Andrew Simms's Blog, page 9

The only sober way to run Britain's economy is to learn our limits

The UK's economy has an Icarus complex: but with finite resources available, we must stop flying too close to the sun

Limits govern everything – from the speed of light to our ability to absorb oxygen or withstand heat. The art of operating within the tolerance thresholds of the material world is what keeps roofs above our heads and bridges standing. Yet, we blithely disregard this at the level of the whole economy. When Daedalus, the Athenian master craftsman, flew, it was a triumph of intelligently crafted ambition. The fall of Icarus, his son, when he failed to respect the heat tolerances of the wax and feathers keeping him aloft, is a lasting monument to fatal disregard of material boundaries.

Britain's economy is in the grip of an Icarus complex. It touches everything from, appropriately, the debate on aviation expansion, to our increasing dependence on fossil fuels and the historically unprecedented scale and speed of tropical deforestation driven by over-consumption.

At the micro level, engineers learn to work within the thresholds of the material world, but at the macro level economists do not. Their models allow them to externalise the cost of failure. However – as with pyramid-selling schemes – this only delays and makes larger a later, system-wide collapse. The macroeconomics practised by government remains clueless with regard to any theory of optimal scale. Yet, as finance and the sub-prime mortgage market discovered, bigger often doesn't equal better.

A straightforward proposal logically follows: the economy should operate within the biosphere's thresholds, its ability to absorb our waste and replenish its productivity. Good estimates are available for what this means in terms of most of our planetary boundaries, from the climate to forests, farming and fisheries.

Once this simple principle is adopted, it introduces an urgent and immediate decision tree. If something like a new airport runway, or expansion of fossil fuel extraction, is going to take you closer to, or further beyond, one of the biosphere's tolerance thresholds – such as potentially runaway climate change – you branch off and do something else. In a world of rational policy debate that would mean no enlargement of Heathrow, or having to identify compensatory carbon savings elsewhere. The latter is not as easy as it sounds as some official projections for expansion lead to the aviation industry using up the UK's entire fair global share of safe carbon emissions before too long.

All the tax breaks and subsidies given for gas fracking or offshore oil would be redirected to beneficial alternatives.

If you reject the notion of living within our environmental means and the immediate choices it implies, what is the logical counter-proposal: that we consume and produce waste beyond the biosphere's ability to absorb and replenish? Such an approach relies upon magical thinking. Yet this is the proposition on which every major economy operates, because none seeks scientifically to identify and operate within the best estimate of its limits.

A peculiar self-absorption allows us to think we can exist separately to the laws that govern the physical world. In its survey of economists for 2014, the Financial Times asked a question about the likely "sustainability" of the UK economy in the year ahead. In it the meaning of sustainability was completely drained of any sense of the environment. It referred only to whether "recovery" – growth in consumption – would continue.

Strangely, the economics of austerity is held up with constant reference to more ideological, self-imposed limits: limits to what we can expect from health, education and other public services, of the pay we can expect or the age at which we can receive a pension. Expectations and ambitions for what the public sphere can achieve are constantly restrained. The only area which knows no bounds in policy terms is the assumption of unlimited consumption growth from finite ecosystems.

There's an unspoken judgment that to acknowledge limits is defeatist, rather than a mature recognition of basic operating conditions. But, as any architect or civil engineer will tell you, the art, precisely, is in discovering what can be achieved creatively given the tolerance of your materials. Working with physical, material limits doesn't block creativity, it sets it free – think of the sound unleashed from wood and gut crafted into a violin, the sight lines of a Frank Gehry building or a statue in stone by Michelangelo, Moore or Hepworth. Push, yes, but don't break.

Concern for the environment doesn't mean a hair-shirt rejection of the material world. On the contrary, it calls for a healthy relationship with it, based on more respect, knowledge, creativity and care. Yes, it rejects wasteful, debt-fuelled, passive consumerism and calls instead, for a more engaged, hands-on "new materialism".

A green economy does this by insisting on quality over quantity, repairability over disposability and by treating people as intelligent agents, capable of learning about, using, maintaining and remaking material objects that endure. In an economy that recognises and revels in the real world, and more active, creative production, there is far more potential for novelty and pleasure.

The popular retelling of the Icarus myth tends to overlook the achievement of Daedalus, who not only flew but landed safely because he understood limits. Take flight, says the moral of the story – soar – but find a way to do so that doesn't melt your wax.

