An end to growth?

Growth is a dominant economic narrative. But it may be over in the UK and anyway isn’t good for us, says green activist Sandy Irving. He sees the 'shrinking' British economy as creating a real test for Greens. ‘In years of boom, it is easier to critique growth and call for another path. It is harder when actually faced with a 'recession'. The fact remains that we in the UK live, as a collectivity, in a three-planet economy, even if products are unevenly distributed, it is self-evidently unsustainable since there is only one planet.’

So he says the prime need is ‘shrinkage in total economic activity, the very thing that the Bank of England, all orthodox economists and accountants and most politicians, with the widespread support amongst the public, want to reverse. They cry out for action "to get the economy going" (i.e. growing). Yet such growth will doom any chance of combating the climate emergency and the many other symptoms of ecological ruination ahead. There is also solid evidence that, beyond a certain point physical growth creates more social negatives than pluses (sometimes called 'affluenza'). It is evident that across nature, from our very own bodies to ecosystem development, that growth must give way to a steady-state’.

He admits that ‘there is some scope for greater efficiency and better management in the economy. But they cannot get round the limits to growth. Indeed, via positive feedback and the 'rebound effect', efficiency gains are routinely cancelled out. Technological breakthroughs tend to bring all sorts of downsides’. So he claims ‘economic shrinkage is actually the name of the game if there is going to be any chance of building a sustainable society. The selling of that message, unpalatable in many quarters, is another matter, one separate from the logic and evidence behind the message itself. The challenge is to find ways of making such contraction palatable’.                                 

He goes on ‘One way is to focus on quality of life, on matters such as health, community vitality, basic security, and, yes, happiness. Japan has had, roughly speaking, a comparative steady-state economy for a number of years, albeit one at too high a level of economic throughput. In wartime, there have been strong limits on what people can consume. It does not necessarily bring social collapse if the trappings of consumerism shrink. In Britain many people were actually healthier during the Second World War, if the deaths and injuries of war are put on one side) Acceptance is easier if fairness in distribution of a more limited largesse is ensured. Our tragedy is that most people cannot/will not see that today we face threats on a scale even greater than those of wartime. Certainly, the impact of unchecked climate change will be greater than World War 2’

He adds that ‘a smaller economy is not only needed to meet that challenge. More positively, there could still be investment in certain activities that really do deliver social well-being and environmental security. Sustainable economy activity will also tend to be more labour-intensive compared to ones dependent on high inputs of fossil fuel energy and comparatively scarce raw materials (high grade metal ores, rare earths etc). To that extent it is the better option for job creation (alongside work-sharing). A smaller economy would leave more physical space for non-human species, so many of whom are now threatened by extinction’.

He concludes ‘the current threat of a recession will test whether those who in the past have talked about a 3-planet economy and its unsustainability really meant what they were saying or whether it was all just hot air. Instead of calling for the economy to be 'kickstarted', we should be pushing for radically different policies, for better not bigger, e.g. http://steadystate.org/discover/policies/’                                                                                                               

There are some alternatives to, or at least modified versions of, this deep green view. For example, if the focus is set worldwide, then some say that, for many of the poor in the world, growth is the only realistic hope of being able to rise above (or even to) subsistence-level existence. That in part is due to the horrifically imbalanced global pattern of wealth, power and access. Change that and maybe the poor would not have to rely on pathetic ‘trickle down’ economics topped up by growth - the main aim of which is of course to maintain high levels of wealth for some by keeping the system expanding. In a global system based on ruthless competition, rival chunks of capital (the assets owned and controlled by companies and the investment capacity of speculators) fight it out for market shares. If the rival companies are all to survive and prosper then the overall global market has to expand. So demand has to be stimulated by any means possible. This process can be tamed a bit (by governments nationally and internationally, pressured by green NGOs) to limit the worst excesses of resource misuse, abuse of the environment and human exploitation, but the world’s affluent consumers continue to feed it, their greed for ‘more’ (ideally at less cost) being enlisted in its support. Attitudinal changes, voluntary simplicity, ethical trade and the like, can help undo some of that, but materialism and ever expanding consumption is so deeply entrenched in our view of what represents a good life, changes may remain marginal, until they are forced on us by adverse environmental or other pressures.

