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TRANSFORMATIVE SKILLS GUIDE

I have written recently that we need a transformative system -wide change process across our education and learning programmes and institutions to tackle the wicked global issues we face. This recently published Skills Guide puts some astonishingly accessible and credible ways to achieve this transformation. It deals with inner skills such as “thinking ,relating, collaborating and acting”-all of which might be developed within individuals but may also be demonstrated in collective groups. But it’s the application of these skills which is crucial to our very survival on planet earth. I’m posting the full text here because I hope this will be disseminated as widely as possibly as a common framework we can all adopt in our work to mitigate and adapt to our twin existential crises of climate change and the depletion of biodiversity?

Given the urgency and all-encompassing nature of climate change, every person, community, and organization must eventually participate in a response. The primary challenge is no longer to develop new technologies or policy ideas. It is rather a challenge of collaboration and implementation at an unprecedented rate, scale and depth. Transformation is needed in our built environment, our food and energy systems, our economies, and most fundamentally, in our relationships with each other and the natural world. To meet these extraordinary challenges, societies need radically better ways to collaborate, make decisions, solve problems and enact change.

Understanding the issue–its causes, impacts, and solutions–is critical in activating concern and motivating engagement with solutions. But while knowledge of Earth systems and the human influences of climate change is necessary, it is not sufficient. Also required are the human qualities and skills needed to translate understanding into effective, transformative collective action. Some of the skills we need will be practical or technical, such as installing solar panels or changing the way we grow crops.

But perhaps more important (and often overlooked) are the foundational inner skills that underpin our ability to perceive, think, and act in the world. For instance, the capacity for people’s ‘complexity awareness’ supports wise decision-making by helping us see more of the system that we are embedded in.

This guide to transformative skills for climate action expands climate literacy to encompass those inner skills, qualities and capacities that help translate scientific understanding into transformative shifts in the way we do things, individually and collectively.

The hope is that this guide will help educators and practitioners shift culture equip the whole of society with these essential inner resources.

The guide can be read here.

TRANSFORMING OUR UNIVERSITIES TO MEET THE ISSUES OF THE 21 CENTURY?

How can we overcome our blindness to what is now right before our eyes: heat, storms, fires, floods, desecrated lands, extinctions, and social injustices and what these portend for their lives. Young people are now recognising that there needs to be more urgency and social focus in our educational systems and crucially we need to think more broadly and wisely about what it means to be human. The youth movement catalysed by the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg are rightly demanding that we stop using the atmosphere as a dump and that we preserve Earth’s forests, rivers, soils, seas, mountains, lifeforms, and grasslands. Their education should provide a foundation of well-considered personal rights and duties, tolerance for differences and dissent, and the wherewithal for truth and reconciliation.

However, the university as presently conceived is an unlikely source of remedy. It is committed not to transformation, great or otherwise, but often to patching up flaws in the modern economic growth paradigm by gambling that it may facilitate its own repair and renewal. The educational system with millions of students each year, billions of dollars of research funding, and trillions in capital assets operates with the assurance that goes with its assumed monopoly of solutions to what ails modern societies. It exists, largely unmolested in the world of influence and money if it does not threaten the dominant culture and its underlying faith in economic growth and human domination of nature. Its organization often impedes conversations across disciplines. Its financial dependency limits serious reckoning with large ideas of justice, peace, interdependence, and ecology.

As one senior academic recently reflected -the example of the contemporary university exemplifies how ways of knowing and acting undermine attempts to govern more effectively in an Anthropocentric world. He argues- as do I that the current organisation of the university with all its constituent parts( e.g.-disciplines ;projects; research institutes.) is poorly equipped to foster the ways of thinking and acting needed to respond to the existential crises. Systemic failings in these institutions include perpetuations of disciplinary silos; inadequate fostering of interdisciplinary and trans disciplinary approaches to research and teaching; inadequate problematising and opportunity framing and an over adherence to linear first order traditions of knowledge production and its dissemination in teaching and research.

The traditional university model must be critiqued and transformed in favour of a higher purpose role aligned to addressing the immense challenge and possibility of securing social and ecological wellbeing in our troubled times. There is a strange and inexplicable reluctance by our institutions of higher education across the entire globe, to overtly promote the fact that they are first and foremost, agencies of human and social development .Project civilisation is profoundly fragile – predicated on the stability of planetary systems – and our universities have extraordinary knowledge and capacity to protect it

WHY ARE SOLAR PANELS CHEAPER IN GERMANY

BY David Toke

Germany is issuing much larger volumes of auctioned contracts for large-scale solar pv and renewable energy this year compared to the UK, but what is especially notable is the ever-plunging prices for solar pv. These continue to fall well below the prices at which the Government is awarding contracts to solar farms in the UK. Indeed solar farms in the UK , won at the Government’s auction, cost prices that are around 60 per cent higher than the contracts that are being awarded by the German Government. So what’s causing this apparent chasm of difference?

Around 8 GW worth of solar pv and 10 GW of onshore wind contracts are being issued this year by the Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzgentur). That compares with the 3.3 GW of contracts issued last month to solar pv and the 1GW awarded for onshore wind by the UK Government. Even in offshore wind Germany leads the UK with 8 GW of contracts being issued this year compared to 5 GW offshore wind issued by the UK. For comparative details of the numbers in the two countries see HERE and HERE.

