Last month I was walking around a large branch of Marks & Spencer, the clothing retailer which for many years has also sold housewares and food. The customer profile of the store is predominantly people aged 55-75, so born sometime between 1936-1956, and in their twenties 1956-1985. Thus, I guess that it was unsurprising that the music playing in the store was from the late 1960s which falls pretty much in the period when the bulk of the customers were aware of the popular music scene or those songs were still lingering on radio play lists. Currently it seems to fit with the styles in the store. Much of the women's wear is based on 1970s styles, making the wearers resemble the character of Margot from 'The Good Life' (1975-8) but in homewares a lot of crockery has a more style and especially iconography of the mid-1960s, with lots of emphasis on London, the kind of thing you might expect to see in Mrs. Peel's flat in 'The Avengers' (1961-9; Peel era: 1965-8). Of course, not everyone in there was over 55, but interestingly there is a lot of cross-generational shopping groups, notably mothers shopping with daughters and quite often with grandchild too.
Anyway, I was walking around browsing to the sounds of 'Waterloo Sunset' (1967) by The Kinks and then 'In The Year 2525' (1968; though it did not chart until 1969/70) by Zager and Evans, a real oddity of 1960s pop music which rather jarred with the jolly crockery and summer shades of clothing. However, I guess it is supposed to be background music rather than you actually paying attention to it. It is interesting how the record has endured despite its very bleak message. The record was produced by Denny Zager and Rick Evans from Nebraska along with Dave Trupp and Mark Dalton, collectively known as Zager and Evans. It was written in 1964 and recorded in 1968 but it took over a year to get into the charts, but reach number 1 in the USA and the UK. By 1970 the single had sold over 4 million copies and to date it has sold 10 million. It effectively became a 'one-hit wonder' as the follow-up single, 'Mr. Turnkey' was too bleak for customers to stomach being about about a rapist who nails his own wrists to a prison cell wall.
I accept that 'In The Year 2525' probably fitted in with the futuristic feel of the period, it reached the top of the US charts at the time the manned mission arrived on the Moon. However, it is a bleak pondering of the future of mankind, and, as one might expect from two men who met at the Nebraska Wesleyan University, it actually has religious aspects to it. I doubt that many listeners actually considered the lyrics very deeply and that like 'Spirit In The Sky' (1969) by Norman Greenbaum with its clearly Christian message and 'My Sweet Lord' (1970), the George Harrison version, the only Hare Krishna focused song ever to enter the charts (to my knowledge) the distinctiveness of the music simply carries the listerner along.
'In The Year 2525' is an example of how to draw the listener in. It starts very slowly with the vocalist's voice dominant: 'In the year 2525/ if man is still alive / and if woman can survive / they may find ...' (the year is said as 'twenty-five, twenty-five'), then for the rest of the song until the conclusion, it moves through at a break-neck speed, jumping from century to century pondering all the problems that man is likely to bring down on himself. Given that it was written in 1964, it is pretty much ahead of its time. I have read magazines from 1964 in which the damage to the ozone layer from CFCs in aerosols was warned about but it was 5-10 years before environmental concerns.
It is not unusual for heavy metal and goth bands to record bleak songs, it is far more atypical for a pretty mainstream (though to the fringes of this, I accept) rock band to go with such a song. It has been re-recorded by artists such as gothic Fields of the Nephilim, industrial Laibach, techno new romantics Visage, German electronic Project Pitchfork and kind of indie Ian Brown. I do wonder what those versions sound like. It would be interesting to find out as a different arrangement may not work because it lacked the operatic-style fast-paced drive of the original.
It is probably easiest if I lay out the entire lyrics and then comment on parts in turn.
In the year 2525
If man is still alive
If woman can survive
They may find...
In the year 3535
Ain't gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies
Everything you think, do, and say
Is in the pill you took today
In the year 4545
Ain't gonna need your teeth, won't need your eyes
You won't find a thing chew
Nobody's gonna look at you
In the year 5555
Your arms are hanging limp at your sides
Your legs not got nothing to do
Some machine is doing that for you
In the year 6565
Ain't gonna need no husband, won't need no wife
You'll pick your son, pick your daughter too
From the bottom of a long glass tube
In the year 7510
If God's a-comin' he ought to make it by then
Maybe he'll look around himself and say
'Guess it's time for the Judgement day'In the year 8510
God is gonna shake his mighty head
He'll either say 'I'm pleased where man has been'
Or tear it down and start again
In the year 9595
I'm kinda wondering if man is gonna be alive
He's taken everything this old earth can give
And he ain't put back nothing
Now it's been 10,000 years
Man has cried a billion tears
For what he never knew
Now man's reign is through
But through the eternal night
The twinkling of starlight
So very far away
Maybe it's only yesterday
In the year 2525
If man is still alive
If woman can survive
They may find
In the year 3535
Ain't gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies
Everything you think, do or say
Is in the pill you took today ... [fade]
The song was written by Evans. Many of the concerns are ones that we can identify as being part of 20th century science fiction. The idea of a pill to give you your opinions is pretty much like 'better a gram than a damn' from 'Brave New World' (1932) by Aldous Huxley which is set in the year 2540. Similarly that novel features children being grown in test tubes such as in the 'long glass tube' mentioned for 6565. Commentators note that such concepts were not commonly discussed among the public at the time. However, the book had sold well internationally and had been dramatised on CBS radio in the USA in 1956. In addition, remember that Evans and Zager were university students in the early 1960s so would have been exposed, like many US teenagers and students to the extensive range of 'pulp' science fiction magazines of the time and science fiction novels and short stories. The belief that, in the future that robots would take over so many chores was one that endured right through the 1960s and 1970s, so the sense of us becoming limp as robots did everything for us was again, a not overly-challenging suggestion.
