A few months ago I started a new Serious Change project. The aim of the project was to write good responses to online newspaper and blog posts about the UK energy system.

Well, after a few months of online meetings, and posting comments, we got pretty good at responding. We even started to see common arguments for not investing public funds in our energy system. So, the obvious thing to do is to list these common arguments and write our best reponses (google doc). Anyone who would like to help write reponses is most welcome to write on that google doc — and if you would like to discuss any aspect of this project then just email lisa at seriouschange dot org dot uk.

The good thing about this exercise is that the next time we come across one of these common arguments, we can save ourselves some work and just refer to our reponse here — and so can you!

http://www.danacentre.org.uk/events/2009/12/03/537

Sign up and go if you would like to.

Please also tell your friends, colleagues, family. It should be a fun evening! We’re probably going to go for a drink afterwards as well (carrying a box of magnetic foam and
6 steel whiteboards).

So,  you have either given flying up or you probably should. There is an element of sacrifice involved. And what hurts most, no one else seems to be giving it up. The UK seems determined to expand its air traffic business [1]. It’s not inconceivable that people could lose their jobs if they refused to fly when it was deemed necessary. Flying is now part of our way of life, and we’ll only stop flying with the collapse of society.

Let’s just accept this reality and consider how to make the best of an unfortunate situation.

Well, obviously, people could fly less. That is a nice easy glib thing to say. More realistically though, they could fly more efficiently [2]. There are many ways that this can be achieved. Better engines. Higher density of passengers on the planes. Slower. Not planes.

But I just said flying is here to stay!

Well, yes it is. And it is inevitable that it will be. You just need less infrastructure to set up a journey. However there are some wacky ideas that shouldn’t just be ignored. How about a fast train from London to New York

No, I mean faster than a plane. A LOT faster. Yes, even than Concorde (RIP). 4000 mph fast enough for you. Should only cost about $175 billion plus running costs [3].

However, that is still a bit of a red herring, I was talking about airships. Now bear with me a moment. It isn’t what you are thinking. Airships don’t blow up. They almost never did even when people were a bit careless in their construction. They are slow, but slow means up to 200mph. That’s less than a day from London to New York (as the crow flies, and I admit being somewhat naive about trade winds). I’d lose a day of holiday to fly across the Atlantic guilt-free!

You could make getting places part of the experience too. There is talk of airships with tennis courts on board! Seriously, who wouldn’t want to fly in something called a Mega-Airship![4]

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8243922.stm

[2] http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/828/

[3] http://www.impactlab.com/2008/06/27/trans-atlantic-supersonic-maglev-vacuum-tube-train/

[4] http://www.ecogeek.org/automobiles/2885–solar-powered-mega-airship

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c18/page_109.shtml

There is a public consultationon on Carbon Capture and Storage going on now until 9th September 2009.

http://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/consultations/clean_coal/clean_coal.aspx

Drop me an email if you would like to be part of it with other Serious Change people.

A few months ago, our friend, Francis Davey gave a speech where he explained the aim of Serious Change is to:

“Change the hearts and minds of people by telling the story of zero carbon Britain and show that this is desirable and getting there will be satisfying.”

Changing hearts and minds means you have to understand people’s values and what they care about.

So let us consider people who care about their family, their home, their job and their bills. They reasonably don’t want disruption to their life unless it is really worth it, for the good of their family, their home, their job or their bills.

Concerns about the science and morality of the climate changing or the technology of alternatives to fossil fuel are, at best, secondary, as these issues are not as clear or immediate as family, home, job and bills.

Well the Daily Mail, and the Tax Payer’s Alliance (TPA) are already talking to these people. They are telling a story of a government that is, without agreement, and therefore undemocratically, taking money from British families to invest in Green technology.

Here is one story from the TPA:

“14% of the average domestic electricity bill is the result of ineffective Government climate change policies that provide massive subsidies to the owners of wind farms but do little to reduce emissions”.

http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/bettergovernment/energy/

Here is a story from the Daily Mail:

“Tough new targets on tackling climate change will cost every household in Britain at least £600 a year, push more than a million people into poverty and send fuel bills soaring, experts warned today.”

