For all his now-global renown as an environmental sage, guide and even prophet, Macfarlane retains a day-job as a Cambridge don (at Emmanuel College). Though Is a River Alive? nods rarely to his own academic hinterland, several centuries of English literary hymns to nature’s majesty and mystery course under, or on, the fervent surface of his prose. Yet his awestruck ecstasy beside the divine onrush of the Mutehekau Shipu — “the river’s voices say and sing what I cannot comprehend” — reminded me not so much of Wordsworth’s Prelude, or some other hallowed Romantic favorite, as a rather more humble riparian vision.

The river for Macfarlane becomes an inscrutable god that can be heard, felt, but never fixed by human minds. Curiously, his Canadian rapture sent me back to a little tributary of the Thames. There, in the glimmer of a midsummer dawn, two frail creatures hear a “heavenly music” and apprehend a watery divinity. It leaves one of them “possessed in all his senses by this new divine thing that caught up his helpless soul and swung and dandled it, a powerless but happy infant in a strong sustaining grasp”.

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I’m not sure whether Macfarlane, or his publishers, would welcome a comparison between his glimpses of transcendence beside the great menaced watercourses of the world and the cozy adventures of Rat and Mole. Never mind: in the “Piper at the Gates of Dawn” chapter of The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame found a voice for a sort of native riverside pantheism. The great horned god Pan, “Friend and Helper”, briefly appears to the animals in a reverie that has bewitched its readers since the book first appeared in 1908. Shaggy, bearded and piping, the sacred spirit of Nature manifests itself among modest winding brooks, culverts, ditches and runnels in the “silent, silver kingdom” of the Thames. Thanks to that anguished pop visionary Syd Barrett, Grahame’s mystical “song-dream” by the river even gave Pink Floyd the title of their 1967 debut album.

Far away or close to home, rivers run through human dreams, and fears. Home Counties waterside enthusiasts — the human counterparts of Grahame’s Rat, Mole and Badger — may feel their force as acutely as (say) the Innu poet and seer Rita Mestokosho, who blesses Macfarlane’s kayak journey downstream. His book begins at, and returns to, a fragile chalk-stream in woodland near Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, imperiled by development and drought alike. It branches out to other waterways around the world, where mining, damming, pollution and climate change have changed — or threaten to change — the “blue commons” of rivers into “limitless source and limitless sump: that which supplies and that which disposes”. Along the way, he meets campaigners from the “Rights of Nature” movement. They bring improbable court cases to establish the “legal personhood” of rivers, and their right to run free of pollution, damming, diversion and abuse.

So, is a river alive? A landmark judgment in New Zealand, the Te Awa Tupua Act, decided so in 2017. In both Ecuador and Canada, the scientist-activists Macfarlane consults have also enjoyed successful days in court. Even in Chennai, where chemical-blighted tracts of water ooze poisonously through the “sacrifice zones” of unchecked industry, cases to protect the lives of rivers have been filed. Macfarlane’s full immersion in the language and outlook of the eco-radicals, and their militant hostility to the “death-extractivism” of states and companies, may leave some of his former fans stranded. Compared to the eerie subterranean explorations in Underland — for this reader, one of the non-fiction masterpieces of the century so far — Is a River Alive? feels tighter, fiercer, more didactic. Campaigning urgency, and the impulse to punctuate his journeys with heartfelt advocacy for “ecocentric legislation”, pushes Macfarlane’s prose into swifter but narrower channels. He knows from the get-go where these journeys should lead: into the branch of radical conservationism that enlists the ritual pieties of traditional spirituality as it advocates for rivers — or forests, or mountains — as “rights-bearing entities”.

That means that Is a River Alive? can feel less like a voyage of discovery than the pursuit of an agenda. Which is not to say that it lacks cascading passages of bejeweled prose in Macfarlane’s keynote manner. He notes that “The history of literature is littered with the debris of attempts to utter water”. If that voyage is doomed to failure, then his counts among the more honorable. However far they choose to travel with Macfarlane’s politics, any reader should thrill to his passage down the white waters of the Mutehekau Shipu with a motley bunch of companions. It leaves him “slowly flooded from within” by the churning rapids and pulsing channels his kayak shoots. By the end, “I am rivered.”

It may seem a long way from such heroic escapades to the gloopy business of river contaminations, and clean-ups, close to Wind in the Willows country. The bulk of Macfarlane’s followers may not care for splashy activist stunts. But they do fret that, as he writes, “Clean rivers” on their doorsteps “have become rivers you cannot drink from without falling ill, which in turn have become rivers you cannot swim in without falling ill”. Yet rivers, as he insists, “heal themselves with remarkable speed”. Only a handful of his admirers will find themselves embroiled in courtroom wrangles over the legal personality of waterways or woodlands: such cases date, it turns out, to a 1972 paper by Christopher Stone entitled “Should Trees have Standing?” Many, however, will be the sort of conscientious citizen who may this week be taking part in the Rivers Trust’s annual health survey, the “Big River Watch”.

Skeptics and scoffers will dismiss Macfarlane at their peril. He speaks to and for a broad constituency — more of a meandering delta than a racing torrent — for whom disgust at the reckless degradation of nature matters more than the finer points of green doctrine. In Britain as elsewhere, rivers (and the crimes committed on and in them) run close to the heart of the cause. Let’s return to Kenneth Grahame country. The writer, after all, derived the idyll of The Wind in the Willows from his childhood beside the Thames at Cookham Dean; later, he lived upriver in Pangbourne.

A few miles west of Cookham lies Henley-on-Thames, once the reliably true-blue constituency of a certain Boris Johnson. Since July 2024, however, the Liberal Democrat Freddie van Mierlo has represented Henley with a handy 6,000 majority. Here, and in dozens of other constituencies, the “blue wall” of guaranteed Conservative hegemony has been washed away in a mainly orange — but sometimes red or green — surge. There’s good reason to believe that one non-trivial factor behind this rural vote collapse was what Macfarlane calls the “gradual, desperate calamity” of England’s rivers.

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The facts are often recited. Not a single English river is in “good overall condition”. Merely 14% have a healthy ecology; 83% count as “highly polluted”. In 2024 water companies made 450,398 discharges of raw sewage into English rivers: a total of 3,614,428 shit-hours. Thames Water, chronically indebted and keen to raise bills by 59% over the next five years, contributed 300,000 hours to that brown tide. Macfarlane rightly celebrates the chalk-stream: one of the rarest ecologies on the planet, with most located in southern Britain. In the crap vanguard as ever, Thames Water in 2024 managed the equivalent of 154 days of sewage discharge into the chalk-stream of the Misbourne.

Abandoned by Pan, Rat and Mole would now paddle through liquid manure. People notice, and care. The state of the Thames became a crucial doorstep issue in Henley and a score of other places drowned in the filth of a botched privatization that benefited only rentier parasites with a monopoly stranglehold. Since the transfer of debt-free public bodies into the private sector, water companies have distributed more than $78 billion in dividends.

They have become, in effect, debt-servicing shareholder-return machines that skimp on vital investment while pumping the results of corporate failure into our waterways. True, some factors behind the rivers’ plight lie beyond water managers’ control, from the frequency of extreme weather to the pressures exerted by rash housing development. But institutional dereliction has made every problem worse. Look at our water corporations, mired in a toxic sludge of monopolistic greed and state-backed impunity, and you could almost tweak Gandhi’s famous riposte when he was asked about Western civilization. British capitalism? It might be a good idea.

For now, the system stinks. Voters know that. Last year they kicked out apologists for the stench. Therese Coffey, the Environment Secretary whose feeble irritation with sewage-dumping companies did nothing to stem the noxious tide, lost her solid Suffolk Coastal seat to Labour. In Chichester, where waterborne fury also swung many votes, a huge Tory plurality crumbled away. The Lib Dem majority there now exceeds 12,000.

North Herefordshire elected a Green MP, as did Waveney Valley in Suffolk. In South Cotswolds, where the Thames rises, the Lib Dems won 44% of the vote. Conservatives lost four out of five seats along the Wye: another storied river choked with sewage. As for Witney, whose quondam member David Cameron blithely sneered at “green crap”, blue-branded ordure helped to bury the Tory candidate. Far from Macfarlane’s Andean streams and Canadian rapids, mucky waters have drowned political careers all along our riverbanks. Innumerable instinctive conservatives, by temperament or principle, have whiffed the dank sludge and fled from the party of polluters with that name. Chesham and Amersham, where the pretty, fragile Misbourne for so long ran Thames Water brown, was of course a Lib Dem gain.

Passions mobilized by wounded rivers have little to do with the contingencies of any governmental drive towards “Net Zero”, or even wrangles over the causes and consequences of climate change. The cherishing of natural goods — and hatred of their defilement — precedes green activism of a more systematic kind. Those headwaters of environmental concern spring from a shared sense of the immeasurable value — if you like, sacredness — of natural life. For growth-seeking politicians of Right or Left to decide that advancement lies in trashing that concern — anti-Net Zero claptrap polemics on one side, a bonfire of planning regulations on the other — would be, will be, a fatal error.

Swipes at Nimby selfishness may appeal to short-term vote-fishers. But that stream soon runs dry. Rivers flow, after all. The gunge that runs through my backyard may soon end up in yours. At home or abroad, the “river defenders” Macfarlane lauds can plausibly claim to merge care for their own lands, and waters, with commitment to the common good. His own water-politics plants him firmly on the left bank. From the stream-fed Los Cedros forests in Ecuador to the toxic trickles of the Cooum and Adyar rivers in Chennai, he pays heed to deep-green campaigners with piratical corporations and corrupt governments in their sights. Look elsewhere for accounts of the towns lit, hearths fed and crops raised by prudent hydro projects — although, to be fair, he targets vandalistic depletion, not sustainable stewardship.