What is interesting is how already, in Zager and Evans's lifetimes so many of these things have become true. If we think of Prozac and how many people have been prescribed it in the USA a country long obsessed with correcting the mental health of people. Test-tube babies became a reality by the late 1970s and now we are even cloning sheep. These things have been happening decades rather than centuries after the song. Whilst household robots have not appeared, the 'limpness' of the human body is with us, notably in the USA where in 2009 all states had between 19-30% of their populations deemed to be obese, rather than simply overweight. On average this means about something like 75 million Americans are obese. The general comment about man taking out of the Earth and not putting back in, touches on the kind of environmental damage we have been witnessing for centuries, but notably through the late 19th century and the 20th century and is still continuing as flooding, global warming and acid rain show.
The song slows down for what is the final verse before the reprise. It suggests that man will eliminate himself as the 'reigning' species. It leaves it open whether God will clear it away instead. From 7510 onwards God is shown considering whether to have judgement day. It is interesting he ponders this for anothet two centuries, though I guess if you are eternal this is not very long. I tend to envisage this rather than the Second Coming, something more like the Flood. God promised humans that he would not repeat this, but the suggestion in the song is that humankind has so wasted the gift of Earth that it all needs to be cleaned out like a sewer.
I know this is only a pop song and not a philosophical consideration of the future of humankind. However, it fascinates me that a song which rather than portraying fun or love but rather questions consumerism and technology and how this interacts with religion could be chart-topping. It also seems a very ironic song to be playing in a shop which is pandering to consumerism, trying to get people to buy more and more. I know Marks & Spencer tries to avoid exploitative production of its items and waste of the World's resources, but it is part of a consumerist system which actually is rapidly draining out so much. I do wonder, sometimes if we will survive to 2125 let alone the year 2525.
Showing posts with label environmental issues. Show all posts
Showing posts with label environmental issues. Show all posts
Monday, 11 April 2011
Wednesday, 9 June 2010
Annual Utility Bills: No Incentive to Be Economical
It has been a while since I have moaned about UK utility companies, but then I received my water bill. In the old days, i.e. before the 1990s, you paid a flat rate for water consumption based on the size of the house. This meant that large families packed into small houses benefited and single old people tended to lose out. Then with the privatisation of water companies in 1989 many of the numerous water companies began to compel tenants and new owners of houses to have water meters fitted. They generally set the tariffs far too high and in the early 1990s there was a rocketing in the number of people having their water cut off, mainly these families who had benefited under the flat rate system, many had to wash at relatives' houses and there was a disproportionate impact on the hygeine of children. The regulator set up in 1989, OFWAT, the coloquial name for what since 2006 has been Water Services Regulation Authority, reined in these extremes, and to a great extent most of us have become used to water metering. In many areas, like where I currently live, rather than water supply and sewage being handled by the same body they are now covered by two different companies. Where I used to live there was one company for both and the sewage charge was 10% of the water charge. Where I am now the sewage charge was initially set at 108% of the water charge and now that I have been here more than a year it has fallen to 95% of the water charge. Basically I am paying for all water I use, twice, even if I tip the water on to the grass or down someone else's drain.
The difference between water meters and gas and electricity meters is that as a consumer you cannot read a water meter yourself. Recently combined the charge for my gas and electricity was raised by £25 per month, and I received a statement that my consumption of both had risen. I accepted, given the snowy winter that consumption of gas had gone up but given that we had switched off one of the two refrigerators we had in the house, I found it difficult to accept that we had been using more electricity. I contacted the supplier and sent in my own readings. The revised bill showed a fall of £25 per month over what I had been paying for both fuels combined last year, so about £50 less per month than I would have been charged if I had not challenged the bill, so saving up to £600 per year. It turned out that because we had moved from a set pattern of heating during the winter and only switched it on and off when we felt cold, our consumption of gas had actually fallen, despite the snow, and our electricity consumption was down by about 20%.
We are very frugal in our house and do not flush the toilet until it smells unpleasant, two people usually use the same bath water and most of the time we shower. We now wear our clothing for many days or even weeks to reduce the amount of clothes washing we do. We no longer grow vegetables so do not water the garden any longer. We probably do not smell as nice as we once did, but it keeps water consumption down. You can imagine my surprise when I found my water bill was more than trebling from £3 per month in 2009/10 to £10 per month in 2010/11. There is no way that we are using three times as much water as last year. However, unlike with the gas and electricity I cannot see the water meter (it is buried under the concrete at the front of the house) and am reliant on whatever figures the water company sends.
A major part of the problem is that you are not actually charged on the amount of water, gas or electricity you have used, you get charge for an estimate of what you will use in the year coming. If you do not stay in a property then you gain no benefit from being economical with any of your utilities as they will not see your lower consumption of the resource until after you have left, so you might as well be profligate with your water, gas and electricity because no matter what you do you are going to get charged for it. This greedy approach from utility companies works against any 'green' steps we might take to reduce our carbon dioxide 'footprint' or use less water. They give no incentive for you to be frugal, in fact the complete opposite. As frugal consumers, we lose out.