So far 4.4 GW of German contracts for ground-based solar pv farms have been issued this year. The latest round rewarded 2152 MW of solar farms with a maximum price of 5.24 c/kWh. See HERE.

Of course, these German prices are in current prices, and in euros. Hence when you factor in that the UK contracts are issued in 2012 value of British pounds, the UK solar windfarm contracts come out as being 60 per cent more expensive than German solar farm contracts issued almost in the same month! And this happens despite the fact that the German schemes are much smaller in size (up to a 20MW limit) and the bulk of farmland is not eligible for funding under the Federal regulations (only low value farmland or degraded land can be used). By contrast in the UK there are no funding limits on any type of farmland and schemes can be as big as they want to be.

Indeed, the German programme even has a substantial facility for issuing contracts for large scale solar projects on rooftops, with around 750 MW of such contracts being issued this year. Under this scheme noise shielding solar pv schemes (mainly on autobahns) are also given contracts. (Such concepts appear to be very foreign to British policymakers!). Even so, these rooftop and noise abatement schemes workout as being cheaper than the cost of conventional fixed tower offshore wind contracts sanctioned in 2024.

An important factor is that on average there will be more sunlight per year in Germany. The schemes are spread around Germany from north the south, and the northern ones will have little, if any, more sunlight than in the south of the UK where most of the British schemes are sited. Nevertheless, if we assume that there is 20 per cent more sunlight available to German schemes, in line with academic analysis (see HERE) this still leaves the British solar farm prices being at least a third more expensive than the German ones.

I put forward two hypotheses for explaining this difference. The first one is simply that there just a lot more people in business and in communities who rate the importance of developing renewable energy in Germany very highly. This has built up over time from the first campaigners for feed-in tariffs in the 1980s. Investment in solar pv is regarded as being an important cause, not just as a transactional activity, as many see it in the UK. This also reflects itself in the continued political support for feed-in tariffs for solar pv on home rooftops.

The grass-roots support for solar pv may also be linked to a second reason why German solar farms are cheaper than British ones (despite all the restrictions relative to British conditions), and that is the sources of capital for the projects. Local and national banks in Germany have been very keen to lend to renewable energy projects. This has allowed high rates of financial gearing. By this I mean that the projects can be financed mostly from bank loans rather than from equity sources. Equity sources require much higher rates of return. In the UK, however, it seems that equity sources of capital are much more dominant.

According to the Frauhofer Institute (see HERE) In 2023 a total of 14.7 GW of solar pv was installed in Germany. Around 30 per cent of that came from large-scale ground mounted schemes, the rest being installed on buildings. Domestic-sized pv accounted for around a quarter of the total capacity, the remainder coming from commercial-sized building projects. Historically, the majority of German solar pv has been installed on buildings.

It is a sobering thought that the solar pv installed in Germany in just one year, 2023, is approaching the entire capacity of solar pv installed in the UK over all time! On the other hand total British solar installation (of all sorts) plods on at barely 2 GW per year. Meanwhile, Germany is accelerating its solar pv installation in 2024 compared to 2023.

The Big Thing Making Hurricane Helene Dangerous Helene’s winds stretch close to 500 miles across. That’s half the width of the entire Gulf of Mexico.

COLLEEN HAGERTY • SEPTEMBER 27, 2024

The Big Thing Making Hurricane Helene Dangerous Helene’s winds stretch close to 500 miles across. That’s half the width of the entire Gulf of Mexico. COLLEEN HAGERTY • SEPTEMBER 27, 2024

