OK - I'm sorry - more of an essay than a blog post, but I’ve got to get all this off my chest in one go. In the 1980s across Europe you would see stickers with a sparky little cartoon atom character shouting ‘nuclear power - no thanks!'.

environmentalists clustered earlier this year to say 'regretfully I’ve changed my mind – climate change is so big it justifies turning to nuclear power’

There was a minor media flurry when two or three prominent UK environmentalists clustered earlier this year to say 'regretfully I’ve changed my mind – climate change is so big it justifies turning to nuclear power’.

Having been asked several times in the last fortnight what I reckon to this argument I’ve decided to pull my thoughts together into one place. Here are the arguments put by the nuclear public relations folks, with my own response to them:

• New Jobs! It’ll be French and German companies and technicians that are most likely to benefit from UK growth in nuclear generation, and we'll be paying top whack as there'll be an acute skills shortage if the industry grows as fast as it hopes. And these are very expensive jobs to ‘create’ in the sense that other kinds of energy related investment generate many more.

• Too Cheap to Meter! (and this time we mean it!) This bold promise was never delivered in the 20th century – on the contrary – nuclear always needed government cash. But everyone anticipates that energy and climate crunches together will see the cost of carbon-based fuels rise and hence the competitiveness of nuclear and renewables increase. Although it’s likely that we'd still need to see central government reaching into its pocket to cover decommissioning/waste issues nuclear is going to become much more competitive. But, it still requires really immense initial capital investment and long time scales.

OK so it may be a French company that’s asking to build them, but it is hardly an investment risk. They’ll only put up the money if prices are guaranteed and waste costs covered by future UK taxpayers. Eggs in several baskets!

Nuclear power plant, Biblis Germany.
[Image by Bigod, some rights reserved]

 The nuclear PR folks are politely pro renewable energy. They suggest it’s good to spread our energy investments. The difficulty with this is that in periods where central government and private investment is under pressure there are opportunity costs carried by any choice. It is simply politically naive to suggest that major commitments to N power will not result in reduced investments in energy efficiency programmes or renewables. Renewables can't do it all & carbon capture and storage are untried and costly! Probably the best card in the N hand. But it assumes that we have to match or grow current levels of energy demand and do nothing to reduce it.

Almost all of developed world society processes and products are 'energy blind'. They developed in an era of very low cost energy and are hugely wasteful. Why not spend the 15 years and many billions we might invest in a decent sized N programme in really aggressive demand-management and clean green re-design of much that we do. Unlike an investment in N power many of these measures would carry plenty of other environmental and social benefits: the collateral benefits of N investment are largely confined to those getting jobs and research funding.

The PR insists that nuclear power's waste issues were always exaggerated and the greens' criticisms were emotional not rational. Whatever the truth of the matter, the industry must be the last people on the planet that think that human systems are infallible.

radwaste is a classic case study of how we pursue short term interests and discount future generations

Having said that the new systems produce less waste and there are much more convincing ways of dealing with particularly the low level stuff. And we already have a big pile of it in the UK anyway. But I think radwaste is a classic case study of how we pursue short term interests and discount future generations - the formal economic process of calculating discount rates generally considers that the best gift you can offer to future generations is a wealthy present. Hence economic and policy analysis has favoured N power in the present and not considered costs to the future of these technologies (including opportunity costs mentioned above).

So in summary – yes we need to invest in effective waste management to deal with the pile we’ve got but let’s not compound the problem further. There's a climate monster behind the door! This is the argument that whatever the downsides we must at all costs avoid a climate tipping point.

The UEA's Professor Tim Lenton says be careful with painting a picture of a threat of one great tipping point - it will propel us towards over hasty techno fixes that may generate new problems, and is in any case a bit of a distraction in terms of how to represent climate change. He makes this point in relation to geo-engineering but the same goes for N. He's lead author on nuanced paper on 'Tipping Elements'.

Well, the industry is set to expand but this raises the geopolitics/terrorism question. I don't think this is the best moment to pick to promote an industry that requires high levels of centralised control and regulation, high levels of security and a great deal of care around the tracking of fuel, waste and protection of plant. It intensifies the heat in already fraught political contexts. How will we decide on who has the tech, on what 'safe' and 'civilian' amounts to and what the wider consequences of sustaining big postgraduate N professions across the world?

