Vegan diets are unhealthy, don't help the environment and lots of animals still die. We should stop indulging their propaganda.

It has become terribly faddish to be a vegan. Hardly a day passes without another TV show featuring some sort of vegan promotion. We're told that being vegan is healthy, environmentally responsible and, of course, morally superior to the old-fashioned human diet filled with animal products. The latest in this stream of propaganda come the other day with the supposedly planet saving 'healthy reference diet' proposed by the EAT-Lancet Commission:

The Commission quantitively describes a universal healthy reference diet, based on an increase in consumption of healthy foods (such as vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, and nuts), and a decrease in consumption of unhealthy foods (such as red meat, sugar, and refined grains) that would provide major health benefits, and also increase the likelihood of attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals.

It's true that these folk aren't proposing that we should all be forced into eating a vegan diet (although they do suggest lots of draconian choice-reduction enforced by government) but the arguments are familiar and move on from the traditional "don't kill animals" position of vegans to a more nuanced morality tale about saving the planet and eating healthily. It is still, however, vegetarian propaganda wrapped up as science. EAT is funded by a couple of Norwegian billionaires (they paid Bill Clinton 3.5m Norwegian Krone to speak at one of their conferences) and funds a familiar collection of researchers:

Take Christiana Figueres, former Executive Secretary of the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). She has compared meat eaters to smokers - who likewise were once role models but later became pariahs - and believes that they should be having their meal outside of the restaurant. Or Harvard's professor Walter Willett, who has claimed that one in three early deaths could be saved if we all gave up meat, and Oxford's vegan researcher Marco Springmann who has called for a meat tax to prevent over “220,000 deaths” and save billions in healthcare costs.

This comes from a review of the EAT-Lancet Commission proposals published in the newsletter of the European Food Agency. The review by food scientist Frédéric Leroy and sociologist Martin Cohen concludes:

The initial effect of the EAT-Lancet campaign seems to be not so much to promote animal welfare as to open up for “Big Ag” lucrative new markets and feed the hunger of governments for new tax bases. What start as academic and scientific debates become political arguments that are dangerously simplistic and may have several detrimental consequences for both health and the environment.

This points us to the core issue with vegan and near-vegan diets - they are unhealthy, probably do little for the environment and almost certainly are bad for the planet's animals. It has always struck me as ridiculous to pretend that we can inhabit the planet without, at some point, killing animals. Moreover, vegans seem to make an almost arbitrary distinction between types of animals - keeping livestock is wrong but it's all fine to drive at 70 mph along the M6 while slaughtering hundreds of innocent flies. And how many little beasts are killed by the arable farmer in growing, harvesting and preparing that quinoa, soy or rice?

Humans have had a close relationship with livestock for thousands of years and cows, sheep, pigs and poultry shared our lives from prehistoric times. Indeed keeping animals makes sense as crop scientist, Dr Sarah Taber points out in a tweet - "when produce is too far gone to sell & there's no processing market (say, melons), it often gets fed to livestock. That's…actually a lot of the point of livestock, historically. They eat stuff we can't & turn it into meat, milk, & eggs that we can."

The idea of a balanced diet means perhaps eating more vegetables and less meat but vegan foods are commonly highly processed and require the addition of supplements to replace the nutrition lost from not eating meat or dairy. And, as Joanna Blythman points out, most of the pastureland in places like the UK simply isn't suitable for growing anything but grass:

But wet, green Britain lends itself to livestock production. Huge upland swathes of the country are quite incapable of growing food crops, but this otherwise agriculturally useless land can be grazed by cattle, sheep, goat, deer and other game. When meat and milk comes from predominantly free-ranging, grass-fed animals, this isn't stealing mountains of grain out the mouths of people, but harnessing natural resources to produce quality, healthy food.

Despite this the vegan propagandists are given a free ride but the media - nobody challenges Marco Springmann when he makes sweeping claims about the health benefits or a vegan diet (or rather the disbenefits of eating meat) or extravagent claims about the impact of livestock on climate change. And we're expected to change our choices and habits because a few people have adopted this pretty stupid dietary choice while their propagandists tell us meat-eaters that we're morally reprehensible humans.

The EAT-Lancet report has been beautifully ridiculed by Chris Snowdon but everywhere else - the BBC, ITV, radio and broadsheet newspapers - has treated it as a genuine contribution to science rather than as a piece of propaganda produced by vegan extremists.

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The New Puritan Left - fat, poor people must be stopped from eating so many burgers

Ban it! Tax it! For the children! Climate change! Obesity! Cancer! What about the animals!

Hardly a day passes by without the boundaries of fussbucketry being pushed a little further. It began with fags and (I speak as an ex-smoker here) it was hard to argue that smoking wasn't bad for our health. Or rather the heath of those people actually smoking. Now, however, the New Puritan, "ban all the good stuff" has reached into every corner of our lives with its relentless message about "health", "climate change" and "ethics".

In an edition featuring, in huge black type, the words "The Return of Fascism", the New Statesman lives up to its front cover with a spectacular piece of food fascism:

What does need addressing is the excessive consumption of this potentially carcinogenic product, which not only causes cancer and life-threatening illnesses, but is damaging our environment, antibiotic effectiveness, and the NHS.

Indeed, it is the excessive consumption of meat that we should be acting to reduce.

Consuming just 50g of processed meat (a hot dog, for example) a day raises the risk of developing bowel cancer by 18 per cent over a lifetime. With the average UK adult consuming 70g a day and one in four now obese, the burden of meat consumption on the NHS is real. More funding is needed.

In these few short sentences, the left's full embrace of a controlling fascistic agenda is captured - health, environment, government, NHS and obesity stirred together creating a toxic mixture of statist absolutism. And the solution, just as with booze and sugar, is to tax meat. Make it so those chubby working class people can only afford meat on special occasions (like it was in the old days) while telling them it's for their own moral and physical good.

There was a time when I'd engage with what the left laughingly call "the science" of all this but I now realise that this is just a a circle jerk of self-referencing literature produced mainly by sociologists, left-wing journalists and 'public health' organisations astroturfed by big pharma 'philanthropy'. Suffice it to say that telling people eating bacon gives a slightly increased risk of bowel cancer is fine, saying that eating a hot dog a day will doom you is hyberbolic nonsense. No-one denies that cow farts contribute to the world's production of greenhouse gases but it is simply a lie - a huge lie - to claim (on the back of deforestation not bovine flatulence) it's the second biggest source of those bad gases.

But enough of all this - it's not about science, it's about the ideology - nay, the cult - of health. Our collective obsession with how minor variations in diet might just be increasing our mortality risk. We've no real way of telling whether this is true or not since removing confounding factors from epidemiology is nigh on impossible, especially when it comes to diet. The cult, at least in the UK, has an ally in our health system - the cultists tell us it's our fault that the NHS is under pressure. We are too fat, too drunk, smoke too much and generally live such dissolute lives the poor, desperate nurses and doctors can't cope. It's rubbish, of course - it's still our fault but because we're living too damned long not because we're fat drunks with a smoking habit.

You're not going to die because you're eating meat. And neither is eating meat some sort of terrible, irresponsible and unethical idea despite this being what the cultists want you to think. Cows aren't destroying the planet - rice farming alone produces more greenhouse gas than the entirety of the world's livestock farming. And killing and eating other animals is an entirely normal, reasonable and ethical thing for humans to do (as, for that matter, is wearing their skins on our feet and our backs). I know there are some folk who've adopted some sort of self-denying, bunny-hugging philosophy and that's cool (and unhealthy), but they are not better people than us carnivores, they are not more ethical, and they're not saving the planet by doing so.

We - the meat-eaters - need to start challenging the health cultists, the vegans, the swivel-eyed environmentalists and the tin-pot little fascists in government departments churning out policy at the behest of these ghastly fussbuckets. And, in doing so, we need to start pulling apart the offensive idea that it's in any way ethical to use taxes as a sledgehammer to get people to change what they do. Not only are these taxes regressive - it's not well-paid newspaper journalists or academic sociologists who won't be able to afford the meat after you've taxed it, it's the poor. Just like minimum pricing for booze and the sugar tax, what we have is a sneering attack on the ordinary family. It's not grass-fed, wagyu steak that the fussbuckets hate, it's the burger (just look at the picture the New Statesman use), the hot dog and the bacon sarnie from the roadside caff at 5am on the way to lay concrete or clean out sewers.