In the hours and days to come, we’ll get a better understanding of how well forecasters did predicting the path and strength of this storm, a task that has become increasingly difficult. Because at the same time technology has improved oversight of these storms, with artificial intelligence models that have raised the bar for prediction accuracy and the ability to deploy radar systems as they pass overhead, climate change is altering the ingredients that feed their formation. For example, record-high temperatures in oceans have changed the behaviour of storms as they form, Matt Lanza, who monitors Atlantic storm activity for The Eyewall, explained to me, resulting in more storms intensifying rapidly ahead of landfall. This has made storms like 2023’s Hurricane Idalia tougher to predict, despite being closely tracked. Helene, too, rapidly intensified on its way to reaching land. The area of Florida where it hit, a little over 50 miles from the state capital in Tallahassee, is no stranger to storms— in just the past 13 months, Florida’s Big Bend has had to absorb the impacts of both Idalia and Hurricane Debby, each of which caused billions of dollars in damages. Still, Truchelut said Hurricane Helene could be a “truly unprecedented scenario for North Florida.” Part of the unusual force behind this storm can be attributed to another unprecedented scenario — the warmth of the water in the Gulf of Mexico. CBS News said the water surface temperature below the storm’s formation was up to 89 degrees Fahrenheit, which is as much as 4 degrees above average. This follows the overall Gulf warming trend observed by NOAA, which the agency says “increases the intensity of hurricanes.” Another factor that allowed Helene to grow so huge so fast was the lack of wind shear, a term meteorologists use to refer to the way wind changes speed or direction or both across different elevations. Strong upper-level winds can inhibit storms from forming or growing. In Helene’s case, however, warm water was accompanied by low wind shear and plenty of moisture— conditions that aligned to provide tremendous energy for the storm’s formation. The only thing really standing in Helene’s way was its own size, Lanza noted, which would have made it more difficult for the storm to get organized and strengthen further. The most obvious reason size matters is the footprint the storm will have on land. To give you an idea of just how large Helene is, Lowry said in his newsletter Friday that the full breadth of its winds upon landfall stretched over 450 miles across, nearly half the entire width of the Gulf of Mexico. This means the effects of the storm began long before it officially made landfall and will continue long after the eye of the storm has moved on. Hours before Helene officially reached Florida, rain was already drenching communities in the storm’s projected path. Meanwhile, “Severe and life-threatening impacts from Helene will occur hundreds of miles from the cone confines, especially on the eastern half of the storm,” Florida meteorologist Ryan Truchelut wrote in the Tallahassee Democrat, summing up just how far-reaching Helene’s effects could be. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a self-described “rare news release” on Wednesday to warn of the potential for major flooding as far inland as Appalachia, some 300 miles from the Gulf Coast. Another serious size-related consideration relates to the potential storm surge, or how far above average tides the water will rise. “When you have a storm this big, you’re just inherently moving a lot of water over a broader area,” Lanza said. As Hurricane Helene’s eye approached Florida, water levels easily surpassed multiple storm surge records. But what stood out to Lanza was not just that the surge was powerful, it was also that the threat of surge was so widespread. “A much smaller storm, you can still have a very large storm surge, but it’s going to be very isolated near to where it comes ashore,” he told me. “With a storm like Helene, because of its size, near and east of where it comes ashore, you’re going to have a massive storm surge — and you’re going to have a pretty big storm surge even down the coast from that.” The NHC warned that much of Florida’s Western coastline would see multiple feet of water. Messaging the risks of these storms to an extreme weather-weary public is another challenge stemming from climate change. “Record breaking” has now become a familiar phrase for most of us, describing everything from extreme temperatures to rainfall rates. But as tropical storms become more intense, fuelled by warming-influenced weather conditions, finding ways to accurately convey threats to the public is increasingly essential. Ahead of Helene’s landfall, the NHC stressed that the storm surge would be “unsurvivable,” encouraging residents to heed evacuation orders. According to The New York Times, the warnings — paired with memories of those other recent storms — seemed to have worked, leaving Big Bend-area towns “eerily empty.” Even the local Waffle House, a business widely recognized for making its own assessments of hurricane risk, was shuttered on Thursday. The NHC is experimenting with new graphics in hopes of better conveying risks outside of the classic “cone of uncertainty,” which illustrates the predicted path of a tropical storm’s eye. The centre shared an image on social media showing inland risks from storms, not just those along the coast. So if you noticed the NHC’s risk map for Hurricane Helene coloured the entire state in a palette of watches and warnings, the reason why is twofold: Yes, the risks widespread with this storm, but the agency is also trying to get better at telling you about them. And in the case of major hurricane like Helene, the more warning, the better.

Climate change action – all in our heads?

The psychology of climate change. Why aren’t we doing more?

Guest blog by Neil Kitching

My readers know that we should be taking climate change seriously, very seriously. We are educated, articulate, care for the environment, care for each other, and claim to care about future generations. Why are our emissions not falling faster? Please note that this article is for those based in ‘high income’ countries; ‘low income’ countries have more justification to concentrate on economic growth. I have added links (in brackets) to my previous blogs for those that wish to delve deeper.

I am no expert, but it seems that psychology and social norms trump science. The science is clear. Any warming over 1.5 degrees is ‘dangerous’ (Global Climate Report), yet we are already nudging that level and committed to much more. Impacts will be unpleasant at best, and some will be irreversible. For example, melting ice sheets, sea level rise, and changes in ocean currents (Sea Level Rise).

We lead busy lives, with a range of priorities and pressures. Just getting on with our lives can be enough. Some people have spare money, some get by some struggle. But more wealth doesn’t seem to be a key factor in taking decisive action. Rich people may invest in solar panels, but overall, they create more emissions (The Super Rich).

Parts of the fossil fuel industry must take part of the blame. Like the smoking industry(Smoking and Climate), they have stifled research, misled the public and politicians, and convinced us that there is no alternative. Many politicians, particularly in the USA, receive funding from the fossil fuel industry. Some have run a successful campaign to cast doubt and to delay environmental regulations. Yet, the fossil fuel industry only exists because we continue to buy their products. We now need the experts who work in the fossil fuel industry to invest their talents into renewables and better solutions.

I’m not sure we can place the blame on politicians. Most are good at reading the public mood. Yes, they can be unduly influenced by lobbyists, but they also react to public pressure. They simply don’t receive enough of that pressure.

Public opinion is hard to measure. Whilst polls indicate a majority in favour of more action to tackle the climate crisis, change is never easy. People don’t like being told they must buy an electric car, or a heat pump, or to eat less meat. Even when the majority is in favour, local campaign groups spring up to prevent or delay action, for example, campaigning against new transmission pylons to transport renewable electricity.

The traditional television and newspaper media have switched their approach in the last few years. Most no longer feel the need to provide a false balance – one story questioning climate change for every story in support of climate change. Of course, there are exceptions, with some newspapers readily taking up any story that criticises the switch to electric vehicles or heat pumps. But overall, the media has ‘got onboard’ in the last few years.