At present, although everyone is complicit, it’s the rich minority who consume most and generate most emissions. That has to change, so the poor can share in a degree of affluence. But its nature also has to change: we all need to change our materialist expectations - and also avoid runaway population growth, or some say even aim for a reduced global population over time, to stay within earth’s carrying capacity. 

In the deep green view, the process of change must happen soon, ideally voluntarily, and anything that offers alternatives that seem to avoid that are dangerous illusions and diversions. So renewables are sometimes portrayed as ‘technical fixes’ avoiding the need to reduce energy use, while possibly creating new eco-problems, especially if introduced in unchanged social and economic contexts. Even energy saving technologies are sometimes seen as illusory: we just need to use less.  That’s not to say that such things will not be valuable in the steady-state, balanced and decentralised society they look to, but on their own they are not sufficient- we need radical and global social and cultural change. To a small degree that has happened: green values are now quite widespread and some of that is due to the emergence and adoption of new eco-technologies. But in the main all they do is enable life to go on much as before, with the new technologies in the main being produced and sold in the same old way. Some market relations may have changed, challenging some parts of the supply/retail system (the big utilities), but PV solar domestic ‘prosumers’ are still consumers, buying in PV kit probably manufactured in sweat shops in China!  

Can we do better? What tools do we have? In the energy context, the basic technologies exist now, or are being developed, but we are only just starting to put them together in ways that challenge the old economic model, via grass roots initiatives, energy co-ops and community owned distribution grids. It’s patchy. Germany is a leader, and local Transition movements are spreading. But its huge task. Though they can challenge rapacious competition, these local initiatives don’t really tackle the key issues of production and consumption-led growth. To take this all on fully would require a wider movement for social, cultural and political change. A big project.

The Lucas plan revisited- ahead of the curve

With the 40^th anniversary of the Lucas workers celebrated alternative plan coming up, the Breaking the Frame group, has, with others, organized a conference in Birmingham in November. It aims to link the experience of radical trade union groups then, trying to redirect the technology focus of their companies to create sustainable, socially useful work, with similar current campaigns: http://lucasplan.org.uk 

The Alternative Corporate Plan produced by shop stewards from the 13 Lucas Aerospace plants in the mid 1970s outlined a series of socially useful projects that they felt could secure employment on a sustainable basis. The company was heavily reliant on defence orders and the Labour government of the time was cutting back and there were threats of large scale redundancies. The cross-plant cross-union shop stewards ‘Combine’ committee thought that, to avoid that, the companies resources and their skills could be used on alternative products. The diversification plan they produced included medical aids, new transport systems and a range of alternative energy technologies, then very novel, including solar and wind technologies. The idea was that the public funding saved from the defence cuts could be retargeted to socially useful production along these lines.

The overall plan was resisted by the company management, who objected to being told what to produce, although some prototypes were developed under pressure from the trade unionists or by supporters independently. For example, an absorption cycle gas-fired heat pump, based on an early Open University idea, was built by Lucas at its plant in Burnley, with some middle management actually being quite keen since there were prospects of a joint OU/Lucas research grant from the (then) Department of Energy. A 15kW prototype was tested, but no funding emerged and the idea was not followed up. See p22/23 in this report:  http://oro.open.ac.uk/19946/1/EPMK_Aug_09.pdf 

Heat pumps are nowadays very widely used, although very few gas fired heat pumps have been built - the 150kW (th) one currently used at the OU is a rare example. See: http://modbs.co.uk/news/archivestory.php/aid/9841/__65279;Ener-G_teams_up_boreholes_with_absorption_heat_pumps_.html

Most heat pumps are electric powered and designed for use in individual homes (and the OU has surveyed them). That approach is backed by government, partly as a way to use the excess nuclear electricity they will have at night from the proposed new nuclear plants at Hinkley etc.  There are all sorts of problems with that- the power grid couldn't supply enough power to take over from ordinary gas central heating (which is their plan)! Gas heat pumps would be better- the gas grid is already there. And they would also be bigger, and more suited to community heating. That was very much to Lucas plan’s credo - not small eco-toys for middle class houses, but large efficient systems for council high rises.  It’s arguably what we should be doing now. It’s the same for many of the other ideas that were in the plan.