It has become received wisdom among the great and good (despite all the evidence to the contrary) that the real problem facing our world is that people are living bad lives - we are all, in the eyes of the New Puritan Cult that has captured too much of our government, sinners against the twin gods of heath and the environment. Of course, the great and good don't speak of themselves here but of others, of the great unwashed majority who like cheap food, enjoy a drink and have the audacity to enjoy themselves in an manner not approved by those great and good. Calls for a tax on meat ("we don't want a ban" - the prohibitionists cry of old) represent the endeavour of a minority to impose their bigotry on the majority, the very definition of fascism: fat, poor people must be stopped from eating so may burgers.

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Buses aren't saving the planet...

One of the usual arguments against suburbs is essentially "cars are bad for the environment". This statisitc - from the USA so data may differ for other places - tells a different story:

The average car on the road consumed 4,700 British thermal units (BTUs) per vehicle mile in 2015, which is almost a 50 percent reduction from 1973, when Americans drove some of the gas-guzzliest cars in history. The average light truck (meaning pick ups, full-sized vans, and SUVs) used about 6,250 BTUs per vehicle mile in 2015, which is also about half what it was in the early 1970s.

By comparison, the average transit bus used 15 percent more BTUs per vehicle mile in 2015 than transit buses did in 1970. Since bus occupancies have declined, BTUs per passenger mile have risen by 63 percent since 1970. While buses once used only about half as much energy per passenger mile as cars, they now use about a third more.

Hmmmm.

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Clean, green, child-friendly and joyful - why we need more suburbia

I wrote recently about our confused, often negative relationship with suburbs and the idea of suburbia:

So why is it that we have such a problematic relationship with suburbia? How did a suburban boy like Simon Schama come to use 'suburban' as an insult, as a way to dismiss someone he disagreed with and felt, in some way, beneath his attention? And when did we start the fetish of the city - the dirty, crowded, unsafe, unfriendly, child-free city? A fetish that, frankly, is something we (perhaps secretly) despise - what we hanker for is suburbia.

I feel that this attitude is damaging society by supporting the idea that somehow suburbs are places without soul or even worse, places that are environmentally damaging, socially divisive, mere creatures of our car-crazed culture. Suburbs are a sin:

In all, that suburban form of homogeneity, orderliness and spacing was an outward response to internal desires for security and control. But there was a cost to such an approach. Namely, the texture of life. Because sameness breeds sameness, which breeds stasis—hence, the “soulless” suburb moniker that has come to permeate the pauses in between suburban praise of “good schools,” “abundant parking” and “safety.”

Inside this desire is something else. Yes, it's to do with safety, comfort and good schools but it's also about space to live. And this is the reason why so much of the New Urbanist, city-focused planning and development approach is problematic. We might be building places suited to people in one stage of their lives but those folk don't stay in a sort of city living, Peter Pan world of endless youthful fun. Mostly because there comes a point in many people's lives when youthful fun isn't fun anymore.

Suburbs are essential if cities are to succeed rather than turn into rapacious parasites sucking the life from rural communities while the 24-hour party people become ever richer in their unhealthy, child-free towers:

For the first time in the history of the Western world, the one-person household has become the dominant mode of living. In Manhattan, New York City’s most densely populated borough, more than half of all homes have a single occupant.

Now I'm sure most of these single-person households are perfectly happy but there, niggling away in the back of my mind, is a question as to whether this really is ideal living. What we do know is dense urban environments in the developed world are increasingly child-free. Here's Aaron Renn, who lives in that child-free Manhattan:

The values and priorities of people without children are different from those with children. One example is the value people put on space. In our central cities populated with largely people who have no children, a big obsession is changing zoning regulations to allow smaller units, including so-called “micro-apartments.” These kinds of developments would enable more upscale young adult singles to live in cities. That’s good in itself. Yet it is not paired with equal concern about creating more housing for families.

When you look, for example, at the recently published (draft) London Plan - 2kg of turgid prose interspersed with nice maps - you see that, far from addressing the sort of concerns Renn raises, the Mayor simply sees housing as a numbers game with the solution being to build the little boxes on top of each other rather than next to each other. In places - Grove Park, Eltham, Southgate, Chiswick - that were once filled with family homes (with gardens), we can expect ever taller accommodation blocks suited to the frenetic, solo life lived by so many young Londoners. All this is intended to avoid taking anything out of the precious 'green belt', to not build new suburbs but crowd the ones we've got.

The attacks on suburbanisation - as typified by that London Plan - continue. Witness the responses to the damage done by Hurricane Harvey in Houston. We're told (by New Yorkers) it is the Texan laissez faire approach to development that made things worse:

For years, the local authorities turned a blind eye to runaway development. Thousands of homes have been built next to, and even inside, the boundaries of the two big reservoirs devised by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1940s after devastating floods. Back then, Houston was 20 miles downstream, its population 400,000. Today, these reservoirs are smack in the middle of an urban agglomeration of six million.

Terrible! Suburban sprawl at its worst - we need denisification, zoning, strict enforcement. Or do we?

Houston’s dispersed, multipolar form, notes MIT’s Alan Berger, may have helped it respond more effectively to Harvey; the city has no central point, like Manhattan in New York City, whose closure damages the entire region. If we accept that more Harvey-like events are possible, even probable, then the most important issue is not zoning but flood control, which requires resilient systems.

So sprawl ain't so bad after all. Indeed, it might just be a good thing. Let's start with a look at South London. This is part of Beckenham, the suburb where I was brought up (my old primary school is featured as is the house where Mary Finnegan - and David Bowie - lived):



The striking thing about this image is the presence of so many mature trees and so much undeveloped space (OK planners, I know you call a garden development). Across the vast acres of London's suburbs this is the norm - even in Croydon. Suburbia is a lot greener - and more environmentally sustainable - than most urbanists and planners credit:

“We’ve all grown up thinking that urban density and verticality is a good thing but there has never been a study that has really looked at this in any detail; they’ve all been generic studies, based on large sets of generalised data. So we thought we should undertake a more focused study to prove it. And the results have been quite the opposite to those we thought we would find.”

And what did they find?

The high-rise residents energy consumption was 27 per cent more per person than the suburbanites, and even per average square metre of space, consumption was 4.6 per cent higher. Remarkably, the suburban homes involved not only had a typically larger floor area and greater surface-to-volume area (e.g. higher ceilings, roof cavities, etc.), they were also wooden-framed and significantly older – nearly 100 years old on average.

Some of the greater energy use in the high-rises was due to the lifts and the lighting and heating of common spaces and amenities. But on the “embodied energy” (in construction and materials) measure, the high-rise buildings required 49 per cent more embodied energy per square metre, and 72 per cent more per resident.

Piling people up in tall towers feels like better land use but it turns out to be the wrong idea if we want a more sustainable urban environment as well as some children (and let's not get started on safety). And, if you're concerns are about social sorting, - planners are always on about mixed tenure and social mobility after all - densification is again a bad idea:

One important point that needs to be taken into account when studying this phenomenon, is just how steeply “exclusionary” a city is “by location”. It has often been noted (e.g. by the authors of the “Costs of Sprawl 2000” study) that the higher house prices are (e.g. expressed by a median multiple) in the entire urban area, the stronger the “drive to qualify” effect. Chicago is actually significantly cheaper in all housing options than Australia’s main cities. Explicit anti-sprawl growth boundary policies exacerbate this “spatial sorting by income” effect, inevitably forcing up the price of all urban land and housing of all types in all locations.

It seems that, far from suburban sprawl being a bad thing, it is instead pretty much essential if we want sustainable cities. Urban containment policies everywhere have failed (check out Auckland's homelessness, London's beds in sheds and Seattle's inward migration crisis) but despite this planners are still churning out strategies for cities based on 'green belts' and urban densification. The reason for this isn't because we want to protect environments but rather because we've convinced ourselves that suburbs - sprawl, to use the pejorative term - are unpleasant places filled with dull people.