As you can see from the examples above, the charges the utility companies demand often seem to be conjured out of the air rather than based on real consumption levels. A few years back I rented a five bedroomed-house with a woman and her infant son. Previously seven adults had lived in the house. When we received the water bill, the company felt it necessary to tell us that our consumption was 'excessive' and that we should use less water. We asked how as three people, one only a child, we were using more than seven adults had done. I accept those seven adults may have been smelly but as I have shown, we are very economical in our consumption. It seems this time the figure has been conjured out of the air. I could accept a small increase due to investment or repair costs, but a 230% increase seems mad. Naturally I have challenged the water company, but not having my own figures I am unable to base my challenge on measurable figures.
Generally at the end of the year we find we are in credit to all the utility companies, including the telephone companies. Until we move out of the house we do not receive this money back and usually it is rolled on into the next year. All the time the company is holding our money not for anything we have actually bought for them, simply on the basis of what they say we will use in the future. It gains interest (however small at the moment) while it sits in their accounts and we are deprived of that money ourselves. I certainly advise everyone to challenge their utility supplier. Privatisation was supposed to create a competitive market in utilities but in fact has simply created a cartelised one in which the deal for the average consumer is very poor. For now, however, the companies do seem to yield if you challenge them, and like me, by simply emailing them you could save yourself £600 or maybe more, per year. What needs to happen though, and is very unlikely to do so given the new government, is utility companies be compelled to have charging systems that in fact encourage frugal consumption, rather than as at present have systems that encourage not to give any thought to how much you use because you know you are stuck paying the same rate whatever you do.
The difference between water meters and gas and electricity meters is that as a consumer you cannot read a water meter yourself. Recently combined the charge for my gas and electricity was raised by £25 per month, and I received a statement that my consumption of both had risen. I accepted, given the snowy winter that consumption of gas had gone up but given that we had switched off one of the two refrigerators we had in the house, I found it difficult to accept that we had been using more electricity. I contacted the supplier and sent in my own readings. The revised bill showed a fall of £25 per month over what I had been paying for both fuels combined last year, so about £50 less per month than I would have been charged if I had not challenged the bill, so saving up to £600 per year. It turned out that because we had moved from a set pattern of heating during the winter and only switched it on and off when we felt cold, our consumption of gas had actually fallen, despite the snow, and our electricity consumption was down by about 20%.
We are very frugal in our house and do not flush the toilet until it smells unpleasant, two people usually use the same bath water and most of the time we shower. We now wear our clothing for many days or even weeks to reduce the amount of clothes washing we do. We no longer grow vegetables so do not water the garden any longer. We probably do not smell as nice as we once did, but it keeps water consumption down. You can imagine my surprise when I found my water bill was more than trebling from £3 per month in 2009/10 to £10 per month in 2010/11. There is no way that we are using three times as much water as last year. However, unlike with the gas and electricity I cannot see the water meter (it is buried under the concrete at the front of the house) and am reliant on whatever figures the water company sends.
A major part of the problem is that you are not actually charged on the amount of water, gas or electricity you have used, you get charge for an estimate of what you will use in the year coming. If you do not stay in a property then you gain no benefit from being economical with any of your utilities as they will not see your lower consumption of the resource until after you have left, so you might as well be profligate with your water, gas and electricity because no matter what you do you are going to get charged for it. This greedy approach from utility companies works against any 'green' steps we might take to reduce our carbon dioxide 'footprint' or use less water. They give no incentive for you to be frugal, in fact the complete opposite. As frugal consumers, we lose out.
As you can see from the examples above, the charges the utility companies demand often seem to be conjured out of the air rather than based on real consumption levels. A few years back I rented a five bedroomed-house with a woman and her infant son. Previously seven adults had lived in the house. When we received the water bill, the company felt it necessary to tell us that our consumption was 'excessive' and that we should use less water. We asked how as three people, one only a child, we were using more than seven adults had done. I accept those seven adults may have been smelly but as I have shown, we are very economical in our consumption. It seems this time the figure has been conjured out of the air. I could accept a small increase due to investment or repair costs, but a 230% increase seems mad. Naturally I have challenged the water company, but not having my own figures I am unable to base my challenge on measurable figures.
Generally at the end of the year we find we are in credit to all the utility companies, including the telephone companies. Until we move out of the house we do not receive this money back and usually it is rolled on into the next year. All the time the company is holding our money not for anything we have actually bought for them, simply on the basis of what they say we will use in the future. It gains interest (however small at the moment) while it sits in their accounts and we are deprived of that money ourselves. I certainly advise everyone to challenge their utility supplier. Privatisation was supposed to create a competitive market in utilities but in fact has simply created a cartelised one in which the deal for the average consumer is very poor. For now, however, the companies do seem to yield if you challenge them, and like me, by simply emailing them you could save yourself £600 or maybe more, per year. What needs to happen though, and is very unlikely to do so given the new government, is utility companies be compelled to have charging systems that in fact encourage frugal consumption, rather than as at present have systems that encourage not to give any thought to how much you use because you know you are stuck paying the same rate whatever you do.
Wednesday, 4 March 2009
Simon Hoggart: Advocate of Eco-Crime
Regular readers of this blog, if there is such a thing, know that I am often stimulated to comment by things written in 'The Guardian' newspaper. I am typical of many British liberals in that I get my information from it and the BBC News, these days usually online rather than watching television. However, this does not stop me being irritated by the things it says. If I pick up a copy of the far more right-wing 'Daily Mail' or 'The Daily Telegraph' then I get even more irritated, but such a high level of irritation is probably not healthy for me and there are not enough hours in the day for me to blog about them all. I suppose one issue is that with the centre ground of British politics having shifted so far to the right since 1976/9, that me, Clement Attlee and Winston Churchill let alone Sir Stafford Cripps, Aneurin Bevan and Tony Benn are left looking like left-wing extremists. I know Churchill was strongly opposed to the Socialists, but if you look at his policies these days they would seem to be of the extreme left-wing variety: a mixed economy plus a strong welfare state. Partly that comes from the fact that the Labour revolution of 1945-51 was more Liberal than Socialist in its outlook.