Social media is a can of worms. There is good and bad in it, what else can I say? The unfortunate fact is that it is an ‘echo chamber’ where like-minded people get together, so it stifles polite and meaningful debate. It raises fears or sows the seed of doubt in people who otherwise may act more decisively.

Community groups can, and should be, be part of the solution. But they are often trying to push a boulder uphill. They struggle to make an impact beyond a small group of activists. They can help to enact local change if the conditions are ripe, but we need politicians and businesses to create the right environment for local community action.

Individual lifestyle changes can have an immediate impact (How to Slash your Carbon Footprint). Choosing to share a house will reduce our home emissions, whilst where we choose to live can have a significant impact on our need to travel. However, many of us still perceive it to be desirable to move out of cities into suburbs or the country. Dietary changes (The Mediterranean Diet) are difficult for many and have not been adopted by the majority.

Buying less, and producing less waste, sounds easy but we are bombarded with marketing adverts and cheap products (Can we, should we, buy less Stuff?) and have access to poor recycling facilities.

The cost of changing to low carbon solutions is a concern, although sometimes misplaced (Insulate your Home), and based on short termism. Electric cars may cost more but their lifetime costs are now lower than petrol cars. The good news is the dramatic falling cost of solar pv, wind power and batteries are beginning to have a real global impact on carbon emissions (The Electric Tipping Point). However, some solutions are still more expensive, and some will always be so based on current global economics. For example,

decarbonising steel and concrete manufacturing is expensive. Meanwhile farmers have doubts about the practicalities of using fewer artificial fertilisers and pesticides. Economics and capitalism may be an underlying problem. But we are not ready to change tack dramatically. Politicians still espouse economic growth, or, if we are lucky, ‘sustainable economic growth’. There is a concern that if one country stopped economic growth, they would lose competitiveness and strength in a hostile world. However, our economy is based on continued growth which requires ever more energy and raw materials. Efficiency and recycling help but are not enough. And the ‘rebound effect’ is powerful. If, for example, I receive a government grant to invest in energy efficiency at home, this will reduce my energy bills. What will I do with my spare money? I could save it, in which case a bank will invest it in a growing company, or I could spend it. On an overseas holiday perhaps?

Businesses are integral to climate action. In our economy it is businesses that provide the goods and services that we all use. Given the right conditions they can act fast and enable radical changes to happen quickly. For example, new regulations quickly transformed the manufacture of home fridges and freezers to be far more energy efficient. But businesses are still obsessed with growth and this growth often overwhelms the good that they do – they now encourage us to buy larger fridges and freezers (with constant chilled water on tap), then we come under pressure to extend our houses and kitchens to have space for our larger fridges.

Solutions must be practical before we will adopt them. The first electric cars had insufficient range for most people. Today people are still worried about the lack of charging infrastructure. Fortunately, these challenges are being steadily overcome (EV’s: An Honest Assessment). Innovation and government investment can help to lay the foundation for more practical solutions.

With rare exceptions humans act when they perceive an immediate threat. We are not good at long term planning even if it is good for us such as investing in our pensions or looking after our health. Climate change impacts seem like something for the future, although it is already happening faster than predicted. We all claim to care about our grandchildren, but are we acting that way? Short termism is a real problem. So, you can see that there is no shortage of reasons and excuses for us not acting as fast as we should. But I think there is one more, based on psychology. This is the ‘herd mentality.’

We act based on social norms. No-one else seems to be panicking about climate change. People still buy petrol cars, go on foreign holidays, eat meat. We see adverts for cheap foreign holidays, marketing campaigns to buy ever more stuff which will somehow make us happier. Most people are not out demonstrating and demanding change from politicians. I think we are hoping that it will all somehow be ok, that action will be taken, perhaps the scientists are wrong, perhaps new technology will come to our rescue. It was cold this week where I live, perhaps climate change is exaggerated. Is this wishful thinking? Sorry, but yes is the answer.

Conclusions

Imagine a future conversation with your grandchild. They ask you three questions:

1. “Didn’t you know that you were killing the planet?”

2. “Why didn’t you stop?”

3. “What did you do to tackle the climate crisis?”

Will you be proud of your answers?

In conclusion, I think we need psychologists to work alongside scientists and economists to come up with solutions which are radical, but acceptable to the public (What if?).

Further Reading

ISM (individual, social, material) is a free to use tool to understand and deliver behaviour

change. It draws from economics, social psychology, and sociology.

The Climate Psychology Alliance is another useful source.

A clean energy revolution in the Derbyshire Dales

The first community-owned solar power in the Derbyshire Dales has been installed on the roof of Twiggs Stores in Matlock, thanks to a partnership between Derbyshire Dales Community Energy (DDCE) and the Big Solar Co-op. This will be the first of many renewable energy projects in the region that harness the potential of communities to power a sustainable future.