A new edition of Andrew Simms's book Cancel the Apocalypse is published by Little, Brown next month. He works for Global Witness and is a fellow of the New Economics Foundation

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Great story telling is vital to winning the green debate | Andrew Simms

Stories with deep cultural resonance allow people to see themselves "on the right side" of an issue, as Aesop, Pushkin and Dr Suess show

Slowly and painfully it's dawning on campaigning organisations that no amount of fact and rational argument will win the case on climate change. As the Radical Emissions Reduction conference, organised by the Tyndall Centre at the Royal Society, heard on 11 December, forces don't align according to a rational analysis and policy process.

Rather, powerful interests mobilise constituencies by manipulating people's sense of belonging to different groups. And they do so by telling stories with deep cultural resonances that allow people to see themselves "on the right side" of an issue.

This presents a problem. In spite of the fluidity of much social media, large scale media ownership still tends to be politically one-sided (to the right).

A tilted playing field creates a communication problem, but only up to a point. Good storytelling breaks the leash of attempts at narrow cultural control. And, when it comes to folk wisdom, the devil certainly doesn't have all the best tunes, or tales. As it's the season of myth and legend, here's just a few that might come in handy.

How better to capture the self-defeating over-exploitation of the planet's life-supporting biosphere than with a few words from Aesop. In the goose that laid the golden egg, the young farmer is not satisfied with his daily bounty of precious metal – for which read also the bounty of our oceans, farmland and forests. Depending on the version of the story, the goose is killed either by demands to lay ever more, or cut open in the belief that inside it must be full of gold. But, on having its neck wrung it turns out to be like any other bird inside. Either way, all is lost through a sense that what the farmer already had, wasn't enough.

Hans Christian Andersen's tale, The Emperor and the Nightingale, is a good cautionary tale about the dangers of technological 'upgrade culture'. Searching for things of the greatest beauty in his kingdom, the Emperor has brought to court the elusive nightingale, whose song enchants him. But he forgets the nightingale when made a gift of a jewelled, mechanical substitute, and the real bird leaves the palace. After the robotic bird breaks, Death comes to stalk the gravely ill ruler. Then, the real nightingale returns and its serenade is so spell-binding that Death retreats and the Emperor survives.

In The Fisherman and the Fish, by Alexander Pushkin, reworks an older tale to give a succinct account of the emptiness of the consumerist, hedonic treadmill. One day a gold fish that speaks like a human is caught in the net of a seemingly content old fisherman. He lives in a hut by the sea with his good wife. Pleading for its life the fish promises to grant any wish. The Fisherman refuses in honour but, on hearing the tale, his outraged wife demands he return and ask for the wish.

Over days the fish then grants the requests that begin with a new wash tub, and escalate to a mansion, as each fails to satisfy and bring happiness. The couple overreach finally when the wife, now made a Tsaritsa, asks for the fish to become her servant. Returning home the fisherman finds his mansion returned to a hovel and the gift of every other wish gone.

Pushkin echoes the Brothers Grimm tale The Three Wishes, in which a woodsman is implored by a spirit living in a tree not to cut it down. This, in turn, is contemporary to the popular early 19th century song Woodman Spare That Tree by George Pope Morris.

One of the greatest tales of Western literature, Goethe's Faust, contains not just the tragedy of a man who loses his soul, but also a parable of the tragedy of development. In his quest Faust is first a dreamer then a lover.

Finally he reinvents himself as that modern ambiguity, a 'developer,' riding roughshod over people and dispossessing them, having convinced himself he is improving their lot. It's impossible to read without thinking of the machinations behind giant modern construction programmes that trample communities, whether dams, airports, office blocks, motorways or shopping centres.

More recently Dr Seuss's The Lorax, written in 1971 during the burgeoning of the modern environmental movement, is about as direct an environmental fable as you can get. It concerns the fate of the Truffula Trees. The Lorax must protect them from the 'Once-ler' – a personification of short-sighted capitalist exploitation of nature – who is:

Figgering on biggering
and BIGGERING
and BIGGERING
and BIGGERING
turning more Truffula Trees into Thneeds
which everyone, EVERYONE, EVERYONE needs!

More recently still, a central motif of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy is the 'Subtle Knife,' which cuts through the fabric of worlds allowing people to travel from one to the other. But, the price of their convenience is the release of dark forces. Pullman himself concedes an analogy with airplane contrails, aviation and climate change.

Less well known, but a favourite of mine, are the tales of Archy, a cockroach with the soul of a poet, and Mehitabel, an alley cat with a celebrated past. Nightly, Archy types letters to his 'boss' describing their adventures by jumping on the keys of a mechanical typewriter (hence no upper case letters). His wry and poignant stories started appearing in 1916 in a daily column by Don Marquis written for the New York Evening Sun.