We need to change our thinking and rediscover the joy of suburbia not just because suburbs are great but because not building them is making our cities less sustainable, more crowded, unfriendly to children and shockingly expensive. So let's start with a correction on the environment - here's one of the editors of Infinite Suburbs:

One of the consistent themes in the book, and what gets me most excited as a landscape scholar, is the virtue of low density and the ecological potential of the suburban landscape. Environmentally, suburbs will save cities from themselves. Sarah Jack Hinners’s research in the book really surprised me. It suggests that suburban ecosystems, in general, are more heterogeneous and dynamic over space and time than natural ecosystems. Suburbs, she says, are the loci of novelty and innovation from an ecological and evolutionary perspective because they are a relatively new type of landscape and their ecology is not fixed or static.

Yet - and these editors observe this - the planning and development profession still "overwhelmingly vilify suburbia and seem disinterested in significantly improving it. Robert Bruegmann’s essay in the book reminds us that those who consider themselves the intellectual elite have a long history of anti-suburban crusades, and they have always been proven wrong."

Much of the NIMBY argument - albeit from people already in suburbs - is made easier by the willingness of planners to argue that dense urban development will work. We've got to a stage where words like "brownfield" and "regeneration" dominate the case made by the likes of CPRE rather than the reality of that case as 'we don't want any more houses round here' and little else. This urban redevelopment argument (and it is one of the five purposes for the UK's 'green belts') acts as cover for a policy that is responsible for much of London's housing crisis.

I can understand how someone who has enjoyed a field view for years might be put out by it being replaced by an estate of family housing (and I know how developers like to push the country aspect - one development in Cottingley had hoardings with a picture of horses proclaiming "meet the new neighbours") but I also feel that we shouldn't let such sensitivities dominate the system to the point where:

Around 9,000 illegal “beds in sheds” housing tens of thousands of people have sprung up across London over the last five years, a report says today.

Do we seriously think that protecting someone's open view across a not particularly special field should prevent us building the homes we need to prevent people ending up in cramped flats or on a bed in a drafty wooden structure down the end of an inner city garden? Especially when building tower blocks is expensive, environmentally-damaging and unsafe?

It is time to get less precious about those fields, to end planning micro-management of housing delivery and to get back to the sort of build rates we saw from the private sector in the 1930s (when lots of those lovely London suburbs were built) - touching 300,000 in 1937/8. Suburbs are great - you can call them what you like, even 'garden cities' - and we need more of them. The best way to do this is to put the planners back in their box and let people get on building the homes they (and we) need.

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"They can pay more for their food" - Jay Rayner meets Marie-Antoinette

I'm going to leave aside accusations of vanity, self-promotion and smugness because we are all guilty of such vices. I'm going to focus instead on the vexed question of whether it is ever morally defensible to argue that governments should enact policies people should pay more for something as fundamental as the food we eat.

Here's the argument:

British consumers have become too used to food being sold too cheaply. In an age of austerity when many are struggling it is a tricky argument to make, but the fact remains. We need an agriculture sector in a position to invest in its base to help improve our productivity and therefore our self-sufficiency. The 10% of income (down from 20% in 1970) that we spend on food does not enable that. Many may find this unpalatable but the fact is this: unless we improve our self-sufficiency, we will be at the complete mercies of those international markets. Unless we pay a little more now, we risk paying vastly more later. This is an argument that farmers, retailers and the Government needs to engage with.

This is the core of an argument made by food writer, Jay Rayner, as a sort of cod justification for refusing to give the benefit of his knowledge and expertise to the UK Government. Now I know most people think Rayner's article is about the unfolding terrors of Brexit but it isn't, it's about how Rayner thinks the UK (note the UK not Europe or the EU) needs to be more self-sufficient in its production of food because lots of terrible things might happen if we're not - most of which, surprisingly, is about food prices:

...the UK sits with dwindling self-sufficiency, in a stormy world in which food has become one of the great economic battlegrounds. Added to that is the appalling folly of Brexit, forced through by a cabal of ideologues happy to trot out falsehoods about the sunny uplands of economic joy that leaving the European Union would bring.

Instead it has resulted in a devaluation of the pound, making imports more expensive and the exporting of our food more attractive.

If, as many fear, a bad deal is done for Britain resulting in huge tariffs and penalties on trade, food price inflation is going to be in double digits for years to come. That’s if we can get hold of food at all. The people who will suffer the most, of course, are those who already have the least. For them the buying of food will use up a massive proportion of their expendable income.

Now there are a few things here that do rather matter with the first being the presumption that a UK government would impose "huge tariffs and penalties" on trade in food. And, given that this would be necessary to have the policy he wants of greater self-sufficiency, why he has such a problem with such impositions? Or, to put the question a different way, how does Rayner propose to increase the proportion of UK food consumption produced in the UK? And wouldn't this be completely impossible if we remained a member of the EU?

To give Rayner his due, he refuses to wholly embrace the 'supermarkets are totally evil' line used by many of those supporting his mission of expensive food. Rayner also slaps down the urban growing fad:

They are interesting educationally. Allotments are good for mental wellbeing and general fitness. But the carbon footprint of the food produced tends to be appalling.

The problem is that, in criticising localism, Rayner undermines the basis for his argument on food production and self-sufficiency.

...do not be fooled by environmental arguments around localism. What matters most when judging environmental impact of food production is the full life cycle: you need to look at the carbon (and other inputs) not just of the trucks getting produce from field to fork, but in the farm buildings and machinery, the fertilisers and the workforce.

It's hard to find a more compelling argument for international free trade in agriculture than this one. A world where food is grown in the place most suited to its production rather in a less fertile location just across the road. If food miles aren't the problem (Rayner cites transport costs as 2% to 4% of total food cost) then what are the arguments for self-sufficiency at any level below the whole world?

It seems to me that Rayner, if he is to make his argument for remaining in the EU, has to recognise that the shared competence on agriculture needs to be viewed at the level of the whole union not individual member countries. And just so we're clear what this means:

It turns out that the EU is not self-sufficient in terms of all the nutrients normally locked in agricultural products and principally available for different usages: The respective self-sufficiency ratio is only 91 per cent.

I hate to make Rayner's pro-remain argument better than he does but being 91% self-sufficient in food is better than being less than 50% self-sufficient in food - and this is without any change at all to our current approach on food prices. Rayner makes a localised and protectionist argument (one that, incidentally couldn't be achieved if we stayed in the EU) focusing solely on UK food production rather than EU food production within a single market.

Rayner doesn't set out how his proposal to increase food prices, perhaps even to double those food prices will be achieved. It seems from his article that the model is essentially to dramatically reduce the area under production through environmental regulation and, therefore, to increase the costs to UK farmers. Obviously such a policy can only be achieved if two things are done: huge tariffs amounting to de facto import bans on foods that can only be produced expensively in the UK and the introduction of VAT on food so as to fund, in part, the subsidies necessary to sustain newly uneconomic farm businesses. And, to be blunt, no government is going to get away with imposing a huge tax on food, so the only way to deliver Rayner's policy is through preventing (or at best, severely restricting) imports of food. Fans of the corn laws will be delighted!

It shouldn't surprise us that Rayner doesn't get to the financial and economic logic of his argument (preferring instead horror stories about horsemeat and vague suggestions that the European Food Safety Agency, EFSA, regime would be scrapped) because it makes almost no sense at all. Not only does the logic of his argument about the EU tell us we are already more-or-less self-sufficient but also that doubling food prices has to involve a massive tax hike on food.

To return to where we started - is it morally justified to argue for government action to hugely increase food prices? For my part, I don't think it is an ethically defensible argument. Food is essential (and especially the basic nutrients Rayner considers when he talks of the 2007/8 food price spike) and government should prioritise policies that reduce prices such as relaxing planning rules to allow more efficient supermarkets. Rayner, like Tim Lang, the lefty food policy wonk of choice, fails entirely to see that the very people who lose under their policies are the poorest. And to suggest otherwise as Rayner does, is to propagate a terrible misrepresentation - the massive hike in prices his policies demands can only reduce the quality of life for millions of families in Britain. I'll be OK, Jay Rayner will be OK, but the poorest and most vulnerable in our society won't be OK.

