Date published: 2005/03/16
The fifth lecture of the university's Third Annual Lecture Series in Sustainable Development (2005) was given today by Nick Mabey of the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit (PMSU), London. He was trained as a (mechanical) engineer but became the chief economist of WWF before moving on to the Foreign Office and now the PMSU.
All the previous speakers in the series were old and it was starting to look like Sustainable Development was a field populated by people on an easy path to retirement. So it was good to see a fresh young face. And as you would expect from someone in the PMSU, he gave the impression of being a clever technocrat. Clever enough in fact that you wonder whether people like that should be wasting their time in or near government rather than working in engineering actually solving the problems of the world rather than just diagramming them.
He made a joke at the beginning that he was going to zip through his slides and that that kind of style was called "Shock and Awe" in the PMSU. (Something about being able to get through 200 slides in half an hour proving that you are providing value for money.) He then proceeded to indeed zip through his slides (probably less than 200, but hard to know for sure).
His first slide said "the views expressed in this presentation are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect official UK government policy". Then he launched into a general discussion of how to accomplish change progressing towards sustainable development, before discussing three specific recent projects at the PMSU: fisheries policy, energy policy and countries at risk of political instability.
Now the presentation was extremely professional (lots of boxes with arrows going between them) and having been both a poacher and a gamekeeper he did a good job of pointing out both sides of the various issues, between the ideals of sustainable development and the practicalities of dealing with government departments and politicians. The latter in particular don't like complexities, they just want a simple solution with a pithy strapline, and part of the game of this kind of technocrat is to make sure the politicians pick the desired strapline.
On fisheries policy he said that nobody (neither the scientists nor the fishermen) trusted the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP). He claimed that the problems with the CFP were often thought to stem from politicians not listening to scientists, but in fact the failure was instead systemic. In particular compliance (or more accurately, lack of compliance) was a major issue. Apparently it is a common view amongst the bureaucrats of Europe that the fishermen are all to blame for the situation. Apparently fishermen are dismissed with the sneering comment "fishermen are hunters" (and so will seek out and destroy fish no matter what the rules).
So some bureaucrats apparently believe that the only solution to the fishing problem is to regulate the fishermen even harder. Well, Mabey said that the annual fishing industry revenue in the UK was around 546 million pounds, the profit was around 125 million pounds and the cost of government regulation of the industry was around 120 million pounds. So there is not a lot of point to increasing regulatory cost. But currently less than 1 percent of boats are inspected at sea. So the only way forward is to create a culture where compliance is the norm. (Easier said than done.)
He did mention that global warming was going to make a nonsense of a lot of the models predicting fish stocks, and so scientists were going to have to adjust their thinking as well. (And if global warming is going to kill off a species in the near future then there is little point worrying how much fishermen catch today. But it would be a brave scientist who had enough confidence in any of their own predictions to say so.)
On energy policy he said that by 2020 80% of UK oil demand and 84% of UK gas demand would have to be imported (equating to 75% of UK energy supply). This is a turn-around from recent times for the UK (because of the North Sea). But he said other countries coped so the UK should be able to, but we needed to worry about the security of supply, etc.
Blair has signed up to the idea of reducing UK CO2 (all greenhouse gas?) emissions by 60% by 2050 from the 1990 levels. Of course Blair can promise anything he wants about 2050, he'll be dead by then so won't be held accountable. In order to add some credibility they said the target would also be 20% by 2010 and perhaps around 30% by 2020. Now the 20% target might not be met, but the only reason we are anywhere close is because of the "dash for gas" (which Mabey did not mention), which in its own way is a disaster in the making (wasting a precious lightweight energy source on fixed location uses like power generation, rather than saving it for mobility).
Mabey claimed that a lot of these energy targets are really there for diplomatic reasons as much as anything else, to convince other countries to do something about global warming. (But this seems a bit implausible. A lot of it is to pander to the chattering classes in the UK who believe the world is about to end.)
Later he said that one way to get people to pay more attention to problems is to "reframe" the issues. What this means is to come up with catch phrases which people like. So instead of saying "we are going to cut emissions by 60%", which sounds drastic and bound to harm the economy, you instead say "climate change is about investing to secure the benefits of a stable climate". Well this summarises the problems with modern goverment, it is the victory of style over substance. (Bush is at the top of this game, with his administration producing fake "news" videos for distribution which are just propaganda for administration policies. Blair is not far behind.)
On countries at risk, Mabey did not have that much interesting to say. Except that apparently the PMSU has designed a tool to do risk assessment for these countries (http://www.policyhub.gov.uk). It's hard to take this seriously, but what the heck.
At the end there were a couple of questions from the audience. One chap complained that people still used GDP to measure progress and this was all wrong, some other measure (NDP, net domestic product) was the way to go. Well Mabey pointed out that at least GDP had a theoretical underpinning, which a lot of the suggested alternatives did not. And is it not amazing how the comfortable middle classes always think GDP is irrelevant. It's ok if you have a comfortable middle class job. This same chap asked about the "joined up government" which Blair had promised. This chap had been on the council of English Nature and he said when they laid out their objectives it was clear that the biggest obstacles to achieving these were not corporations but were other government departments. Mabey dealt with this one deftly as well, saying that where there were obvious silly incompatibilities between goals of different departments then these were easy to fix, but normally the incompatibilities came about because different departments (quite reasonably) had different priorities. And you have to wonder if anyone who works for English Nature ever had the thought that perhaps they were the obstructors, and not the other side. (No doubt the other side thought so.)
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