At the end of Dr Kevin Anderson's call for immediate, radical emissions reduction at the Tyndall conference, he quotes the philosopher Roberto Unger saying the greatest obstacle to transformation is the lack of imagination to conceive that the world could be different. That's why over the next year, those working on climate change may need fewer facts, and more and better story telling.

Archy, in his elegiac missive, What the ants are saying, signs off with these words:

it wont be long now it won't be long
till earth is barren as the moon
and sapless as a mumbled bone

dear boss I relay this information
without any fear that humanity
will take warning and reform

It's now thirty-five months before the world enters a new, more perilous phase of global warming, and counting.

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Rewrite the aims of the economic revolution word for word | Andrew Simms

Rising environmental and economic instabilities make it imperative to redefine old plans on our own terms

A spasm of interest in radical overhaul of the "system" seems to have foundered on the killer question: "Where's the plan for a different one?"

Rewrite the aims of the economic revolution – word for word | Andrew Simms

Rising environmental and economic instabilities make it imperative to redefine old plans on our own terms

A spasm of interest in radical overhaul of the "system" seems to have foundered on the killer question: "Where's the plan for a different one?"

But, with the prospects for an urgently needed green economy being suffocated daily by business as usual, how difficult can it be to rewrite the failing, founding principles of mainstream, planet-eating, people-crushing, neoliberal economics? Not difficult at all, it turns out. In some cases you just need to change a few words to turn the world around. With celebrities talking revolution, students walking out of unreconstructed university economics lectures, and allegations flying of departments stuck in doctrine and dogma, it could prove a timely correction, as market analysts might say.

Let's go back to where it all began. Mont-Pèlerin is a small village in Switzerland. In photographs it has the same tranquil postcard perfection that was used to deeply unnerving effect in the French television drama The Returned, in which people inexplicably come back from the grave to the bewilderment of friends and family.

In April 1947, Mont-Pèlerin was home to an ideological resurrection, and as with The Returned, what came back was critically different.

Philosophers, academics and historians gathered at the Hotel du Lac to discuss how to halt the spread of ideas that emphasised common purpose and governments acting directly in the public interest. Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, scions of the Chicago School of Economics, Ludvig von Mises of the Austrian school, and philosopher Karl Popper were among the like-minded who set out to perfect a market system that would underpin their vision of a free society.

That meeting set in train an economic counter-revolution that, over three decades later, saw the inexorable rise of neoliberalism. They married the old, neoclassical belief in deregulated markets with newer liberal concerns about personal freedom, fully conflating the two. The Mont-Pèlerin Society was formed and remains active today, still promoting essentially the same message.

Karl Popper, author of The Open Society and Its Enemies, did not stay involved. He had a more nuanced view on markets and freedom, pointing out that "proponents of complete freedom are in actuality, whatever their intentions, enemies of freedom". Popper saw the logical consequence of ignoring how power, unregulated markets and unrestrained individual behaviour would interact, reasoning that this notion of freedom paradoxically would be, "not only self-destructive but bound to produce its opposite, for if all restraints were removed there would be nothing whatever to stop the strong enslaving the weak". By Popper's definition, neoliberalism wasn't, in fact, liberalism at all.

Since then, real market systems have failed on an epic scale. With great irony, they were only saved by Keynesian-style government intervention of heroic proportions. As the wheel, or perhaps spiral, of history turns again, a thought experiment seems in order.

Why not rewrite the original statement of aims of the Mont-Pèlerin Society in the light of lessons from recent history and in the face of today's pressing problems? With the environment falling apart, social cohesion sacrificed to the ideology of austerity, and economic instability rife, old plans need reworking. Here's my version (the Society's original is easily sourced on its website), with no apologies. Jeremy Paxman's sceptical eyebrows might be pleased to know that, in many ways, all the plan for an economic revolution needs is a word changed here and there. With excuses for the language of 1947, here are the founding principles of neoliberalism rewritten, word for word:

A new statement of aims

The central values of civilisation are in danger. Over large stretches of the earth's surface the essential conditions for human prosperity, dignity, justice, and the free expression of dissent without intimidation have already disappeared.
In others they are under constant menace from the development of current tendencies of policy. State intrusion into our private lives marches alongside the punishment of those in poverty due to an economic crisis they did not create, and energy policies guaranteed to ensure climatic upheaval.

The position of the individual, community and campaign group is incrementally undermined by extensions of arbitrary power. Even those most precious possessions of enlightened society—the celebra|tion of difference, freedom to expose corruption and hold elites accountable—are threatened by the spread of creeds which, claiming the defence of freedom when representing a privileged minority, seek only to establish a position of power in which they can suppress and obliterate all views but their own.

