Andrew Simms's Blog, page 12

50 months to avoid climate disaster – and a change is in the air | Andrew Simms

At the halfway point to a climate gamble, 50 contributor ideas give just a taste of the creativity and innovation available to us

"One or other of us will have to go," Oscar Wilde is supposed to have said on his deathbed to the hated wallpaper in his room. The perilous acceleration of Arctic ice loss, and the imminent threat of irreversible climate change poses a similar ultimatum to the economic system that is pushing us over the brink. For society's sake I hope this time we redecorate.

Fortunately, many people are queuing up to propose better designs, rather than just cursing the interiors, as you can read about here.

Monday 1 October marks the halfway point in a 100-month countdown to a game of climate roulette.

On a very conservative estimate, 50 months from now, the dice become loaded against us in terms of keeping under a 2C temperature rise. This level matters because beyond it an environmental "domino effect" is likely to operate. In a volatile and unpredictable dynamic, things like melting ice, and the release of carbon from the planet's surface are set to feed off each other, accelerating and reinforcing the warming effect.

The time frame follows an estimate of risk of rising greenhouse gas concentrations from the world's leading authority on climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that passed a certain point, it will no longer be "likely" that we stay the right side of the line. Some consider even a 2C rise too much, but it is the limit that the EU and others have signed up to.

Extraordinarily, however, in spite of the stakes, the issue has receded from the political frontline like a wave shrinking down a beach. This could, though, merely be a prelude to it returning with a vengeance. Politicians may have turned their backs, others have not.

Here's what a broad selection of groups and individuals who range from the Women's Institute to Oxfam and Margaret Thatcher's former environmental adviser, say in an open letter published in the Guardian today to the coalition government and opposition:

"This year has seen the record loss of sea ice, and greenhouse gas concentrations above the Arctic at their highest point for possibly 800,000 years. Crop-wrecking droughts and record temperatures have scorched the American Mid-West."

But, to our dismay, climate change and the weather volatility it fuels have fallen far down the political agenda when it needs to be at the top. It remains, however, one of the greatest threats to human progress, and tackling it is a huge economic opportunity

They call on both the coalition and Labour to spell out what they will do differently in the next 50 months to prevent a climate catastrophe.

Individually some go further. James Gustave Speth, the former head of the United Nations Development Programme appeals for mass, non-violent protest.

The climate scientist Prof Kevin Anderson says it is too late for rich countries to "grow" their way out of the problem and must find a new way to run their economies. He says everyone, including climate scientists, must reduce their emissions and he commits to lowering his own.

Barbara Stocking, chief executive of Oxfam also says it's time for lifestyle change in the wealthy world, especially if we are to tackle global poverty.

Sir Crispin Tickell, former UK permanent representative to the UN and the man credited with persuading Margaret Thatcher as prime inister to acknowledge and act on global warming, calls for a World Environment Organisation to simplify and make effective the wide range of international treaties and agreements.

Many more people describe the huge opportunities for economic recovery and better lives that could come from a great transition to a low-carbon, high well-being economy, but which are currently going begging.

Change is in the air, in spite of the current official blind spot and attempt to return to business as usual, or even go "backwards" as today's joint letter of concern warns. Why, for example, do we encourage the oil industry with tax breaks, when we know that to avoid runaway climate change we can only afford to burn around a fifth of the fossil fuels left in the ground, making it unburnable?

The ideas from our 50 contributors are just a taste of the creativity and innovation available. The failure to act "appears both reckless and short sighted" they write. Yet in the government, the situation appears to be like the old joke about the shopkeeper. When a customer asks for a new product, the shopkeeper replies, "No, sorry mate, people keep asking me for that and I keep telling them, there's just no call for it."

Whether it was rebuilding Europe after the second world war, or action to protect the ozone layer, we know it is possible to put aside narrow self-interest. Leadership like that goes down in history.

What we do in the next 50 months is not a choice between what we have done in the past and what we are doing today. It is an invitation to embark on the most extraordinary, exhilarating and challenging adventure our society has yet faced, learning how to thrive without disastrously destabilising the climate on which we depend. Every step matters, and it matters most that we start walking.

• 100 months and counting...

Climate changeEthical and green livingAndrew Simms
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We can learn resilience from the natural world - but only up to a point | Andrew Simms

Life on Earth can adapt to all sorts of conditions but we are living outside its cycle of normal variation

Fire climates – places with little rainfall, lots of wind and long spells when it is hot and dry – are perfect for some species. Woodland giants like the sequoias of the west coast of North America release seed when their cones are heated to temperatures that only fire can reach. A lodgepole pine may hold its cones for half a century until the right conflagration comes along.

Big trees like firs, spruces and sequoias that live for 1,000 years or more can be extraordinarily resilient to heat and flame. When a forest fire reaches the canopy, gases burn at around 1000C. In such a life span, an individual tree might survive several so-called "century fires" (confusingly these great fires occur every 200-300 years).