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Loving the place you live - the essence of conservatism

From Roger Scruton:

This is why the true environmentalist is also a conservative. For the desire to protect the environment arises spontaneously in people, just as soon as they recognise their accountability to others for what they are and do, and just as soon as they identify some place as “ours”. Oikophilia is deep in all of us, and it is illustrated by the two-century-old campaign in my country to preserve the countryside, and by the similar campaign in the United States to protect the unspoiled wilderness. If we are to have a cogent environmental policy it must appeal to the oikophilia of the electorate, and that means that it must respect their sentiments of national identity. It must stand firm in the face of globalism, including the globalist rhetoric that would accuse all patriotic people of “racism and xenophobia” just because they are not prepared to let their home be swallowed in the global entropy.

It all does rather remind me of Kipling's paean to his home county of Sussex:



Love of place - country, county, town or village is central to the idea of conservatism but is often overlooked in our discourse. Whenever I'm with my fellow Conservative councillors - as I was for a couple of days this week - the feeling that comes across most is of of really being bothered about protecting where they live, their commmunity, their neighbours.

This idea:

Love of place is great equalizer and mobilizer. In all my years of doing community practice, I’ve never seen a more powerful model for moving communities forward and enabling places to optimize who they are instead of trying to be someplace else. It is this message that frees people to love their place, and hearing that their love of place is a powerful resource is not something many residents (or their leaders) have properly recognized and leveraged. That’s why I think I often see tearful reactions in my audiences and hear heartfelt stories of personal relationship with a place after my talks. The message of attachment—that the softer sides of place matter—resonates deeply.

You cannot, though, embrace the ideas of neighbour, community and place while simultaneously rejecting the idea of nation or worse still try to cast those who speak with emotion about nation as 'narrow-minded', xenophobic or racist. And this sense of place - belonging - underlies why Theresa May was right to say claiming to be a citizen of the world makes you a citizen of nowhere.

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On efficient farming (and driverless tractors)

This really does matter (although it will cause palpitations in all the locavores, organic food nuts and pseudo-environmentalists):

Globally, therefore, adoption of American farming techniques could increase agricultural productivity so much that a landmass the size of India could be returned to nature, without compromising the food supply to our apparently “peaking” global population – the world’s population is likely to peak at 8.7 billion in 2055 and then start to decline. Last, but not least, tens of millions of agricultural laborers in Africa and Asia will be freed from back-breaking labor, migrate to the cities and create wealth in other ways.

If you are truly concerned about the future of humanity in general, and hunger, poverty and equality in particular, forget about The Hunger Games and embrace the driverless tractor instead.

Absolutely. The problem is that the wealthy do-gooders of the developed West are intent on destroying agricultural efficiency in a mad belief that this results in both a healthier world and a planet saved. Since neither of these things are true, it's time we recognised the benefits of industrial agriculture.

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So you're fat? It's not your fault you know.

****

Or so says the Government's obesity 'tzar', Susan Jebb, professor of diet and population health at the University of Oxford:

"Obesity has increased so greatly over the last few decades. That's not a national collapse in willpower. It's something about our environment that has changed," she said.

"You need in some cases a superhuman effort to reduce your food intake. Is that their fault? I don't think it is."

Let's get one thing out of the way. This isn't complete bollocks but the environmental change that Professor Jebb thinks is the problem, isn't the cause. No-one is disputing that there are genetic differences in propensity for weight gain, we've known that for decades. Nor is anyone disputing that some people have less (or more) willpower than others, that socialisation - typically parental attitudes and diet - is important and that there is a mountain of misinformation about health and diet.

The problem is that our increased rates of obesity didn't take place in an environment of rising calorie consumption. And whatever fad or fancy you subscribe to in this debate, it is indisputable that the reason for weight gain is consuming more calories than you use. Any sort of calorie, your body doesn't make any distinction between sources. There isn't such a thing as an unhealthy food, just unhealthy diets.

Two things have changed. Firstly (and we'll get this one out of the the way) we are, on average, older and older people are, again on average, fatter than younger people. This isn't a problem (unless you see sub-optimal birth rates as a problem).

The other change is that we live a vastly more sedentary life than we did three or more decades ago. Coca-cola even ran an ad featuring these differences (and, as ever, ad men were spot on). And the environmental change is striking:

In 1970, 2 in 10 working Americans were in jobs requiring only light activity (predominantly sitting at a desk), whereas 3 in 10 were in jobs requiring high-energy output (eg, construction, manufacturing, farming). By 2000, more than 4 in 10 adults were in light-activity jobs, whereas 2 in 10 were in high-activity jobs. Moreover, during the past 20 years, total screen time (ie, using computers, watching television, playing video games) has increased dramatically. In 2003, nearly 6 in 10 working adults used a computer on the job and more than 9 in 10 children used computers in school (kindergarten through grade 12). Between 1989 and 2009, the number of households with a computer and Internet access increased from 15% to 69%. Other significant contributors to daily sitting time—watching television and driving personal vehicles—are at all-time highs, with estimates of nearly 4 hours and 1 hour, respectively

This isn't about whether we do that half hour of 'physical activity' we're encouraged to partake of - that's a red herring. This is about the totality of our lives, about the elimination of activity from more and more tasks. Think about putting a screw in - we've now replaced the screwdriver requiring a vigorous physical act with a power tool. Multiply that across everything from beating eggs through to buying a weeks groceries and we've a striking picture of decreased activity.

We can't deal with this problem (although it isn't really a problem, is it) by taking up jogging. Nor can we wind back from the efficiency and productivity gain - in every aspect of life - that technology brings. And we can't force people to take up a sport, go for bracing country walks or sign up to a gym - not when there's a great Netflix box set just out. We can begin to design environments that promote movement - not just at work bearing in mind that this takes up less than a fifth of a typical week. Plus we can (since we're talking about weight here) reduce our total calorie intake.

Indeed we have reduced how much we eat:



So, if we want to do something about the 'obesogenic' environment, we don't do it by banning fast food shops, taxing sugar or forcing children to eat almost completely nutrition-free salads for dinner. No, we do it by designing in physical movement - stairs instead of escalators, public transport instead of cars, proper going-out-of-the-office lunchtimes. A thousand and one little bits of change that mean people move a bit more.

It might just work. What I know for sure is that Professor Jubb's anti-food, anti-pleasure agenda won't make a jot of difference (except to raise the ire - and blood pressure - a people who want a little pleasure in their lives). And, remember, you all have agency - you can choose. You don't have to be fat. If you are, it really is mostly down to your choice.


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Cows aren't destroying the planet. Ignorant folk like George Monbiot are.

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George Monbiot is having a go at cows. Well, not just cows but sheep, pigs, chickens and goats as well. And probably alpaca, yaks and dromedaries too.

Raising these animals already uses three-quarters of the world’s agricultural land. A third of our cereal crops are used to feed livestock: this may rise to roughly half by 2050. More people will starve as a result, because the poor rely mainly on grain for their subsistence, and diverting it to livestock raises the price.

As usual with Monbiot, the article is replete with links to assorted stuff mostly from the more scaremongering end of the climate change community. And the premise seems superficially appealing - it does require a whole load of grass to fatten a cow and, if we're growing grass we can't be growing grain crops suitable for humans to eat. The problem with this argument is that the facts about agriculture's land use don't fit Monbiot's scare story:

Ausubel, Wernick, & Waggoner (2013) argue that ‘peak farm’ is already a reality, saying ‘while the ratio of arable land per unit of crop production shows improved efficiency of land use, the number of hectares of cropland has scarcely changed since 1990. Absent the 3.4 percent of arable land devoted to energy crops (Trostle 2008), absolute declines would have begun during the last decade.’