Anyway, we are getting off track. So, 'The Guardian' is the daily newspaper which sits closest to me politically though these days the gap is quite wide. I have also noted that too often it allows weak analysis into its articles which with a little sub-editorial work would have been picked up. However, as the 'Bad Science' column of that very newspaper constantly shows, actually stopping and thinking about things, digging below the attention grabbing headlines, is something that very few people do these days. They want shocking, easy answers rather than ones that involve real thinking. I was recommended to check out the new movie 'Idiocracy' (2006). I have no idea why I have never come across this before. However, it is about a man from present day who is put into suspended animation for 500 years and awakes in a world in which everything has been 'dumbed down'. It is a satire on current US society, but you can really believe it when you see what is written and broadcast without giving any thought to it.
On this basis I come to the columnist Simon Hoggart. He was recently selected by John Prescott to represent the essence of British middle class people. He has a very nice job, he churns out a column in 'The Guardian' on Saturday which aside from being far shorter, is really little different to this blog. The major thing is of course he gets paid for it. He pokes some gentle fun at middle class mores such as the round-robin letters sent at Christmas and recounts his life as he goes on innumerable holidays and for dinners and so on. However, there is a very dangerous thing about Hoggart and this is why I have invented the new crime of 'advocacy of eco-crime'. I accept that aside from fining people for dumping hazardous waste, eco-crime as a branch of the law is not overly developed, but I imagine that will change in the future. The advocacy element of my charge comes from legislation we do have in the UK, introduced in 2005 to punish people who whilst they may not take part in terrorism, encourage terrorism or justify or glorify it, not just in the UK but anywhere in the world.
Why do I feel that Hoggart should be charged with 'advocacy of eco-crime'? It is his incessant attacks on wind turbines. He represents these as the 'cathedrals' of what he sees as the 'religion' of environmentalism. He neglects to comment on the other 'religions' of our modern society, in particularly the highly damaging cult of consumerism which, generally unchallenged, has been setting the agenda for government policies and public behaviour certainly since the 1960s if not longer. It has 'cathedrals' in every town centre and out-of-town retail park, but I see no complaint about the rubbish and pollution these generate in vast quantities. On the basis of seeing concerns with the environment as a damaging 'religion' he simply portrays the environmentalists as misguided, foolish and to some extent dangerous. His particular gripe is with wind turbines which he feels are ugly, generate a minimal amount of electricity, wear out too quickly (despite lasting as long as a coal, oil or nuclear fuelled power station) and thus drive people away from the areas where they are introduced wrecking the tourist economy. I have seen a single wind turbine power a whole village and a factory without emitting any smoke. I do not need any more convincing of the need for them. Hoggart forgets that in the early 19th century before the country began filling with smog, air and water pollution many English counties had 200-400 windmills, to the extent that it was difficult to be anywhere without seeing one. For some reason, windmills which were a great fire hazard (due to the flour in the air you could not light a candle inside one and any spark could cause an explosion), are seen as attractive and useful but wind turbines are somehow evil. Given the strange concern about the appearance of wind turbines many are now being built out to sea, but this is still not enough. In Dorset I came across a campaign to prevent wind turbines built 16Km off shore. Would they rather have a coal-fired power station on Portland Bill instead? One advantage of wind turbines that Hoggart and others forget is that if you take them down you can erase all trace of them, but the site where a power station has been is contaminated for decades, just look at the site of the Millenium Dome built in South London where a gas-fired power station had stood. It took months to clean up the site before it was safe to build anything on it; nuclear power stations leave an even greater legacy.
Hoggart is a man of double standards. He seems delighted that some environmentalists have now seen nuclear power as the quickest way for the world to reduce its CO2 emissions. Hoggart sees this as vindication of his attacks on environmentalists (in this case Stephen Tindale, former director of Greenpeace and Chris Goodall a candidate for the Green Party) and that there should have been no opposition to nuclear power in the 1970s and 1980s, as if it would all be fine by now because we would have loads of nuclear power stations. He argues their switch in opinion demonstrates that environmentalists cannot be trusted, suggesting that we should never listen to them again. Again, this simply is derived from Hoggart's bile rather than thinking through the actual developments. The environmentalists are no big fans of nuclear power they know the risks it brings (anyone who lived through the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 is aware of this; the mutations among children born affected by it are absolutely horrific even more than twenty years on), but they see it as numerous Pacific nations are on the verge of disappearing beneath the sea as the lesser of two evils. If the UK had embraced nuclear power in the 1970s to the scale that Hoggart feels is necessary, then we could be looking at a large area, say of Cumbria (location of Windscale/Sellafield plant) and neighbouring counties around that would be uninhabitable; as it is the sea off there has major ecological damage to creatures. The UK is tiny compared to Belarus and more densely populated; 4000 people died after the Chernobyl disaster in the UK it would have been many times more.