Politicians have to agree to drive energy demand down dramatically

I'd agree with anyone that this much endangered low hanging fruit won't deliver the kinds of emissions cuts that might mitigate the threat of dangerous climate change. Politicians have to agree to drive energy demand down dramatically. Politically impossible to make our housing stock decent, our towns and cities pleasant and healthy, and our experience of travel more rewarding? For this and a host of other reasons we need to redefine quality of life.

To say to other nations that 'we can have nuclear power but you aren't mature enough' is not going to help gather an international community to address global challenges.

The sibling issue is that the west chasing after nuclear again makes it appear that this is the 'developed' choice. That's despite the Finns working on a new plant whose installation will overshoot by several years and lots of cash and has Finnish contractors and government and the French and German builders bickering over whose fault it is.

In short: there are fast, cheap ways of cutting energy consumption in the near term that we've still not done and those will deliver emissions cuts years before the nuclear engineers reach for the 'on' button.

About the author

Joe Smith is a lecturer in the environment at the Open University and chair of Interdependence Day. He has written books on climate change and sustainability, the media and global issues, and the green movement.

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Air travel is front of mind, personally and politically: I’ve just come off a flight booker website and found an amazingly/distressingly cheap return flight to Delhi for a work trip. When I was a school leaver the same amount of money wouldn’t have got me further than Barcelona by any means of transport. Air travel stats show blistering growth in flying for work and play in recent decades.

Despite the compelling story of a pilot safely landing on the Hudson river this week the far bigger air travel story in my view is the UK Government’s decision to give the go-ahead to the building of a 3^rd Heathrow runway. But this is a story of more than domestic significance. A comment from the Chinese news agency Xinhua reads like an answer to an exam essay question on tensions between economic and environmental interests:

Despite claims by governments that the environment remains top of their agenda, they have often had to make a sacrifice as the economy becomes a greater priority. This is reflected by the recent decision by the British government, which gave the go-ahead to the controversial expansion of Heathrow airport in London, one of the busiest air hubs in the world. It seems that in the face of the recession, even a strong advocate of low-carbon growth must downplay their green ethics to make way for the economic development of the country.

Dongying Wang, Xinhua, 17 January 2009

Benny Peiser subbed this down for his perky and provocative ‘climate contrarian’ newsletter: ‘China Smiles As Britain’s Climate Policy Goes Up In Smoke’. Not for the first time with his missives I wouldn’t have put it quite like that myself, but it’s certainly true that this decision is a pretty tidy summary of how little the key players in the UK Government have absorbed about the meaning of the term ‘sustainability’. The Labour governments’ noisy claims to international leadership on climate change since 1997 look tawdry nowadays – and in a critical year for climate politics with the Kyoto follow up being negotiated in advance of it coming into force in 2012.

Heathrow airport.
[image by Amin Tabrizi, some rights reserved]

The decision not to manage demand (down) but rather to pursue the ‘sixties road building dictum of ‘predict and provide’ leaves little room for optimism about the goal of making big cuts in CO2 emissions in the UK. Air travel is still a relatively small proportion of CO2 emissions, but it is one of the fastest growing, and once people settle into consumption patterns based around cheap air travel these habits can be hard to break.

The defence that Minister Geoff Hoon offered up in the face of film star stunts targeted against the decision was playground stuff. He noted that they’re among the most enthusiastic users of the Heathrow-Los Angeles route. Emma Thompson may brush off the barb but I’m afraid it strikes its target with me. My Delhi air tickets will take me on a British Council sponsored tour of talks and films about media and environmental change, and yes, regular readers will know that last year I flew to Greenland with a Cape Farewell expedition.

I’ve come to my own deal with the devil about my decision to burn a good dose of jet fuel in relation to my work on communications and environmental change. But that doesn’t stop me feeling very sheepish indeed about these trips. But I come back to the fact that all the individualised worrying in the world isn’t going to help to make the price of air travel reflect its full environmental cost. Neither is it going to deliver big efficiency gains in the air fleet: these essential and urgent leadership tasks belong not to famous actors and unknown academics, but to politicians.

About the author

Joe Smith is a lecturer in the environment at the Open University and chair of Interdependence Day. He has written books on climate change and sustainability, the media and global issues, and the green movement.

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In 2008, food prices in the developed and developing world are soaring. Global inflation in food, as measured by the international food price index, increased by 40 per cent in 2007, and has soared further this year.