We celebrated this pioneering “small step” for the planet and humankind last week at Matlock Town Hall’s Imperial Rooms. We invited almost 50 people -Councilors from all political parties and business leaders along with the committed Community Energy Derbyshire Hub members some of whom spoke about their ongoing Community Energy funded project work

The Derbyshire Dales have a long-standing cultural connection to renewable energy thanks to its rich industrial heritage, when water mills in the Derwent Valley powered the production of high-quality silk and other textiles. The installation on Twiggs represents an important next step in the Dales’ journey – recapturing a strong history of community and sustainable energy, with a modern twist. Established almost 120 years ago, Twiggs is a well-loved family business which provides steel and a vast array of building supplies and tools to local people. Their solar panel installation consists of 165 panels with a generating capacity of 57kW. It should produce around 47,000 kWh per year – equivalent to meeting all the electricity needs of 18 houses each year.

“Twiggs has been privileged to be part of the community energy driven decarbonisation programme in the Derbyshire Dales. It’s been a real pleasure to be their first solar PV installation on our retail premises in Matlock – saving us money and leading the drive to tackle the impacts of climate change.” Richard Tarbatt, Managing Director at Twiggs

Working with Twiggs was a natural partnership, as Steve Martin, Co-Founder and Co-Chair of DDCE, outlines:

“We couldn’t ask for a better partner for our first project than Twiggs. They are an institution in Matlock: a family business genuinely connected with and supportive of the community. This project will support them as they support us – reducing their energy bills and making a very real contribution to achieving Net Zero by 2050. It shows what is possible, and we look forward to working with more local businesses for our next projects.”

The following video gives more details about action across the Derbyshire Dales, including Richard Tarbatt, Managing Director of Twiggs, giving his view on what solar means for the company and the community. https://vimeo.com/872297302

The Case for Growth Agnosticism

A useful guide to anyone interested in the current debate by the new labour government on economic growth-A commentary by Michael Albert of the University of Edinburgh

Can the needs of the planet be reconciled with the need for economic growth within our capitalist economy?
This is one of the biggest questions that divides sustainability researchers. Broadly speaking, there are three main positions in this debate: green growth, degrowth, and growth agnosticism (or “a-growth”).
The green growth position is currently dominant among mainstream economists and policymakers. It believes that there is no fundamental contradiction between economic growth – measured in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – and sustainability. The key argument here is that GDP growth is not inherently reliant on environmentally damaging practices. Instead, we can “decouple” growth from environmental damage – in other words, we can continue to grow the economy while reducing CO2 emissions, energy consumption, raw material extraction, and land-use practices that destroy intact ecosystems to make way for agriculture or mega-infrastructure projects.
As evidence, green growthers show that many rich countries – including the UK – have absolutely decoupled their GDP from emissions and energy consumption. This means that emissions and energy consumption have stabilized or declined even as GDP continues to go up in these countries. They also show that the world economy as a whole has relatively decoupled from energy and emissions – meaning that the latter are still growing, but at a slower rate compared to global GDP. At the same time, they argue that more ambitious climate and environmental policies can help accelerate these trends to create truly green growth. For instance, rich countries can coordinate and raise carbon prices while bolstering public investment in renewable energy infrastructure, thereby bringing down emissions more rapidly. They can also invest in “circular economy” practices in which waste products are recycled and used as inputs in other forms of production – such as by creating electric vehicle batteries that are easier to recycle, thus decreasing the need for primary extraction of lithium, cobalt, and other minerals that are currently needed to produce these batteries.

In sum, the green growth argument is that we are already seeing trends towards green growth (particularly in rich countries), and that these trends can be accelerated through more ambitious policies. Furthermore, they claim that green growth is not only possible but necessary, since they believe that GDP growth is essential to eliminate poverty, fund public services, invest in climate mitigation and adaptation, and improve collective welfare overall.In contrast, degrowthers argue that the green growth position is less empirically substantiated than its proponents believe. First, degrowthers do not contest the fact that many rich countries have achieved absolute decoupling from emissions and energy use. But they argue that these statistics obscure the energy, emissions, and raw materials embodied in their imports, since they only reflect those produced within their territories. Furthermore, degrowthers show that global energy and material use continues to rise at the global scale – which they argue is really the scale we should be focusing on, since this is what is ultimately driving our planetary crisis.
And as the global economy continues to expand at a compound rate – meaning that it would be roughly twice as large as today by mid-century, and five times larger by the end of the century – they fear that efficiency improvements and gains from circular economy policies would be wiped out by the dramatic increase in economic activity as a whole. Second, degrowthers argue that the real question with emissions is not whether they can be absolutely decoupled from growth, but how rapidly. For instance, one study shows that the rates of decarbonization achieved in even the best performing countries – including the UK and Sweden – are nowhere near fast enough to achieve their net zero by 2050 targets. Furthermore, they show that a “net zero” by 2050 target is insufficient from the standpoint of global climate justice: if the whole world needs to reach net zero by 2050 in order to stabilize global temperature increases around 1.5°C, then rich countries – who have already used far more than their “fair share” of the planet’s carbon budget – would need to get there much faster, as early as 2030 according to some studies.
For degrowthers, the likelihood that rich countries could achieve such ambitious climate targets while continuing to rely on economic growth is vanishingly small (if not impossible). Third, in direct opposition to the green growthers, degrowthers believe that green growth is very unlikely if not impossible, but also unnecessary in the first place (at least in rich countries). This is because GDP – as many economists recognize – is a poor measurement of social welfare: it measures the scale of monetary transactions and profits that accrue within an economy, which tells us little about whether quality of life is actually improving for most people. It also includes many “bads” that are harmful to quality of life: for instance, if most of us work 70 hours a week, this would boost GDP while also fuelling exhaustion and burnout rather than improved well-being. Degrowthers thus believe that GDP growth is a circuitous and inefficient way to improve collective welfare, especiallyin rich countries that already have high levels of per capita income and material consumption. Instead, they argue that alternative economic models are possible that focus on reducing our material footprint while alsoenhancing collective welfare – such as by shortening the work week, increasing our leisure time, guaranteeing access to basic necessities, and investing more deeply in the “care” sectors of the economy, such as mental and physical health care, elderly care, education, affordable housing, and ecological restoration.

