Date published: 2007/03/07
The fourth lecture in the Department of Engineering's Fifth Annual Lecture Series in Sustainable Development (2007) was given by Pooran Desai, from the "environmental" corporation / organisation / charity BioRegional. The most public project associated with BioRegional is perhaps the BedZED development in Beddington, just south of London. But Desai has also co-authored a little book called "One Planet Living", which was the title of his lecture. (First environmental tip: reduce waste, don't buy the book.)
Many organisations with aims similar to BioRegional are a bit crackpot, but Desai mostly spoke sense and seemed to have thought some things through. (But not others.) It is too early to know whether BedZED is really a success, and how much it could be replicated or whether it is just another example of housing mainly designed for the middle class. (For example, how well would BedZED cope with a hooligan teenager in their midst.) It seems that BioRegional has now set up its own property development company so will be involved with building more housing (but not just another BedZED, which was designed by one firm of architects, led by Bill Dunster, and the other projects are with lots of other architects and developers).
The lecture was indeed on the one planet concept. The basic premise behind this strap line is that there are around 12.6 billion hectares of "biologically active land" on the planet. Given that there are around 6 billion people, that means that each person should have around 2 hectares to produce their needs (food, energy, etc.). Any more and it means that we are running an "unsustainable" deficit. And we have the claim that the average British person (and indeed the average European) is currently sustained by around 6 hectares of land. This would mean that the average British person is using 3 times as much as their "fair" share and so if everyone on the planet did the same then we would need 3 planets worth of ecosystem to sustain our lifestyle. Of course we only have 1. Desai's selling point was to claim that with sufficient effort we could reduce the UK consumption to the "one planet" level (which apparently happens to be the level that China is currently at, although of course their consumption is rapidly increasing.)
This whole "one planet" philosophy is of course very attractive to the so-called environmentalists, who hate the so-called western lifestyle (where you can eat strawberries in winter and go on holidays abroad even if you are not middle class). But there are various problems with the concept. For one thing, we have several billion years of ecosystem in the bank (which is the source of our fossil fuels, for example). So it's quite possible we could run a deficit for quite some time.
There is also the question of how you arrive at the estimate of 6 hectares. Since the people doing the sums all hate the so-called western lifestyle, their estimates have to be taken with a pinch of salt.
Further, there is a serious problem with saying that it is only "fair" that everyone gets the same share. The world currently has 6 billion people but is expected to have around 9 billion by 2050. Meanwhile the British population will probably remain more-or-less the same as today. If you take the "one planet" argument at face value, then you are saying that we in Britain have to reduce our consumption by 33% by 2050 even though we would have been (somewhat) responsible and not contributed billions of new people to the planet. Is this really fair? Someone asked about population during questions after the talk, but Desai completely fobbed it off (apparently this is "controversial"). Perhaps the fair thing to do is to say that for every child that someone has they lose a certain fraction of their "share". This would mean that people who are responsible are not penalised just because other people have decided to be irresponsible.
Desai gave the usual middle class view that the car is the greatest source of evil on the planet. (With cotton being deemed the most damaging crop on the planet.) Indeed he got his only cheers on the night (but there are rarely cheers during this lecture series) when he hammered this anti-car message home, saying their should be no more road building and no more airport expansion. The enthusiasm of the audience for this message was understandable, since the kind of people who attend these lectures are fully paid up members of the anti-car and anti-airplane religious cult. (Of course Desai has a car. But it is only for "fun" and was converted at no doubt great expense to run on fat oil, so that's ok then. It is only people who use their car for work or for shopping who should be hammered. How dare the peasants be independently mobile.) Desai even claimed that car use was responsible for the massive use of Prozac (a novel claim) and the alleged obesity problem (lots of the chattering classes claim this). (One would have thought that a more important factor contributing to Prozac use is that the medical industry profits from pushing drugs on people.)
Instead of claiming that the car is the greatest source of evil on the planet, you would be better placed to claim that having children is the greatest source of evil on the planet. (Well, religion is really the greatest source of evil on the planet, but that is another subject.) If instead of going up to 9 billion people by 2050 we reduced back down to 3 billion (the 1960 level) then the planet would definitely be better off. On this score, for example, the executive director of BioRegional has three children, and that really is totally irresponsible. There is no point going around claiming you can solve the world's environmental problems if you are going to have three (or more) children.
Like most of the middle class, Desai believes we should all source our food and other products "locally" (and as much as possible should be reused or recycled). He gave several examples of how this would lead to much lower CO2 emissions. But he only considered direct CO2 emissions and completely ignored indirect CO2 emissions due to things like land management, production subsidies and taxes and most importantly labour (every pound you pay a worker in turn gets spent on products that have CO2 emissions). So he was not considering the "whole system" sums.
He even went further away from the "whole system" approach when he talked about exports from South Africa. Here he gave figures for the so-called FEET index, which measures the Foreign Exchange Earned per Tonne of CO2 emitted in transporting the product to its market. Needless to say this does not even measure the direct CO2 emissions correctly (since it ignores the emissions of production), never mind the indirect ones. Why bother doing sums if they are misleading?
In spite of not liking cars, Desai was enthusiastic about car clubs, perhaps because he belongs to one. One good thing about car clubs is that they allow greater utilisation of each vehicle. But they lead to less driving, so are obviously not very convenient. Desai considered that to be a good thing. People would only drive the car when it was "necessary" (whatever that means). He also mentioned that he once took a train to Edinburgh and picked up a car club car to go to a business appointment. Well, that is hardly a novel thing to do. In non-middle class circles it's called a rental car.
Back onto his anti-car diatribe, he was enthusiastic about congestion. The more the better, since it would mean people would be encouraged not to use their car. He repeated the usual academic middle class view that there is no point in building new roads since the new roads would just fill up with cars. How dreadful, the government builds things that people use. Of course you can use exactly the same argument about trains (but these people never do). There is no point in adding yet more train capacity and subsidising train journeys ever more since it just means that London commuters will live further and further from work (because they have successfully externalised some of the cost of their journey).
On the UK CO2 emissions front, Desai at least took a better view than most people. The UK has around 12.5% lower CO2 emissions now compared with 1990 (the Kyoto baseline year). Much of this is due to the "dash to gas" (away from coal). But Desai correctly pointed out that much of it was also due to the UK exporting its CO2 emissions abroad. This is because if you buy a product from abroad, you should be deemed responsible for the CO2 emissions that went into making and transporting it, not the country of origin. (This is one of the fatal flaws of the Kyoto Treaty, it does not do the accounting correctly.) Desai estimated that the UK currently exports around 20% of its CO2 emissions (and that figure is growing).
The UK government is going to require all new homes built from 2016 to be "zero carbon". Only apparently it has not defined what it means to be "zero carbon". Well, whatever definition it uses, it will be more false accounting, since it will not consider the CO2 emitted in the building and maintenance of the housing. It seems that some in government want a house to be deemed "zero carbon" only if all its energy requirements are met by on-site (so-called) renewable energy sources. Desai was against this approach, because it was false accounting. Wind energy is one of the flavour-of-the-month renewable energy sources. B&Q sell some kit for around £1500. Well depending on how much wind you have where you install your turbine you might only save around £100 per year in electricity bills (or less). (Of course that also depends on how much normal electricity costs.) So that would be a 15 year payback time. But that completely ignores maintenance. Apparently this kit is supposed to have a service every 6 months at a cost of £400 (surely that must be wrong??). And on the biomass front, in BedZED, for example, apparently the CHP (Combined Heat and Power) plant was not doing as well as had been planned. The bottom line was that Desai believed that some energy in "zero carbon" homes must be produced off-site.
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