Andrew Simms's Blog, page 11

The four-day week: less is more

More free time, fewer carbon emissions and an answer to our economic woes. Why aren't we all working a four-day week?

In 2008, when much of the western world was reeling from the aftermath of the banking collapse, the US state of Utah quietly came up with a radical solution. The recession had hit hard, worsened by rapidly rising energy prices. Queues lengthened at food banks; unemployment and mortgage foreclosures rose dramatically. Money needed to be saved. The task fell to Jon Huntsman, the Republican governor. Instead of simply bringing a knife to public spending and pushing austerity measures, he surprised people with a new approach.

Back in 1970, an American management consultant called Riva Poor wrote a book advocating a revolution in work and leisure called 4 Days, 40 Hours. It caused a stir at the time, arguing that great benefits would flow from taking a longer weekend and working fewer but longer days. Then the issue went away. Quietly, though, a four-day week became a common option for public employees at city and county level. As a public administrator, Huntsman knew this, and he saw the opportunity to go further.

He realised that if swaths of public sector workers all worked a shorter week in unison, he'd be able to close public buildings on the extra day, so saving money. But something like this hadn't been tried state-wide before. All kinds of problems might emerge, from childcare to public anger over lack of access to services. "I thought, we can study this for another six months or we can do it, and figure it out as we go," Huntsman recalls.

At only a month's notice, 18,000 of the state's 25,000 workforce were put on a four-day week. Around 900 public buildings closed on Fridays, with even more partially closing. Many of the state's vehicles were left in their garages on the extra day, travelling 3m fewer miles. Only essential safety services and a few other staff were exempt. You might expect such a quick and significant change to cause turmoil.

"It started with a one-year test period, and there were hiccups at the beginning," says Professor Rex Facer, from Brigham Young University, an adviser on the initiative who also analysed its impact. "Some businesses complained about access to public officials on the day departments closed. But the agencies figured out the problems, the state communicated what it was doing better, and in six months complaints dropped to zero."

Facer looked into how the public and state employees responded. Eight out of 10 employees liked the four-day week and wanted it to continue. Nearly two-thirds said it made them more productive and many said it reduced conflict at home and work. Only 3% said it made childcare harder. Workplaces across the state reported higher staff morale and lower absenteeism. There were other surprises, too. One in three among the public thought the new arrangements actually improved access to services. "The programme achieved exactly what was intended," Facer says. "The public and businesses adapted to it. The extended opening times on the four days when employees worked were actually preferred by many. It was more convenient for them being able to contact public bodies before and after conventional working hours."

Falling energy prices reduced the expected economies, but the change still saved the state millions. Staff wellbeing went up with the longer weekend and with shorter, easier commuting outside the normal rush hour, which benefited other commuters, too, by reducing congestion. It wasn't the objective, but at a stroke the four-day week cut carbon emissions by 14%.

Then President Obama made Governor Huntsman his ambassador to China. In autumn 2011 the state-wide four-day week ended. Not because it had failed, but because it fell victim to a power struggle between the state legislature and the new, less committed governor's office.

Yet in spite of the repeal, the popularity of the shorter week meant it was kept by the state's larger cities, such as West Valley City and Provo, and was copied elsewhere, for example by the forestry department in Virginia. Far from being an evolutionary dead end for the workplace, the idea of changing the conventional five-day, 9am-5pm working week to reap a range of social, economic and environmental benefits is catching on.

Just weeks ago, Gambia announced a four-day week for public sector workers – not through economic necessity, but to allow more time for "prayer and farming". In Ghana there are calls to follow Gambia's example, to allow time for attending funerals on a Friday.

Yet mention shorter hours in Europe and people tend to think of the French 35-hour week, written off as a failure and largely repealed by former president Nicolas Sarkozy. Never mind that many French businesses kept their shorter week in spite of the change in the law – or that, quietly, over the last couple of decades, working less has also become the norm in the Netherlands. The Dutch seem to have found answers to all the practical problems that might come up. As in Utah, the public sector led the way in response to recession, this time in the early 1990s, by hiring new staff on 80% contracts.

Job-sharing in health and education is now standard. There are part-time bankers, surgeons and engineers. One in three Dutch men either works part-time or compresses his hours, as in Utah, introducing the term "daddy days" to the language. Many more women – three-quarters – work part-time. Polling suggests that almost all Dutch part-time workers do not want to increase their hours. The approach, backed by decent state childcare provision, allows for high levels of female employment.

But could it work in Britain, where we have the third longest working hours in Europe (behind only Austria and Greece)? The message from David Cameron and George Osborne appears to be that we can all expect to work longer and later in life, and very probably for lower pay. The state pension is being delayed until 68 for many, and if Britain renegotiates its relationship with the EU, as Cameron promises, even the current assurance of a maximum 48-hour week could disappear.

The last place you might expect a new, more progressive work culture to take root is in the bonus-fuelled City of London. But listening to 49-year-old Nick Robins, who analyses climate risks and challenges for HSBC, it seems the City could be hiding a little secret. "There's not much discussion of it," Robins says, "but if you want to work less, it seems to be quite open." He turned his back on the City's conventional long hours for a four-day week. "You may get 20% less pay but you get 50% more free time," he says. Other City workers are doing the same, Robins says, but without drawing attention to the fact. He finds the lack of discussion peculiar. "It is a strange thing that in the UK we haven't thought in a cultural sense about time. The debate is oddly absent, and then it comes up only to do with family – in other words, swapping one type of work for another."