If the UK government had not dilly-dallied over alternative sources of energy and got down to developing these in the 1970s when the oil price rises were an impetous, the UK would be in a far better position now. UK scientists were at the cutting edge in wind and wave power but a lot of their projects were under-funded or allowed to go abroad. Almost forty years have passed and Britain is only slowly making use of alternative energy. We are in a different world now, the policies of the 1970s whether from government or environmentalists would not fit in the late 2000s. Hoggart complains about the religion of environmentalism and yet he also wants to punish the 'believers' for not being sufficiently dogmatic in their views over a 40-year period. He conveniently edits his memory. I read a copy of the children's magazine 'Look and Learn' from 1964 and it outlined the damage CFCs from aerosol sprays were doing to the environment and it took thirty years to begin eliminate them from products. The environmentalists were right about that, yet to Hoggart they must be wrong or he forgets it.
Thus, I charge Simon Hoggart, columnist with the crime of advocacy of eco-crime. He has abused his influential position to glorify dangerous policies towards energy in the UK. He has sought to persuade influential people to adopt approaches that will halt the growth of much needed wind turbines and so is contributing both to the shortage of energy in the UK but also to air and water pollution and the rising of the world's average temperature. He has sought to ridicule those going about legitimate business in promoting a more thoughtful development in these areas simply on the basis of them responding to changing circumstances. He has allowed those arguing his line not to be challenged on their inconsistencies and simply often irrational behaviour to these issues.
Hoggart's punishments will be to move to the Wittenham Clumps in South Oxfordshire and every morning open his curtains to see how the vast towers of Didcot power station to the North-West blights the entire landscape of this otherwise beautiful part of England. He will be to house a family from a Pacific island which has gone under water because he has persuaded people not to move to methods of providing power that cost others so much in terms of their homes and identity. Of course he will be forced away from his column. He has had a free hand to whine on incessantly about his own, perverse perspective on things for too long; 'The Guardian' should be embarrassed to keep on employing him and should relieve him of his duties and allow more rational, thoughtful people into his place.
P.P. 22/3/2010: This weekend I noted that Hoggart, clearly out of wind turbines to complain about has now turned to cyclists, portraying them as being 'dangerous' when transported on trains. What he failed to note in his complaint against cyclists using public transport is that even a decade ago cyclists and other passengers were not compelled to mix; us cyclists simply lifted out bicycle into the guards van and stood with it all the way. It is the removal of these that has forced bicycles to mix with other passengers. Even so, bicycles on trains are no more hazardous on trains that the pushchairs, skis and snowboards, let alone the vast luggage, that Hoggart seems to have no problem with. Has he set himself a mission of trying to curtail any form of activity which will help reduce air pollution and eke out our fossil fuel supplies?
Anyway, we are getting off track. So, 'The Guardian' is the daily newspaper which sits closest to me politically though these days the gap is quite wide. I have also noted that too often it allows weak analysis into its articles which with a little sub-editorial work would have been picked up. However, as the 'Bad Science' column of that very newspaper constantly shows, actually stopping and thinking about things, digging below the attention grabbing headlines, is something that very few people do these days. They want shocking, easy answers rather than ones that involve real thinking. I was recommended to check out the new movie 'Idiocracy' (2006). I have no idea why I have never come across this before. However, it is about a man from present day who is put into suspended animation for 500 years and awakes in a world in which everything has been 'dumbed down'. It is a satire on current US society, but you can really believe it when you see what is written and broadcast without giving any thought to it.
On this basis I come to the columnist Simon Hoggart. He was recently selected by John Prescott to represent the essence of British middle class people. He has a very nice job, he churns out a column in 'The Guardian' on Saturday which aside from being far shorter, is really little different to this blog. The major thing is of course he gets paid for it. He pokes some gentle fun at middle class mores such as the round-robin letters sent at Christmas and recounts his life as he goes on innumerable holidays and for dinners and so on. However, there is a very dangerous thing about Hoggart and this is why I have invented the new crime of 'advocacy of eco-crime'. I accept that aside from fining people for dumping hazardous waste, eco-crime as a branch of the law is not overly developed, but I imagine that will change in the future. The advocacy element of my charge comes from legislation we do have in the UK, introduced in 2005 to punish people who whilst they may not take part in terrorism, encourage terrorism or justify or glorify it, not just in the UK but anywhere in the world.
Why do I feel that Hoggart should be charged with 'advocacy of eco-crime'? It is his incessant attacks on wind turbines. He represents these as the 'cathedrals' of what he sees as the 'religion' of environmentalism. He neglects to comment on the other 'religions' of our modern society, in particularly the highly damaging cult of consumerism which, generally unchallenged, has been setting the agenda for government policies and public behaviour certainly since the 1960s if not longer. It has 'cathedrals' in every town centre and out-of-town retail park, but I see no complaint about the rubbish and pollution these generate in vast quantities. On the basis of seeing concerns with the environment as a damaging 'religion' he simply portrays the environmentalists as misguided, foolish and to some extent dangerous. His particular gripe is with wind turbines which he feels are ugly, generate a minimal amount of electricity, wear out too quickly (despite lasting as long as a coal, oil or nuclear fuelled power station) and thus drive people away from the areas where they are introduced wrecking the tourist economy. I have seen a single wind turbine power a whole village and a factory without emitting any smoke. I do not need any more convincing of the need for them. Hoggart forgets that in the early 19th century before the country began filling with smog, air and water pollution many English counties had 200-400 windmills, to the extent that it was difficult to be anywhere without seeing one. For some reason, windmills which were a great fire hazard (due to the flour in the air you could not light a candle inside one and any spark could cause an explosion), are seen as attractive and useful but wind turbines are somehow evil. Given the strange concern about the appearance of wind turbines many are now being built out to sea, but this is still not enough. In Dorset I came across a campaign to prevent wind turbines built 16Km off shore. Would they rather have a coal-fired power station on Portland Bill instead? One advantage of wind turbines that Hoggart and others forget is that if you take them down you can erase all trace of them, but the site where a power station has been is contaminated for decades, just look at the site of the Millenium Dome built in South London where a gas-fired power station had stood. It took months to clean up the site before it was safe to build anything on it; nuclear power stations leave an even greater legacy.