In a wider historical frame, however, critiques of what Macfarlane calls the “delusion of resource inexhaustibility” hardly belong to the modern Left alone. No act of the late pope’s pontificate struck a wider or deeper chord than his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si. Francis’s great plea to humanity to hear the divine voice of nature had, by the way, plenty to say both about the pollution of water sources, and their profit-driven transfer from shared to private assets. For Francis, “access to safe drinkable water is a basic and universal human right, since it is essential to human survival and, as such, is a condition for the exercise of other human rights”.

In Macfarlane’s own catchment area of English literature, the champions and celebrants of rivers, seas and lakes have emerged from diverse families of thought. One especially gifted prose-poet of English rivers, and the animal lives they nurture, was not even a traditional conservative but an outright fascist: Henry Williamson, even if the sad, warped politics that has disfigured the legacy of the author of Tarka the Otter and Salar the Salmon owed more to personal misery than ideological frenzy. Williamson was a traumatized outlier. Much more common is the reverent respect for ancient liquid powers that flows, for instance, through “The Dry Salvages”, the third of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. “I do not know much about gods,” begins the poet, “but I think that the river/ Is a strong brown god — sullen, untamed and intractable.

Eliot’s brooding river divinity — “Unhonored, unpropitiated/ By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting” — occupies a place in the same pantheon as the water-gods sensed by Robert Macfarlane by the raging whitewaters of Canada, or by Kenneth Grahame along a placid backwater of the Edwardian Thames. River-worshippers may sound sentimental, or sanctimonious. But watery deities still roar, or whisper, to millions, and even sway their votes. Those who jeer at “green crap” may find their prospects sunk in the stinking sewers they defend.

The volume was the result of a research project funded by the Club of Rome and carried out at MIT, which at the time had some of the world’s most sophisticated computers. It was translated into 30 languages and sold somewhere in excess of 30 million copies. Robert C. Townsend, author of the then-famous book Up the Organization, summed up the general reaction in a neat sentence: “If this book doesn’t blow everybody’s mind who can read without moving his lips, then the earth is kaput.”

Of course there was pushback. Within days of its publication, articles denouncing its conclusions started popping up in the media. Books followed, claiming to prove that there was nothing to worry about and infinite growth really could continue forever. Two things made the pushback fascinating to students of human folly. The first is that it so systematically misstated everything that the scientists behind The Limits to Growth were saying. The second was that it succeeded in drowning out what the scientists were saying and replacing it with a caricature that was easy to dismiss.

The same caricature remains glued in place today. Listen to defenders of the conventional wisdom, and you’ll find any number of supposedly serious thinkers insisting that The Limits to Growth claimed that the world would run out of petroleum by the end of the 20th century, or that some other catastrophe would arrive long before now.

It requires no more than a casual reading of the book to discover that these statements are quite simply wrong: The Limits to Growth said no such thing. Yet the lie continues to circulate, because it makes it easier for most of us to avoid asking hard questions about the future of the industrial world.

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It is thus worth taking a moment to understand exactly what the book was trying to say. To begin with, it wasn’t offering predictions. It was exploring principles. The World3 computer model used to generate the famous graphs went through dozens of different runs, each with its own set of initial assumptions. The goal of the project was to show how the complex system we call human industrial civilisation unfolds over time. It showed that two crucial factors, both of which behave in counterintuitive ways, set the stage for disaster.

The first of these is exponential growth. Most people have encountered the old story about the Indian sage who challenged a king to a game of chess and asked for a simple gift if he won: one grain of rice for the first square on the board, two for the second, four for the third, and so on through all 64 squares, with each square getting double the number of rice grains as the one before it.

When the king lost the game, he discovered that he had offered the sage an impossible boon: the total amount of rice he owed the sage amounted to more than 210 billion tonnes, enough to cover the entire nation of India with a meter-thick layer of rice.

Most people, when they encounter this story, insist that there has to be something wrong with the maths — that there’s no way a mere 64 doublings could amount to that much rice. There’s something wrong, all right, but it’s not the maths. The human mind instinctively imagines growth in linear rather than exponential terms. There’s probably good evolutionary reason for that — in the world our tribal ancestors inhabited for all those millennia, linear growth was the rule and exponential growth the almost unheard-of exception. But it’s a lethal liability now, when technology has unleashed a whole cascade of exponential growth curves that our minds can’t even begin to grasp without a serious struggle.

That’s one of the two crucial issues that The Limits to Growth anatomised. The other is the impact of delaying factors on the ability of human societies to adjust to change. To borrow a helpful analogy from the book, one of the things that drivers have to take into account is the delay between when they see a problem in the road ahead and when the car can respond to it. That’s why good drivers slow down when visibility is low, or when they are driving in residential neighbourhoods where a child might dart out into the street without warning. The bigger the vehicle is and the faster it’s moving, the more time it takes to swerve or stop.

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Delaying factors play an equally challenging role in steering or braking modern industrial civilisation, the biggest and fastest vehicle of all. Anthropogenic climate change makes a good example. Billions of tonnes of heat-trapping greenhouse gases were dumped into the atmosphere from smokestacks and car exhausts before anyone noticed that the planet was warming and climate belts were shifting unpredictably. Most of the climate impacts of the pollution already absorbed by the atmosphere have not yet happened, since the sheer mass of atmosphere and oceans imposes a big delaying factor on them.

In other words, even if we slammed on the brakes now, skidding to a halt is going to take a while — and since it’s still politically possible to ignore the consequences, most nations are still paying lip service to the climate change crisis and continuing to burn fossil fuels as though there’s no tomorrow.

In the real world, exponential growth leads to crisis far sooner than our intuitive models lead us to expect. In the real world, delaying factors make it a lethal mistake to wait until crisis arrives before enacting countermeasures. Combine those two principles and you end up with a stark warning of impending trouble— and that’s exactly what The Limits to Growth provided.

The warning, as we all know, was not heeded in any meaningful way. Talking heads pontificated for a few years, before other topics seized the collective imagination of the chattering classes, and the environmental movement struggled on gamely for another decade or so, before selling out to moneyed interests and turning into yet another set of slick corporate enablers. Most people dismissed the environmental prophecies of the Seventies out of hand, and embraced the conviction that the danger was past because it had not yet arrived. Meanwhile every variable tracked by the MIT study did exactly what the World3 model predicted it would, setting us up for our present predicament.

The close fit between the model and the reality didn’t quite go unnoticed. In 2000, investment guru Matthew R. Simmons published a paper titled “Revisiting The Limits to Growth: Could The Club of Rome Have Been Correct, After All?” Simmons assessed the predictions from the MIT study, compared them to nearly three decades of evidence, and pointed out that the World3 model stood up much better than the predictions of its critics: “For a work that has been derisively attacked by so many energy economists, a group whose own forecasting record has not stood the test of time very well, there was nothing that I could find in the book which has so far been even vaguely invalidated.”

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In 2014, a study published by researchers at the University of Melbourne in Australia, headed by Graham Turner, factored in another decade and a half of data and got the same results. Last year, in turn, a study by Gaya Herrington compared the World3 model with empirical data and once again found the model to be impressively accurate. Did any of these findings influence public policy, or even start to clear away the fog of misinformation that surrounds The Limits to Growth half a century after its publication? Not to any extent that matters.

Thus it’s probably wise to assume that a model that yielded accurate predictions of the last 50 years can be expected to yield equally accurate predictions of the 50 years ahead. Here again, misstatements about, so it is worth reviewing what The Limits to Growth actually said about the future:

“If the present growth trends in world population, industrialisation, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.”

The growth trends of 1972 did in fact continue unchanged, and so here we are.

In most of the World3 runs that assumed realistic resource limits and unaltered public attitudes, crunch time arrives sometime around 2015-2030. That’s when pollution begins to cause significant global disruptions, global food supply falters, global industrial output starts a prolonged contraction, and global population peaks and begins to decline as well. If this doesn’t sound familiar, you might want to get out more often.

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It’s crucial here to avoid that bizarre astigmatism of the imagination that convinces so many people nowadays that the only possible alternative to business as usual is apocalyptic collapse. Most of the World3 runs, including the ones that match the real world most closely, don’t predict collapse. They predict decline. That’s the future The Limits to Growth traces out ahead of us: a long era of unstoppable contraction in which the exponential growth of the last two centuries or so slams into reverse, and global population and industrial output contract steadily, year after year and decade after decade, until these and other variables finally reach a level that can be sustained over the long term.

From within the conventional wisdom of our time, that long arc of decline is unthinkable. That’s why the warning of The Limits to Growth went unheeded. What too few people were willing to consider back in 1972 is that the future is under no obligation to behave in thinkable ways. Now that the limits to growth are rising up all around us, as global population peaks, industrial output falters, the point at which crisis can be averted is long past. All we can do is try to brace ourselves for a future that will leave the fake certainties of our age in tatters.

There was something special about the sunshine. Not a mere winter’s end, but a quality of light that struck me as out of the ordinary.

It could be just my imagination. These are strange, silent, times and the mind plays tricks. But there is a plausible external cause. Fewer flights mean fewer vapour trails (a.k.a. ‘contrails’) in the sky. These artificial clouds reflect sunlight back into space — thus reducing the amount that teaches the ground. Contrails are thus a big contributor to the phenomenon of ‘global dimming’.