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1172626/BUDGET-2009-Government-spend-1billion-green-initiatives.html?ITO=1490

But the TPA and Daily Mail stories aren’t being told fairly.

People are not told how much of their money is going to oil and gas suppliers in tax breaks and subsidies. They are not told how much extra they are paying in tax or heating and car related bills because of these subsidies and tax breaks. The government support to oil and gas companies is a complex set of data to unpick, but with freedom of information requests and thoughtful investigation, it can be done.  

It seems to me that telling this story is the right thing to do, regardless of any environmental concerns. But as I am interested in a fair analysis of the details of changing Britain’s energy system, it is also the first step in that investigation.    

You can listen to the full Francis Davey speech here:

http://cloud.seriouschange.org.uk/SeriousChangeOverview.mp3

The Tax Payers Alliance (TPA) is a huge success in terms of how frequently it is quoted and the range of publications it is quoted in.

The basic premise is that people don’t like having ‘their’ money taken away from them, in the form of taxes, and wasted. The TPA then extends this basic premise to show the inadequacies and inefficiency of the government.   

But how does the TPA do this?

The Reports

The website produces 4-5 reports a month. This is a lot less than I thought relative to the amount of coverage it gets. But each report fits the public mood and is well written. You can see them all here:

http://tpa.typepad.com/home/research-by-the-.html#April2009

It seems that a common theme in these reports is to 1) find the amount of UK tax paid for a particular service, ideally one that is inefficient or doesn’t have strong public backing, and 2) divide that cost into the number of households and then 3) report that the government is taking this amount of pounds from your family and wasting it.

The reports do range in detail. Some are simple freedom of information requests with a short introduction:

http://tpa.typepad.com/waste/files/TheGlobalWarmingIndustryinLocalGovernment.pdf

Others are more detailed reports about government departments that are described and recommendations made, like in this fisheries policy analysis:

http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/cfp.pdf

The Blogs

The rest of the site is made up of blog posts which fit into the categories of:

-         Media Coverage summaries of articles where the TPA has been quoted. This makes up most of the blogging on the site.  

-         Economics 101 includes a time line of tax, and other blog entries under headings such as; Corporate Tax, Dynamic Modelling, Fairness, Flat Tax, Green Taxes, Income Tax, Regulation.

-         Better Government contains a document outlining how the government should be run by successful business people: http://tpa.typepad.com/bettergovernment/files/BetterGovernment.pdf . Then breaks down the criticism into the government departments of health, defense, education, energy, law and order, international aid, EU and then has some categories concerning quality and structure and trust of government.

-         Burning Our Money is the most humorous part of the site, this contains the ‘non-job of the week’. Then there is the ‘rewards for failure’ section which includes bonuses at the BBC, just quoted from the telegraph and Sun, no original research here. There is also reporting on public sector pensions and Taxpayer-funded politics.

-         European Union this is a campaign to stop the EU rip-off.

-         Blogs By Location in West Midlands and TaxPayers’ association of Europe.

The Book

This is where it all began for the TPA in 2005, with volunteers writing the ‘Bumper Book of Government Waste’. The book shows how £101 billion is wasted by the government.

http://tpa.typepad.com/waste/2007/10/the-bumper-book.html

The Campaigns and Lobbying

There seems to be only one campaign on the whole site. It was launch in January and is to ‘stop the EU rip-off’:

http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/eu/

There are campaign materials to download and links to reports.

Aside from this the TPA will report on other people campaigning or lobbying and they also show public support for campaign groups like the NoToID

http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/campaign/2009/05/what-on-earth-is-the-point.html

In the End

So what can we learn from this?

-         A well thought out book or large report is enough to get media attention initially.

-         Then don’t underestimate the value of regular, well placed reports combined with killer PR.

-         Back up with regular blogging, doesn’t have to original, just on topic.