The political point is that this group of workers could identify what was needed in the communities to which they belonged- and they had the skills to make the technology. But they didn’t have the power or money to make it happen-and the Labour government offered warm words but little practical help. The official trade union bureaucracy was also less than helpful- the Combine committee was an unofficial grass roots organisation which they did not recognize. Then, in 1979, Maggie Thatcher was elected and launched a major attack on  the trade union movement, culminating in the defeat of the Miners. Many of the Lucas activists were sacked or moved on and the battle for radical product diversification was lost. There had been some other similar ‘workers plans’, following on from the Lucas plan, for example in power engineering (Clarke Chapman and Parsons in Newcastle, backing CHP) and in defence (Vickers in Barrow, with wave power being one idea), but they too were side-tracked.  40 years on it’s still the same. What actually emerges is what government and corporate leaders think is best. Though some now do think that renewables are a good idea!

The Lucas campaign may have failed, but the idea lives on, with, in the current context, one focus being the development of alternatives to employment on projects like the proposed Trident nuclear submarine system renewal.  With UK coal plants closing there is also a need to develop alternative employment options for staff in that sector, and the same would be true when and if the nuclear programme is abandoned. What the Lucas campaign showed was that it is possible for the workforce themselves, rather than external experts or technocrats, to develop plans for the future, and arguably better plans, more attuned to needs rather than profits.

The need for better plans for sustainable energy and other environmentally appropriate technologies is now if anything even clearer. But are we any more ready for that politically than in the 1970s?  Some of the ideas from the Lucas plan had been taken up by radical local authorities, notable the GLC via its local Technology Networks, but they too were seen off as politics swung to the right in the 1980s. With trade union power much diminished and local councils on the defensive, as yet, no new power base exists, although the renewal of grass roots support for Labour, and the growth of wider green movement, may change that.  We may see at the Birmingham conference…

Catch up on Lucas: www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2014/jan/22/remembering-the-lucas-plan-what-can-it-tell-us-about-democratising-technology-today

The academic journal Science as Culture recently had a special issue on ‘Contested Technology’ (Vol. 25 No.3), which includes my paper on ‘The Alternative Technology movement: an early green radical challenge’ identifying links to and conflicts with the Lucas workers plan campaign and practical focus.  There were some ideological differences, with the ‘AT’ movement more inclined to small-scale experimental projects, the Lucas plan more concerned with meeting the needs of existing mainstream communities. In the extreme this revealed a class-based conflict, with one Lucas Combine member disparaging some of the AT movements proposals as ‘gimmicks for individual architect built houses’ and ‘playthings for the middle class’. Is that still the case? Or have both sides now moved on?

 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09505431.2016.1164400:

Community-scale Energy

Most people say small scale energy project are a good idea-  inherently better than large inflexible centralized corporately owned projects, allowing for local ownership and control. However, there can be economies of scale. Some renewable energy projects are best technically and economically at larger scale- wind turbines for example, due to the basic physics of wind energy capture and conversion.  Certainly since the power available is proportional to the square of the bade size and the cube of the wind speed, a large diameter 1MW wind turbine on a good elevated site with good wind speeds will produce far more electricity than 1000 small diameter 1kW domestic-scale micro turbines in low wind speed urban environments. Moreover, in a multi-MW wind farm with a lot of MW units, the cost of linking them to the grid and maintaining them can be shared. Similarly, for wave and tidal projects, their location is geographically defined and they will more efficient at multi-MW scale.

Some individual domestic scale energy technology can be efficient, PV solar for example, with power delivered direct from the user’s roof, but even in that case there are economies in bulk buying, installation and operational scale. Despite the need for grid links, it is cheaper and easier to buy and install a lot of units together at the same time in a large solar farm. Or possibly as part of a major roof-top deployment programme in a collective housing project.

So, although there may be exceptions, it is usually best to go for larger scale. But how large? 

