Sweep it under the carpet
Always room for more
Until it hits the ceiling

It wasn’t too long ago that I was busily writing about the folly of Carbon Capture and Storage as a supposed solution to the release of huge, totally unsustainable amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Back then my main objections were (a) that we had no idea whether it was feasible or safe and (b) coal mining would continue to carry on its destructive activities. I stand by both of those points. But things have changed in two dramatic ways, which make a reopening of this issue imperative.

First, support for CCS has gone beyond politicians and businesses, and beyond the conservative “light green” writers who are relying on businesses and politicians to make things better for all of us (ha!) Eminent writers and scientists, like Jim Hansen, who I have a great deal of respect for as a scientist are saying that coal fired power stations should not be built at all unless they have CCS built in. This is from Hansen’s recent letter to British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown:

A firm choice to halt building of coal-fired power plants that do not capture the CO2 would be a major step toward a solution of the global warming problem. Germany has strong interest in solving the climate problem. Citizens in the United States are stepping up to block one coal plant after another, and the next national election is less than a year away.

If Great Britain and Germany halted construction of coal-fired power plants that do not capture and sequester the CO2, it could be a tipping point for the world. There is still time to find that tipping point, but just barely. I hope that you will give these considerations your attention in setting your national policies. You have the potential to influence the future of the planet.

Now, on the surface this would seem to be a reasonable request, and certainly would prevent the release of a lot of carbon dioxide. In addition, if CCS becomes mandatory on all coal-fired power stations, the electricity generators will weigh up the costs and start to invest in other forms of generation, rather than put all their investment in coal. This is a good thing…if you are only interested in the short term. But there are two huge logical flaws in this thinking: what about all the other carbon dioxide, and what about all the existing coal plant? Carbon dioxide from coal is only one constituent of total carbon emissions: in 2005 (the latest accurate figures available) coal burning was responsible for just over 11 billion tonnes of atmospheric carbon dioxide. In the same year, the total carbon emissions from all sources was over 28 billion tonnes. Coal therefore accounts for about 40 percent of all carbon emissions (or about 25 percent of all greenhouse gases), which is significant, but not the whole story by a long way. Coal fired power stations typically last for between 30 and 50 years, so any plant built in the last 30 years (which accounts for the vast majority of global generation) would have to be retrofitted with CCS equipment unless someone was prepared to make some serious rebuilding investment. In fact, according to the IPCC (see Table 3.8 ) the cost of retrofitting a conventional coal-fired power station pales into insignificance compared to the increase in generation costs: they would have to go up by nearly 300 percent! So the simple answer is to rebuild – oh, about 900 gigawatts (based on http://www.iea.org/textbase/nppdf/free/2007/key_stats_2007.pdf extrapolated) worth of power plant. Yep! I can really see that happening voluntarily. But, just suppose it does happen – this would prevent growth in 40% of the global carbon source; but as Jim Hansen himself said, we have to be reducing the overall amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and by something in the order of 90% within the next two decades. It ain’t gonna happen with Carbon Capture and Storage alone.

Where does the other 60% come from? About two thirds of the remainder comes from the combustion of oil, the vast majority of which is used in motor vehicles. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that capturing these individual sources of carbon is nigh-on impossible, so the only alternative would be to convert every single vehicle on Earth to plug-in hybrids. Now, given that direct fuel combustion is considerably more efficient than burning coal, capturing the CO2, transmitting the electricity, charging the vehicle and using the batteries, we are talking about far more than just the equivalent amount of coal being used again to supply the global fleet: more than a doubling of the world’s coal generation plant! Most of the rest of the carbon dioxide (and I’m purposefully leaving out the indirect emissions from deforestation and agriculture) comes from natural gas – the vast majority of which is used for furnaces and domestic and commercial heating systems. Again, the carbon from this cannot be captured except at a large scale, or from the small percentage of gas used in power stations, so we are talking about converting the (majority) non-captive elements to electricity, further pushing up the electricity generation burden.

But suppose, after all that, we have been able to capture all of the carbon being emitted by human activity. In theory, after about 50 years, the overall carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere would begin to drop – the planet’s atmospheric systems could start to clean themselves up. Could someone please tell me where all this carbon is going to go? Two major locations are under investigation: geological storage and deep ocean storage. Geological storage depends on the availability of existing voids and suitable porous rock into which liquid or gaseous CO2 can be injected. No one has any idea whether there is enough space to store even the current CO2 being produced, let alone the increased burden discussed earlier (Note: If anyone does have any statistics, I would love to see them). As far as the IPCC is concerned, if we used the alternative location, beneath the ocean in solution, there would certainly be enough space, but within 300 years, all of that carbon could once again have returned to the atmosphere – this is all but guaranteed within 1000 years. Fine for the typical short-term thinker who only cares about their next term in office, but as a viable option for the future of humanity, this is a suicidal option.

And let’s not forget that global energy use is increasing year on year. Since 1997, according to BP, world energy consumption went up by 24.6%; if this trend were to continue, then in the approximately 22 years we have to cut down carbon emissions by over 90%, the amount of carbon that has to be stored will have increased by another 50% on top of all the other increases I have talked about. That has to be stored as well, doesn’t it? Energy use will only go down when it is profitable for it to happen – not through carbon trading, for this simply moves the money elsewhere – or if the systems that demand that the economy keeps growing, and profits keep being made, are no more. In fact, carbon storage will only happen, if it is profitable to do it; and in the short-termist view of Industrial Civilization, that’s a no-brainer: carbon storage on a global scale is not economically viable, so it won’t happen.

This leaves us with a very simple choice: we trust the future to the leaders of Industrial Civilization, who have got us into this mess in the first place; or we ensure that Industrial Civilization ceases to exist – getting rid of the problem at a stroke. And that’s where the second thing that has changed since I wrote the previous article, comes in.

The second thing that has changed since I wrote my original article is me. I once thought that, with enough effort, we could really turn around the way things are run; that technology might be able to give us some solutions; that politicians could be persuaded to make things better; that we could – as so many environmental groups believe – build our way out of catastrophe. And then I realised that the enormous chunk of humanity that lives under the yoke of Industrial Civilization was thinking the same: that we were all deluded, being actively deluded to believe that there was only one right way to live – the way of the machine. Even if carbon capture worked, it would only mask the continued destruction we are loading on to this overheated planet, and then only for long enough so that by the time everyone realised where things had gone wrong, it would be far too late to do anything about it.

Nature had carbon capture worked out long ago: plankton, trees, soil…but nature didn’t reckon on civilization screwing up its finely balanced system.

The Earth Blog’s “What If…” articles are thought experiments. The situations proposed are never likely to occur, but it is sometimes essential to go to extremes to see what kind of difference a positive radical change could make to the planet.

At what age do you think your working future is planned out for you? If you are conscious of the impact civilization has on our lives, you shouldn’t be surprised to hear that the answer is: "from birth".

I could be writing this article about both the education system and the workplace, but there would be little point separating the two – real education has nothing to do with the education system we were taken through in our early years, and the children and teenagers of today are being taken through now. Neither is education anything to do with on the job learning or career paths; after all, what people have been brought up to do in Industrial Civilization is to do work, and not just any old work.

The population explosion of the last 200 years can be almost completely accounted for by the Industrial Revolution¹. The growing population of Earth, from the traditional industrial hubs of Europe, into North America and Japan, and then across a huge swath of southern and south-east Asia largely consists of a mass of willing slaves brought up in the cities to be components of the industrial machine. To create wealth you need product; to create product you need people.