Some businesses, though, are less shy about the benefits of a shorter week. Michael Pawlyn is one of the architects who worked on the Eden Project in Cornwall, and has gone on to become a world expert on biomimicry, taking lessons from nature on how to make things better. He'll explain how a beetle can teach you to harvest water in the desert or make fire detectors more sensitive. A big lesson from nature is the importance of fallow time: no ecosystem can be 100% productive all the time. Pawlyn gives staff at his own company "exploration days", when people can just go away and think. "It helps you to distinguish the things that are important from the things that are merely urgent," he says.

Jane MacCuish is a former colleague of Pawlyn's who works for Meadowcroft Griffin, an architecture firm where part-time working is the norm. Along with the company's directors and several of her colleagues, she works an unconventional shorter week. "I work only during school term time and the school day, from 9.30am-3pm," she says. "I work the same hours as my children, and I am efficient and productive in the time I have. The studio benefits from experienced people who need to balance their lives re-entering work, and you can't underestimate the value to society of having parents there after school for children."

The apparent indispensability of key professionals, in the health sector for example, is often used as an argument against shorter weeks. But Caroline Thould, a 39-year-old radiographer, found her employer, University College London Hospital, was open to the idea. She and her husband Peter both decided to go part-time after the birth of their second child, to share childcare.

"We'd both been full-time," Thould says, "and it was hard to lose the equivalent of a full-time salary, but we save on childcare. We still manage a holiday each year, and I think the children will benefit in the long run." In the time they claimed back, the couple helped build gardens at their children's nursery in Flitwick, Bedfordshire.

It's not only well-paid professionals who can afford to work less. Kathleen Cassidy is a 26-year-old community organiser on a low income who chose to work a 25-hour week. "I didn't have huge outgoings," she says. "Rent, food, not much on travel. I've never been much of a spendthrift, never really spent on holidays, cars or things like that. It simplifies life, having less money."

In her spare time, Cassidy has helped former prisoners with their rehabilitation, built a community garden for a housing association and been an activist with the campaign group UK Uncut. "It's about balance and having a passion," she says. "Also not being on a treadmill, where you just work, eat and sleep. I felt I wanted to produce things rather than consume all the time."

These people made choices to work less and adapt their lives. They are pioneers in a country like Britain, which does little to make it easier for people to work less. Choice matters, too. Research by the New Economics Foundation shows that voluntarily working less is positive for our wellbeing, but compulsion, especially in the context of an economy not designed to support part-time work, ruins the benefit.

There are, though, now several reasons we might all want and need to adapt. A recent report from the Centre for Economic and Policy Research suggested a worldwide shift to shorter working hours could reduce carbon emissions enough to halve additional expected global warming between now and 2100.

Then there's the fact that some people in Britain work very long hours, with often involuntary unpaid overtime. The TUC calculates that five million workers give the equivalent of a day's worth of free overtime to their employers every week. Yet we also have high unemployment, making for a divided country burdened with related social costs.

Nick Robins, whose work is all about horizon gazing, thinks we face a long-term future of low to no growth, meaning we might all have to reconsider how we work. "I think we could have to recognise that the norm of a five-day week for everyone is not possible or desirable," he says. Even when economists recall periods of so-called full employment in Britain, they refer to periods when women were homebound, providing the free maintenance of a mostly male paid workforce. Big changes will be needed to make shorter working weeks viable for low-income families.

Faced with systemic economic and environmental threats, we've been told we all have to work harder and find new technological fixes. Could it be that, instead, the best solution might be a simple, social innovation, an option we've had all along? If working less and better can reduce pressure on public services, create a healthier society and cut greenhouse gas emissions, is it time for national "gardening leave" for all? "I wish I'd spent more time at the office" are words few would carve on their headstones

• Andrew Simms is author of Cancel The Apocalypse: The New Path To Prosperity, published by Little Brown at £13.99 on 28 February. To order a copy for £10.99, go to guardian.co.uk.

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Let's play fantasy economics. Things could really get better

A family-oriented nation of fairness, social justice and mutual ownership? It exists – just not all in one place

Do you grudgingly accept there is no fundamental alternative to how things are, hard times and difficult choices? Then come to Goodland. You might want to live here.

Its president refuses the state mansion. He gives away 90% of his pay, living on the national average wage to share in the struggles of his people. Goodland has a new constitution, written by citizens. When its financial sector fell apart, speculators had to take their losses and the guilty were taken to court, not given a public bailout.

The country has a dynamic, largely mutually owned, local banking system. It avoids bad risk and bends over backwards to help small businesses. In Goodland, human wellbeing is more important than economic growth. There is a national plan for good living, free health and education services, subsidised childcare allowing for a more equal workplace, and support for the elderly. It has a law enshrining protection of its life-supporting ecosystems that stands above all other laws.

Goodland's cities are green and grow healthy, organic food for the inhabitants. A phase-out of most fossil fuels is planned by 2017, and its business sector has large, intelligently connected and productive cooperatives. A shorter working week is available by choice.

Utter fantasy? No. Goodland exists. It is just a little, well, spread out. Each aspect can be enjoyed in the real world, just not all in the same place. It's like fantasy football, where you build your perfect team from all known players, but better. Fantasy economics is not limited by the supply of players, but rather grows from emulating best practices wherever you find them.

