Category Archives: Info

The Farage of popular opinion

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I read a very interesting article recently from a group called the Green Alliance, who have taken a step back to look at the shifting landscape of public opinion, particularly in relation to climate change.Farage

They used a term “populism” in the article, which I had to look up.  It basically means any political movement that goes with the public mood, particularly when the general feeling is that there are a bunch of elites at the top, usually involving conspiracy theories.  It is fuelled by chats with mates in the local, listening to celebrities on the telly, that kind of thing.  It generally doesn’t involve a deep understanding of the underlying issues or the science.  How often do you hear someone in the pub saying “good point, I’ll carry out some research – see you same time tomorrow so we can carry on with this interesting debate?”

Under this definition, the current groundswell of support for the UKIP party puts it in the populist category.  They are effectively a party-political voice of the man down the pub.  Pictures of a grinning Nick Farage having a celebratory pint play underline the point.

A party voicing the general public opinion and being on the side of the man on the street?  Nothing wrong with that, you’d think.  The trouble is that some issues, in fact a lot, are very complicated.  They way they need to be dealt with doesn’t always align with what Jo Blogs wants to see happen.

And it can get very dangerous when, as at the moment, the popular opinion is that scientists and others who raise the issue of climate change are grouped among that dangerous elite who should not be trusted.  Or when the populist opinion starts to veer to the right and when members of the populist party are in some way racist.  That turn of events has a precedent in the recent past.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=yKUPUznJZoE

Spot on, David.  Although it is imperative on us to find a way to make it fulfilling, desirable and fun to take actions to care for others and our future – not just something we have no choice but to do.  Why not?

John Bell,

Ordinary bloke

Revolution?

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Last night I attended one of the joint meetings between Transition Town Berkhamsted and the transition group in the neighbouring town, Tring in Transition (they call themselves TinT rather than the other obvious acronym).  The meeting concerned what is termed inner transition, which loosely speaking means discussing the softer side of what we do – the mind-sets we face when trying to raise people’s sights over the horizon, plus our own health and wellbeing.

At this particular gathering we watched a video by Joanna Macey about what she calls “the Great Turning”.  She described how human society is currently going through a fundamental change, comparable to the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution.  In her words, we are moving from the industrial growth model, to a life sustaining society.

She depicted the reliance of the current system on the resources we take from the planet (air, water, minerals, metals, fossil fuels) and on its ability to clean the waste at the end (be that liquid or gaseous pollution or the products at the end of their “life”).  Perpetual growth is doomed to fail, to self-destruct, because it does not allow for those resources and capacity to absorb waste to be finite.

The future as she sees it is one where financial growth at all costs is a thing of the past, and we have instead reconnected with the natural cycle in some way.

She may be right.  My question is this, though – can the free market and growth model really not cope with climate change and the inherent limits of the planet?

I see a couple of other potential futures.  Could we instead move to a society where at its core we have connected the circle by re-using or recycling all of our waste and pollutants into the next set of products?  The other future I see is where our society has so abruptly and completely collapsed that we have been forced to move back to the cycle of nature itself, and we have no choice but to wind the clock back a few tens of thousands of years to when we lived more simply.

In my eyes this is the single greatest challenge to the free market and perpetual growth models.  Can it (can we) acknowledge and cope with dwindling resources and an increasingly crippled natural world?  Or will it implode.  And how much damage will be caused in the meantime, either way?

It may surprise you to hear that I believe it can.  It would need some fundamental changes to the way we think and the processes we use, to incorporate the costs of our actions into the price we pay and therefore our financial decisions.

My concern, which hits me deep down in the gut as I write, is that if it can it will do so at such a great cost to the beauty of the natural world that generations to come will never be able to witness the wonders that we are privileged to be able to observe: the vast diversity of life on our planet.

John Bell,

Ordinary bloke

We don’t need to build all of these houses

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I don’t think there is a housing shortage in the UK.  House prices are too high and so there is a shortage of affordable housing.  To help reduce house prices the response has been to try and build more – the bigger the supply, the lower the price, or so the theory goes.  This places more and more pressure to encroach ever further on the precious green spaces within and around our towns and cities.

But the reason our house prices are too high has nothing to do with lack of supply, and much more to do with how money is created by our financial system.  This isn’t obvious and takes a bit of getting your head around.  Transition Town Berkhamsted are hosting a big event with a speaker Fran Boait from the Positive Money campaign to help us all understand.  I’m going to have a go at explaining, but am in no doubt I’ll make a hash of it – so come along to the talk or watch the video at the end…

It’s official, the financial system is broken.  You’ve heard it repeated over and over in the media.  I have recently been made aware of exactly why is it really is fundamentally flawed.  The inevitable consequence are the booms and busts and recessions that we have habitually seen on and off over the years.