Forest fires are also part of the cycle of pioneering microbial life forms and fire beetles – the latter have fire detectors hundreds of times more sensitive than the kind installed in our homes – rush to fires when they sense them.

We can marvel at the brilliance of life that can adapt to thrive in such astonishing ways, while acknowledging the odd vulnerability to a changing climate of our own species.

For good reason, the Coast Salish people of the Pacific Rim lived in fear of forest fires. The fires were embodied in some of their most terrifying spirits and gods. Neither they nor myriad animals of the woods could survive a century fire. Escape, if possible, was the only solution. Yet the way that great fires spread once established makes escape unpredictable at best. Burning missiles from the main fire shoot out to create satellite fires. These then combine into one immense, furious furnace. Great areas ignite spontaneously at a certain tipping point, the temperature for the combustion of plant matter.

At a much greater scale, with global warming, we now risk triggering a sequence of system-shifting events. Think of this more as an "aeon fire" than a century fire, in which we default to an unpredictable new, more hostile climate, very different to that in which human civilisation evolved. It will take millennia to shift back to a more convivial world, if indeed such a reversal ever occurs.

What informs the optimism of some, and perhaps the complacency of others, is that like life in general, we are incredibly innovative. There's an assumption that whatever happens, we'll sort things out. But now, having adapted to one climate with all its weather-related slings and arrows, we're going beyond its cycle of normal variation. If we don't stay on the right side of the combustion point for irreversible warming effects, we don't know if, or in what shape human civilisation will continue.

One reason for the success of trees, point out the American conservationists David Suzuki and Wayne Grady, is their collective nature: "No tree is an island; it is a communal citizen and derives … benefits from cooperation, sharing, and mutual effort."

The tiny, purposeful hummingbird can be seen all around the forests of the northern Pacific Rim. Its industry was noted by First Nation people who passed on this story.

"A fire had begun in the forest and was in danger of raging out of control. Terrified, many of the animals fled before it took over. But the hummingbird flew to the nearest water, collected a droplet and flew back to the fire dropping the water onto it. As she flew back and forth to protect her habitat, first the bear, and then the owl, the snake and cougar each called out: 'Bird, what are you doing?' The hummingbird answered them all in the same way: 'I am doing what I can'."

Next month is the halfway point in our countdown to when the odds shift against us in the likelihood of staying on the right side of the climate threshold. To celebrate optimism and "doing what I can", we will mark it by publishing some of the best ideas for change that were submitted through this column to the Guardian, and examples of specially commissioned articles from people who lead their own fields and are changing their own lives. A special event jointly organised by onehundredmonths.org, the New Economics Foundation, 5x15 and the Guardian will also be held at the Royal Festival Hall on 1 October.

• www.onehundredmonths.org

Climate changeForestsWildfiresNatural disasters and extreme weatherAndrew Simms
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Don't fall for comforting illusions of progress on climate change | Andrew Simms

Now that climate sceptics are emerging from denial it matters that the rest of us don't drop guard

"The Owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk," wrote Hegel on wisdom's habit of arriving late in a time of crisis. Will the final acceptance by some former sceptics of climate science aid effective action by nightfall?

It is all to play for. Global events leave only the most pathological forms of denial standing, and challenge dated economic doctrines.

The worst drought in half a century in the US mid-west coincides with the hottest first half year from January to June on record. The impact on crops like maize, soybeans and wheat – of which the US is a major world exporter – has been to push the price of the first two to their highest ever, and leave wheat at a four year high.

The domino effect on global food prices, the cost of livestock and biofuels is an echo of what happened in 2008 which pushed around 100 million people globally into hunger.

Meanwhile, Beijing's worst floods in 60 years were exacerbated by the poor infrastructure of rapid urban sprawl – drainage systems couldn't cope. In a world still urbanising that was a reminder of how a bad problem is made worse by designing-in vulnerability.

Greenland's rapid, four-day melt of surface ice was the kind of dramatic event that would be mocked for incredulity in a Hollywood disaster movie. We will soon find out whether its precise dynamics matched past, infrequent big melts on a roughly 150 year cycle, or were part of something far more disturbing.

Little comfort can be drawn from the increasing confidence with which climate scientists now identify the fingerprint of human driven warming in current, specific extreme weather events. Joint work by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US and the UK's Met Office, concluded that last year's heat wave in Texas, which also devastated crops, was 20 times more likely due to climate change than natural variation in weather systems, while the 2011 November warm spell in Britain was made 62 times more likely due to global warming (compared to the 1960s).

In an appropriate metaphor for an Olympic month enjoying highly variable weather, the effect of injecting carbon into the atmosphere was compared by one of scientists involved to an athlete taking steroids. It doesn't guarantee an abnormally strong performance, but makes it much more likely.

Not every extreme event carries the same attribution to warming of course. The great Thai floods were considered not to, while droughts in east Africa were.