Hoggart is a man of double standards. He seems delighted that some environmentalists have now seen nuclear power as the quickest way for the world to reduce its CO2 emissions. Hoggart sees this as vindication of his attacks on environmentalists (in this case Stephen Tindale, former director of Greenpeace and Chris Goodall a candidate for the Green Party) and that there should have been no opposition to nuclear power in the 1970s and 1980s, as if it would all be fine by now because we would have loads of nuclear power stations. He argues their switch in opinion demonstrates that environmentalists cannot be trusted, suggesting that we should never listen to them again. Again, this simply is derived from Hoggart's bile rather than thinking through the actual developments. The environmentalists are no big fans of nuclear power they know the risks it brings (anyone who lived through the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 is aware of this; the mutations among children born affected by it are absolutely horrific even more than twenty years on), but they see it as numerous Pacific nations are on the verge of disappearing beneath the sea as the lesser of two evils. If the UK had embraced nuclear power in the 1970s to the scale that Hoggart feels is necessary, then we could be looking at a large area, say of Cumbria (location of Windscale/Sellafield plant) and neighbouring counties around that would be uninhabitable; as it is the sea off there has major ecological damage to creatures. The UK is tiny compared to Belarus and more densely populated; 4000 people died after the Chernobyl disaster in the UK it would have been many times more.
If the UK government had not dilly-dallied over alternative sources of energy and got down to developing these in the 1970s when the oil price rises were an impetous, the UK would be in a far better position now. UK scientists were at the cutting edge in wind and wave power but a lot of their projects were under-funded or allowed to go abroad. Almost forty years have passed and Britain is only slowly making use of alternative energy. We are in a different world now, the policies of the 1970s whether from government or environmentalists would not fit in the late 2000s. Hoggart complains about the religion of environmentalism and yet he also wants to punish the 'believers' for not being sufficiently dogmatic in their views over a 40-year period. He conveniently edits his memory. I read a copy of the children's magazine 'Look and Learn' from 1964 and it outlined the damage CFCs from aerosol sprays were doing to the environment and it took thirty years to begin eliminate them from products. The environmentalists were right about that, yet to Hoggart they must be wrong or he forgets it.
Thus, I charge Simon Hoggart, columnist with the crime of advocacy of eco-crime. He has abused his influential position to glorify dangerous policies towards energy in the UK. He has sought to persuade influential people to adopt approaches that will halt the growth of much needed wind turbines and so is contributing both to the shortage of energy in the UK but also to air and water pollution and the rising of the world's average temperature. He has sought to ridicule those going about legitimate business in promoting a more thoughtful development in these areas simply on the basis of them responding to changing circumstances. He has allowed those arguing his line not to be challenged on their inconsistencies and simply often irrational behaviour to these issues.
Hoggart's punishments will be to move to the Wittenham Clumps in South Oxfordshire and every morning open his curtains to see how the vast towers of Didcot power station to the North-West blights the entire landscape of this otherwise beautiful part of England. He will be to house a family from a Pacific island which has gone under water because he has persuaded people not to move to methods of providing power that cost others so much in terms of their homes and identity. Of course he will be forced away from his column. He has had a free hand to whine on incessantly about his own, perverse perspective on things for too long; 'The Guardian' should be embarrassed to keep on employing him and should relieve him of his duties and allow more rational, thoughtful people into his place.
P.P. 22/3/2010: This weekend I noted that Hoggart, clearly out of wind turbines to complain about has now turned to cyclists, portraying them as being 'dangerous' when transported on trains. What he failed to note in his complaint against cyclists using public transport is that even a decade ago cyclists and other passengers were not compelled to mix; us cyclists simply lifted out bicycle into the guards van and stood with it all the way. It is the removal of these that has forced bicycles to mix with other passengers. Even so, bicycles on trains are no more hazardous on trains that the pushchairs, skis and snowboards, let alone the vast luggage, that Hoggart seems to have no problem with. Has he set himself a mission of trying to curtail any form of activity which will help reduce air pollution and eke out our fossil fuel supplies?
Sunday, 24 February 2008
Do Greener Paths to the Future Need to Be So Conflicting?
This afternoon the Virgin airline company is flying a Boeing 747 from London to Amsterdam with one engine powered by bio fuel made up of oil from a nut grown in rain forests and ordinary coconuts. This event in the past might have been praised as finding a way to provide sustainable airline fuel, which is daily used in vast quantities, as a substitute for fossil fuels. However, the event has been severely criticised as nothing but a publicity stunt and green groups such as Friends of the Earth have pointed to the fact that bio fuels produce more greenhouse gases both in their growth and in their use than conventional fuels. They also argue that growing bio fuels takes away land that should be used to produce food. They also dismiss Virgin's plans for developing algae-based fuels as impossible in decades. Sir Richard Branson the head of Virgin is probably wondering why he even bothered. His argument is that the nuts will make rain forests more necessary and so people will be less willing to deforest and that the coconuts come from plantations where people cannot even sell their nuts normally.