The market, whose diffused power was meant to guarantee against such abuse, has instead undermined democracy, allowing a previously unimagined concentration of control.
We hold that these developments have been fostered by a rejection of history, empathy and curiosity about consequences that substitutes self-interest for common morality, and by the growth of theories which question the necessity of preserving convivial conditions for life on earth.

We hold further they have been fostered by a decline of belief in public purpose and cooperative exchange; for without the deep resilience, openness and ambition associated with these projects it is difficult to imagine a society in which we may be free, survive and thrive.

Believing that what is essentially an ideological movement must be met by reality, argument and the reassertion of valid ideals, the group, having made a preliminary exploration of the ground, is of the opinion that further study is desirable inter alia in regard to the following matters:

1. The analysis and exploration of the nature of the present crisis so as to bring home to others its essential physical, moral and economic origins. [nb: one word added, 'physical' to include the real world]

2. The redefinition of the functions of the market so as to distinguish more clearly between the totalitarian and the liberal order. [A single word changed, guess which?]

3. Methods of re-establishing the role of society and of assuring its development in such manner that the market and other forms of centralised, unaccountable power are not in a position to threaten the environment in which civilisation evolved and the bonds which hold it together.

4. The possibility of establishing optimal standards by means not inimical to initiative, creativity, community and healthy functioning of ecosystems.

5. Methods of combating the misuse of history for the furtherance of creeds hostile to freedom or in the service of predatory power.

6. The problem of the creation of an international order conducive to the safeguarding of life, peace and liberty and permitting the establishment of harmonious international economic relations.

The group does not aspire to conduct propaganda. It seeks to establish no meticulous and hampering orthodoxy. It aligns itself with no particular party. Its object is solely, by facilitating the exchange of views among minds inspired by certain ideals and broad conceptions held in common, to contribute to the preservation and improvement of the conditions for life and the open society.

Not only does the earlier, original statement of aims make for an interesting departure point, how something so short and simple laid the basis of an economic revolution, there is something to be learnt from their tactics. Arthur Seldon was vice-president of the Mont-Pèlerin Society and went on to found the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) in 1955. The spread of like-minded groups like the IEA was deliberate, a strategic attempt to occupy more niches of debate and expand their intellectual space.

Rather than being precious about policy, as the left has a habit of being, he understood the value of generating ideas on your own terms. The IEA would fly kites, or "fire shells" of ideas, to use their own military analogy, to "clear the ground and set the agenda".

They weren't overly bothered if some missed, as long as they were lobbed in the right direction. They refused to get bogged down with short-term, incremental policy reform, or get stuck loitering in someone else's intellectual corridor. Such self-confidence, clarity of purpose and willingness to experiment is just what a rejuvenated, progressive politics needs, if it is to better understand and even make the new weather of our times.

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Why Cameron's company ownership list helps the climate change fight | Andrew Simms

Secrecy is key to the running of illegal trades that harm the environment. This new register helps shed some light

It might seem arcane, irrelevant even, to the thumping challenge of preventing catastrophic climate change, but the UK publishing a publicly accessible register of company ownership, as David Cameron announced yesterday, is an important step. How so?

Keeping tropical forests standing and fossil fuels underground are two of the greatest challenges in arresting climatic upheaval. Yet, the flow of illicit finance is one of the most powerful engines of the global oil industry and the trade in illegal tropical timber.

In Nigeria alone, since the oil boom began in the 1960s an estimated $400bn has been lost to corruption. The global trade in illegal timber on the other hand is thought by Interpol to be worth about $100bn annually – not much less than the total amount spend by rich countries on aid in 2012, and more than the estimated value of the global cocaine trade.

Secrecy allows these economic activities to flourish. Shell companies – which have been called the getaway cars for crime, corruption and tax evasion – are typically used to hide the real, so-called "beneficial owners" of companies. Of more than 200 major cases of corruption between 1980 and 2010, the World Bank estimates that 7 out of 10 relied on shell companies.

By definition secrecy is a kind of market failure, because it restricts information and markets need information to function efficiently. But it's worse than that. The shadow of secret financial flows contaminates democracy like an oil spill does a water course.

HSBC, for example, has had extensive dealings in both fossil fuels and tropical forestry. Because of the way that the bank does business it was ordered to pay a record $1.9bn fine by authorities in the US for engaging in systemic money laundering.

Hauling carbon out of the ground and cutting down trees can be attractive to a developing country looking for a quick profit. It becomes even more so if inducements, kick-backs and profits flow through shadowy networks of hard-to-trace shell companies. In that light, having a publicly available register of the real owners of companies is a step forward.