And, while the promised economic benefits of the Olympics appear to be missing London's retailers, the economic costs of extreme weather increasingly bite. Unilever, which depends on agricultural commodities, reported that climate change cost the company €200m(£157m) in 2011. At the same time insurers warn that 200,000 UK homes could become uninsurable.

Meanwhile, Britain was part of a G8 call to phase out fossil fuel subsidies but, under George Osborne's influence, has gone cold on renewable energy and thrown £500m to help marginal gas fields.

Bizarrely, the UK, with a high rate of fuel poverty and one of the most energy inefficient building stocks in Europe, recently came top in a ranking of 12 of the world's largest economies judged by energy efficiency.

The problem is that where climate change is concerned, gallons matter more than miles per gallon. Among all countries in the international community, the UK ranks as the eighth largest emitter of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels. In a different measure which looks at how ecologically efficient different nations are in generating life expectancy and wellbeing, compared to their natural resource use, the UK trails in at 41st place.

Now that climate sceptics are emerging from denial it matters that the rest of us don't fall for comforting illusions of progress. There are many great things about the UK, but a paragon of the sustainable use of energy and fossil fuels we are not.

With so little time left to pull back from potentially catastrophic climate it matters dearly which example we choose to follow. For a clear illustration, just look across to Stratford in London, where a certain large, multi-ringed sports event is taking place.

Danny Boyle's glorious celebration in the opening ceremony of what humanity can achieve through optimistic, open and collective endeavour, from universal health care to the world wide web, was an Olympic torch to follow. The oil company BP, the Olympics' hilariously chosen sustainability partner, is one to douse.

• One hundred months

Climate changeClimate change scepticismUnited StatesFloodingNatural disasters and extreme weatherDroughtAndrew Simms
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How would you lead us out of the climate predicament? | Andrew Simms

Our only option is to lead from below. What would you do to achieve the fastest, greatest progress in the fight against climate change?

If you were in a burning office block and the management decided it was too much effort to evacuate, that everyone was too busy and would only be annoyed if interrupted, what would you do?

I doubt you'd sit still. You'd start thinking of every possible way out. I suspect a surprising number would throw themselves unselfishly into the effort to find and save others.

Fanciful? Not really. The only difference is scale. The building is so big – the Earth and its atmosphere – and the fire in rooms that for some, temporarily lucky ones, are too distant for the threat to seem real.

We stand in the retreating shadow of the dismal theatre played out by political leaders at the Rio+20 conference in Brazil.

There is a bewildering, continuing failure of governments – the UK's own near the top of the list – to see that investment in a great, environmental transition would benefit the economy, society and the climate.

The only thing left to do is what populations always have to do when leadership from above fails, that is to lead from below.

In three months' time, the 100 months climate countdown that this series marks will reach the halfway point. From 1 October, based on a conservative assessment, there will be 50 months left before the climate dice become loaded in favour of crossing a critical threshold in temperature rise.

The clock is ticking. The management thinks its too much bother to make a serious attempt to escape the burning building. What will you do, or think should be done, in 50 months to find a way out of the climate predicament?

We want to hear your best ideas. On 1 October lots of people will mark the half way point by gearing up for the challenge and opportunities ahead. We want to be able to tell them what you think and what you plan to do to make every month count. All the good ideas will be collected and used. Just fill out this form.

Systemic flaws in the old politics and economics weekly reveal themselves from the brazen and craven collusion between Westminster and the City of London (and the hilarious attempts by the government and opposition to create the impression of distance between them and the banking system they ushered into its current appalling form).

But these cracks are all around us. In transport there's the return of the lobby for aviation expansion. Witness, for example, Richard Branson's self-awareness bypass, as he simultaneously promotes the culture of flying and still wants to be considered on the right side of history by aligning with campaigns on global warming.

That sound you hear is the fingernails of a clinging establishment scraping down the hulls of systems and ways of behaving that are sinking.

Perhaps it is too much to expect answers to emerge from within institutions that are the living embodiment of the old paradigm.

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn famously observed that no part of an old paradigm and the science it underpins has the aim of calling forth, "new sorts of phenomena", adding, "indeed those that will not fit the box are often not seen at all".

That is why anything new, observed Kuhn, comes from people who are either, "very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change". Most are young or new to rusting old economics, if only because it has hidden for so long behind obfuscating language, theory and models.

Confronted with environmental challenges, too often the automatic response is to reach for a technological fix. Some rapid technological innovation will indeed be important, but perhaps now the greatest, fastest progress can be achieved with the kind of social and economic innovation that would not be "seen at all" in the sinking system.

It's a time for innovations that must be made visible, so that we can all imagine and see by example better ways to live and lead our own way out of the burning building.

• One hundred months

Climate changeAndrew Simms
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

How would you lead us out of our climate predicament? | Andrew Simms

Our only option is to lead from below. So what would you do to achieve the greatest progress in the fight against climate change?

