition to the government’s huge road-building projects that took place in the 1990s.

“People who have been environmental activists on a variety of issues before are shifting their focus, largely because the problem of climate change is on such a massive scale that it makes other causes look small in comparison,” says Leo Murray of the group Plane Stupid.

“In the process, we’ve seen loads of new people contact us recently,” Murray says. “These are people who aren’t traditionally drawn to direct action but they realize the extent of climate change.”

It’s the Planes, Stupid

No, Plane Stupid isn’t arguing against high-carbon Euclidian geometry — their name reflects how they feel about the airline industry.

They’ve picked a tough battle. Big national airlines like British Airways, Air France, and Alitalia are deeply ingrained in the psyche of their respective countries, and they’re also massively subsidized. And the past decade has seen an explosion of cheapo short-haul carriers. For pennies (sometimes literally), no-frills airlines like EasyJet, Ryanair, and Air Berlin fly Europeans all over the continent — sometimes to places they didn’t even know they wanted to go (anybody for sunny Rijeka, Croatia?).

Members of Plane Stupid hold a sit-in at
Nottingham Airport.

Photo: Plane Stupid

In Britain, the idea of a “right to fly” has become so pervasive that supporters of airline fuel taxes are routinely accused of snobbery and elitism. The argument goes something like this: Higher taxes mean Tony Blair and his mates will still be able to unwind in Tuscany, but working-class families won’t get their own holidays in the sun.

Undaunted, Murray and Plane Stupid answer back by pointing out that the worst effects of climate change will affect the world’s poorest people. When I met up with him in a west London pub, he told me he and his fellow activists are prompted to act not just because of what climate change might bring in the future, but what’s happening right now.

“Here in the U.K., we’ve had a drought in the summer and an unusually warm autumn,” he says (which explains why I was still picking zucchini out of my garden on Halloween). “People have become aware that our climate has changed. There is massive suffering and death because of this, and it’s not a radical anarchist position that we’re expressing, it’s a scientific truth.”

According to industry and government figures, air travel only makes up about 6 percent of Britain’s carbon emissions, but with major airport expansion projects at Heathrow and elsewhere, that figure is expected to grow substantially.

A report [PDF] by one of the country’s leading climate change institutes estimated that if air travel emissions keep rising at the same rate, all British houses, businesses, and cars will have to be carbon neutral in order for the U.K. to hit its target of a 60 percent cut in carbon dioxide by 2050.

Still, in these terror-tainted times, sitting on airport runways is probably not the way many would choose to express discontent at climate policy. But that didn’t stop members of Plane Stupid from marching into Nottingham Airport — chosen because it handles short-haul flights — in September, throwing themselves down on a runway, and shutting the place down for the afternoon.

Twenty-four of them were arrested, but in something of a reversal of fortune for environmental protesters, Murray says his group hasn’t simply been dismissed as Plane Idiots.

“In the past, lots of people just didn’t respond well to direct action,” Murray says. “So you often heard people say ‘There’s lots of ways you can protest within the law, so why are you breaking it — what gives you the right?’ But since the [Drax] climate camp, the only response we’ve had is ‘good on ya.’” (That’s the Brit-speak equivalent of a pat on the back).

“It has to do with the issue and our approach, which is a far cry from the old-style environmentalism that some people saw as human bashing,” he says.

Extremism Is in the Eye of the Beholder

Of course, it’s not just a shower of bread and roses for the direct action crowd. One leading climate change scientist has criticized the “language of chaos and controversy” surrounding environmental debate in Britain. And although the activists may be thinking like revolutionaries, there’s a view that says climate change is too big of a problem to tackle via the type of focused actions that tend to attract banner headlines.

“What they maybe don’t realize is how pervasive carbon is in our everyday lives, how every little thing we do affects our carbon output, and how complex the science behind it is,” one scientist friend of mine told me in the pub after the London climate march (OK, so I spend a lot of time in the pub — at least I drink locally produced beer).

There’s also the question of whether the protests, by impeding power plants or blocking runways, have any real positive effect on the environment — and if not, whether that even matters.