But it's still not that simple. As long as the notion remains that liquidating natural assets is the best or only path to human development, the world will remain locked on a counter-productive and ultimately self-destructive path. With that logic in place, the temptations often prove irresistible, regardless of whether there's a shell company. Take the Danish company Dalhoff Larsen and Horneman, for example. Although certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), which is supposed to enable a sustainable forms of industrial logging, it was recently caught importing $300,000 of illegal Liberian timber.

Liberia's president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, notably joined Cameron in backing the call for public registries of ownership.

Things are especially bad in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Recent research by Global Witness revealed that an astonishing 90% of the revenue due to the public purse from logging was lost due to comprehensive tax avoidance by the companies involved.

Not only does a development model based upon liquidating natural assets end up eating itself, the economy of corruption that builds up around it seems to guarantee that only a tiny minority benefit financially.

The flaw at the heart of this model is another issue of hidden ownership – not of firms within the economy, but of the economy itself. There remains no acknowledgement in day-to-day economic commentary that healthy, functioning ecosystems are the foundation and source of our livelihoods. The biosphere is the "real" owner of the economy. And, for the economy to think that it can ultimately prosper through the industrial degradation of the biosphere, is an assumption of reckless stupidity and short-sightedness.

It is progress that we now have a mechanism in place to clean the windows of shell company getaway cars, and be able to peer inside to see who is driving and whose name is on the owners' manual. Making that mechanism work however, ensuring it is easy to operate and sufficiently resourced, remains a challenge.

It would be greater progress still if every day we could keep in clear sight that the economy would itself a shell without what the biosphere provides. How about next we have a public register and daily reports every time, in the name of development, an oil, coal, fracked gas or tropical logging contract gets signed, and stating its likely effects on the biosphere's critical life support functions?

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Climate change is happening, so don't shoot the messenger | Andrew Simms

Despite the attention given to climate change sceptics, the overwhelming majority of scientific evidence supports those sounding the alarm – including the IPCC

Emperor Hu Hai of the Qin dynasty in ancient China had an aide killed when he tried to tell the emperor his power was ebbing away. There was an uprising against his brutal reign. It's one of history's earlier known examples of shooting the messenger. No one likes uncomfortable news and we can go to extraordinary lengths to avoid or suppress it.

When it comes to conveying messages about climate change all kinds of things can happen to the messengers, few of them pleasant. As a Greenpeace activist you might have a Russian gun shoved in your face at sea. Concerned members of the British public worried about fracking might experience violent arrest. Scientists presenting the world with an extraordinary consensus on climatic upheaval find themselves subjected by the media to a standard of evidence that it would be unthinkable to apply to, say, economists.

These are the whistleblowers who provide essential but unwelcome feedback on why a system is failing.

The 95% certainty given by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on human-driven warming sits oddly against the recent Oxford University study that found that around 80% of media stories on climate change focus on uncertainties.

The day before publication of the summary of the IPCC report, the BBC website centred a long story on views of climate sceptics. As news websites go, the BBC's is among the most used and influential globally.

However well journalistically intended, stories like that helped make scepticism a dominant narrative in reporting. On the day of publication of the IPCC findings, the opening questions from interviewers were often about the certainty of the science – with scepticism the unspoken or explicit reference point.

To non-expert (ie most) viewers and readers, the creation of apparent balance between two positions communicates that there are two strongly held views that you might equally choose between.

Minor past errors in IPCC reports, which bore no relation to the fundamental mechanisms and reality of global warming, were repeatedly raised in such a way that implied they questioned the very basis of the science. This would be odd because understanding of the basic chemistry of warming hasn't changed for well over a century. But unless this point is clarified explicitly – and typically it isn't – an extraordinary scientific consensus can appear to be mere opinion, something you can take or leave. Inaction moulders in such equivocation.

Where the economy – the thing driving climate upheaval – is concerned, reporting follows a very different logic. Economics is a far, far messier business than climate science. Projections from the most deferentially treated organisations are commonly wildly, not mildly, at odds with subsequent reality.

However, critical voices in economics with a far stronger claim to be listened to given the experience of the past few years are substantially marginalised. Research by Cardiff University, and supported by the BBC Trust, revealed a striking imbalance (other research shows bias reaching deep into the academic literature).

After the financial crisis of 2008, the people turned to by flagship media programmes to enlighten the public on what had happened were, hugely disproportionately, commentators from the very sectors whose deep self-deception allowed the crisis to happen in the first place. Instead of whistleblowers, these were the yes men. They are messengers who don't get shot, perhaps because their messages are not meant to discomfort, but to reassure us that business as usual can continue.