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The effect is big enough to be noticed when it stops — i.e. on the rare occasions when aviation is interrupted. 9/11 was one such instance, another was April 2010, when planes were grounded by an ash cloud from the Eyjafjallajökull volcano. That too made for an exceptionally bright and splendid spring.

Affordable air travel has opened up the world to millions, indeed billions, of people. But it has also made the world a literally duller place. We associate flying with freedom, and yet some of the light has gone from our lives.

*

There’s a lot that we put up with for the sake of speed. According to the World Health Organisation 1.35 million people are killed on the roads every year. A further 20 to 50 million are injured. How’s that for a global pandemic?

Note that this death toll does not include the lethal impact of exhaust fumes. The WHO estimates that 4.2 million people die every year from their exposure to all forms of outdoor air pollution. Obviously not all of that is vehicular in origin — though in the West, with our strict controls on other sources, tail pipe emissions are the main problem.

Unlike Covid-19, this is not a plague that spares our children. Furthermore, it is a force entirely under our control. We could, if we wished, make it go away. Obviously, there’d be a price to pay — and, clearly, we’re unwilling to pay it. Indeed, we won’t accept even a fraction of the pain we’re enduring in our fight against the virus .

One has to ask why one set of lives (those that would be lost to the pandemic) are worth tanking the economy for, while the other set (the victims of traffic accidents and air pollution) have to be sacrificed year in, year out.

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Of course, I’m ignoring the issue of tail risk. The road vehicle death toll, while horrific, is broadly predictable — in any one year or decade, the worst case scenario isn’t that different from median expectations. With a pandemic though, outcomes are driven by potentially exponential trends — with potentially ruinous consequences. In a ‘ normal’ year, cars may well kill more people than the virus ends up killing this year. What cars definitely won’t do, however, is push healthcare systems, indeed entire societies, to the point of collapse. We are prepared for the carnage on our roads. We have systems in place to deal with the consequences.

Another key difference is that the bulk of what we’re doing to fight the pandemic is temporary. It’s enormously expensive, of course — but at some point it will stop. In contrast, a commitment to saving the victims of the car would require a permanent change to our way of life. And that we’re not prepared to countenance.

And yet there’s a huge amount we could do to reduce road deaths without giving up cars altogether. For instance, we take it for granted that there will be cars on every residential street, but it never had to be that way. We could have used neighbourhood parking to keep the side streets traffic-free and child-friendly. These days, we could use road pricing everywhere to place hard limits on congestion and fund public transport. We could uphold a right to clean air for every child — but instead we allow idiots to run their engines outside the school gate.

Or take air travel. As an island nation we could have built our airports on the coast so that aircraft descend and ascend over water, not people. We could have balanced the right to see the world against the right to tranquility at home. We could make the aviation industry pay for what it’s doing to the planet — instead we subsidise it.

And it’s not just transport. In every aspect of modern life, we meekly accept the hammer blows of progress. Consider construction, for instance. We’ve never been in a better position to build beautiful, brilliantly designed buildings that stand the test of time. We have machinery and materials that would amaze our ancestors. We also have the necessary knowledge. The sum total of humanity’s architectural achievement is available at the click of a button. We have armies of architects, designers and planners — and ways of drawing upon the experience and insights of local residents. Always and everywhere, development could make places better.

But instead we just make them bigger, blighting our lives with ugliness and dysfunction as a careless byproduct. We can’t even make our modern dystopias interesting anymore, the insults of brutalism replaced by spreadsheet architecture.

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I could go on. In just about any field of economic activity — from agriculture to information technology — it seems that we can’t create without also destroying. Things that aren’t priced by market mechanisms, but which have value nonetheless — from local wildlife to the decentralised flow of information — are lost to us forever.

Is this just the price of progress? We can either have birds tweeting in the trees or shops full of food, but not both. Nature or abundance. Tranquility or mobility. Community or convenience. Localism or variety. That, supposedly, is the choice.

But, of course, it isn’t. As I’ve tried to show above, we can deploy our technologies with care. We can think through the consequences, correct our mistakes, direct our efforts away from danger, choose one path over another. For example, the UK has put decades of effort into making our roads safer. Our fatality rate is significantly lower than in Germany or France, it’s half the Canadian rate and a quarter of America’s. We should be proud.

*

We can design a better world if we want it. So why don’t we do it more often and to a greater extent?

Fundamentally, it’s because it means constraining the most dynamic forces in our economy: speed, energy, extraction, transportation, production, consumption, demolition, construction, automation, immigration, globalisation, finance.

These are destructive forces, but they’re also creative. Try to tame them, and the risk is that we will slow down or even kill the essence of life, which is growth.

The case for growth is a powerful one. Nobody makes it better than the economist Tyler Cowen in his book Stubborn Attachments. While a lot of attention is paid to the GDP growth rate at any particular time, Cowen argues that we overlook the importance of growth as it multiplies over decades and centuries. Seemingly small differences in average growth rates can compound into radically different outcomes several generations down the line.

Accepting a less dynamic, slower economy now would mean that our great, great, great grandchildren will live in a much poorer world than they otherwise would have done. And if you’re wondering why we should care about descendants we’ll never meet, consider how you’d feel about our ancestors if they’d taken the same attitude. If, say, they’d suppressed the industrial revolution as being too disruptive of their way of life, we’d now be living in abject poverty. Never mind the temporary shutdown we’re living through now, the modern economy as we understand it wouldn’t exist at all — nor would it for generations to come.

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Therefore, within his consequentialist moral framework Cowen believes that we have a duty to keep growth going at the maximum sustainable rate. Not being a fool, he realises that economic activities can compromise that sustainability, for instance by messing up the climate. Yet within these basic constraints (and also respect for human rights), the argument is that growth is the greatest of greater goods.

What does such a worldview imply? Certainly that we should accept a little global dimming so that aviation can connect a global economy. As for pollution, then yes, within limits, it’s worth putting up with. Our paleolithic ancestors enjoyed unpolluted air, untainted water, got plenty of exercise, ate organic low carb food … and were all dead by the age of 40. I mean, would you swap with a caveman? As for too little wildlife, would you rather have too much (again, ask the cavemen)?

Further implications are that traffic accidents are a price worth paying for mobility. Lousy architecture is the price we pay for urbanisation — and a rate of development that allows countries like China to lift their people out of rural poverty. Of course, we in the West wouldn’t tolerate Chinese environmental standards, but then that stage in our development is safely in the past.

*

So, then, an overwhelming case for letting the economy rip — decarbonising as we must, but otherwise allowing the forces of growth to find the path of least resistance?

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Here are three reasons why not:

The first is that some components of growth are worth a lot more than others. The most important is technological progress. Over time, it is all that matters to an economy (beyond people, of course, and the availability of natural resources). It can be amplified by other forces — like prudent finance and capable government — but ultimately, growth relies on innovation. Take that away and growth eventually stops — though it can run for a while on fumes (e.g. the debt-fuelled property speculation that is recorded as ‘growth’ in our flawed GDP statistics).

We use the word ‘breakthrough’ to describe instances of scientific or technological progress because discovery is difficult. A growth strategy based on always allowing economic activity to find the path of least resistance is therefore counter-productive. Innovation depends on resources being directed at the right challenges (the paths of fruitful resistance, if you will) and overcoming them. Necessity, not deregulation, is the mother of invention.

Secondly, growth is not the only thing that makes an enormous difference on a generational timescale. We also have to be aware of extremely unlikely but highly consequential risks — Black Swan risks. Any long-run economic calculus of the sort that Tyler Cowen advocates has to take account of the fact that the highly improbable becomes increasingly certain given enough time.

Now, those risks may be external to a high-growth economic model — like nuclear war. Or they may be intrinsic, but adjustable — like averting the dangers of climate change by switching to clean energy sources. But what if the black swan risks arise out of, or are greatly multiplied by, something that is an integral feature of our favoured economic model?

The obvious example, right now, is infectious disease in the context of globalisation. A hyper-connected world may well be the best way to maximise overall economic growth — until, that is, we’re ruined by our exposure to the food safety practices of other nations. It’s all very well bequeathing future generations the legacy of decades or centuries of high growth, but it won’t help them if they’re all dead.

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Finally, we need to ask whether the pro-growth policies that delivered growth in the past are still capable of delivering growth now and in the future. Quite frankly, the record of the neoliberal era isn’t great. Or rather it’s been great for the developing countries — thanks to all that previously invented, off-the-shelf technology waiting to made use of — but not so great for the already developed world.

Western economies have failed to maintain the rapid economic growth and social progress of the three or four decades after the Second World War. We are, to quote the title of another Tyler Cowen book, stuck in a Great Stagnation.

How do we get unstuck? Is it by flogging the dead horse of neoliberalism even harder? More deregulation, more globalisation, more inequality? New roads, airports, skyscrapers: More! More! More! Or, at some point, do we need to stand back and question the fundamentals of what we’re doing?

*

Eric Weinstein likens our efforts to recreate the conditions for rapid growth to a cargo cult. Having experienced a great bounty at one point in our history, we ritualistically go through the motions of this or that pro-growth policy not understanding that it’s not in our power to conjure it up again.

Indeed, the rituals — involving, as they do, great sacrifice — are doing us more harm than good.

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But are they really? We’re not very good at thinking about scale, as a species. To put it in perspective, you can run a modern LED bulb for about 120 hours per kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity. The growth of renewables and decline of coal means that those kilowatt-hours are less carbon-intensive than they used to be, which means the generation of each kWh produces about 200g of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂e).