Now it is clear that there are differing views of the future and most greens would like all of us to stop travelling away from where we live certainly by aeroplane and to only eat locally-produced food. We would go back to a kind of 18th century model of living. As it is, in the UK mobility is being reduced greatly given the sharp increases in fuel and public transport prices, but that is not being done on any environmental basis, simply due to the greed of companies. Trains are lesser polluters than cars, lorries and aircraft but it is now more expensive to go by train from Cornwall in South-West England to West Scotland than it is to fly to Cuba and stay in a hotel for a week. You can have a holiday in Egypt for less than a train fare from London to Newcastle in North-East England.
The world as a whole produces too much food and has been wasting vast quantities of it for decades. The European Union has long encouraged farmers to 'set aside' land from production for other uses or just to lie fallow so as to reduce food production. Now I accept that much of this land is not in regions of the world producing tropical fruit but rape seed which grows in vast quantities in the UK is a bio fuel too. The world can feed everyone who currently lives on it, it is just that the food resources are held by the rich and the agricultural economies of much of the world is distorted to satiate the rich, at cheap prices, rather than feed locals. Fair trade approaches are beginnning to assist a little but will not alter two centuries of distortion overnight.
As I have noted before, control of oil has taken over from first religion and then politics as the prime cause of wars in our contemporary world. So whilst bio fuels may have difficulties at present if more people can grow fuel in many parts of the world it should reduce the fighting to capture what is becoming an increasingly rare resource and we have known that for the past four decades.
Branson represents one view of the future which is a capitalist, global economy that pays attention to its impacts on the environment and on people. There is a much more popular model which is that simply capitalism proceeds as it is at the moment chewing up everything and everyone in its way. Now, I am no advocate for Branson, but I am relieved that he seems to behave more in the way that many Victorian businessmen did, tempering his drive for profits with other concerns. He could simply continue to run his airlines on the fuel they currently use and not bother to experiment, but he feels it is important to do so.
The green movement keeps making a huge error that undermines its campaigns. It keeps offering us one option: return to the 18th century or die. Now for the bulk of the population sitting in brightly lit houses, microwaving their meals, playing with their ipods, flying for holidays in Spain, the 18th century is not an attractive prospect. They are willing to take that gamble than give up all the things that they feel they have worked hard for (and which it is becoming increasingly difficult to get hold of as prices rise and wages stay stagnant). So, the bulk of us are not going to listen and we are not going to alter our behaviour to benefit the planet.
Personally I have long encountered this 'all or nothing' approach from the greens. Back in 1980s I was an enthusiastic youth and with my housemates recycled and did all we could living in a Midlands town to address environmental issues. Then I went to a talk which featured all the candidates in the local election. Me and my friend were on the front row knowing that the Green Party candidate was going to be there and were interested to hear what she had to say. That was the day we abandoned all attempts to be green. When her turn came she made no effort to try to win over anyone in the audience and simply said in the following words 'you will never be like us, you will never really understand'. She made it appear that she would feel dirtied to receive the votes of the audience. In addition, it seemed to me as an impressionable supporter that however hard I worked I would never be able to reach the perception or the status of this 'us' she spoke about. She left that hall with less support than she had entered it with, but probably felt righteous through her patronising of what she saw as the greedy idiots killing her planet.
Green movements no matter what their focus need to learn from religions. Christianity offers the model of Hell but it also offers Heaven as a reward for living a good life. At the moment the greens simply keep showing us different versions of Hell without any suggestion of how a green, sustainable world could look like (and not just one that is the 18th century recycled - people are not going to give up on high tech); this is why Branson is popular he seems to indicate a time when you could travel without damaging the Earth in doing so.
Another aspect that the greens overlook is that those religions that have an 'elect' that you are born into, die out, they do not grow and they do not prosper in the meantime. Addressing environmental issues is too important to adopt that approach. You need to win over a much larger chunk of the population, because even if say, 75% of the ordinary British people supported green movements actively their influence would be minimal against the 0.1% of the population who are super-rich. However, the greens seem to be making no effort even to address the bulk of the population. Again they need to look at how religions did it. In the past some men and women would become monks and nuns. They were a small elite in society, living godly ways. However, many would reach out into the local communities and some people would become lay brothers, associated with the monastery but not taking vows and other people would help the monastery with money and labour. A successful movement needs to ripple out into its community or it becomes cut off. Those bodies which have a single rule and turn away anyone who does not match their standards will not thrive. There are millions of young people who could support green movements but if it has strict rules they are never going to participate. There are millions of families who could reduce their consumption of fuels, plastics, paper, water, and so on, but they need it set out in easy steps otherwise like me twenty years ago they will simply give up and go for the easy option of not bothering at all.
It is a great sensation to feel righteous and patronise the idiots in society, however, more greens have got to give up this power trip and realise that if they are going to lay foundations for real change for our planet's benefit they need to come up with an offer to the bulk of the population which is more appealing than 'change or die'. Despite what you might think most people will gamble on the 'die' option especially when so many scientists and politicians give us conflicting information about what that entails or what causes it. It may be uncomfortable to sit down with Branson who you see as a self-publicist, but at least he has made more steps in your direction than the bulk of businesspeople and if you avoid ridiculing you may find you can get his money and influence behind you. It is better to show people, gently, the error of their ways, than to dismiss their efforts which have often been at heavy cost to them as worthless. When the green movement lost me in 1988, it probably did not notice, but there are others who have a lot more power and influence than me who could accelerate achieving many green objectives. Responsibility for the destruction of the planet will not lie with the attitudes the green movement adopted, however, responsibility for not changing the minds of sufficient people to stop that destruction will lie with them.