The president mentioned above is José Mujica of Uruguay. He lives on about £450 per month. His presidential guard is two policemen and a three-legged dog. He drives a 1987 VW Beetle and criticises the rich countries' development model, berating other world leaders' "blind obsession to achieve growth with consumption".

After financial meltdown in Iceland, the "pots and pans" revolution led to a new citizen-drafted constitution, adoption pending, that actively engaged half the electorate. Rather than making the public pay for the crisis, as Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman points out, Iceland also "let the banks go bust" and, instead of placating financial markets, "imposed temporary controls on the movement of capital to give itself room to manoeuvre". In Porto Alegre in Brazil, since 1990, citizens meet every week to decide how a big portion of the city's public purse gets spent. It's called participatory budgeting and in seven years led to doubling access to proper sanitation in poor neighbourhoods.

One reason Germany was less hit by the bank crisis is because 70% of the sector is in small or community banks. By comparison, in the UK the big five banks hold 80% of mortgages and 90% of small and medium enterprise accounts. The German banks have a dual mandate, having to be useful as well as profitable. They're also mostly mutually owned, don't indulge in risky speculation, have local knowledge, branch autonomy and decision making.

In Spain, the multi-headed €14bn Mondragón cooperative, with over 80,000 employees, demonstrates that less self-interested company ownership models can succeed at scale. And the successful uptake by the Dutch of a shorter working week suggests we aren't condemned to work ourselves to death, whatever the coalition says.

Bhutan famously measures its success not by using GDP – simply a measure of the amount, not quality, of economic activity – but by assessing Gross National Happiness. This broad, composite indicator uses 151 variables including: good governance, education, health, ecological resilience, community vitality, wellbeing, time use, living standards and cultural diversity.

After the UN General Assembly adopted 22 April as Mother Earth Day, Bolivia adopted its Mother Earth Law in 2010. The law requires all current and future legislation to accept the "ecological limits set by nature". In practice, it means pushing a transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, and environmentally auditing companies. Elsewhere, Nicaragua committed to a near-complete phase-out of fossil fuels by 2017, while Cuba's organic, urban farming movement has greened cities and boosted public health.

In Ecuador, there is an overarching National Plan for Good Living that rejects "most orthodox approaches to development". It embodies what it calls five revolutions: constitutional and democratic; ethical; economic and agrarian; social; and "in defence of Latin American dignity". The aim is to reassert a country's sovereign authority to put its own social and economic objectives above that of the markets.

As Britain agonises about the affordability of services, Denmark's tax system pays for free health and education, home help for the elderly, and about three-quarters of the cost of childcare. Far from harming the economy, higher taxes stimulate investment in infrastructure, education and R&D.

To suggest Britain has no economic alternatives to its current chosen path is a self-serving political deception. Only our will and imagination restrain us. Here is one, possible, Goodland. Why not build it, or create your own?

Andrew Simms is a fellow of the New Economics Foundation (nef). His book Cancel the Apocalypse: the New Path to Prosperity is published on 28 February by Little Brown. Heather Stewart is away

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Can Obama's fire and brimstone on climate change herald a new hope? | Andrew Simms

British politicians should watch and learn as the US president shows true leadership on green issues

Eyebrows were raised at Barack Obama's political judgment when he used biblical language to promise action on climate change in his second inaugural address. Inaction would be a betrayal of children and future generations, he said, if we left to them a world of "raging fires and crippling drought and more powerful storms." A scientifically informed, massive shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy was the way to a biosphere "commanded to our care by god". It was, he had previously said, also the path to "economic vitality."

The contrast with UK chancellor George Osborne's repeated attacks on environmental action couldn't be greater. For him, raise a green finger and your risk "putting the country out of business".

But, given the difference in stature of the two politicians, Obama's timing and confident framing, might the tide be turning? The case that action makes sense whether you are motivated by a love of, family, god, our natural inheritance, each other or a healthy economy has been made before. Yet to make all these arguments at such a symbolic occasion, in the face of a striking lack of interest among other heads of state and a resurgent domestic fossil fuel industry, could change the game.

UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon put climate action at the top of his action list for 2013, but he doesn't have to appeal to an electorate in the same way. Obama's speech surprised precisely because his words were a bold use of precious political capital without any obvious short-term gain. This looked like a rare bird in the political garden – leadership; its arrival highlighted an uncomfortable absence of that quality elsewhere – not least on the right in the UK.

There, an unapologetic politics of self-interest, struck by memory loss about market failure, has risen to hold sway. As it appears not to give a damn, it might not be expected to lead.

There is a deep strangeness in most of the left's failure to grasp the need for new economic strategies in the light of climate change. This ranges from Labour's general lack of interest and its inaction when in government, including the feebleness and missed opportunity of its attempt to stimulate the economy after the 2008 crash, to its relative silence on climate change now, and its unquestioning support for the HS2 high-speed rail project, whose economic and environmental benefits are, at best, highly questionable.

But it goes further, to the unions who defend energy-intensive industries rather than supporting the transition to low-carbon alternatives, and deep into the academic left's inability to discuss anything other than strategies for a return to orthodox economic growth.

The idea is gaining ground that, regardless of concerns for the environment, market failure and long-term trends in technology and resources have created the prospect of a long period of low-to-no growth. We could be imaginatively exploring how to rethink the economy for the better rather than just get the old one going again. In terms of economic theory it feels as though the left has got its head stuck under the bonnet of an old Ford Escort and is desperately trying to get the engine started again when it could be rethinking the transport system

Of course there are exceptions. A new collaboration called SHIFT with a focus on climate action and job creation, brings together a wide coalition of interests that includes unions, the public sector and academics as well as the private sector. And some union figures talk about the need for a 'just transition' to a low carbon economy.