Finally, the growth agnostic (or a-growth) position falls somewhere between these two poles, though it is closer to the degrowth position in many respects. This is the position that many of us at CMP advocate. A-growthers agree that GDP is a poor measurement of social welfare and doesn’t deserve to be the lodestar that guides economic policy. We agree that our main goal should be to halt the climate and mass extinction crises while improving our overall health, well-being, and security, whether or not this involves an increase in GDP. We are more agnostic, however, on whether “green growth” in some form is fundamentally impossible. For one, many of us believe that the most urgent problem is not necessarily aggregate GDP growth itself, but rather the growth of particular industries that are overwhelmingly responsible for destroying the planet – mainly the fossil fuel industry, but also the livestock and commercial fishing industries, which are predominantly responsible for the biodiversity crises plaguing our lands and oceans. We also recognize that it is possible for solar and wind energy to enable a different kind of “growth” that is less extractive and more circular – since these technologies require less material extraction compared to fossil fuels, and can be recycled more effectively. At the same time, we recognize that the renewable energy economy is already perpetuating many of the same forms of ecologically damaging and socially unjust forms of growth that characterized the fossil fuel economy – including dispossession of communities and degradation of ecosystems to make way for solar and wind farms, new mines for transition metals like lithium and cobalt, and new battery storage and transmission lines to integrate intermittent renewables. The nature of the renewable energy future-to-come will not be the result of technological change alone. Rather, it will also be shaped by social struggles and policy choices, which could lead to a more circular, democratic, and just renewable energy economy, rather than one that perpetuates socially and ecologically damaging extraction and enriches investor-owned utilities while foisting higher electricity costs onto the rest of us.
Whether or not a more just and sustainable renewable energy economy would be compatible with continuous GDP growth is debatable, and arguably besides the point. What matters is that we build it as rapidly as possible; what happens to GDP is a secondary concern.
Still, we should also recognize that the green growthers have a point: at least within our current economy, GDP growth is indeed necessary to create jobs, reduce unemployment, fund public services, and thus ensure economic security for workers and businesses alike. It is thus understandable that many experts believe we must find a way to make growth compatible with sustainability, however long the odds might seem. But like the degrowthers, we do not see economic growth as inherently necessary to achieve these critical objectives. Instead this is a question of how we design our economies. Our current economy is indeed designed to rely on growth, but there is a new generation of heterodox economists showing how we can create a different kind of economy that achieves social and ecological objectives while ditching GDP, such as by creating a different kind of monetary system in which governments would not need growth to fund public services: they would spend it directly into the economy, while using a mix of taxation and supply-side policies to manage inflation risks. We do not claim to have all the answers here. We do not know exactly what a post-GDP economy would look like. But we can reasonably assume that it is possible and desirable. In terms of political feasibility, our immediate near-term objective is to create a more sustainable and inclusive form of growth in which the gains are broadly shared, rather than accruing to a small elite. In this we agree with the green growthers. But if the growth imperative continues to prevent us from undertaking the actions needed to reverse the planetary crisis and invest in the things that directly improve people’s lives, then it must be ditched.

To riff on a well-known cartoon from the New Yorker, we do not want to look back on the 21st century thinking: “well, the planet got destroyed. But at least for a beautiful period in time we sustained 2-3% annual compound GDP growth!” A piece by Michael Albert (University of Edinburgh)

The right have hijacked Englishness. Can it be reclaimed?

I spent Saturday morning listening to an exceptional former Green MP Caroline Lucas talk about England and being English and how distorted our electoral system has become. She is a formidable and eloquent analyst of how our system has become a bandwagon for the right and how we might change this dynamic by transforming many of our outdated systems including the absence of a separate parliament of England! She spoke at The Buxton Book Festival to a packed audience in the Opera House- and received a fully deserved massive ovation. She will undoubtedly be missed in parliament-but hopefully she will find a suitable and appealing platform to advocate for transformative change which will embrace and catalyse localism and energy democracy through the evocative and compelling stories on Community Energy Groups like those in Derbyshire.

Her new book “Another England: How to Reclaim Our National Story”

With the UK more divided than ever, England has re-emerged as a potent force in our culture and politics. But today the dominant story told about our country serves solely the interests of the right. The only people who dare speak of Englishness are cheerleaders for Brexit, exceptionalism and imperial nostalgia.