A TPA interview and office visit is reported at:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7241315.stm

Sustainable Energy - without the hot air

The UK can’t live off its own renewable energy with current technology.

If we make efficiency savings by electrifying transport and use different heating technology and add in some of: nuclear power, clean coal or other countries renewables, we could make many energy plans that add up to demand, without reducing our quality of life, for 2050.

This will require serious change to our current lives, and this change will be rewarding in every aspect.

I like the Daily Mail. It doesn’t represent my views but I have to admire how powerfully it conveys its messages. It is angry, argumentative and fantastically critical.  

 Here are two stories that I think, having read the Daily Mail for the last few months, are representative of its attitude to UK energy. Then I talk about what we can learn from them.

So, I was delighted when I read this about wind farms with quotes from David MacKay. It has conclusion of  “And, yes, we need to invest in more renewable energy. “ and “The answer is messy, expensive and fraught with controversy and debate. But it is not blowing in the wind.”

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1172230/Are-wind-farms-lot-hot-air–windy.html?ITO=1490

The next day was budget day and there was: “Tough new targets on tackling climate change will cost every household in Britain at least £600 a year, push more than a million people into poverty and send fuel bills soaring, experts warned today.”

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1172626/BUDGET-2009-Government-spend-1billion-green-initiatives.html?ITO=1490

This article goes on to say that “Critics said the targets, which include a drive to build more windfarms, would cost the economy £14billion a year by 2020 and would have only a negligible impact on climate change.”

So it is quite possible to have, in the same paper, using the same stock photos, science stories very positive about renewable energy but political and editorial stories that are totally negative about the way it is happening and its effects.

And it’s the criticism that is the headline grabbing stuff. It is more emotive to think of the government taking money from your family and wasting it, than it is to think about how cool it would be if we had a load of windmills.  

But actually criticizing the government is a useful activity. The current situation is that we have a set of targets for reducing carbon emissions; it is 80% reduction from 1990 levels, by 2050. There are no complete plans yet for how to reach that target.

I would like to see groups getting together to intelligently criticize the government for missing opportunity with renewable technology and not having good enough policy or any policy at all and present these arguments in journalist sized pieces.      

How would you do this?

The Daily Mail gets lots of its source material from The Tax Payers Alliance and Migration Watch. Again these two bodies don’t reflect my views, but they do an excellent job of communicating what they are about.

So, what about setting up a news source like this but for constructive criticism of UK energy policy?

It also reinforces the ideas that Anthony Giddens puts forward in his book The Politics  Of Climate Change.  Anthony Giddens (Labour life peer and sociologist) had to say in this interview about the book (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/thinkingallowed/thinkingallowed_20090325.shtml):

• The strategy of trying to scare people about the future catastrophe of global warming doesn’t work because it is an abstract notion of what might happen in the future.
• We need to show people there are many positive innovations that will reduce the risk of climate change.
• With innovations we need to talk about opportunity not risk, benefit not just costs.
• He sees the difference between himself and the Green party as he has more interest in the sharp edged technological innovations than the protection of nature.
• He expresses the opinion that nuclear is the technology that can scale in the short term.
• We need incentives rather than taxes.
•  He says that Obama is an inspiration, as he sees the new economy converges with climate change investment.
• Energy markets should be under some government control as markets won’t do the job on their own.
• He wants to see a group of business leaders who publicly put forward the idea that it should be only those companies that are ‘environmentally progressive’ that will be competitive in the future. And they will lead by example.
• He puts forward the idea that we need a wider set of measures of growth/welfare for the future, as he believes that the economic growth measures we have do not reflect the total sum of human welfare.

If you want to get a picture of what energy consumption is like in the UK at present, you can do worse than look at this Energy trends: March 2009:

http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file50354.pdf

It is quite useful to have these figures in mind when reading things like David MacKay’s Without The Hot Air. It shows you how much we will have to change to get to a low carbon energy system, like the energy plans MacKay suggests. It is detailed plans for a new energy system that will be taken seriously by DECC, so we have to understand in as much detail where we are and how we can change.