But, looking across the landscape of the British left, these are rare exceptions. Based on emerging research, even newspapers such as the Financial Times have started to question whether "unlimited growth is a thing of the past?" [paywall]

It will be ironic if the British left finds itself lagging behind the US president, and running to catch up with the business press in the debate on how to shape and rethink the economy in the light of new environmental and economic realities.

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How Olympic spirit can turn around the prospects of global warming | Andrew Simms

It will take the equivalent collective effort and rewarding togetherness of an Olympics every year, but it is believable

"Extraordinary", "amazing" - the ritual reviews of 2012 agreed it was special. It was particularly good for the word "unbelievable". Commentators and athletes sputtered it repeatedly about Olympic successes, Jessica Ennis liked it so much she used it as the title of her autobiography. But here are seven more seemingly unbelievable things about 2012 that are harder to come to terms with, and two insights that could make things better in 2013.

It is unbelievable, given the inevitable consequence of compromising a habitable climate, that global greenhouse gas emissions kept on rising. A record 35.6bn tonnes of carbon dioxide entered the atmosphere, a rise of 2.6%, leaving emissions 58% higher than 1990 levels. That is the year used as a measure for international efforts to cut carbon and we are meant to be heading in the opposite direction: down.

It is unbelievable that this situation is allowed to continue when all the years from 2001 – 2011 were among the hottest on record, and that when the numbers are done, 2012 will almost certainly join them. To underline the point for those who find numbers alone tedious, Europe had its warmest spring and Arctic sea ice hit a record low. The World Meteorological Organisation stated: "Climate change is taking place before our eyes."

Both northern and southern hemispheres had their catastrophic extreme weather events in hurricane Sandy and super typhoon Bopha.

Bad as things are, it is hard to believe that new research keeps revealing them to be even worse than thought. We knew that the west Antarctic ice was adding to sea level rise, but then we found out that central west Antarctica is "among the most rapidly warming regions on Earth."

It was unbelievable that in the heart of the fossil-fuel rich Middle East, there should be riots in Jordan caused by rising gas prices.

But it is more unbelievable still that in the UK the government is so spellbound by the success of gas and shale gas in the United States (transient and unrepeatable here or elsewhere in Europe for several reasons), that it intends to gamble on deepening our dependence on imported gas, and subsidise shale gas development here.

It is similarly unbelievable that at an official level we are not seriously rethinking our food system in terms of its high dependence on imports and vulnerability to the shocks of a warming world. During 2012 wheat imports to the UK hit their highest for 32 years as bad weather led to crop failures and pushed record grain prices. The situation was worse than the last food price shock in 2007-08.

Extreme weather events became such a commonplace that one weekend I stumbled across my young daughter playing "natural disasters" with her Lego. The animals were helping to rebuild hedgehog's house and clean up a chemical spill after a hurricane.

But, there were reminders of inspiration too. It was the 50th anniversary of Rachel Carson's seminal book Silent Spring. She told us that: "Those who contemplate the beauty of the Earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life exists." And it appears that, as with many other things, she has been proved right. Studies of people's responses to nature show that when you walk in woodland, for example, you engage the part of your brain that deals with "involuntary attention" in such a way that it reduces mental fatigue.

Perhaps there's a positive lesson, a different kind of legacy that we can take from the eulogised Olympics. At the time an awful lot of fuss was made of the sponsors. They got privileged seats, transport and some hilariously heavy-handed policing of competing brands to protect their interests. There were huge billboard adverts saying that nothing would have happened without them.

Leave aside for a moment the jaw-dropping inappropriateness of having oil company BP as your sustainability partner, junk food giants providing the catering at an event meant to promote sport and health, or the Paralympics being sponsored by a company, Atos, seen as the enemy by people receiving disability benefits. How much did the direct sponsors of the 2012 Olympics actually contribute to the costs of the event? Half? One-third? Unbelievably, it was about just 6% (a bit more in you include the IOC's global partners, but a bit less if you priced in the value of volunteers freely donated time).

For that sponsors were able to purchase the reflected glory of a society's achievement, and pass it off disproportionately as their own. Why does it matter? Because it creates a distorted view of what the public sphere as opposed to the market can do. It reinforces the view that only markets are dynamic and should be relied on to make things happen, whereas planning and public purpose and resources should not - exactly the opposite of the truth.

In fact, unbelievably, it's us and the governments that we elect that can make really big things happen when the will is there and when they matter. To turn around the prospects of global warming it will take the equivalent collective effort, and rewarding togetherness of an Olympics every year. We can do it if we choose to. There's nothing to lose by trying, and everything to gain. Believe it.

www.onehundredmonths.org

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Why Haringey should be the next venue for global climate talks | Andrew Simms

If the London borough uses climate action to solve social and economic problems, could it stand as a beacon for others?

For a country of less than 2 million people, there must be something special about Qatar. Summer temperatures head uncomfortably upwards of 40C and the country is prone to haze, dust and sandstorms, yet it persuaded international football authorities to let it host the World Cup in 2022. And, in spite of the nation having the world's highest per capita carbon emissions, Doha, its largest city, is staging the current climate talks. History will judge what effect this has on footballers' performance and the progress of climate negotiations.