In simpler terms, improved agricultural efficiency is allowing us to feed the world's population while using less land. The main reason for this, of course, is that there is a lot less inefficient subsistence farming (the sort of farming that organisations like Oxfam spend a lot of time trying to preserve) and a lot more commercial and industrial agriculture. Moreover, in terms of resource use, this sort of intensive farming is far more environmentally friendly:

Agricultural economists at UC Davis, for instance, analyzed farm-level surveys from 1996-2000 and concluded that there are “significant” scale economies in modern agriculture and that small farms are “high cost” operations. Absent the efficiencies of large farms, the use of polluting inputs would rise, as would food production costs, which would lead to more expensive food.

Farming - not everywhere but in too many places - is treated as if it were some sort of cultural activity rather than the means by which we feed the world's population. Monbiot talks about waste management issues associated with farming but doesn't recognise that these exist because, unlike other industries, farming has not had to capture the cost of this waste. It is not an inevitable consequence of of the business. Moreover, as those chaps at UC Davis showed, less intensive production is more polluting.

Finally can we put this greenhouse gas malarkey to bed. The cow's only source of carbon is the grass she chews. And the grass only has one source of carbon - the atmosphere. A good chunk of that carbon ends up in those fine marbled steaks we eat. So saying that a lot of the 'greenhouse gas' emissions come from cows farting might be true, but only if we believe that somehow those cows are magically creating more carbon than they consume.

As usual Monbiot is telling half-truths and peddling misinformation.

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If we want to protect the environment, we need to fall in love with the car again

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New Start magazine is home to the most predictable and dated of approaches to regeneration. A bunch of folk wrapped in the New Economic Foundation, Green Party, Agenda 21 line of anti-development, anti-car, anti-freedom beliefs that simply don't reflect the reality of either regeneration or the thrust of transport technology. Here's a classic of the genre from the misnamed Campaign for Better Transport:

We know our reliance on cars is bad for us – bad for our health, bad for the environment and bad for the economy. Yet the way we plan and build continues as if it were still the 1950s and the car a watchword for freedom.

And so on in this vein. Each illustration of the car's evil is ticked - 'clone towns', 'subtopia', 'car-dependent ghettoes', 'foorball pitch sized car parks', 'retail parks'. And the glorious alternatives to economic growth are celebrated - 'improved public health', 'revitalised town centres' and 'tackling carbon emissions'. Plus of course the desire that planning rules should be changed "so economic growth is no longer allowed to trump essential considerations like environment and health". As if planning rules do anything at all but limit economic growth - it's what they're designed to do.

My problem with this - and all the stuff about "strong public transport links with discounted ticket prices, the establishment of cycling routes and initiatives such as free bike workshops all contributing" - is that it completely fails to recognise the direction of transport technology. All the most innovative and green developments in transport are about roads and transport on roads - from smart road surfaces and electric vehicles through to flexible urban pods and lorry peletons the future of transport lies with clean green vehicles using a new generation of roads not with 19th century technologies like trains, trams, bicycles and trolley buses.

Technology is making roads dramatically safer and allowing greater capacity while the development of hybrid engines and more efficient transmission systems is making vehicle significantly less polluting. New materials reduce the carbon emissions in manufacture and make recycling or waste reduction easier. In time vehicles become smaller as technology eliminates collisions allowing for more flexible parking systems.

The problem is that we have a planning system that sees roads as a problem and cars as a curse rather than seeing these systems as a more flexible, safer. reliable and sustainable solution that railway tracks or other systems dedicated to single uses. Most public transport solutions (with the honourable exception of electric buses) rely on this exclusivity - from bus lanes and tram lines to swathes of countryside ripped up to accommodate high speed rail. It really is time we set aside this obsession with old technology and began to support investment in the exciting technologies of tomorrow - technologies based on the shared space that is the highway.

If we want a sustainable transport future then the answer lies in working with technologies that make roads more flexible, safer and faster. We need to embrace the idea of increased road capacity and smoother traffic flow that smart road technologies will bring. Above all we need to remember that the car still is a watchword for freedom, is still the preferred means of transport for the majority, and that driverless technologies open up that freedom to people who right now can't access the car. We need to fall in love with the car again.



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Three errors in Laudato Si' - and why it's ideas are bad for the poor

Goit Stock - a bit of that wonderful nature we love

All the pomp, power and might of the Catholic Church has been used to promote a social and economic agenda centred on an environmentalism that is sweetly bucolic and profoundly anti-development. I'm not qualified to comment on the theology in the latest Papal Enclyclical letter - Laudato Si' on "care for our common home"  - but it steps beyond that theology when it addresses matters of demonstrable fact. The Pope, and the Church he leads, promotes ideas are not in the interests of the poor nor especially helpful in addressing the challenges of a changing environment.

Before we look at three errors in Laudato Si', let's remember that, at the heart of the matter is the idea of 'climate change'. This is not - whatever its advocates want to tell us - settled science. There is enough challenge to the basic 'greenhouse' argument of climate change's causes to merit scepticism. And there is sufficient inconsistency in the empirical record for doubt to be a valid response to the doomladen predictions of some who believe in both climate change itself and also in the idea that man's actions are causing that climate change. These statements aren't a 'denial' of climate change but rather an honest reflection on the debate as seen by one curious layman. We should recall, moreover, that the Catholic Church is not (and would not claim to be) a scientific institution so, in the matter of climate science and environmentalism, is no better qualified to express opinion than I am. Nevertheless, the jury is out on climate change and there remains a very strong case, given this, for preparedness in the face of its possible effects.

My concern doesn't lie, therefore, with the Catholic Church's diagnosis (although I might take issue with some of this) but rather with the consequences of the anti-growth programmes that are more-or-less explicitly endorsed in Laudato Si'.

Pope Francis begins his Encyclical with St Francis of Assisi:

He was particularly concerned for God’s creation and for the poor and outcast. He loved, and was deeply loved for his joy, his generous self-giving, his openheartedness. He was a mystic and a pilgrim who lived in simplicity and in wonderful harmony with God, with others, with nature and with himself. He shows us just how inseparable the bond is between concern for nature, justice for the poor, commitment to society, and interior peace.

Anyone brought up in the Catholic tradition will know of St Francis's love for the natural world, his rejection of earthly wealth in favour of simplicity and his concern for the poor. So this Saint perhaps represents the ideal patron for an encyclical about the natural world - 'our common home' as the Pope describes it. The idea of stewardship - this is the only world we've got let's not ruin it for our children - flows beautifully from St Francis's preaching to the birds and flowers.

The problem I have is that the Pope, for all his unquestioned concern for the poor and excluded, fails to see that his environmentalism is largely against the interests of those poor people in that it wants to reduce growth in the world's economy so as to better preserve the resources of the Earth. In the developed world there might be a case for less growth (and this is exactly what we have today, largely accompanied by cries about 'austerity') but the idea that less growth is in the interest of the poor - whether in Buenos Aires' slums or the Sahel's isolated farms - is quite simply wrong.

Let us look at three of the Pope's errors in this regard:

Exposure to atmospheric pollutants produces a broad spectrum of health hazards, especially for the poor, and causes millions of premature deaths. People take sick, for example, from breathing high levels of smoke from fuels used in cooking or heating.

The error here isn't in the concern about pollution or even that this pollution disproportionately affects the world's poor but rather in the assumption that a developed economy is more polluting that a less developed economy. Using the example of fuel for cooking and heating we can observe that most of us living in developed economies do not breathe in choking, carcinogenic fumes every day from the simple process of feeding and warming ourselves (other than from a barbeque in the garden). This is not true in the poorer parts of the world contributing to over a million deaths a year from respiratory diseases. Even worse the use of 'biomass' for fuel is not very sustainable - something the Pope recognises when talking about paper:

We have not yet managed to adopt a circular model of production capable of preserving resources for present and future generations, while limiting as much as possible the use of non-renewable resources, moderating their consumption, maximizing their efficient use, reusing and recycling them.

And - for Europe and the USA at least - the Pope is wrong about paper recycling since over 70% of paper in Europe is recycled and around two-thirds in the USA. Perhaps we could do still better but we should also remember that:

Paper is made from a natural renewable resource, wood, which has the capacity to be produced in an endless cycle. To safeguard this cycle, our forests have to be managed and harvested in a sustainable manner.