This means that leaving the lights on creates between one and two grammes of CO₂e an hour. The first boiler I found online had an output of 12KW, so one hour of running that boiler is the equivalent of 1,440 hours of leaving a light on — or, if you prefer, running your boiler for about three seconds is the equivalent of leaving a light on for an hour.

Why am I musing on my role as household saver of trace quantities of CO₂?  Because of a story last week about asthma inhalers and carbon footprint, which the BBC reported as “Asthma carbon footprint ‘as big as eating meat’”.

I think it’s a bit misleading — besides which, the presentation makes it seem somehow asthma sufferers’ fault. But I also think it’s instructive of how we think about scale, and this goes beyond the arguments about climate change.

Here are the numbers: there were 50 million inhalers prescribed in the UK in 2017; about 35 million of those use propellant gases called hydrofluoroalkanes, or HFAs. HFAs are favoured because CFCs were banned for the whole destroying-the-ozone-layer thing, but they’re enormously potent greenhouse gases. Several hundred or several thousand times as powerful, by weight, as carbon dioxide.

The BBC, quoting research by Cambridge University, says that replacing “even one in every 10 of these inhalers” with a different kind would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of 58 kilotonnes of carbon dioxide, or “the carbon footprint of 180,000 return car journeys from London to Edinburgh”.

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Even more dramatically, “at the individual level, each metered-dose inhaler replaced by a dry powder inhaler could save the equivalent of between 150kg and 400kg (63 stone) of carbon dioxide a year”. That is, they say, about the equivalent of the saving you’d make by quitting eating meat.

(Before we go any further, I want to quibble a bit with these numbers. The BBC lifted that last paragraph almost verbatim from a Cambridge press release; the original phrasing was “At the individual level each metered-dose inhaler replaced by a dry powder inhaler could save the equivalent of between 150 and 400kg of CO₂ annually”. I don’t know about you, but I definitely read both of them as saying that each inhaler produces that.)

But 58 kilotonnes is 58 million kilogrammes. Divide 58 million kilogrammes by 3.5 million inhalers and you get about 16kg per inhaler, ie about 10% of the lowest estimate. GlaxoSmithKline reckons that each of its HFA inhalers creates the equivalent of 18kg of carbon dioxide, so that’s probably the right ballpark.

(I asked Cambridge and they said, yes, they were assuming that patients use about 12 of them a year. I think that’s a bit misleading and that the BBC, and Cambridge, really ought to clarify it. Still, though, that headline figure of 58 kilotonnes is probably about right.)

So it’s basically right, but is it a lot? Fifty-eight thousand tonnes of carbon dioxide sounds big, but everything sounds big. Well, I had a go at looking at some other things. For instance, since I mentioned it before, how about heating your house? The 23 million or so households in the UK use a total of about 350 terawatt-hours (TWh) of energy a year, depending on how cold the winter is.

One TWh is one billion kWh, so as we saw earlier it produces on average about 200,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂e). So heating British homes creates about 70,000,000 tonnes of CO2e — 1,200 times greater than 58 kilotonnes.

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Will Brexit leave us dining on rat poo?

By Tom Chivers

Or how about eating meat, since that’s the example the BBC gave. The average Briton eats about 85kg of meat a year, according to Our World in Data. Let’s assume that’s half-beef and half-chicken, which is a silly assumption but probably won’t lead us too far astray. According to the University of Michigan Centre for Sustainable Systems, a kilo of beef creates about 15kg of CO₂e and a kilo of poultry about 3kg, so that’s an average of 9kg. Nine times 85, multiplied by a UK population of 66 million, gives us about 50 billion kilos of CO₂e a year, or about 900 times bigger than 58 kilotonnes.

Even if we start talking about replacing all of the HFA-propelled inhalers, rather than just one in 10 of them, the impact of asthma on British carbon emissions is probably on the order of 1% of that of heating our homes or eating meat.

This story is an interesting one if you’re, say, a doctor of respiratory medicine, who might think it’s a good reason to prefer prescribing dry powder inhalers rather than HFA ones, all else being equal. But it’s of almost zero interest to the general public, and will just mean that asthma sufferers get told “don’t you know that’s bad for the environment?” all the time by the sort of person who only reads headlines.

But we aren’t very good at thinking about scales and proportions. In general, I think, we assign things a value of ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and bracket them all together in those two categories. For instance, we feel good when we take a bag-for-life to reduce plastic bag use. But you can make 1,000 bags for 6kWh, while boiling a kettle takes about 0.1kWh, so you could make 16 plastic bags for the energy cost of just one round of tea.

From a purely climate point of view, your plastic bags are largely irrelevant. Reducing plastic waste is also good, of course, although again, Western countries account for a tiny fraction of the ocean pollution we worry about — almost all of it comes from Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, in fact.

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It’s not just environmental things. We do it with money, too. I worry about whether or not to give Apple an extra £1.28 a month to increase my iCloud storage, which is ridiculous compared to the unprintable sums I haemorrhage on rent.

At the national level, I saw David Schneider, the comedian, tweeting something about how the Tories were the party of “£100m on Brexit ads, £11m on Brexit 50ps, £8bn on No Deal prep, £13.8m to ferry company with no ships, £600m a week in lost investment/growth”, as though these things were equivalent. But even if those numbers are right, the Brexit ads, the 50ps, and the ferry company added all together make up about 1.6% of the No Deal prep. It’s bizarre to include the decimal place in “£13.8 million” when £13.8 million is itself a rounding error when compared to £8 billion.

None of this is meant to make you stop taking care over the small things: look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves, as they say. There’s nothing wrong with stopping using plastic bags, although you need to be very careful that you don’t lose your cotton bags-for-life, since they use about 100 times as much energy to make.

But we ought to pay a bit more attention to where the line is between the penny stories and the pound stories. Asthma inhalers are not a major source of British greenhouse emissions; as I say, they should be a consideration for GPs and doctors of respiratory medicine, not for the rest of us, and certainly not for worried asthma sufferers.

And we dads, as we walk from room to room complaining that it’s like “the bloody Blackpool illuminations in here”, should shout at our children much more about leaving the heating on than the lights on – about a thousand times more, in fact.

In richer economies, industry’s share (itself composed of manufacturing, construction and resource extraction) is much smaller — approximately 20% in America, Britain and France. In Germany, though, it’s significantly bigger at around 30%. This is unusual for a major western economy — especially one without a vast hinterland full of natural resources (like Canada or Australia).

When you consider that Germany’s export-led economy also lacks the ‘advantage’ of low labour costs, you have to wonder how they do it. The country’s high tech, high skill, high wage manufacturing sector is a wonder of the global economy, the engine room of Europe and a force for stability in German politics. Which is why its sudden downturn has caused widespread concern. Is this a sign of impending recession – not just in the Bundesrepublik, but across the EU and beyond?’

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Are we due another recession?

By Peter Franklin

Writing for Bloomberg, Chris Bryant argues that in some ways it might be worse than that:

“So far the problems aren’t nearly as acute as in 2009; industrial production fell by a comparatively modest 4.2% in July. The worry, though, is that demand is being sapped by a mix of both cyclical and longer-lasting structural factors…”

What structural factors?

The biggest one is technological. The future of the automotive industry is electric, whereas the dominance of the all-important German car industry is based on its mastery of the internal combustion engine. The great shift to electric vehicles is the most disruptive change to the industry since the advent of the production line.

Vorsprung durch Technik? Absolutely, but if you change the Technik you restart the race — and that gives manufacturers in other countries a chance to steal a march. It doesn’t help that it’s not long since German industry took a huge bet on diesel engine technology. Thanks to Germany’s clout in the EU, plus blatant falsification of emissions tests, most of Europe was drawn down the diesel route. It was a disaster for air quality and thus human health, but it’s also proving to be a slow-burn commercial catastrophe. Political and consumer opinion has turned against diesel, which now looks like a dinosaur technology, its extinction in sight.

The fatal miscalculation is compounded by the fact that battery electric vehicle technology is progressing rapidly, with governments setting deadlines for a complete transition to low carbon transport. Indeed pressure is building to bring the deadlines forward.

Of course, it wouldn’t be the first time that industries have failed to predict disruption. Think IBM and the personal computer and Kodak and digital photography. However, in those cases there were other companies in the same industries and countries ready to ride the wave of change, plus a ruthlessly competitive business culture that allowed the new to replace the old.

German industry is different. Its strength lies in tightly interwoven supply chains and close collaborative relationships between business, finance and government. That can work very well in normal circumstances, but not in times of disruption when what is required is speed and agility. Some companies will adapt, a lot will be left behind – especially those that have evolved to fulfil specialised roles in long-established supply chains. Chris Bryant, again:

“…the German carmakers BMW AG and Daimler AG have issued profit warnings as tighter emission rules oblige them to keep spending heavily. Their suppliers are the ones really hurting though. At least three — Eisenmann, Weber Automotive and a subsidiary of Avir Guss — have filed for insolvency in recent weeks and investors are betting the pain will spread more widely…

“The company that best illustrates this slow-burn crisis is Continental AG. Last week the tire and car parts titan announced a massive restructuring, which it said would affect 20,000 jobs over the next decade, or some 8% of the workforce. Explaining its decision, the manufacturer warned of an ‘emerging crisis in the automotive industry’.”

Even if the German car industry fully adapts to the electric engine, things will never be the same. The fact is that the new technology is a fundamentally different beast — not only in terms of its energy source, but also its simplicity. As Bryant reminds us, “electric vehicle drivetrains have far fewer parts and the process is less labor intensive.”