Yet there are other stories, equally compelling, about who we are: about the English people’s radical inclusivity, their deep-rooted commitment to the natural world, their long struggle to win rights for all. These stories put the Chartists, the Diggers and the Suffragettes in their rightful place alongside Nelson and Churchill. They draw on the medieval writers and Romantic poets who reflect a more sustainable relationship with the natural world. And they include the diverse voices exploring our shared challenges of identity and equality today. Here, Caroline Lucas delves into our literary heritage to explore what it can teach us about the most pressing issues of our time: whether the toxic legacy of Empire, the struggle for constitutional reform, or the accelerating climate emergency. And she sketches out an alternative Englishness: one that we can all embrace to build a greener, fairer future

Interdisciplinary campus battles UK sector status quo

London Interdisciplinary School has geared its courses around tackling real-world challenges, but some students seem reluctant to step outside the traditional higher education sector

June 28, 2024

Street Entertainer unwrapping a person wrapped in cling film in Covent Garden, London to illustrate Problem of prestige dogs interdisciplinary campus

Source: Grant Rooney / Alamy

Three years after the London Interdisciplinary School (LIS) opened its doors to students, its dean, Carl Gombrich, describes its curriculum as “radical but simple”.

The institution offers only a single course – Interdisciplinary Problems and Methods, which draws on skills from such diverse fields as English literature, mathematics, neuroscience and political science to study “real-world challenges”, including sustainability and the ethics of artificial intelligence, holding that a cross-disciplinary approach is needed to prepare students to tackle multifaceted global issues.

In 2021, LIS became the first higher education institution in the UK since the University of Warwick in 1965 to be given degree-awarding powers at inception, but it did not come without its challenges. While there was “a lot of goodwill” from regulators as LIS worked to establish itself, Professor Gombrich, alongside founders Ed Fidoe and Chris Persson, discovered that current regulation was geared towards single-discipline approaches.

According to Professor Gombrich, who set up UCL’s first interdisciplinary arts and sciences degree course before joining LIS: “Interdisciplinarity as a theme doesn’t really exist as a learning outcome in education,” which makes “innovation naturally quite difficult” for any institution that wants to challenge traditional degree structures.

While the Conservative government may have tried to make it easier for new institutions to establish themselves through the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, Professor Gombrich said he “did not appreciate” the challenge that LIS would still face after three years in terms of winning recognition and status in the conservative and hierarchical UK higher education system.

“The prestige thing is huge,” he said. Potential students can be “suspicious that we can be, or are, as intellectually demanding, fulfilling and, ultimately, as useful to them as a traditional intellectual degree or a Russell Group university”.

A cost-of-living crisis in which students are focused on getting value for their investment could certainly make this hurdle harder to overcome, Professor Gombrich conceded. While renown and recognition can come with time, “the question for us internally is, do we want to wait that long? Definitely years, if not decades?”

The students LIS does attract “are not from privileged backgrounds – they’re just brave”, he said. Of its 151 students, 82 per cent attended state schools. Meanwhile, its master’s course has “taken off like a house on fire”. Having started with just nine MA students in 2022, the university counted 42 in its most recent cohort.

“They just get the need for interdisciplinarity much more,” Professor Gombrich said. “They’ve been out in the world. They’ve worked. They see that studying one thing at university was nice in many cases, but really not that helpful or important for their careers.”

And LIS has had some notable successes. With its first undergraduate cohort graduating this summer, its students have lined up some impressive positions. The first job offer received by any of the class was for Goldman Sachs’ competitive graduate scheme, with other students gaining sustainability advisory roles and software engineer positions.

Professor Gombrich made clear that the LIS approach “isn’t for every university”. But there should be the choice, he said, and LIS should form part of a healthy ecosystem of higher education providers.

“With 600,000 people a year at university at least, there has to be a big space for students who go just because they want to get a job out of uni. And there has to be a big space for students to go just because they want to study medieval poetry. Both are possible. And there’s a third space, which should be big too, for extremely bright, talented, purpose-driven students who want both.”

Ultimately, this tension goes to the heart of the purpose of higher education: as graduates increasingly complain about feeling ill-equipped to enter the workforce, are universities there to prepare young people for their first job, or to provide a quality education that will set them up for their working lives and their place in wider society? Professor Gombrich said it did not have to be “black or white”.

Problems surrounding AI and sustainability are not “going to be solved by shouting in the streets or some technical solution”, he said. “[They are] going to be solved by some very smart person who gets the concept, who gets the history, who gets the data and is able to organise or set up a business which tackles this problem. So I don’t like the dichotomy between education either as instrumentalist for work or ivory towers. It’s clearly not [that simple].”

People will need a variety of complex skills and a range of knowledge to compete in a changing jobs landscape, he continued. “The jobs of now are already hyphenated,” he said, underlining the need for an interdisciplinary approach. Citing digital health, cybersecurity and sustainable fashion as examples, he said: “Hyphenation and hybridisation is inherently interdisciplinary.” Encouraging students to engage in a multidimensional approach prepares them for the lateral thinking needed in the workplace, he said.

But those championing such change can find themselves stymied by how higher education is viewed within the UK. Pressure on sixth forms and colleges to get students into Russell Group universities means that “there are some very powerful, locked-in incentives in terms of targets and perceptions”.

What the country needed instead, Professor Gombrich continued, was a “national conversation” about the role of higher education, and whether traditional degrees are inculcating the diversity of thought required of students and wider society.

juliette.rowsell@timeshighereducation.com

What does progress look like on a planet at its limit?

