Andrew Simms's Blog, page 4
December 11, 2015
If airlines care about climate change they should make everyone travel economy
Business travel is booming and airlines are expecting other sectors to compensate for their apathy
After a period of decline in some countries, business travel is on the rise. Total spending is expected to have grown by 7.4% in the UK, 3.1% in the US and 15% in China, according to the Global Business Travel Association, with $1.25tn predicted to have been spent globally on business flights this year.
Related: Heathrow third runway decision put off until at least summer 2016
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December 9, 2015
Not the Paris climate talks: pictures worth a thousand words
A flurry of conceptual art has provided an eloquent visual counterpoint to the sound and fury of political negotiations at the UN climate summit
As the Paris talks draw to a close, there has been late flourish of artistic and cultural response to the potentially catastrophic threat of climate change. Some works are shouts of outrage, or attempt simply to make us connect with the reality of global warming. Others are of a more ambitious bent, seeking to be part of the solution by actively bringing people together to reimagine how we live in the world.
The campaigning work of the Beehive Collective, a volunteer-driven arts organisation in Paris for the festival of economic alternatives, has more in common with the medieval artisans who made the Bayeux tapestry than the fashionable but fleeting clicktivism of the age.
Continue reading...December 1, 2015
Paris talks make the climate clock tick loudly but it never stops | Andrew Simms
With one year to go before the 100 months countdown ends, how has the climate debate changed?
The climate clock may tick loudly when world leaders turn their gaze in its direction, but it never stops. This series of articles about what’s happening in our warming world, which has seen attention to the issue come and go as the time for meaningful action to avert uncontrollable climate change slips away, now has one year to go.
Continue reading...November 18, 2015
How scientific miscalculations could crash the climate | Andrew Simms
In the last month, experts have questioned the accuracy of current targets for both emissions reductions and the resources needed for climate action. So what does this mean for the planet?
Measurement can be simply a matter of getting things to fit– or a matter of life and death. By confusing different scales and units, a friend once nearly ordered a Venetian blind that would have been three metres wide and only three inches deep.
Related: Could the 2C climate target be completely wrong?
Continue reading...October 21, 2015
Sønderborg: the little-known Danish town with a zero carbon master plan #keepitintheground
Denmark joins more than a hundred places around the world making business-friendly zero carbon commitments as they transition away from fossil fuels
Almost completely surrounded by water, the little-known Danish town of Sønderborg is no stranger to flooding from both seawater rising along its coastline and heavy rainfall. With climate change ensuring more of both, Sønderborg is learning to tackle the immediate problems of adapting to a warming world while becoming part of the broader solution.
Its ProjectZero plan, launched in 2007 as a joint venture between the people, politicians and businesses of Sønderborg, aims to enable the town of approximately 77,000 to become zero carbon by 2029.
Related: World Bank: clean energy is the solution to poverty, not coal
Related: Are we reaching a positive climate change tipping point?
Continue reading...October 8, 2015
Cars, aviation, steel ... the stranded assets risk spreads far beyond fossil fuel firms | Andrew Simms
VW is paying the price of revelations that ‘clean diesel’ is as much a lie as ‘clean coal’ - in a low-carbon economy 100s of energy intensive industries will have to reinvent themselves or become similarly exposed
Imagine you invested heavily in glam rock silver spandex clothing just as punk music happened. You’d suddenly be left with a lot of shiny stuff you couldn’t shift. It would be a ‘stranded asset’ – the victim of an unanticipated devaluation due to shifting fashion (though you might argue it was always a liability).
Increasingly, mainstream acceptance that money poured into fossil fuels risks becoming trapped in similarly stranded assets, raises the intriguing possibility that the logic might leak out and touch other parts of the economy which are heavily dependent on the same fossil fuels.
Continue reading...September 9, 2015
How do we fund the refugee crisis? With a Tobin tax | Andrew Simms
It took a single image to move governments to accept moral responsibility for humane treatment of the refugee crisis, but what will it take now to persuade them to pay for adequate action? David Cameron appears set to raid the already stretched aid budget to meet costs, robbing Peter to meet Paul’s settlement costs.
Related: How does UK refugee commitment compare with other countries?
It would be much better practice to pay for core international public needs from core international taxation
Related: Syrian man pictured crying as his family landed in Greece finds refuge in Germany
Continue reading...September 3, 2015
New economic thinking could help tackle the planetary and housing crises | Andrew Simms
Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘people’s quantitative easing’ for house building was derided by many, but to keep a roof over all our heads in the face of climate change it is time for fresh economic thinking
If your house was slowly falling down, in serious danger of catching fire or getting repossessed you’d know something was wrong and needed changing. Yet, tens of millions of homes are at risk globally according to Nasa’s latest research on sea level change, because of ice loss from Greenland and the Antarctic, melting glaciers and the thermal expansion of the warming oceans.
Oikos, meaning household, and nomos, meaning roughly a set of rules, are the generally accepted Greek roots for the word economics. Hence, stripped of its own wilful obfuscations as a discipline, economics is the art of good housekeeping. But, as the Nasa research shows, economics is failing lamentably at the level of planetary housekeeping, just as it is in the UK at the more prosaic but also important level of the housing market.
Continue reading...August 18, 2015
Exploding the productivity myth: jobs, cuts and carbon slaves
Growth-based, capitalist economies propped up by fossil fuels strive for higher productivity at the expense of people and the planet we rely on
Employees at retailer Amazon are being stressed to their limits in the name of productivity, reports the New York Times. Meanwhile, in the UK the threat of strikes on the London Underground has hung over the capital this summer. In the face of funding cuts, management is trying to get more from less, extending the tube service by introducing night trains while making cuts to ticket office staff. Fearing a combination of a less safe network due to reduced staff at stations and more anti-social shifts for train drivers, a dispute is raging between unions and management.
Related: Pushing Earth beyond its natural limits - in pictures
Related: Small scale hydropower can provide stream of new jobs to rural regions
Related: This endless quest for growth will see Greece self-destruct
Continue reading...August 3, 2015
Our environmental deficit is now beyond nature’s ability to regenerate
We are heading fast in the wrong direction despite the world gearing up to approve new sustainable development goals and a new climate accord
The world enters ecological ‘overshoot’ this year on 13 August, six days earlier than last year. All the world’s production and consumption for the rest of the year, this suggests, then runs up an environmental deficit beyond nature’s ability to regenerate itself and safely absorb our economic waste. It’s a highly conservative estimate, based on the best data available.
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