True creativity might bring the next climate talks to the London borough of Haringey. There, in spite of a mountain range of social and economic problems, they are attempting to cut their greenhouse gas emissions 40% by 2020, beyond the most ambitious aspiration of the European Union.

Does that seem like a strange idea? The borough is London's most unequal, with life expectancy lower in the most, compared with the least deprived wards by seven years for men and four years for women. Half of its wards rank as either very rich or very poor, and the borough was a chief site of the wave of urban riots in 2011. It has industry, heavy commercial through-traffic and congestion. But there are also nature reserves, wooded and conservation areas. It borders six other boroughs, meaning that to solve key energy and transport challenges it must find ways to collaborate. It has a growing population and within Haringey 193 languages are spoken by residents. In other words, Haringey illustrates in microcosm challenges facing the world as a whole.

But unlike others, such as the chancellor, George Osborne, who see economic circumstances as an excuse to turn away from pressing environmental challenges, Haringey sees action on climate change as a way of solving its social and economic problems.

Around 8,000 businesses in the borough, mostly small, employ about 64,000 people. The Haringey Carbon Commission, which I chaired, was set up by the council to advise on how best to meet its 40% cut by 2020 commitment.

We found that simply meeting local demand for energy efficiency retrofitting to buildings, and the installation of alternative, low-carbon energy technologies would create or safeguard an additional 3,000 local jobs. It would also contribute to an initial 10% carbon reduction. Over the next two decades up to 11,000 jobs could be created similarly. Over 40 recommendations in total covered everything from housing to transport, enterprise and a "green bank" to exchange time and skills.

In order to capture and reinvest financial benefits into the community, we recommended a new network of co-operatives to deliver the retrofit programme. The creation of a low-carbon enterprise district in the Upper Lee Valley was another proposal, along with the establishment of three innovation labs to look at technology, social innovation and new financial mechanisms.

But the commission looked further to find what might motivate people more deeply. And we found, for example, that the local resident Paolo had parents in Colombia, where their farm has been hit by severe drought. Then there was Nasreen, whose family members in Mauritius report uncomfortably hotter and drier summers and colder winters. Michael was originally from the Caribbean, where islands are threatened by sea-level rise and extreme weather.

The easiest thing to see is the direct economic opportunity of investing in green enterprise (except seemingly if you run the Treasury). But if that wasn't enough, when you live in a gloriously diverse country like Britain, once you look, climate change is no longer distant and deniable, a problem for strangers and some unspecified future. It is near and now, touching a father, sister, cousin or former neighbour. To acknowledge our extended responsibility and as a means to learn and share experiences of a warming world, the Carbon Commission recommended that Haringey twin with six diaspora communities where people live on the frontline of climate change.

Since then, the report has been formerly adopted by the council, which set up a local authority-backed company to finance and deliver alternative energy schemes. Nevertheless, Haringey will still struggle to meet its target without supportive action by national government. This Wednesday sees the chancellor's autumn statement.

The demonstrable failure of the Treasury's much loved "expansionary fiscal contraction," should see Osborne choosing more reliable macro-economic tools, and a new economic strategy to underpin committed local action. That means investing in a more balanced Britain with long-term, stable incentives for green industries and spending to engineer comprehensive, modern low-carbon infrastructure. If he does that, not only will it create jobs, protect against energy shocks and tackle climate change, but the resulting multiplier effect and new productive capacity will more than pay for itself and stave off inflationary fears.

There is a tantalising prospect that if a one London borough can show how climate action solves ingrained economic and social problems, it will stand as a beacon for others. Osborne showed willingness to flout convention with guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Buy Nothing Day? There must be a better way to protest

The international protest day exhorts us to buy nothing, but what if there was a way to make a stand against materialism while boosting the economy?

Brace yourself, you are about to enter an abusive relationship. It will waste your energy and the planet's resources, leave you feeling sullied and probably in debt. Your partner in this case is the material world; the type of relationship, consumerism; and the date you're going on is the materialistic orgy of Christmas.

Does it have to be this way?

You could abstain: this Saturday is international Buy Nothing Day. Begun in 1992 in Mexico to protest against overconsumption, it has become an annual fixture in the US, where this year, in obligatory fashion, it has been dubbed Occupy Xmas. In Britain, shoppers are exhorted by its organisers to "lock up your wallets and purses, cut up your credit cards and dump the love of your life – shopping".

That will work for some, especially those whose wallets and credit cards are already empty or overextended.

But it leaves two problems. Historically, appealing successfully to abstinence – persuading teenagers not to have sex, for instance – tends to fail, without an equally attractive alternative to offer. Second, one of the few things that most economists agree on is that the economy lacks demand (spending).

So perhaps it's time for a new kind of materialism, based on an economy of better, not more: one that is rich in the good-quality work created by providing useful services, that makes things which last and can be repaired many times before being recycled, allowing us to share better the surplus of stuff we already have. It is emerging now in things ranging from furniture to tools, cars, fridges, clothes and food. "Repair, reduce, re-use, recycle", long a mantra of green economists, could be the basis of a new economic model that performs the neat trick of boosting demand without increasing consumption.

The New Materialism, by Andrew Simms & Ruth Potts, is published on 24 November.