Greenpeace activist Ben Stewart told me that his group prevented 20,000 tons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere when they forced Didcot power station west of London to partially shut down earlier this month. That might sound like a lot, until you compare it with Britain’s total carbon output: more than 150 million metric tons a year.

On the other hand, activists argue that symbolism is powerful. “At Drax, most of us felt we could shut the plant down, but we made the decision not to. The point was to demonstrate we had the power to do so if we wanted,” John Zee says. “And we’re not just shutting things down and saying no, we’re saying yes to things like decentralized energy, to community gardens.”

Indeed, every political or cultural movement needs a story, with characters, events, catalysts, drama, and struggle. So could one of the British protesters become the Emily Wilding Davison or Rosa Parks or Julia Butterfly Hill of the climate change movement? Will people a couple of decades from now look back and, in Leo Murray’s words, “know that we were right, and know who the real extremists were”?

Obviously, there’s no way to know the answers to those questions right now. But in the meantime, activists are already holding meetings and planning for the next climate camp — coming to a British power plant yet to be determined, some time in 2007.

All’s quiet on the Alston front.

Photo: www.visitcumbria.com.

And not just any old hags, either — residents of this northern English town would prefer strapping young things who aren’t afraid to get dirty. “Quite frankly, old people are not going to give us the vitality that we need,” says Vince Peart, the cheerful if lovelorn spokesperson for the town’s matchmaking campaign. “We’re looking for young people who will work.”

The area around Alston, a hamlet perched in the Pennine mountains, was once home to 20,000 people. Nowadays it’s closer to 2,000. While Peart’s booty call has proved to be a headline-grabbing move, he admits it’s not just women the town is lacking. Warm bodies of all sorts are in short supply.

Peart is trying to keep positive as he crisscrosses Britain on a double-headed mission to lobby politicians on rural issues and get dates for his buddies. He and other lonely Alstonites should take heart, though: they’re really not alone. Around the world, a demographic shift is under way, with people having fewer children. The resulting population decrease could — more than hybrid cars or wind farms or policy shifts — be our best hope for the salvation of the planet. Eventually.

Less Is More, More or Less

The little attention given to shrinking populations tends to focus on Europe. Among the nations with the lowest fertility levels in the world are relatively rich countries like Italy and Spain, but they are matched by still-developing Eastern European nations like Romania and Ukraine. Even the continent’s comparatively lusty countries, such as France and Ireland, are only cranking out an average of 1.8 children per woman — well below the “replacement level” of 2.1 that’s needed to sustain current population levels.

Last of a dying breed?

Photo: iStockphoto.

Populations are declining in seven of the 25 European Union member countries, and the trend will continue. According to Eurostat [PDF], the E.U.’s pocket-protector brigade, population numbers will rise gradually over the next two decades to about 470 million, thanks mainly to immigration, before falling by 20 million people by mid-century, when immigration will no longer be able to offset rising death rates and falling birthrates. Germany alone is projected to lose 8 million by 2050, a drop of nearly 10 percent from its present population of 82.5 million — that’s a loss roughly equal to the populations of its five biggest cities combined.

This trend isn’t brand-new; in fact, Oxford demographer David Coleman dates declining birthrates in Europe to the social-welfare state that began in the 1930s. In a society veering away from agriculture, he points out, children were no longer worth it, in hard economic terms. Other explanations for falling birthrates include women’s rights, increasing female participation in the workforce, and birth-control programs.

Outside Europe, a notable trend toward depopulation is also occurring in Japan, where the fertility rate has fallen in recent years. The government estimates that by 2050 there will be 25 million fewer Japanese — that’s like saying goodbye to one-fifth of the current population, or all of greater Tokyo.

But the real surprise may be that birthrates are falling even in developing nations. Throughout the developing world, the U.N. says, people are having fewer babies — an average of fewer than three per woman — and 20 developing countries have fertility levels below the 2.1 replacement level. China’s policies, including the notorious one-child rule, have driven its birthrate from 5.9 in the 1970s to sub-replacement level. An even larger decrease — the fastest ever recorded — occurred in Iran, which dropped from seven births per woman in the early ’80s to around the replacement level today.

