Category Archives: courier

Happiness is a team sport

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Courier article – posted here two weeks after publication.
I wonder how many people on Mersea were closely following the fortunes of the England team in the World Cup. By the time this gets published we’ll know who has won it this year. Personally I’d like it if a country that has never won it before wins the prize – so Holland or Spain – but the form of the German team (playing their semi-final tonight as I write this) is ominous.

Before watching the England-Germany game – for which I didn’t entertain much hope, although I thought we’d limit it to a 3-1 defeat – I was watching the BBC build-up, and there was an interview with Boris Becker, where he said (rather smugly, it must be admitted) “football is a team sport, and Germany has the better team”. It was annoying to admit it, but he was right. Doubtless there are all sorts of long-term reasons why England doesn’t do well at international tournaments but the sight of our players doing their best to impersonate cranially-challenged poultry was unnerving. I’m sure that Capello’s slavish adherence to 4-4-2 had something to do with it, but….

There was another bit of feedback from the victorious Germans after the match. Thomas Muller – who scored twice against us – said “”It is difficult to have so many ‘alpha males’ and have them row in the same direction. You don’t only need chiefs, you also need a few Indians. You need people who are willing to do the hard work. It may be a problem with England that players are simply not mentally prepared to go that extra mile for their team-mates.” It was annoying to admit it, but he was right.

Football is a team sport. It doesn’t matter how many ‘new Maradonas’ or ‘new Zidanes’ a team might have – if they don’t work together, if they don’t have a common purpose, if they are not prepared to make personal sacrifices in pursuit of a larger goal – then they will fail. The failures will be both individual and corporate. The team of brilliant individuals will always lose out to the team of lesser talents prepared to work together.

The great French philosopher Albert Camus once wrote “After many years during which I saw many things, what I know most surely about morality and the duty of man I owe to sport and learned it in the RUA” – the RUA being his football team, for whom he kept goal. It is, in truth, not a complicated lesson to learn. If we look after each other, and work for the common good, then everyone benefits.

This doesn’t just apply to leisure pursuits like football. It applies to every sphere of our lives, and in our context of increasing economic misery, it will apply most of all to the fundamental matters of life – having enough to eat, having a roof over our head, having clothes for our children to wear. If we look after each other, and work for the common good, then everyone benefits.

When exploring the context of our contemporary crises – of economic collapse, resource exhaustion, wars and the rumours of wars – I am very struck by the way in which the best-informed commentators continually return to one basic truth. There are so many things that can be done to help prepare people for what is coming – getting out of debt, learning to grow our own food, investing in alternative energy – but the single most important thing is to build up a community. This is because a community working together can withstand a very great deal more than a loose collection of individuals all looking out for their own interests.

Which is one of the blessings that Mersea enjoys. Partly – but not just – because of the geographical accident of being an island, Mersea does have a community identity, and we need to do as much as we can to support and foster it. There are many ways in which that can be done – and I’ll return to what they are in later columns – but one way is to be involved with, and supportive of, the West Mersea Mayor and Council, and the work that they do. In an ideal world the local council would have much more authority within Mersea than they presently enjoy – and Colchester Borough, and Essex County, and, indeed, Whitehall and Westminster would all have much less – but it will take some time for rationality to break through the entrenched bureaucracy. In the meantime we need to work with what we’ve got and work as constructively and co-operatively as we can. If we don’t hang together, we will most assuredly hang separately.

Our common future will only be reached collaboratively. That is, our happiness is a team sport, and if we look after each other, and work for the common good, then everyone benefits.

The future is not what it was

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A Courier article – published here 2 weeks after publication in the paper itself.

I write this on the day that Mr Osborne has raised the rate of VAT to 20%. This is necessary, we are to understand, because without that extra income, the budget will not balance and the country will go bankrupt. Sadly, barring a miracle, I don’t see any way in which some form of bankruptcy can be avoided. Now, before I go further, I should say: this is going to be a very depressing article, so don’t read it until you’re in a robustly positive frame of mind (that, or quite convinced, with me, that the Rector’s reckoning can be wrong).

OK.