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Cameron's 'growth first' strategy shows a government running on empty

This insistence on growth is old hat. We can't go on prioritising a failed banking system at the expense of people and planet

Several plausible reactions stalk David Cameron's pledge to put "growth first" and by implication, everything else, like people and the environment, second. Firstly, blaming regulation for holding back what would otherwise be a more dynamic economy, is a neat political distraction from the obstacle represented by the government itself. For example, clinging to George Osborne's loved but laughable strategy of "expansionary fiscal contraction" proved to be a failure.

In slashing spending within the public sphere he failed to understand the degree to which the private sector depended on it. Second, in spite of substantial public ownership of the banks, and even more substantial public financial support, the coalition has failed to make them redesign their lending strategies to support a productive economy.

By criticising the checks and balances that still apply to the market system the government pulls off a perfect political trick. It uses the strategy – employed more readily by economic conservatives since the collapse and public bailout of financial markets in 2008 – of using the very failure of those deregulated markets as an excuse to promote them more deeply into our lives. Evidence appears irrelevant to this case, as few in the private sector put planning problems anywhere near the top of the business snag list.

The second reaction to Cameron's comments is simply: "what's new". Even back in January 2011 the prime minister said: "It is a new year and this coalition government has one overriding resolution, and that is to help drive growth." We've heard the rhetoric of "growth first" for decades, in spite of plenty of evidence that in countries like the UK it long ago failed to deliver higher life satisfaction.

Putting the over-privileged interests of growth and finance first, could be at the cost of jobs, workers rights and, by further over-consuming environmental resources, our collective future. But it doesn't have to be this way. Growth is useless if, in the hammer-and-nail way Cameron talks about it, it can so disregard the economic objective of improving society and the environment that it becomes, in effect, "uneconomic growth".

The third reaction you could have is to decry the lost opportunity, to feel loss or anger that in the face of a flawed and failing economic model, there is a government so terrified of new ideas, or lacking in imagination that all it can do is force us back to the scene of the crime to relive the experience.

Back in 2008, Cameron was calling for a measure of "general wellbeing" to sit alongside growth. The Office for National Statistics is still developing measures of national wellbeing, which will be interesting to watch if all they do is act as bystanders to a single bottom line, old-fashioned economic growth strategy. In an essay that I commissioned from the future prime minister for the book Do Good Lives Have to Cost the Earth? published in 2008, David Cameron wrote:

"For the past few decades we have witnessed unparalleled prosperity. But it is hard to escape there is something not quite right. In some cases, it difficult to put your finger on exactly what it is: a feeling of emptiness, and a lack of defined relationships and solid social structures. In other respects, it is clearly identifiable: rates of drug abuse and depression are rocketing. It goes to show what most of us instinctively feel: that the pursuit of wealth is no longer – if it ever was – enough to meet people's hope and aspirations; that over-consumption of the world's resources cannot satisfy our most inborn desires; and yes, that quality of life means more than quantity of money."

Not only did the old growth engine contain that unnamed emptiness, and drive the corrosion of family and community – things meant to be close to the heart of good conservatives – it blew up on the motorway. The transition to a low-carbon Britain offers so many alternatives to build an economy that is better, rather than just bigger at any cost. Just £10 bn, for example, a tiny fraction of the bank bailout, would reskill 1.5 million people to work in it.

The economy of human care and planetary stewardship is rich with employment. But now, Cameron has found a different political language. If you question the sale of arms to authoritarian regimes you are said to be "squeamish", your complaints about planning decisions are called "spurious", and you are "trashing Britain" if you point out that our catastrophically dysfunctional banking system is still not reformed. If Cameron is saying that our only option is to climb back on board the old economy, and kickstart it "by any means necessary", I think I'd rather get out and go by bike.

Economic policyDavid CameronEconomic growth (GDP)EconomicsBanking reformBankingFinancial sectorAndrew Simms
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A green economy is the future, but John Hayes only looks to the past | Andrew Simms

The Tory energy minister has had it with windfarms apparently – an inconsistent, ignorant and damaging stance

"Enough is enough" says Conservative energy minister John Hayes about the building of onshore windfarms in Britain. It makes you wonder where else in energy policy he might consider enough to be enough: the accumulation of hazardous, long-term radioactive waste from nuclear power, for example, or the build-up of life-threatening greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels?

Why pick on wind, and in particular, now, is it really such a threat? No country has yet been invaded to annex its windfarms, and no terrorists or foreign powers are known to be fiendishly acquiring wind turbine technology with which to hold the world to ransom.

Hayes' intervention raises eyebrows for several reasons. Timing is one. Attacking renewable energy, which is part of the answer to solving climate change, just as a massive extreme weather event – the kind set to worsen in a warming world – is ripping through north America leaving carnage in its wake, amounts at best to questionable political judgment.

A much worse, perhaps unpardonable sin, for a Conservative minister is to demonstrate ignorance of your own nation's rich heritage. His ire is raised against the possibility of 4,000 new wind turbines being "allowed to spread" through the country and be "imposed on communities". This he sees as a shocking attack of the new from the "bourgeois left". But, for someone of Hayes' political persuasion, one which prides itself on a sense of history and tradition, he seems unaware that as long ago as the seventeenth century an estimated 90,000 windmills quietly turned up across the landscape of Britain.

It's a matter of taste, of course, but I find the aerodynamic elegance of a modern wind turbine rather more attractive than ubiquitous giant meccano of electricity pylons which march about the country without apparent complaint from the energy minister. I wonder if his concern about things being "imposed" on communities stretches back to Conservative transport and planning policy that saw roads carve through countryside and out-of-town superstores kill high streets?