The European paper industry, whilst producing approximately 30% of the world's paper, is a responsible guardian of European forests, 33% more new trees grow in Europe than are harvested each year. According to the UN FAO, forest cover in Europe has increased by 30% since 1950. The 6,450 km² annual increase of European forest cover corresponds to a daily increase the size of 4,363 football pitches.

Deforestation is not about paper but rather about either the gathering of biomass for fuel, the clearing of land for agriculture or the replacement of forest diversity with non-food monoculture. For the first of these switching to cleaner fuels (and almost every other fuel is cleaner than burning wood on a fire) represents the right solution and the others require governments to change their attitude to unsustainable subsistence farming methods and the use of productive land to grow biofuels rather than food.

The Pope's next target is water:

Even as the quality of available water is constantly diminishing, in some places there is a growing tendency, despite its scarcity, to privatize this resource, turning it into a commodity subject to the laws of the market. Yet access to safe drinkable water is a basic and universal human right, since it is essential to human survival and, as such, is a condition for the exercise of other human rights. Our world has a grave social debt towards the poor who lack access to drinking water, because they are denied the right to a life consistent with their inalienable dignity.

Here we see the first example in Laudato Si' of the Pope's anti-market message - a message that rather condemns to poor to poverty rather than offering them a route from out of that poverty. As you drive up the M1 from Nottingham to Sheffield you pass Severn Trent Water's treatment plant at Church Wilne attached to which are large signs proclaiming "30 glasses for less than 1p" - this is the reality of a market-led and privatised water system: clean, fresh water delivered by pipe to a tap in your kitchen at less than a penny a gallon. Even better, that penny-a-gallon includes collecting all the waste water, cleaning it up and recycling it!

The contrast - in places where water is either owned in common or owned by the state -  is like this:

Every day millions of people in Africa, usually women and girls, walk miles to have access to any water at all. The length of time it takes to collect the little water they can get means that they do not have time to do anything else during the day. Children do not get the chance to have an education simply because they are too busy collecting water.

To make matters worse, the only water they have access to is from streams and ponds. That water is usually full of diseases and makes themselves and their families very sick. Adults face the decision on a daily basis between dehydration and sickness from the water they drink. Even worse, they have to face this decision for their children.

We give money so charities can install wells with a safe supply, drill boreholes and improve sanitation in urban slums. But the long term solution is the same solution we had in the UK - having the resources to build the systems that deliver water to homes, build treatment systems and ensure quality. This came about because of foresight in investment (often by local authorities) and the ability of people to pay for that water supply. It may be a 'universal human right' to have water but it's a right that's better served in the capitalist world where businesses charge us for supplying clean water than in places where such businesses don't exist.

After pollution and water, the Pope promotes his third error when he speaks of cities:

Nowadays, for example, we are conscious of the disproportionate and unruly growth of many cities, which have become unhealthy to live in, not only because of pollution caused by toxic emissions but also as a result of urban chaos, poor transportation, and visual pollution and noise. Many cities are huge, inefficient structures, excessively wasteful of energy and water. Neighbourhoods, even those recently built, are congested, chaotic and lacking in sufficient green space. We were not meant to be inundated by cement, asphalt, glass and metal, and deprived of physical contact with nature.

We see in this observation the understandable reaction to the unsanitary, chaotic, mish-mash that is the developing world slum - self-built shacks precariously perched on hillsides, mud and waste mixed together in the tiny passages between the rows of these shacks, and thousands of people crammed into the tiniest of spaces looking out onto the shinier, cleaner and richer parts of that city. It is a painful sight to anyone who cares for the poor.

Yet people have chosen that life over another life - they have crammed themselves into these places because they think it will be better than the subsistence farm up-country where they were brought up. And cities - by virtue of their very concentration - use fewer resources than dispersed agricultural communities:

For many nations, rapid urban change over the last 50 years is associated with the achievement of independence and the removal of colonial controls on people's right to move in response to changing economic opportunities. The concentration of population in urban areas greatly reduces the unit costs of providing good quality water supplies and good quality provision for sanitation, health care, schools and other services. It also provides more possibilities for their full involvement in government. And, perhaps surprisingly, urban areas can also provide many environmental advantages including less resource use, less waste and lower levels of greenhouse gases.

This doesn't mean we shouldn't worry about the spread of disease, the safety of buildings, the exploitation of children and the provision of education but it does mean the Pope is wrong to suggest that the urbanisation of the past two centuries "has not always led to an integral development and an improvement in the quality of life". Leaving aside the sort of rejectionist bucolic dream of Thoreau (and generations of hippies since), there is no aspect of life's quality that isn't better today for the mass of humanity than was the case at almost any point in the past two centuries. And for all that wealthy westerners now dream of a rural idyll (albeit with every mod con from running water and sewage through gas and electricity to the now essential broadband) the truth is that the city, despite its crowding and chaos, is an essential element in allowing that better life.

Others (better qualified than I am) will have noted that the Pope's anti-consumption, anti-markets, anti-capitalist message - for all its compatibility with a man who took St Francis of Assisi as his guide - really does the poor no favours. We know (but need reminding time and time again) that the impact of neoliberal ideas on the world has seen the fastest decline in poverty in mankind's history - far from capitalism (for all its sins) being the problem, it is a great deal of the solution.

As so often with these grand proposals, a detailed analysis reveals them to lack the foundations needed to deliver - they are, as the parable goes, built on sand. The Pope, in setting out his Church's 'social teaching', has made too many errors of fact.

It is welcome - it is always welcome - that people, whether religious leaders or not, step back and remind us of our duty to the poorest in our world. And it is right too that we are reminded about the need to conserve and preserve the only planet we've got. But it is not right to so conflate these two concerns that the result is a 'social teaching' that neither serves the interests of the poor nor addresses the imperative of environmental stewardship. The poor stay in poverty, trapped in a back-breaking, hand-to-mouth existence that both fails them and destroys the planet's resources, while the poor old planet gets an endless round of international meetings combined with an almost childish rejection of the very market mechanisms that can both 'save the planet' and also lift the poor from out of that poverty the pope so rightly condemns.



I don't doubt that Pope Francis cares deeply for the poor but I'm afraid he is another victim of sentiment's triumph over evidence. It seems wrong that some have great wealth while other starve and it suits the sentimentalist narrative for that ownership of wealth to somehow be the cause of others' poverty. But it ain't so and it would be more exciting if, instead of simply hugging the poor, Pope Francis had sent the world the message that neoliberalism, market capitalism, property rights and freedom are the central elements in both eliminating poverty and saving the planet.

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A reminder - in case you needed one - that the left are the enemy of the poor

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I observed a day or two ago that the environmental policies foisted on us by assorted left-wing governments are specifically designed to make energy more expensive. And that, while the better off can take the hit, the real victims of this 'planet-saving' policy platform are to poor.

Today we are reminded, via the pages of the trendy left's house journal, that the left really do want things to be more expensive. In this case it's a classic - a multi-millionaire, anti-capitalist who makes money from selling expensive stuff to rich people says that the poor should pay more for their food and clothes:

Clothes and food should cost much more than they do in Britain to reflect their true impact on the environment, Vivienne Westwood said on Wednesday night.

Speaking at a Guardian Live event at Chelsea Old Town Hall hosted by columnist Deborah Orr, the controversial fashion designer said: “Clothes should cost a lot more than they do – they are so subsidised.

“Food should cost most more too – you know something is wrong when you can buy a cooked chicken for £2. The world runs on debt and that’s why nothing costs what it should.”

You see folks - you should be made poorer because rich people like Ms Westwood would then feel so much better about their impact on the environment. Now remember that all those rich socialists in Islington town houses will be fine. They'll still have fancy food on the table, nice designer clothes and a classy bottle of wine (just one glass, mind).

But the single mum with three kids in Bradford who rather liked the fact she could buy a cooked chicken for two quid will have to explain to her children why they have less too eat and why they never get new clothes just hand-me-downs. Sadly though generations of brainwashing won't lead her to tell those children what they really need to know - that the 'progressive' policies of left-wing parties, the supposed parties of the poor, have resulted in those children being poorer.