Levels of world cereal crops are at an all time low. As food-aid programmes run out of money, world leaders meet in frenzied anxiety about diminishing food stocks; they are beginning to acknowledge, at last, the severity of this ‘man-made’ global food crisis.

Forecasters, such as the international think-tank Chatham House, have predicted that demand for food will rise by 50 per cent by 2030. The UN have reported that to simply keep up with the growth in human population, more food will have to be produced in the world in the next 50 years than there has been produced during the previous 10,000 years. About 40 per cent of the world’s agricultural land is already degraded. In 1980 the world’s population was 4.4 billion. By 2050 it is expected to reach 9 billion.

Famine.
[image © copyright BBC]

In Italy, women have marched in protest as wheat prices more than doubled. In the UK, families are feeling the pinch, especially in the price of food commodities. From Haiti to Uzbekistan, the poor are bearing the brunt of the problem. Hundreds of people have died in protests across the world. In India, rice has been rationed. In April the World Bank predicted that at least 100 million people across the globe could face starvation. EU estimates suggest that 25,000 people are dying daily from hunger as food prices reach their highest level since 1945. In June the oil price keeps rising to an unprecedented 135 dollars a barrel.

The causes of this international food crisis are very complex. A variety of factors have been identified, ranging from climate change, poor farming practices, deforestation and soil erosion to global overpopulation. Speculation on commodity futures in the world’s stock markets, following the collapse in confidence in conventional financial markets and the fall of the dollar, has exacerbated the problem. Following the credit crunch the search for profits has resulted in enormous fluctuations in market prices that do not appear to be related to shifts in supply and demand.

As the world’s oil reserves decline, the switch by governments, including our own, to force increasing acreages of farmland to convert from food production to the production of crops for bio-fuels, has distorted the system of production to the extent that an attempt, if it was, to satisfy environmental priorities has created increased food scarcity and pushed up prices.

By 2010, across Europe it will be mandatory, for example, for petrol retailers to mix 5.75 per cent of bio-fuels into fuel sold to motorists. However, it is not just in the EU that we are being asked to burn crops to fuel our cars – the USA, India, Brazil and China have similar prospective schemes. India, for example, has pledged to meet 10 per cent of its vehicle fuel needs with bio-fuels. In America, bio-fuel consumption for motor vehicles is now enough to cover all the import needs of the 82 nations classified by the UN as ‘low-income food deficit countries’. It is probably too simplistic to suggest that our transport systems can lead to starvation in the developing world, but the connection is unavoidable.

In seven of the past eight years, the world has consumed more grain than it has supplied. The growth in bio-fuel consumption has not only benefited the rich countries and denuded the poorest, but it has depleted global grain stockpiles, pushing millions more of the world’s poor deeper into poverty. The International Monetary Fund reported in April that corn-based ethanol production in the USA accounted for half the increase in the global demand for corn. Jean Zeigler, a UN expert on the right to food has called this new phenomenon a ‘crime against humanity’.

We may be on the cusp of the biggest structural change in the world food market for over a century. In the next few years, relief and aid programmes in the developing world may be undermined, while the tensions of international politics may further impinge on the life chances of humanity. Increased competition over depleted resources could lead to conflict and war.

The world’s population is growing at around 80 million people a year. In the rising powers of India, Brazil and China, a huge growth in middle-class populations has led to a revolution in demand for those consumer goods we in the West have taken for granted for so long. These countries have also seen a substantial shift in food consumption towards the dairy and meat-based diets of the western world. As the environmentalists remind us, they also have quadrupled their own use of oil to fuel their vehicles.

Unfortunately, as the world seeks a sustainable future and struggles with ways to limit the damage done by humanity to our environment, it is likely that there will be millions of losers. In 2008 the British Government predicted that by 2050 half the arable land in the world might no longer be suitable for production because of water shortages and climate change.

Today The UN’s World Food Programme is unable to cover the increased cost of food aid to the poorest nations in the world.  While we in Britain are feeling the pinch the impact on the world's poorest countries is huge. If you are one of the 2.8 billion people in the world who live on under $2 a day, you may pay for the recent surge in growing grain for petrol with your life. And it looks like getting worse.

About the author

Richard Skellington edits Society Matters for the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Open University. He’s an administrator who manages the Environment, Development and International Studies programme.

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