Hayes is, of course, another example of a broader, creeping retreat from reason on energy policy that includes the appointment of Peter Lilley MP – an oil company executive and global warming sceptic – to the select committee on climate change and energy, and the new environment secretary himself, Owen Paterson.

Their antipathy toward the economic potential of environmental action seems cruelly to deny Britain a vital route out of its industrial torpor, not to mention the chance of building real energy security, and creating countless job opportunities by cashing in on the fact that, according to Deutsche Bank, pound for pound of investment, energy efficiency and renewable technologies deliver anywhere between two- and four-times the number of jobs compared to the old, conventional energy sources.

A week ago I spoke at a conference to launch a national initiative on the transition to a low-carbon economy in the Belgian city of Ghent. A few hundred tickets had been sold in the run up to the event, and then, suddenly, it sold out with hundreds turned away by the box office. What happened? Just days before came news that the Ford motor works in Genk was going to close. More than 10,000 jobs depended on it. A speech, more properly a eulogy, that was made in Belgian parliament by a young MP left hardened politicians and commentators in tears.

Yet such events shouldn't really shock us. The past tells us that change is inevitable. At the end of the cold war, for example, employment in military industries fell dramatically. New work had to be found elsewhere, and largely it was. Today, driven by a combination of economic, natural resource and environmental factors, rich countries inescapably face an era of industrial change and reorganisation. The worst thing we can do is go into denial about it and cling to an economic model not only whose age is passing, but which would make the necessary changes even harder when circumstances become more demanding, and which, worst of all, where the shift to green energy is concerned, denies people potential jobs, the country greater energy security and solutions to cold homes and energy poverty.

Of course, as every good Tory knows, some things about the past were very, very good. Bring back the windmill, I say (or at least its modern equivalent).

Onehundredmonths.org

Wind powerEnergyRenewable energyGreen economyGreen politicsAndrew Simms
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Every part of our society depends on energy. Yet we don't have a plan | Andrew Simms

Cutting household costs is vital, but that can only be part of a much wider approach to how we keep the nation going

Why is Britain not better insulated against volatile energy prices? It's an issue much bigger than how we heat our homes. More than a decade ago, rising fuel prices triggered protests by truck drivers that revealed the fragile nature of the nation's infrastructure. The government and the protesters seemed equally stunned at the swiftness with which a blockade of a handful of fuel depots could interrupt so many vital supply lines and services.

In an atmosphere of near panic, Whitehall met supermarket bosses who were warning that their shops had just three days' worth of food on the shelves. In 2008, there was a triple whammy of the banking crisis, rocketing oil costs and food prices driven both by the price of oil and crop failures due to extreme weather. It can't be exaggerated how much the fate of transport, farming, households and industry is sewn into the fabric of the energy system. It carries a kind of DNA for our livelihoods. Everything relies on energy and changes in the industry have impacts that work through the wider economy in complex and interwoven ways. Now the fabric of the system has worn thin and could be ripped apart by the economic and environmental pressures pulling on it.

Faced with this picture, end-of-pipe policy reforms, such as David Cameron's voter-friendly but ill-prepared pledge to force the big utilities to offer customers their cheapest deal, are entirely inadequate. They are no substitute for grabbing the overdue economic opportunity of investing in a modern, resilient, low-carbon energy system.

The big picture is important. Debate could easily get bogged down in technology versus technology point scoring. And it easy to pick off those who overclaim for certain technologies That would simply continue the locked-in mess we already have. But if we ask questions such as how many jobs can be created, how much carbon can you cut and how much energy do you get back for the amount of energy invested, a mix of renewable technologies will be first in queue

Since 2008, two different governments have had the chance to create countless jobs, build a better energy system, ensure Britain has warmer homes in winter and tackle climate change by investing at scale in a "green new deal".

It is still the case that a tiny fraction of the public resources used to underpin the banking system could revolutionise energy generation and radically reduce consumption and dependence through energy efficiency measures in the nation's building stock. Why not, for example, inject productive capital in a targeted way into the real economy through green bonds via the Green Investment Bank?

Last week, the IMF noted that the negative, "reverse leverage" of spending cuts was worse than it thought. To no one's surprise, George Osborne's faith in the exotic economic notion of "expansionary fiscal contraction" didn't work. At the same time, in response to voices from business, the government acknowledges that some kind of industrial policy is now necessary to get the nation back to work and energy is key to this.

Yet, in spite of high prices and climate change targets, there is still a sense in which energy policy is stuck in the mindset that characterised transport policy back in the 1970s and 1980s – one of predict and provide, rather than simply pushing the utilities to offer lower prices.

It is oddly appropriate that the banking sector's former chief lobbyist, Angela Knight, who represented the British Bankers' Association, is now the voice of the big energy companies at Energy UK. For complacency on energy policy today ranks with the overconfident thinking in 2006 on banking and finance. While all energy issues matter, it is still the case that the greatest overall threat comes from our dependence on oil – high and volatile in price, environmentally destabilising in use and explosive in terms of geopolitics.

George Osborne gives the oil companies tax breaks and self-serving reports from within the industry tell us that oil is entering a new golden age, exploiting its newer "unconventional" sources such as Alaskan shale oil. Such a case was made recently in a report funded by the oil company BP, written by a former oil company executive Leonardo Maugeri and published by the Harvard Kennedy School. Nothing could be more wrong and ranks in terms of complacency with Gordon Brown's 2006 Mansion House speech boast on the success of the UK's "light touch" financial regulation.