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Our environment policies make people poorer...

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Well you knew that didn't you? You knew that the deal between big energy distributors, government and the environment movement is about driving up prices for the energy consumer? You knew that so-called 'regulatory oversight' coupled with obsessing about subsidised renewables results in more jobs for green activists, bigger government departments and higher profits for the distributors? And you knew that, for all Ed Miliband's populist nonsense about price fixing, the left is entirely wedded to making energy more expensive so as to 'combat climate change'?

All this is part of an international effort to drive up energy prices so as to make renewable systems (but not nuclear energy, of course) economic as an alternative to using the earth's abundant supplies of fossil fuels. And, like so much else in our environmental and international development policy, the consequence of this is to ensure that millions of poor Africans, Indians and Arabs remain just that - poor. And, here at home, to exacerbate levels of fuel poverty.

Yet when the status quo on energy is challenged - as Owen Patterson has done - the response of our Liberal Democrat energy minister is to sound like a cracked record justifying keeping people poor because of the risks from climate change:

“The overwhelming majority of scientists agree that climate change exists while most leading British businesses and City investment funds agree with the Coalition that taking out an ‘insurance policy’ now will protect the UK against astronomical future costs caused by a changing climate.

“The majority of European countries are ready to implement proposals that would see [them] adopt targets similar to our Climate Change Act in a deal the Prime Minister should seal later this month.

“With the USA, China and India also now taking the climate change threat seriously, the global marketplace for green technology is increasingly strong.” 

Note the language of opportunity here - opportunity for the already rich to exploit, in effect, the diversion of money from the poor to their projects (and pockets). There is no doubt that the Climate Change Act represents one of the most regressive imposts on the UK ever enacted - a massive transfer from the least well off to the better off. All those feed-in tariffs for solar panels, those subsidies for wind farms and those bungs by councils at 'microgeneration' - these things don't benefit the least well-off in society, they are a cost to them in higher energy prices.

And take a look internationally at what Ed Davey calls an 'insurance policy' - a scheme to protect the rich world from the consequences of climate change while watching the poor parts of the world head off to hell in assorted and rickety hand carts. Not because of the floods, famines and pestilence of global warming but because we've prevented them replacing burning wood and dung with cheap fossil fuel electricity generation from coal and gas.

The truth about the environmental movement and 'green' policies is that they want to save the planet. But they want to save the planet for rich people living in a Brighton semi, a Shipley terrace or a docklands apartment not for poor people in Mogadishu, Mumbai or, for that matter, Bethnal Green. The environmental movement is filled with the comfortably off who worry about recycling, whether their brown rice is organic and the organising of walking buses to get Joshua and Emily to school. These aren't people who have to make a choice about whether to turn on the heating or have a hot meal, they aren't living in a shack with no sanitation cooking on a dung fire that's giving them lung disease and they aren't people living in a village that has one electric point that's live only a few hours a week.

I'm not a climate change 'denier' but I still think our policies are misplaced - worse that that we are imposing huge costs on the least well off to deliver that planetary salvation. This means there will be more of those poor people, more people in fuel poverty, more ill-health and more people dying for lack of food or heating. I don't agree with Owen Patterson that the concern is energy security (although this is important), I think our concern should be reducing poverty. And if we want to do that faster, we need to provide cheap energy to everyone and especially to the poorest in the world. Our environmental policies are doing the opposite, our environmental policies are making people poorer.

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Quote of the day - Owen Paterson on the green lobby...

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OK so the term 'green blob' does rather summon up images of Quatermass but Paterson is absolutely spot on in his condemnation of the so-called 'green' lobby:

I soon realised that the greens and their industrial and bureaucratic allies are used to getting things their own way. I received more death threats in a few months at Defra than I ever did as secretary of state for Northern Ireland. My home address was circulated worldwide with an incitement to trash it; I was burnt in effigy by Greenpeace as I was recovering from an operation to save my eyesight. But I did not set out to be popular with lobbyists and I never forgot that they were not the people I was elected to serve.

Indeed, I am proud that my departure was greeted with such gloating by spokespeople for the Green Party and Friends of the Earth.

It was not my job to do the bidding of two organisations that are little more than anti-capitalist agitprop groups most of whose leaders could not tell a snakeshead fritillary from a silver-washed fritillary. I saw my task as improving both the environment and the rural economy; many in the green movement believed in neither. 

These things cannot be said too often. The 'green' movement is driven less by the interests of our local environments that by self-interest, the search for power and influence, and above all by an unwavering belief that improving the conditions for ordinary men and women comes at a cost to the environment.  It doesn't. Just as no-one is poor become another is rich, the environment is not doomed by the desire of people like me to see poor people everywhere enjoying the fruits of capitalism's bounty.

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Jim and Sandra move to the countryside. A story of planning policy.

Jim was fed up. Fifty hours a week running the print and design business, endless repairs to a house he didn't really like and Sandra moaning on and on about her job and how she wants more time with the horse.

For the bloke looking in at them, thought Jim, it looks a great life. Big four-bed detached, Range Rover and enough cash to have a couple of decent holidays every year as well as eating out regularly and the occasional weekend break.

But Jim was fed up. Tired. And ready for a change.

That chance came when the two guys with the web design business called and offered silly money for the business. A few sums, a chat with the accountant and it looked like a deal. The buyers want to keep on Steve, he's three years from retirement so he's probably sorted. Looks like best part of a million quid once the value of the old mill building he'd bought for a song thirty years ago is factored in. The buyers probably want to convert it to trendy loft apartments.

What to do thought Jim as he headed to the King's Arms for a pint and a ponder.

In the pub there's the usual crowd and Jim parks himself on a stool in the main bar. Propped up at one end is a copy of the Sunday Telegraph and Jim has a quick flick through, not really reading much just absorbing the headlines. As he's doing this one headline leaps from the page:

MPs fight to save the National Parks from suburbanisation 

This strikes a chord for Jim. Not the politics but the idea of moving to the country. I'll look into that he says to himself. Maybe find an old barn or farmhouse to do up - would be a project and at the end a great place to live.

Once he's home Jim tells Sandra about his thoughts. She's thrilled, full of ideas and excited at the prospect (and a second horse). Jim does some research and finds out that the government is relaxing the rules on converting farm buildings by removing the need to get planning permission so long as certain conditions are met such as keeping the same footprint, height, design and materials as well as complying with rules on flooding, highways and so forth.

Jim sets to with looking for an opportunity - he's got two possible places in mind. One's a smallholding on Dartmoor where the farmer has finally had enough of 80 hour weeks, no holidays and an income less than the minimum wage. Getting half-a-million for the farm means he can retire - nice bungalow in Torquay and enough cash to provide an OK pension. The other's a ramshackle set of farm buildings near Honiton, not as nice a location (and a nicer price), where there's already a planning permission for a barn conversion.

Jim and Sandra want the Dartmoor place. It's the sort of place they like, they're not bothered about the isolation and it's not so far into Plymouth by car. With the new relaxed rules they can use the farmhouse (perhaps with a little extension to give another bedroom although this would still need planning permission) and build three good houses on the footprint of the barns, two to sell which should recoup much of the cost of buying the farm and a third for the kids when they visit.

Looks like a deal, thought Jim, we'll drive down on Saturday and make a good offer. But first it's a pint at the King's Arms.

Down the pub Jim is telling Clive the landlord about his plans, he'd be sorry to leave but no point in waiting too long - "I'd be too old then" jokes Jim.

Clive frowns, picks up the newspaper. "Looking at a national park are you? Maybe you should read this then."

Jim reads the piece Clive points to:

As reported in the Daily Telegraph, the Government is planning to exempt National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONBs) from measures that would allow landowners to convert barns into up to three houses, without having to get planning permission.

Jim read it several times. The deal was off. No way was he taking the risk of buying the farm now, not if he might not get the permission to do what he wanted. Bad news for Joe, the farmer, who'll have to stay there longer or else take a lot less money. Joe won't get to retire, move to Torquay and live his life out in modest comfort.