There were a few who saw what was going on and realised that some of the most brutal aspects of physical work needed changing: the great philanthropists of the West - Titus Salt, Lord Leverhulme, Joseph Rowntree - bear the passing of time, mellowed into a whimsical tale of pure goodness; ignoring the fact that the philanthropists were largely ensuring that their workforces remained loyal and hard-working. To be blunt, working during the Industrial Revolution in the West was hell; working in the new Industrial Revolution in the sweatshops, mines and factories of China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam: different sets of eyes, but the same vision of hell. Time may have passed, but all that has really changed is the location.

Yet, incredibly, the participants see such conditions as a necessary evil. Unionisation, a living wage and the promise that the company will do its best not to shorten your life is the best that can be hoped for. Such "victories" make life tolerable for those people working to make the shoes you wear, the food you eat and the televisions you watch, but they do not change the fact that we are all part of the machine. The education system is where it starts.

For centuries governments and dictators have twisted a population's knowledge base to their own ends. We may look back in history, and gape at the ritual burning or enforced suppression of the works of authors whose printed ideas did not match those of the accepted orthodoxy, but the flames are closer than we like to admit. The Nazi elite stirred up hatred of anti-Nazi materials in a coordinated "synchronization of culture"², while only a decade later the US government elite stirred up hatred of left-leaning beliefs in a coordinated exhumation of so-called Communist sympathisers; the Chinese government installed the Great Chinese Firewall to suppress "immoral" Internet access, while at the same time the US government continue to control information coming out of wartime Iraq and Afghanistan through the use of "embedded journalists". In the last few decades, stories of censored schoolbooks in far off lands³ have made those in supposedly more enlightened nations cringe, yet in a culture that apparently promotes freedom of thought and expression, teachers are forced to become mouthpieces for the Culture of Maximum Harm:

The Government has worked with partners from the statutory and voluntary and community sectors to define what the five outcomes mean. We have identified 25 specific aims for children and young people and the support needed from parents, carers and families in order to achieve those aims.⁴

This is from the UK Government Every Child Matters programme, which "sets out the national framework for local change programmes to build services around the needs of children and young people so that we maximise opportunity and minimise risk." Twenty-five aims, supposedly to promote the well-being of children, yet containing the following items:

·        Ready for school
·        Attend and enjoy school
·        Achieve stretching national educational standards at primary school
·        Achieve stretching national educational standards at secondary school
·        Develop enterprising behaviour
·        Engage in further education, employment or training on leaving school
·        Ready for employment
·        Access to transport and material goods
·        Parents, carers and families are supported to be economically active

National educational standards; Enterprising behaviour; Ready for employment; Access to material goods; Economically active - the progression is there for everyone to see. Even when veiled as being in order to "improve the lives of children", the educational system is little more than an instruction manual for creating little wheels and cogs. I urge you to look at your own national curriculum, searching for words like Citizenship, Enterprise and Skills - it won't take long to find the real motivation behind the education system where you live. "A child in the work culture is asked, 'What do you want to be?' rather than 'What do you want to do?' or 'Where do you want to go?' The brainwashing to become some kind of worker starts young and never stops."⁵

This is a wake up call: look at the work you do and how it neatly fits into the industrial machine, ensuring economic growth and continued global degradation; think about your job and what part it plays in ensuring we remain disconnected from the real world; read your children's books, talk to their teachers - find out how your own flesh and blood is being shaped into a machine part. As we are encouraged to work more and more in order to feed our inherited desire for material wealth and artificial realities, we lose touch with the real world; we pack our children off to day centres and child minders in order that we can remain economic units, and stop being parents; most of us work to produce things that nobody needs, and we are unable to perceive the things that we do need - food, shelter, clean air, clean water, love, friendship, connection.

The vast majority of us don't need to do the job we do. The lucky few, who through chance or design have found work that is a fulfilling part of their lives rather than their lives being a slave to work, provide examples for the rest of us. Once you decide to break out of this cycle for all the right reasons and reduce your expenses to the bare minimum by refusing to follow the instructions of civilization, leaving your job and taking on something that provides you with a real living becomes easy.

The Earth Blog’s “The Problem With…” articles are short opinion pieces that take an uncompromising look at key things that affect the global environment.

This article is an edited extract from the author’s book “A Matter Of Scale”.

How do I summarise something consisting of 100,000 words, 17 chapters, four self-contained and entirely different sections, and containing the solution to most of the world’s ills? More than that, though, how can I make you understand that A Matter Of Scale may be the most important book ever written?

A hollow claim, much like everything that includes the phrase, “This book could change your life”, but the difference here is I am not trying to make a penny out of the work I have put into it – in fact I have spent years of my life, an awful lot of money and the last 12 months writing as though my life depended on it, in order to produce something that now has to stand up on its own merits. So please forgive me if I take a few words explaining myself.

It was a couple of years ago that I conceived the idea of writing a book, while I was still working for a financial organisation, but growing more disillusioned with everything except for the few things that kept me sane: my family, my friends and the brief times I had had the chance to connect with something other than the consumer culture. By January 2007, I had made up my mind to ditch paid work for something I realised was far more important – it sounds desperately cheesy, but I realised there was a sense of destiny in doing what I was about to do.

By the time I left work I had pages upon pages of ideas, notes and references; most of them scribbled down during sleepless nights, idle periods at my desk and on the train travelling to and from London. I also had a very simple idea – something so simple that it just had to be right:

“What matters is what matters to us.”

It seems almost meaningless, but it was the first of many links and connections that were to come about as I delved further into writing. In essence, it means that unless we are (as humans) able to consciously experience something, then it doesn’t matter. That seems reckless, at best, but there was a mirror to this: because – and it became increasingly clear as I was writing the first part of the book – humans are being adversely affected, directly and indirectly by the actions of humanity. If it could  be made clear that it really was ourselves who matter most of all to us, it would be incontrovertible that we have to do something about the problems we have created. It would entirely go against what it means to be human if we knowingly ignored what was happening.

In order to make it totally obvious that there was a lot more unsettling stuff going on than most of us realised, I then had to look into all sorts of different areas for evidence of the effects of our activities upon human beings: forget, for a moment, that species are being wiped out every day and that habitats are being destroyed; what was most astonishing of all was that almost everything we were doing was affecting something else at some scale or another, and it was coming back to bite us. Whatever I read about, at every scale imaginable – bacteria, insects, birds, fish, trees, entire global ecosystems – it kept coming back with the same answer: we were causing our own demise.

The title was born: A Matter Of Scale.

Then I went on holiday with my family and gave myself time to think. Six weeks of thinking about the thing I had committed myself to: a book covering everything from problems to solutions, to be written in four months. “It’ll all be over by Christmas!” I foolishly thought.

By Christmas, I had finished Part Two: Why It Matters, and was halfway through Part One: The Scale Of The Problem. By this time I had already confused my “Readers Panel” (a group of volunteers who bravely offered to nit-pick their way through my writing) by sending them Part Two before any chapters in Part One; despite my claims that it didn’t matter which way round you read them. Part Two came easy – a background in philosophy helped, and being a human, it was relatively easy to write about my own species. On the other hand, I am not a virus, a nematode or a spruce tree: in fact, I spent most of my time in Part One learning about the subjects from scratch, and using that learning experience to try and make the subject as interesting and readable as possible. From what I have been told, I may, at least, have succeeded in writing a very nice ecological textbook!