If you were in a burning office block and the management decided it was too much effort to evacuate, that everyone was too busy and would only be annoyed if interrupted, what would you do?

I doubt you'd sit still. You'd start thinking of every possible way out. I suspect a surprising number would throw themselves unselfishly into the effort to find and save others.

Fanciful? Not really. The only difference is scale. The building is so big – the earth and its atmosphere – and the fire in rooms that for some, temporarily lucky ones, are too distant for the threat to seem real.

We stand in the retreating shadow of the dismal theatre played out by political leaders at the Rio+20 conference in Brazil.

There is a bewildering, continuing failure of governments, the UK's own near the top of the list, to see that investment in a great, environmental transition would benefit the economy, society and the climate.

The only thing left to do is what populations always have to do when leadership from above fails, that is to lead from below.

In three months' time, the 100 months climate countdown that this series marks will reach the halfway point. From 1 October, based on a conservative assessment, there will be 50 months left before the climate dice become loaded in favour of crossing a critical threshold in temperature rise.

The clock is ticking. The management thinks its too much bother to make a serious attempt to escape the burning building. What will you do, or think should be done, in 50 months to find a way out of the climate predicament?

We want to hear your best ideas. On 1 October lots of people will mark the half way point by gearing up for the challenge and opportunities ahead. We want to be able to tell them what you think and what you plan to do to make every month count. All the good ideas will be collected and used. Just fill out this form.

Systemic flaws in the old politics and economics weekly reveal themselves from the brazen and craven collusion between Westminster and the City of London (and the hilarious attempts by the government and opposition to create the impression of distance between them and the banking system they ushered into its current appalling form).

But these cracks are all around us. In transport there's the return of the lobby for aviation expansion. Witness, for example, Richard Branson's self-awareness bypass, as he simultaneously promotes the culture of flying and still wants to be considered on the right side of history by aligning with campaigns on global warming.

That sound you hear is the fingernails of a clinging establishment scraping down the hulls of systems and ways of behaving that are sinking.

Perhaps it is too much to expect answers to emerge from within institutions that are the living embodiment of the old paradigm.

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn famously observed that no part of an old paradigm and the science it underpins has the aim of calling forth, "new sorts of phenomena", adding, "indeed those that will not fit the box are often not seen at all".

That is why anything new, observed Kuhn, comes from people who are either, "very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change". Most are young or new to rusting old economics, if only because it has hidden for so long behind obfuscating language, theory and models.

Confronted with environmental challenges, too often the automatic response is to reach for a technological fix. Some rapid technological innovation will indeed be important, but perhaps now the greatest, fastest progress can be achieved with the kind of social and economic innovation that would not be "seen at all" in the sinking system.

It's a time for innovations that must be made visible, so that we can all imagine and see by example better ways to live and lead our own way out of the burning building.

• One hundred months

Climate changeAndrew Simms
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Rio+20: don't wait for disappointment from the bureaucrats | Andrew Simms

Todays' technocratic politicians will only ever lead from behind, once a critical mass of people have already shown the way

In three weeks the 20th anniversary conference of the Earth Summit will take place in Rio, Brazil. Once again, most of us will feel like spectators to the biggest debate about life on earth: whether or not to maintain convivial environmental conditions for human civilisation.

Such events become so lost in technocratic detail, that it is easy, perhaps even procedurally intended, that the full meaning of what is under discussion gets obscured.

From a civil servant's or negotiator's point of view, clarity and exposure to the meaning of failure is probably intolerable. Imagine you've agreed something which, even if an improvement on what went before, still leaves us heading over the cliff of catastrophic, irreversible climate change. You've dropped the baby.

We can hear the sound of it falling. Carbon concentrations in the atmosphere above the Arctic crossed the line of 400 ppm this year for the first time in a very, very long time, at least since before anything vaguely human set foot on the land mass of the United Kingdom.

Instead of going down, as they are meant to do, emissions also rose in the EU in 2010, which is supposed to be leading the world in cutting carbon, and did so in spite of the recession.

The economy also continues to massively reward those who profit from exploiting fossil fuels. Mick Davis, chief executive of mining company Xstrata, which is engaged in a merger deal with commodity trading giant Glencore, has just been given a $46m windfall "retention payment", not to run while the deal is done.

It creates an almost irresistible temptation to indulge in "world gone mad" hyperbole.

Not only are we powerless in watching an existential struggle being reduced to the negotiation of which verbs and adjectives may be used in agonisingly agreed official obfuscations, but we must watch as the powerful plunder with impunity the public realm of natural resources for private gain, regardless of consequence.

What can we do, nothing? No, our actions are limited only by our imagination. If you want to know how different the future can be, just look to the past and compare it to the present. We can, for example, remove the legal privileges that put the interests of finance above all else. We can completely redesign how we move around, like the city of Ghent did, making cars mere guests on streets.

Food, energy, homes, trade can all be re-imagined and better ways found. The point is to start, and many people are. The global range of initiatives beginning the transition to a new economy is impressive.