In any case, I strongly suspect that we’ll see a long-term decline in demand for cars of whatever description. Electric and self-driving vehicle technology will revolutionise public transport and green-minded urban electorates are turning against the tyranny of automobile.

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Who'll have the guts to ban cars from our cities?

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More generally, an economy that’s fuelled on local supplies of polluting brown coal and Russian natural gas looks poorly prepared for the environmental and security challenges that lie ahead. And as for Germany’s once lauded Energiewende, that’s become a lesson in how not to transition to more sustainable energy sources.

There are non-technological challenges too. Let’s not forget that a great deal of Germany’s competitiveness is an artificial effect of the Eurozone — which pushes down the exchange rate at which German exporters trade, while artificially pushing it up for potentially low cost competitors elsewhere in Europe. Meanwhile the Single Market and Customs Union provide a protective shield against competition from outside the EU. However, the stability of this mercantilist super structure cannot be taken for granted. Brexit is the first crack in the foundations and others are accidents waiting to happen.

The UK’s departure will also reduce the contributions to infrastructure spending in southern and eastern Europe — i.e. Germany’s captive export markets (which also provide a source of cheap labour for German-owned local industries). Meanwhile, the Americans are calling for Germany and its neighbours make a much bigger contribution to their military defence. It’s a reasonable demand that can’t be resisted forever, but the end of sponging off America would mean higher taxes on German producers and consumers.

The most immediate threat, of course, is recession. With comparatively low levels of government debt, the obvious thing for the Germans to do is turn on the spending taps. The problem with that, however, is the Eurozone. If Germany starts splashing the cash, then other Eurozone members will demand the same freedom, starting with Italy. However, many of these countries have much higher levels of public debt, which through the common monetary policy of the single currency exposes Germany to unacceptable risks.

Brexity Britons may be tempted to enjoy that fine German export — a spot of schadenfreude. But we really ought not to. For a start we’re not out of the EU yet — and even if we do escape soon, there’s no escaping Germany’s influence on the global economy and the international order. Remember that our neighbour’s low unemployment and political stability depends on the continued success of its very special, but far from invulnerable, economic model.

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Not everyone bowed their heads for the 85-year-old fashion titan who worked right through his dotage while dressed like a be-pompadoured 18^th-century vampire. Ingrid Newkirk, of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta), sent this charmant tweet an hour after the announcement of the death of her, as she called him, “nemesis”: “Karl Lagerfeld has gone, and his passing marks the end of an era when fur and exotic skins were seen as covetable.”

Lagerfeld’s attitude to fur was pragmatic. “I hate the idea of killing animals in a horrible way,” but, “as long as people eat meat and wear leather, I don’t get the message.”

When he died, Kaiser Karl still held his 35-year-long creative directorship of Chanel, and also at the Italian fur house, Fendi, where he had run the show since 1966. Fendi furs can cost as much as a modest baronial hall and he never apologised for it; unlike his colleagues in high-fashion houses, who are in the grip of an epidemic of self-righteousness as fur phobia sweeps like a playground craze through the fashion industry.

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Teen Vogue's idiotic hypocrisy

By Douglas Murray

Even sober broadsheets will spin the fur-banning stories for maximum drama. Grave reports that Chanel had ‘banned’ exotic skins were fake news; the great fashion house actually – factually – stopped using snake, lizard and crocodile skins because the company had no access to the farms producing the best quality materials.

The opinion of the herd is forcing change elsewhere though. Last year Versace, Michael Kors, Burberry and Gucci joined the fur exodus. The latter made an especially odd announcement about dropping fur to focus on ‘sustainable’ fabrics. It’s one thing to frame the debate in terms of whether fur production can ever be ‘humane’ but to cite sustainability as your rationale is hogwash.

Fur, though, will last a lifetime, or two. I should know: I have one made in the Fifties. It’s closer to my mum’s age than mine. It’s dealt with rain and snow. I’ve slept in it a few times. It’s still in great shape. A coat made from the pelts of the many many thousands of culled coyote, say, is about as sustainable as it gets. What else to do with the pelts? Throw them in a pit?

Further reading

Consumer greed is making suckers of us all

By Giles Fraser

While the industry obsesses about fur, the greatest devastation it wreaks is through the accumulative damage of the 60% of fabrics created in factories from fossil fuels, that and mass market cotton. Cotton is such a thirsty and polluting business that it has left tracts of waterways dry or starved of oxygen and empty of life. In Central Asia, the Aral Sea has nearly disappeared because cotton farmers have bled the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers dry.

A report published by the Environmental Audit Committee on sustainability in fashion during London Fashion Week suggested that all new clothes be sold with a penny tax to cover schemes to manage all the waste the industry creates. But the swiftest way to be sustainable is to stop flogging us tons of stuff that by definition will go out of fashion in six months. The trouble is, that is where the industry’s profits lie.

So fashion’s focus is, instead, on things we can ban and feel nicely righteous telling the world about. The huge online fashion retailer, Asos, worked with Peta to create a corporate responsibility programme that includes banning all skins, teeth and horns, mohair, cashmere and silk. Even mother-of-pearl buttons are out. Save the bivalves, people!

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By Ruth Valerio

Peta, meanwhile, lauded Boohoo, another British online retailer, for its decision to ban wool. That’s shorn wool – one of the most enduring and sustainable fabrics known to man – not sheepskins. Boohoo sells clothes so cheap there’s no way a noble fabric such as wool would make sound business sense.

So wool is verboten. But plastics and fake fur are fine, despite shedding microfibres that will take hundreds of years to degrade. Let’s not forget that last year, Britons sent 300,000 tonnes of clothing and textiles to landfill.

Nor are upmarket clothing brands blameless. They will throw good clothes away – or burn them, as Burberry did – rather than have their garments devalued by being sold at a discount. Vivienne Westwood has been shouting about “disposable crap”, waving her “Buy less, choose well and make it last” placard since 2013. But Vivienne Westwood Group was also ranked 0/36 “don’t buy” on the independent Rank a Brand website which “assesses and ranks consumer…brands on sustainability and social responsibility.”

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By James Bloodworth

Such greenwashing does not fly with Patrick Grant, creative director of the Savile Row tailors Norton & Co and the affordable sustainable fashion brand, Community Clothing. “Fashion is fundamentally at odds with good practice, which is to buy something of high quality and use it forever,” he says. Grant thinks cheap fur is disgusting; but when it comes to high-end farmed fur, he’s with the dear departed Kaiser Karl. European fur from Scandinavia lives a pretty decent life. The animals are not crammed into cages and tortured as Peta would have you believe.

Norway, however, is going to ban the production of fur by 2025. The virtue-signallers and hypocrites are driving its production from one of the most humane regions of the world. In the UK, fur production has been banned since 2000. Post Brexit, the UK government has hinted it will ban the sale of fur altogether. The irony is that these one-dimensional ethical campaigns are hounding the fur trade out of Europe to the lands that animal rights forgot, China and Russia.

In the meantime we are free to buy as much virtue-signalling clothing made from recycled plastic bottles as we wish, perched atop our moral high ground, clad in our microfibre-shedding garments.

Because the only thing more that stinks more than the stripped corpses of farmed mink is hypocrisy.

I’m in favour of restriction. The biggest problem with the British economy – and with Western capitalism in general – is not too little freedom, but too much. Too much, that is, for those who make it their business to increase their share of existing wealth without creating any. This is what economists call rent-seeking (which includes, but isn’t limited to, what tenants pay to their landlords).

Rent-seekers are able to extract value from others because of the monopoly rights that the state gives them over a particular resource – be it land, intellectual property, permission to pollute, political power or something else. Rent-seeking is therefore a result of government policy. Unsurprisingly, governments find themselves relentlessly lobbied by those with a vested interest in maintaining the unjust, opportunity-sapping status quo.

Further reading

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By Graeme Archer

Taking on those vested interests requires courage and determination. But that’s why a government – especially one that believes in the opportunity to create rather than extract wealth – should be judged on the quality of its enemies.

Here are ten enemies that the Cameron and May governments should have made, but didn’t:

1. Land owners

Conservatives believe in the right to private property. And so they should. But that right shouldn’t include the uplift in value created when land becomes ripe for development.

The price of farmland can shoot up from less than £10,000 to more than £1,000,000 an acre just because of a planning decision. The act of merely owning the land has contributed precisely nothing to this added value – and yet landowners are able to claim the lion’s share of it.

This injustice, which Winston Churchill condemned back in 1909, lies at the heart of the housing crisis – a crisis which is destroying the Conservative ideal of a property-owning democracy and therefore popular support for conservatism among younger people.

If the Government did something about legal barriers that prevent it from acquiring land at agricultural-use value to build new housing, then a whole range of opportunities could open up. Instead, it continues to side with a few lucky farmers rather than millions of aspiring home owners.

2. The big developers

Of course, if we built more houses, the law of supply and demand would mean lower prices and reduced profits for those lucky landowners, right?

Wrong – and so is the idea that the planning system is mostly to blame for the dearth of new homes. In fact, there’s a huge backlog of unused planning permissions – leading to accusations that the big developers are “land banking”; ie, manipulating the development of the land they hold to control prices.

Of course, that can’t be possibly be true, because the Government has commissioned an investigation – the Letwin Review – which has been taken as evidence that developers don’t land bank. However, the Independent Review of Build Out Rates, Draft Analysis, June 2018, also says this:

“The fundamental driver of build out rates once detailed planning permission is granted for large sites appears to be the ‘absorption rate’ – the rate at which newly constructed homes can be sold into (or are believed by the house builder to be able to be sold successfully into) the local market without materially disturbing the market price.”