Now it is clear that there are differing views of the future and most greens would like all of us to stop travelling away from where we live certainly by aeroplane and to only eat locally-produced food. We would go back to a kind of 18th century model of living. As it is, in the UK mobility is being reduced greatly given the sharp increases in fuel and public transport prices, but that is not being done on any environmental basis, simply due to the greed of companies. Trains are lesser polluters than cars, lorries and aircraft but it is now more expensive to go by train from Cornwall in South-West England to West Scotland than it is to fly to Cuba and stay in a hotel for a week. You can have a holiday in Egypt for less than a train fare from London to Newcastle in North-East England.
The world as a whole produces too much food and has been wasting vast quantities of it for decades. The European Union has long encouraged farmers to 'set aside' land from production for other uses or just to lie fallow so as to reduce food production. Now I accept that much of this land is not in regions of the world producing tropical fruit but rape seed which grows in vast quantities in the UK is a bio fuel too. The world can feed everyone who currently lives on it, it is just that the food resources are held by the rich and the agricultural economies of much of the world is distorted to satiate the rich, at cheap prices, rather than feed locals. Fair trade approaches are beginnning to assist a little but will not alter two centuries of distortion overnight.
As I have noted before, control of oil has taken over from first religion and then politics as the prime cause of wars in our contemporary world. So whilst bio fuels may have difficulties at present if more people can grow fuel in many parts of the world it should reduce the fighting to capture what is becoming an increasingly rare resource and we have known that for the past four decades.
Branson represents one view of the future which is a capitalist, global economy that pays attention to its impacts on the environment and on people. There is a much more popular model which is that simply capitalism proceeds as it is at the moment chewing up everything and everyone in its way. Now, I am no advocate for Branson, but I am relieved that he seems to behave more in the way that many Victorian businessmen did, tempering his drive for profits with other concerns. He could simply continue to run his airlines on the fuel they currently use and not bother to experiment, but he feels it is important to do so.
The green movement keeps making a huge error that undermines its campaigns. It keeps offering us one option: return to the 18th century or die. Now for the bulk of the population sitting in brightly lit houses, microwaving their meals, playing with their ipods, flying for holidays in Spain, the 18th century is not an attractive prospect. They are willing to take that gamble than give up all the things that they feel they have worked hard for (and which it is becoming increasingly difficult to get hold of as prices rise and wages stay stagnant). So, the bulk of us are not going to listen and we are not going to alter our behaviour to benefit the planet.
Personally I have long encountered this 'all or nothing' approach from the greens. Back in 1980s I was an enthusiastic youth and with my housemates recycled and did all we could living in a Midlands town to address environmental issues. Then I went to a talk which featured all the candidates in the local election. Me and my friend were on the front row knowing that the Green Party candidate was going to be there and were interested to hear what she had to say. That was the day we abandoned all attempts to be green. When her turn came she made no effort to try to win over anyone in the audience and simply said in the following words 'you will never be like us, you will never really understand'. She made it appear that she would feel dirtied to receive the votes of the audience. In addition, it seemed to me as an impressionable supporter that however hard I worked I would never be able to reach the perception or the status of this 'us' she spoke about. She left that hall with less support than she had entered it with, but probably felt righteous through her patronising of what she saw as the greedy idiots killing her planet.
Green movements no matter what their focus need to learn from religions. Christianity offers the model of Hell but it also offers Heaven as a reward for living a good life. At the moment the greens simply keep showing us different versions of Hell without any suggestion of how a green, sustainable world could look like (and not just one that is the 18th century recycled - people are not going to give up on high tech); this is why Branson is popular he seems to indicate a time when you could travel without damaging the Earth in doing so.
Another aspect that the greens overlook is that those religions that have an 'elect' that you are born into, die out, they do not grow and they do not prosper in the meantime. Addressing environmental issues is too important to adopt that approach. You need to win over a much larger chunk of the population, because even if say, 75% of the ordinary British people supported green movements actively their influence would be minimal against the 0.1% of the population who are super-rich. However, the greens seem to be making no effort even to address the bulk of the population. Again they need to look at how religions did it. In the past some men and women would become monks and nuns. They were a small elite in society, living godly ways. However, many would reach out into the local communities and some people would become lay brothers, associated with the monastery but not taking vows and other people would help the monastery with money and labour. A successful movement needs to ripple out into its community or it becomes cut off. Those bodies which have a single rule and turn away anyone who does not match their standards will not thrive. There are millions of young people who could support green movements but if it has strict rules they are never going to participate. There are millions of families who could reduce their consumption of fuels, plastics, paper, water, and so on, but they need it set out in easy steps otherwise like me twenty years ago they will simply give up and go for the easy option of not bothering at all.
It is a great sensation to feel righteous and patronise the idiots in society, however, more greens have got to give up this power trip and realise that if they are going to lay foundations for real change for our planet's benefit they need to come up with an offer to the bulk of the population which is more appealing than 'change or die'. Despite what you might think most people will gamble on the 'die' option especially when so many scientists and politicians give us conflicting information about what that entails or what causes it. It may be uncomfortable to sit down with Branson who you see as a self-publicist, but at least he has made more steps in your direction than the bulk of businesspeople and if you avoid ridiculing you may find you can get his money and influence behind you. It is better to show people, gently, the error of their ways, than to dismiss their efforts which have often been at heavy cost to them as worthless. When the green movement lost me in 1988, it probably did not notice, but there are others who have a lot more power and influence than me who could accelerate achieving many green objectives. Responsibility for the destruction of the planet will not lie with the attitudes the green movement adopted, however, responsibility for not changing the minds of sufficient people to stop that destruction will lie with them.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