Then came The Connection. Part Three was extremely difficult to write. Now I was exploring things that I had never gone into in much depth before, and to say my eyes were opened as I delved further into the subject, and my own developing ideas, would be a serious understatement. I’m not going to spoil things for you: simply to say that many people reading the book will end up in places they didn’t realise existed. Some of the places are beautiful, tranquil, deeply personal and moving; some of the places are truly horrible – because that is the difference between a connected life and the disconnected lives we are forced to lead.

By the time Spring emerged in the Northern Hemisphere, Part Three was being wrapped up, for the time being, and I was revisiting earlier parts of the book, clarifying, correcting and making some major changes in places where things hadn’t worked the first time. I was ready to write the final section, and yet I still wasn’t ready: what was the solution?

I knew it would come to me eventually, but I had no way of knowing when, and like all solutions, forcing it could make it worse. So I started writing: first about Anger, its place in the solution, and why it became part of the problem; then about civilization itself – the problem I knew by this time, was not humanity, it was the way Industrial Civilization had created a monster, a fake, disconnected humanity to serve its own ends – our place in it, and why it was so vulnerable; then I realised what the solution was and where it had to lead us. Those last two chapters were the most thrilling, and overwhelming pieces of writing I had ever done; and possibly ever likely to do.

I’m not quite done yet. Part Four still needs a couple of days work: it’s a hell of a solution, and I want to make sure everyone truly understands why it has to be that way, and how to carry it through. Oh, and also why so many other “solutions” are utterly useless. There is a web site which, at the time of writing, contains the first three parts of the book, readable online entirely for free. Remember at the beginning of this piece I said that I didn’t intend to make any money from this work? I am risking the wrath, and rejection, of any potential publisher, by insisting that the entire book will be online for anyone to read, regardless of what happens to the print edition – because, as far as A Matter Of Scale is concerned, what matters is that as many people as possible get the chance to find out the truth behind humanity, civilization, the state of the world and, most of all, themselves.

The entire book text will be online early in July 2008.

You can start reading now at www.amatterofscale.com.

Here’s a photo of my vegetable patch. At the front are two rows of lettuce and a patch of spinach – the kinds that you can keep picking and they will keep growing. Halfway down the raised bed (surrounded by thin copper wire to deter the slugs) are some tomato plants – two different types. At the far end is a wigwam consisting of eight bamboo canes cut in half and a piece of plastic-coated metal rod I found in a hedge a couple of weeks ago, thinking that it might come in handy. There are twenty-four French bean plants beginning to curl their way up the canes and I reckon we will be giving beans away in a few months time. The three pots on the left contain herbs: oregano, basil, tarragon and a few garlic cloves I threw in the soil to see what would happen; and there are a couple of chilli pepper plants courtesy of my Dad who also supplied the beans.

It’s not a very big vegetable patch, but it’s the first time I have ever grown my own food – yes, despite all the other things I have striven to do, growing food wasn’t on my list of priorities, but now I’ve started I want to do it properly and learn all about growing seasons, pests, propagation, seed keeping, nutrients and anything else I can find out. It was never really an option, growing food: I left the house at 8 o’clock every morning while I worked in London, and got back at 7, with barely enough time to eat meals and spend some time with the children during daylight hours. I should have tried to grow food, really, but never got round to it. I could have taken the children out with me to plant seeds, water the growing plants and pull out weeds, but it just didn’t seem important: it does now – I am no longer on the corporate treadmill.

Being accused of hypocrisy is something I have had to get used to. I made a comment on DeSmogBlog – a very fine web site – recently, which went like this:

Apart from the conditional nature of this comment, continued growth in emissions until 2025 at the current rate will *GUARANTEE* death to all but a few hardy species on Earth.

The more politicians speak about technology the more virulently anti-technology I get. No solution is effective unless it delivers: technology since the industrial revolution has delivered us to the brink of catastrophe.

Someone, a serial sceptical commentator, leapt on my attitude to technology:

No, you reject evil technology. But from your blog's author profile, we get:

"Keith Farnish is an environmental writer and activist who, in a former life, was a business continuity and IT security manager. He lives in Essex, UK with his wife and two children."

Right, so if you hadn't been an "IT security manager", you could just have easily provided for your family as a subsistence farmer, living in a mud hut? Unfortunately, that wouldn't leave you much discretionary income to spend on a cache of automatic weapons and freeze-dried rations for your underground bunker, for when The End Times come. Hurray for technology!

"The wood burner arrives in 4 weeks (seriously)."

And you (seriously) believe that burning wood is less polluting than heating with electricity or natural gas? You're pretty far gone, bro.

Apart from the incorrect information about wood-burning, I suppose he had a point: I did used to be an IT Manager, and did used to earn quite a bit of money – that makes me a technophile rich-kid, doesn’t it? Well, no actually. We didn’t used to spend much money (we spend even less now) and I genuinely believe that technology is about as helpful in the climate crisis as anything that comes out of George Bush’s mouth (see this article); but it goes deeper than that.

Fundamentally, I don’t consider myself to be a member of this Culture of Maximum Harm: I may still be a component, gradually trying to ease myself and my family out of it, but I refuse to be considered a willing participant, however much this culture wants to sink its unsustainable claws deeper into my unwilling flesh. Market research companies try to shoehorn people into convenient categories and, to my delight, I don’t appear to match a single one these categories. More importantly, despite any “privilege” I may have had, I have changed so much about my life that my working past has become almost irrelevant to my future.

A corporation doesn’t become a greenwashing corporation just because it wants to look green – it is greenwashing because a corporation cannot be anything but a profit-making, resource consuming entity. A person, on the other hand, can change.

Last week we had a wood-burner installed. Here’s a picture of it:

Yesterday I took the children up to our neighbour’s house, and we filled up two wheelbarrows with logs – offcuts from their tree-surgery work. My brother-in-law also delivered some floorboards he had been asked to remove as part of his bathroom fitting work – they will make fantastic kindling. This year we may not have to use the gas-fired central heating at all: a little bit of pain for the gas company and the industrial machine, and a lot less pollution because, whatever the commentator on DeSmogBlog may have thought, the burning of logs in an efficient burner is a lot less polluting than my central heating.

Leaving my well-paid job to do full time environmental work was a step; learning to cook with just local, seasonal and dried produce was a step; starting to grow my own food was a step; switching off my central heating, after progressively turning it down further and further was a step; switching off the television and deciding to talk, play cards, read and just enjoy each other’s company was a step. But here’s an interesting thing: almost none of these steps will be featured in the countless lists you read in newspapers and magazines for “turning green” – they are all too big for the mainstream media, and even the mainstream environmental groups to propose to an “unwilling” public.

The majority of the public may be unwilling to change, but why should that mean that the growing, willing minority aren’t given the kind of information and the kind of inspiration to make the changes that will bring us over to a more sustainable way of life – the kind of life that doesn’t need big energy suppliers, supermarkets, factories, agri-businesses, media systems, and swill-eating politicians who only want us to live the way of life that benefits the industrial economy?

“Doing your bit” isn’t going to change anything; nor is it practical for millions of people to just throw in their lot and opt-out; but it is time to start taking that first, second, third step out of the system. When you do take those steps, though, make sure they are big ones – big enough so that if you slip back a bit, you are still going forwards; big enough so that you are far enough away to fight off the temptations of the consumer culture; big enough to actually make a difference.