Deliberately restricting supply in order to stop prices from falling? How is that not manipulating the market?

It’s plainly obvious what’s going on. The Government must stop hiding behind jargon like “absorption rates” and take land supply out of the developers’ control.

3. Nimbys and cowboys

The planning system isn’t entirely free from blame. A particular problem is the designation of green belts around urban areas. Preventing sprawl is a worthy objective, but choking the growth of prosperous cities such as Oxford and Cambridge is not. Model developments like Poundbury in Dorchester, show that we can build beautifully designed extensions to towns and cities that enhance local life instead of harming it.

However, instead of negotiating a grand bargain on sustainable urban development, the Government has failed to confront the green belt fundamentalists, while turning a blind eye to ugly, piecemeal development in unprotected areas – the worst of both worlds.

4. The bankers

In August 2011, riots erupted across urban England. But what happened next was just as remarkable: a shock-and-awe demonstration of the power of CCTV. Rioters were systematically identified by the police (with public help), shamed by the media and harshly punished by the courts. So much for the anonymity of the mob.

Now compare all that to the UK government reaction to the financial crisis. No shock-and-awe for the bankers. There have been a few prosecutions in relation to specific scams such as the Libor-rigging scandal. Oh, and someone had their knighthood cancelled. But that’s about it.

It would seem that recklessly crashing the global economy is an almost crime-free activity.

Further reading

Ten years on from the crash, the most important banking reform has still not been enacted

By Liam Halligan

5. The beneficiaries of QE

Of course, that’s not to say that the financiers weren’t targeted by the state. Indeed, they were singled out… for a massive programme of assistance.

There were the immediate bailouts of failing banks, but also a much longer period of Quantitative Easing or QE. Though presented as a general tonic for ailing economies, QE has the specific effect of inflating the value of financial assets and therefore rebuilding the bankers’ balance sheets (and boosting the investment portfolios of the wealthy).

The mechanics of the policy also generates a cascade of transactions on which fees can be charged – another nice little earner for those lucky enough to benefit.

Even if we accept the argument that governments had no choice but to resort to QE, it remains a profound injustice that the sector responsible for the original crisis has profited so handsomely from the emergency treatment.

But don’t expect any meaningful process of ‘financial truth and reconciliation’. The brain-aching complexity of QE is precisely what allows governments to get away with not having untangled it.

6. The nuclear industry

When the Conservative Government came to power in 2010 one of its first moves was to slash subsidies for renewable power. Quite right too – the leading renewable technologies were considered capable of delivering more for less, and that’s exactly what they’ve achieved. Despite self-serving predictions that the industry would shrivel without generous subsidies, it has thrived – cutting costs and expanding capacity.

No such market discipline for the nuclear sector, however. Hinkley Point C – the first new nuclear power station to begin construction since the 1980s – is to receive a guaranteed and very expensive price for its electricity over 35 years. So assuming it’s up and running by 2025, we’ll still be paying for its overpriced electricity in 2060.

By the way, the nuclear tech we’re getting for this money – the European Pressurised Reactor – is  dogged by a history of engineering problems and cost overruns.

How on earth did we end-up with this radioactive lemon? Well, it was the first – and, so far, only – opportunity to guarantee a future for Britain’s nuclear industry (even if most of the kit is imported from the French).

No industry and no technology should be owed a living – and certainly not one with nuclear’s record of failure.

7. The rail industry

Speaking of enormously expensive things that don’t turn up on time, let’s talk about our trains.

The Train Operating Companies (TOCs) aren’t best-loved by British public. But this year, with the biggest timetable changes for at least a decade, was the chance for a reset. It was really important then that the whole thing went smoothly.

It was a disaster – with services in the North and South East of England descending into chaos.

The regulator’s report into the fiasco found that the TOCs, Network Rail, the Department for Transport and indeed the regulator all made mistakes – but also that it was unclear as to who was responsible for what.

The obvious conclusion is that the structure of the industry is unsustainable. Of course, if no one has ultimate responsibility then no one can be held ultimately accountable (right up to the Secretary of State for Transport) – which suits all concerned. Except the passengers, of course.

Further reading

Can we reform our rancid political debate?

By Douglas Murray

8. Air polluters

At least most trains are electric these days, which means they don’t belch out the airborne pollutants linked to 40,000 premature deaths in the UK every year and billions of pounds’ worth of damage.

The disastrous decision to encourage the use of diesel engines in Europe can be blamed primarily on the German government and the Volkswagen emissions scandal. However, the British government has repeatedly failed to take the action necessary to clean up the air in our worst-affected cities – or say, in sufficient detail, how it plans to fulfil its legal responsibility to do so.

The long-term solution is to switch to electric vehicles, but we also need a short-term solution. The difficulty isn’t that we don’t know what to do (ie, dis-incentivise the use of polluting vehicles in vulnerable urban areas); it’s that it wouldn’t be popular with motorists.

The most powerful vested interests are the ones composed of millions of people. The trouble is that also leaves millions of people breathing polluted air – but that’s OK because a lot of those are children and they can’t vote.

9. The carpetbaggers of London

On to another kind of grubbiness. How is the Government getting on with its repeated promises to do something about the foreign money laundered through London’s property market?

Very slowly, is the answer. Almost 100,000 properties in the UK are owned by offshore companies. To its credit, the Government is forcing these publicly to register their “beneficial owners” – though not until 2021. Better late than never, but one has to wonder how so much information about so many properties is going to be verified.

Of course, this would be a much smaller problem if the ownership of high-end property in the UK weren’t so lightly taxed (and therefore ridiculously attractive). One would assume that most foreign investment in London real estate is legitimate; but one has to ask: who benefits?

Certainly not the ordinary working people and productive enterprises priced out of their own capital. And not those who pay heavy taxes on the fruits of their labour because their government won’t shift the burden on to idle wealth.

London and other British cities should be fully open to genuine entrepreneurs and innovators from around the world. But we don’t need more speculators; we’ve got quite enough of our own.

Further reading

What's killing the Conservatives?

By James Kirkup

10. Government itself

Let’s conclude with the vested interest closest to home – the machinery of government and the wider political system. The Conservatives came to power promising a revolution in the way that we’re governed. The 2010 Conservative manifesto was entitled Invitation to Join the Government of Britain and promised a “Big Society” in place of a “Big State”.

There have been some reforms – most notably a significant devolution of power to cities. But, on the whole, the status quo remains intact. Parliament, Government and the Civil Service all work in much the same way as they did in 2010. Even the most straightforward reforms, like a modest reduction in the number of MPs from 650 to 600, have yet to be delivered. 

Others have been scrapped – such as the introduction of “extended ministerial offices“. These were a tiny move to towards reducing the dependency of Cabinet ministers on the civil service – and on Downing Street. Of course, even that proved too much of a threat to the established order.

And thus a sclerotic system of government struggles on – unable and unwilling to confront its own vested interests, let alone anyone else’s.

Actually, yes. You can go one rung lower on the ladder of cool – to the abode of the bus enthusiast.

While a wisp of steam age romance still clings to the train, the poor old bus has nothing at all in the way of glamour. To be compared to the back end of one is to be cruelly insulted.

Margaret Thatcher is supposed to have said that “a man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself a failure”. In fact, there’s no evidence that she uttered any such thing. But filtering the sentiment through a caricature of Thatcher is a safe way of expressing prejudices about people who use buses – clearly, it is thought, they have no other choice. Even the humble cyclist cuts a more dynamic figure these days.

And yet if there’s one form of transport set to transform our cities it’s the bus. I’ve previously made the case for why automated buses might go mainstream long before driverless cars, but that’s not the only transformative tech at stake.

More from this series

How driverless cars could make streets safer

By Peter Franklin

Electric vehicles have many advantages over gas guzzlers – not least in drastically cutting back on carbon emissions and local air pollution.

With battery electric cars already on our roads, it might be assumed that lighter vehicles will go electric long before heavier ones. But, according to Michael Liebreich, in a must-read for Bloomberg New Energy Finance, that’s not necessarily the case:

“Buses, which were under the radar in 2016, have started going electric faster than light-duty vehicles. There are nearly 400,000 electric buses on the road already, 99 percent of them in China; BNEF expects electric buses to have a lower total cost of ownership in almost all charging configurations by 2019. By 2030, it expects 84 percent of all municipal bus sales globally to be electric, and by 2040, some 80 percent of the global municipal bus fleet will be electric.”

Buses, because they travel predictable routes aren’t subject to the same ‘range anxiety‘ as privately-owned battery-powered vehicles. Furthermore, bus fleets share depots, where charging infrastructure and the specialist servicing of electrical drive systems can be more easily deployed. Then there’s the economics:

“…if an electric car can compete with internal combustion on a total cost-of-ownership (TCoE) basis for a given route pattern, an electric bus or truck will too. And since bus and truck purchasers are driven almost entirely by TCoE, not sticker price or branding, once break-even is achieved, the switch to electric will be as fast as the supply chain and charging infrastructure will allow.”

The availability of affordable non-polluting vehicles will embolden policy-makers to slap heavier penalties on dirty vehicles – thus accentuating the the economic advantages of the new tech.

For a whole range of reasons, electric vehicles will be easier to automate than fossil fuelled ones – not least because EVs have fewer moving parts. The automation of electric buses would take out another big chunk of the operating costs: the bus driver. The drivers’ loss would be the passengers’ gain, making bus travel even more attractive – even to the extent of ending the need (if not the desire) for urban motoring.