The future that we face over the next, say, eighteen months to five years, is one of financial depression, specifically deflation. Why do I say this? Well, let us begin by pondering some figures – these are in TRILLIONS of US dollars:

World gross product per year: 55
Total value of global issued currency: 65
Total value of world stock markets: 100
Total value of world real estate: 125
(So far so good, now for the kicker)
Total value of financial derivatives: 1600

Financial derivatives are all those complicated things we’ve heard about on the news over the last few years, like ‘sub-prime mortgages’ and ‘credit default swaps’. The simple conclusion from the above figures is that the financial world has long-since lost touch with the real world of tangible wealth. There simply isn’t enough real wealth corresponding to all the financial obligations that have now been entered into. To put this in simpler, more graphic terms – imagine the amount of wealth in the world as a cake. What the comparatively recent explosion in nominal financial wealth has done is to give a great many different people legal claims to the same bit of cake. On paper, the financial world says that we have a great many cakes – unfortunately there is only the one.

What this means is that the financial system is irretrievably bankrupt. Over the next few years we are going to see something called ‘deleveraging’ – in essence, all the debts are going to be called in. In Warren Buffett’s famous image, ‘we’re going to watch the tide go out and find out who has been swimming without their trunks on’. We are in what I think of as a ‘Wile E Coyote moment’ – remember the great Looney Tunes character, who sprints after the road runner over the edge of the cliff, and manages to keep running on thin air until the moment that he looks down?

Our political leadership has been committed to keeping the show on the road for as long as possible – or at least for long enough to ensure that the movers and shakers are able to get some measure of safety for themselves, eg with the bonuses still being given to Goldman Sachs and other bankers – but they are rapidly running out of options. What we are going to end up living through is a severe contraction of the money supply, what the economists call deflation. Most people are familiar with inflation – the price of everthing goes up – but we’re less familiar with deflation. It sounds at first like a good thing – the price of everything goes down – but the problem is that in a deflation our ability to pay goes down faster. It won’t matter if the average shopping bill comes down to £50 a week rather than £80 if the impact of unemployment and bankruptcies now means that families can only afford to pay £30 rather than £75.

We have been here before – in the 1930s most spectacularly – and the consequences are frightening. One way to get a handle on what it means is to consider real interest rates. If a bank charges a 5% interest rate, and inflation is running at 2%, then the real interest rate is 3% (bank charge minus inflation). However, in a time of deflation, the cost of money could become very high (with consequent damage to the economy) even when the nominal rate of interest is low, or zero (eg bank rate of 1%, deflation of -3% gives a real rate of 4% – the two negatives become a positive). Governments who try to stimulate activity in this context are ‘pushing on a string’, with just as much effect (look at Japan’s recent history). In this context, the very worst place to be is in debt, because the real value of the debt will increase rapidly. That applies especially to mortgages, as the nominal price of housing is likely to plummet leaving a great many people with massive negative equity.

Thomas Hardy once wrote, ‘If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst’ (but see here). I’ve only skimmed over the nature of our financial crisis in this article – those who want to explore the background for this post might like to visit a blog site called ‘The Automatic Earth‘ which is where I got the figures from. There is a very great deal that people can do to prepare for these and the other crises that are accumulating around us, linked to the Transition process – but I’ll have to give the positive side in another article.

Diamonds and Pearls

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(A Courier article)

I’ve been talking a little bit about values – about how we value the world and the many wonderful things in it – and about how to understand what theologians call ‘idolatry’, which is simply what happens when we get our priorities wrong. I want this week to talk about some of the pressures that lead us to get our values muddled, and to do that I want to share talk about diamonds.

Everybody knows that diamonds are a girl’s best friend. Everybody also knows that they are a girl’s best friend because they are incredibly valuable, and can be counted on to remain committed to the girl even if the boy ups and leaves. Why, though, are diamonds valuable? After all, they are basically just a stone, a rock, something that is dug up from the ground. Yes, when they are cut and polished they can look very pretty, but why should that make them valuable? Yes, they are extremely hard, and therefore useful in industrial processes (and industrial processes can now manufacture diamonds at will), but why should that make them valuable? Most of all, why are diamonds seen as more valuable than rubies and emeralds and sapphires – all at least as beautiful, and in fact much rarer.