On March 11, 2006 – just over two years ago as I write these words – I published an article on The Earth Blog called, “Why The Public Won’t Change”, opening with the words:

Watch the streets around you - do you see a concerned populace, driving little, walking lots, happily queuing for buses, fighting for renewable electricity, demanding local produce?

Of course not - the general public really don't care about the climate. Campaigners can try and make themselves feel like they (we) are in touch with the population, but this will not happen unless they feel like the population - like they feel they don't need to care. Campaigners are, and always will be, in the minority - the public look after number 1, occasionally numbers 2, 3, 4 etc. in the form of family (although the numbers driving their kids around smog ridden streets, unsecured, chatting on their mobile phones, or slumped in front of the TV while the kids learn about the wonders of the XBox, make me doubt this) - they are not interested in saving the planet.

It’s two years on and, as much as we hear of a great raising of consciousness across the globe towards the dangers of climatic change and global environmental degradation, the picture as far as public action goes is identical. Environmental campaigners are trying to turn around an ocean going oil tanker by offering it small inducements and little taps on the sides of its vast metallic bulk – but the tanker keeps gliding onwards. I realise now, that when the article first came out I was spot on about one key thing: the public, as a body, simply don’t want to change. This applies to the vast majority of people in industrial civilization – through a combination of lifelong brainwashing and a general apathy about the condition they are in – but it doesn’t apply to everyone. As I learnt from a social analyst friend of mine, the biggest mistake campaigners and reformers have made in approaching the problem is change is that they have assumed we behave the same – as though the population really is an oil tanker. It is far better to assume that the population is like a shoal of fish, a swarm of bees or a flock of birds.

In 2006 I thought that we could take the “oil tanker” approach, by changing the systems that are causing the problems from the inside out, through government lobbying, mass consciousness raising, corporate improvement and so many other fruitless methods. It became clear that I was hopelessly wrong; and so were (and still are) the vast majority of campaigners.

I am proud of some of the essays I have written here: all of the “What If…?” articles were labours of love, and still – I think – stand up on their own. Some of the articles, such as “4 Essential Ways To Save The Earth” and “What Is The Point Of Investing In The Future If There is No Future To Invest In” badly fall down on their conclusions, even though the main text is still well worth reading. I genuinely believed that simple, wholesale solutions were possible, whereas I now understand that change will involve just a few of the fish, bees and birds amongst the teeming masses.

Changing The Minority

So, let’s assume you do want to change. Like a self-confessed alcoholic, you have placed your foot on the first step to recovery: admitting you have a problem. “I am a civilization addict”.

Civilization addicts are most definitely in the vast majority; yet as a proportion of addicts who want to recover, far more alcoholics have admitted they have a problem than those addicted to this culture of maximum harm.

It was always going to be that way: change does not happen at once, but for those groups and individuals who really think it’s going to turn around all of a sudden then that can be extremely disheartening. What they, and us recovering addicts, need to recognise is that there are only so many people capable of escaping from the trap – and those people must be the target of campaigning (or rather, treatment).

Me, I’m an innovator when it comes to changing the society I am living in. This isn’t a boast; it’s just a definition, based on the vastly overused Diffusion of Innovations concept that Everett Rogers made his own. There are five different groups of people that apply to each potential innovation – whether that be adopting a new technology, becoming interested in a television program or changing a society: innovators (which account for around 2.5% of the population), early-adopters (12.5%), early majority (35%), late majority (35%) and laggards (15%). The percentage figures can change depending on the “innovation”, but what is more important is that they reflect a time period of uptake: the early-adopters will not “take on” an innovation until the innovators have; and so on.

On its own, that seems simple enough, but that is ignoring the different stages that each individual has to go through in order for their personal adoption to be achieved. This is neatly summarised by Gregg Orr:

1) Knowledge – person becomes aware of an innovation and has some idea of how it functions,

2) Persuasion – person forms a favourable or unfavourable attitude toward the innovation,

3) Decision – person engages in activities that lead to a choice to adopt or reject the innovation,

4) Implementation – person puts an innovation into use,

5) Confirmation – person evaluates the results of an innovation-decision already made.

People in the next group are unlikely to start their adoption process until those in the previous group have, at least, started their “implementation” phase, and more likely not until the “confirmation” phase. This final phase is when the adopter decides whether they are happy with the outcome of the adoption, and is in a position to encourage others – friends, family, colleagues, neighbours – to start the adoption process themselves.

With all that said, it sounds as though any major change in society towards a survivable future is going to take an age, especially when you consider the enormous pressure placed on individuals to ensure that they don’t change at all (this is described in all its gory detail in A Matter Of Scale – which will be available in mid-2008 ) . All is not lost, though: the Diffusion of Innovations idea describes a bell-curve, meaning that once the small minority have turned their backs on industrial civilization, there is a very large group of people who may then be persuaded to do the same, followed by an even larger bulk of people doing the right thing.

In fact, by the time a sizable minority have changed, the system may well be in tatters. But the planet might still be a decent place to live on.

A darkened room, its walkways dimly illuminated by emergency lighting and the displays of monitoring equipment, rumbles with the vibrations of cooling systems injecting chilled air towards hot processors and spinning disks. The shrill sounds of thousands of data storage devices fill the air, alongside the cooling systems; the relentless blinking and trilling of green lights goes on as data is sent and received through miles of copper and glass fibre. Clunk. Warning sounds – alarming cries from dumb systems that only know that something has failed. In a wink the UPS takes up the load, drawing power not from the high voltage mains, but from deep tanks of diesel embedded in the lower levels of this data centre. Management is notified and the call goes out for emergency supplies of liquid fuel: the contract says there is to be no interruption, and the fuel suppliers are on standby 24 hours a day. The fuel suppliers are receiving further calls, from a standing start they experience a tide of demand as throughout the city the power fails: data centres, hospitals, offices, government buildings, military installations – who gets the fuel first? Who gets the last reserves?

As Anne takes her first steps towards the bathroom, she understands something is amiss. Her clock is blank; no light seeps in through the blinds from the street; her fumbled attempts to switch on the bedside lamp were to no avail. The blackness is total – even the moon won’t come out to play with the darkened surface of the world. Sirens broadcast their Doppler cries in distant parts of the town as Anne moves her left foot onto the next step down, and misses her footing…thump, thump, thump, down the stairs and into the wall; a sickening rip as her ankle bends askew. She pulls her way down the remaining steps and picks up the telephone, her breath is short – there is a tone, the telephone company keeps the system running through its own generators. She dials 9…the keypad is soundless. She hangs up then brings the receiver to her ear – nothing; the gentle burr has gone as the last diesel dries up at her local exchange.

It seems cruel to leave Anne like this; less so to let the disks in the data centre spin down – though this data centre and other like it service the largest financial organisations on Earth and tomorrow the markets won’t be opening. Anne’s plight is repeated across the nation as the switchgear reacts to low loads, shuts itself off and puts the grid into standby. The hospitals will be busy until their own power supplies drop out. The ambulances can do little but patrol – the mobile phone network failed hours ago. Like perverse moths to a doused flame, the drivers and walkers are out seeing what a darkened world looks like…for a while, until they panic.

Inexorably, the country grinds to a halt as the extinguished lights symbolise the start of turmoil in a culture whose lifeblood is electricity, and whose arteries are the cables that join the organs of state and industry together.

This is a warning: the peaks are approaching.