A recent and methodologically more complete analysis than Maugeri's by the IMF on the future of oil notes that diminishing increases in production can only be bought at a likely doubling of the price of oil over the next decade. This is likely to usher in the phenomenon of what might be called economic peak oil – "a pain barrier" beyond which the level of oil prices has a dramatic effect. The IMF calls it a "shock" that will have "large and persistent" macro-economic effects.

Then there is the climate question. The UK and the EU are committed to a course of action that will prevent temperatures rising by more than 2°C. And the latest science tells us that to meet that we can only afford to burn around one-fifth of the available, and economically recoverable, fossil fuel reserves between today and 2050.

There must be a strong sense of deja-vu in households bewildered by how their energy costs float up against a backdrop of rising international fuel prices but don't seem to float down when they reduce. Several factors explain why. The market is over-concentrated, with too few, too large self-interested energy companies that regulators either cannot or won't regulate in the public interest. Second, it is precisely because Britain has failed aggressively to diversify its energy supply, so that it remains highly vulnerable to changes in the prices of fossil fuels. Equally, the economic opportunity to invest at scale in energy efficiency and the insulation of Britain's old, draughty building stock would more than pay for itself bringing jobs, lower fuel bills, warmer homes in winter and boost the overall economy.

As it is, we suffer an uncompetitive market, with too little diversity of supply and a clean, renewables sector crying out for the investment conditions to expand, which is further hampered by a government too hidebound by economic doctrine to see the one policy – a green new deal – that could solve all these problems. So here is that rare political thing – a win-win situation. It's the sort of thing that great legacies are made of. With so many other problems around, wouldn't any politician want to grab it with both hands?

EnergyEnergy industryEnergyEnergy billsEnergy researchEthical and green livingConsumer affairsHousehold billsEnergy efficiencyOilOil and gas companiesGreen dealEnergy monitoringOilAndrew Simms
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The growing appeal of national gardening leave | Andrew Simms

Fancy a day off each week to grow your own food? We would all reap numerous lifestyle, health and environmental benefits

Less time in the office, and more time in the garden: add these two good ideas together and we can make an even better one. If all new employees in otherwise full-time jobs were given the voluntary option of a shorter, four-day working week, Britain could reap a wide range of economic, social and environmental benefits. This option is standard employment practice in the Netherlands. It could be done flexibly, either by working shorter hours, or by compressing a conventional working week into four days.

Individuals could, of course, spend the extra day however they liked. But, if the time was combined with supporting the rapid expansion of productive and pleasurable gardening in the nation's towns and cities, it would help tackle a staggering array of urgent challenges. Britain would be much better off if we adopted a scheme of "national gardening leave."

Growing things brings enormous individual health and wellbeing benefits. But the greening of urban space does much more than that. It makes for more convivial towns and cities, can produce a more resilient food economy and acts as an important buffer against the extremes of a warming climate. It's effective against depression, dementia, cardiovascular complaints and a huge range of other medical conditions.

The combined cost of physical inactivity, poor diet and mental ill-health in the UK runs into tens of billions of pounds. In a single activity can gardening alleviate all three problems, reducing the need for some public services and increasing our capacity to care for each other. The educational benefits in terms of helping restore attention spans benefit old and young equally. Refamiliarising people with food through growing their own is one of the best ways to learn and improve a diet.

In some of the poorest, recession-hit neighbourhoods from Detroit in the US, to Hackney in London, community gardening allows people to help themselves to fresh, healthy food, that otherwise they might not get and strengthens the ties that hold communities together.

Increasing urban green space reduces the lethal effect of heatwaves, set to worsen due to climate change, by cooling built-up spaces that become "heat islands". They can improve air quality and temper flooding that follows intense rain, also likely to worsen in a warming world.

There are hard economic benefits here, the chance for better lives and a more resilient food system, with more of a buffer built-in against volatile weather and food and energy prices. To reap all these, however, requires two key ingredients that appear to be missing, in short supply, or otherwise hard to access.

These ingredients are the time to do it, and the physical space to do it in. A study last year of New York, the most densely populated city in the US, found upwards of 6,000 acres that could be put to use in urban farming. How much space could London, or Birmingham or Manchester find if they really looked? Every workplace and public institution in the UK could probably find at least some growing space: in a car park, a window sill or a roof. The roof of a Budgens supermarket in North London recently became the home of the initiative "Food from the sky."

What about time? A long historical struggle reduced the norm of the working week to what we have now. The next step could make for happier employees, save money and reduce our carbon footprint. That's what happened in the municipality of Utah when, in response to the economic crisis of 2008 they put staff onto a four-day week. Absentee rates fell, millions of dollars were saved, and carbon emissions cut 14%. In the UK we have high unemployment coupled with a culture of long hours and overwork. By distributing more equally the work available at any given point in time, more could enjoy the benefits of work while ameliorating the destructive aspects of overwork.

Normal isn't working. We need to do something different to improve the shape of life in Britain. To be a national gardening leave employer all you'd need to do is offer new staff (and existing ones where possible) the option of a four-day week. Add a growing space for the rapid expansion of productive and pleasurable gardening, and we can make Britain better, starting now. If you're an employer, and think you can do this, get in touch.

Work & careersEmployee benefitsGardensGardening adviceFoodFarmingFood & drinkClimate changeAndrew Simms
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