The interesting point is that there is a way to fix it.  Not one you’d hear of much in the mainstream media to date.  There is a growing movement called Positive Money that are lobbying and raising awareness of the issue and the obvious fix.

Technical bit – from reading the book Modernising Money: How Our Monetary System is Broken And How It Can Be Fixed, by Ben Dyson and Andrew Jackson.

Ask yourself this – how is money created?  You probably think of the royal mint, or the Bank of England.  You’d be wrong.

97% of the money in the UK economy is created by a bank giving someone a loan.  All they do is open an account for you with a positive balance, and note down that you owe them that balance plus interest.  No physical money needs to exist for this to happen.

The banks want to loan as much as possible, because that is how they make a profit.  And they don’t need that much in reserve to make those loans – if they loan you £100, they need much less than £100 to start with, and they can reduce this further by immediately selling on the fact that you owe them some money to someone else.

And ratio of their capital to the value of loans they make is lowest for mortgages.  So of the money they give out, they want to give as much out for mortgages as they can, so they can loan out more and increase their profits.

Following a recession, banks are less willing to loan out money.  When they loan to people to buy houses, they notice that house prices start to go up, so they want to attract more people to take out mortgages, so they lower the mortgage rates slowly, and people are willing to take out larger mortgages, and house prices go up.  House prices are going up, so more people want to invest in housing, so more mortgages are taken out, and house prices go up again.

In short, house prices are too high because banks create money, biased towards the housing market, which is relatively fixed in size, so the more money floating around the housing market, the more houses cost.

It also leads inexorably to booms and busts, as bank loans tend towards the housing market and financial assets, which creates no real value in the economy.  This creates an asset bubble, and a recession ensues.

The fix is simple, and of course very difficult.  The loophole in the law that was put in place in 1854 to stop banks from creating money is fixed – banks cannot create money by a trick of accounting, by creating a loan.  Instead money is created by a central bank, such as the Bank of England.  Profits from the creation of this money goes to reduce debt or spend on something useful, and the money created is directed towards a productive part of the economy.  Booms and busts are a thing of the past, and asset bubbles cease.

I am in no doubt that this makes little sense to most readers, so come along to the talk, read the book, or watch this video. It’s really good:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_profilepage&v=JBZWw1DG8zU

John Bell,

Ordinary bloke

It’s happening, it’s us and it’s bad

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Peppa PigThe planet is warming and the climate changing, we are doing it, it is bad and we can sort it out.  I’m worried about this because the people who are going to feel the brunt of this are the same people I have to coerce into getting ready for school in the morning rather than play nurses or watch Peppa Pig.

We know the planet is warming by looking at the combination of surface and ocean temperatures.  If you just look at the surface temperatures it looks as though there are confusing pauses in the warming, but that’s just because the weather is what transfers heat in the oceans to the surface, and weather comes and goes.

A lot of people think that the warming is natural, as we’ve been in and out of ice ages in the past.  Or maybe it is changes in the intensity of the sun.  Unfortunately the earth was cooling for 7000 years before we got in on the act.  It’s not changes in the intensity of the sun, which has been going up and down with its 11 year cycle and been cooling – if it was the sun there would be less warming at night.

In fact, the only explanation out there that fits the observed data is that there are more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which have come from you and me.  The physics tells us that some heat will be reflected back to Earth if there are more greenhouse gases and the science bods have directly measured that the heat that is escaping is at the wavelengths of the greenhouse gases.

We know the greenhouse gases, the main one being carbon dioxide, have resulted from us because the extra carbon dioxide is the sort you get from burning fossil fuels rather than that naturally abundant in the atmosphere.

Excluding impacts of increased war or exoduses or ocean turning more acid, and considering impacts out to the year 2200 only, Cambridge University in the UK suggest that each tonne of carbon dioxide emitted costs $100 down the line (including discounting the value of the future).  Given we are emitting 35.6 billion tonnes per year, that means that we are causing $3.6 trillion damage per year.  That’s not considering the impacts on the natural world and the mass extinctions we are already perpetrating.

And all we need to do is switch things off, buy less manufactured stuff, spend more time at home and get behind energy sources that don’t emit carbon dioxide for the remaining energy needed to keep us going until nuclear fusion comes along.  It’s not hard, and at the same time it is very hard indeed.

Please do let me know what you think.

John Bell,

Ordinary bloke