But when something is wrong, however uncomfortable, you have to walk towards it. Here is a point on which to finish that will likely win me few friends. The Labour party under Ed Miliband – one of the few politicians who really understood climate change – has been seeking an issue to strengthen its challenge to the coalition. It settled on the cost of living in general, and energy prices in particular. In calling for a freeze on energy prices it won almost universal plaudits and seemed to reverse the party's fortunes.

But what was good short-term politics is a bad longer-term survival strategy. Fossil fuels are locked into our power generation system, and keeping high-carbon electricity cheap is about the worst thing you can do for climate change. As even the UN's high commissioner for human rights said recently, the great challenge is to keep the carbon in the ground.

As for Emperor Hu Hai – killing the messengers who brought bad news didn't help. Before long, reality rose up and amid chaos he was forced into suicide. It's time to listen.

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The green new deal is the antidote that UK desperately needs | Andrew Simms

Five years after it was first proposed, the deal is relevant now more than ever. So why are politicians dragging their feet?

What does a recovery look like? On current evidence it involves an increasingly divided workplace with more people, especially the young, caught in low-paid, insecure employment.

A matching economic accessory comes in the form of spiralling consumer debt, with rising reliance on overdrafts, credit cards and pay-day loans. And the UK's carbon emissions are rising.

So that's this season's "look" for recovery: poor, insecure, indebted and polluting. If based on debt-fuelled consumption and misery-making employment conditions, the term recovery is at best loose, like applying the word reform to any proposal at all to change public services, no matter how damaging. Where rising emissions are concerned, the recovery is rather like a lung cancer patient getting just well enough to start smoking again.

This is what we've gleaned from five years' worth of reflection and learning since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, even though it revealed a fundamental flaw in a system which everyone (or at least all those star-struck by high finance) believed explained how the world really worked.

In 2008 I was part of the group which published the green new deal. Over 12 months a combination of extreme weather events, high and volatile oil prices and the emerging banking crisis had created a perfect economic storm. The green new deal was designed with broad and positively self-reinforcing policies. It would render safe and re-purpose the banking system, invest in a low-carbon makeover of the UK economy, create good jobs and increase energy security.

Five years on, we believe it is still, by far, the best and most commonsense plan for the UK economy. Next week we will publish a revised update on its fifth anniversary. This new national plan will show how we can make sickly, much-abused economic shoots into healthy green ones.

How badly is it needed? Ask anyone on a low-paid, zero-hours contract, or someone enslaved to the payday lenders; or anyone who cares about the prospect of their children growing up in a world gripped by worsening climactic upheaval.

In the recent frenzy to further deepen our dependence on fossil fuels, there is an almost maniacal resistance to accepting the reality of global warming, and an equally wilful blindness to the positive opportunities offered by economic redesign.

A rush to reprivatise the RBS bank (only saved by public largesse at the height of the financial crisis) rests on a doctrinal belief – comprehensively disproved five years ago – that private, self-interested markets in finance are best for everyone. That's bad enough, but it has blinded government to the possibilities of it changing the bank's structure and lending priorities. For example, if broken up into German-style regional landesbanks, it could better serve useful businesses. Similarly, given a new mandate to lend to low-carbon sectors, it could help future-proof the UK economy.

Instead there is a grim determination to return to old ways. And, taking account of the scale of RBS's financial support to fossil fuels around the world, one estimate gives the bank a carbon footprint bigger than the whole of the UK.

Norway is famous for sensibly investing income from its fossil fuels. The UK, in effect, used the proceeds from North Sea oil and gas to bankroll high unemployment in the 1980s. Norway's oil fund (known as a sovereign wealth fund) is now vast, totalling three-quarters of a trillion dollars, and a debate is raging over its reform in the run-up to Norwegian elections next week.

Unfortunately, the debate centres not on the good that can be done with a sum several times larger than the annual, global aid budget – but on where it can get the best return. Given it's a small country and already well-off, and that the fossil fuels once burned will have worldwide impacts, Norway could almost singlehandedly fund a global green new deal and show leadership by leaving in the ground those remaining reserves which it is not safe to burn.

Why not mark the anniversary of a failed financial system with action in advance to prevent the failure of our environmental one, and do the economy a favour at the same time. Then we would have a recovery worthy of the name.

Onehundredmonths.com

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Never mind the economic deficit. What about the environmental one? | Andrew Simms

Today is Earth Overshoot Day, when we've consumed more natural resources than our biosphere can replace over a year

Two contradictory ideas shape UK politics. First, the argument for austerity, that the nation cannot and should not live beyond its financial means. Second, the notion that we can and must, in effect, live beyond our environmental means. That is why any increase in our spending and consumption is hailed as economic success.