The simple answer is: Advertising. In 1947 an advertising agency working for De Beers (who used to control over 80% of the diamond market – imagine Murdoch controlling not just Sky and the Times but BBC, ITV, the Daily Mirror and even our humble Courier and you get an idea of how dominant De Beers was) came up with a new advertising slogan, “A Diamond is Forever”, and began to associate the purchase of diamonds with the idea of eternal love. All the talk about ‘how to make one month’s salary last a lifetime’ and how to show the seriousness of your love for your fiancee – all this was created for marketing purposes. After all, why should the giving of a clear lump of carbon symbolise love? Why couldn’t it be rubies (red for the heart)? Or something else completely different, like the keys to a house, or a portrait, or a meal?

My point here is simply that the cultural significance of diamonds is something that was created, and created not all that long ago. Yes, there is some intrinsic value to a diamond, but not much, and certainly not as much as our culture gives. In other words, I see diamonds as a perfect example of the way in which our values can be distorted by wordly pressures. We as individuals value diamonds because our culture as a whole has accepted the advertising slogans about diamonds. It’s all an illusion.

Of course, it isn’t just with diamonds that we go along with peer pressure and value what other people value. It applies to what we eat and how we dress, how we travel and how we entertain ourselves. We do it with most of our choices, and doing so actually makes life easier and more convenient for everyone. Imagine what it would be like if there were no shared values! There wouldn’t be much of a community left. Yet alongside the positive ‘social glue’ there is the danger that who we are, who we are meant to be, gets squashed by the majority.

For in the end, if we simply go along with the crowd, we stand to lose all that is most essential in our own lives. We gain the world, but lose our own soul. When Jesus talks about this, he uses the language of ‘living in the Kingdom’. He said “the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of great price, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.” (Matthew 13.45) In other words, rather than simply going with the flow, and accepting the values that the wider society have given to us, finding heaven involves finding the one thing that needs to be given a higher value than anything else in our lives. Once we have that in place – and we can give up everything else in order to get it – then we get everything else as well, in its proper place. We see the world clearly, and we have our lives in proportion.

I believe that our present way of life has rather too much of diamonds, and not enough of pearls. We have accepted certain things as having a very high value – such as economic growth and technological progress – but we have ended up giving them too much value. As a result, we are destroying the ecological basis for our existence, and losing our humanity in the process. We need to recover a proper sense of priorities, and remember what it means to be human.

You can’t always get what you want

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I have to say I’ve been rather impressed with our shiny new Con-Dem Nation. It seems to be an example of grown-up politics, of rolling up sleeves and hammering out an agreement with which neither side is totally happy but with which (hopefully) both sides can live for the next five years. In other words, it seems that both sides have got their priorities in proper proportion – which brings me to what I want to say this week.

Last time out I talked about Phineas Gage, the man with the hole in his head who lost all capacity for judgement, and I promised to say a little bit more about how this fits in to a Christian world view. Everyone has a hierarchy of values, it’s impossible to be human and not have a sense of some things being more important that others. As Mr Zimmerman once sang “You’ve gotta serve somebody.”

Where people articulate and express their values then we can talk about what they worship, which is simply how we orient ourselves to what we see as most valuable. For the faithful, God is the single most important thing in life. Moreover, we also believe that if God is at the centre then everything else falls into its proper place – in other words, everything is given a proper place, neither overvalued nor undervalued.

So how do theologians describe the ways in which, from a Christian point of view, values can be distorted? Where the value system is severely distorted then theologians use the word idolatry to describe it. This is when one thing within the world becomes the most important thing in a person’s world and everything else has to shift around it. It might be an absolutely dedicated football fan who has to go to every match that their team plays. It might be getting obsessive about a television serial and insist on watching every episode no matter what else is happening. (Once you have grasped what this is you can see it in all sorts of surprising places).