For people waiting to taking the first step, Nelson Mandela's famous observation is well remembered, that often we are held back more by fear of success and fully realising our power and abilities, than being helpless victims of circumstance.

The scale and depth of the climate challenge may seem insurmountable, and politicians will tell us with no irony, that they cannot sell, and no one will buy the policy ticket necessary for our own environmental rescue. Setting ambitions and targets around the Rio anniversary has been a bit like removing the tarpaulin from the lifeboat, and then deciding it is better to go down with the ship because no one can be bothered to launch it.

But todays' technocratic politicians will only ever lead from behind, once a critical mass of people have already shown the way. That's us, and we all have a part to play.

On June 20, while the Rio conference takes place, instead of waiting for disappointment, several groups have organised a Festival of Transition, which anyone can enjoy and contribute to, wherever they are. It asks simply that people take a taste of breaking with business as usual by doing something different for 24 hours themselves, where they are, with friends, work colleagues or neighbours.

Already, in Senegal some plan to plant a food garden and celebrate with neighbours by feasting on locally-produced, not imported, food. In Madeira others are going to experiment with money-free exchange, still others with sharing things rather than buying new stuff. In London academics are holding a seminar on ecological public health, and in Helsinki neighbours are going to get together to compare how much energy they use. You might also choose, for the first time, to hold a politician to account.

If change is to happen we need to build a culture of experimentation. For too long where climate change is concerned we have been obsessed with technological fixes, and overlooked the speed and scale of transformation that can come from social, behavioural and economic innovation.

The festival is about reminding ourselves of our own creativity, adaptability and potential for joyously making our own change, rather than miserably waiting for others to fail to bring it. No individual action could ever be enough.

We can't know where a critical mass of people becoming active might bring about a positive tipping point for change. And, we will never know unless more and more are engaged.

One hundred months

Rio+20 Earth summitCarbon emissionsClimate changeGlobal climate talksEnvironmental sustainabilitySustainable developmentAndrew Simms
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Shell's stance on wind power reveals a profound truth of capitalism | Andrew Simms

When pushed to choose between profit and survival, the oil giant chooses profit – irrespective of collective consequence

They couldn't "make the numbers work". There's something so blithe – and enormously telling - about the excuse offered by the oil company Shell to explain why they were not investing in wind power in Britain.

Presented with an accounting fact – that, on Shell's terms, wind power is deemed insufficiently profitable – observers are expected to automatically understand their logic, nod in agreement and move on.

With the Conservative party casting aside its green overcoat, Shell must feel even more comfortable than usual with a business decision diametrically at odds with the preservation of a habitable planet.

And they have, of course, been able to "make the numbers work" for heavily polluting tar sands. The high and fluctuating price of oil has gifted Shell massive, windfall profits from an asset which could be seen as a common global inheritance, one whose use carries an equally high cost. What makes the need for one set of numbers to "work" trump all other considerations, even the ultimate one of a climate fit for civilisation? How did we get to the odd state of affairs where a company citing extreme and narrow self-interest, can make investment decisions with profound negative decisions for the rest of society, while expecting and receiving impunity? With George Osborne as chancellor, they even get an understanding, indulgent pat on the shoulder to accompany the new tax breaks given to the oil sector in the budget.

Take one small step away from the detached, insulated and self-reinforcing cultural sphere of elite business and the situation quickly appears deeply strange. Global energy companies like Shell are few and massive. The process of rapidly liquidating humanity's once-off fossil fuel inheritance is both eye-wateringly profitable, nicely protected, and cushioned by public infrastructure investment and the afore-mentioned tax breaks. Even though they are private companies, at one level the operations of players like Shell and BP are elaborately interwoven with the workings of governments (wars being fought and governments changed with their interests in mind) and frequently collude on issues of national energy security. They are not fully separate entities.

A quid pro quo must be an acknowledgement that their vast influence over our present and future energy choices – and hence our very futures - carries particular responsibilities to do the right thing by all of us. The argument against some kind of public interest oversight of key decisions by agents like Shell - that it's a private company, spending its own money in a free market, doesn't wash. Shell, it should be noted in passing, have been found guilty more than once by the Advertising Standards Authority for exaggerating their green credentials.

So, to what could we compare their glib, yet profound, invoking of the numbers not working? What if you took your child to a hospital's paediatric ward only to find it closed, the hospital management having opened a bar instead because it earned them more money? Or what about a tobacco company whose marketing currently promotes smoking (and therefore an early death) among young women in Asia, being given the chance to shift out of producing cigarettes, and into growing fairly traded fruit instead, but which opts to stay with tobacco because the margins are better? How is tobacco marketing different to slow, coerced suicide?

Both are circumstances in which socially unacceptable decisions are made in which the only ultimate justification is profit maximisation. Both could be accused of being unlikely and unreal (but are they?). Neither, however, touches the potential global consequence of Shell's choice.