Community scale projects may be a sensible compromise between scale and efficiency- small enough to be locally owned and controlled, but large enough to be efficient.  Local ownership of wind farms has proved to be a good way forward in many countries, not least in avoiding opposition to projects imposed by remote corporate owners. That is how wind took off so dramatically in Denmark, with most of the projects being locally owned. Energy co-ops are now spreading across Germany, with about 40% of German renewable energy capacity being locally owned- although some of that is domestic PV, owned by individuals.

While there is clearly a strong environmental sentiment at work, the main driver for this expansion has been economics and the availability of attractive rates from Feed-In Tariffs.

Policy changes can slow progress, although the momentum and new market that has been created means that unit costs are falling and new cheaper technology is emerging, making subsidies less vital. So it’s a success story, both in terms of capacity and the expansion of local control, to the extent that conventional energy suppliers have now lost control of much of the market. There are however some issues. The spread of distributed self-generation makes it harder to manage the overall energy system, balancing supply and demand.

Most renewables are variable, and most individual PV self-generators still top up from the grid to meet their needs when there are lulls in local solar availability and at night. So they still need grid links, which also allow them to export any excesses, and offset the costs of their system.  Some may now be installing battery storage, as an alternative, and some may even try to go off grid, but then they loose the export earnings and it maybe be hard to meet all their energy needs in this way. Arguably it makes more sense to retain grid links and import power when needed, especially since, as noted above, it can be generated by larger more efficient projects elsewhere. Grid links make it possible to use power generated at the best sites, and if suitably extended, help balance and smooth out local variations in supply across wide areas. On that basis, sticking just to autarchic local generation maybe suboptimal, whether by individuals or communities. It may require much more local capacity than otherwise needed and also more local storage, with in many case small storage systems being less efficient than large ones.  Set against that is the possibility than local grid linked storage could be seen as a form of distributed storage, taking power from the grid when available, and, along with local generation, reducing the need for large grid power exchanges at peak demand times. The need for more grids to handle variable renewables and their local impacts, is certainly an issue in some countries. That’s one reason why Greenpeace has suggested that the ratio between small/local and large/remote generation should be 70:30. That’s optimistic, depending on the location. Given the high energy use and their spatial constraints, few cities  could meet 70% of their energy needs from renewable energy generated within their boundaries: they would have to import power from rural and offshore areas. The best achieved so far, in a survey of 13 leading EU city initiatives, has been around a 7% contribution from ‘internal’ urban renewables sources: http://www.energy-cities.eu/Energy-Cities-Members-delivering

None of this means that local generation projects are a bad idea. They can play a significant role, especially at the community/municipal scale. But aiming for high levels of local self sufficiency may not be sensible or needed. Instead we need to consider the system as a whole, while opting for local generation wherever possible, so as to gain the local social benefits.  A strict interpretation of ‘local generation’ would imply near total self-sufficiency e.g. for villages and town, but in a more realistic version they could import power from projects nearby e.g. local wind farms. However, as argued above, even that seems unnecessarily restrictive- what is wrong with trading local excesses to where there is a need and at other times importing power from locations where it is best generated? 

That implies that there will still be some large scale possibly corporate led projects, run to top the system up, although in principle some of these could be municipally owned and controlled. So could the local energy distribution system, including heat supply via biomass fired CHP/ district heating networks and large heat stores, topped up with solar heat. That would still leave conventional companies supplying the energy hardware, unless new co-operative/locally owned manufacturing enterprises emerge. Or even nationalised companies, taking over the whole thing, including transmission. How far we might or should go in this ‘socialised energy economy’ direction obviously depends on your political views! But in the end it all comes down to money and power. Community groups have little of either at present, local councils not much more. So there is a way to go. However, we have seen the growth of grass roots power and local projects in Germany, and that has changed the situation. Similar initiatives may emerge in the UK: the GIFT campaign looks exciting, with, potentially, municipal involvement: www.nuclearpolicy.info/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/GIFTS_initiative.pdf

Bottom-up grass roots initiatives may look weak when faced with corporate power, but with conventional politics all but frozen in many countries, they offer one of the few signs of life. See this excellent review: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032115013477

There is much to do at national level and policy changes are needed, but grass roots activism may help to open up new possibilities. For helpful updates on local green energy projects around the UK see: http://www.microgenscotland.org.uk