Idolatry can be understood in parallel with addiction – eg a drug addict – where the wider richness of life gets drained out and all that the junkie can do is think about their next fix. They gear their life around getting the money to get their next high. That is a very good image of what idolatry is (it doesn’t have to be a physical addiction, it can be a mental addiction as well). An important truth about idols is that idols give what they promise. If an idol is worshipped, the idol will grant the worshippers’ requests. Heroin, to take that example, does give a tremendous high – it gives what it promises – but it takes away life in exchange. That is what an idol is. Mammon, for example, the god of money or wealth (an idol which Jesus talks about which is still very prevalent in our society) – if you worship mammon, if you structure your life around mammon, you will gain wealth. That is a spiritual, practical law, if you worship wealth, you will become wealthy. The kick is that you will lose your life in the process. Your life will be drained away. For what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world but forfeit his soul?

For most people, however, it’s not as clear as this and in practice you have polytheism, many gods. It might be – “my family has this much importance, my work has this much importance, my friendships have this much importance, my pleasures in life, this has this much importance and there is nothing beyond them”. This is where most people actually live, navigating between different competing interests, muddling along, but there is nothing which integrates them. There is nothing which puts them all in their proper place and actually allows them to flourish fully, to be fully human. Another option is simply chaos. This is the position that Phineas Gage ended up in. He was driven by the momentary impulse; rather like the dogs in ‘Up’ whenever a squirrel is mentioned, the dogs just forgot what they’re doing and concentrate on the squirrel.

So at the core of a religious tradition like Christianity lies a commitment to valuing the world properly. This is why there is such an insistence upon truth, for it is the truth that makes us free. Learning a faith is all about getting things in proper proportion, learning to see the world as it truly is – as God has intended and created it. A different way of putting this is to say: only the holy can see truly, it is only the saints who can see the world clearly. In so far as our hearts are set on God then we see the truth. If we don’t have our hearts set on God and God alone then our vision of the world is more or less distorted. As Jesus put it: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

Next time – a bit more on idolatry, and how understanding it illuminates our cultural predicament.

Hard choices, and a hole in the head

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In the rather cheesy disaster-fest “The Day After Tomorrow” there is a very dramatic moment when the hero draws a line across the middle of the United States and tells the President ‘evacuate everyone South of this line’. The President asks, ‘what about the people to the North?’ ‘It’s too late for them’ comes the reply. Now, I happen to think that this film is even more implausible than most, but what this scene does is exemplify the nature of a hard choice. Sometimes we are forced to make a decision between different outcomes – to choose the least worst from a series of bad options (a bit like the general election perhaps). What comes to the fore in such situations is that we reveal what it is that we value the most and, most importantly, what we value expresses who we are. In a context of declining energy resources, who will we choose to be?

I would like to talk about an obscure railroad foreman from the nineteenth century by the name of Phineas Gage. Gage was working in the Vermont area clearing land for the building of a new railroad when he had a rather dramatic accident – a tamping rod (used in the controlled explosions) was propelled up through his head, entering just below the eye and leaving through the top of his skull. Those who were with him thought that it must have been a fatal accident, but Gage survived. That is, the physical form of Gage survived, for following the accident his personality seemed to be completely different. Whereas previously he had been sober and responsible, now he couldn’t hold down a job and was delinquent and uncouth. He ended up being part of PT Barnum’s travelling circus, where he was exhibited – with the tamping rod – as a modern miracle.

According to a modern neuro-scientist’s reconstruction, what had happened to Gage was that his capacity to exercise judgement had been destroyed. Consider what happens in a game of chess. There are a vast number of moves that are possible at any one point in the game and a competent player will immediately discount some of those moves as being ones likely to cause a defeat. Unlike with a computer, this is very rarely done on the basis of a full analysis of all the permutations that might follow (our brains are not that efficient); rather it is done on the basis of a judgement about what constitutes good and bad moves. That is, we react emotionally to certain outcomes and rule them out.

In the same way, in order to function in our normal, daily human lives we have to exercise judgement regularly, from when we get up in the morning, through all our daily interactions and deciding when to go to bed. Without that capacity to judge and decide we relinquish something essential. The particular area of the brain that was damaged in Gage related to the ability of the brain to process information from the body, especially the viscera – in other words, our emotional reactions. What seems to be happening in some neuro-scientific circles today is a return to the classical understanding of human understandings and cognition – that our emotions are an essential part of the process, that they are the means by which we evaluate information and make decisions.