As Liebreich points out, the special advantages of electrifying buses also applies to other heavy vehicles – especially those owned and operated in fleets within urban areas. In short, the potential will soon exist for an urban transport revolution.

More from this series

Trump, truckers and the automation paradox: robots could lead to labour shortages

By Peter Franklin

So here’s a prediction: At some point in the next decade, a mainstream mayoral candidate for a major city will stand on a platform of phasing out all non-electric vehicles – and, moreover, almost all cars of any type.

This will be controversial to say the least. But the candidate will be able to promise a radically transformed city: cheaper mobility, no congestion, quieter and safer streets, and massively reduced air pollution.

On the other hand, city dwellers will lose the right to drive.

It will be a hugely consequential and deeply divisive choice – but, sometimes, that’s what democracy is for.

I’m in favour of restriction. The biggest problem with the British economy – and with Western capitalism in general – is not too little freedom, but too much. Too much, that is, for those who make it their business to increase their share of existing wealth without creating any. This is what economists call rent-seeking (which includes, but isn’t limited to, what tenants pay to their landlords).

Rent-seekers are able to extract value from others because of the monopoly rights that the state gives them over a particular resource – be it land, intellectual property, permission to pollute, political power or something else. Rent-seeking is therefore a result of government policy. Unsurprisingly, governments find themselves relentlessly lobbied by those with a vested interest in maintaining the unjust, opportunity-sapping status quo.

Further reading

What the Tories need in their next leader

By Graeme Archer

Taking on those vested interests requires courage and determination. But that’s why a government – especially one that believes in the opportunity to create rather than extract wealth – should be judged on the quality of its enemies.

Here are ten enemies that the Cameron and May governments should have made, but didn’t:

1. Land owners

Conservatives believe in the right to private property. And so they should. But that right shouldn’t include the uplift in value created when land becomes ripe for development.

The price of farmland can shoot up from less than £10,000 to more than £1,000,000 an acre just because of a planning decision. The act of merely owning the land has contributed precisely nothing to this added value – and yet landowners are able to claim the lion’s share of it.

This injustice, which Winston Churchill condemned back in 1909, lies at the heart of the housing crisis – a crisis which is destroying the Conservative ideal of a property-owning democracy and therefore popular support for conservatism among younger people.

If the Government did something about legal barriers that prevent it from acquiring land at agricultural-use value to build new housing, then a whole range of opportunities could open up. Instead, it continues to side with a few lucky farmers rather than millions of aspiring home owners.

2. The big developers

Of course, if we built more houses, the law of supply and demand would mean lower prices and reduced profits for those lucky landowners, right?

Wrong – and so is the idea that the planning system is mostly to blame for the dearth of new homes. In fact, there’s a huge backlog of unused planning permissions – leading to accusations that the big developers are “land banking”; ie, manipulating the development of the land they hold to control prices.

Of course, that can’t be possibly be true, because the Government has commissioned an investigation – the Letwin Review – which has been taken as evidence that developers don’t land bank. However, the Independent Review of Build Out Rates, Draft Analysis, June 2018, also says this:

“The fundamental driver of build out rates once detailed planning permission is granted for large sites appears to be the ‘absorption rate’ – the rate at which newly constructed homes can be sold into (or are believed by the house builder to be able to be sold successfully into) the local market without materially disturbing the market price.”

Deliberately restricting supply in order to stop prices from falling? How is that not manipulating the market?

It’s plainly obvious what’s going on. The Government must stop hiding behind jargon like “absorption rates” and take land supply out of the developers’ control.

3. Nimbys and cowboys

The planning system isn’t entirely free from blame. A particular problem is the designation of green belts around urban areas. Preventing sprawl is a worthy objective, but choking the growth of prosperous cities such as Oxford and Cambridge is not. Model developments like Poundbury in Dorchester, show that we can build beautifully designed extensions to towns and cities that enhance local life instead of harming it.

However, instead of negotiating a grand bargain on sustainable urban development, the Government has failed to confront the green belt fundamentalists, while turning a blind eye to ugly, piecemeal development in unprotected areas – the worst of both worlds.

4. The bankers

In August 2011, riots erupted across urban England. But what happened next was just as remarkable: a shock-and-awe demonstration of the power of CCTV. Rioters were systematically identified by the police (with public help), shamed by the media and harshly punished by the courts. So much for the anonymity of the mob.

Now compare all that to the UK government reaction to the financial crisis. No shock-and-awe for the bankers. There have been a few prosecutions in relation to specific scams such as the Libor-rigging scandal. Oh, and someone had their knighthood cancelled. But that’s about it.

It would seem that recklessly crashing the global economy is an almost crime-free activity.

Further reading

Ten years on from the crash, the most important banking reform has still not been enacted

By Liam Halligan

5. The beneficiaries of QE

Of course, that’s not to say that the financiers weren’t targeted by the state. Indeed, they were singled out… for a massive programme of assistance.

There were the immediate bailouts of failing banks, but also a much longer period of Quantitative Easing or QE. Though presented as a general tonic for ailing economies, QE has the specific effect of inflating the value of financial assets and therefore rebuilding the bankers’ balance sheets (and boosting the investment portfolios of the wealthy).

The mechanics of the policy also generates a cascade of transactions on which fees can be charged – another nice little earner for those lucky enough to benefit.

Even if we accept the argument that governments had no choice but to resort to QE, it remains a profound injustice that the sector responsible for the original crisis has profited so handsomely from the emergency treatment.

But don’t expect any meaningful process of ‘financial truth and reconciliation’. The brain-aching complexity of QE is precisely what allows governments to get away with not having untangled it.

6. The nuclear industry

When the Conservative Government came to power in 2010 one of its first moves was to slash subsidies for renewable power. Quite right too – the leading renewable technologies were considered capable of delivering more for less, and that’s exactly what they’ve achieved. Despite self-serving predictions that the industry would shrivel without generous subsidies, it has thrived – cutting costs and expanding capacity.

No such market discipline for the nuclear sector, however. Hinkley Point C – the first new nuclear power station to begin construction since the 1980s – is to receive a guaranteed and very expensive price for its electricity over 35 years. So assuming it’s up and running by 2025, we’ll still be paying for its overpriced electricity in 2060.

By the way, the nuclear tech we’re getting for this money – the European Pressurised Reactor – is  dogged by a history of engineering problems and cost overruns.

How on earth did we end-up with this radioactive lemon? Well, it was the first – and, so far, only – opportunity to guarantee a future for Britain’s nuclear industry (even if most of the kit is imported from the French).

No industry and no technology should be owed a living – and certainly not one with nuclear’s record of failure.

7. The rail industry

Speaking of enormously expensive things that don’t turn up on time, let’s talk about our trains.

The Train Operating Companies (TOCs) aren’t best-loved by British public. But this year, with the biggest timetable changes for at least a decade, was the chance for a reset. It was really important then that the whole thing went smoothly.

It was a disaster – with services in the North and South East of England descending into chaos.

The regulator’s report into the fiasco found that the TOCs, Network Rail, the Department for Transport and indeed the regulator all made mistakes – but also that it was unclear as to who was responsible for what.

The obvious conclusion is that the structure of the industry is unsustainable. Of course, if no one has ultimate responsibility then no one can be held ultimately accountable (right up to the Secretary of State for Transport) – which suits all concerned. Except the passengers, of course.

Further reading

Can we reform our rancid political debate?

By Douglas Murray

8. Air polluters

At least most trains are electric these days, which means they don’t belch out the airborne pollutants linked to 40,000 premature deaths in the UK every year and billions of pounds’ worth of damage.

The disastrous decision to encourage the use of diesel engines in Europe can be blamed primarily on the German government and the Volkswagen emissions scandal. However, the British government has repeatedly failed to take the action necessary to clean up the air in our worst-affected cities – or say, in sufficient detail, how it plans to fulfil its legal responsibility to do so.

The long-term solution is to switch to electric vehicles, but we also need a short-term solution. The difficulty isn’t that we don’t know what to do (ie, dis-incentivise the use of polluting vehicles in vulnerable urban areas); it’s that it wouldn’t be popular with motorists.

The most powerful vested interests are the ones composed of millions of people. The trouble is that also leaves millions of people breathing polluted air – but that’s OK because a lot of those are children and they can’t vote.

9. The carpetbaggers of London

On to another kind of grubbiness. How is the Government getting on with its repeated promises to do something about the foreign money laundered through London’s property market?

Very slowly, is the answer. Almost 100,000 properties in the UK are owned by offshore companies. To its credit, the Government is forcing these publicly to register their “beneficial owners” – though not until 2021. Better late than never, but one has to wonder how so much information about so many properties is going to be verified.

Of course, this would be a much smaller problem if the ownership of high-end property in the UK weren’t so lightly taxed (and therefore ridiculously attractive). One would assume that most foreign investment in London real estate is legitimate; but one has to ask: who benefits?

Certainly not the ordinary working people and productive enterprises priced out of their own capital. And not those who pay heavy taxes on the fruits of their labour because their government won’t shift the burden on to idle wealth.

London and other British cities should be fully open to genuine entrepreneurs and innovators from around the world. But we don’t need more speculators; we’ve got quite enough of our own.

Further reading

What's killing the Conservatives?

By James Kirkup

10. Government itself

Let’s conclude with the vested interest closest to home – the machinery of government and the wider political system. The Conservatives came to power promising a revolution in the way that we’re governed. The 2010 Conservative manifesto was entitled Invitation to Join the Government of Britain and promised a “Big Society” in place of a “Big State”.