Capitalism can be thought of as a system in which the returns to capital take priority over other concerns. Yet questioning capitalism, or suggesting its days may be numbered, raises fairly universal disbelief or derision. Even intelligent members of the political left struggle to imagine a different economic system, most suggesting only reforms to business as usual.

Yet Shell's throwaway remark about numbers not working reveals a profound truth of capitalism: when pushed to choose between profit and survival, it chooses profit irrespective of collective consequence. There, with refreshing clarity in that simple statement, is why the legal structures that privilege finance and underpin capitalism cannot continue, and why, regardless of what benefits it may have brought to a wealthy global minority in the past, capitalism can not be the operating system of a global economy already transgressing environmental limits. Some argue that we merely need to wait for the price signal to reorient us toward environmentally safe choices.

But that change needs to happen now as the International Energy Agency and many others repeatedly point out (in fact, because of the time lag between carbon emissions and their consequences in global warming it needed to happen decades ago).

And, as the Shell decision makes clear with rare, flat simplicity, there is no price signal currently levering the necessary change to happen within the unavoidable time frame for action. Oddly, a company whose business model is based on the exploitation of irreplaceable natural assets for profit, and which epitomises the privilege of finance under capitalism, may just have provided the most convincing example of why the economic system it flourishes under must be replaced.

• www.onehundredmonths.org

Wind powerEnergyRenewable energyOilFossil fuelsOil and gas companiesEnergy industryOilRoyal Dutch ShellClimate changeOil sandsAndrew Simms
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Cut the country some slack and introduce national gardening leave | Andrew Simms

Downtime would allow overburdened oil and food systems to function better while addressing broader economic and social problems

What is a politician's main skill set: persuasion, self-advancement in a hostile environment, the ability to avoid blame? It might be many more things, some unmentionable, but it is not actually doing things. Generally, you wouldn't go to an MP to fix your plumbing, build a bridge, or bake and sell a pasty. In the main, they're not practical people.

For that reason perhaps we shouldn't be surprised to see them floundering recently in the face of real world events.

The extraordinary thing is that their instincts for survival and blame avoidance hadn't fully grasped the threat of the tanker drivers' protest (or indeed the nation's fond attachment to affordable hot pies). It is more than a decade since blockades of fuel depots by lorry drivers, upset at the price of petrol, brought the nation to within days of crisis. At the time everyone was shocked at how easily such a small number of people could leave us all at a standstill.

But it was a seizure waiting to happen. In nature, ecosystems require slack to function well. But narrow economic notions of efficiency and a culture of short-sighted cost cutting drove the practice of "just-in-time" delivery into the mainstream. As a result, instead of having back-up stores of food or fuel "just-in-case" – something which in nature and society for millennia has been a tactic for robustness and resilience – we hang by the thread of last-minute deliveries from elsewhere. A side-effect of the ready-made, just-in-time world has been to change our expectations, strip our skills to do with food, and foster dependency on the vulnerable logistics of the supermarket model.

That's why, with only around three days' worth of stores, at any one point in time we're only nine meals from anarchy, as we discovered in the summer of late 2000.

Rather than being efficient, over-reliance on just-in-time delivery makes essential systems incredibly fragile and vulnerable to interruption. Cue government minister Frances Maude delivering a seemingly off-the-cuff television interview about jerry cans worthy of Armando Ianucci's satire In the Thick of It.

But instead of Maude babbling advice that gave the Fire Service irregular heartbeats and brought quick rebuke, what else could have been done?

First of all, the inevitable long-term decline and rising price of oil is not a well-kept secret. At least since 2000 we should have been planning and implementing a new, energy efficient, mass transport system not reliant on oil.

Second, we need to plan a food system that is resilient to a range of "inevitable surprises", from climate, energy and politically driven shortages. With rising "food nationalism" as countries facing shortfalls understandably feed their own people first, as Russia has, the politics of the global food chain, is becoming a match for the geopolitics of oil.

The trend of the last few decades has been for the UK to become more dependent on the rest of the world, but this means becoming less so and more able to meet our own needs. Less energy intensive farming and transport systems will not only be more resilient, but they'll help tackle the core external shocks of climate change and dependence on volatile oil supplies.

Thirdly, we need to build in slack to the system and relearn how to do things for ourselves.

Is there a way to can tackle these problems at the same time as addressing broader economic and social problems?

I think so. National gardening leave, or something like it. Quite seriously, take a step back and look at a range of our problems.

Simultaneous overwork and unemployment, a whole range of social problems related to overconsumption and materialism, and a vulnerable deskilled population with a fostered dependency on the nanny supermarket. What single thing could begin to break such a negative spiral. Introduce a four-day week, with the fifth day given over to re-acquiring a wide range of practical skills that our politicians seemingly lack so desperately, which will allow us to stand on our own feet and do more for ourselves and our communities.