This is where the great religious traditions of the world come in. For each religious tradition might be better characterised as a ‘wisdom tradition’, that is, they are ways of educating people’s emotions so that they can make better decisions. This starts very simply, such as in teaching children to delay gratification – ‘if you eat up your supper you can get pudding’ – or with adults, ‘if you work hard for three years you will get a degree and a better job’. It expands to include all the language of virtues and vices, that is, how to cultivate in ourselves things like courage, honesty, patience, self-control, tolerance and so on. Essentially, all the things that make for a good society flow from emotional maturity.

Sadly, in our society, this truth was obscured by the Enlightenment perspective that reason and emotion are necessarily opposed, and that the path to Enlightenment lay in repressing and controlling our emotions wherever possible (and, as a corollary, that religion was all about emotionality, fit only for women and children, not the hard-headed strong rationality exhibited by manly men.) This had the sad result that we lost our ability to judge what is good and what is not. As a society we handed over our ability to assess good and evil to the scientists – who are, of course, so very rational – and now we are in a situation where the scientists say ‘if we carry on like this we are doomed’ – and we lack the emotional maturity to respond to this information correctly. As a civilisation, we are like poor Phineas Gage – once we knew who we were, and were competent and capable. Now we are a circus exhibit, fit only for a world of reality TV and game shows. How to get out of this predicament – and where our historic Christian faith has something to say – I will start to explain next time.

Are humans smarter than yeast?

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Imagine the classic scientist’s petri dish, in which is growing a culture of yeast. Some sugar is introduced into the dish, and the yeast thinks ‘food!’ – so the yeast population expands as it gorges on the sugar. Sadly, there are bounds to the petri dish, and the amount of sugar is limited. The yeast population expands rapidly, bumps into the limits to growth, and then collapses. For the yeast, think of human population; for the sugar, think of fossil fuels; for the boundaries of the petri dish, think of the earth. Put simply, the problem faced by the yeast, and the problem faced by the human community on earth, is the same – exponential growth cannot continue for ever in a finite space. Human society is facing a similar situation, and the only question is – can we do better than the yeast?

Exponential growth occurs whenever something grows at a constant rate – for example, an economy that is growing at 5% a year. So if we begin with 100 widgets of production, and our production grows by 5% then after 1 year we will have 105 widgets. If the growth continues then after another year we will have 110.25 widgets. After another year we will have 115.7625 widgets. Notice that the amount added on increases each time – 5 widgets in the first year, 5 and a quarter in the second year, five and a half in the third year. That is because the underlying quantity has increased. So exponential growth is not simply adding on a fixed amount each year, it is adding on an increasing amount each year.

The interesting thing about exponential growth, and what makes it so marvellous and miraculous and devastating, is something called ‘doubling time’. When a certain percentage of growth is maintained over time then we can expect the underlying quantity to double at a particular rate. For example, if growth is maintained at 7.5% a year then the underlying quantity will double (approximately) every ten years. Which brings us to the famous tale of the chessboard and the king. The tale goes – and it is entirely apocryphal so it has been told many ways – that a great inventor gave the king a chess set. The king was greatly pleased with the gift and asked the inventor what he would like as a reward. The inventor asked that a grain of rice be placed on the first square, two grains of rice on the second, four on the third, eight on the fourth and so on round all the 64 squares of the chessboard, doubling each time, and that he be given the total quantity of rice that would end up on the board. The king readily agreed and asked his treasurer to dispense the rice. After taking some time to work out how much this would be, the treasurer told the king that it amounted to more rice than was available in the whole world – at which point the king decided the inventor was more trouble than he was worth and had his head chopped off.

When a population embarks upon exponential growth in response to a sudden abundance of food ecologists call it ‘overshoot’. In a situation of temporary abundance (the food supply for the yeast) there is a short period of exponential growth leading to a population explosion (lots more yeast); once the temporary abundance has been exhausted then there is a crash while the system returns to an equilibrium (a very small part of the yeast population survives). The human population of the earth has been growing exponentially, and the numbers have exploded through the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. However, just as with the yeast, exponential growth cannot go on forever and it will come to an end.