There have been some reforms – most notably a significant devolution of power to cities. But, on the whole, the status quo remains intact. Parliament, Government and the Civil Service all work in much the same way as they did in 2010. Even the most straightforward reforms, like a modest reduction in the number of MPs from 650 to 600, have yet to be delivered. 

Others have been scrapped – such as the introduction of “extended ministerial offices“. These were a tiny move to towards reducing the dependency of Cabinet ministers on the civil service – and on Downing Street. Of course, even that proved too much of a threat to the established order.

And thus a sclerotic system of government struggles on – unable and unwilling to confront its own vested interests, let alone anyone else’s.

In the big finish to the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, the Bird’s Nest stadium was invaded by Boris Johnson (then Mayor of London), Leona Lewis and a brand new London bus (above).

London was clearly proud of the New Routemaster – a 21st-century update on of the iconic red doubledecker – and wanted to show it off to the world. Its hybrid diesel-electric engine, however, was no more than a nod to a better future.

To see what that might look like, we have to go back to China, where all-electric buses are transforming public transport.

Jeremy Hodges reports on this revolution for Bloomberg:

“The numbers are staggering. China had about 99 percent of the 385,000 electric buses on the roads worldwide in 2017, accounting for 17 percent of the country’s entire fleet. Every five weeks, Chinese cities add 9,500 of the zero-emissions transporters—the equivalent of London’s entire working fleet, according Bloomberg New Energy Finance.”

The only reasonable response to these numbers is “wow!’ London might also like to ask itself whether it, er, missed the bus.

Of course, a decade ago all-electric buses were still seen as being a long way from going mainstream. Then again, you sometimes have to make the future happen:

“A decade ago, Shenzhen was a typical example of a booming Chinese city that had given little thought to the environment. Its smog became so notorious that the government picked it for a pilot program for energy conservation and zero emissions vehicles in 2009. Two years later, the first electric buses rolled off BYD’s production line there. And in December, all of Shenzhen’s 16,359 buses were electric.”

It is true that China’s air pollution problems are so bad that only drastic action will do. Nevertheless in acting with an appropriate scale of ambition, the Chinese are not only improving the environment, they’re also creating huge export opportunities:

“Other cities are taking notice. Paris, London, Mexico City and Los Angeles are among 13 authorities that have committed to only buying zero emissions transport by 2025.

“London is slowly transforming its fleet. Currently four routes in the city center serviced by single-decker units are being shifted to electricity. There are plans to make significant investments to the clean its public transport networks, including retrofitting 5,000 old diesel buses in a program to ensure all buses are emission-free by 2037.

Not coincidentally, production of that other iconic London vehicle – the black cab – is also going all-electric. Also worth noting is that the manufacturer, the London Taxi Company, has relaunched as LEVC (the London Electric Vehicle Company). Oh, and these days, it’s a wholly-owned subsidiary of Geely, a Chinese company. Is that enough straws in the wind for you?

The West has an awful lot of re-thinking to do – on the environment, on transport and on industrial policy too.

We also need to rethink our basic assumptions about China. The idea that world-changing technology is developed by the West and copied in the East is now badly out of date. 

Recommended reading

Who wants to buy the products of 'Beijing Analytica'? Many of us (probably).

By Peter Franklin

In a world due to be turned upside down by robotics, genetic engineering and quantum computing, we’re going to need more than lawyers and accountants making the big decisions.

In fact, it would be great to have some scientifically-literate decision-making on some not-so-futuristic policy areas too.

Take the example of highway maintenance. Politicians probably get more angry letters about potholes than any other issue – but somehow there’s never enough money for adequate repairs. One reason why is that the taxation of heavier vehicles doesn’t properly reflect the damage that they do to road surfaces.

It might be assumed that the heavier a vehicle the more damage it does – and indeed that’s the case. What isn’t as widely understood is just how disproportionate an impact that each unit of extra weight has – meaning a heavy goods vehicle does massively more damage than a car:

It’s a point explained by Philippa Edmunds in a piece for CityMetric:

“The standard 44 tonne HGV, which is the industry workhorse, causes 136,000 times more damage to road infrastructure than a Ford Focus because the damaging power rises exponentially as weight increases – a phenomenon known as the ‘Generalised Fourth Power Law’.

“Local and urban roads, unlike motorways, are not built to sustain the large volume of heavy goods now traffic using them.”

The Generalised Fourth Power Law, or Fourth Power Rule, means that with every doubling of weight, a vehicle does sixteen times (i.e. 2×2×2×2) as much damage.

There are a few complications to take into account, but that’s the basic physics.

Ms Edmunds represents the UK Campaign for Better Transport, which argues that road freight is significantly undertaxed – and not solely because the damage caused to roads:

“HGVs are almost seven times more likely than cars to be involved in fatal collisions on minor roads. They’re responsible for 17 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions and a fifth (21 per cent) of NOx emissions from road transport, despite making up just 5 per cent of vehicle miles. When the full costs of HGVs are taken into account that equates to a £6bn a year taxpayer subsidy.”

As with all hidden subsidies, the distortion of incentives causes further problems:

“This subsidy undermines the incentive for the haulage industry to be efficient. Only a third (34 per cent) of HGVs are full in terms of load volume. Almost another third (30 per cent) are driving around completely empty – a figure that’s been growing for some years. Partially loaded trucks result in unnecessary lorry journeys to feed our shopping habits.

“In contrast, the German distance-based charging system incentivises efficiency and has reduced empty lorries by a third, as well as reducing tonne kilometres because of better loading rates; prior to its introduction, Germany had similar empty lorry levels to the UK.”

Hidden subsidies often have hidden beneficiaries. A prime example, in this case, are the online retailers whose delivery vehicles trundle around minor roads and residential streets in ever-greater numbers.

Recommend reading

Will Elon Musk drive a truck through the oil industry?

By Peter Franklin

If those such as Amazon had to shoulder the full costs of the congestion, pollution and damage done by their deliveries, then price competition would speed up the transition to more sustainable transport technologies.

Electric and self-driving vehicles are the key to change:

• Electric engines would massively cut pollution (including noise pollution)
• With dynamic road charging, delivery vehicles could be incentivised to travel where and when they cause the least congestion
• Without driver error, there’d be fewer accidents
• And without the need for a driver in each vehicle, it would be feasible to have larger fleets of smaller, lighter vehicles – which would do less damage to the roads

Door-to-door deliveries could be entrusted to very-much smaller vehicles such as the delivery ‘pods’ already being tested. These are small enough to share pavement space with pedestrians rather than road space with traffic. We might trip over them, but that’s better than being run over by a truck.

All of this is going to happen sooner or later, but to make it sooner we fast need a rational system of road taxation.

Another awkward fact is the tendency of death rates to rise during periods of strong economic growth. It’s a puzzle that Austin Frakt unpicks for the New York Times:

“One study of European countries just before and during the Great Recession found that a one-percentage-point increase in the unemployment rate is associated with a 0.5 percent decline in the overall mortality rate. Other studies of Europe during different periods, as well as those of the United States, found a similar relationship between joblessness and mortality.

“This is counterintuitive, since economic growth is a major factor in higher living standards. When the economy is more productive, we have more resources to promote health and well-being.”

What is it that makes growth so deadly (at least in the short term)? Here’s part of the answer:

“Occupational hazards and stress can directly harm health through work. Some studies find that alcohol and tobacco consumption increases during booms, too. Both are associated with higher death rates. Also, employed people drive more, increasing mortality from auto accidents.

“During recessions, people without jobs may have more time to sleep and exercise and may eat more healthfully. One study found that higher unemployment is associated with lower rates of obesity, increased physical activity and a better diet.”

Obviously, we can’t hide in our beds all day; so what can we do about the dangers of gainful employment? Most of it comes down to us: spending our money more wisely, eating more healthily and driving more safely. Employers should also realise that expecting people to work long hours is a really good way of getting a sick, tired and unhappy workforce. 

However, the biggest danger associated with stronger growth is not one that individuals or companies can do much about on their own:

“…a surging economy does more than generate greater income. An industrial economy also pumps out more air pollution as more goods are produced. Polluted air, it turns out, is a major contributor to the mortality-increasing effect of an economic boom. In their analysis of how economic growth increases mortality, David Cutler and Wei Huang, of Harvard University, and Adriana Lleras-Muney, of U.C.L.A., found that two-thirds of the effect can be attributed to air pollution alone.”

Some further evidence:

“In their analysis of the Great Recession in Europe, José Tapia Granados of Drexel University and Edward Ionides of the University of Michigan found that a one-percentage-point increase in the unemployment rate is associated with a one percent lower mortality rate for respiratory illnesses…”

We should not have to choose between jobs and health, growth and clean air.

Fortunately, an end to the worst air pollution is within sight. In most places in the world, airborne pollutants are primarily produced by the combustion of fossil fuels, especially coal and oil. As luck would have it, these are precisely the activities that we are pledged to phase out in the fight against climate change.

In many countries, including the United Kingdom, we’re very close to getting rid of coal as a significant source of electricity. The internal combustion engine is also heading for obsolesence, with manufacturers racing against one another to get to an all-electric future.

The growth paradigm in economics is sometimes described as a treadmill: a constant struggle to stimulate enough supply to enable more consumption; and enough demand to enable more production. There is more than a grain of truth to this. 

However, capitalism, which is as much about innovation as it is about growth, is not condemned to go around in circles for ever. At its best, it spirals upward – creating problems, but also solving them (at the prompting of democracy).

In an imperfect world, this may be as close to sustainability as we get.