The benefits would be wide ranging. With more time to grow some of our own food, make, mend, do and repair, we'd get the buzz that comes from learning new skills, and the satisfaction of producing things, shifting away from the shopping mall deadness of purely passive consumerism. At the same time, the redistribution of both paid and unpaid work would bring more people back into the workplace, with all the wellbeing advantages that brings, while removing the destructive aspects of overwork. More time for friends, family, and getting involved with life and the community would improve things for everyone. Our own history shows that productivity is barely effected by shorter working weeks.

When Utah put its workforce onto a four-day week in 2008 in response to the recession, it saved millions, saw reduced absenteeism, healthier, happier workers and cut its carbon emissions by about 14%.

We could call them National Transition Days. So, instead of turning our garages or cupboards into petrol bombs, lets hear some good advice from government, the introduction of gardening leave for the nation (you wouldn't just have to grow food - walk, talk, fix a solar panel, take your choice). The working week has reduced beyond recognition in the last 200 years, lets just take it to the next logical step.

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Farming and energy: lessons from collapsed civilisations | Andrew Simms

Renewable energy technologies and agro-ecological farming represent opportunities to avoid the mistakes of the past

Patterns in the way that societies, even whole civilisations, collapse are visible throughout history. It could be the people of Easter Island transgressing ecological boundaries, the failure to adapt to a changing climate in the case of the Greenland Norse, or the imperial overreach of the western Roman Empire, which responded by developing a complex, inward looking and fractious over-blown bureaucracy. We should learn lessons from all of these.

An almost universally common element in such downfalls is what the archeo-anthropologist Joseph Tainter calls "declining marginal returns". It's what it sounds like. A society hits an optimum level, conquests or good harvests provide the resources for it to grow, but being bigger it needs more. Sooner or later, to get the same amount out of the system, to keep the good times rolling, ever more resources are needed. When that happens, the end can come suddenly and catastrophically.

At around the same time, late in the first millennium, two highly evolved societies collapsed in this way, brought down by the law of diminishing returns. The Mayan civilisation in Central America, and the kingdom of Mesopotamia – a cultural and technological cradle of the Western world – that ranged across parts of modern day Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq.

In both cases the climate supported productive, sophisticated farming systems that in turn fed growing, competitive cities. But to support the growth, farming moved on to more marginal land, stressing available soil and water resources and creating a more vulnerable system. The response was further intensification. They brought everything they knew about irrigation and agricultural technology to bear to keep the system going. In Mesopotamia the soil salinised and the fragile ecology caused output to vary wildly, a kind of reverse ecological leverage kicked-in. The Mayans, writes Tainter, ended up with "high-density, stressed population, practicing intensive agriculture, living largely in political centres, supporting both an elite class and major public works programmes, and competing for scarce resources."

In both cases, in around a century, things fell apart. In Mesopotamia the area of land under human habitation fell to just 6% of what it had been 500 years previously.

The advantage we have is forms of scientific analysis, monitoring equipment and communications technology to be able to spot and convey the signs of diminishing returns. Soil erosion, biodiversity loss and climate change are the currency of our own, global diminishing returns. Yet our own response, reaching for the crutches of technological fixes and intensification in both agriculture and energy, ways to keep our existing lifestyles and patterns of consumption going, rather than seeking out social innovations and different ways to live, seem to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Ultimately what did for the medieval Greenland Norse was their failure to learn from the other local civilisation that did survive the little ice age. The Christian, dairy farming Norse saw the Inuit as pagan and inferior. So, when the grasses and their cattle failed, they refused even to copy elements of the Inuit's successful survival strategies, such as fishing, merely trying to make what they already knew work.

It's dangerous to look into the past for exact parallels, they almost never exist. But equally it's foolish not to learn from the mistakes of others. And it is hard not to see in George Osborne's now infamous, renewable energy industry-killing conference speech, a clinging to the past from which there can only be diminishing returns.

If the signal sent from one speech can take the wind from the blades of one renewable energy industry and flick off the switch for solar, we are living the old curse of those who fail to learn from the mistakes of the past being doomed to repeat them in some other form.

Similarly, in agriculture, two very different visions for farming globally presents another such choice. On one hand there is Sir John Beddington's Foresight report, which foresees a future of farming intensification, based on hi-tech and reliance on markets.

Or there is the option of rolling-out more agro-ecological techniques (technology but of a different sort) and giving support to smaller farmers, as advocated by the government scientific adviser Bob Watson and the International Assessment of Agricultural Science & Technology for Development.

The trick we need to learn is how to solve several problems at the same time. How do you revive economies, create mass employment and maintain the environment simultaneously? The technologies you choose matter, each carries with it a different DNA for the economy and society that surrounds it. The ones you pick can lock in a way of being for decades. We need to choose technologies for which low carbon and lots of jobs are part of that DNA. Step forward both multiscale renewable energy technologies and agro-ecological farming. As Jared Diamond put it in his book Collapse, societies choose to fail or survive. We are more aware now of the likely consequences of our choices than any society in history. Wouldn't it be embarrassing if we continued to make the wrong ones.