This is not a new insight. It was first popularised through work sponsored by the Club of Rome in the early 1970’s and published as ‘The Limits to Growth’. This was a work that was more misunderstood and maligned than actually read and considered. However, time has shown the essential insights of that report to be correct. The conclusion of the report was that, if nothing was done to amend the path that our culture had embarked upon then, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, our economy would start to hit the ecological resource limits and further growth would be prevented. In other words, around about now.

The best way to understand this is to think about physical economic growth as a cancer. Just as a tumour is a part of a body which is growing rapidly, without any regard to the health of the wider organism, so too is exponential growth of our physical economy something which will destroy the wider human and planetary ecology on which it depends. If we continue to pursue economic growth at all costs, then a fate very much like that of the yeast in the petri dish awaits us. Can we do better than the yeast? (Something to ponder at this time of a general election, when politicians promises to restore “growth”).

To my mind, the predicament we face is not a practical problem requiring practical solutions, but a challenge to our values. We need to work out what it is that we really want to preserve in our society, and what we are prepared to do without. This is an essentially spiritual task. More on that in the next issue.

The only way is down

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Some of you may have noticed that Richard Branson was part of an industry task force that recently released a report on the dangers of ‘Peak Oil’ – something that will make the financial crisis the equivalent of a ‘little local difficulty’. Personally speaking I’m glad that the message is finally breaking through to the powers that be. Readers with a long memory might remember that I wrote about this in the Courier back in December of 2005!

Consider the supply of oil from the UK fields in the North Sea:

(Production had a dip in the mid-1980s for two reasons: the collapse in the oil price and the Piper Alpha disaster.)

UK production of oil began in 1975, hit a maximum rate of flow (the ‘peak’) in 1999 and has been declining ever since. Since 2006 the UK has been a net importer of oil – we had gone from being a major exporter to an importer in seven years (this is very significant, and I’ll come back to this issue in a later article) – and as a consequence our balance-of-payments as a nation has been crippled, yet one more example of the financial black hole that our country is presently in.

The real trouble is that this issue of an oil-field beginning production, increasing to a peak, and then inexorably declining with malign consequences, isn’t something that only applies to the UK. The US went through the same situation in 1970. For them, it meant losing control of the oil market, ceding that control to OPEC, and living through the consequent energy crises of the 1970’s. In fact, of some 65 nations who produce oil, around 54 have now passed their peak. The real question then is: at what point will oil supply for the world peak? Sadly, the answer to that is ’round about now’ – the world is now in roughly the place that the UK was in in the late 1990s. There is more oil being produced than ever before, and if we simply use the past as a guide to the future, then all seems rosy. Sadly, nature doesn’t allow oil to be extracted forever. There is a limited amount, and we are facing a future with much less available.

What does it actually mean on the ground? Well, to explain Peak Oil to people that have never heard of it before I like to develop an analogy. Let’s say that a new pub opens on Mersea, and this pub has a wonderful new beer selling for £1 a pint. They haven’t done any publicity, so on the opening night, only one person comes along. Of course, he thinks this is marvellous, and so the next night he brings a friend. The next night, they both bring friends; the night after, they all bring friends. The pub is a success! Demand for this wonderful beer is increasing. However, success brings its own problems. There comes a point when the demand for pints is greater than the publican is able to supply. At that point there are realistically only three possibilities:

1. the publican puts the price up, which helps to reduce demand to a manageable level;
2. the publican sets up a rationing system – you can all have two pints each; or
3. the customers start fighting to get to the bar.

This is the situation that we face. We have seen 1) in the price of oil going up to almost $150 a barrel in 2008 – not an insignificant factor in our present recession. We have also seen 3) in the occupation of Iraq and various other realpolitik manoeuvrings by China in particular. In reality, especially after the fuel-tax protests of 2000, the government has already put plans in place with regard to 2) which we are likely to hear much more about over the next decade.

What Peak Oil means is that the supply of oil will first become expensive, and then become scarce. This will have a major impact upon most facets of our lives. Take a moment to think about what you have done today, and then think about how oil has enabled certain things to happen. From the clothes that we wear, to the toothpaste we clean our teeth with, to the food on our breakfast table, to the transport we so often take for granted, oil is the necessary underpinning for our contemporary society. All of this is at risk. The transport sector is the most vulnerable, but the ripples from the peaking of the oil supply extend much more widely.