Peak Coal. If humans continue to burn coal at the current rate and the levels of oil burning and deforestation stay the same there is no doubt that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will reach 450 parts per million by the middle of the century. This is a critical tipping point. James Hansen makes the stark observation that the only way to keep carbon dioxide levels low enough for the climate to recover, in the current technology-based culture the industrial nations are exporting to the rest of the world, is to stop burning all coal. This is not happening: consumption of coal is rising as China and the USA gobble up their own supplies, and the rest of the world balks at the rising costs of (the already peaked) natural gas. Coal continues to feed the economic treadmill. The production peak will come by 2015 if we don’t switch off the burners.

Peak Uranium. As there begins a drive for carbon free energy to feed a population whose electricity demand is growing – between 1983 and 2005 electricity demand doubled worldwide – the consumption of uranium is already exceeding its production. Uranium can be made to go further, but only through the production of plutonium. Thorium breeding is experimental, and even if successful will not produce enough energy to close the nuclear gap in time. The Uranium Peak is expected some time in the middle of the 20th century – sooner if coal is abandoned.

Some options remain. Renewables have huge potential, but are being rolled out abysmally slowly, and will never catch the peaks in time. Gas, as I mentioned is already on the wane, and the use of oil products will only cut into global demand for transport – at $110 a barrel, it has already priced itself out of the mains electricity market. As mains supplies fail the industrial world’s resilience rests on a continuous supply of diesel – just one demand placed upon an industry that is now digging up sand and shale to extract the last gobs of black gold. At some point in the near future, nations will lose their electricity supplies, with dire consequences for the infrastructure, and the people that depend on it.

Those That Don’t Survive

It calls itself the “developed” world: a world where machines usurped manual craft long ago, or use the hands of the poor to serve the rabid consumption of the rich. A world in which economic growth is the measure of a nation and the ownership of material goods is the mark of the man, or the woman. A world in which leisure time bypasses nature and sucks up the money the “developed” world’s inhabitants spend their working lives accumulating.

Above all, the “developed” world is an industrial world: one that defines itself through its use of technology – its cars, its planes, its cookers, refrigerators and washing machines, its computers, its electric lawnmowers and air conditioning units, its cranes, furnaces and steel mills. A world that depends on energy.

People in countries like the USA, Japan, Canada and Germany have, in just the last 50 years, morphed from seeing the continued supply of electricity as a luxury to savour, to demanding vast quantities that run every aspect of their lives. When the electricity goes off, lives switch off. Not only will their be widespread panic, accompanied by the inevitable looting and violence which distinguishes societies that live on a psychological knife-edge; people will not be able to feed themselves for long, keep themselves warm, even drink from the taps that are kept under constant electrically pumped pressure.

The mental burdens will also be intense for many.  For those who spend their lives plugged into the mains, the loss of television, computer, telephone and even lighting will be unbearable. A hollowed-out existence in which the only veneer of life is driven by electricity seems like real life until the lights go out.

Politically, loss of power is suicide: the number one energy priority for Western governments is “security” – in other words, the need to maintain a continuous supply of power to every key part of the national infrastructure. What this really means is keeping a continuous supply of power to the economy – the money generating, trading and investing entities that stretch across the industrial world have their entire memories stored on computer disks. When the computers crash, the markets crash, and take governments down with them.

As civilisations continue to become more energy intensive, and dependent on its continuous supply, the need to secure reliable energy sources becomes ever more critical. Interference with the electricity supply of most industrial nations is considered to be an act of terrorism, even if the intention of the protagonist is to highlight the dramatic changes happening to the climate as a result of its generation. Electricity dependency creates a state of fear: fear that is generated by those that want to keep the economy, and its suckling society from collapse, and fear that results from individuals’ psychological need for artificial stimuli.

In effect, energy rich societies are under siege and, bizarrely, the attackers are those that perpetuate that energy dependence: the retailers, the advertisers, the property developers, those at the top of the heap that ride on the crest of a wave of wealth and political power. The wave is breaking, and the flotsam will be toxic for those who are in the water.

Those That Survive

In another home – a little place in the west of Scotland, in southern Nigeria, or perhaps in the south of France – a family is sitting around their wood burner, talking about the news that they picked up in the local bakery. Power cuts in the cities, darkness along the roads, civil unrest and a government that wants to crack down on dissent. Time to bring the chickens in, perhaps; the wolves could be coming to the door. There is still some oil in the lamps and stocks of candles, but at this time of the year bed time is soon after tea: as the body clock of each family member takes its cue from the darkness outside, they pump some water for teeth and a wash, then snuggle into bed, leaving the embers glowing.

Tomorrow they will take a walk into the village and find out if anyone needs help.

The Earth Blog’s “What If…” articles are thought experiments. The situations proposed are never likely to occur, but it is sometimes essential to go to extremes to see what kind of difference a positive radical change could make to the planet.

It is often said that the greatest fear of both the politician and the businessman is that somewhere, someone is doing something that he has no control over. Witness the remarkable drive to acquire cheap oil sources by the USA (Iraq – by war, Chad – by bribery, Venezuela – by engineering a coup) and China (Sudan – by bribery, Indonesia – bribery again). Witness the rush to file new patents in everything and anything: 1.7 million in 2005, up from less than 1.1 million in 1995. Anyone would think that something bad was about to happen to the global economy.

I jest, of course. The economy is fine: the rich people are still getting richer and the effects of continuing political repression, and the climate change due in the next couple of decades will only hit those poor people with flies on their eyes, and mud on their feet. Isn’t capitalism grand?

But something is changing, and it only becomes obvious when you listen to the messages very carefully indeed.

The transparent and often brutal rhetoric of the USA in environmental conferences up to and including Bali has, in the past, revealed the power of the commercial lobbyists and the way that many politicians in the USA think. It’s pretty standard stuff: first it was utter denial of the science of climate change; then it was the refusal to commit to targets which might force the commercial dinosaurs to make dramatic changes in the way they operate; and now it is the influx of corporate and political greenwash which is using all the tools in the advertisers’ box of tricks to convince the public that the problem is being dealt with and everything can carry on as normal.

The US government (along with, notably, the British government) has kept a pretty low profile when it comes to human rights abuses. The USA is one of the largest manufacturers of torture equipment in the world, exporting their wares to any government that might wish to keep troublemakers in check (I use the word “troublemaker” in the loosest possible sense), and as well as their armed forces having a history of unprovoked abuse amongst the people of occupied territories, they resolutely refuse to allow the International Criminal Court to try any of their citizens.

The motivation for this is clearly that both the businesses and the politicians want to carry on doing things the same way as always, and heaven help anyone who dares to get in their way!

So why, in June 2007 did George Bush say:

Another dissident I will meet here [in the Czech Republic] is Rebiyah Kadeer of China, whose sons have been jailed in what we believe is an act of retaliation for her human rights activities. The talent of men and women like Rebiyah is the greatest resource of their nations, far more valuable than the weapons of their army or their oil under the ground. America calls on every nation that stifles dissent to end its repression, to trust its people, and to grant its citizens the freedom they deserve.

And why, in January 2008 did he say:

Let us create a new international clean technology fund, which will help developing nations like India and China make greater use of clean energy sources. And let us complete an international agreement that has the potential to slow, stop, and eventually reverse the growth of greenhouse gases. This agreement will be effective only if it includes commitments by every major economy and gives none a free ride.