Today, the world goes into ecological debt, or "overshoot" – an estimate of the moment in the year when humanity has consumed more natural resources and created more waste than our biosphere can replace and safely absorb over a 12-month period.

Since the 1970s we've been living beyond our means, going into ecological deficit before the end of each year. And, the day when we hit "overshoot" has been creeping ever earlier. This year it falls two days earlier than in 2012. It now takes about 18 months for the biosphere to compensate for a year's worth of human consumption and waste. Conservatively, here in the UK we're using the equivalent of three and a half times the natural resources we have as a nation. For a country like Japan the figure is seven times. Many low-consuming countries in Africa are ecological creditors. Indonesia has been a creditor, but rising consumption and deforestation are running down its natural assets and pushing it over the brink.

For how long we can get away with not balancing the ecological books is a question that exercises many scientific minds, if unfortunately few political and economic ones. It's a bit like Jenga, the game with the tower of wooden blocks; you can keep taking them away for a while until, with a suspenseful amount of uncertainty, the whole thing collapses.

Later this year the IPCC releases its next major report on global warming. It may suggest that the climate is slightly less sensitive to rising emissions (although others say the opposite may be true) but with a likely prognosis that we are still on course to go over the edge and soon become locked into long-term, worsening climatic upheaval.

The contradiction between our approach to good financial and ecological management is stark enough, but even worse than it appears at first glance. Money is not like soil, or forests or fossil fuels. It is not a bounded thing in the way that a natural resource or ecosystem is. It is a social contract, a measure of trust, a promise to pay, long since separated from any underpinning finite material such as gold. Therefore, in some senses, it is unlimited. That's why in both the US and the UK governments were able to magic hundreds of billions of dollars and pounds from thin air, through the magic of double-entry book keeping, to bail out failed banks and pull the economy back from the brink. As an advocate of local currencies once put it, a lack of money should no more stop us doing something than should a lack of inches prevent us from building a house.

The Earth's ecosystems can be more or less productive depending on how well we care for them, but they are ultimately finite. So, we have chosen to ignore the idea of living within our means in the one arena, the ecological, where it is critical for our survival. Conversely, politicians obsess about the idea of living within our means in the economic arena, where it is debilitating to society in practical terms, and theoretically flawed. Obliviousness to ecological debt is characteristic of an economic system in which the interests of finance come first and which fails to recognise the environmental foundations of prosperity.

As a result, money flows into things that maximise short-term financial returns, rather than optimising overall value for the economy and society. Tax breaks go to the oil and gas industry while renewable energy is starved of investment and undermined by a hostile chancellor of the exchequer.

One problem has always been how to bring such ideas home. That is beginning to change. The fracking debate is reminding many that the energy we take for granted actually comes from somewhere. Using less, or having more clean, community-owned renewable sources suddenly seems more attractive than injecting chemical cocktails into the ground not far from your home to push more carbon out of it. These reactions are in Conservative heartlands. And, it was a Tory minister, Lord de Mauley at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, who recently reminded us that rampant consumerism is not very conservative. Buying second-hand and repairing things, he said, would tackle scandalous levels of waste and leave you better off.

"Live without limits" is the slogan of Jeep, makers of archetypal, gas guzzling off-road vehicles. However, if you tried to, you wouldn't live very long. By accumulating too much ecological debt, we are losing the climate to which we are adapted. Historically speaking, the public debt is at relatively low levels, while our ecological debt is larger than ever and growing. That is the issue that should be at the top of the political agenda.

Climate changeClimate changeIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)Shale gas and frackingEnergyFossil fuelsGasAusterityEconomicsAndrew Simms
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End this love for dirty fuels

The future belongs to clean energy, but the UK is embracing shale gas and fracking instead of renewables – appalling policy

That blaring noise you can hear could be the sound of the UK missing the boat. A succession of crises over more than a decade revealed the UK's dependence on fossil fuels, increasingly imported, to be both perilous and expensive. The fuel protests of 2000 showed the interconnected vulnerability of our food and fuel systems, while the oil price spike of 2008 revealed the economy as hostage to volatile market.

You'd think then, that if only as an exercise in prudent government – forget about climate change for a moment – aggressive energy diversification into abundant, domestic renewable sources would be a good idea.

Yet, if anything, flip-flopping on feed-in tariffs and scaldingly negative remarks from the chancellor, George Osborne, and others have, wilfully or not, undermined a whole UK industrial sector just as it could be growing, creating jobs and being a world leader.