The US government commissioned a report on Peak Oil which was published in 2005. The exact date of the peak is a matter of controversy – not least because it would have a major impact on the share prices of oil companies, and others – so the researchers were not asked to talk about when Peak Oil would happen, only what the implications were. The report said this: “The world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and long-lasting. Previous energy transitions (wood to coal and coal to oil) were gradual and evolutionary; oil peaking will be abrupt and discontinuous.”

So: what is to be done? More on that in the next issue.

Bradwell: the wrong answer to the wrong question

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(I’ve started writing articles for the local paper. They’ll be posted here a little while after being published.)

One of the issues on Mersea at the moment is the proposed installation of new nuclear reactors at Bradwell, just across the water. This has raised a lot of strong emotions. But why is the government looking to build new nuclear power stations? The simple reason is that it has belatedly realised that we have entered into an energy crisis and, if it doesn’t build new power stations, a lot of people will be trying to function without electricity in the near future.

Ponder this graph:

This shows the amount of nuclear generating capacity that is expected to go ‘off-line’ over the next decade or so. Simply to maintain a power supply equivalent to what we have today we need to find some 8 Giga-watts (GW) of generation capacity (from a total of around 56GW nationally). Of course, the ‘equivalent to what we have today’ understates the issue. We are facing an energy crunch from several different directions: coal plants (the majority of our generation capacity) are being forced to close down due to EU regulations; the oil supply has almost certainly peaked – hence the price rises – and will become progressively more expensive and scarce; and the same applies to gas, although on a slightly later scale. For comparison, the Gunfleet Sands wind farm that we can see from the beach (phase one) has a maximum capacity of 0.1GW.

Even if we ignore the problematic nature of depending on fossil fuels over the coming years, we are facing a shortfall of generating capacity. This is why the Government indicated in 2006 that they would look to build some new nuclear power stations, as part of the requirement to generate some 25GW of new capacity.

Now, there are many issues associated with establishing new nuclear capacity. BANNG have rehearsed many reasons why Bradwell is the wrong answer to the predicament that we face. My concern, however, is that the wrong question is being asked. Essentially the government is trying to work out a way of continuing business as usual, and this, frankly, is daft. Two principal reasons for why:

First, our present energy infrastructure is built around centralised generation of electricity, which is then distributed through the national grid to homes and industry. Taken as a whole (from energy source to eventual use) this is incredibly inefficient, and is only possible in the context of cheap and abundant fossil fuels. In the context of scarce and expensive energy, the future forms that power generation will take will be both more local and more resilient. For example, Woking has been a pioneer in establishing combined heat and power systems and Mersea is not too small to explore doing something similar. It would certainly be a more reasonable course of action than complaining about both the development of nuclear and windpower at the same time!

Second, there is the proverbial snowball’s chance in hell that we will be able to maintain our present, high-energy lifestyle. This is why the Transition Town process (Transition Island in Mersea’s case!) is so very important. We need, as individuals and even more as a community, to begin to prepare for energy descent – a context within which energy will be both scarcer and much more expensive than it is now. This doesn’t have to be a frightening prospect, rather the opposite. We will be growing much more of our own food, using much more human-powered transport, and enjoying much more human-scale and homegrown entertainment. What we will not have very much of are things like private cars or homes warm enough to wear just T-shirts in the middle of winter.

The real question for us is about what we are going to prioritise. What are the things that are really important for us, that are worth fighting for? What, on the other hand, are we prepared to do without?

Personally speaking, I believe that the government has woken up a little too late to do anything substantial the energy crisis (although I hope I’m wrong), and for that reason we probably won’t be faced with a new nuclear power station at Bradwell. We simply won’t be able to afford one (and bear in mind that nuclear power has never yet turned a profit). Yet that will be a very literal cold comfort when we face a harsh winter again, and people find that they are unable to heat their homes. If we are to face our energy constrained future honestly then we need to focus much more closely on preparations now – such as ensuring that homes are properly insulated, that, wherever possible, we have passive solar hot water supplies installed, and so on.

I plan over the coming issues to explore aspects of this energy crisis in more depth. Next time: an explanation of ‘Peak Oil’ and why it matters.