Now, with sharp light being played upon on the environmental and human rights abuses of China, a script more subtle, more clever, yet far more sinister than the simple “business as usual” theme is being written; a script which could buy the USA many more years with which to carry on its destructive activities. In the press and on the televisions of the USA future Chinese carbon emissions are being cast as demons from which we must all run screaming: they must be cut down, and the cuts must be deep. In the media, the Beijing Olympics is becoming a clarion call for journalists to explore and condemn the numerous human rights abuses carried out by the Chinese government.

Look a little closer and you realise that this isn't about creating level playing fields; it is about ensuring that the existing economic super power remains in power.

In 1990, the GDP (effectively the national wealth) of China was just under $1.9 trillion, or just 26% of the GDP of the United States. In 2005, the Chinese powerhouse economy, largely driven by exports to the USA and Europe, had grown to be worth 66% of that of the USA, despite the fact that the USA economy had grown by an impressive 56% in that period.

(Source : International Monetary Fund)

The United States government has gone into self-preservation mode against the might of China. This is nothing to do with concern for the planet, or for human rights: if it were then the USA would be cutting its own sky-high emissions to the bone rather than propping up its ailing economy with entreaties to buy more stuff, and the corporations of the USA would be criticising a regime that locks anyone away who dares speak out rather than eagerly sponsoring the Beijing Olympics.

The actions of the US government in calling for changes to other countries human rights records merely reflects their own desire to draw attention away from their own appalling record at home and around the world, and thus protect the good name of the USA. Who would want to buy goods from a country that abuses its people?

The actions of the US government in calling for half-hearted climate agreements merely reflect the corporations’ own interests in the face of potential environmental scrutiny: they try to look good, to appear environmentally responsible when in fact they are just protecting their bottom line. Who would want to buy goods from a company that contributes to climate change?

There is no doubt at all that China has to make fundamental changes to both its atrocious treatment of innocent people, and its exponential growth in climate changing greenhouse gases. There is also no doubt that the business and political leaders of the USA are being hopelessly hypocritical in so many areas by making out that China is the world’s pariah when, in fact, they are simply scared that China may one day run the world’s economy.

I need to talk to you about hope. I need to warn you about having it, for merely by having hope you could become nothing more than a bundle of ineffectual good intentions. Hope could, in fact, be the single most dangerous thing to have in the environmental struggle we need to face up to.

In order to understand hope fully we must first understand grief, for it is within the depths of grief that hope finds its most willing victims.

Grief

The Earth is not yet a dead planet, but already people are grieving its loss.

The process of grieving can be a very complex and drawn-out experience, leaping from immense highs to profound lows, not knowing what to believe or what to feel. Eventually, most people have moved from one stage to the next, backwards and forwards until they have reached the point where they accept the cause of the grief and are able to regroup and possibly move on to something else. Death may be an end, but it doesn’t have to be the end.

Surprisingly, the grieving process is evident in almost everyone who has been touched in some way by climate change and the possibility of environmental collapse. Amongst most politicians and business people in the industrial West – the consumer culture – Denial was the first stage, within themselves (although I tend to think that this was more about maintaining the status quo than coping with loss) but especially to others – if customers and citizens could be made to believe nothing was happening then nothing had to change.

We have seen how this has now panned out. Years of false scientific evidence, corporate political lobbying, and the decapitation of any agreements that dared to challenge the twin gods of wealth and power kept the denial industry in business for a long, long time. Anger has been evident amongst those who saw the truth, but that anger was suppressed, brutally in many cases, by those who sought to maintain denial. Much of that anger was diverted into symbolic actions, like protest marches, petitions and billboard campaigns; all of which achieve nothing except sate the appetite of the angry. Politicians like symbolic actions – they dissipate anger; they allow the pretence of free speech and action to be advertised to the world; symbolic actions do not threaten the system.

Meanwhile, as the protests went on, and still the chances of the planet remaining habitable for humans increased not one jot, the corporations and the politicians realised the evidence for human-induced climate change was overwhelming and so quietly slipped into Bargaining mode. Another stage of the classic grieving cycle this, in effect, has allowed inaction to continue, right up to the present day: in Bali, in Hawaii, in Scotland – wherever the powerful meet – bargaining takes place, and nothing changes. Stupidly, much of the environmental movement see this process as a positive thing – stupidly they do not see beyond the veil of ignorance: the bargaining process is just a way of making sure everything can carry on for as long as possible without anything having to change.

I see many people that I know and love hit the fourth stage – that of Depression. “It’s all over”, “there is nothing we can do”, “we may as well give up.” Give up what?

“Give up hoping”, many say. And what have you been doing all these years: hoping for change, hoping people might see sense, hoping that right will prevail above all the darkness and evil? Before we have slipped into the Acceptance stage, it seems that so many people have already given up, as though the Earth were a corpse over which we have to shed tears, over which we pour our grief, while still hanging onto a shred of hope that something good may come of all this.

Some simply say there is no point in fighting any more; that the battle is lost and the victors – the powerful individuals and bodies that become more powerful with each victory – will take the spoils, whatever tattered form they may take. For these people, there is still a chance of rekindling the desire to fight, for they have not fallen prey to hope; the hopers have already been defeated by their own blind faith.

What Is Hope?

Not all hope is bad. There are actually two types. First, the benign wish or blessing that shows you care: “I hope you have a good day”, “Hope to see you again soon”, “I hope you pass your exam.” In isolation, and as merely a gesture then this kind of hope can make someone feel wanted. This kind of hope is nice – it is harmless.

There is a second kind of hope that is not harmless; it is the kind of hope that implies more than benign wishes. I call this kind of hope the “secular prayer”; it bears all of the hallmarks of religious prayer, and carries the same dangers that are faced when you entrust your future to it. This is the dangerous form.

I want to mention the use of prayer, since I brought it up here. There appears to be no empirical evidence showing one way or another that prayer works. The Religious Tolerance web site has carefully broken down the methods, results and reaction to all of the recent major studies carried out on the effectiveness of prayer, and the conclusion you have to reach is that prayer alone simply does not have any recordable effect. The reactions that that this statement invokes are generally along the lines that God must not be tested; more specifically: "You're going to do your best to limit the prayer some people get so that you can measure the benefits for those who receive a lot of prayer? Do you think that's how God intended prayer to be used?"

So that, appears to be that. Except that when you look deeper into the research, you find something very interesting. A widely cited and carefully controlled study into the relative effects of prayer on post-operative coronary recovery found no significant difference in recovery rates between those who received prayer unknowingly and those who did not receive prayer at all. But here’s the interesting bit: the group of patients who knowingly received prayer had a 15-20% worse recovery rate than the other two groups. Some commentators (along with, surprisingly, my 10 year old daughter) suggested this was because of the increased pressure of knowing you were expected to respond to prayer, but I suspect the cause to be down to something different.

Hope.

You see, when you hope for something to happen – not the benign good wishes, but the deep, heartfelt hope that aches for an outcome of your choosing – then something happens to you: your motivation to work for the desired outcome actually reduces. In effect this is the very opposite to the meaning of “giving up hope”. By entrusting an outcome to the ethereal entity that is “hope” then you are passing on responsibility to something that is out of your control. This is what you are doing when you pray: you pass on the responsibility for the outcome of your prayers to an external force.