So is this good news for those concerned about crowding and consumption? Well, here’s where it gets a bit tricky. Even though birthrates are falling, we’re decades away from feeling the effects. According to the U.N.’s best guess, anyone still kicking in 50 years will be sharing the world with about 9 billion others. Even where birthrates are below replacement level, populations continue to grow — there’s a time lag before the effects of declining birthrates are felt. For instance, one estimate projects that China will still add 260 million people by 2025.

Business as usual in Tokyo.

Photo: iStockphoto.

Immigration and urbanization also create a sort of demographic microwave, leaving some areas ice cold and others blisteringly hot. In much of Europe and Japan, while rural areas are emptying out and birthrates are plunging, cities are coping with an influx of newcomers. For every amusing feature about a town like Alston, there’s a corresponding news flash about thousands of Eastern Europeans moving to the U.K. In Rome, squatters are angry about spiraling housing costs caused by overcrowding. Meanwhile, in the former East Germany, where a sagging economy and the ease of migration to the West are compounding downward population trends, they’re chopping up old communist apartment blocks to make nice low-density family homes — that is, if concrete can ever be considered either nice or low-density.

But still, the big picture is getting smaller. After 2050, the U.N.’s medium-scenario estimates say the world will grow more slowly, hitting a peak of about 10 billion people in 2200 before stabilizing or entering a period of slow decline. This involves a huge amount of guesswork — we’re talking about estimating the number of children born to parents who aren’t yet born themselves — but the ultra-long-term trends are down.

Crave New World

This may be bad news if you sell cradles or run a mommy podcast, but environmentalists could have cause for celebration. In Europe, some of the effects are already being felt. “The decline in population is opening room for species that have been pushed back by humans,” says Reiner Klingholz of the Berlin Institute for Population Development. “We’re seeing an increase in animals such as wolves and deer.

“In [eastern] Germany, for example, you have old buildings, houses, factories, railway lines, and so forth where nature has taken over,” he adds. “In places where there was nothing but humans and industry, now you have birds nesting in the rafters and foxes lurking around.”

And fewer people could also benefit — well, people. Oxford environmentalist and population expert Norman Myers says a smaller population is a more sustainable one. A drop in numbers could lead to a drop in energy use — think fewer cars on the road, fewer power plants, smaller towns — which bodes well for the climate. “This is something to be applauded solely because the sooner we move to declining populations, the less strain we place on the environment,” Myers says, “and the better off we’ll be.”

But let’s put the champagne and condoms on ice for a moment. Shifting populations bring their own set of concerns. For instance, Europe’s population is still rising — but four-fifths of that increase is due to immigration. Since new arrivals tend to be shunted into low-wage jobs, some demographers warn that European societies could fissure into two castes: childless Brahmins and the foreign underclasses who serve coffee, sweep streets, and shell out taxes to support them.

Gray matters.

Photo: iStockphoto.

On top of that, a declining population is an aging one. And in an aging society, says Philip Longman, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and author of The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do About It, “gray competes with green.” Older people tend to have more disposable income, and thus tend to consume more. They use more housing units per person than families, swelling their environmental footprint. And ultimately, says Longman, “aging societies will face budgetary pressures” — think Social Security and other pension plans — “that will leave less resources available for investment in cleaner energy, conservation, remediation, mass transit, and all other environmentally friendly goods.”

Could the environmental dream of zero population growth be a nightmare? Some think so. I ask Vince Peart if he sees any benefit to undercrowding. He thinks for a moment — long enough for a few Alston old-timers to drop off — but can’t come up with an answer. There aren’t more trees around or more native species to admire in his town. Perversely, the cost of living is going up as city people snap up second homes in the area. And the weekenders don’t tend to support local businesses. Finally, he just says, “We’re at risk of turning into something of a ghost town, a tourist attraction.”

The Incredible Shrinking Debate

With the global population zooming upward, it’s hard to drum up much talk about future depopulation. And even those you might expect to be excited at the prospect aren’t talking about it much, because advocating smaller populations isn’t very … sexy. Groups like Greenpeace and Oxfam, which once championed population control, now barely mention it, according to David Nicholson-Lord of the Optimum Population Trust. He says progressives haven’t been able to blend commitments to reproductive choice with sustainability, so raising the banner for population control has been left up to a few lonely voices on the left and, on the other end of the spectrum, the anti-immigration right.