Putting endless growth above our wellbeing and the environment is no longer tenable-from a Guardian Culture article by Kate Raworth

Here’s a question for our times: how should we imagine the shape of progress? In the twentieth century the answer may have seemed to be very clear. It was growth, measured in terms of national income, or gross domestic product (GDP). And that growth was to be endless, an ever-rising curve. No matter how rich a nation already was, its politicians and economists would consistently claim that the solutions to its problems depended on yet more growth. As this article powerfully sets out, this last-century promises that economic growth will enable high-income countries to overcome their problems – whether problems of poverty or pollution – has not delivered. It is clearly time to reimagine the shape of progress and, with it, the policies that could bring about a twenty-first-century prosperity for a fractured humanity on a destabilized planet.

Stepping back, it’s useful first to recognize the appeal of growth. It is, after all, a wonderful, healthy phase of life, which is why people the world over love to see children, gardens and trees grow. No wonder the Western mind so readily accepted it as the shape of economic progress too, and simultaneously adopted the very twentieth-century mantra that ‘more is better’, both personally and nationally.

Yet if we look to nature, it’s clear that nothing in the living world succeeds by growing forever: anything that seeks to do so will, in the process, destroy itself or the system on which it depends. In nature things that succeed grow until they are grown up, at which point they mature, enabling them to thrive, sometimes for hundreds of years. As the Biomimicry pioneer

Janine Benyus reminds us, a tree keeps on growing only up to the point that it is still able to send nutrients to the leaves at the outermost tips of its branches, at which point it stops. Its pursuit of growth is bounded by a greater goal of distributing and circulating the resources that nurture and sustain the health of its whole being. Although we can appreciate the nuanced role, value and limits of growth in the living world, when it comes to the design of our economies, we have been acculturated to perceive growth as a constant aspiration and necessity. Thanks to the availability of cheap fossil-based energy in the twentieth century, the rapid and persistent economic growth that this enabled in industrialized countries soon came to be seen as normal and natural, indeed as essential. Its continuation over many decades led to the creation of institutional designs and policies – from credit creation to shareholder dividends to pension funds – that are structurally dependent on growth without end. In other words, we have inherited economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive.

This requirement for endless growth has become so locked into economic theories, political narratives, and public expectations that, over recent decades, governments have made clear the desperate and often destructive measures they are willing to go to into order to reboot growth when it becomes elusive. They deregulate – or rather re-regulate – finance in the hope of unleashing new productive investment, but often end up unleashing speculative bubbles, house price hikes and debt crises instead. They promise corporations that they will ‘cut red tape’ but end up dismantling legislation that was put in place to protect workers’ rights, community residents and the living world. They privatize public services – from hospitals to railways – turning public wealth into private revenue streams that so often undermine the very services they claim to provide. They add the living world into the national accounts as ‘ecosystem services’ and ‘natural capital’, assigning it a value that looks dangerously like a price. And, despite committing to keep global heating ‘well below 2 degrees C’, they open new licensing for fossil fuel exploration, while failing to make the scale of transformational public investments needed for a renewable energy revolution. These policy choices are akin to throwing precious cargo off a plane that is running out of fuel, rather than admitting it is time to touch down and instead create post-growth economies that focus on delivering social and ecological health and integrity.

The insistent pursuit of growth in high-income countries is not only preventing carbon emissions and material consumption from being reduced at the speed and scale that these times urgently demand. It is also failing to tackle poverty and endemic social inequalities – the very problems for which growth is so often offered as the remedy. Indeed, the key message is that the pursuit of growth has become ‘counter-productive’ to the mission of tackling poverty. The policy tools that are so commonly used to stimulate growth – creating ‘business-friendly’ environments through privatization, commodification, and trade liberalization – in fact have all too often widened inequalities and created the very social exclusion that growth was promised to address.

Instead of pursuing endless growth it is time to pursue a thriving well-being for all people as part of a thriving living world, with policymaking that is designed to be in service to this goal. And this means putting human well-being and ecological integrity at the heart of our vision for economic success.

Starting with the goal of human well-being within planetary boundaries results in a very different shape of progress: in the place of endless growth we find a dynamic balance, one that aims to meet the essential needs of every person while protecting the life-supporting systems of our planetary home. And since we are the inheritors of economies that need to grow, whether they make us thrive, a critical economic challenge in high-income countries is to create economies that enable us to thrive, whether they grow.

Tackling and reversing inequalities needs to be at the heart of a new eco-social contract because doing so can deliver major impacts, both in terms of improving well-being – including self-expressed life satisfaction– and in terms of reducing nations’ ecological footprints, due to the well-documented links between social inequalities and consumption impacts. Tackling inequalities is also critical for reasons of political economy. One of the most damaging consequences of growth that exacerbates economic inequalities is the concentration of wealth and economic power in few hands. This can all too easily be converted into political power to influence elections and policymaking processes, to ensure that policies are retracted, enacted, or recrafted to preserve the systemic advantages of the already wealthy. There is, in other words, a tacit market for political influence, and it is used to ensure that inequalities of wealth, power and voice are perpetuated.

When we turn away from growth as the goal, we can focus directly on asking what it will take to deliver social and ecological well-being. And while many of the policies that this brings to the fore were, only a decade ago, considered too radical to be realistic, they are now gaining public interest, leading to animated discussion and serious policy consideration.

Kate Raworth