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Climate changeFarmingRenewable energyEnergyAndrew Simms
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Clinging to economic growth suffocates the imagination | Andrew Simms

After 40 years, the message of The Limits to Growth report is still not being heard. We need other ways to share a finite planet

Listen to the news today and you would think that economic growth was the only answer to all our problems. But 40 years ago The Limits to Growth, written by a group of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and published by The Club of Rome, broke a modern taboo: it suggested that growth itself might be the problem.

It wasn't the first time someone had suggested that an economy endlessly expanding in scale was neither possible nor necessarily desirable. As long ago as 1821, David Ricardo wrote of the ultimate equilibrium to which economic development led. And, in his Principles of Political Economy, 1848, John Stuart Mill raised and answered the question like this:

"Towards what ultimate point is society tending by its industrial progress? When the progress ceases, in what condition are we to expect that it will leave mankind? It must always have been seen, more or less distinctly, by political economists, that the increase of wealth is not boundless: that at the end of what they term the progressive state lies the stationary state, that all progress in wealth is but a postponement of this."

Why, then, did The Limits to Growth shock in 1972, and why does questioning growth today still provoke incredulity and anger? The report itself became something of an albatross for the green movement. The view entered folklore that it contained predictions about resource use that were alarmist and plain wrong. But, as New Scientist magazine reported recently, it was the critics of the book who turned out to be mistaken.

For one thing, the model used by the MIT scientists didn't make precise "predictions", but projected what was likely to happen if certain trends continued, allowing for "adjustable assumptions" of resource use. Their real finding was not that collapse was likely to occur by a particular year, but that population and the global economy would contract rapidly after peaking. The only circumstances under which some kind of stabilisation, rather than collapse, was achieved, was constraining population and the scale of the economy.

Models and reality are not the same thing. But – strikingly given the relatively crude computer modelling available at the time – the MIT projections have proved remarkably accurate. Today they can be checked against decades of actual data. Population, industrial output, pollution and food consumption all track the lines in the model.

There is a popular view that economic growth can be saved by efficiency measures, recycling and technological substitution, such as nuclear and renewable energy replacing fossil fuels. Yet the model allowed even for these variables, and crashed under the pressure of growth just the same.

I took part in a debate last week with Michael Jacobs who was an environmental adviser to Gordon Brown's Treasury. My job was to respond to a lecture he gave at University College London called The Green Moment? The Crises of Capitalism and the Response of Progressive Politics. Jacobs's critique, which several on the left share, is that pointing out the non-viability of economic growth (at least at the global aggregate level and where rich countries are concerned) is a mistaken article of faith in the green movement.

His argument is that, firstly, opposing growth is bad politics, it's bad spin for the green movement that "puts people off". Secondly he argues that low growth is compatible, even in rich countries, with environmental constraints. The first point is immaterial if the limits are scientifically real. It is an inconvenient reality that cannot be spun away. The second point is a claim that must be backed with evidence, it cannot simply be asserted.

And while I have yet to see any figures to illustrate how growth in rich countries can, in perpetuity, be compatible with environmental limits, several assessments point to the opposite conclusion. The Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at Manchester University found that to prevent dangerous global warming, economic growth in rich countries would not be possible. With colleagues at the New Economics Foundation, I came to a similar conclusion.

Jacobs quotes, admiringly, the work of Tim Jackson on "prosperity without growth" with the former government advisory body the Sustainable Development Commission. Yet Jackson's work too, as the name suggests, foresees a future without growth.

Work by the Stockholm Resilience Centre on environmental "planetary boundaries" shows several have already been transgressed, requiring large absolute reductions of consumption in rich countries.

One thing is sure: advocates of growth need to be able to show not only that environmental impact can be cancelled out by efficiency and resource substitution, but that deep, absolute reductions in resource use can be achieved simultaneously, and that such gains can be made year, after year, after year, ad infinitum.

A key insight by the original MIT group was the problem of time lag. Environmental problems became obvious and were acted on too late. Damage became locked in. This is the moment we are now living through. Nasa climate scientist James Hansen recently pointed out that if the rich world had started reducing emissions as recently as 2007, the annual reductions necessary would have been 3%. Wait until next year and the figure rises to 6%, wait further until 2020 and the annual target leaps to a staggering 15% reduction per year.

Bear in mind that the Stern Review on the economics of climate change found that annual emissions reductions greater than 1% have "been associated only with economic recession or upheaval".

There are many problematic issues to do with growth that can't be covered here. Clinging to growth, however, suffocates the imagination needed to devise more convivial ways to share a finite planet. At the very least, and with so much evidence to the contrary, the burden of proof now lies heavily on those who reject the original message of the Limits report, for them to demonstrate how, and under what circumstances, we could possibly enjoy "growth forever" in a finite world. Kenneth Boulding, the founder of general systems theory, thought this to be a view held only by "madmen and economists".

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