“I think [population control] is deeply unfashionable, and taboo, and has fallen off of a lot of agendas — and that’s due partly to that broad agenda known as political correctness,” Nicholson-Lord says. “It’s seen as the wrong diagnosis and also as disempowering … it has a bad name, and unfairly, I think.”

Nicholson-Lord and his trust embrace positions that would make most liberals queasy, like zero net immigration for the U.K. He argues that more groups should concern themselves with such issues, since the environmental benefits of a lower population are just too high — and the world’s environmental problems too urgent — to push for anything less. “We have to think seriously about the world’s population,” he says, “and about what kind of levels can be sustained in the long term.”

If anybody running Europe is doing this type of pondering, they’re not saying. In the playground of public policy, population decrease is seen as a problem, not an opportunity. Several countries, including France and Estonia, offer generous pro-family benefits, while others, including Britain, Italy, Belgium, and Germany, are tinkering with their retirement systems to keep older residents working longer. But in debates over pensions and child and family benefits, serious discussion about proper population levels doesn’t really happen.

And there’s the challenge. The issue of population, once a key part of the green agenda, is today limited to a few demographers, think-tankers, and wonks. If countries can manage with fewer people, and even turn depopulation into an environmental benefit, we could be onto something big. Political tussles over whether to cut emissions or pursue clean technologies might seem as quaint and empty as a pub in Alston. But before that happens, we’ll have to start talking about it again.

Credit or debit … or planet?

What would you be willing to do to slow climate change?

Oh sure, you might drive and fly less. You might already have, like me, signed up for a green-energy plan. But would you hand over an ID card every time you filled up your gas tank? Would you let the government track each time you turned on your washing machine or computer? How about your nose-hair trimmer?

Residents of the U.K. might soon be compelled to take such measures. Although it hasn’t received much publicity outside the climate-research community, the dry-sounding yet radical idea of “Domestic Tradable Quotas” — basically, personal energy rationing — already has some influential backers in Britain.

I first stumbled upon this concept while putting together a radio documentary on the cultural effects of climate change. My journey began on a train from London to Norwich, a city in eastern England that’s home to one of the country’s main climate-research hubs, the Tyndall Center.

A scientist friend of mine who works at the center had promised to show me around and make a few introductions. Before that, however, she showed me a recent paper written by a few of her colleagues. “If you’re really interested in this sort of thing,” she said, “you’ve got to check out this.”

The paper was titled “Domestic Tradable Quotas: A policy instrument for the reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions” [PDF]. At the time, as you can imagine, I stifled a yawn and said, “Oh yeah, thanks” — but the laziness that passes for journalistic skepticism evaporated as I digested the report’s language.

Here’s how it would work. Every resident of the U.K. would receive an annual, identical allocation of carbon units, a number that would be reduced each year in line with the government’s climate-change goals. Each energy-quaffing Brit would also be issued a plastic card, like a climate-change Visa with an environmental spending limit. Every time cardholders used carbon-based energy — for example, by buying fuel or electricity — they’d have to swipe the card, and a number of DTQ points would be deducted.

According to research by Tina Fawcett of the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University, personal emissions among Britons currently vary by a factor of up to 12 — so capping everyone’s energy use at the same level might be a recipe for all sorts of trouble, in the nation that brought us soccer hooligans. But low-carbon users who don’t drive or fly much would be able to sell their excess units to Hummer owners, jet-setters, and others who refuse to get on the energy-reduction bandwagon. Under the model being studied, the units’ financial value would fluctuate throughout the year according to supply and demand, creating a government-supervised free market in carbon emissions.

Let’s Get Personal

Armed with this eye-opening report, I tracked down one of its primary researchers, Kevin Anderson. Since his research was peppered with phrases such as “equal per capita basis,” “trans-community theory of justice,” and even “communitarianism,” my mind was swimming with images of a bearded, sickle-waving Marxist. I was, of course, wrong. One of the main men looking at the possibility of thrusting Britain headfirst into a low-carbon economy is a friendly, perfectly reasonable chap.