What appeared to be happening to the coronary patients is that by receiving and accepting prayer, part of the responsibility for that recovery went out of the control of those patients, and perhaps even out of the control of the healthcare professionals who were looking after them. A positive state of mind is often a vital attribute in recovering from illness, whether mental or physical, and also other conditions such as addiction. Quite how this works is uncertain – it may be related to the release of hormones known as Endorphins, or other more complex effects involving the immune system – but more studies than not show that maintaining positivity is beneficial. Knowing that someone cares about you enough to pray for you is one thing, though; thinking that the job of getting you better has passed from you to something you have no control over is another thing entirely.

Dereliction Of Responsibility

Every day, in all sorts of ways, we hand over the responsibility of our actions to other parties. We entrust religious leaders to act as proxy supreme beings, to give us blessings and pray for the delivery of our souls and a winner's cheque through the post for all. We entrust politicians to justly run districts, states, countries, the whole planet, on our behalf, and deliver whatever is in their jurisdiction from whatever evils we have asked them to deal with. We ask the heads of corporations to use profits wisely, to provide fair wages, allow union representation and listen to their staff and respond appropriately – we ask them not to destroy the planet. We ask environmental organisations to look after the planet on our behalf, to lobby fiercely and petition prudently, to give us a world worth living in.

We are guilty of a mass dereliction of responsibility.

Just like prayer, when we vote we hope the politicians will do the right thing after they have been elected. When we buy a product from a company, we hope that company are acting in the best interests of everyone and every thing they impact. When we sign a petition, go on a protest march or write a letter, we hope that it will change things for the better. But it is never that simple.

Voters vote for different things: your hope that a politician will increase pollution controls will be running counter to the hope of another voter that pollution controls are weakened. Your entrustment of a company that they will act ethically runs contrary to the basic needs of a shareholder in that same company, that demands an increase in profits, which requires poorer labour standards, increased use of natural resources, corner cutting and cost slashing across the board. Your petition or protest march may give you hope that something will change when in fact you have simply sublimated your anger and concern into a symbolic action that threatens not a single media executive, company director or head of state.

When was the last time you followed up one of your actions? Did you sign a petition, track the course of that petition to its target, find out the reaction of the target, question the target on why they didn’t do as you asked, spoke to them in person, exposed their ignorance in public, carried on and on and on until what you wanted to be done was done? Of course you didn’t, because you hoped that signing the petition was enough. You innocently believed that right would out simply because you placed your demands on the wings of dear hope.

Even after writing this, and knowing what I write is true, I still accidentally use the word “hope” when I really mean that I will make sure something happens. It’s a terrible habit, and one that we have all become naturalised into doing. Once we become addicted to passing the buck to someone else, it’s very difficult to take it back – but take it back we must:

“When we stop hoping for external assistance, when we stop hoping that the awful situation we’re in will somehow resolve itself, when we stop hoping the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free – truly free – to honestly start working to thoroughly resolve it. When hope dies, action begins. “ (Derrick Jensen, Endgame)

Stop hoping, and start doing. And keep doing it until you have achieved far more than you could ever have hoped for.

Lists are useful things: shopping lists, lists of things to do, lists of addresses, lists of names and numbers, lists of articles to write. I do keep a list of articles to write, but making a list of “x ways to save the world” has never been among them. A while ago I did write an article called “4 Essential Ways To Save The Earth”, which was not exactly a list (it was over 6000 words long), more a way of describing the types of systems that have to be changed. But it was a good way of putting my thoughts in order.

Then the environmental blogs started to fill up, much like the environmental books had years before, with lists and lists of things you should do in order to be a good green person. Meanwhile the Earth carried on heating, the forests continued to be cleared, the oceans became more acidic and the population kept growing and consuming more and more. I have not seen a single list that actually takes people to a genuinely sustainable place, let alone addresses the root causes of our situation.

It’s about time that was put right.

Not too long ago I visited a school to talk about climate change, and realised that I would probably be asked to tell the students what they should be doing to make things better. Buy organic milk; recycle more; change your lightbulbs; do lots of other really trivial things that on their own will have virtually no impact. How could I get around this problem without frightening the students into retreat, leaving them confused as to the best actions or giving them something that wasn’t worth the paper it was written on?

Finally, after some time breaking things down, analysing everything I know about the way systems (cultural and ecological) work, throwing out the trivial stuff and talking to my 10 year old daughter, I whittled everything down to just 6 main subject headings. They need a little explanation individually, as does the thought behind them. Essentially, if you take them all together and if a large enough number of people follow them, two things will happen:

1) Humanity will become far more sustainable, reversing the trends we are seeing in our consumption and damaging activities.

2) The systems that drive this culture’s terrible behaviour will break down, having no option but to change or die.

Each action taken alone is enough to fundamentally change and even take down one or more of the damaging systems that the industrial world makes us think are essential – they are not. These systems include the motor industry, the industrial food production system, the corporate fiscal system and many others. Many of them are interlinked and dependent upon each other, and when one falls, others can fall too. The real beauty of the 6 Things You Must Do is that they are all eminently achievable: they can be completed in one go or in steps, and you can concentrate on one or two at a time, so long as you get there by 2030, the year that we have to have become sustainable if we are to prevent runaway and irreversible environmental change.

I am not saying that the 6 Things are easy to achieve. People have been hardwired in the West, and increasingly in other parts of the world to behave in a certain way – an orthodoxy – which even the environmental organisations take as read. Not only is our behaviour controlled and thus difficult to change without considerable motivation, there are many things that are not achievable without fundamental changes taking place in society. But behaviour is the most important. You may think you are making great sacrifices, but you are actually making your life far more satisfying and in tune with how humans naturally behave.

So, here are The 6 Things You Must Do, if you want to ensure that we have a future on Earth:

CONNECTING : Get back in touch with your planet. You are part of nature so act as though you are. Understand your place in nature, how you affect it and how it affects you.

CONSUMING : Don't buy anything that you don't need. If you have to buy something, remember the 4 R's: Reduce, Repair, Reuse and Respect.

EATING : Become vegan, or as near as you can to remain healthy. Buy local. Eat simply.

LIVING : Reduce the energy used in your home to the bare minimum. Change your behaviour to allow for this. Become energy independent.

TRAVELLING : Travel as little as possible. Don't fly. Don't drive. Instead: walk, cycle, use the bus, go by train.

EDUCATING : Convince yourself and everyone you know - children, parents, politicians, teachers - that we need to change completely and we need to change now.

Simple, challenging and very effective. If you want more details then write to me at keith@theearthblog.org. There will be a lot more information and help in my forthcoming book, A Matter Of Scale – watch this space.

It is 3:30 in the morning as the cold winter air paws at the roof tiles, and the drizzle softly obscures the blind windows of our sleeping house. In a chilly annex, unseen, a valve opens, and the water begins flowing; the gentle ticking of the water meter in the kitchen disturbs no one. I turn over and continue my sleep, warm and dry under the duvet. The water continues flowing, 3 litres, 4..5…for minute after minute, creating a deep, warm pool, soaking everything it touches. I am unaware, dreaming of things I will have no recollection of upon waking.

It is 7:20 in the morning. I ease myself from the bed and pad downstairs. The ground floor is cold, I need a coffee and a shower. I stop and notice a tiny unobtrusive light out of the corner of my eye through the small panes of glass in the back room doorway. “Please Remove Washing”, announces the LCD array – polite, if ever a machine could be so. I decide to have my coffee and shower, and then hang out the clothes that completed their overnight wash cycle 3 hours ago.