Apparently having him (and a couple of other families) living up there isn't as sustainable as Joe staying on his uneconomic farm struggling to make a living. And him converting the place would 'change the character of the area irreversibly'. What nonsense thought Jim, what nonsense.

Still Dartmoor's loss is somewhere else in Devon's gain. The National Park has won its point, Joe, the farmer, is still struggling on trying (and mostly failing) to make a living and Jim with Sandra and the horse are spending their wealth in Honiton. And Dartmoor remains a place where only the rich can buy the few houses that come on the market, not the old farms needing conversion but the little cottages and already converted farms. The place is trapped in an environmental timewarp condemned to an unviable, unsustainable economic base because the advocates of viability and sustainability are plain stupid.

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Fracking and the legacy of the mines...

Harry Stone was a miner born
He worked to win his wages
Riding down the cages
And raging at the seams
He worked his stall from dusk till dawn
Sweet sweat and raw endeavour
Black diamonds bound together
By a strong and simple means

For two-hundred years and more England built its wealth and success, in large part, on the exploitation of its minerals  - as someone said we're an island of coal in a sea of oil. And, for all the machismo of coal-mining, it was a dangerous life and the winning of coal left great scars on the landscape, polluted the environment and created unstable landforms. The blasting of the coalface and the shifting to the tunnel-ridden rocks led to subsidence and even earth tremors.

Yet the coal ripped from the ground was the fuel for our industrial revolution. That coal provided the heat and light, the power to drag us from bare subsistence agriculture to today's warn, healthy and pleasant condition. Those men who rode the cages down into the dark - the ones who died in accidents, the one's who coughed up their lungs - they played a great part us us being wealthy.

Today the land around the mines - 'scarred like the face of the moon' as the Cornish tin and clay mined landscape was once described - slowly recovers. Where once there were ugly, deep-grey heaps of waste and spoil, we now see young woodland, ponds, trails and fields. In places the structures of the minehead are preserved - a reminder of why the town is there and what men did in times past.

Today a new fuel is there for us to win, a fuel that can power our lights, our homes, our industry for a hundred years and more. It's a fuel that doesn't require men to crawl into dark holes, to destroy their health with dust and fumes. It's a fuel we can win from the surface without despoiling the landscape, without any significant - let alone long-lasting - damage to the environment. It's a fuel that can replace the last few coal-powered generators and ensure that we can all keep our homes warm at a reasonable price.

And the fuel is shale gas. Compared to the damage - to society health and environment - that coal-mining causes, the winning of shale gas is benign. Yet people living in places that have gained from the wealth of mining without the costs of winning that wealth would stop us all - including the children of those miners - from enjoying this benefit:

The prospect of fracking is what has unsettled Fernhurst. Towers burning off excess gas and oil wouldn’t fit in with Tennyson’s vision of ‘Green Sussex fading into blue’. Beyond that, there is a terror of toxic and radioactive leaks and long-term pollution of aquifers. Marcus Adams, leader of the Frack Free Fernhurst campaign group, told me, ‘I find it extraordinary that the government allows companies to use this fracking technology when we don’t properly understand it.’ Adams is no environmentalist, merely an ordinary if concerned bloke who has lived in the area for many years. He is convinced that permission to explore will lead to permission to frack, so he and some likeminded neighbours want to thwart Celtique’s initial proposal.

Compared to the cost of mining - a cost that people like Marcus Adams didn't pay although they live with the benefits of that mining - the impact of fracking is vanishingly small. And, short term. Part of me shrugs at the opposition - I'm sure the opposition would be there wherever the extraction took place - but another part is angry.

Angry that the twisting and misrepresenting of the facts by environmental campaigners, the frenetic lobbying of the 'renewable' energy companies and the scaremongering of media results in a risk that the benefit of a 100 years of cheaper energy will be denied us. That we should slide into a world of brown-outs, industrial decline and ever higher energy prices just to protect - for a few years - a few acres of Sussex.

If this attitude had prevailed in times past we wouldn't have dug those mines at Wentworth, at Heanor and in Ashington. Instead we'd have left it there and carried on burning wood and scraping a living - in a good year - from a third of an acre of poor field.  But we did dig those mineshafts and win that coal, it did help make us rich.

And the least thanks we can offer the miners who won that coal is to go and win the shale gas, to provide the fuel to power future generations and future industry.

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Green means poor and greener means poorer

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The Centre for Cities reports on how economic misery is saving the planet - at least in terms of reducing those pesky carbon emissions:

Between 2005 and 2010, total CO2 emissions in the UK fell 10 percent, with the most dramatic shifts coming since the recession began in 2008. Industrial emissions, which account for 44 percent of all UK CO2 emissions, fell 15 percent since 2005.

And to illustrate this, the writers cite Middlesborough - where of course they closed down steel plants and chemical works. With the result that:

However, the vast majority of the reduction in CO2 emissions came from industrial decline. Anecdotally, the closure of major manufacturing plants like Corus Steel in 2010 and Croda Chemicals would have had a large impact on the emissions of the city. Overall, employment in manufacturing fell in Middlesbrough by roughly 20 percent since the onset of the recession.

Saving the planet comes at the expense of human misery. The losers aren't the better off but those on the margins, poorer people. The whole point and purpose of green economics is to make us poorer - and that means more of that human misery. Just as Oxfam wants poor Africans to stay as poor Africans, the green movement believes economic growth is wrong - and this means poor people staying poor, or worse getting poorer.

These greens should be driven from the land.

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#Greenpeacefail...

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If, say, a lobby group for forestry interests did this there would be the most enormous outcry:

The event was a hoax, and so was the follow-up email and the website with its often hilarious-if-it-wasn't-true fake...marketing copy.

Yet environmental campaign group Greenpeace are revelling in their media manipulation, lies and misrepresentation. Indeed as the New Statesman (hardly the most anti-green bunch) have put it:

The real villain here is Greenpeace. This is an NGO that thinks it is acceptable to lie to the public, to lie to bloggers and journalists, and to then intimidate writers with threatening emails warning of legal action. This absolutely is not okay. I don’t care if you’re saving the Arctic, rescuing kittens from YouTube’s vicious pet-celebrity training camps, or training pandas to pull famine-ridden children out of earthquake debris; to behave in this deceitful way demonstrates an astonishing amount of contempt for the public - not least for environmentalist supporters who spread their message in good faith only to find themselves forced into embarrassing retractions.

There is a limit to the bounds of campaigning. For me, Greenpeace crossed it years ago when they forced Shell to adopt a less environmentally sensible disposal of a redundant oil rig for the sake of cheap headlines and the 'kerching' of the organisations cash register. But this really is stepping even further beyond those bounds:

“Even if you think Shell is evil and will lie to achieve their goals, now you know Greenpeace is the exact same way.” 

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A panel of all the folk who screwed up urban design in the first place...

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...or so it seems:

"We’ve signed up people from architecture, planning and infrastructure backgrounds, as well as academics, health specialists and community engagement workers, to bring an informed expert viewpoint and help CABE champion good design."

Perhaps when we stop trying to micromanage - plan to death I call it - urban environments we'll get some better outcomes.

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Politics and the tragedy of the commons

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In the context of Hardin's classic 'Tragedy of the Commons' essay, I was struck by the truth of this observation:

One thing that Hardin overlooked is that the political process often replicates the same economic dynamic that encourages the tragedy of the commons -- a dynamic fostered by the ability to capture concentrated benefits while dispersing the costs. Like the herder who has an incentive to put out yet one more animal to graze, each interest group has every incentive to seek special benefits through the political process, while dispersing the costs of providing those benefits to the public at large. Just as no herder has adequate incentive to withhold from grazing one more animal, no interest group has adequate incentive to forego its turn to obtain concentrated benefits at public expense. No interest group has adequate incentive to put the interests of the whole ahead of the interests of the few. The logic of collective action discourages investments in sound public policy just as it discourages investments in sound ecological stewardship.

The rest of the article is worth a read and addresses the importance of property rights in driving environmental improvement and conservation.

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