“If we collectively decide to reduce the amount of carbon we emit, we have to decide what is a fair way of doing that,” he told me. “This scheme means that every individual, whether you’re the queen or someone living on a poor housing estate, will get the same allocation.” He suggested the economic effects of DTQs might not be too profound. People would be expected to change their behavior, he explained; faced with the financial disincentive of having to shell out at the end of the year for extra credits, he believes most would.

Will the queen have to hoof it?

Photo: Tom Hanks.

Much to my surprise, Anderson also told me that DTQs had already been considered in Parliament — albeit as part of a “10-minute rule bill,” a truncated legislative proposal that’s more of an attention-getting device than a serious attempt at passing a law. The bill’s sponsor was Member of Parliament Colin Challen.

“We have to get far more personal in the ways we tackle carbon emissions,” Challen told me. “A voluntary approach will only get through to about 20 percent of the population.” He said he’ll propose DTQs again in the current session of Parliament, in hopes of getting more people interested. He’s found some support among his colleagues, but says some elements in the Department of Trade and Industry and in the Treasury are “understandably wary” of the proposal.

Challen heads a parliamentary group on climate change. But he’s a “backbencher” — the rough equivalent of a junior member of Congress — and although he does belong to the ruling Labor Party, he’d be the first to admit that his sway over Tony Blair is somewhat limited. So, after chatting with him, I rang up MP Elliot Morley, a minister in the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs who has special responsibility for climate change. He does have Blair’s ear, and in all honesty I expected him to be a bit frosty to such a radical plan — that is, if he knew much about it at all.

Wrong again.

“Personal carbon allowances are a very attractive intellectual idea,” he told me by phone while on a chatter-filled train. “The implementation would potentially be very expensive, but that shouldn’t stop us from looking at the arguments.”

Although the details have yet to be worked out, the government would have to either establish or sponsor the establishment of a nationwide database, produce and distribute the carbon cards, and make sure the whole system runs smoothly once it’s in place. Some of the costs could potentially be passed on to members of the public.

“There is a big job involved in explaining the idea of carbon allowances to the public,” Morley pointed out. “[But] we shouldn’t rule any idea out just on this basis.”

So … No Twisted Knickers?

For a serious plan that could have an astonishing impact on the country’s environment, politics, and economics, DTQs have received scant attention from London’s usually feverish press. Perhaps that’s because the idea is relatively new, and there are a few major problems that have yet to be even looked at, much less ironed out. (I’m sure it has nothing to do with Jude Law.)

One major issue would be the complexity of toting up and transferring, buying, and selling carbon points. At a very basic level, it might be difficult to determine what kinds of transactions would be included. My wife’s car commute to work certainly would, but what about mine and Elliot Morley’s long-distance train rides? Or the energy my computer is using while I write this story? Or even the purchase of a head of lettuce that was trucked in to a grocery store? The question of if and how the energy from these economic interactions would be counted is far from straightforward.

Then there’s the issue of having an extraordinary amount of personal detail in a centralized government database. Britons have already dealt with a recent proliferation of public closed-circuit television cameras (of the type used to capture suspects’ images in the recent bombings); a central London “congestion charge” program that keeps detailed records of license plates and vehicle movements; and a nasty legislative fight over mandatory ID cards.

In fact, some activists worry that Blair could piggyback DTQs onto ID cards in a massive attempt to greenwash the latter and make them more palatable to his center-left base. But, says Michael Parker, spokesperson for No2ID, an anti-identification-card organization, “There’s clearly many other ways in which such a [carbon-trading] scheme could be offered without adding the massive bureaucracy of an ID-card system.”

Despite these potential problems, Challen says DTQ implementation is “not a matter of if, but when.” Anderson predicted a program could be set up within four to 10 years. Last month, the influential Sustainable Development Commission, which reports to the prime minister, recommended that the government “formally consider” the proposal within two years. With the government taking the issue seriously, researchers are whispering about a critical mass and scrambling for funding to advance their studies, while NGOs and charities pay close attention as well.

In other words, the queen might want to look into switching full-time to the old-school renewable horse-and-buggy — just in case.