The fridge and freezer are still humming away, and on dark mornings I need some light, a burst of news on the radio and a mug of coffee for my wife and I. Actually, I say “need”, but really it’s “want”; although by the looks on the faces of some people who come to visit, and the determination to keep their coats on because my thermostat is set to a balmy (for me) 17°C , you would think my house was located somewhere in a world without power. Actually, it’s probably located somewhere in the 1960s, when lighting, heating and home appliances in the industrial West were used far more frugally than now. Between 1970 and 2004, according to the UK government, the amount of energy used for space heating and water heating in the UK increased by 22%. In the same period the energy use for lighting and appliances increased by a massive 148%.

The more significant change has been in the fuel type used in this period. Solid fuels burned at home, like coal and wood, decreased in usage from just over 18 to less than 1 million tonnes of oil equivalent. At the same time natural gas increased from 9 to 34 mtoe, while electricity from the national grid increased from just under 7 to nearly 10 mtoe. Overall, people in the UK have increased their domestic energy consumption by nearly 32%; and this in a land without air conditioning. It is to the USA that we have to go to see some really fascinating figures.

According to the US Department of Energy there has been a massive shift in the way energy used in the home is produced. In 1970 United States homes used 206 million tonnes of oil equivalent in “primary consumption”, meaning that the fuel – such as coal, wood or butane – was burnt in or around the home. In the same year 135 mtoe was drawn from the national grid in the form of electricity. By 2004, the figure for primary consumption had gone down by 16%, reflecting the move away from solid fuels. By 2004, the consumption of electricity had gone up by 160% or, if you like, the USA consumed 2.3 times as much electricity in 2004 as it did only 34 years earlier. The USA consumes a lot of electricity!

Ok, so what has that to do with a washing machine running during the night? For the answer to that, we need to look at the way electricity is produced.

Demand Issues

I grew up in the 1970s in the UK, during a time when power cuts due to industrial action, or more commonly due to equipment failure or damage, were pretty common, much as they are now in many poorer countries throughout the world. I remember playing Monopoly by candle light, and vaguely recall television programmes sometimes only running for a short period during the day to reduce power consumption. I don’t remember being cold and miserable – we had clothes to put on for when the weather became uncomfortable, and we had fun, playing games, telling stories, and would have played music if any of us had been able to.

In 2007, in the industrial West, a person who switches on a light expects it to work immediately, and stay working. The demand (amount of electricity required) varies tremendously throughout the day; the graph for the UK is relevant for most industrial countries with a normal working day, although there are seasonal variations:

(Source: http://www.nationalgrid.com/uk/Electricity/Data/Demand+Data/)

The “base load” can be seen by the red block, moving up and down gradually depending on the weather. The daily load is demonstrated by the vertical lines which show that the highest demand (around 5.30pm) is something like 75% higher than the lowest demand (around 6am).This is a big problem.

This demand for constantly changing amounts of electricity contrasts with the way in which that electricity is produced. For the USA, where 50% of electricity is produced by coal, turning up the power is not like turning on a light switch. A source at Drax Power Station (which provides 7% of the UK’s electricity, and produces 4% of its carbon dioxide) told me that a coal-fired power station stores high pressure steam, which allows about 10% more power to be generated in a matter of seconds. After this initial burst, enough coal has to be available to produce the steam for that additional load until it is no longer needed.

In the UK, coal and gas each supply about 37% of total electricity. For a gas-fired power station the response time is less than 5 minutes – no good at all if everyone in the country instantaneously turned their kettles on, but good enough for the real world. In France, where over 78% of electricity is generated by nuclear power stations response times are much trickier to deal with. A nuclear power station doesn’t respond quickly to demand – 2 days is about the fastest time the power could be made available. The way France gets round this is by having 20% or so in the form of hydro electricity, which can be produced on demand, along with other methods, such as having agreements with large users to reduce their demand when required.

Nuclear power stations do not stay running all the time, in fact they are a major source of intermittency due to their large size and tendancy to develop minor faults. Wind turbines – which have gained an unjustified reputation for intermittency – are not really a problem as wind can be predicted accurately; as such they could provide as much as 25% of electricity in many countries. But there is a problem, and it’s a big one: if a 90% reduction in carbon dioxide by 2030 is going to be achieved by industrial nations (yes, it is necessary!) then there is only so much tinkering in the electricity infrastructure that can take place. We need large amounts of renewables; we need to dramatically cut the use of coal and gas (in that order); we are generally unhappy about having pools of nuclear waste lying around; and we want to keep the lights, our refrigerators, our TVs, our computers, and everything else that requires electricity on. It’s not going to happen without some drastic changes in thinking.

Changing Behaviour

The way that variations in electricity demand are dealt with is known as Load Management, and in its way it is a very clever system. But that assumes that we are prepared to put up with vast quantities of carbon dioxide emissions – we may, but the planet certainly isn’t, and it will rebel if pushed too far! In fact “load management” is no more managing the load than a water company “manages” it’s floodwaters by opening more sluice gates. The load is merely being coped with. Management must take place at the demand side as well.

First of all, and I cannot stress this enough, the overall demand must go down, down, down. A 90% cut in carbon emissions by 2030 is just over 9% a year for the next 23 years. An initial 9.5% cut is very easy: just change all of your lights to energy saving versions and watch TV less – that should do it. The next year’s cut is a bit more difficult: switching every light bulb off that you don’t need, only boiling the precise amount of water you need, making sure nothing is left on standby – that kind of thing. It gets progressively harder as the “quick wins” are used up – you may have to move the fridge and freezer into a cooler room, change appliances, change your lifestyle. But in fact it’s not really that hard when you think about it, because although the first 9.5% cut is easy, it is also the largest cut of them all: 9.5% of your original total compared to the 3rd cut which only needs an extra 7.8% shaved off your original consumption.

You are also getting used to the idea of using less energy and are, without realising it, undergoing a shift in behaviour. Little changes can make a huge difference if they keep happening: “Doing your bit” is not a one-off activity, it is a continuous process of improvement through which your “bit” becomes a whole lot of dramatic change. In 2020 you will only need to cut a further 3% from your original total, which is dead easy when you think about it; especially for someone who has been changing their behaviour for 12 years.

And here’s a clever thing, and the reason for all the talk about load management: why not change the time during which you do things? The peak load will always be around 5.30 in the evening, and the lowest demand will always be in the early hours of the morning. Now, remember my washing machine which did its wash cycle while I was asleep? By moving the time during which appliances do their work, you could help be responsible for shutting down every coal-fired power station on your electricity grid. It’s not that difficult; simply by running your existing washing machines, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners and steam irons between 2.30am and 11.00am rather than in the afternoon or evening, the overall load will balance out, and the dirty coal-fired power stations will be out of a job.

If everyone did their clothes washing in the early hours of the morning then in the UK that would mean between 6000 and 7000 gigawatt hours of electricity a year wouldn’t need to be supplied by coal – that is 5.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, or a quarter of Drax Power Station’s entire annual output. One percent of the UK’s entire carbon emissions removed just by running washing machines overnight. If this was carried out in the USA another 27.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide wouldn’t have to be generated by coal. A Night Shift would be a great start to ridding the world of coal-fired power stations.

As I have said, the first priority is reducing your electricity demand, plus reducing your emissions from transport, water heating, space heating, the energy required to manufacture billions of consumer goods each year, and the energy wasted in producing and transporting food around the world. You can do that, bit by bit, until almost all of it is gone. But while you are doing that, think of the Night Shift, too.