I was asked to give a speech for the Local Government Chronicle Net Zero conference entitled ‘Charting the utopian path: a vision for a net zero council’. But ‘utopian’ is an interesting concept choice. Because it suggests a journey, or destination, that is imaginary and near perfect. Would that imply it’s also unattainable? It can’t be, because this is a climate emergency and every council – and the country – needs to be at zero carbon well before 2050.
Planetary boundaries
As the Stockholm Resilience Centre identifies, the climate emergency is just one of the crises we face. We have exceeded six of the nine planetary boundaries it charts. The collapse of nature and biodiversity is one of these (which should, at the very least, challenge our unnatural desire for neatness in our landscapes – let’s ditch the straight lines, the hacked-down, scalped, grass monoculture!). But other planetary boundaries have already been exceeded, including the poorly titled ‘novel entities’.
Perhaps the worst-named planetary boundary ever, ‘novel entities’ is shorthand for plastics, pesticides and pharmaceuticals. And these present the most immediate threat to our planet. Think about microplastics for example – these breakdown products of bigger materials have recently been found in human testes and semen; they’re in placentas and crossing the blood/brain barrier; they’re even in beer! So we can’t just think about net zero carbon – that’s the thinking that gave us the #dieselgate scandal – we have to think systemically, about living within the physical limits of this fragile planet.
As a society we are using our share of the resources of three planets, when we only have one. This is profoundly unsustainable – environmentally, socially and politically. The one guarantee is that in five and ten years’ time we’ll be in a very different place to where we are now. And that’s good news, because we are now trashing the planet and creating thoroughly miserable societies.
Innovative strategies and collaborative efforts
I was asked to talk about comprehensive utopian plans, community engagement and collaborative governance, and technological innovation. Which is quite a collection of buzzwords. Any number of keynote speakers could have talked about solar panels and wind turbines, active transport and low-carbon building materials, about caring for our soils and restoring biodiversity. All of which are important for us to deliver quickly, and at scale, but none of those things are enough. So rather than offering technical details and specific technologies, I suggest a framework for looking at issues and activities, technologies and approaches.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the UK’s Climate Change Committee (CCC ) have increasingly been turning to fantasy technologies and ever-more-unrealistic assumptions about new discoveries, even to dangerous suggestions of geoengineering to make their models add up. Their mandate, and traditionally their approach, has not allowed them to venture into ‘politics’, to suggest social and economic change. But we cannot stay below the 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, or even well below 2 degrees, with a business-as-usual society with added technology. Are we really talking about building artificial trees to suck carbon out of the atmosphere?!
We cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet. That’s not politics, it’s science.
We need to change the way our society and economy work, to innovate socially, politically and economically. The last IPCC reporting round included more sociologists, anthropologists and social psychologists, and this is an approach that local government should take too, adapting their practical arrangements and plans to meet their communities’ needs.
Cleanest, greenest and cheapest
How can people live good lives, with minimum environmental impact?
The cleanest, greenest, cheapest energy you can possibly have is the energy you don’t need to use. Which highlights the importance of ensuring all new houses are built to be environmentally sustainable, and to be more resilient to some of the effects of climate change. This is something that makes sense for homeowners’ energy bills as well as for the planet. We have to stop building new houses that immediately need to be retrofitted to improve, for example, energy efficiency.
The cleanest, greenest, cheapest transport is for the journey you don’t have to take. This is why governments the world over know the value of 15-minute cities. Years ago, I visited the Belgian city of Ghent, a few months after a Green transport chief had effectively removed cars from the city centre. Many windows still contained posters opposing the scheme. Yet when an election came soon after no party, not even the far-right, proposed removing it. Courage is needed. So, rather than allow such plans to become hostage to a culture war of vested interests, our political leaders need to defend them.
Likewise, a four-day working week as standard is an important climate and environmental measure. Despite the resistance of the last government, many councils know this is an obvious way to reduce pressure on transport systems and, more importantly, to reduce pressure on human lives.
Building sustainability
And invariably, the cleanest, greenest and cheapest solution to a building need is going to be an existing building. An understanding of ‘embodied carbon’ (all the CO2 emitted in producing materials) has come late to many sectors, but it is arriving now. As I was once told at an event with the Federation of Master Builders, the first thing to ask when presented with a plan is “do we need this building at all?”. The second thing is “can we build one building with two functions, rather than two buildings?”
We have school buildings that sit often empty for months at a time, for weekends and evenings. A crucial climate measure will be to use these spaces to train generations of engineers and builders. More than that, we should restore adult education, cut to practically nothing over recent decades. A pottery class, a language lesson, IT literacy instruction, are all climate actions: they build human capacity and human engagement, and they strengthen communities, which is what we’re going to need to face the climate emergency together.
Building for climate resilience
Rather than focusing on ‘efficiency’, we need to talk more about resilience. How do we create systems and structures that can resist shocks and/or rebound from them?
When Lancaster was hit by Storm Desmond in 2015, the community came close to falling apart – without electricity, without cash machines and the internet, without local people empowered to make decisions and act. The one supermarket in town that had power closed on Sunday at 4pm as scheduled, despite a queue of desperate people outside. The rail station wouldn’t open for a crowd of international students seeking to escape, because it didn’t have light (though everyone had torches on their phones) and the manager didn’t feel empowered to make the sensible decision.
Building community capacity is a key climate adaptation and resilience measure.
When it comes to procurement the ‘Preston model’ is frequently seen as an economic and social justice boosting approach, which of course it is. But it is also vital for climate mitigation and climate action. Re-localising our economies has obvious climate benefits. Localising food supply is where this is most evident, obvious and easily deliverable. We have no right to rely on other people’s soils, water and labour to feed us, and we won’t be able to do that in future. A ring of market gardens around towns and cities can provide a foundation of food security.
This will require courage, and strong leaders who can take people with them. It can’t be imposed top down. ‘Consultation’ should be meaningful. Consultation shouldn’t mean asking the community to choose between variations of the same pre-agreed plan, or asking them choose the colour of paint on the doors of an already completed construction project. True change needs to be led by communities, with meaningful consultation harnessing local skills and talent. This should not be imposed by Westminster.
Technological innovation
Many people – some of them snake oil sellers – will say that artificial intelligence (AI) is the answer to saving carbon. Some 25 years ago I wrote a master’s thesis partly on AI, and we were almost there then. Today we are exactly the same distance away. What we have now is big data, not AI. Just ask McDonald’s, which has just abandoned trials of AI-controlled ordering in US drive-throughs. Customers weren’t impressed by a slice of bacon perched on an ice-cream cone, or by the arrival of hundreds of dollars’ worth of McNuggets.
And what AI does is not ‘in the cloud’. It is very much ‘down to Earth’. It relies on enormous energy and water-hungry server farms, on the supply of rare and precious minerals that can only be destructively wrenched from the Earth. ICT already accounts for 2–3% of global greenhouse emissions and this is set to increase rapidly. Digitisation is not an inevitable occurrence but a political choice.
Dialogue is better than monologue. Westminster needs to get out of the way and stop sticking its oar in. There are some decisions that need to be made at a global level such as the amount of climate change we think we can bear. But how the carbon cuts needed in Leeds or Leicester, Newcastle or Newton Abbott should be delivered, should be decided in those places, right down to a parish or town level. The people affected are those best equipped to decide climate action.
Across the country people have been holding climate assemblies (and other people’s assemblies) for deliberative decision-making. This is true, thoughtful democracy; braver and more honest; more given to joined-up thinking and the unleashing of human creativity than our current politics. True democracy in the UK is local councils. They already have the answers.