Renewables are, according to the International Energy Agency, now the theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

The Olympic legacy is that it proved public funding works | Andrew Simms

London 2012 gave a glimpse of a more fortunate Britain – a triumph of direct funding and volunteering over austerity

Welcome to the Britain that actually learned from the best of the Olympics. You take a day off work to potter around your community allotment, paid for by a national public health fund. Next week you fancy another day off to take an interesting elderly person who attends the same GP surgery as you for tea. They talk in fascinating detail about how grim things were before the NHS. After that, maybe a day building a garden at the local school, or helping to set up a publicly funded community green energy scheme. At the end of the month you'll have a big party with everyone else doing similar things, then start all over again. Better still, your employer cheers you on, the national press treats you like a hero and the prime minister lauds the example you have set.

You're a Games Maker who never gave up. You're living in a nation that stumbled on an extraordinary idea – that instead of chaining ourselves to desks, working ever longer and throwing ourselves on the mercy of the markets, there is another way. A new book, London 2012: How Was It For Us? argues it could be like this for everyone – a publicly funded good time: working less, getting to know complete strangers, feeling better about life and watching the economic and social benefits flow.

David Cameron and George Osborne would be horrified if the idea crept out because it directly contradicts government moralising on austerity and the primacy of the private sector. Yet it's a lesson we can all draw from, and holds the simple logic of acknowledging the positive impact of the Olympics that the coalition is claiming credit for.

Nearly £10bn in trade and investment came our way as a result of hosting the Olympics, they say. Given that the Olympics was over 90% publicly funded, it must be a clear triumph of the stimulus that public spending can generate.

But that's inconvenient, because the government insists the opposite. Cuts to public investment, we're told, are necessary and inevitable. Cameron says that "all available policy levers" should be used to make it easier for the private sector to "create a new economic dynamism".

Meanwhile, Osborne positions the public sector as an enemy that "crowds out" private enterprise. Sebastian Coe even declared himself, in the Guardian, unsure as to whether he believed in the role of government at all – at least until the interviewer pointed out that without the government, London 2012 would never have happened.

Such strangely schizophrenic attitudes could result from common misapprehensions about the financing of the event. Corporate sponsorship grew like ivy over it and special privileges were showered like confetti on to sponsors, so that their role seemed central. But in fact all the heavy lifting was public, in terms of direct funding and volunteer staffing. Only about 6% of funds actually came from corporations.

There were many things wrong about the event in general. For one thing, it was in the wrong place: other parts of the country needed it far more. And pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline wins a medal for sheer brazenness. Just two weeks after being found guilty of promoting antidepressants for unapproved uses, including treatment of children, they promoted their supplying of anti-doping kits to the Olympics with the slogan, "the crowd is my only drug". Survivors of the Bhopal chemical disaster protested at sponsorship from Dow Chemical, and there was the full-blown irony of fossil fuel giant BP being s sustainability partner for the event.

But nothing should disguise some vital revelations about ourselves and what a dynamic public sphere, widely defined, can achieve. About how our economic options are much broader than we are led to believe.

What did the Games show that is truly great about Britain? Danny Boyle's opening ceremony celebrated campaigns for social justice, the collective provision of society's basic needs, literature, music, comedy and the open domain of the worldwide web. These were triumphs largely of the public sphere and collective endeavour, not of the self-interested market. They demonstrate what a truly big society can do when liberated from a narrow economic doctrine.

Beyond basic needs being met, at the heart of our quality of life are the so-called "five ways to well-being": connecting with people around us, being active, taking notice of the world, continual learning and giving. One explanation for the national high was that the Olympics created ample opportunities for all of these. It also interrupted our routines, reminding us that we are gregarious beings who like to party, something that some other cultures can be better at remembering.

Philosopher Mark Rowlands, author of Running with the Pack, asks whether, if there was a pill that provided for all our needs, we would just take it and sit in a chair, satisfied. He thinks not, and views humanity as a maker and player of games for the sake of it.

Economics today is preached much like Christianity once was. We're meant to endure and forego in the present for some infinitely deferred later promise. It's an analogy for a mistake that Rowlands sees in attitudes to human development: "We think of childhood as a time of preparation for the important part of life that comes later," he writes. "I suspect this gets things the wrong way around … Children know that what's worth doing in life is worth doing for its own sake. And everything else is merely unfortunate."

As the politicians polish their reputations with people's memories of London 2012, others might remember clouds of dogma parting briefly to reveal the possibility of a very different, more fortunate Britain. We should take note while the sun shines.

Olympic Games 2012Paralympics 2012Olympic GamesLiberal-Conservative coalitionPublic financeVolunteeringLondonAndrew Simms
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